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I am glad that on the history of serfdom we proceed in agreement , as they say in business. It is certain that serfdom and bondage are not a peculiarly medieval-feudal form, we find them everywhere or nearly everywhere where conquerors have the land cultivated for them by the old inhabitants e.g., very early in Thessaly. This fact has even misled me and many other people about servitude in the Middle Ages; one was much too much inclined to base it simply on conquest, this made everything so neat and easy. See Thierry among others. The position of the Christians in Turkey during the height of the old Turkish semi-feudal system was something similar.

Letters: Marx-Engels Correspondence 1882

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1882/letters/82_12_22.htm

In 1850-51, he travelled to Spain for another Bradford firm, then to the West Indies, and across almost the whole of South America. After a short visit to Europe, he returned to his beloved West Indies, where he did not want to deny himself the pleasure of taking a look at the real original of Louis-Napoleon III, the negro king Soulouque in Haiti. However, as W. Wolff wrote to Marx on August 28, 1856, he had I called him the German proletariat s first and most important poet. Indeed his socialist and political poems are far superior to Freiligrath s in originality and wit, and especially in fervent emotion. He often used the Heine forms, but only to invest them with an entirely original, independent content. Moreover, he differed from most other poets in that he was quite unconcerned about his poems once written. Having sent a copy to Marx or me, he let his verses lie and it was often hard to persuade him to get them printed. Only during the publication of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung was it different. The following extract from a letter of Weerth to Marx from Hamburg, April 28, 1851, shows why: Incidentally, Weerth also wrote less shocking pieces, and I shall take the liberty of sending some of these to the Sozial-demokrat s feuilleton from time to time.

Works of Frederick Engels

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1883/05/georg-weerth.htm

An immeasurable loss has been sustained both by the militant proletariat of Europe and America, and by historical science, in the death of this man. The gap that has been left by the departure of this mighty spirit will soon enough make itself felt. Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history: the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc.; that therefore the production of the immediate material means, and consequently the degree of economic development attained by a given people or during a given epoch, form the foundation upon which the state institutions, the legal conceptions, art, and even the ideas on religion, of the people concerned have been evolved, and in the light of which they must, therefore, be explained, instead of vice versa, as had hitherto been the case. But that is not all. Marx also discovered the special law of motion governing the present-day capitalist mode of production, and the bourgeois society that this mode of production has created. The discovery of surplus value suddenly threw light on the problem, in trying to solve which all previous investigations, of both bourgeois economists and socialist critics, had been groping in the dark. Two such discoveries would be enough for one lifetime. Happy the man to whom it is granted to make even one such discovery. But in every single field which Marx investigated -- and he investigated very many fields, none of them superficially -- in every field, even in that of mathematics, he made independent discoveries. Such was the man of science. But this was not even half the man. Science was for Marx a historically dynamic, revolutionary force. However great the joy with which he welcomed a new discovery in some theoretical science whose practical application perhaps it was as yet quite impossible to envisage, he experienced quite another kind of joy when the discovery involved immediate revolutionary changes in industry, and in historical development in general. For example, he followed closely the development of the discoveries made in the field of electricity and recently those of Marcel Deprez. For Marx was before all else a revolutionist. His real mission in life was to contribute, in one way or another, to the overthrow of capitalist society and of the state institutions which it had brought into being, to contribute to the liberation of the modern proletariat, which he was the first to make conscious of its own position and its needs, conscious of the conditions of its emancipation. Fighting was his element. And he fought with a passion, a tenacity and a success such as few could rival. His work on the first Rheinische Zeitung (1842), the Paris Vorwarts (1844), the Deutsche Brusseler Zeitung (1847), the Neue Rheinische Zeitung (1848-49), the New York Tribune (1852-61), and, in addition to these, a host of militant pamphlets, work in organisations in Paris, Brussels and London, and finally, crowning all, the formation of the great International Working Men's Association -- this was indeed an achievement of which its founder might well have been proud even if he had done nothing else. And, consequently, Marx was the best hated and most calumniated man of his time. Governments, both absolutist and republican, deported him from their territories. Bourgeois, whether conservative or ultra-democratic, vied with one another in heaping slanders upon him. All this he brushed aside as though it were a cobweb, ignoring it, answering only when extreme necessity compelled him. And he died beloved, revered and mourned by millions of revolutionary fellow workers -- from the mines of Siberia to California, in all parts of Europe and America -- and I make bold to say that, though he may have had many opponents, he had hardly one personal enemy. His name will endure through the ages, and so also will his work.

Engels' burial speech

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1883/death/burial.htm

At the graveside Gottlieb Lemke laid two wreaths with red ribbons on the coffin in the name of the editorial board and dispatching service of the Sozialdemokrat and in the name of the London Communist Workers' Educational Society. Frederick Engels then made the following speech in English: Signed: Fr. Engels

1883: The death of Karl Marx

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1883/death/dersoz1.htm

On 20th March Miss Eleanor Marx received the following telegram, written in French, from the Editorial Office of The Daily News: "In memory of the defender of workers' rights in theory and their implementation in practice the students of the Petrovsky Agricultural Academy in Moscow. "Mr. Engels is requested to tell us his address and the cost of the wreath. The amount due will be forwarded to him without delay. "Students of the Petrovsky Academy in Moscow." In addition to that, our friend P. Lavrov in Paris remitted me an order on 31st March for 124.50 frs ( 4.18s.9d.), sent in by students of the Technological Institute in Petersburg and by Russian student women, also for a wreath to go on the grave of Karl Marx. Thirdly, last week the Sozialdemokrat announced that Odessa students also wished for a wreath in their name to be placed on Marx's grave. As the money received from Petersburg is easily enough for all three wreaths, I have taken the liberty of paying for the Moscow and Odessa wreaths from that as well. The preparation of the inscriptions, a somewhat unfamiliar practice here, has caused some delay, but the wreaths will be placed on the grave at the beginning of next week, and I shall then be able to render an account, in the Sozialdemokrat of the money received. A beautiful, large wreath has reached us from Solingen via the Communist Workers' Educational Society here, "for the grave of Karl Marx from the workers of the scissors, knife and sword industry at Solingen". When we placed it on the grave on 24th March, we found that the long ends of the red silk bows on the wreaths from the Sozialdemokrat and the Communist Workers' Educational Society had been cut off and stolen by people desecrating the grave. Complaining to the trustees was to no avail, but will no doubt mean that the grave will be protected in future. A Slavonic association in Switzerland expresses the hope "that a special memorial will be established to Karl Marx through the setting-up of an international fund bearing his name in support of the victims of the great emancipation struggle and for the furtherance of that struggle itself", and has sent an initial contribution which I have retained for the time being. Of course, the fate of this suggestion depends primarily on whether there is a response to it, and that is why I am publishing it here. In order to counter the false rumours which are being circulated in the press with some actual facts, I am passing on the following brief details concerning the illness and death of our great theoretical leader. Having been almost totally cured of an old liver complaint by three periods of treatment at Karlsbad, Marx was left suffering only from a chronic stomach complaint and nervous exhaustion, which took the form of headaches and, mainly, persistent insomnia. Both complaints disappeared more or less after a visit to a seaside or health resort in the summer, and did not return, with more troublesome effects, until after the New Year. Chronic throat complaints and coughing, which also contributed to the insomnia, and chronic bronchitis were, on the whole, less troublesome. But it was to those very complaints that he was to succumb. Four or five weeks before the death of his wife' he was suddenly seized by a severe bout of pleurisy, complicated by bronchitis and incipient pneumonia. The affair was very dangerous, but it turned out well. He was then sent first of all to the Isle of Wight (early in 1882), and following that to Algiers. The journey was a cold one and he arrived in Algiers suffering from a renewed attack of pleurisy. In normal circumstances that would not have made so much difference. But in Algiers the winter and the spring were colder and rainier than ever. In April vain attempts were made to heat the dining room! The final result was that his overall condition became worse instead of better. Having been sent from Algiers to Monte Carlo (Monaco), Marx arrived there, after a cold and damp voyage, suffering from a third but milder attack of pleurisy. On top of that constant bad weather, which he seemed to have brought with him specially from Africa. So here too he had to fight against a fresh bout of illness rather than have the opportunity to restore himself. Towards the beginning of summer he went to visit his daughter Madame Longuet at Argenteuil, and used his stay there to go to the sulphurous springs in the neighbouring town of Enghien to treat his chronic bronchitis. Despite the continued wet summer the treatment was a success, slow but to the satisfaction of the doctors. They now sent him to Vevey on Lake Geneva, and there he recovered most, so that he was allowed to spend the winter, not in London, it is true, but on the south coast of England. Here he wanted at last to take up his work again. When he came to London in September, he looked well and often climbed Hampstead Hill (about 300 feet above his lodging) with me, without complaint. When the November fogs threatened to descend he was sent to Ventnor, the southern tip of the Isle of Wight. Immediately he was subjected again to wet weather and fog. The inevitable consequence was a fresh cold, coughing and so on; in short, weakening through confinement to his room when he should have been restoring himself by moving about in the fresh air. Then Madame Longuet died. The next day (12th January) Marx came to London, clearly suffering from bronchitis. This was soon complicated by laryngitis, which made it almost impossible for him to swallow. Able to bear the greatest of pain with the most stoic equanimity, he preferred to drink a litre of milk (which he had loathed his whole life long) rather than eat the appropriate solids. In February an ulcer developed in his lung. The medicaments had no effect on his body, surfeited as it was with medicines administered over the previous fifteen months; at most they weakened his appetite and inhibited his digestion. He became visibly thinner, almost by the day. All the same, the illness was taking a relatively favourable course overall. His bronchitis was almost cured and it became easier for him to swallow. The doctors a were full of hope. Then, visiting him between two and three o'clock -- the best time to see him -- I suddenly found the whole house in tears: he was so ill that they thought it was probably the end. And yet that very morning he had taken wine, milk and soup with relish. Faithful old Lenchen Demuth, who had raised all his children from the cradle and has been with the household for forty years, went up to him and came straight back down: "Come with me, he's half asleep." When we went in, he was completely asleep, but forever. One cannot wish to die an easier death than Karl Marx did in his armchair. And now, to close with, a piece of good news: The manuscript of the second volume of Capital has been preserved completely intact. Whether it can be printed in its present form I am not yet in a position to say. There are more than 1,000 pages of folio. But "the process of circulation of capital" and "the forms of the process as a whole" are complete in a version dating from the years 1867-1870. There is the beginning of a later version and copious material in the form of critical extracts, particularly on Russian landownership, a good deal of which may yet be put to use. His oral instruction was that his youngest daughter Eleanor and I should be his literary executors. London, 28th April 1883 Frederick Engels Meanwhile the three wreaths for Moscow, Petersburg and Odessa were completed. To prevent the ribbons from being stolen, we were obliged to make it impossible for them to be used again by making little incisions on the edges. They were laid on the grave yesterday. A shower of rain had so affected the ribbon on the Erfurt wreath that it could not be used for anything else, and thus escaped being stolen. These three wreaths cost 1.1s.8d. each, a total of 3.5s.0d. I therefore have 1.13s.9d.left from the 4.18s.9d. that was sent to me, and I shall send that back to P. Lavrov in order to comply with the wishes of the donors. The death of a great man provides a first-rate opportunity for small people to make political, literary and actual capital out of it. Here just a few examples which should be made public, not to speak of the many which have occurred in private correspondence. In a letter dated 2nd April Philipp van Patten, Secretary of the Central Labor Union in New York, wrote to me as follows: "We have a high appreciation of the talents and the achievements of Marx but cannot believe that he was in sympathy with the anarchistic, disorganising methods of Most and I would like to obtain from you an expression of opinion as to Karl Marx's position upon the question of Anarchy versus Social-Democracy. Too much mischief has already been done here by the untimely and imprudent talk of Most and it is rather disagreeable for us to learn that so high an authority as Marx endorsed such tactics." "Marx and I, ever since 1845, have held the view that one of the final results of the future proletarian revolution will be the gradual dissolution and ultimate disappearance of that political organisation called the State; an organisation the main object of which has ever been to secure, by armed force, the economical subjection of the working majority to the wealthy minority. With the disappearance of a wealthy minority the necessity for an armed repressive State-force disappears also. At the same time we have always held, that in order to arrive at this and the other, far more important ends of the social revolution of the future, the proletarian class will first have to possess itself of the organised political force of the State and with its aid stamp out the resistance of the Capitalist class and re-organise society. This is stated already in the Communist Manifesto of 1847, end of Chapter II. "The Anarchists reverse the matter. They say, that the Proletarian revolution has to begin by abolishing the political organisation of the State. But after the victory of the Proletariat, the only organisation the victorious working class finds readymade for use, is that of the State. It may require adaptation to the new functions. But to destroy that at such a moment, would be to destroy the only organism by means of which the victorious working class can exert its newly conquered power, keep down its capitalist enemies and carry out that economical revolution of society, without which the whole victory must end in a defeat and in a massacre of the working class like that after the Paris Commune. "Does it require my express assertion, that Marx opposed these anarchist absurdities from the very first day that they were started in their present form by Bakunin? The whole internal history of the International Working Men's Association is there to prove it. The Anarchists tried to obtain the lead of the International by the foulest means, ever since 1867 and the chief obstacle in their way was Marx. The result of the five years' struggle was the expulsion, at the Hague Congress, September 1872, of the Anarchists from the International, and the man who did most to procure that expulsion, was Marx. Our old friend F. A. Sorge of Hoboken, who was present as a delegate, can give you further particulars if you desire. "Now as to Johann Most. If any man asserts that Most, since he turned anarchist, has had any relations with, or support from Marx, he is either a dupe or a deliberate liar. After the first No. of the London Freiheit had been published, Most did not call upon Marx and myself more than once, at most twice. Nor did we call on him or even meet him accidentally anywhere or at any time since his newfangled anarchism had burst forth in that paper. Indeed, we at last ceased to take it in as there was absolutely nothing in it'. We had for his anarchism and anarchist tactics the same contempt as for that of the people' from whom he had learnt it. "While still in Germany, Most published a 'popular' extract of Das Kapital. Marx was requested to revise it for a second edition. I assisted Marx in that work. We found it impossible to eradicate more than the very worst mistakes, unless we re-wrote the whole thing from beginning to end, and Marx consented his corrections being inserted on the express condition only that his name was never in any way connected with even this revised form of Johann Most's production. "You are perfectly at liberty to publish this letter in the Voice of the People, if you like to do so. About two years ago a young Italian, one Signor Achille Loria from Mantua, sent Marx a copy of a book he had written on ground-rent together with a letter written in German in which he proclaimed himself to be a disciple and admirer of Marx. He also corresponded with him for some time after that. In the summer of 1882 he came to London and visited me twice. The second time I had occasion seriously to tell him my opinion about the fact that, in a pamphlet' which had appeared in the meantime, he had accused Marx of having deliberately misquoted. Now this puny fellow, who got his wisdom from the German academic socialists, has written an article on Marx in Nuova Antologia and has the effrontery to send me, "his most worthy friend" (!!), a separate offprint. What constituted this effrontery will be clear from the following translation of my reply (I wrote to him in his language, for his German is even shakier than my Italian): London, 12th May 1883 Frederick Engels

1883: The death of Karl Marx

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1883/death/dersoz2.htm

Karl Marx was one of those pre-eminent men of whom a century produces not many. Charles Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature upon our planet. Marx is the discoverer of the fundamental law according to which human history moves and develops itself, a law so simple and self-evident that its simple enunciation is almost sufficient to secure assent. Not enough with that, Marx had also discovered the law [which] has created our actual state of society with its great class-division of capitalists and wages-labourers; the law according to which that society has become organised, has grown until it [has] almost outgrown itself, and according to which it must ultimately perish like all previous historical phases of society. Such results render it all the more painful that he should have been taken from us in the midst of his work, and that, much as he did, still more he left uncompleted. But science, though dear to him, was far from absorbing him entirely. No man could feel a purer joy than he when a new scientific progress was secured anywhere, no matter whether practically applicable or not. But he looked upon science above all things as a grand historical lever, as a revolutionary power in the most eminent sense of the word. And as such he used, to such purpose he wielded that immense knowledge, especially of history in all its branches of which he disposed. For he was indeed, what he called himself, a Revolutionist. The struggle for the emancipation of the class of wages-labourers from the fetters of the present capitalistic system of economic production, was his real element. And no more active combatant than he ever existed. The crowning effort of this part of his work was the creation of the International Working Men's Association of which he was the acknowledged leader from 1864-72. The Association has disappeared, as far as outward show goes; but the fraternal bond of union of the working men of all civilised countries of Europe and America is established once for ever, and continues to live even without any outward, formal bond of union. No man can fight for any cause without creating enemies. And he has had plenty of them. For the greater part of his political life he was the best hated and best slandered man in Europe. But he scarcely ever noticed calumny. If ever man lived calumny down, he did, and at the time of his death he could look with pride upon the millions of his followers, in the mines of Siberia as well as in the workshops of Europe and America; he saw his economical theories adopted as the undisputed creed of universal socialism, and if he still had many opponents, there was scarcely one personal enemy left. La Justice adds its own editorial note:

1883: The death of Karl Marx

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1883/death/justice.htm

(a) On the Prototype of Mathematical "Infinity" in the Real World. Re pp. 17-18: Concordance of thought and being - Mathematical infinity. The fact that our subjective thought and the objective world are subject to the same laws, and that consequently too in the final analysis they cannot be in contradiction to one another in their results, but must coincide, governs absolutely our whole theoretical thought. It is the unconscious and unconditional premise for theoretical thought. Eighteenth century materialism, owing to its essentially metaphysical character, investigated this premise only as regards content. It restricted itself to the proof that the content of all thought and knowledge must derive from sensuous experience, and revived the principle: nihil est in intellectu, quod non fuerit in sensu. It was modern idealistic, but at the same time dialectical, philosophy, and especially Hegel, which for the first time investigated it also as regards form. In spite of all the innumerable arbitrary constructions and fantasies that we encounter here, in spite of the idealist, topsy-turvy, form of its result - the unity of thought and being - it is undeniable that this philosophy proved the analogy of the processes of thought to those of nature and history and vice versa, and the validity of similar laws for all these processes, in numerous cases and in the most diverse fields. On the other hand, modern natural science has extended the principle of the origin of all thought content from experience in a way that breaks down its old metaphysical limitation and formulation. By recognising the inheritance of acquired characters, it extends the subject of experience from the individual to the genus; the single individual that must have experienced is no longer necessary, its individual experience can be replaced to a certain extent by the results of the experiences of a number of its ancestors. If, for instance, among us the mathematical axioms seem self-evident to every eight-year-old child, and in no need of proof from experience, this is solely the result of "accumulated inheritance." It would be difficult to teach them by a proof to a bushman or Australian negro. In the present work dialectics is conceived as the science of the most general laws of all motion. Therein is included that their laws must be equally valid for motion in nature and human history and for the motion of thought. Such a law can be recognised in two of these three spheres, indeed even in all three, without the metaphysical philistine being clearly aware that it is one and the same law that he has come to know. Let us take an example. Of all theoretical advances there is surely none that ranks so high as a triumph of the human mind as the discovery of the infinitesimal calculus in the last half of the seventeenth century. If anywhere, it is here that we have a pure and exclusive feat of human intelligence. The mystery which even to-day surrounds the magnitudes employed in the infinitesimal calculus, the differentials and infinites of various degree, is the best proof that it is still imagined that what are dealt with here are pure "free creations and imaginings " of the human mind, to which there is nothing corresponding in the objective world. Yet the contrary is the case. Nature offers prototypes for all these imaginary magnitudes. Our geometry has, as its starting point, space relations, and our arithmetic and algebra numerical magnitudes, which correspond to our terrestrial conditions, which therefore correspond to the magnitude of bodies that mechanics terms masses - masses such as occur on earth and are moved by men. In comparison to these masses, the mass of the earth seems infinitely large and indeed terrestrial mechanics treats it as infinitely large. The radius of the earth == , this is the basic principle of all mechanics in the law of falling. But not merely the earth but the whole solar system and the distances occurring in the latter in their turn appear infinitely small as soon as we have to deal with the distances reckoned in light years in the stellar system visible to us through the telescope. We have here, therefore, already an infinity, not only of the first but of the second degree, and we can leave it to the imagination of our readers to construct further infinities of a higher degree in infinite space, if they feel inclined to do so. According to the view prevailing in physics and chemistry today, however, the terrestrial masses, the bodies with which mechanics operates, consists of molecules, of smallest particles which cannot be further divided without abolishing the physical and chemical identity of the body concerned. According to W. Thomson's calculations, the diameter of the smallest of these molecules cannot be smaller than a fifty-millionth of a millimetre. But even if we assume that the largest molecule itself attains a diameter of a twentyfive- millionth of a millimetre, it still remains an infinitesimally small magnitude compared with the smallest mass dealt with by mechanics, physics, or even chemistry. Nevertheless, it is endowed with all the properties peculiar to the mass in question, it can represent the mass physically and chemically, and does actually represent it in all chemical equations. In short, it has the same properties in relation to the corresponding mass as the mathematical differential has in relation to its variable. The only difference is that what seems mysterious and inexplicable to us in the case of the differential, here seems a matter of course and as it were obvious. Nature operates with these differentials, the molecules, in exactly the same way and according to the same laws as mathematics does with its abstract differentials. Thus, for instance, the differential of x3==3x2dx, where 3xdx2 and dx3 are neglected. If we put this in geometrical form, we have a cube with sides of length x, the length being increased by the infinitely small amount dx. Let us suppose that this cube consists of a sublimated element, say sulphur; and that three of the surfaces around one corner are protected, the other three being free. Let us now expose this sulphur cube to an atmosphere of sulphur vapour and lower the temperature sufficiently; sulphur will be deposited on the three free sides of the cube. We remain quite within the ordinary mode of procedure of physics and chemistry in supposing, in order to picture the process in its pure form, that in the first place a layer of thickness of a single molecule is deposited on each of these three sides. The length x of the sides of the cubes will have increased by the diameter of a molecule dx. The content of the cube x3 has increased by the difference between x3 and x3+3x2dx+3xdx2+dx3, where dx3, a single molecule and 3xdx2, three rows of length x+dx, consisting merely of lineally arranged molecules, can be neglected with the same justification as in mathematics. The result is the same, the increase in mass of the cube is 3x2dx. Strictly speaking dx3 and 3xdx2 do not occur in the case of the sulphur molecule, because two or three molecules cannot occupy the same space, and the cube's increase of bulk is therefore exactly 3x2dx+3xdx+dx. This is explained by the fact that in mathematics dx is a linear magnitude, while it is well known that such lines, without thickness or breadth, do not occur independently in nature, hence also the mathematical abstractions have unrestricted validity only in pure mathematics. And since the latter neglects 3xdx2+dx3, it makes no difference. Similarly in evaporation. When the uppermost molecular layer in a glass of water evaporates, the height of the water layer, x, is decreased by dx, and the continual flight of one molecular layer after another is actually a continued differentiation. And when the warm vapour is once more condensed to water in a vessel by pressure and cooling, and one molecular layer is deposited on another (it is permissible to leave out of account secondary circumstances that make the process an impure one) until the vessel is full, then literally an integration has been performed which differs from the mathematical one only in that the one is consciously carried out by the human brain, while the other is unconsciously carried out by nature. But it is not only in a transition from the liquid to the gaseous state and vice versa that processes occur which are completely analogous to those of the infinitesimal calculus. When mass motion, as such, is abolished - by impact - becomes transformed into heat, molecular motion, what is it that happens but that the mass motion is differentiated? And when the movements of the molecules of steam in the cylinder of the steam engine become added together so that they lift the piston by a definite amount, so that they become transformed into mass motion, have they not been integrated? Chemistry dissociates the molecules into atoms, magnitudes of more minute mass and spatial extension, but magnitudes of the same order, so that the two stand in definite, finite relations to one another. Hence, all the chemical equations which express the molecular composition of bodies are in their form differential equations. But in reality they are already integrated in the atomic weights which figure in them. For chemistry calculates with differentials, the mutual proportions of their magnitudes being known. Atoms, however, are in no wise regarded as simple, or in general as the smallest known particles of matter. Apart from chemistry itself, which is more and more inclining to the view that atoms are compound, the majority of physicists assert that the luminiferous ether, which transmits light and heat radiations, likewise consists of discrete particles, which, however, are so small that they have the same relation to chemical atoms and physical molecules as these have to mechanical masses, that is to say as d2x to dx. Here, therefore, in the now usual notion of the constitution of matter, we have likewise a differential of the second degree, and there is no reason at all why anyone, to whom it would give satisfaction, should not imagine that analogies of d3x, d4x, etc., also occur in nature. Hence, whatever view one may hold of the constitution of matter, this much is certain, that it is divided up into a series of big, well-defined groups of a relatively massive character in such a way that the members of each separate group stand to one another in definite finite mass ratios, in contrast to which those of the next group stand to them in the ratio of the infinitely large or infinitely small in the mathematical sense. The visible system of stars, the solar system, terrestrial masses, molecules and atoms, and finally ether particles, each of them form such a group. It does not alter the case that intermediate links can be found between the separate groups. Thus, between the masses of the solar system and terrestrial masses come the asteroids (some of which have a diameter no greater than, for example, that of the Reuss principality, younger branch), meteors, etc. Thus, in the organic world the cell stands between terrestrial masses and molecules. These intermediate links prove only that there is no leap in nature, precisely because nature is composed entirely of leaps. In so far as mathematics calculates with real magnitudes, it also employs this mode of outlook without hesitation. For terrestrial mechanics the mass of the earth is regarded as infinitely large, just as for astronomy terrestrial masses and the corresponding masses of meteors are regarded as infinitely small, and just as the distances and masses of the planets of the solar system are reduced to nothing as soon as astronomy investigates the constitution of our system of stars extending beyond the nearest fixed stars. As soon, however, as the mathematicians withdraw into their impregnable fortress of abstraction, so-called pure mathematics, all these analogies are forgotten, infinity becomes something totally mysterious, and the manner in which operations are carried out with it in analysis appears as something absolutely incomprehensible, contradicting all experience and all reason. The stupidities and absurdities by which mathematicians have rather excused than explained their mode of procedure, which remarkably enough always leads to correct results, exceed the most pronounced apparent and real fantasies, e.g. of the Hegelian philosophy of nature, about which mathematicians and natural scientists can never adequately express their horror. What they charge Hegel with doing, viz. pushing abstractions to the extreme limit, they do themselves on a far greater scale. They forget that the whole of so-called pure mathematics is concerned with abstractions, that all their magnitudes, taken in a strict sense, are imaginary, and that all abstractions when pushed to extremes are transformed into nonsense or into their opposite. Mathematical infinity is taken from reality although unconsciously, and consequently also can only be explained from reality and not from itself, from mathematical abstraction. And, as we have seen, if we investigate reality in this regard we come also upon the real relations from which the mathematical relation of infinity is taken, and even the natural analogies of the way in which this relation operates. And thereby the matter is explained. (H ckel's bad reproduction of the identity of thinking and being.) But also the contradiction between continuous and discrete matter, see Hegel. Note 2. Re page 46: The various forms of motion and the sciences dealing with them. It will be seen that this formulation differs from that in the text and in the previous note only by being rather less definite. But when an English journal (Nature) translated the above statement of Kekul to the effect that mechanics is the statics and dynamics of masses, physics the statics and dynamics of molecules, and chemistry the statics and dynamics of atoms, then it seems to me that this unconditional reduction of even chemical processes to something merely mechanical unduly restricts the field, at least of chemistry. And yet it is so much the fashion that, for instance, H ckel continually uses "mechanical" and "monistic" as having the same meaning, and in his opinion "modern physiology ... in its field allows only of the operation of physico-chemical - r in the wider sense, mechanical - forces." (Perigenesis.) If I term physics the mechanics of molecules, chemistry the physics of atoms, and furthermore biology the chemistry of proteins, I wish thereby to express the transition of each of these sciences into the other, hence both the connection, the continuity, and the distinction, the discrete separation. To go further and to define chemistry as likewise a kind of mechanics seems to me inadmissible. Mechanics - in the broader or narrower sense - knows only quantities, it calculates with velocities and masses, and at most with volumes. When the quality of bodies comes across its path, as in hydrostatics and aerostatics, it cannot achieve anything without going into molecular states and molecular motion, it is itself only a mere auxiliary science, the prerequisite for physics. In physics, however, and still more in chemistry, not only does continual qualitative change take place in consequence of quantitative change, the transformation of quantity into quality, but there are also many qualitative changes to be taken into account whose dependence on quantitative change is by no means proven. That the present tendency of science goes in this direction can be readily granted, but does not prove that this direction is the exclusively correct one, that the pursuit of this tendency will exhaust the whole of physics and chemistry. All motion includes mechanical motion, change of place of the largest or smallest portions of matter, and the first task of science, but only the first, is to obtain knowledge of this motion. But this mechanical motion does not exhaust motion as a whole. Motion is not merely change of place, in fields higher than mechanics it is also change of quality. The discovery that heat is a molecular motion was epoch-making. But if I have nothing more to say of heat than that it is a certain displacement of molecules, I should best be silent. Chemistry seems to be well on the way to explaining a number of chemical and physical properties or elements from the ratio of the atomic volumes to the atomic weights. But no chemist would assert that all the properties of an element are exhaustively expressed by its position in the Lothar Meyer curve, that it will ever be possible by this alone to explain, for instance, the peculiar constitution of carbon that makes it the essential bearer of organic life, or the necessity for phosphorus in the brain. Yet the "mechanical" conception amounts to nothing else. It explains all change from change of place, all qualitative differences from quantitative, and overlooks that the relation of quality and quantity is reciprocal, that quality can become transformed into quantity just as much as quantity into quality, that, in fact, reciprocal action takes place. If all differences and changes of quality are to be reduced to quantitative differences and changes, to mechanical displacement, then we inevitably arrive at the proposition that all matter consists of identical, smallest particles, and that all qualitative differences of the chemical elements of matter are caused by quantitative differences in number and by the spatial grouping of those smallest particles to form atoms. But we have not got so far yet. It is our modern natural scientists' lack of acquaintance with any other philosophy than the most mediocre vulgar philosophy, like that now rampant in the German universities, which allows them to use expressions like "mechanical" in this way, without taking into account, or even suspecting, the consequences with which they thereby necessarily burden themselves. The theory of the absolute qualitative identity of matter has its supporters - empirically it is equally impossible to refute it or to prove it. But if one asks these people who want to explain everything "mechanically" whether they are conscious of this consequence and accept the identity of matter, what a variety of answers will be heard! The most comical part about it is that to make "materialist" equivalent to "mechanical" derives from Hegel, who wanted to throw contempt on materialism by the addition "mechanical." Now the materialism criticised by Hegel - the French materialism of the eighteenth century - was in fact exclusively mechanical, and indeed for the very natural reason that at that time physics, chemistry, and biology were still in their infancy, and were very far from being able to offer the basis for a general outlook on nature. Similarly H ckel takes from Hegel the translation: causae efficientes==mechanically acting causes, and causae finales==purposively acting causes; where Hegel, therefore, puts mechanical as equivalent to blindly acting, unconsciously acting, and not as equivalent to mechanical in H ckel's sense of the word. But this whole antithesis is for Hegel himself so much a superseded standpoint that he does not even mention it in either of his two accounts of causality in his Logic - but only in his History of Philosophy, in the place where it comes historically (hence a sheer misunderstanding on H ckel's part due to superficiality!) and quite incidentally in dealing with teleology (Logic, III, II, 3) where he mentions it as the form in which the old metaphysics conceived the antagonism of mechanism and teleology, but otherwise treating it as a long superseded standpoint. Hence H ckel copied incorrectly in his joy at finding a confirmation of his "mechanical" conception and so arrives at the beautiful result that if a particular change is produced in an animal or plant by natural selection it has been effected by a causa efficiens, but if the same change arises by artificial selection then it has been effected by a causa finalis! The breeder as causa finalis! Of course a dialectician of Hegel's calibre could not be caught in the vicious circle of the narrow opposition of causa efficiens, and causa finalis. And for the modern standpoint the whole hopeless rubbish about this opposition is put an end to because we know from experience and from theory that both matter and its mode of existence, motion, are uncreatable and are, therefore, their own final cause; while to give the name effective causes to the individual causes which momentarily and locally become isolated in the mutual interaction of the motion of the universe, or which are isolated by our reflecting mind, adds absolutely no new determination but only a confusing element. A cause that is not effective is no cause. N.B. Matter as such is a pure creation of thought and an abstraction. We leave out of account the qualitative difference of things in comprehending them as corporeally existing things under the concept matter. Hence matter as such, as distinct from definite existing pieces of matter, is not anything sensuously existing. If natural science directs its efforts to seeking out uniform matter as such, to reducing qualitative differences to merely quantitative differences in combining identical smallest particles, it would be doing the same thing as demanding to see fruit as such instead of cherries, pears, apples, or the mammal as such instead of cats, dogs, sheep, etc., gas as such, metal, stone, chemical compound as such, motion as such. The Darwinian theory demands such a primordial mammal, H ckel's pro-mammal, but it, at the same time, has to admit that if this pro-mammal contains within itself in germ all future and existing mammals, it was in reality lower in rank than all existing mammals and exceedingly crude, hence more transitory than any of them. As Hegel has already shown, Encyclop dia I, p.199, this view is therefore "a one-sided mathematical standpoint," according to which matter must be looked upon as having only quantitative determination, but, qualitatively, as identical originally, "no other standpoint than that" of the French materialism of the eighteenth century. It is even a retreat to Pythagoras, who regarded number, quantitative determination as the essence of things. In the first place, Kekul . Then: the systematising of natural science, which is now becoming more and more necessary, cannot be found in any other way than in the interconnections of phenomena themselves. Thus the mechanical motion of small masses on any heavenly body ends in the contact of two bodies, which has two forms, distinct from one another only in degree, viz. friction and impact. So we investigate first of all the mechanical effect of friction and impact. But we find that they are not thereby exhausted: friction produces heat, light, and electricity, impact produces heat and light if not electricity also - hence conversion of motion of masses into molecular motion. We enter the realm of molecular motion, physics, and investigate further. But here too we find that molecular motion does not represent the conclusion of the investigation. Electricity passes into and arises from chemical reaction. Heat and light, ditto. Molecular motion becomes transformed into motion of atoms - chemistry. The investigation of chemical processes is confronted by the organic world as a field for research, that is to say, a world in which chemical processes take place, although under different conditions, according to the same laws as in the inorganic world, for the explanation of which chemistry suffices. In the organic world, on the other hand, all chemical investigations lead back in the last resort to a body - protein - which, while being the result of ordinary chemical processes, is distinguished from all others by being a self-acting, permanent chemical process. If chemistry succeeds in preparing this protein, a so-called protoplasm, with the specific nature which it obviously had at its origin, a specificity, or rather absence of specificity, such that it contains potentially within itself all other forms of protein (though it is not necessary to assume that there is only one kind of protoplasm), then the dialectical transition has also been accomplished in reality, hence completely accomplished. Until then, it remains a matter of thought, alias of hypothesis. When chemistry produces protein, the chemical process will reach out beyond itself, as in the case of the mechanical process above, that is, it will come into a more comprehensive realm, that of the organism. Physiology is, of course, the chemistry and especially the physics of the living body, but with that it also ceases to be specially chemistry, on the one hand its domain becomes restricted but, on the other hand, inside this domain it becomes raised to a higher power. (c) On Nageli's Incapacity to Know the Infinite. N geli, pp. 12, 13. N geli first of all says that we cannot know real qualitative differences, and immediately afterwards says that such "absolute differences" do not occur in Nature! P.12. In the first place, every qualitative infinity has many quantitative gradations, e.g. shades of colour, hardness and softness, length of life, etc., and these, although qualitatively distinct, are measurable and knowable. In the second place, qualities do not exist but only things with qualities and indeed with infinitely many qualities. Two different things always have certain qualities (properties attaching to corporeality at least) in common, others differing in degree, while still others may be entirely absent in one of them. If we consider two such extremely different things - e.g. a meteorite and a man - together but in separation, we get very little out of it, at most that heaviness and other corporeal properties are common to both. But an infinite series of other natural objects and natural processes can be put between the two things, permitting us to complete the series from meteorite to man and to allocate to each its place in the interconnection of nature and thus to know them. N geli himself admits this. Thirdly, our various senses might give us absolutely different impressions as regards quality. According to this, properties which we experience by means of sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch would be absolutely different. But even here the differences disappear with the progress of investigation. Smell and taste have long ago been recognised as allied senses belonging together, which perceive conjoint if not identical properties; sight and hearing both perceive wave oscillations. The sense of touch and sight are mutually complementary to such an extent that from the appearance of an object we can often enough predict its tactile properties. And, finally, it is always the same "I" that receives and elaborates all these different sense impressions, that comprehends them into a unity, and likewise these various impressions are provided by the same thing, appearing as its common properties, and therefore helping us to know it. To explain these different properties, accessible only to different senses, to bring them into connection with one another, is therefore the task of science which so far has not complained because we have not a general sense in place of the five special senses, or because we are not able to see or hear tastes and smells. Wherever we look, nowhere in nature are there to be found such "qualitatively or absolutely distinct fields," which are put forward as incomprehensible. The whole confusion springs from the confusion about quality and quantity. In accordance with the prevailing mechanical view, N geli regards all qualitative differences as explained only in so far as they can be reduced to quantitative differences (on which what is necessary to be said will be found elsewhere), or because quality and quantity are for him absolutely distinct categories. Metaphysics. "We can know only the finite, etc." This is quite correct in so far as only finite objects enter the sphere of our knowledge. But the statement needs to be completed by this: "fundamentally we can know only the infinite." In fact all real, exhaustive knowledge consists solely in raising the single thing in thought from singularity into particularity and from this into universality in seeking and establishing the infinite in the finite, the eternal in the transitory. The form of universality, however, is the form of self-completeness, hence infinity; it is the comprehension of the many finites in the infinite. We know that chlorine and hydrogen within certain limits of temperature and pressure and under the influence of light, combine with an explosion to form hydrochloric acid gas, and as soon as we know this, we know also that this takes place everywhere and at all times where the above conditions are present, and it can be a matter of indifference, whether this occurs once or is repeated a million times, or on how many heavenly bodies. The form of universality in nature is law, and no one talks more of the eternal character of the laws of nature than the natural scientist. Hence if N geli says that the finite is made impossible to establish by not desiring to investigate merely this finite, adding instead something eternal to it, then he denies either the possibility of knowing the laws of nature or their eternal character. All true knowledge of nature is knowledge of the eternal, the infinite, and hence essentially absolute. But this absolute knowledge has an important drawback. Just as the infinity of knowable matter is composed of the purely finite, so the infinity of thought which knows the absolute is composed of an infinite number of finite human minds, working side by side and successively at this infinite knowledge, committing practical and theoretical blunders, setting out from erroneous, one-sided, and false premises, pursuing false, tortuous, and uncertain paths, and often not even finding the right one when they run their noses against it (Priestley). The cognition of the infinite is therefore beset with double difficulty and from its very nature can only take place in an infinite asymptotic progress. And that fully suffices us in order to be able to say: the infinite is just as much knowable as unknowable, and that is all that we need. Curiously enough, N geli says the same thing: "We can know only the finite, but also we can know all that is finite that comes into the sphere of our sensuous perception." The finite that comes into the sphere, etc., constitutes in sum precisely the infinite, for it is just from this that N geli has derived his idea of the infinite! Without this finite, etc., he would have indeed no idea of the infinite! (Bad infinity, as such, to be dealt with elsewhere.) (Before this investigation of infinity comes the following): (1) The "insignificant sphere" in regard to space and time. (2) The "probably defective elaboration of the sense organs." (3) That we can only know the finite, transitory, changing and what differs in degree, the relative, etc. (as far as), "we do not know what time, space, force and matter, motion and rest, cause and effect are." It is the old story. First of all one makes sensuous things into abstractions and then one wants to know them through the senses, to see time and smell space. The empiricist becomes so steeped in the habit of empirical experience, that he believes that he is still in the field of sensuous knowledge when he is operating with abstractions. We know what an hour is, or a metre, but not what time and space are! As if time was anything other than just hours, and space anything but just cubic metres! The two forms of existence of matter are naturally nothing without matter, empty concepts, abstractions which exist only in our minds. But, of course, we are also not supposed to know what matter and motion are! Of course not, for matter as such and motion as such have not yet been seen or otherwise experienced by anyone, but only the various, actually existing material things and forms of motion. Matter is nothing but the totality of material things from which this concept is abstracted, and motion as such nothing but the totality of all sensuously perceptible forms of motion; words like matter and motion are nothing but abbreviations in which we comprehend many different sensuously perceptible things according to their common properties. Hence matter and motion cannot be known in any other way than by investigation of the separate material things and forms of motion, and by knowing these, we also pro tanto know matter and motion as such. Consequently, in saying that we do not know what time, space, motion, cause, and effect are, N geli merely says that first of all we make abstractions of the real world through our minds, and then cannot know these self-made abstractions because they are creations of thought and not sensuous objects, while all knowing is sensuous measurement! This is just like the difficulty mentioned by Hegel, we can eat cherries and plums, but not fruit, because no one has so far eaten fruit as such. When N geli asserts that there are probably a whole number of forms of motion in nature which we cannot perceive by our senses, that is a poor apology, equivalent to the suspension - at least for our knowledge - of the law of the uncreatability of motion. For they could certainly be transformed into motion perceptible to us! That would be an easy explanation, of, for instance, contact electricity. Ad vocem N geli. Impossibility of conceiving the infinite. As soon as we say that matter and motion are not created and are indestructible, we are saying that the world exists as infinite progress, i.e. in the form of bad infinity, and thereby we have conceived all of this process that is to be conceived. At the most the question still arises whether this process is an eternal repetition - in a great cycle - or whether the cycles have upward and downward portions.

1883-Dialectics of Nature-Appendix 1

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1883/don/appendix1.htm

In the sphere of society reflection is still more difficult. Society is determined by economic relations, production and exchange, and besides by the historically prerequisite conditions.... It was the greatest revolution that the world had so far experienced. Natural science also flourished in this revolution, was revolutionary through and through, advanced hand in hand with the awakening modern philosophy of the great Italians, and provided its martyrs for the stake and the prisons. It is characteristic that Protestants and Catholics vied with one another in persecuting it. The former burned Servetus, the latter Giordano Bruno. It was a time that called for giants and produced giants, giants in learning, intellect, and character, a time that the French correctly called the Renaissance and Protestant Europe with one-sided prejudice called the Reformation. At that time natural science also had its declaration of independence, though it is true it did not come right at the beginning, any more than that Luther was the first Protestant. What Luther s burning of the Papal Bull was in the religious field, in the field of natural science was the great work of Copernicus, in which he, although timidly, after thirty-six years hesitation and so to say on his deathbed, threw down a challenge to ecclesiastical superstition. From then on natural science was in essence emancipated from religion, although the complete settlement of accounts in all details has gone on to the present day and in many minds is still far from being complete. But from then on the development of science went forward with giant strides, increasing, so to speak, proportionately to the square of the distance in time from its point of departure, as if it wanted to show the world that for the motion of the highest product of organic matter, the human mind, the law that holds good is the reverse of that for the motion of inorganic matter. The first period of modern natural science ends in the inorganic sphere with Newton. It is the period in which the available subject-matter was mastered; it performed a great work in the fields of mathematics, mechanics and astronomy, statics and dynamics, especially owing to Kepler and Galileo, from whose work Newton drew the conclusions. In the organic sphere, however, there was no progress beyond the first beginnings. The investigation of the forms of life historically succeeding one another and replacing one another, as well as the changing conditions of life corresponding to them palaeontology and geology did not yet exist. Nature was not at all regarded as something that developed historically, that had a history in time; only extension in space was taken into account; the various forms were grouped not one after the other, but only one beside the other; natural history was valid for all periods, like the elliptical orbits of the planets. For any closer analysis of organic structure both the immediate bases were lacking, viz., chemistry and knowledge of the essential organic structure, the cell. Natural science, at the outset revolutionary, was confronted by an out-and-out conservative nature, in which everything remained today as it was at the beginning of the world, and in which right to the end of the world everything would remain as it had been in the beginning. It is characteristic that this conservative outlook on nature both in the inorganic and in the organic sphere The first breach: Kant and Laplace. The second: geology and palaeontology (Lyell, slow development). The third: organic chemistry, which prepares organic bodies and shows the validity of chemical laws for living bodies. The fourth: 1842, mechanical (theory of) heat, Grove. The fifth: Darwin, Lamarck, the cell, etc. (struggle, Cuvier and Agassiz). The sixth : the comparative element in anatomy, climatology (isotherms), animal and plant geography (scientific travel expeditions since the middle of the eighteenth century), physical geography in general (Humboldt), the assembling of the material in its interconnection. Morphology (embryology, Baer). The old teleology has gone to the devil, but it is now firmly established that matter in its eternal cycle moves according to laws which at a definite stage now here, now there necessarily give rise to the thinking mind in organic beings. The normal existence of animals is given by the contemporary conditions in which they live and to which they adapt themselves those of man, as soon as he differentiates himself from the animal in the narrower sense, have as yet never been present, and are only to be elaborated by the ensuing historical development. Man is the sole animal capable of working his way out of the merely animal state his normal state is one appropriate to his consciousness, one that has to be created by himself. ... God is nowhere treated worse than by the natural scientists who believe in him. Materialists simply explain the facts, without making use of such phrases, they do this first when importunate pious believers try to force God upon them, and then they answer curtly, either like Laplace: Sire, je n'avais pus, etc., or more rudely in the manner of the Dutch merchants who, when German commercial travellers press their shoddy goods on them, are accustomed to turn them away with the words: Ik kan die zaken niet gebruiken,[I have no use for the things] and that is the end of the matter. But what God has had to suffer at the hands of his defenders! In the history of modern natural science, God is treated by his defenders as Frederick-William III was treated by his generals and officials in the Jena campaign. One division of the army after another lays down its arms, one fortress after another capitulates before the march of science, until at last the whole infinite realm of nature is conquered by science, and there is no place left in it for the Creator. Newton still allowed Him the first impulse but forbade Him any further interference in his solar system. Father Secchi bows Him out of the solar system altogether, with all canonical honours it is true, but none the less categorically for all that, and he only allows Him a creative act as regards the primordial nebula. And so in all spheres. In biology, his last great Don Quixote, Agassiz, even ascribes positive nonsense to Him; He is supposed to have created not only the actual animals but also abstract animals, the fish as such! And finally Tyndall totally forbids Him any entry into nature and relegates Him to the world of emotional processes, only admitting Him because, after all, there must be somebody who knows more about all these things (nature) than John Tyndall! What a distance from the old God the Creator of heaven and earth, the maintainer of all things without whom not a hair can fall from the head! Tyndall s emotional need proves nothing. The Chevalier des Grieux also had an emotional need to love and possess Manon Lescaut, who sold herself and him over and over again; for her sake he became a cardsharper and pimp, and if Tyndall wants to reproach him, he would reply with his emotional need! God = nescio; but ignorantia non est argumentum (Spinoza).

Marx Engels on Religion

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1883/don/appendix3.htm

It was the greatest progressive revolution that mankind has so far experienced, a time which called for giants and produced giants giants in power of thought, passion, and character, in universality and learning. The men who founded the modern rule of the bourgeoisie had anything but bourgeois limitations. On the contrary, the adventurous character of the time inspired them to a greater or less degree. There was hardly any man of importance then living who had not travelled extensively, who did not command four or five languages, who did not shine in a number of fields. Leonardo da Vinci was not only a great painter but also a great mathematician, mechanician, and engineer, to whom the most diverse branches of physics are indebted for important discoveries. Albrecht D rer was painter, engraver, sculptor, and architect, and in addition invented a system of fortification embodying many of the ideas that much later were again taken up by Montalembert and the modern German science of fortification. Machiavelli was statesman, historian, poet, and at the same time the first notable military author of modern times. Luther not only cleaned the Augean stable of the Church but also that of the German language; he created modern German prose and composed the text and melody of that triumphal hymn which became the Marseillaise of the sixteenth century. The heroes of that time had not yet come under the servitude of the division of labour, the restricting effects of which, with its production of onesidedness, we so often notice in their successors. But what is especially characteristic of them is that they almost all pursue their lives and activities in the midst of the contemporary movements, in the practical struggle; they take sides and join in the fight, one by speaking and writing, another with the sword, many with both. Hence the fullness and force of character that makes them complete men. Men of the study are the exception either persons of second or third rank or cautious philistines who do not want to burn their fingers. At that time natural science also developed in the midst of the general revolution and was itself thoroughly revolutionary; it had to win in struggle its right of existence. Side by side with the great Italians from whom modern philosophy dates, it provided its martyrs for the stake and the prisons of the Inquisition. And it is characteristic that Protestants outdid Catholics in persecuting the free investigation of nature. Calvin had Servetus burnt at the stake when the latter was on the point of discovering the circulation of the blood, and indeed he kept him roasting alive during two hours; for the Inquisition at least it sufficed to have Giordano Bruno simply burnt alive. The revolutionary act by which natural science declared its independence and, as it were, repeated Luther's burning of the Papal Bull was the publication of the immortal work by which Copernicus, though timidly and, so to speak, only from his deathbed, threw down the gauntlet to ecclesiastical authority in the affairs of nature. The emancipation of natural science from theology dates from this act, although the fighting out of the particular antagonistic claims has dragged out up to our day and in many minds is still far from completion. Thenceforward, however, the development of the sciences proceeded with giant strides, and, it might be said, gained in force in proportion to the square of the distance (in time) from its point of departure. It was as if the world were to be shown that henceforth the reciprocal law of motion would be as valid for the highest product of organic matter, the human mind, as for inorganic substance. The main work in the first period of natural science that now opened lay in mastering the material immediately at hand. In most fields a start had to be made from the very beginning. Antiquity had bequeathed Euclid and the Ptolemaic solar system; the Arabs had left behind the decimal notation, the beginnings of algebra, the modern numerals, and alchemy; the Christian Middle Ages nothing at all. Of necessity, in this situation the most fundamental natural science, the mechanics of terrestrial and heavenly bodies, occupied first place, and alongside of it, as handmaiden to it, the discovery and perfecting of mathematical methods. Great work was achieved here. At the end of the period characterised by Newton and Linnaeus we find these branches of science brought to a certain perfection. The basic features of the most essential mathematical methods were established; analytical geometry by Descartes especially, logarithms by Napier, and the differential and integral calculus by Leibniz and perhaps Newton. The same holds good of the mechanics of rigid bodies, the main laws of which were made clear once for all. Finally in the astronomy of the solar system Kepler discovered the laws of planetary movement and Newton formulated them from the point of view of the general laws of motion of matter. The other branches of natural science were far removed even from this preliminary perfection. Only towards the end of the period did the mechanics of fluid and gaseous bodies receive further treatment. Physics proper had still not gone beyond its first beginnings, with the exception of optics, the exceptional progress of which was due to the practical needs of astronomy. By the phlogistic theory, chemistry for the first time emancipated itself from alchemy. Geology had not yet gone beyond the embryonic stage of mineralogy; hence paleontology could not yet exist at all. Finally, in the field of biology the essential preoccupation was still with the collection and first sifting of the immense material, not only botanical and zoological but also anatomical and even physiological. There could as yet be hardly any talk of the comparison of the various forms of life, of the investigation of their geographical distribution and their climatic, etc., living conditions. Here only botany and zoology arrived at an approximate completion owing to Linnaeus. But what especially characterises this period is the elaboration of a peculiar general outlook, in which the central point is the view of the absolute immutability of nature. In whatever way nature itself might have come into being, once present it remained as it was as long as it continued to exist. The planets and their satellites, once set in motion by the mysterious "first impulse", circled on and on in their predestined ellipses for all eternity, or at any rate until the end of all things. The stars remained for ever fixed and immovable in their places, keeping one another therein by "universal gravitation". The earth had persisted without alteration from all eternity, or, alternatively, from the first day of its creation. The "five continents" of the present day had always existed, and they had always had the same mountains, valleys, and rivers, the same climate, and the same flora and fauna, except in so far as change or cultivation had taken place at the hand of man. The species of plants and animals had been established once for all when they came into existence; like continually produced like, and it was already a good deal for Linnaeus to have conceded that possibly here and there new species could have arisen by crossing. In contrast to the history of mankind, which develops in time, there was ascribed to the history of nature only an unfolding in space. All change, all development in nature, was denied. Natural science, so revolutionary at the outset, suddenly found itself confronted by an out-and-out conservative nature in which even to-day everything was as it had been at the beginning and in which to the end of the world or for all eternity everything would remain as it had been since the beginning. High as the natural science of the first half of the eighteenth century stood above Greek antiquity in knowledge and even in the sifting of its material, it stood just as deeply below Greek antiquity in the theoretical mastery of this material, in the general outlook on nature. For the Greek philosophers the world was essentially something that had emerged from chaos, something that had developed, that had come into being. For the natural scientists of the period that we are dealing with it was something ossified, something immutable, and for most of them something that had been created at one stroke. Science was still deeply enmeshed in theology. Everywhere it sought and found its ultimate resort in an impulse from outside that was not to be explained from nature itself. Even if attraction, by Newton pompously baptised as "universal gravitation", was conceived as an essential property of matter, whence comes the unexplained tangential force which first gives rise to the orbits of the planets? How did the innumerable varieties of animals and plants arise? And how, above all, did man arise, since after all it was certain that he was not present from all eternity? To such questions natural science only too frequently answered by making the creator of all things responsible. Copernicus, at the beginning of the period, writes a letter renouncing theology; Newton closes the period with the postulate of a divine first impulse. The highest general idea to which this natural science attained was that of the purposiveness of the arrangements of nature, the shallow teleology of Wolff, according to which cats were created to eat mice, mice to he eaten by cats, and the whole of nature to testify to the wisdom of the creator. It is to the highest credit of the philosophy of the time that it did not let itself be led astray by the restricted state of contemporary natural knowledge, and that from Spinoza right to the great French materialists it insisted on explaining the world from the world itself and left the justification in detail to the natural science of the future. I include the materialists of the eighteenth century in this period because no natural scientific material was available to them other than that above described. Kant's epoch-making work remained a secret to them, and Laplace came long after them. We should not forget that this obsolete outlook on nature, although riddled through and through by the progress of science, dominated the entire first half of the nineteenth century, and in substance is even now still taught in all schools. 1 The first breach in this petrified outlook on nature was made not by a natural scientist but by a philosopher. In 1755 appeared Kant's Allgemeine Naturgesehichte und Theorie des Himmels [General Natural History and Theory of the Heavens]. The question of the first impulse was abolished; the earth and the whole solar system appeared as something that had come into being in the course of time. If the great majority of the natural scientists had had a little less of the repugnance to thinking that Newton expressed in the warning: "Physics, beware of metaphysics!", they would have been compelled from this single brilliant discovery of Kant's to draw conclusions that would have spared them endless deviations and immeasurable amounts of time and labour wasted in false directions. For Kant's discovery contained the point of departure for all further progress. If the earth were something that had come into being, then its present geological, geographical, and climatic state, and its plants and animals likewise, must be something that had come into being; it must have had a history not only of co-existence in space but also of succession in time. If at once further investigations had been resolutely pursued in this direction, natural science would now be considerably further advanced than it is. But what good could come of philosophy? Kant's work remained without immediate results, until many years later Laplace and Herschel expounded its contents and gave them a deeper foundation, thereby gradually bringing the "nebular hypothesis" into favour. Further discoveries finally brought it victory; the most important of these were: the proper motion of the fixed stars, the demonstration of a resistant medium in universal space, the proof furnished by spectral analysis of the chemical identity of the matter of the universe and the existence of such glowing nebular masses as Kant had postulated. It is, however, permissible to doubt whether the majority of natural scientists would so soon have become conscious of the contradiction of a changing earth that bore immutable organisms, had not the dawning conception that nature does not just exist, but comes into being and passes away, derived support from another quarter. Geology arose and pointed out, not only the terrestrial strata formed one after another and deposited one upon another, but also the shells and skeletons of extinct animals and the trunks, leaves, and fruits of no longer existing plants contained in these strata. It had finally to be acknowledged that not only the earth as a whole but also its present surface and the plants and animals living on it possessed a history in time. At first the acknowledgement occurred reluctantly enough. Cuvier's theory of the revolutions of the earth was revolutionary in phrase and reactionary in substance. In place of a single divine creation, he put a whole series of repeated acts of creation, making the miracle an essential natural agent. Lyell first brought sense into geology by substituting for the sudden revolutions due to the moods of the creator the gradual effects of a slow transformation of the earth. 2 Lyell's theory was even more incompatible than any of its predecessors with the assumption of constant organic species. Gradual transformation of the earth's surface and of all conditions of life led directly to gradual transformation of the organisms and their adaptation to the changing environment, to the mutability of species. But tradition is a power not only in the Catholic Church but also in natural science. For years, Lyell himself did not see the contradiction, and his pupils still less. This is only to be explained by the division of labour that had meanwhile become dominant in natural science, which more or less restricted each person to his special sphere, there being only a few whom it did not rob of a comprehensive view. Meanwhile physics had made mighty advances, the results of which were summed up almost simultaneously by three different persons in the year 1842, an epoch-making year for this branch of natural investigation. Mayer in Heilbronn and Joule in Manchester demonstrated the transformation of heat into mechanical energy and of mechanical energy into heat. The determination of the mechanical equivalent of heat put this result beyond question. Simultaneously, by simply working up the separate physical results already arrived at, Grove - not a natural scientist by profession, but an English lawyer proved that all so-called physical energy, mechanical energy, heat, light, electricity magnetism, indeed even so-called chemical energy, become transformed into one another under definite conditions without any loss of energy occurring, and so proved post factum along physical lines Descartes' principle that the quantity of motion present in the world is constant. With that the special physical energies, the as it were immutable "species" of physics, were resolved into variously differentiated forms of the motion of matter, convertible into one another according to definite laws. The fortuitousness of the existence of a number of physical energies was abolished from science by the proof of their interconnections and transitions. Physics, like astronomy before it, had arrived at a result that necessarily pointed to the eternal cycle of matter in motion as the ultimate reality. The wonderfully rapid development of chemistry, since Lavoisier, and especially since Dalton, attacked the old ideas of nature from another aspect. The preparation by inorganic means of compounds that hitherto had been produced only in the living organism proved that the laws of chemistry have the same validity for organic as for inorganic bodies, and to a large extent bridged the gulf between inorganic and organic nature, a gulf that even Kant regarded as for ever impassable. Finally, in the sphere of biological research also the scientific journeys and expeditions that had been systematically organised since the middle of the previous century, the more thorough exploration of the European colonies in all parts of the world by specialists living there, and further the progress of paleontology, anatomy, and physiology in general, particularly since the systematic use of the microscope and the discovery of the cell, had accumulated so much material that the application of the comparative method became possible and at the same time indispensable. On the one hand the conditions of life of the various floras and faunas were determined by means of comparative physical geography; on the other hand the various organisms were compared with one another according to their homologous organs, and this not only in the adult condition but at all stages of development. The more deeply and exactly this research was carried on, the more did the rigid system of an immutable, fixed organic nature crumble away at its touch. Not only did the separate species of plants and animals become more and more inextricably intermingled, but animals turned up, such as Amphioxus and Lepidosiren, that made a mockery of all previous classification, and finally organisms were encountered of which it was not possible to say whether they belonged to the plant or animal kingdom. More and more the gaps in the paleontological record were filled up, compelling even the most reluctant to acknowledge the striking parallelism between the evolutionary history of the organic world as a whole and that of the individual organism, the Ariadne's thread that was to lead the way out of the labyrinth in which botany and zoology appeared to have become more and more deeply lost. It was characteristic that, almost simultaneously with Kant's attack on the eternity of the solar system, C. F. Wolff in 1759 launched the first attack on the fixity of species and proclaimed the theory of descent. But what in his case was still only a brilliant anticipation took firm shape in the hands of Oken, Lamarck, Baer, and was victoriously carried through by Darwin in 1859, exactly a hundred years later. Almost simultaneously it was established that protoplasm and the cell, which had already been shown to be the ultimate morphological constituents of all organisms, occurred independently as the lowest forms of organic life. This not only reduced the gulf between inorganic and organic nature to a minimum but removed one of the most essential difficulties that had previously stood in the way of the theory of descent of organisms. The new conception of nature was complete in its main features; all rigidity was dissolved, all fixity dissipated, all particularity that had been regarded as eternal became transient, the whole of nature shown as moving in eternal flux and cyclical course. Thus we have once again returned to the point of view of the great founders of Greek philosophy, the view that the whole of nature, from the smallest element to the greatest, from grains of sand to suns, from protista to men, has its existence in eternal coming into being and passing away, in ceaseless flux, in un-resting motion and change, only with the essential difference that what for the Greeks was a brilliant intuition, is in our case the result of strictly scientific research in accordance with experience, and hence also it emerges in a much more definite and clear form. It is true that the empirical proof of this motion is not wholly free from gaps, but these are insignificant in comparison with what has already been firmly established, and with each year they become more and more filled up. And how could the proof in detail be otherwise than defective when one bears in mind that the most essential branches of science trans-planetary astronomy, chemistry, geology have a scientific existence of barely a hundred years, and the comparative method in physiology one of barely fifty years, and that the basic form of almost all organic development, the cell, is a discovery not yet forty years old? The innumerable suns and solar systems of our island universe, bounded by the outermost stellar rings of the Milky Way, developed from swirling, glowing masses of vapour, the laws of motion of which will perhaps be disclosed after the observations of some centuries have given us an insight into the proper motion of the stars. Obviously, this development did not proceed everywhere at the same rate. Recognition of. the existence of dark bodies, not merely planetary in nature, hence extinct suns in our stellar system, more and more forces itself on astronomy (M dler); on the other hand (according to Secchi) a part of the vaporous nebular patches belong to our stellar system as suns not yet fully formed, whereby it is not excluded that other nebulae, as M dler maintains, are distant independent island universes, the relative stage of development of which must be determined by the spectroscope. How a solar system develops from an individual nebular mass has been shown in detail by Laplace in a manner still unsurpassed; subsequent science has more and more confirmed him. On the separate bodies so formed suns as well as planets and satellites the form of motion of matter at first prevailing is that which we call heat. There can be no question of chemical compounds of the elements even at a temperature like that still possessed by the sun; the extent to which heat is transformed into electricity or magnetism under such conditions, continued solar observations will show; it is already as good as proved that the mechanical motion taking place in the sun arises solely from the conflict of heat with gravity. The smaller the individual bodies, the quicker they cool down, the satellites, asteroids, and meteors first of all, just as our moon has long been extinct. The planets cool more slowly, the central body slowest of all. With progressive cooling the interplay of the physical forms of motion which become transformed into one another comes more and more to the forefront until finally a point is reached from when on chemical affinity begins to make itself felt, the previously chemically indifferent elements become differentiated chemically one after another, obtain chemical properties, and enter into combination with one another. These compounds change continually with the decreasing temperature, which affects differently not only each element but also each separate compound of the elements, changing also with the consequent passage of part of the gaseous matter first to the liquid and then the solid state, and with the new conditions thus created. The period when the planet has a firm shell and accumulations of water on its surface coincides with that when its intrinsic heat diminishes more and more in comparison to the heat emitted to it from the central body. Its atmosphere becomes the arena of meteorological phenomena in the sense in which we now understand the word; its surface becomes the arena of geological changes in which the deposits resulting from atmospheric precipitation become of ever greater importance in comparison to the slowly decreasing external effects of the hot fluid interior. If, finally, the temperature becomes so far equalised that over a considerable portion of the surface at least it does not exceed the limits within which protein is capable of life, then, if other chemical conditions are favourable, living protoplasm is formed. What these conditions are, we do not yet know, which is not to be wondered at since so far not even the chemical formula of protein has been established we do not even know how many chemically different protein bodies there are and since it is only about ten years ago that the fact became known that completely structureless protein exercises all the essential functions of life, digestion, excretion, movement, contraction, reaction to stimuli, and reproduction. Thousands of years may have passed before the conditions arose in which the next advance could take place and this formless protein produce the first cell by formation of nucleus and cell membrane. Rut this first cell also provided the foundation for the morphological development of the whole organic world; the first to develop, as it is permissible to assume from the whole analogy of the pal ontological record, were innumerable species of non-cellular and cellular protista, of which Eozoon canadense alone has come down to us, and of which some were gradually differentiated into the first plants and others into the first animals. And from the first animals were developed, essentially by further differentiation, the numerous classes, orders, families, genera, and species of animals; and finally mammals, the form in which the nervous system attains its fullest development; and among these again finally that mammal in which nature attains consciousness of itself man. Man too arises by differentiation. Not only individually, by differentiation from a single egg cell to the most complicated organism that nature produces - no, also historically. When after thousands of years of struggle the differentiation of hand from foot, and erect gait, were finally established, man became distinct from the monkey and the basis was laid for the development of articulate speech and the mighty development of the brain that has since made the gulf between man and monkey an unbridgeable one. The specialisation of the hand this implies the tool, and the tool implies specific human activity, the transforming reaction of man on nature, production. Animals in the narrower sense also have tools, but only as limbs of their bodies: the ant, the bee, the beaver; animals also produce, but their productive effect on surrounding nature in relation to the latter amounts to nothing at all. Man alone has succeeded in impressing his stamp on nature, not only by shifting the plant and animal world from one place to another, but also by so altering the aspect and climate of his dwelling place, and even the plants and animals themselves, that the consequences of his activity can disappear only with the general extinction of the terrestrial globe. And he has accomplished this primarily and essentially by means of the hand. Even the steam engine, so far his most powerful tool for the transformation of nature, depends, because it is a tool, in the last resort on the hand. But step by step with the development of the hand went that of the brain; first of all consciousness of the conditions for separate practically useful actions, and later, among the more favoured peoples and arising from the preceding, insight into the natural laws governing them. And with the rapidly growing knowledge of the laws of nature the means for reacting on nature also grew; the hand alone would never have achieved the steam engine if the brain of man had not attained a correlative development with it, and parallel to it, and partly owing to it. With men we enter history. Animals also have a history, that of their derivation and gradual evolution to their present position. This history, however, is made for them, and in so far as they themselves take part in it, this occurs without their knowledge or desire. On the other hand, the more that human beings become removed from animals in the narrower sense of the word, the more they make their own history consciously, the less becomes the influence of unforeseen effects and uncontrolled forces of this history, and the more accurately does the historical result correspond to the aim laid down in advance. If, however, we apply this measure to human history, to that of even the most developed peoples of the present day, we find that there still exists here a colossal disproportion between the proposed aims and the results arrived at, that unforeseen effects predominate, and that the uncontrolled forces are far more powerful than those set into motion according to plan. And this cannot be otherwise as long as the most essential historical activity of men, the one which has raised them from bestiality to humanity and which forms the material foundation of all their other activities, namely the production of their requirements of life, that is to-day social production, is above all subject to the interplay of unintended effects from uncontrolled forces and achieves its desired end only by way of exception and, much more frequently, the exact opposite. In the most advanced industrial countries we have subdued the forces of nature and pressed them into the service of mankind; we have thereby infinitely multiplied production, so that a child now produces more than a hundred adults previously did. And what is the result? Increasing overwork and increasing misery of the masses, and every ten years a great collapse. Darwin did not know what a bitter satire he wrote on mankind, and especially on his countrymen, when he showed that free competition, the struggle for existence, which the economists celebrate as the highest historical achievement, is the normal state of the animal kingdom. Only conscious organisation of social production, in which production and distribution are carried on in a planned way, can lift mankind above the rest of the animal world as regards the social aspect, in the same way that production in general has done this for men in their aspect as species. Historical evolution makes such an organisation daily more indispensable, but also with every day more possible. From it will date a new epoch of history, in which mankind itself, and with mankind all branches of its activity, and especially natural science, will experience an advance that will put everything preceding it in the deepest shade. Nevertheless, "all that comes into being deserves to perish". Millions of years may elapse, hundreds of thousands of generations be born and die, but inexorably the time will come when the declining warmth of the sun will no longer suffice to melt the ice thrusting itself forward from the poles; when the human race, crowding more and more about the equator, will finally no longer find even there enough heat for life; when gradually even the last trace of organic life will vanish; and the earth, an extinct frozen globe like the moon, will circle in deepest darkness and in an ever narrower orbit about the equally extinct sun, and at last fall into it. Other planets will have preceded it, others will follow it; instead of the bright, warm solar system with its harmonious arrangement of members, only a cold, dead sphere will still pursue its lonely path through universal space. And what will happen to our solar system will happen sooner or later to all the other systems of our island universe; it will happen to all the other innumerable island universes, even to those the light of which will never reach the earth while there is a living human eye to receive it. And when such a solar system has completed its life history and succumbs to the fate of all that is finite, death, what then? Will the sun's corpse roll on for all eternity through infinite space, and all the once infinitely diverse, differentiated natural forces pass for ever into one single form of motion, attraction ? "Or" as Secchi asks "do forces exist in nature which can re-convert the dead system into its original state of an incandescent nebula and re-awake it to new life? We do not know". At all events we do not know in the sense that we know that 2 2 = 4, or that the attraction of matter increases and decreases according to the square of the distance. In theoretical natural science, however, which as far as possible builds up its view of nature into a harmonious whole, and without which nowadays even the most thoughtless empiricist cannot get anywhere, we have very often to reckon with incompletely known magnitudes; and logical consistency of thought must at all times help to get over defective knowledge. Modern natural science has had to take over from philosophy the principle of the indestructibility of motion; it cannot any longer exist without this principle. But the motion of matter is not merely crude mechanical motion, mere change of place, it is heat and light, electric and magnetic stress, chemical combination and dissociation, life and, finally, consciousness. To say that matter during the whole unlimited time of its existence has only once, and for what is an infinitesimally short period in comparison to its eternity, found itself able to differentiate its motion and thereby to unfold the whole wealth of this motion, and that before and a.fter this remains restricted for eternity to mere change of place - this is equivalent to maintaining that matter is mortal and motion transitory. The indestructibility of motion cannot be merely quantitative, it must also be conceived qualitatively; matter whose purely mechanical change of place includes indeed the possibility under favourable conditions of being transformed into heat, electricity, chemical action, or life, but which is not capable of producing these conditions from out of itself, such matter has forfeited motion; motion which has lost the capacity of being transformed into the various forms appropriate to it may indeed still have dynamis but no longer energeia, and so has become partially destroyed. Both, however, are unthinkable. This much is certain: there was a time when the matter of our island universe had transformed a quantity of motion of what kind we do not yet know into heat, such that there could be developed from it the solar systems appertaining to (according to M dler) at least twenty million stars, the gradual extinction of which is likewise certain. How did this transformation take place? We know just as little as Father Secchi knows whether the future caput mortuum of our solar system will once again be converted into the raw material of a new solar system. But here either we must have recourse to a creator, or we are forced to the conclusion that the incandescent raw material for the solar system of our universe was produced in a natural way by transformations of motion which are by nature inherent in moving matter, and the conditions of which therefore also must be reproduced by matter, even if only after millions and millions of years and more or less by chance but with the necessity that is also inherent in chance. The possibility of such a transformation is more and more being conceded. The view is being arrived at that the heavenly bodies are ultimately destined to fall into one another, and one even calculates the amount of heat which must be developed on such collisions. The sudden flaring up of new stars, and the equally sudden increase in brightness of familiar ones, of which we are informed by astronomy, is most easily explained by such collisions. Not only does our group of planets move about the sun, and our sun within our island universe, but our whole island universe also moves in space in temporary, relative equilibrium with the other island universes, for even the relative equilibrium of freely moving bodies can only exist where the motion is reciprocally determined; and it is assumed by many that the temperature in space is not everywhere the same. Finally, we know that, with the exception of an infinitesimal portion, the heat of the innumerable suns of our island universe vanishes into space and fails to raise the temperature of space even by a millionth of a degree centigrade. What becomes of all this enormous quantity of heat? Is it for ever dissipated in the attempt to heat universal space, has it ceased to exist practically, and does it only continue to exist theoretically, in the fact that universal space has become warmer by a decimal fraction of a degree beginning with ten or more noughts? The indestructibility of motion forbids such an assumption, but it allows the possibility that by the successive falling into one another of the bodies of the universe all existing mechanical motion will be converted into heat and the latter radiated into space, so that in spite of all "indestructibility of force" all motion in general would have ceased. (Incidentally it is seen here how inaccurate is the term "indestructibility of force" instead of "indestructibility of motion".) Hence we arrive at the conclusion that in some way, which it will later be the task of scientific research to demonstrate, the heat radiated into space must be able to become transformed into another form of motion, in which it can once more be stored up and rendered active. Thereby the chief difficulty in the way of the reconversion of extinct suns into incandescent vapour disappears. For the rest, the eternally repeated succession of worlds in infinite time is only the logical complement to the co-existence of innumerable worlds in infinite space a principle the necessity of which has forced itself even on the anti-theoretical Yankee brain of Draper. 3 It is an eternal cycle in which matter moves, a cycle that certainly only completes its orbit in periods of time for which our terrestrial year is no adequate measure, a cycle in which the time of highest development, the time of organic life and still more that of the life of beings conscious of nature and of themselves, is just as narrowly restricted as the space in which life and self-consciousness come into operation; a cycle in which every finite mode of existence of matter, whether it be sun or nebular vapour, single animal or genus of animals, chemical combination or dissociation, is equally transient, and wherein nothing is eternal but eternally changing, eternally moving matter and the laws according to which it moves and changes. But however often, and however relentlessly, this cycle is completed in time and space, however many millions of suns and earths may arise and pass away, however long it may last before the conditions for organic life develop, however innumerable the organic beings that have to arise and to pass away before animals with a brain capable of thought are developed from their midst, and for a short span of time find conditions suitable for life, only to be exterminated later without mercy, we have the certainty that matter remains eternally the same in all its transformations, that none of its attributes can ever be lost, and therefore, also, that with the same iron necessity that it will exterminate on the earth its highest creation, the thinking mind, it must somewhere else and at another time again produce it.

1883-Dialectics of Nature-Introduction

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1883/don/ch01.htm

It is, therefore, from the history of nature and human society that the laws of dialectics are abstracted. For they are nothing but the most general laws of these two aspects of historical development, as well as of thought itself. And indeed they can be reduced in the main to three: Moreover, anyone who is even only slightly acquainted with his Hegel will be aware that in hundreds of passages Hegel is capable of giving the most striking individual illustrations from nature and history of the dialectical laws. We are not concerned here with writing a handbook of dialectics, but only with showing that the dialectical laws are really laws of development of nature, and therefore are valid also for theoretical natural science. Hence we cannot go into the inner interconnection of these laws with one another. All qualitative differences in nature rest on differences of chemical composition or on different quantities or forms of motion (energy) or, as is almost always the case, on both. Hence it is impossible to alter the quality of a body without addition or subtraction of matter or motion, i.e. without quantitative alteration of the body concerned. In this form, therefore, Hegel's mysterious principle appears not only quite rational but even rather obvious. It is surely hardly necessary to point out that the various allotropic and aggregational states of bodies, because they depend on various groupings of the molecules, depend on greater or lesser quantities of motion communicated to the bodies. But what is the position in regard to change of form of motion, or so-called energy? If we change heat into mechanical motion or vice versa, is not the quality altered while the quantity remains the same? Quite correct. But it is with change of form of motion as with Heine's vices; anyone can be virtuous by himself, for vices two are always necessary. Change of form of motion is always a process that takes place between at least two bodies, of which one loses a definite quantity of motion of one quality (e.g. heat), while the other gains a corresponding quantity of motion of another quality (mechanical motion, electricity, chemical decomposition). Here, therefore, quantity and quality mutually correspond to each other. So far it has not been found possible to convert motion from one form to another inside a single isolated body. We are concerned here in the first place with nonliving bodies; the same law holds for living bodies, but it operates under very complex conditions and at present quantitative measurement is still often impossible for us. If we imagine any non-living body cut up into smaller and smaller portions, at first no qualitative change occurs. But this has a limit: if we succeed, as by evaporation, in obtaining the separate molecules in the free state, then it is true that we can usually divide these still further, yet only with a complete change of quality. The molecule is decomposed into its separate atoms, which have quite different properties from those of the molecule. In the case of molecules composed of various chemical elements, atoms or molecules of these elements themselves make their appearance in the place of the compound molecule; in the case of molecules of elements, the free atoms appear, which exert quite distinct qualitative effects: the free atoms of nascent oxygen are easily able to effect what the atoms of atmospheric oxygen, bound together in the molecule, can never achieve. But the molecule is also qualitatively different from the mass of the body to which it belongs. It can carry out movements independently of this mass and while the latter remains apparently at rest, e.g. heat oscillations; by means of a change of position and of connection with neighbouring molecules it can change the body into an allotrope or a different state of aggregation. Thus we see that the purely quantitative operation of division has a limit at which it becomes transformed into a qualitative difference: the mass consists solely of molecules, but it is something essentially different from the molecule, just as the latter is different from the atom. It is this difference that is the basis for the separation of mechanics, as the science of heavenly and terrestrial masses, from physics, as the mechanics of the molecule, and from chemistry, as the physics of the atom. In mechanics, no qualities occur; at most, states such as equilibrium, motion, potential energy, which all depend on measurable transference of motion and are themselves capable of quantitative expression. Hence, in so far as qualitative change takes place here, it is determined by a corresponding quantitative change. In physics, bodies are treated as chemically unalterable or indifferent; we have to do with changes of their molecular states and with the change of form of the motion which in all cases, at least on one of the two sides, brings the molecule into play. Here every change is a transformation of quantity into quality, a consequence of the quantitative change of the quantity of motion of one form or another that is inherent in the body or communicated to it. "Thus, for instance, the temperature of water is first of all indifferent in relation to its state as a liquid; but by increasing or decreasing the temperature of liquid water a point is reached at which this state of cohesion alters and the water becomes transformed on the one side into steam and on the other into ice." (Hegel, Encyclopedia, Collected Works, VI, p. 217.) Similarly, a definite minimum current strength is required to cause the platinum wire of an electric incandescent lamp to glow; and every metal has its temperature of incandescence and fusion, every liquid its definite freezing and boiling point at a given pressure - in so far as our means allow us to produce the temperature required; finally also every gas has its critical point at which it can be liquefied by pressure and cooling. In short, the so-called physical constants are for the most part nothing but designations of the nodal points at which quantitative addition or subtraction of motion produces qualitative alteration in the state of the body concerned, at which, therefore, quantity is transformed into quality. The sphere, however, in which the law of nature discovered by Hegel celebrates its most important triumphs is that of chemistry. Chemistry can be termed the science of the qualitative changes of bodies as a result of changed quantitative composition. That was already known to Hegel himself (Logic, Collected Works, III, p. 488). As in the case of oxygen: if three atoms unite into a molecule, instead of the usual two, we get ozone, a body which is very considerably different from ordinary oxygen in its odour and reactions. Again, one can take the various proportions in which oxygen combines with nitrogen or sulphur, each of which produces a substance qualitatively different from any of the others! How different laughing gas (nitrogen monoxide N2O) is from nitric anhydride (nitrogen pentoxide, N2O5) ! The first is a gas, the second at ordinary temperatures a solid crystalline substance. And yet the whole difference in composition is that the second contains five times as much oxygen as the first, and between the two of them are three more oxides of nitrogen (N0, N2O3, NO2), each of which is qualitatively different from the first two and from each other. This is seen still more strikingly in the homologous series of carbon compounds, especially in the simpler hydrocarbons. Of the normal paraffins, the lowest is methane, CH4; here the four linkages of the carbon atom are saturated by four atoms of hydrogen. The second, ethane, C2H6, has two atoms of carbon joined together and the six free linkages are saturated by six atoms of hydrogen. And so it goes on, with C3H8, C4H10, etc., according to the algebraic formula CnH2n+2, so that by each addition of CH2 a body is formed that is qualitatively distinct from the preceding one. The three lowest members of the series are gases, the highest known, hexadecane, C16H34, is a solid body with a boiling point of 270 C. Exactly the same holds good for the series of primary alcohols with formula CnH2n+20, derived (theoretically) from the paraffins, and the series of monobasic fatty acids (formula CnH2nO2). What qualitative difference can be caused by the quantitative addition of C3H6 is taught by experience if we consume ethyl alcohol, C2H12O, in any drinkable form without addition of other alcohols, and on another occasion take the same ethyl alcohol but with a slight addition of amyl alcohol, C5H12O, which forms the main constituent of the notorious fusel oil. One's head will certainly be aware of it the next morning, much to its detriment; so that one could even say that the intoxication, and subsequent "morning after" feeling, is also quantity transformed into quality, on the one hand of ethyl alcohol and on the other hand of this added C3H6. In these series we encounter the Hegelian law in yet another form. The lower members permit only of a single mutual arrangement of the atoms. If, however, the number of atoms united into a molecule attains a size definitely fixed for each series, the grouping of the atoms in the molecule can take place in more than one way; so that two or more isomeric substances can be formed, having equal numbers of C, H, and 0 atoms in the molecule but nevertheless qualitatively distinct from one another. We can even calculate how many such isomers are possible for each member of the series. Thus, in the paraffin series, for C4H10 there are two, for C6H12 there are three; among the higher members the number of possible isomers mounts very rapidly. Hence once again it is the quantitative number of atoms in the molecule that determines the possibility and, in so far as it has been proved, also the actual existence of such qualitatively distinct isomers. Still more. From the analogy of the substances with which we are acquainted in each of these series, we can draw conclusions as to the physical properties of the still unknown members of the series and, at least for the members immediately following the known ones, predict their properties, boiling point, etc., with fair certainty. Finally, the Hegelian law is valid not only for compound substances but also for the chemical elements themselves. We now know that "the chemical properties of the elements are a periodic function of their atomic weights" (Roscoe-Schorlemmer, Complete Text-Book of Chemistry, II, p. 823), and that, therefore, their quality is determined by the quantity of their atomic weight. And the test of this has been brilliantly carried out. Mendeleyev proved that various gaps occur in the series of related elements arranged according to atomic weights indicating that here new elements remain to be discovered. He described in advance the general chemical properties of one of these unknown elements, which he termed eka-aluminium, because it follows after aluminium in the series beginning with the latter, and he predicted its approximate specific and atomic weight as well as its atomic volume. A few years later, Lecoq de Boisbaudran actually discovered this element, and Mendeleyev's predictions fitted with only very slight discrepancies. Eka-aluminium was realised in gallium (ibid., p. 828). By means of the - unconscious - application of Hegel's law of the transformation of quantity into quality, Mendeleyev achieved a scientific feat which it is not too bold to put on a par with that of Leverrier in calculating the orbit of the still unknown planet Neptune. In biology, as in the history of human society, the same law holds good at every step, but we prefer to dwell here on examples from the exact sciences, since here the quantities are accurately measurable and traceable. Probably the same gentlemen who up to now have decried the transformation of quantity into quality as mysticism and incomprehensible transcendentalism will now declare that it is indeed something quite self-evident, trivial, and commonplace, which they have long employed, and so they have been taught nothing new. But to have formulated for the first time in its universally valid form a general law of development of nature, society, and thought, will always remain an act of historic importance. And if these gentlemen have for years caused quantity and quality to be transformed into one another, without knowing what they did, then they will have to console themselves with Moliere's Monsieur Jourdain who had spoken prose all his life without having the slightest inkling of it.

1883-Dialectics of Nature-ch2

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1883/don/ch02.htm

All motion is bound up with some change of place, whether it be change of place of heavenly bodies, terrestrial masses, molecules, atoms, or ether particles. The higher the form of motion, the smaller this change of place. It in no way exhausts the nature of the motion concerned, but it is inseparable from the motion. It, therefore, has to be investigated before anything else. The whole of nature accessible to us forms a system, an interconnected totality of bodies, and by bodies we understand here all material existence extending from stars to atoms, indeed right to ether particles, in so far as one grants the existence of the last named. In the fact that these bodies are interconnected is already included that they react on one another, and it is precisely this mutual reaction that constitutes motion. It already becomes evident here that matter is unthinkable without motion. And if, in addition, matter confronts us as something given, equally uncreatable as indestructible, it follows that motion also is as uncreatable as indestructible. It became impossible to reject this conclusion as soon as it was recognised that the universe is a system, an interconnection of bodies. And since this recognition had been reached by philosophy long before it came into effective operation in natural science, it is explicable why philosophy, fully two hundred years before natural science, drew the conclusion of the uncreatability and indestructibility of motion. Even the form in which it did so is still superior to the present day formulation of natural science. Descartes' principle, that the amount of motion present in the universe is always the same, has only the formal defect of applying a finite expression to an infinite magnitude. On the other hand, two expressions of the same law are at present current in natural science: Helmholtz's law of the conservation of force, and the newer, more precise, one of the conservation of energy. Of these, the one, as we shall see, says the exact opposite of the other, and moreover each of them expresses only one side of the relation. When two bodies act on each other so that a change of place of one or both of them results, this change of place can consist only in an approach or a separation. They either attract each other or they repel each other. Or, as mechanics expresses it, the forces operating between them are central, acting along the line joining their centres. That this happens, that it is the case throughout the universe without exception, however complicated many movements may appear to be, is nowadays accepted as a matter of course. It would seem nonsensical to us to assume, when two bodies act on each other and their mutual interaction is not opposed by any obstacle or the influence of a third body, that this action should be effected otherwise than along the shortest and most direct path, i.e. along the straight line joining their centres. It is well known, moreover, that Helmholtz (Erhaltung der Kraft [The Conservation of Force], Berlin, 1847, Sections 1 and 2) has provided the mathematical proof that central action and unalterability of the quantity of motion are reciprocally conditioned and that the assumption of other than central actions leads to results in which motion could be either created or destroyed. Hence the basic form of all motion is approximation and separation, contraction and expansion - in short, the old polar opposites of attraction and repulsion. It is expressly to be noted that attraction and repulsion are not regarded here as so-called "forces" but as simple forms of motion, just as Kant had already conceived matter as the unity of attraction and repulsion. What is to be understood by the conception of "forces" will be shown in due course. All motion consists in the interplay of attraction and repulsion. Motion, however, is only possible when each individual attraction is compensated by a corresponding repulsion somewhere else. Otherwise in time one side would get the preponderance over the other and then motion would finally cease. Hence all attractions and all repulsions in the universe must mutually balance one another. Thus the law of the indestructibility and uncreatibility of motion takes the form that each movement of attraction in the universe must have as its complement an equivalent movement of repulsion and vice versa; or, as ancient philosophy - long before the natural scientific formulation of the law of conservation of force or energy - expressed it: the sum of all attractions in the universe is equal to the sum of all repulsions. However it appears that there are still two possibilities for all motion to cease at some time or other, either by repulsion and attraction finally cancelling each other out in actual fact, or by the total repulsion finally taking possession of one part of matter and the total attraction of the other part. For the dialectical conception, these possibilities are excluded from the outset. Dialectics has proved from the results of our experience of nature so far that all polar opposites in general are determined by the mutual action of the two opposite poles on one another, that the separation and opposition of these poles exists only within their unity and inter-connection, and, conversely, that their inter-connection exists only in their separation and their unity only in their opposition. This once established, there can be no question of a final cancelling out of repulsion and attraction, or of a final partition between the one form of motion in one half of matter and the other form in the other half, consequently there can be no question of mutual penetration or of absolute separation of the two poles. It would be equivalent to demanding in the first case that the north and south poles of a magnet should mutually cancel themselves out or, in the second case, that dividing a magnet in the middle between the two poles should produce on one side a north half without a south pole, and on the other side a south half without a north pole. Although, however, the impermissibility of such assumptions follows at once from the dialectical nature of polar opposites, nevertheless, thanks to the prevailing metaphysical mode of thought of natural scientists, the second assumption at least plays a certain part in physical theory. This will be dealt with in its place. How does motion present itself in the interaction of attraction and repulsion? We can best investigate this in the separate forms of motion itself. At the end, the general aspect of the matter will show itself. Let us take the motion of a planet about its central body. The ordinary school textbook of astronomy follows Newton in explaining the ellipse described as the result of the joint action of two forces, the attraction of the central body and a tangential force driving the planet along the normal to the direction of this attraction. Thus it assumes, besides the form of motion directed centrally, also another direction of motion or so-called "force" perpendicular to the line joining the central points. Thereby it contradicts the above-mentioned basic law according to which all motion in our universe can only take place along the line joining the central points of the bodies acting on one another, or, as one says, is caused only by centrally acting forces. Equally, it introduces into the theory an element of motion which, as we have likewise seen, necessarily leads to the creation and destruction of motion, and therefore presupposes a creator. What had to be done, therefore, was to reduce this mysterious tangential force to a form of motion acting centrally, and this the Kant-Laplace theory of cosmogony accomplished. As is well known, according to this conception the whole solar system arose from a rotating, extremely tenuous, gaseous mass by gradual contraction. The rotational motion is obviously strongest at the equator of this gaseous sphere, and individual gaseous rings separate themselves from the mass and clump themselves together into planets, planetoids, etc., which revolve round the central body in the direction of the original rotation. This rotation itself is usually explained from the motion characteristic of the individual particles of gas. This motion takes place in all directions, hut finally an excess in one particular direction makes itself evident and so causes the rotating motion, which is bound to become stronger and stronger with the progressive contraction of the gaseous sphere. But whatever hypothesis is assumed of the origin of the rotation, it abolishes the tangential force, dissolving it in a special form of the phenomena of centrally acting motion. If the one element of planetary motion, the directly central one, is represented by gravitation, the attraction between the planet and the central body, then the other tangential element appears as a relic, in a derivative or altered form, of the original repulsion of the individual particles of the gaseous sphere. Then the life process of a solar system presents itself as an interplay of attraction and repulsion, in which attraction gradually more and more gets the upper hand owing to repulsion being radiated into space in the form of heat and thus more and more becoming lost to the system. One sees at a glance that the form of motion here conceived as repulsion is the same as that which modern physics terms "energy." By the contraction of the system and the resulting detachment of the individual bodies of which it consists to-day, the system has lost "energy," and indeed this loss, according to Helmholtz's well-known calculation, already amounts to 453/454 of the total quantity of motion originally present in the form of repulsion. Let us take now a mass in the shape of a body on our earth itself. It is connected with the earth by gravitation, as the earth in turn is with the sun; but unlike the earth it is incapable of a free planetary motion. It can be set in motion only by an impulse from outside, and even then, as soon as the impulse ceases, its movement speedily comes to a standstill, whether by the effect of gravity alone or by the latter in combination with the resistance of the medium in which it moves. This resistance also is in the last resort an effect of gravity, in the absence of which the earth would not have on its surface any resistant medium, any atmosphere. Hence in pure mechanical motion on the earth's surface we are concerned with a situation in which gravitation, attraction, decisively predominates, where therefore the production of the motion shows both phases: first counteracting gravity and then allowing gravity to act - in a word, production of rising and falling. Thus we have again mutual action between attraction on the one hand and a form of motion taking place in the opposite direction to it, hence a repelling form of motion, on the other hand. But within the sphere of terrestrial pure mechanics (which deals with masses of given states of aggregation and cohesion taken by it as unalterable) this repelling form of motion does not occur in nature. The physical and chemical conditions under which a lump of rock becomes separated from a mountain top, or a fall of water becomes possible, lie outside our sphere. Therefore, in terrestrial pure mechanics, the repelling, raising motion must be produced artificially: by human force, animal force, water or steam power, etc. And this circumstance, this necessity to combat the natural attraction artificially, causes the mechanicians to adopt the view that attraction, gravitation, or, as they say, the force of gravity, is the most important, indeed the basic, form of motion in nature. When, for instance, a weight is raised and communicates motion to other bodies by falling directly or indirectly, then according to the usual view of mechanics it is not the raising of the weight which communicates this motion but the force of gravity. Thus Helmholtz, for instance, makes "the force which is the simplest and the one with which we are best acquainted, viz. gravity, act as the driving force... for instance in grandfather clocks that are actuated by a weight. The weight... cannot comply with the pull of gravity without setting the whole clockwork in motion." But it cannot set the clockwork in motion without itself sinking and it goes on sinking until the string from which it hangs is completely unwound: When this process, as far as terrestrial mechanics is concerned, has reached its end, when the heavy mass has first of all been raised and then again let fall through the same height, what becomes of the motion that constituted it? For pure mechanics, it has disappeared. But we know now that it has by no means been destroyed. To a lesser extent it has been conveyed into the air as oscillations of sound waves, to a much greater extent into heat - which has been communicated in part to the resisting atmosphere, in part to the falling body itself, and finally in part to the floor, on which the weight comes to rest. The clock weight has also gradually given up its motion in the form of frictional heat to the separate driving wheels of the clockwork. But, although usually expressed in this way, it is not the falling motion, i.e.. the attraction, that has passed into heat, and therefore into a form of repulsion. On the contrary, as Helmholtz correctly remarks, the attraction, the heaviness, remains what it previously was and, accurately speaking, becomes even greater. Rather it is the repulsion communicated to the raised body by rising that is mechanically destroyed by falling and reappears as heat. The repulsion of masses is transformed into molecular repulsion. Heat, as already stated, is a form of repulsion. It sets the molecules of solid bodies into oscillation, thereby loosening the connections of the separate molecules until finally the transition to the liquid state takes place. In the liquid state also, on continued addition of heat, it increases the motion of the molecules until a degree is reached at which the latter split off altogether from the mass and, at a definite velocity determined for each molecule by its chemical constitution, they move away individually in the free state. With a still further addition of heat, this velocity is further increased, and so the molecules are more and more repelled from one another. But heat is a form of so-called "energy"; here once again the latter proves to be identical with repulsion. In the phenomena of static electricity and magnetism, we have a polar division of attraction and repulsion. Whatever hypothesis may be adopted of the modus operandi of these two forms of motion, in view of the facts no one has any doubt that attraction and repulsion, in so far as they are produced by static electricity or magnetism and are able to develop unhindered, completely compensate one another, as in fact necessarily follows from the very nature of the polar division. Two poles whose activities did not completely compensate each other would indeed not be poles, and also have so far not been discovered in nature. For the time being we will leave galvanism out of account, because in its case the process is determined by chemical reactions, which makes it more complicated. Therefore, let us investigate rather the chemical processes of motion themselves. When two parts by weight of hydrogen combine with 15.96 parts by weight of oxygen to form water vapour, an amount of heat of 68,924 heat units is developed during the process. Conversely, if 17.96 parts by weight of water vapour are to be decomposed into 2 parts by weight of hydrogen and 15.96 parts by weight of oxygen, this is only possible on condition that the water vapour has communicated to it an amount of motion equivalent to 68,924 heat units - whether in the form of heat itself or of electrical motion. The same thing holds for all other chemical processes. In the overwhelming majority of cases, motion is given off on combination and must be supplied on decomposition. Here, too, as a rule, repulsion is the active side of the process more endowed with motion or requiring the addition of motion, while attraction is the passive side producing a surplus of motion and giving off motion. On this account, the modern theory also declares that, on the whole, energy is set free on the combination of elements and is bound up on decomposition. And Helmholtz declares: Hence we have now no longer the two simple basic forms of attraction and repulsion, but a whole series of sub-forms in which the winding up and running down process of universal motion goes on in opposition to both attraction and repulsion. It is, however, by no means merely in our mind that these manifold forms of appearance are comprehended under the single expression of motion. On the contrary, they themselves prove in action that they are forms of one and the same motion by passing into one another under given conditions. Mechanical motion of masses passes into heat, into electricity, into magnetism; heat and electricity pass into chemical decomposition; chemical combination in turn develops heat and electricity and, by means of the latter, magnetism; and finally, heat and electricity produce once more mechanical movement of masses. Moreover, these changes take place in such a way that a given quantity of motion of one form always has corresponding to it an exactly fixed quantity of another form. Further, it is a matter of indifference which form of motion provides the unit by which the amount of motion is measured, whether it serves for measuring mass motion, heat, so-called electromotive force, or the motion undergoing transformation in chemical processes. We base ourselves here on the theory of the "conservation of energy" established by J. R. Mayer in 1842 and afterwards worked out internationally with such brilliant success, and we have now to investigate the fundamental concepts nowadays made use of by this theory. These are the concepts of "force", "energy", and "work". It has been shown above that according to the modern view, now fairly generally accepted, energy is the term used for repulsion, while Helmholtz generally uses the word force to express attraction. One could regard this as a mere distinction of form, inasmuch as attraction and repulsion compensate each other in the universe, and accordingly it would appear a matter of indifference which side of the relation is taken as positive and which as negative, just as it is of no importance in itself whether the positive abscissae are counted to the right or the left of a point in a given line. Nevertheless, this is not absolutely so. For we are concerned here, first of all, not with the universe, but with phenomena occurring on the earth and conditioned by the exact position of the earth in the solar system, and of the solar system in the universe. At every moment, however, our solar system gives out enormous quantities of motion into space, and motion of a very definite quality, viz. the sun's heat, i.e. repulsion. But our earth itself allows of the existence of life on it only owing to the sun's heat, and it in turn finally radiates into space the sun's heat received, after it has converted a portion of this heat into other forms of motion. Consequently, in the solar system and above all on the earth, attraction already considerably preponderates over repulsion. Without the repulsive motion radiated to us from the sun, all motion on the earth would cease. If to-morrow the sun were to become cold, the attraction on the earth would still, other circumstances remaining the same, be what it is to-day. As before, a stone of 100 kilogrammes, wherever situated, would weigh 100 kilogrammes. But the motion, both of masses and of molecules and atoms, would come to what we would regard as an absolute standstill. Therefore it is clear that for processes occurring on the earth to-day it is by no means a matter of indifference whether attraction or repulsion is conceived as the active side of motion, hence as "force" or "energy." On the contrary, on the earth to-day attraction has already become altogether passive owing to its decisive preponderance over repulsion; we owe all active motion to the supply of repulsion from the sun. Therefore, the modern school - even if it remains unclear about the nature of the relation constituting motion - nevertheless, in point of fact and for terrestrial processes, indeed for the whole solar system, is absolutely right in conceiving energy as repulsion. The expression "energy" by no means correctly expresses all the relationships of motion, for it comprehends only one aspect, the action but not the reaction. It still makes it appear as if "energy" was something external to matter, something implanted in it. But in all circumstances it is to be preferred to the expression "force." As conceded on all hands (from Hegel to Helmholtz), the notion of force is derived from the activity of the human organism within its environment. We speak of muscular force, of the lifting force of the arm, of the leaping power of the legs, of the digestive force of the stomach and intestinal canal, of the sensory force of the nerves, of the secretory force of the glands, etc. In other words, in order to save having to give the real cause of a change brought about by a function of our organism, we fabricate a fictitious cause, a so-called force corresponding to the change. Then we carry this convenient method over to the external world also, and so invent as many forces as there are diverse phenomena. In Hegel's time natural science (with the exception perhaps of heavenly and terrestrial mechanics) was still in this naive state, and Hegel quite correctly attacks the prevailing way of denoting forces (passage to be quoted). Similarly in another passage: And even in this sense it is one-sided, for it expresses everything in a one-sided manner. All natural processes are two-sided, they rest on the relation of at least two effective parts, action and reaction. The notion of force, however, owing to its origin from the action of the human organism on the external world, and further because of terrestrial mechanics, implies that only one part is active, effective, the other part being passive, receptive; hence it lays down a not yet demonstrable extension of the difference between the sexes to non-living objects. The reaction of the second part, on which the force works, appears at most as a passive reaction, as a resistance. This mode of conception is permissible in a number of fields even outside pure mechanics, namely where it is a matter of the simple transference of motion and its quantitative calculation. But already in the more complicated physical processes it is no longer adequate, as Helmholtz's own examples prove. The refractive force lies just as much in the light itself as in the transparent bodies. In the case of adhesion and capillarity, it is certain that the "force" is just as much situated in the surface of the solid as in the liquid. In contact electricity, at any rate, it is certain that both metals contribute to it, and "chemical affinity" also is situated, if anywhere, in both the parts entering into combination. But a force which consists of separated forces, an action which does not evoke its reaction, but which exists solely by itself, is no force in the sense of terrestrial mechanics, the only science in which one really knows what is meant by a force. For the basic conditions of terrestrial mechanics are, firstly, refusal to investigate the causes of the impulse, i.e. the nature of the particular force, and, secondly, the view of the one-sidedness of the force, it being everywhere opposed by au identical gravitational force, such that in comparison with any terrestrial distance of fall the earth's radius = (infinity). But let us see further how Helmholtz, "objectivises" his "forces" into natural laws. In a lecture of 1854 (loc. cit.., p. 119) he examines the "store of working force" originally contained in the nebular sphere from which our solar system was formed. "In point of fact it received an enormously large legacy in this respect, if only in the form of the general force of attraction of all its parts for one another." This indubitably is so. But it is equally indubitable that the whole of this legacy of gravitation is present undiminished in the solar system to-day, apart perhaps from the minute quantity that was lost together with the matter ' We should now call this potential energy. which was flung out, possibly irrevocably, into space. Further, "The chemical forces too must have been already present and ready to act; but as these forces could become effective only on intimate contact of the various kinds of masses, condensation had to take place before they came into play." If, as Hclmholtz does above, we regard these chemical forces as forces of affinity, hence as attraction, then again we are bound to say that the sum-total of these chemical forces of attraction still exists undiminished within the solar system. But on the same page Helmholtz gives us the results of his calculations "that perhaps only the 454th part of the original mechanical force exists as such" - that is to say, in the solar system. How is one to make sense of that? The force of attraction, general as well as chemical, is still present unimpaired in the solar system. Helmholtz does not mention any other certain source of force. In any case, according to Helmholtz, these forces have performed tremendous work. But they have neither increased nor diminished on that account. As it is with the clock weight mentioned above, so it is with every molecule in the solar system and with the solar system itself. "Its gravitation is neither lost nor diminished." What happens to carbon and oxygen as previously mentioned holds good for all chemical elements: the total given quantity of each one remains, and "the total force of affinity continues to exist just as powerfully as before." What have we lost then? And what "force" has performed the tremendous work which is 453 times as big as that which, according to his calculation, the solar system is still able to perform? Up to this point Helmholtz has given no answer. But further on he says: "Whether a further reserve of force in the shape of heat was present, we do not know." - But, if we may be allowed to mention it, heat is a repulsive "force," it acts therefore against the direction of both gravitation and chemical attraction, being minus if these are put as plus. Hence if, according to Helmholtz, the original store of force is composed of general and chemical attraction, an extra reserve of heat would have to be, not added to that reserve of force, but subtracted from it. Otherwise the sun's heat would have had to strengthen the force of attraction of the earth when it causes water to evaporate in direct opposition to this attraction, and the water vapour to rise; or the heat of an incandescent iron tube through which steam is passed would strengthen the chemical attraction of oxygen and water, whereas it puts it out of action. Or, to make the same thing clear in another form: let us assume that the nebular sphere with radius r, and therefore with volume 4/3(pi)r has a temperature t. Let us further assume a second nebular sphere of equal mass having at the higher temperature T the larger radius R and volume 4/3(pi)R . Now it is obvious that in the second nebular sphere the attraction, mechanical as well as physical and chemical, can act with the same force as in the first only when it has shrunk from radius R to radius r, i.e. when it has radiated into world space heat corresponding to the temperature difference T - t. A hotter nebular sphere will therefore condense later than a colder one; consequently the heat, considered from Helmholtz's standpoint as an obstacle to condensation, is no plus but a minus of the "reserve of force." Helmholtz, by pre-supposing the possibility of a quantum of repulsive motion in the form of heat becoming added to the attractive forms of motion and increasing the total of these latter, commits a definite error of calculation. Let us now bring the whole of this "reserve of force", possible as well as demonstrable, under the same mathematical sign so that an addition is possible. Since for the time being we cannot reverse the heat and replace its repulsion by the equivalent attraction, we shall have to perform this reversal with the two forms of attraction. Then, instead of the general force of attraction, instead of the chemical affinity, and instead of the heat, which moreover possibly already exists as such at the outset, we have simply to put - the sum of the repulsive motion or so-called energy present in the gaseous sphere at the moment when it becomes independent. And by so doing Helmholtz's calculation will also hold, in which he wants to calculate "the heating that must arise from the assumed initial condensation of the heavenly bodies of our system from nebulously scattered matter." By thus reducing the whole "reserve of force" to heat, repulsion, he also makes it possible to add on the assumed "heat reserve force". The calculation then asserts that 453/454 of all the energy, i.e. repulsion, originally present in the gaseous sphere has been radiated into space in the form of heat, or, to put it accurately, that the sum of all attraction in the present solar system is to the sum of all repulsion, still present in the same, as 453: 1. But then it directly contradicts the text of the lecture to which it is added as proof. If then the notion of force, even in the case of a physicist like Helmholtz, gives rise to such confusion of ideas, this is the best proof that it is in general not susceptible of scientific use in all branches of investigation which go beyond the calculations of mechanics. In mechanics the causes of motion are taken as given and their origin is disregarded, only their effects being taken into account. Hence if a cause of motion is termed a force, this does no damage to mechanics as such; but it becomes the custom to transfer this term also to physics, chemistry, and biology, and then confusion is inevitable. We have already seen this and shall frequently see it again. For the concept of work, see the next chapter.

1883-Dialectics of Nature-ch3

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1883/don/ch03.htm

According to this, we are venturing now into a very dangerous field, the more so since we cannot very well take the liberty of guiding the reader "through the school of mathematical mechanics. Perhaps, however, it will turn out that, where it is a question of concepts, dialectical thinking will carry us at least as far as mathematical calculation. Galileo discovered, on the one hand, the law of falling, according to which the distances traversed by falling bodies are proportional to the squares of the times taken in falling. On the other hand, as we shall see, he put forward the not quite compatible law that the magnitude of motion of a body (its impeto or momento) is determined by the mass and the velocity in such a way that for constant mass it is proportional to the velocity. Descartes adopted this latter law and made the product of the mass and the velocity of the moving body quite generally into the measure of its motion. Huyghens had already found that, on elastic impact, the sum of the products of the masses, multiplied by the squares of their velocities, remains the same before and after impact, and that an analogous law holds good in various other cases of motion to a system of connected bodies. Leibniz was the first to realise that the Cartesian measure of motion was in contradiction to the law of falling. On the other hand, it could not be denied that in many cases the Cartesian measure was correct. Accordingly, Leibniz divided moving forces into dead forces and live forces. The dead were the pushes or pulls of resting bodies, and their measure the product of the mass and the velocity with which the body would move if it were to pass from a state of rest to one of motion. On the other hand, he put forward as the measure of vis viva, of the real motion of a body, the product of the mass and the square of the velocity. This new measure of motion he derived directly from the law of falling. The Cartesians protested with might and main and there developed a famous controversy lasting many years, in which Kant also participated in his very first work (Gedanken von der wahren Sch tzung der lebendigen Kr fte [Thoughts on the True Estimation of Live Forces], 1746), without, however, seeing clearly into the matter. Mathematicians to-day look down with a certain amount of scorn on this barren controversy which dragged out for more than forty years and divided the mathematicians of Europe into two hostile camps, until at last d'Alembert by his Trait de dynamique (1743), as it were by a final verdict, put an end to the useless verbal dispute, for it was nothing else. (Suter, ibid., p. 366.) It would, however, seem that a controversy could not rest entirely on a useless verbal dispute when it had been initiated by a Leibniz against a Descartes, and had occupied a man like Kant to such an extent that he devoted to it his first work, a fairly large volume. And in point of fact, how is it to be understood that motion has two contradictory measures, that on one occasion it is proportional to the velocity, and on another to the square of the velocity? Suter makes it very easy for himself; he says both sides were right and both were wrong; nevertheless, the expression 'vis viva' has endured up to the present day; only it no longer serves as the measure of force, but is merely a term that was once adopted for the product of the mass and half the square of the velocity, a product so full of significance in mechanics. Hence, mv remains the measure of motion, and vis viva is only another expression for mv2/2, concerning which formula we learn indeed that it is of great significance for mechanics, but now most certainly do not know what significance it has. Let us, however, take up the salvation-bringing Trait de dynamique and look more closely at d'Alembert's final verdict"; it is to be found in the preface. In the text, it says, the whole question does not occur, on account of l'inutilit parfaite dont elle est pour la m canique. This is quite correct for purely mathematical mechanics, in which, as in the case of Suter above, words used as designations are only other expressions, or names, for algebraic formulae, names in connection with which it is best not to think at all. Nevertheless, since such important people have concerned themselves with the matter, he desires to examine it briefly in the preface. Clearness of thought demands that by the force of moving bodies one should understand only their property of overcoming obstacles or resisting them. Hence, force is to be measured neither by mv2 nor by XXX, but solely by the obstacles and the resistance they offer. Now, there are, he says, three kinds of obstacles: (1) insuperable obstacles which totally destroy the motion, and for that very reason cannot be taken into account here; (2) obstacles whose resistance suffices to arrest the motion and to do so instantaneously: the case of equilibrium; (3) obstacles which only gradually arrest the motion: the case of retarded motion. D'Alembert's proposal for reaching a reconciliation amounts to the following calculation: A mass 1, with velocity 1, compresses 1 spring in unit time. A mass 1, with velocity 2, compresses 4 springs, but requires two units of time; i.e. only 2 springs per unit of time. A mass 1, with velocity 3, compresses 9 springs in three units of time, i.e. only 3 springs per unit of time. Hence if we divide the effect by the time required for it, we again come from mv2 to mv. This is the same argument that Catelan in particular had already employed against Leibniz; it is true that a body with velocity 2 rises against gravity four times as high as one with velocity 1, but it requires double the time for it; consequently the quantity of motion must be divided by the time, and =2, not =4. Curiously enough, this is also Suter's view, who indeed deprived the expression vis viva of all logical meaning and left it only a mathematical one. But this is natural. For Suter it is a question of saving the formula mv in its significance as sole measure of the quantity of motion; hence logically mv2 is sacrificed in order to arise again transfigured in the heaven of mathematics. However, this much is correct: Catelan's argument provides one of the bridges connecting mv with mv2, and so is of importance. The mechanicians subsequent to d'Alembert by no means accepted his verdict, for his final verdict was indeed in favour of mv as the measure of motion. They adhered to his expression of the distinction which Leibniz had already made between dead and live forces: mv is valid for equilibrium, i.e. for statics; mv2 is valid for motion against resistance, i.e. for dynamics. Although on the whole correct, the distinction in this form has, however, logically no more meaning than the famous pronouncement of the junior officer: on duty always to me, off duty always me." It is accepted tacitly, it just exists. We cannot alter it, and if a contradiction lurks in this double measure, how can we help it? Thus, for instance, Thomson and Tait say (A Treatise on Natural Philosophy, Oxford, 1867, p. 162); The quantity of motion or the momentum of a rigid body moving without rotation is proportional to its mass and velocity conjointly. Double mass or double velocity would correspond to double quantity of motion. And immediately below that they say: The vis viva or kinetic energy of a moving body is proportional to the mass and the square of the velocity conjointly. The two contradictory measures of motion are put side by side in this very glaring form. Not so much as the slightest attempt is made to explain the contradiction, or even to disguise it. In the book by these two Scotsmen, thinking is forbidden, only calculation is permitted. No wonder that at least one of them, Tait, is accounted one of the most pious Christians of pious Scotland. In Kirchhoff's Vorlesungen ber mathematische Mechanik [Lectures on Mathematical Mechanics] the formulae mv and mv2 do not occur at all in this form. Perhaps Helmholtz will aid us. In his Erhaltung der Kraft [Conservation of Force] he proposes to express vis viva by mv2/2, a point to which we shall return later. Then, on page 20 et seq., he enumerates briefly the cases in which so far the principle of the conservation of vis viva (hence of mv2/2) has been recognised and made use of. Included therein under No. 2 is In any case, it becomes evident here that mv and mv2 serve to determine two quite distinct processes, but we certainly knew long ago that mv2 cannot equal mv, unless v=l. What has to be done is to make it comprehensible why motion should have a twofold measure, a thing which is surely just as unpermissible in natural science as in commerce. Let us, therefore, attempt this in another way. By mv, then, one measures a motion propagated and altered by mechanical powers ; hence this measure holds good for the lever and all its derivatives, for wheels, screws, etc., in short, for all machinery for the transference of motion. But from a very simple and by no means new consideration it becomes evident that in so far as mv applies here, so also does mv2. Let us take any mechanical contrivance in which the sums of the lever-arms on the two sides are related to each other as 4:1, in which, therefore, a weight of 1 kg. holds a weight of 4 kg. in equilibrium. Hence, by a quite insignificant additional force on one arm of the lever we can raise 1 kg. by 20 m.; the same additional force, when applied to the other arm of the lever, raises 4 kg. a distance of 5 m., and the preponderating weight sinks in the same time that the other weight requires for rising. Mass and velocity are inversely proportional to one another; mv, 1x20=m'v', 4x5. On the other hand, if we let each of the weights, after it has been raised, fall freely to the original level, then the one, 1 kg., after falling a distance of 20 m. (the acceleration due to gravity is put in round figures =10 m. instead of 9,81 m.), attains a velocity of 20 m.: the other, 4 kg., after falling a distance of 5 m., attains a velocity of 10 m. mv2=1 x 20 x 20 =400 =m'v'2=4x10x10=400 On the other hand the times of fall are different: the 4 kg. traverse their 5 m. in 1 second, the 1 kg. traverses its 20 m. in 2 seconds. Friction and air resistance are, of course, neglected here. But after each of the two bodies has fallen from its, height, its motion ceases. Therefore, mv appears here as the measure of simple transferred, hence lasting, mechanical motion, and mv2 as the measure of the vanished mechanical motion. Further, the same thing applies to the impact of perfectly elastic bodies: the sum of both mv and of mv2 is unaltered before and after impact. Both measures have the same validity. 'This is not the case on impact of inelastic bodies. Here, too, the current elementary textbooks (higher mechanics is hardly concerned at all with such trifles) teach that before and after impact the sum of mv remains the same. On the other hand a loss of vis viva occurs, for if the sum of mv2 after impact is subtracted from the sum of mv2 before impact, there is under all circumstances a positive remainder. By this amount (or the half of it, according to the notation adopted) the vis viva is diminished owing both to the mutual penetration and to the change of form of the colliding bodies. The latter is now clear and obvious, but not so the first assertion that the sum of mv remains the same before and after impact. In spite of Suter, vis viva is motion, and if a part of it is lost, motion is lost. Consequently, eithermv here incorrectly expresses the quantity of motion, or the above assertion is untrue. In general the whole theorem has been handed down from a period when there was as yet no inkling of the transformation of motion; when, therefore, a disappearance of mechanical motion was only conceded where there was no other way out. Thus, the equality here of the sum of mv before and after impact was taken as proved by the fact that no loss or gain of this sum had been introduced. If, however, the bodies lose vis viva in internal friction corresponding to their inelasticity, they also lose velocity, and the sum of mv after impact must be smaller than before. For it is surely not possible to neglect the internal friction in calculating mv, When it makes itself felt so clearly in calculating mv2. But this does not matter. Even if we admit the theorem, and calculate the velocity after falling, on the assumption that the sum of mv has remained the same, this decrease of the sum of mv2 is still found. Here, therefore, mv and mv2 conflict, and they do so by the difference of the mechanical motion that has actually disappeared. Moreover, the calculation itself shows that the sum of mv2 expresses the quantity of motion correctly, while the sum of mv expresses it incorrectly. Such are pretty nearly all the cases in which mv is employed in mechanics. Let us now glance at some cases in which mv2 is employed. When a cannon-ball is fired, it uses up in its course an amount of motion that is proportional to mv2, irrespective of whether it encounters a solid target or comes to a standstill owing to air resistance and gravitation. If a railway train runs into a stationary one, the violence of the collision, and the corresponding destruction, is proportional to its mv2. Similarly, mv2 serves wherever it is necessary to calculate the mechanical force required for overcoming a resistance. But what is the meaning of this convenient phrase, so current in mechanics: overcoming a resistance? If we overcome the resistance of gravity by raising a weight, there disappears a quantity of motion, a quantity of mechanical force, equal to that produced anew by the direct or indirect fall of the raised weight from the height reached back to its original level. The quantity is measured by half the product of the mass and the final velocity after falling, mv2/2. What then occurred on raising the weight? Mechanical motion, or force, disappeared as such. But it has not been annihilated; it has been converted into mechanical force of tension, to use Helmholtz's expression; into potential energy, as the moderns say; into ergal as Clausius calls it; and this can at any moment, by any mechanically appropriate means, be reconverted into the same quantity of mechanical motion as was necessary to produce it. The potential energy is only the negative expression of the vis viva and vice versa. A 24-lb. cannon-ball moving with a velocity of 400 m. per second strikes the one-metre thick armour-plating of a warship and under these conditions has apparently no effect on the armour. Consequently an amount of mechanical motion has vanished equal to mv2/2, i.e. (since 24 lbs. =12 kg.) =12 X 400 X 400 X 1/2= 960,000 kilogram-metres. Wat has become of it? A small portion has been expended in the concussion and molecular alteration of the armour-plate. A second portion goes in smashing the cannon-ball into innumerable fragments. But the greater part has been converted into heat and raises the temperature of the cannon-hall to red heat. When the Prussians, in passing over to Alsen in 1864, brought their heavy batteries into play against the armoured sides of the Rolf Krake, after each hit they saw in the darkness the flare produced by the suddenly glowing shot. Even earlier, Whitworth had proved by experiment that explosive shells need no detonator when used against armoured warships; the glowing metal itself ignites the charge. Taking the mechanical equivalent of the unit of heat as 424 kilogram-metres, the quantity of heat corresponding to the above-mentioned amount of mechanical motion is 2,264 units. The specific heat of iron=0.1140; that is to say, the amount of heat that raises the ternperature of 1 kg. of water by 1 C. (which serves as the unit of heat) suffices to raise the temperature of 1/0.1140 = 8.772 kg. of iron by 1 C. Therefore the 2,264 heat-units mentioned above raise the temperature of 1 kg. of iron by 8.772 X 2,264 =19,860 C. or 19,860 kg. of iron by 1 C. Since this quantity of heat is distributed uniformly in the armour and the shot, the latter has its temperature raised by 19,860/2X12=828 , amounting to quite a good glowing heat. But since the foremost, striking end of the shot receives at any rate by far the greater part of the heat, certainly double that of the rear half, the former would be raised to a temperature of 1,104 C. and the latter to 552 C., which would fully suffice to explain the glowing effect even if we make a big deduction for the actual mechanical work performed on impact. Mechanical motion also disappears in friction, to reappear as heat; it is well known that, by the most accurate possible measurement of the two processes, Joule in Manchester and Codling in Copenhagen were the first to make an approximate experimental measurement of the mechanical equivalent of heat. The same thing applies to the production of an electric current in a magneto-electrical machine by means of mechanical force, e.g. from a steam engine. The quantity of so-called electromotive force produced in a given time is proportional to the quantity of mechanical motion used up in the same period, being equal to it if expressed in the same units. We can imagine this quantity of mechanical motion being produced, not by a steam engine, but by a weight falling in accordance with the pressure of gravity. The mechanical force that this is capable of supplying is measured by the vis viva that it would obtain on falling freely through the same distance, or by the force required to raise it again to the original height; in both cases mv2/2. Hence we find that while it is true that mechanical motion has a two-fold measure, each of these measures holds good for a very definitely demarcated series of phenomena. If already existing mechanical motion is transferred in such a way that it remains as mechanical motion, the transference takes place in proportion to the product of the mass and the velocity. If, however, it is transferred in such a way that. it disappears as mechanical motion in order to reappear in the form of potential energy, heat, electricity, etc., in short, if it is converted into another form of motion, then the quantity of this new form of motion is proportional to the product of the originally moving mass and the square of the velocity. In short, mv is mechanical motion measured as mechanical motion; mv2/2 is mechanical motion measured by its capacity to become converted into a definite quantity of another form of motion. And, as we have seen, these two measures, because different, do not contradict one another. It becomes clear from this that Leibniz's quarrel with the Cartesians was by no means a mere verbal dispute, and that d'Alembert's verdict in point of fact settled nothing at all. D'Alembert. might have spared himself his tirades on the unclearness of his predecessors, for he was just as unclear as they were. In fact, as long as it was not known what becomes of the apparently annihilated mechanical motion. the absence of clarity was inevitable. And as long as mathematical mechanicians like Suter remain obstinately shut in by the four walls of their special science, they are bound to remain just as unclear as d'Alembert and to put us off with empty and contradictory phrases. But how does modern mechanics express this conversion of mechanical motion into another form of motion, proportional in quantity to the former? It has performed work, and indeed a definite amount of work. But this does not exhaust the concept of work in the physical sense of the word. If, as in a steam or heat engine, heat is converted into mechanical motion,i.e. molecular motion is converted into mass motion, if heat breaks up a chemical compound, if it becomes converted into electricity in a thermopile, if an electric current sets free the elements of water from dilute sulphuric acid, or, conversely, if the motion (alias energy) produced in the chemical process of a current-producing cell takes the form of electricity and this in the circuit once more becomes converted into heat - in all these processes the form of motion that initiates the process, and which is converted by it into another form, performs work, and indeed a quantity of work corresponding to its own quantity. Work, therefore, is change of form of motion regarded in its quantitative aspect. But how so? If a raised weight remains suspended and at rest, is its potential energy during the period of rest also a form of motion? Certainly. Even Tait arrives at the conviction that potential energy is subsequently resolved into a form of actual motion (Nature, XIV p.459). And, apart from that, Kirchhoff goes much further in saying (Mathematical Mechanics, p. 32) Rest is a special case of motion, and thus proves that he can not only calculate but can also think dialectically. Hence, by a consideration of the two measures of rnechanical motion, we arrive incidentally, easily, and almost as a matter of course, at the concept of work, which was described to us as being so difficult to comprehend without mathematical mechanics. At any rate, we now know more about it than from Helmholtz's lecture On the Conservation of Force(1862), which was intended precisely to make as clear as possible the fundamental physical concepts of work and their invariability. All that we learn there about work is: that it is something which is expressed in foot-pounds or in units of heat, and that the number of these foot-pounds or units of heat is invariable for a definite quantity of work; and, further, that besides mechanical forces and heat, chemical and electric forces can perform work, but that all these forces exhaust their capacity for work in the measure that they actually result in work. We learn also that it follows from this that the sum of all effective quantities of force in nature as a whole remains eternally and invariably the same throughout all the changes taking place in nature. The concept of work is neither developed, nor even defined. And it is precisely the quantitative invariability of the magnitude of work which prevents him from realising that the qualitative alteration, the change of form, is the basic condition for all physical work. And so Helmholtz can go so far as to assert that friction and inelastic impact are processes in which mechanical work is destroyed and heat is produced instead. (Pop. Vortr ge [Popular Lectures], II, p. 166.) Just the contrary. Here mechanical work is not destroyed, here mechanical work is performed. It is mechanical motion that is apparently destroyed. But mechanical motion can never perform even a millionth part of a kilogram-metre of work, without apparently being destroyed as such, without becoming converted into another form of motion. But, as we have seen, the capacity for work contained in a given quantity of mechanical motion is what is known as its vis viva, and until recently was measured by mv2. And here a new contradiction arose. Let us listen to Helmholtz (Conservation of Force, p. 9). We read there that the magnitude of work can be expressed by a weight m being raised to a height h, when, if the force of gravity is put as g, the magnitude of work =mgh. For the body m to rise freely to the vertical height h, it requires a velocity v= (square root of) 2gh, and it attains the same velocity on falling. Consequently, mgh=mv2/2 and Helmholtz proposes to take the magnitude mv2/2 as the quantity of vis viva, whereby it becomes identical with the measure of the magnitude of work. From the viewpoint of how the concept of vis viva has been applied hitherto... this change has no significance, but it will offer essential advantages in the future. It is scarcely to be believed. In 1847, Helmholtz was so little clear about the mutual relations of vis viva and work, that he totally fails to notice how he transforms the former proportional measure of vis viva into its absolute measure, and remains quite unconscious of the important discovery he has made by his audacious handling, recommending his mv2/2 only because of its convenience as compared with mv2! And it is as a matter of convenience that mechanicians have adopted mv2/2. Only gradually was mv2/2 also proved mathematically. Naumann (Allg. Chemie [General Chemistry], p. 7) gives an algebraical proof, Clausius (Mechanische W rmetheorie [The Mechanical Theory of Heat], 2nd Edition, p. 18), an analytical one, which is then to be met with in another form and a different method of deduction in Kirchhoff (ibid., p. 27) Clerk Maxwell (ibid., p. 88) gives an elegant algebraical proof of the deduction of mv2/2 from mv. This does not prevent our two Scotsmen, Thomson and Tait, from asserting (ibid., p. 164): The vis viva or kinetic energy of a moving body is proportional to the mass and the square of the velocity conjointly. If we adopt the same units of mass as above (namely, unit of mass moving with unit velocity) there is a particular advantage in defining kinetic energy as half the product of the mass and the square of the velocity. Here, therefore, we find that not only the ability to think, but also to calculate, has come to a standstill in the two foremost mechanicians of Scotland. The particular advantage, the convenience of the formula, accomplishes everything in the most beautiful fashion. For us, who have seen that vis viva is nothing but the capacity of a given quantity of mechanical motion to perform work, it is obvious on the face of it that the expression in mechanical terms of this capacity for work and the work actually performed by the latter must be equal to each other; and that, consequently, if mv2/2 measures the work, the vis viva must likewise be measured by mv2/2. But that is what happens in science. Theoretical mechanics arrives at the concept of vis viva, the practical mechanics of the engineer arrives at the concept of work and forces it on the theoreticians. And, immersed in their calculations, the theoreticians have become so unaccustomed to thinking that for years they fail to recognise the connection between the two concepts, measuring one of them by mv2, the other by mv2/2, and finally accepting mv2/2 for both, not from comprehension, but for the sake of simplicity of calculation!

1883-Dialectics of Nature-ch4

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1883/don/ch04.htm

The second form in which mechanical motion disappears is in friction and impact - which differ only in degree. Friction can be conceived as a series of small impacts occurring successively and side by side, impact as friction concentrated at one spot and in a single moment of time. Friction is chronic impact, impact is acute friction. The mechanical motion that disappears here, disappears altogether as such. It can never be restored immediately out of itself. The process is not directly reversible. The motion has been transformed into qualitatively different forms of motion, into heat, electricity - into forms of molecular motion. Hence, friction and impact lead from the motion of masses, the subject matter of mechanics, to molecular motion, the subject matter of physics. In calling physics the mechanics of molecular motion, it has not been overlooked that this expression by no means covers the entire field of contemporary physics. On the contrary. Ether vibrations, which are responsible for the phenomena of light and radiant heat, are certainly not molecular motions in the modern sense of the word. But their terrestrial actions concern molecules first and foremost: refraction of light, polarisation of light, etc., are determined by the molecular constitution of the bodies concerned. Similarly almost all the most important scientists now regard electricity as a motion of ether particles, and Clausius even says of heat that in "the movement of ponderable atoms (it would be better to say molecules)... the ether within the body can also participate" (Mechanische W rmetheorie [Mechanical Theory of Heat] I, p. 22). But in the phenomena of electricity and heat, once again it is primarily molecular motions that have to be considered; it could not be otherwise, so long as our knowledge of the ether is so small. But when we have got so far as to be able to present the mechanics of the ether, this subject will include a great deal that is now of necessity allocated to physics. The physical processes in which the structure of the molecule is altered, or even destroyed, will be dealt with later on: they form the transition from physics to chemistry. Only with molecular motion does the change of form of motion acquire complete freedom. Whereas, at the boundary of mechanics the motion of masses can assume only a few other forms - heat or electricity - here, a quite different and more lively capacity for change of form is to be seen. Heat passes into electricity in the thermopile, it becomes identical with light at a certain stage of radiation, and in its turn reproduces mechanical motion. Electricity and magnetism, a twin pair like heat and light, not only become transformed into each other, but also into heat and light as well as mechanical motion. And this takes place in such definite measure relations that a given quantity of any one of these forms of energy can be expressed in any other - in kilogram-metres, in heat units, in volts, and similarly any unit of measurement can be translated into any other. The practical discovery of the conversion of mechanical motion into heat is so very ancient that it can be taken as dating from the beginning of human history. Whatever discoveries, in the way of tools and domestication of animals, may have preceded it, the making of fire by friction was the first instance of men pressing a non- living force of nature into their service. Popular superstitions to-day still show how greatly the almost immeasurable import of this gigantic advance impressed itself on the mind of mankind. Long after the introduction of the use of bronze and iron the discovery of the stone knife, the first tool, continued to be celebrated, all religious sacrifices being performed with stone knives. According to the Jewish legend, Joshua decreed that men born in the wilderness should be circumcised with stone knives; the Celts and Germans used stone knives exclusively in their human sacrifices. But all this long ago passed into oblivion. It was different with the making of fire by friction. Long after other methods of producing fire had become known, every sacred fire among the majority of peoples had to be obtained by friction. But even to- day, popular superstition in the majority of the European countries insists that fire with miraculous powers (e.g. our German bonfire against epidemics) may be lighted only by means of friction. Thus, down to our own day, the grateful memory of the first great victory of mankind over nature lives on - half unconsciously - in popular superstition, in the relics of heathen-mythological recollections, among the most educated peoples in the world. However, the process of making fire by friction is still one-sided. By it mechanical motion is converted into heat. To complete the process, it must be reversed; heat must be converted into mechanical motion. Only in that case is justice done to the dialectics of the process, the cycle of the process being completed - for the first stage, at least. But history has its own pace, and however dialectical its course may be in the last analysis, dialectics has often to wait for history a fairly long time. Many thousands of years must have elapsed between the discovery of fire by friction and the time when Hero of Alexandria (ca. 120 B.C.) invented a machine which was set in rotary motion by the steam issuing from it. And almost another two thousand years elapsed before the first steam engine was built, the first apparatus for the conversion of heat into really useable mechanical motion. The steam engine was the first really international invention, and this fact, in turn, testifies to a mighty historical advance. The Frenchman, Papin, invented the first steam engine, and he invented it in Germany. It was the German, Leibniz, scattering around him, as always, brilliant ideas, without caring whether the merit for them would be awarded to him or someone else, who, as we know now from Papin's correspondence (published by Gerland), gave him the main idea of the machine: the employment of a cylinder and piston. Soon after that, the Englishmen, Savery and Newcomen, invented similar machines; finally, their fellow- country-man, Watt, by introducing a separate condenser, brought the steam engine in principle up to the level of to-day. The cycle of inventions in this sphere was completed; the conversion of heat into mechanical motion was achieved. What came afterwards were improvements in details. Practice, therefore, solved after its own fashion the problem of the relations between mechanical motion and heat. It had, to begin with, converted the first into the second, and then it converted the second into the first. But how did matters stand in regard to theory? The situation was pitiable enough. Although it was just in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that innumerable accounts of travel appeared, teeming with descriptions of savages who knew no way of producing fire other than by friction, yet physicists were almost uninterested in it; they were equally indifferent to the steam engine during the whole of the eighteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth. For the most part they were satisfied simply to record the facts. Finally, in the twenties, Sadi Carnot took the matter in hand, and indeed so very skilfully that his best calculations, afterwards presented by Clapeyron in geometrical form, have been accepted up to the present day by Clausius and Clerk Maxwell. Sadi Carnot almost got to the bottom of the question. It was not the lack of factual data that prevented him from completely solving it, but solely a preconceived false theory. Moreover, this false theory was not one which had been forced upon physicists by some variety of malicious philosophy, but was a theory contrived by the physicists themselves, by means of their own naturalistic mode of thought, so very superior to the metaphysical-philosophical method. In the seventeenth century heat was regarded, at any rate in England, as a property of bodies, as "a motion of a particular kind, the nature of which has never been explained in a satisfactory manner". This is what Th. Thomson called it, two years before the discovery of the mechanical theory of heat (Outline of the Sciences of Heat and Electricity, 2nd edition, London, 1840). But in the eighteenth century the view came more and more to the fore that heat, as also light, electricity, and magnetism, is a special substance, and that all these peculiar substances differ from ordinary matter in having no weight, in being imponderable.

1883-Dialectics of Nature-ch5

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1883/don/ch05.htm

The discovery of the galvanic current is approximately 25 years younger than that of oxygen and is at least as significant. for the theory of electricity as the latter discovery was for chemistry. Yet what a difference obtains even to-day between the two fields ! In chemistry, thanks especially to Dalton's discovery of atomic weights, there is order, relative certainty about what has been achieved, and systematic, almost planned, attack on the territory still unconquered, comparable to the regular siege of a fortress. In the theory of electricity there is a barren lumber of ancient, doubtful experiments, neither definitely confirmed nor definitely refuted; , an uncertain fumbling in the dark, uncoordinated research and experiment on the part of numerous isolated individuals, who attack the unknown territory with their scattered forces like the attack of a swarm of nomadic horsemen. It must be admitted, indeed, that in the sphere of electricity a discovery like that of Dalton, giving the whole science a central point and a firm basis for research, is still to seek. It is essentially this unsettled state of the theory of electricity, which for the time being makes it impossible to establish a comprehensive theory, that is responsible for the fact that a one-sided empiricism prevails in this sphere, an empiricism which as far as possible itself forbids thought, and which precisely for that reason not only thinks incorrectly but also is incapable of faithfully pursuing the facts or even of reporting them faithfully, and which, therefore, becomes transformed into the opposite of true empiricism. If in general those natural scientists, who cannot say anything bad enough of the crazy a priori speculations of the German philosophy of nature, are to be recommended to read the theoretico-physical works of the empirical school, not only of the contemporary but even of a much later period, this holds good quite especially for the theory of electricity. Let us take a work of the year 1840: An Outline of the Sciences of Heat and Electricity, by Thomas Thomson. Old Thomson was indeed an authority in his day ; moreover he had already at his disposal a very considerable part of the work of the greatest electrician so far - Faraday. Yet his book contains at least just as crazy things as the corresponding section of the much older Hegelian philosophy of nature. The description of the electric spark, for instance, might have been translated directly from the corresponding passage in Hegel. Both enumerate all the wonders that people sought to discover in the electric spark, prior to knowledge of its real nature and manifold diversity, and which have now been shown to be mainly special cases or errors. Still better, Thomson recounts quite seriously on p. 446 Dessaigne's cock-and-bull stories, such as that, with a rising barometer and falling thermometer, glass, resin, silk, etc., become negatively electrified on immersion in mercury, but positively if instead the barometer is falling and the temperature rising ; that in summer gold and several other metals become positive on warming and negative on cooling, but in winter the reverse; that with a high barometer and northerly wind they are strongly electric, positive if the temperature is rising and I negative if it is falling, etc. So much for the treatment of the facts. As regards a priori speculation, Thomson favours us with the following treatment of the electric spark, derived from no lesser person than Faraday himself: I have, adds Thomson, given this explanation of Faraday's in his own words, because I do not understand it clearly. This will certainly have been the experience of other persons also, quite as much as when they read in Hegel that in the electric spark " the special materiality of the charged body does not as yet enter into the process but is determined within it only in an elementary and spiritual way," and that electricity is " the anger, the effervescence, proper to the body," its "angry self " that " is exhibited by every body when excited." (Philosophy of Nature, paragraph 324, addendum.) Yet the basic thought of both Hegel and Faraday is the same. Both oppose the idea that electricity is not a state of matter but a special, distinct variety of matter. And since in the spark electricity is apparently exhibited as independent, free from any foreign material substratum, separated out and yet perceptible to the senses, they arrive at the necessity, in the state of science at the time, of having to conceive of the spark as a transient phenomenal form of a " force " momentarily freed from all matter. For us, of course, the riddle is solved, since we know that on the spark discharge between metal electrodes real "metallic particles" leap across, and hence in actual fact " the special materiality of the charged body enters into the process." As is well known, electricity and magnetism, like heat and light, were at first regarded as special imponderable substances. As far as electricity is concerned, it is well known that the view soon developed that there are two opposing substances, two " fluids," one positive and one negative, which in the normal state neutralise each other, until they are forced apart by a so-called " electric force of separation." It is then possible to charge two bodies, one with positive, the other with negative electricity; on uniting them by a third conducting body equalisation occurs, either suddenly or by means of a lasting current, according to circumstances. The sudden equalisation appeared very simple and comprehensible, but the current offered difficulties. The simplest hypothesis, that the current in every case is a movement of either purely positive or purely negative electricity, was opposed by Fechner, and in more detail by Weber, with the view that in every circuit two equal currents of positive and negative electricity flow in opposite directions in channels lying side by side between the ponderable molecules of the bodies. Weber's detailed mathematical working out of this theory finally arrives at the result that a function, of no interest to us here, is multiplied by a magnitude l/r, the latter signifying "the ratio . . . of the unit of electricity to the milligram." (Wiedemann, Lehre vom Galvanismus, etc. [Theory of Galvanism, etc.], 2nd edition, III, p. 569). The ratio to a measure of weight can naturally only be a weight ratio. Hence one-side empiricism had already to such an extent forgotten the practice of thought in calculating that here it even makes the imponderable electricity ponderable and introduces its weight into the mathematical calculation. The formula derived by Weber sufficed only within certain limits, and Helmholtz, in particular, only a few years ago calculated results that come into conflict with the principle of the conservation of energy. In opposition to Weber's hypothesis of the double current flowing in opposite directions, C. Naumann in 1871 put forward the other hypothesis that in the current only one of the two electricities, for instance the positive, moves, while the other negative one remains firmly bound up with the mass of the body. On this Wiedemann includes the remark: " This hypothesis could be linked up with that of Weber if to Weber's supposed double current of electric masses e flowing in opposite directions, there were added a further current of neutral electricity, externally inactive, which carried with it amounts of electricity e in the direction of the positive current." (III, p. 577.) This statement is once again characteristic of one-sided empiricism. In order to bring about the flow of electricity at all, it is decomposed into positive and negative. All attempts, however, to explain the current with these two substances, meet with difficulties; both the assumption that only one of them is present in the current and that the two of them flow in opposite directions simultaneously, and finally, the third assumption also that one flows and the other is at rest. If we adopt this last assumption how are we to explain the inexplicable idea that negative electricity, which is mobile enough in the electrostatic machine and the Leyden jar, in the current is firmly united with the mass of the body? Quite simply. Besides the positive current +e, flowing through the wire to the right, and the negative current, -e, flowing to the left, we make yet another current, this time of neutral electricity, e, flow to the right. First we assume that the two electricities, to be able to flow at all, must be separated from one another ; and then, in order to explain the phenomena that occur on the flow of the separated electricities, we assume that they can also flow unseparated. First we make a supposition to explain a particular phenomenon, and at the first difficulty encountered we make a second supposition which directly negates the first one. What must be the sort of philosophy that these gentlemen have the right to complain of? However, alongside this view of the material nature of electricity, there soon appeared a second view, according to which it is to be regarded as a mere state of the body, a " force " or, as we would say to-day, a special form of motion. We saw above that Hegel, and later Faraday, adhered to this view. After the discovery of the mechanical equivalent of heat had finally disposed of the idea of a special " heat stuff," and heat was shown to be a molecular motion, the next step was to treat electricity also according to the new method and to attempt to determine its mechanical equivalent. This attempt was fully successful. Particularly owing to the experiments of Joule, Favre, and Raoult, not only was the mechanical and thermal equivalent of the so-called " electromotive force " of the galvanic current established, but also its complete equivalence with the energy liberated by chemical processes in the exciting cell or used up in the decomposition cell. This made the assumption that electricity is a special material fluid more and more untenable. The analogy, however, between heat and electricity was not perfect. The galvanic currents still differed in very essential respects from the conduction of heat. It was still not possible to say what it was that moved in the electrically affected bodies. The assumption of a mere molecular vibration as in the case of heat seemed insufficient. In view of the enormous velocity of motion of electricity, even exceeding that of light, it remained difficult to overcome the view that here some material substance is in motion between the molecules of the body. Here the most recent theories put forward by Clerk Maxwell (1864), Hankel (1865), Reynard (1870), and Edlund (1872) are in complete agreement with the assumption already advanced in 1846, first of all as a suggestion by Faraday, that electricity is a movement of the elastic medium permeating the whole of space and hence all bodies as well, the discrete particles of which medium repel one another according to the law of the inverse square of the distance. In other words, it is a motion of ether particles, and the molecules of the body take part in this motion. As to the manner of this motion, the various theories are divergent; those of Maxwell, Hankel, and Reynard, taking as their basis modern investigations of vortex motion, explain it in various ways from vortices, so that the vortex of old Descartes also once more comes into favour in an increasing number of new fields. We refrain from going more closely into the details of these theories. They differ strongly from one another and they will certainly still experience many transformations. But a decisive advance appears to lie in their common basic conception: that electricity is a motion of the particles of the luminiferous ether that penetrates all ponderable matter, this motion reacting on the molecules of the body. This conception reconciles the two earlier ones. According to it, it is true that in electrical phenomena it is something substantial that moves, something different from ponderable matter. But this substance is not electricity itself, which in fact proves rather to be a form of motion, although not a form of the immediate direct motion of ponderable matter. While, on the one hand, the ether theory shows a way of getting over the primitive clumsy idea of two opposed electrical fluids, on the other hand it gives a prospect of explaining what the real, substantial substratum of electrical motion is, what sort of a thing it is whose motion produces electrical phenomena . The ether theory has already had one decisive success. As is well known, there is at least one point where electricity directly alters the motion of light: it rotates the latter's plane of polarisation. On the basis of his theory mentioned above, Clerk Maxwell calculates that the electric specific inductive capacity of a body is equal to the square of its index of refraction. Boltzmann has investigated dielectric coefficients of various nonconductors and he found that in sulphur, rosin, and paraffin, the square roots of these coefficients were respectively equal to their indices of refraction. The highest deviation - in sulphur - amounted to only 4 per cent. Consequently, the Maxwellian ether theory in this particular has hereby been experimentally confirmed. It will, however, require a lengthy period and cost much labour before new series of experiments will have extracted a firm kernel from these mutually contradictory hypotheses. Until then, or until the ether theory, too, is perhaps supplanted by an entirely new one, the theory of electricity finds itself in the uncomfortable position of having to employ a mode of expression which it itself admits to be false. Its whole terminology is still based on the idea of two electric fluids. It still speaks quite unashamedly of " electric masses flowing in the bodies," of " a division of electricities in every molecule," etc. This is a misfortune which for the most part, as already said, follows inevitably from the present transitional state of science, but which also, with the one-sided empiricism particularly prevalent in this branch of investigation, contributes not a little to preserving the existing confusion of thought. The opposition between so-called static or frictional electricity and dynamic electricity or galvanism can now be regarded as bridged over, since we have learned to produce constant currents by means of the electric machine and, conversely, by means of the galvanic current to produce so-called static electricity, to charge Leyden jars, etc. We shall not here touch on the subform of static electricity, nor likewise on magnetism, which is now recognised to be also a sub-form of electricity. The theoretical explanation of the phenomena belonging here will under all circumstances have to be sought in the theory of the galvanic current, and consequently we shall keep mainly to this. A constant current can be produced in many different ways. Mechanical mass motion produces directly, by friction, in the first place only static electricity, and a constant current only with great dissipation of energy. For the major part, at least, to become transformed into electric motion, the intervention of magnetism is required, as in the well- known magneto-electric machines of Gramme, Siemens, and others. Heat can be converted directly into current electricity, as especially occurs at the junction of two different metals. The energy set free by chemical action, which under ordinary circumstances appears in the form of heat, is converted under appropriate conditions into electric motion. Conversely, the latter form of motion, as soon as the requisite conditions are present, passes into any other form of motion: into mass motion, to a very small extent directly into electro-dynamic attractions and repulsions; to a large extent, however, by the intervention of magnetism in the electro-magnetic machine; into heat - throughout a closed circuit, unless other changes are brought about; into chemical energy - in decomposition cells and voltameters introduced into the circuit, where the current dissociates compounds that are attacked in vain by other means. All these transformations are governed by the basic law of the quantitative equivalence of motion through all its changes of form. Or, as Wiedemann expresses it: "By the law of conservation of force the mechanical work exerted in any way for the production of the current must be equivalent to the work exerted in producing all the effects of the current." The conversion of mass motion or heat into electricity offers us no difficulties here; it has been shown that the so- called "electromotive force" in the first case is equal to the work expended on that motion, and in the second case it is " at every junction of the thermopile directly proportional to its absolute temperature " (Wiedemann, III, p. 482), i.e. to the quantity of heat present at every junction measured in absolute units. The same law has in fact been proved valid also for electricity produced from chemical energy. But here the matter seems to be not so simple, at least for the theory now current. Let us, therefore, go into this somewhat more deeply. One of the most beautiful series of experiments on the transformations of form of motion as a result of the action of a galvanic cell is that of Favre (1857-58). He put a Smee cell of five elements in a calorimeter; in a second calorimeter he put a small electro-magnetic motor, with the main axle and driving wheel projecting so as to be available for any kind of coupling. Each production in the cell of one gram of hydrogen, or solution of 32 6 grams of zinc (the old chemical equivalent of zinc, equal to half the now accepted atomic weight 65 2, and expressed in grams), gave the following results: The equivalence of motion in all its transformations is, therefore, strikingly proved for electric motion also, within the limits of unavoidable error. And it is likewise proved that the " electromotive force " of the galvanic battery is nothing but chemical energy converted into electricity, and the battery itself nothing but an apparatus that converts chemical energy on its liberation into electricity, just as a steam engine trans forms the heat supplied to it into mechanical motion, without in either case the converting apparatus supplying further energy on its own account. A difficulty arises here, however, in relation to the traditional mode of conception. The latter ascribes an "electric force of separation." to the battery in virtue of the conditions of contact present in it between the fluids and metals, which force is proportional to the electromotive force and therefore for a given battery represents a definite quantity of energy. What then is the relation of this electric force of separation, which according to the traditional mode of conception of the battery as such is inherently a source of energy even without chemical action, to the energy set free by chemical action? And if it is a source of energy independent of the latter, whence comes the energy furnished by it? This question in a more or less unclear form constitutes the point of dispute between the contact theory founded by Volta and the chemical theory of the galvanic current that arose immediately afterwards. The contact theory explained the current from the electric stresses arising in the battery on contact of the metals with one or more of the liquids, or even merely on contact of the liquids themselves, and from their neutralisation or that of the opposing electricities thus generated in the circuit. The pure contact theory regarded any chemical changes that might thereby occur as quite secondary. On the other hand, as early as 1805, Ritter maintained that a current could only be formed if the excitants reacted chemically even before closing the circuit. In general this older chemical theory is summarised by Wiedemann (I, p. 284) to the effect that according to it so-called contact electricity "makes its appearance only if at the same time there comes into play a real chemical action of the bodies in contact, or at any rate a disturbance of the chemical equilibrium, even if not directly bound up with chemical processes, a `tendency towards chemical action' between the bodies in contact." It is seen that both sides put the question of the source of energy of the current only indirectly, as indeed could hardly be otherwise at the time. Volta and his successors found it quite in order that the mere contact of heterogeneous bodies should produce a constant current, and consequently be able to perform definite work without equivalent return. Ritter and his supporters are just as little clear how the chemical action makes the battery capable of producing the current and its performance of work. But if this point has long ago been cleared up for chemical theory by Joule, Favre, Raoult, and others, the opposite is the case for the contact theory. In so far as it has persisted, it remains essentially at the point where it started. Notions belonging to a period long outlived, a period when one had to be satisfied to ascribe a particular effect to the first available apparent cause that showed itself on the surface, regardless of whether motion was thereby made to arise out of nothing- notions that directly contradict the principle of the conservation of energy-thus continue to exist in the theory of electricity of to-day. And if the objectionable aspects of these ideas are shorn off, weakened, watered down, castrated, glossed over, this does not improve matters at all: the confusion is bound to become only so much the worse. As we have seen, even the older chemical theory of the current declares the contact relations of the battery to be absolutely indispensable for the formation of the current: it maintains only that these contacts can never achieve a constant current without simultaneous chemical action. And even to-day it is still taken as a matter of course that the contact arrangements of the battery provide precisely the apparatus by means of which liberated chemical energy is transformed into electricity, and that it depends essentially on these contact arrangements whether and how much chemical energy actually passes into electric motion. Wiedemann, as a one-sided empiricist, seeks to save what can be saved of the old contact theory. Let us follow what he has to say. He declares (I, p. 799): It is seen that the contact theory has become very modest. It concedes that it is not at all indispensable for explaining the current, and neither proved theoretically by Ohm nor experimentally by Fechner. It even concedes then that the so-called fundamental experiments, on which alone it can still rest, can never furnish other than uncertain results in a quantitative respect, and finally it asks us merely to recognise that in general it is by contact - although only of metals! - that electric motion occurs. If the contact theory remained content with this, there would not be a word to say against it. It will certainly be granted that on the contact of two metals electrical phenomena occur, in virtue of which a preparation of a frog's leg can be made to twitch, an electroscope charged, and other movements brought about. The only question that arises in the first place is: whence comes the energy required for this? To answer this question, we shall, according to Wiedemann (I, p.14) The modesty of the contact theory becomes greater and greater. At first it is admitted that the powerful electric force of separation, which has later such a gigantic work to perform, in itself possesses no energy of its own, and that it cannot function if energy is not supplied to it from outside. And then it has allotted to it a more than diminutive source of energy, the vis viva of adhesion, which only comes into play at scarcely measurable distances and which allows the bodies to travel a scarcely measurable length. But it does not matter: it indisputably exists and equally undeniably vanishes on contact. But even this minute source still furnishes too much energy for our purpose: a large part is converted into heat and only a small portion serves to evoke the electric force of separation. Now, although it is well known that cases enough occur in nature where extremely minute impulses bring about extremely powerful effects, Wiedemann himself seems to feel that his hardly trickling source of energy can with difficulty suffice here, and he seeks a possible second source in the assumption of an interference of the molecular vibrations of the two metals at the surfaces of contact. Apart from other difficulties encountered here, Grove and Gassiot have shown that for exciting electricity actual contact is not at all indispensable, as Wiedemann himself tells us on the previous page. In short, the more we examine it the more does the source of energy for the electric force of separation dwindle to nothing. Yet up to now we hardly know of any other source for the excitation of electricity on metallic contact. According to Naumann (Allg. u. phys. Chemie [General and Physical Chemistry], Heidelberg, 1877, p. 675), "the contact-electromotive forces convert heat into electricity"; he finds "the assumption natural that the ability of these forces to produce electric motion depends on the quantity of heat present, or, in other words, that it is a function of the temperature," as has also been proved experimentally by Le Roux. Here too we find ourselves groping in the dark. The law of the voltaic series of metals forbids us to have recourse to the chemical processes that to a small extent are continually taking place at the contact surfaces, which are always covered by a thin layer of air and impure water, a layer as good as inseparable as far as we are concerned. An electrolyte should produce a constant current in the circuit, but the electricity of mere metallic contact, on the contrary, disappears on closing the circuit. And here we come to the real point: whether, and in what manner, the production of a constant current on the contact of chemically indifferent bodies is made possible by this "electric force of separation," which Wiedemann himself first of all restricted to metals, declaring it incapable of functioning without energy being supplied from outside, and then referred exclusively to a truly microscopical source of energy. The voltaic series arranges the metals in such a sequence that each one behaves as electro-negative in relation to the preceding one and as electro-positive in relation to the one that follows it. Hence if we arrange a series of pieces of metal in this order, e.g. zinc, tin, iron, copper, platinum, we shall be able to obtain differences of electric potential at the two ends. If, however, we arrange the series of metals to form a circuit so that the zinc and platinum are in contact, the electric stress is at once neutralised and disappears. "Therefore the production of a constant current of electricity is not possible in a closed circuit of bodies belonging to the voltaic series." Wiedemann further supports this statement by the following theoretical consideration: And not content with the theoretical and experimental proof that the contact electricity of metals by itself cannot produce any current, we shall see too that Wiedemann finds himself compelled to put forward a special hypothesis to abolish its activity even where it might perhaps make itself evident in the current. Let us, therefore, try another way of passing from contact electricity to the current. Let us imagine, with Wiedemann, "two metals, such as a zinc rod and a copper rod, soldered together at one end, but with their free ends connected by a third body that does not act electromotively in relation to the two metals, but only conducts the opposing electricities collected on its surfaces, so that they are neutralised in it. Then the electric force of separation would always restore the previous difference of potential, thus a constant electric current would make its appearance in the circuit, a current that would be able to perform work without any compensation, which again is impossible. - Accordingly, there cannot be a body which only conducts electricity without electromotive activity in relation to the other bodies." We are no better off than before: the impossibility of creating motion again bars the way. By the contact of chemically indifferent bodies, hence by contact electricity as such, we shall never produce a current. Let us therefore go back again and try a third way pointed out by Wiedemann: Thus the miracle has been accomplished. By the mere electric contact force of separation, which, according to Wiedemann himself, cannot be effective without energy being supplied from outside, a constant current. has been produced. And if we were offered nothing more for its explanation than the above passage from Wiedemann, it would indeed be an absolute miracle. What have we learned here about the process? 1. If zinc and copper are immersed in a liquid containing a so-called binary compound, then, according to paragraph 27, the zinc becomes negatively charged and the copper positively charged. But in the whole of paragraph 27 there is no word of any binary compound. It describes only a simple voltaic element of a zinc plate and copper plate, with a piece of cloth moistened by an acid liquid interposed between them, and then investigates, without mentioning any chemical processes, the resulting static- electric charges of the two metals. Hence, the so-called binary compound has been smuggled in here by the back-door. 2. What this binary compound is doing here remains completely mysterious. The circumstance that it "can be decomposed into two chemical constituents that fully saturate each other" (fully saturate each other after they have been decomposed?!) could at most teach us something new if it were actually to decompose. But we are not told a word about that, hence for the time being we have to assume that it does not decompose, e.g. in the case of paraffin. 3. When the zinc in the liquid has been negatively charged, and the copper positively charged, we bring them into contact (outside the liquid). At once "these electricities neutralise one another through the place of contact, through which therefore a current of positive electricity flows from the copper to the zinc." Again, we do not learn why only a current of "positive" electricity flows in the one direction, and not also a current of "negative", electricity in the opposite direction. We do not learn at all what becomes of the negative electricity, which, hitherto, was just as necessary as the positive; the effect of the electric force of separation consisted precisely in setting them free to oppose one another. Now it has been suddenly suppressed, as it were eliminated, and it is made to appear as if there exists only positive electricity. But then again, on p. 51, the precise opposite is said, for here "the electricities unite in one current"; consequently both negative and positive flow in it! Who will rescue us from this confusion? 4. "Moreover, since the electric force of separation making its appearance on the contact with these two metals carries away the positive electricity in the same direction, the effects of the electric forces of separation are not abolished as in a closed metallic circuit. Hence, there arises a constant current," etc. - This is a bit thick. For as we shall see a few pages later (p. 52), Wiedemann proves to us that on the "formation of a constant current ... the electric force of separation at the place of contact of the metals ... must be inactive, that not only does a current occur even when this force, instead of carrying away the positive electricity in the same direction, acts in opposition to the direction of the current, but that in this case too it is not compensated by a definite share of the force of separation of the battery and, hence, once again is inactive." Consequently, how can Wiedemann on p. 45 make an electric force of separation participate as a necessary factor in the formation of the current when on p. 52 he puts it out of action for the duration of the current, and that, moreover, by a hypothesis erected specially for this purpose? 5. " Hence there arises a constant current of positive electricity, flowing in the closed circuit from the copper through its place of contact with the zinc, in the direction of the latter, and through the liquid from the zinc to the copper." - But in the case of such a constant electric current, "heat would be produced by it in the conductors themselves," and also it would be possible for "an electro-magnetic motor to be driven by it and thus work performed," which, however, is impossible without supply of energy. Since Wiedemann up to now has not breathed a syllable as to whether such a supply of energy occurs, or whence it comes, the constant current so far remains just as much an impossibility as in both the previously investigated cases. No one feels this more than Wiedemann himself. So he finds it desirable to hurry as quickly as possible over the many ticklish points of this remarkable explanation of current formation, and instead to entertain the reader throughout several pages with all kinds of elementary anecdotes about the thermal, chemical, magnetic, and physiological effects of this still mysterious current, in the course of which by way of exception he even adopts a quite popular tone. Then he suddenly continues (p. 49): " We know that when the current traverses the liquid the constituents of the binary compound (HCl) contained in it become separated in such a manner that one constituent (H) is set free on the copper, and an equivalent amount of the other (Cl) on the zinc, whereby the latter constituent combines with an equivalent amount of zinc to form ZnCl." On the formation of a molecule of HCl from hydrogen and chlorine, an amount of energy ==22,000 units of heat is liberated (Julius Thomsen). Therefore, to break away the chlorine from its combination with hydrogen, the same quantity of energy must be supplied from outside for each molecule of HCl. Where does the battery derive this energy? Wiedemann's description does not tell us, so let us look for ourselves. When chlorine combines with zinc to form zinc chloride a considerably greater quantity of energy is liberated than is necessary to separate chlorine from hydrogen; (Zn,Cl2) develops 97,210 and 2(H,Cl) 44,000 units of heat (Julius Thomsen). With that the process in the battery becomes comprehensible. Hence it is not, as Wiedemann relates, that hydrogen without more ado is liberated from the copper, and chlorine from the zinc, "whereby" then subsequently and accidentally the zinc and chlorine enter into combination. On the contrary, the union of the zinc with the chlorine is the essential, basic condition for the whole process, and as long as this does not take place, one would wait in vain for hydrogen on the copper. The excess of energy liberated on formation of a molecule of ZnCl2 over that expended on liberating two atoms of H from two molecules of HCl, is converted in the battery into electric motion and provides the entire "electromotive force" that makes its appearance in the current circuit. Hence it is not a mysterious "electric force of separation" that tears asunder hydrogen and chlorine without any demonstrable source of energy, it is the total chemical process taking place in the battery that endows all the "electric forces of separation" and "electromotive forces" of the circuit with the energy necessary for their existence. For the time being, therefore, we put on record that Wiedemann's second explanation of the current gives us just as little assistance as his first one, and let us proceed further with the text: Herewith the last relics of the contact theory are now happily eliminated from formation of the current, and simultaneously also the last relics of Wiedemann's first explanation of current formation given on p. 45. It is finally conceded without reservation that the galvanic battery is a simple apparatus for converting liberated chemical energy into electric motion, into so-called electric force of separation and electromotive force, in exactly the same way as the steam engine is an apparatus for converting heat energy into mechanical motion. In the one case, as in the other, the apparatus provides only the conditions for liberation and further transformation of the energy, but supplies no energy on its own account. This once established, it remains for us now to make a closer examination of this third version of Wiedemann's explanation of the current. How are the energy transformations in the circuit of the battery represented here? It is evident, he says, that in the battery Firstly, if the process goes on in pure form, no heat at all is set free in the battery on solution of the zinc; the liberated energy is indeed converted directly into electricity and only from this converted once again into heat by the resistance of the whole circuit. Secondly, vis viva is half the product of the mass and the square of the velocity. Hence the above statement would read: the energy set free on solution of an equivalent of zinc in dilute hydrochloric acid, ==so many calories, is likewise equivalent to half the product of the mass of the ions and the square of the velocity with which they migrate to the metals. Expressed in this way, the sentence is obviously false: the vis viva appearing on the migration of the ions is far removed from being equivalent to the energy set free by the chemical process. But if it were to be so, no current would be possible, since there would be no energy remaining over for the current in the remainder of the circuit. Hence the further remark is introduced that the ions come to rest "either with formation of a compound (ZnCl2) or by escaping in the free state." But if the loss of vis viva is to include also the energy changes taking place on these two processes, then we have indeed arrived at a deadlock. For it is precisely to these two processes taken together that we owe the whole liberated energy, so that there can be absolutely no question here of a loss of vis viva, but at most of a gain. It is therefore obvious that Wiedemann himself did not mean anything definite by this sentence, rather the "loss of vis viva" represents only the deus ex machina which is to enable him to make the fatal leap from the old contact theory to the chemical explanation of the current. In point of fact, the loss of vis viva has now performed its function and is dismissed; henceforth the chemical process in the battery has undisputed sway as the sole source of energy for current formation, and the only remaining anxiety of our author is as to how he can politely get rid from the current of the last relic of excitation of electricity by the contact of chemically indifferent bodies, namely, the force of separation active at the place of contact of the two metals. Reading the above explanation of current formation given by Wiedemann, one could believe oneself in the presence of a specimen of the kind of apologia that wholly - and half-credulous theologians of almost forty years ago employed to meet the philologico-historical bible criticism of Strauss, Wilke, Bruno Bauer, etc. The method is exactly the same, and it is bound to be so. For in both cases it is a question of saving the heritage of tradition from scientific thought. Exclusive empiricism, which at most allows thinking in the form of mathematical calculation, imagines that it operates only with undeniable facts. In reality, however, it operates predominantly with out-of-date notions, with the largely obsolete products of thought of its predecessors, and such are positive and negative electricity; the electric force of separation, the contact theory. These serve it as the foundation of endless mathematical calculations in which, owing to the strictness of the mathematical formulation, the hypothetical nature of the premises gets comfortably forgotten. This kind of empiricism is as credulous towards the results of the thought of its predecessors as it is sceptical in its attitude to the results of contemporary thought. For it the experimentally established facts have gradually become inseparable from the traditional interpretation associated with them; the simplest electric phenomenon is presented falsely, e.g. by smuggling in the two electricities; this empiricism cannot any longer describe the facts correctly, because the traditional interpretation is woven into the description. In short, we have here in the field of the theory of electricity a tradition just as highly developed as that in the field of theology. And since in both fields the results of recent research, the establishment of hitherto unknown or disputed facts and of the necessarily following theoretical conclusions, run pitilessly counter to the old traditions, the defenders of these traditions find themselves in the direst dilemma. They have to resort to all kinds of subterfuges and untenable expedients, to the glossing over of irreconcilable contradictions, and thus finally land themselves into a medley of contradictions from which they have no escape. It is this faith in all the old theory of electricity that entangles Wiedemann here in the most hopeless contradictions, simply owing to the hopeless attempt to reconcile rationally the old explanation of the current by "contact force," with the modern one by liberation of chemical energy. It will perhaps be objected that the above criticism of Wiedemann's explanation of the current rests on juggling with words. It may be objected that, although at the beginning Wiedemann expresses himself somewhat carelessly and inaccurately, still he does finally give the correct account in accord with the principle of the conservation of energy and so sets everything right. As against this view, we give below another example, his description of the process in the battery: zinc-dilute sulphuric acid-copper: But Wiedemann further tells us, not once, but at least twice (I, p. 472 and p. 614), that "according to recent knowledge the water itself is not decomposed," but that in our case it is the sulphuric acid H2SO4 that splits up into H2 on the one hand and into SO3+O on the other hand, whereby under suitable conditions H2 and O can escape in gaseous form. But this alters the whole nature of the process. The H2 of the H2SO4 is directly replaced by the bivalent zinc, forming zinc sulphate, ZnSO4. There remains over, on the one side H2, on the other SO3+O. The two gases escape in the proportions in which they unite to form water, the SO3 unites with the water of the solvent to reform H2SO4, i.e. sulphuric acid. The formation of ZnSO4, however, develops sufficient energy not only to replace and liberate the hydrogen of the sulphuric acid, but also to leave over a considerable excess, which in our case is expended in forming the current. Hence the zinc does not wait until the electrolytic process puts free oxygen at its disposal, in order first to become oxidised and then to become dissolved in the acid. On the contrary, it enters directly into the process, which only comes into being at all by this participation of the zinc. We see here how obsolete chemical notions come to the aid of the obsolete contact notions. According to modern views, a salt is an acid in which hydrogen has been replaced by a metal. The process under investigation confirms this view; the direct replacement of the hydrogen of the acid by the zinc fully explains the energy change. The old view, adhered to by Wiedemann, regards a salt as a compound of a metallic oxide with an acid and therefore speaks of sulphuric zinc oxide instead of zinc sulphate. But to arrive at sulphuric zinc oxide in our battery of zinc and sulphuric acid, the zinc must first be oxidised. In order to oxidise the zinc fast enough, we must have free oxygen. In order to get free oxygen, we must assume - since hydrogen appears at the copper plate - that the water is decomposed. In order to decompose water, we need tremendous energy. How are we to get this? Simply "by the electrolytic process" which itself cannot come into operation as long as its chemical end product, the "sulphuric zinc oxide," has not begun to be formed. The child gives birth to the mother. Consequently, here again Wiedemann puts the whole course of the process absolutely the wrong way round and upside down. And the reason is that he lumps together active and passive electrolysis, two directly opposite processes, simply as electrolysis. So far we have only examined the events in the battery, i.e. that process in which an excess of energy is set free by chemical action and is converted into electricity by the arrangements of the battery. But it is well known that this process can also be reversed: the electricity of a constant current produced in the battery from chemical energy can, in its turn, be reconverted into chemical energy in a decomposition cell inserted in the circuit. The two processes are obviously the opposites of each other; if the first is regarded as chemico-electric, then the second is electro-chemical. Both can take place in the same circuit with the same substances. Thus, the voltaic pile from gas elements, the current of which is produced by the union of hydrogen and oxygen to form water, can, in a decomposition cell inserted in the circuit, furnish hydrogen and oxygen in the proportion in which they form water. The usual mode of view lumps these two opposite processes together under the single expression: electrolysis, and does not even distinguish between active and passive electrolysis, between an exciting liquid and a passive electrolyte. Thus Wiedemann treats of electrolysis in general for 143 pages and then adds at the end some remarks on "electrolysis in the battery," in which, moreover, the processes in actual batteries only occupy the lesser part of the seventeen pages of this section. Also in the "theory of electrolysis" that follows, this contrast of battery and decomposition cell is not even mentioned, and anyone who looked for some treatment of the energy changes in the circuit in the next chapter, "the influence of electrolysis on the conduction resistance and the electromotive force in the circuit" would be bitterly disappointed. Let us now consider the irresistible "electrolytic process" which is able to separate H2 from O without visible supply of energy, and which plays the same role in the present section of the book as did previously the mysterious "electric force of separation." "Besides the primary, purely electrolytic process of separation of the ions, a quantity of secondary, purely chemical processes, quite independent of the first, take place by the action of the ions split off by the current. This action can take place on the material of the electrodes and on the bodies that are decomposed, and in the case of solutions also on the solvent." (I, p. 481.) Let us return to the above-mentioned battery: zinc and copper in dilute sulphuric acid. Here, according to Wiedemann's own statement, the separated ions are the H2 and O of the water. Consequently for him the oxidation of the zinc and the formation of ZnSO4 is a secondary, purely chemical process, independent of the electrolytic process, in spite of the fact that it is only through it that the primary process becomes possible. Let us now examine somewhat in detail the confusion that must necessarily arise from this inversion of the true course of events: Let us consider in the first place the so-called secondary processes in the decomposition cell, of which Wiedemann puts forward some examples (pp. 481, 482). Na2SO4+2H2O==O+SO3+2NaOH+2H. In fact, in this example the decomposition Na2SO4==Na2+SO3+O could be regarded as the primary electro-chemical process, and the further transformation Na2+2H2O==2NaHO+2H But yet a third process takes place in this decomposition cell: SO3 combines with H2O to form H2SO4, sulphuric acid, provided the SO3 does not enter into combination with the metal of the positive electrode, in which case again energy would be liberated. But this change does not necessarily proceed immediately at the electrode, and consequently the quantity of energy (21,320 heat-units, J. Thomsen) thereby liberated becomes converted wholly or mainly into heat in the cell itself, and provides at most a very small portion of the electricity in the current. The only really secondary process occurring in this cell is therefore not mentioned at all by Wiedemann. In the modern chemical mode of expression we have, therefore, to represent the process as follows: copper is deposited on the platinum; the liberated SO4, which cannot exist by itself, splits up into SO3+O, the latter escaping in the free state; the SO3 takes up H2O from the aqueous solvent and forms H2SO4, which again combines with the copper of the electrode to form CuSO4, H2 being set free. Accurately speaking, we have here three processes: (1) the separation of Cu and SO4; (2) SO3+O+H2O==H2SO 4+O; (3) H2SO4+Cu==H2+Cu SO4. It is natural to regard the first as primary, the two others as secondary. But if we inquire into the energy changes, we find that the first process is completely compensated by a part of the third: the separation of copper from SO4 by the reuniting of both at the other electrode. If we leave out of account the energy required for shifting the copper from one electrode to the other, and likewise the inevitable, not accurately determinable, loss of energy in the cell by conversion into heat, we have here a case where the so-called primary process withdraws no energy from the current. The current provides energy exclusively to make possible the separation of H2 and O, which moreover is indirect, and this proves to be the real chemical result of the whole process - hence, for carrying out a secondary, or even tertiary, process. Nevertheless, in both the above examples, as in other cases also, it is undeniable that the distinction of primary and secondary processes has a relative justification. Thus in both cases, among other things, water also is apparently decomposed and the elements of water given off at the opposite electrodes. Since, according to the most recent experiments, absolutely pure water comes as near as possible to being an ideal non-conductor, hence also a non-electrolyte, it is important to show that in these and similar cases it is not the water that is directly electro-chemically decomposed, but that the elements of water are separated from the acid, in the formation of which here it is true the water solvent must participate. For the time being let us leave the copper out of account and consider the zinc. The decomposition of HCl is regarded here as the primary process, the solution of Zn as secondary. According to this conception, therefore, the current brings to the decomposition cell from outside the energy necessary for the separation of H and Cl, and after this separation is completed the Cl combines with the Zn, whereby a quantity of energy is set free that is subtracted from that required for separating H and Cl; the current needs only therefore to supply the difference. So far everything agrees beautifully; but if we consider the two amounts of energy more closely we find that the one liberated on the formation of ZnCl2 is larger than that used up in separating 2HCl; consequently, that the current not only does not need to supply energy, but on the contrary receives energy. We are no longer confronted by a passive electrolyte, but by an exciting fluid, not a decomposition cell but a battery, which strengthens the current-forming voltaic pile by a new element; the process which we are supposed to conceive as secondary becomes absolutely primary, becoming the source of energy of the whole process and making the latter independent of the current supplied by the voltaic pile. We see clearly here the source of the whole confusion prevailing in Wiedemann's theoretical description. Wiedemann's point of departure is electrolysis; whether this is active or passive, battery or decomposition cell, is all one to him: saw-bones is saw-bones, as the sergeant-major said to the doctor of philosophy doing his year's military service. And since it is easier to study electrolysis in the decomposition cell than in the battery, he does, in fact, take the decomposition cell as his point of departure, and he makes the processes taking place in it, and the partly justifiable division of them into primary and secondary, the measure of the altogether reverse processes in the battery, not even noticing when his decomposition cell becomes surreptitiously transformed into a battery. Hence he is able to put forward the statement: "the chemical affinity that the separated substances have for the electrodes has no influence on the electrolytic process as such" (I, p. 471), a sentence which in this absolute form, as we have seen, is totally false. Hence, further, his threefold theory of current formation: firstly, the old traditional one, by means of pure contact; secondly, that derived by means of the abstractly conceived electric force of separation, which in an inexplicable manner obtains for itself or for the "electrolytic process" the requisite energy for splitting apart the H and Cl in the battery and for forming a current as well; and finally, the modern, chemico-electric theory which demonstrates the source of this energy in the algebraic sum of the chemical reactions in the battery. Just as he does not notice that the second explanation overthrows the first, so also he has no idea that the third in its turn overthrows the second. On the contrary, the principle of the conservation of energy is merely added in a quite superficial way to the old theory handed down from routine, just as a new geometrical theorem is appended to an earlier one. He has no inkling that this principle makes necessary a revision of the whole traditional point of view in this as in all other fields of natural science. Hence Wiedemann confines himself to noting the principle in his explanation of the current, and then calmly puts it on one side, taking it up again only right at the end of the book, in the chapter on the work performed by the current. Even in the theory of the excitation of electricity by contact (I, p. 781 et seq.) the conservation of energy plays no role at all in relation to the chief subject dealt with, and is only incidentally brought in for throwing light on subsidiary matters: it is and remains a " secondary process." Let us return to the above example III. There the same current was used to electrolyse hydrochloric acid in two U-tubes, but in one there was a positive electrode of zinc, in the other, the positive electrode used was of copper. According to Faraday's basic law of electrolysis, the same galvanic current decomposes in each cell equivalent quantities of electrolyte, and the quantities of the substances liberated at the two electrodes are also in proportion to their equivalents (I, p. 470). In the above case it was found that in the first tube a quantity of zinc 32.53 was dissolved, and in the other a quantity of copper 2 x 31.7. "Nevertheless," continues Wiedemann, "this is no proof for the equivalence of these values. They are observed only in the case of very weak currents with the formation of zinc chloride ... on the one hand, and of copper chloride ... on the other. In the case of denser currents, with the same amount of zinc dissolved, the quantity of dissolved copper would sink with formation of increasing quantities of chloride ... up to 31.7." It is well known that zinc forms only a single compound with chlorine, zinc chloride, ZnCl; copper on the other hand forms two compounds, cupric chloride, CuCl2, and cuprous chloride, Cu2Cl2. Hence the process is that the weak current splits off two copper atoms from the electrode for each two chlorine atoms, the two copper atoms remaining united by one of their two valencies, while their two free valencies unite with the two chlorine atoms: The above experiment is one performed by Renault (1867) and is one of a whole series of similar experiments in which the same current is led in one U-tube through salt solution (positive electrode - zinc), and in another cell through a varying electrolyte with various metals as the positive electrode. The amounts of the other metals dissolved here for each equivalent of zinc diverged very considerably, and Wiedemann gives the results of the whole series of experiments which, however, in point of fact, are mostly self-evident chemically and could not be otherwise. Thus, for one equivalent of zinc, only two-thirds of an equivalent of gold is dissolved in hydrochloric acid. This can only appear remarkable if, like Wiedemann, one adheres to the old equivalent weights and writes ZnCl for zinc chloride, according to which both the chlorine and the zinc appear in the chloride with only a single valency. In reality two chlorine atoms are included to one zinc atom, ZnCl2, and as soon as we know this formula we see at once that in the above determination of equivalents, the chlorine atom is to be taken as the unit and not the zinc atom. The formula for gold chloride, however, is AuCl3, from which it is at once seen that 3ZnCl2 contains exactly as much chlorine as 2AuCl3, and so all primary, secondary, and tertiary processes in the battery or cell are compelled to transform, for each part by weight of zinc converted into zinc chloride, neither more nor less than two-thirds of a part by weight of gold into gold chloride. This holds absolutely unless the compound AuCl3 also could be prepared by galvanic means, in which case two equivalents of gold even would have to be dissolved for one equivalent of zinc, when also similar variations according to the current strength could occur as in the case of copper and chlorine mentioned above. The value of Renault's researches consists in the fact that they show how Faraday's law is confirmed by facts that appear to contradict it. But what they are supposed to contribute in throwing light on secondary processes in electrolysis is not evident. Wiedemann's third example led us again from the decomposition cell to the battery, and in fact the battery offers by far the greatest interest when one investigates the electrolytic processes in relation to the transformations of energy taking place. Thus we not infrequently encounter batteries in which the chemico-electric processes seem to take place in direct contradiction to the law of the conservation of energy and in opposition to chemical affinity. According to Poggendorff's measurements, the battery: zinc - concentrated salt solution - platinum, provides a current of strength 134.6. Hence we have here quite a respectable quantity of electricity, one third more than in the Daniell cell. What is the source of the energy appearing here as electricity? The "primary" process is the replacement of sodium in the chlorine compound by zinc. But in ordinary chemistry it is not zinc that replaces sodium, but vice versa, sodium replacing zinc from chlorine and other compounds. The "primary" process, far from being able to give the current the above quantity of energy, on the contrary requires itself a supply of energy from outside in order to come into being. Hence, with the mere "primary" process we are again at a standstill. Let us look, therefore, at the real process. We find that the change is not Zn+2NaCl==ZnCl2+2Na, but Zn+2NaCl+2H2O==ZnCl2+2NaOH+H2. In other words, the sodium is not split off in the free state at the negative electrode, but forms a hydroxide as in the above example I (pp. 118-119). To calculate the energy changes taking place here, Julius Thomsen's determinations provide us at least with certain important data. According to them, the energy liberated on combination is as follows: (ZnCl2)==97,210, (ZnCl2, aqua)==15,630, Deducting consumption of energy on the separations: The excess of liberated energy equals 6,720 heat-units. This amount is obviously small for the current strength obtained, but it suffices to explain, on the one hand, the separation of the sodium from chlorine, and on the other hand, the current formation in general. We have here a striking example of the fact that the distinction of primary and secondary processes is purely relative and leads us ad absurdum as soon as we take it absolutely. The primary electrolytic process, taken alone, not only cannot produce any current, but cannot even take place itself. It is only the secondary, ostensibly purely chemical process that makes the primary one possible and, moreover, supplies the whole surplus energy for current formation. In reality, therefore, it proves to be the primary process and the other the secondary one. When the rigid differences and opposites, as imagined by the metaphysicians and metaphysical natural scientists, were dialectically reversed into their opposites by Hegel, it was said that he had twisted the words in their mouths. But if nature itself proceeds exactly like old Hegel, it is surely time to examine the matter more closely. With greater justification one can regard as secondary those processes which, while taking place in consequence of the chemico-electric process of the battery or the electro- chemical process of the decomposition cell, do so independently and separately, occurring therefore at the same distance from the electrodes. The energy changes taking place in such secondary processes likewise do not enter into the electric process; directly they neither withdraw energy from it nor supply energy to it. Such processes occur very frequently in the decomposition cell; we saw an instance in the example I above on the formation of sulphuric acid during electrolysis of sodium sulphate. They are, however, of lesser interest here. Their occurrence in the battery, on the other hand, is of greater practical importance. For although they do not directly supply energy to, or withdraw it from, the chemico-electric process, nevertheless they alter the total available energy present in the battery and thus affect it indirectly. There belong here, besides subsequent chemical changes of the ordinary kind, the phenomena that occur when the ions are liberated at the electrodes in a different condition from that in which they usually occur in the free state, and when they pass over to the latter only after moving away from the electrodes. In such cases the ions can assume a different density or a different state of aggregation. They can also undergo considerable changes in regard to their molecular constitution, and this case is the most interesting. In all these cases, an analogous heat change corresponds to the secondary chemical or physical change of the ions taking place at a certain distance from the electrodes; usually heat is set free, in some cases it is consumed. This heat change is, of course, restricted in the first place to the place where it occurs: the liquid in the battery or decomposition cell becomes warmer or cooler while the rest of the circuit remains unaffected. Hence this heat is called local heat. The liberated chemical energy available for conversion into electricity is, therefore, diminished or increased by the equivalent of this positive or negative local heat produced in the battery. According to Favre, in a battery with hydrogen peroxide and hydrochloric acid two-thirds of the total energy set free is consumed as local heat; the Grove cell, on the other hand, on closing the circuit became considerably cooler and therefore supplied energy from outside to the circuit by absorption of heat. Hence we see that these secondary processes also react on the primary one. We can make whatever approach we like; the distinction between primary and secondary processes remains merely a relative one and is regularly suspended in the interaction of the one with the other. If this is forgotten and such relative opposites treated as absolute, one finally gets hopelessly involved in contradictions, as we have seen above. As is well known, on the electrolytic separation of gases the metal electrodes become covered with a thin layer of gas; in consequence the current strength decreases until the electrodes are saturated with gas, whereupon the weakened current again becomes constant. Favre and Silbermann have shown that local heat arises also in such a decomposition cell; this local heat, therefore, can only be due to the fact that the gases are not liberated at the electrodes in the state in which they usually occur, but that they are only brought into their usual state, after their separation from the electrode, by a further process bound up with the development of heat. But what is the state in which the gases are given off at the electrodes? It is impossible to express oneself more cautiously on this than Wiedemann does. He terms it "a certain," an "allotropic," an "active," and finally, in the case of oxygen, several times an "ozonised" state. In the case of hydrogen his statements are still more mysterious. Incidentally, the view comes out that ozone and, hydrogen peroxide are the forms in which this "active" state is realised. Our author is so keen in his pursuit of ozone that he even explains the extreme electro-negative properties of certain peroxides from the fact that they possibly "contain a part of the oxygen in the ozonised state!" (I, p. 57.) Certainly both ozone and hydrogen peroxide are formed on the so-called decomposition of water, but only in small quantities. There is no basis at all for assuming that in the case mentioned local heat is produced first of all by the origin and then by the decomposition of any large quantities of the above two compounds. We do not know the heat of formation of ozone, O3, from free oxygen atoms. According to Berthelot the heat of formation of hydrogen peroxide from H2O (liquid)+O=-21,480; the origin of this compound in any large amount would therefore give rise to a large excess of energy (about 30 per cent. of the energy required for the separation of H2 and O), which could not but be evident and demonstrable. Finally, ozone and hydrogen peroxide would only take oxygen into account (apart from current reversals, where both gases would come together at the same electrode), but not hydrogen. Yet the latter also escapes in an "active" state, so much so that in the combination: potassium nitrate solution between platinum electrodes, it combines directly with the nitrogen split off from the acid to form ammonia. In point of fact, all these difficulties and doubts have no existence. The electrolytic process has no monopoly of splitting off bodies "in an active state." Every chemical decomposition does the same thing. It splits off the liberated chemical elements in the first place in the form of free atoms of O, H, N, etc., which only after their liberation can unite to form molecules, O2, H2, N2, etc., and on thus uniting give off a definite, though up-to-now still undetermined, quantity of energy which appears as heat. But during the infinitesimal moment of time when the atoms are free, they are the bearers of the total quantity of energy that they can take up at all; while possessed of their maximum energy they are free to enter into any combination offered them. Hence they are "in an active state" in contrast to the molecules O2, H2, N2, which have already surrendered a part of this energy and cannot enter into combination with other elements without this quantity of energy surrendered being re-supplied from outside. We have no need, therefore, to resort to ozone and hydrogen peroxide, which themselves are only products of this active state. For instance, we can undertake the above-mentioned formation of ammonia on electrolysis of potassium nitrate even without a battery, simply by chemical means, by adding to nitric acid or a nitrate solution a liquid in which hydrogen is set free by a chemical process. In both cases the active state of the hydrogen is the same. But the interesting point about the electrolytic process is that here the transitory existence of the free atoms becomes as it were tangible. The process here is divided into two phases: the electrolysis provides free atoms at the electrodes, but their combination to form molecules occurs at some distance from the electrodes. However infinitesimally minute this distance may be compared to measurements where masses are concerned, it suffices to prevent the energy liberated on formation of the molecules being used for the electric process, at least for the most part, and so determines its conversion into heat - the local heat in the battery. But it is owing to this that the fact is established that the elements are split off as free atoms and for a moment have existed in the battery as free atoms. This fact, which in pure chemistry can only be established by theoretical conclusions, is here proved experimentally, in so far as this is possible without sensuous perception of the atoms and molecules themselves. Herein lies the high scientific importance of the so-called local heat of the battery. The conversion of chemical energy into electricity by means of the battery is a process about whose course we know next to nothing, and which we shall get to know in more detail only when the modus operandi of electric motion itself becomes better known. The battery has ascribed to it an "electric force of separation" which is given for each particular battery. As we saw at the outset, Wiedemann conceded that this electric force of separation is not a definite form of energy. On the contrary, it is primarily nothing more than the capacity, the property, of a battery to convert a definite quantity of liberated chemical energy into electricity in unit time. Throughout the whole course of events, this chemical energy itself never assumes the form of an "electric force of separation," but, on the contrary, at once and immediately takes on the form of so-called "electromotive force" i.e. of electric motion. If in ordinary life we speak of the force of a steam engine in the sense that it is capable in unit time of converting a definite quantity of heat into the motion of masses, this is not a reason for introducing the same confusion of ideas into scientific thought also. We might just as well speak of the varying force of a pistol, a carbine, a smooth-bored gun, and a blunderbuss, because, with equal gunpowder charges and projectiles of equal weight, they shoot varying distances. But here the wrongness of the expression is quite obvious. Everyone knows that it is the ignition of the gunpowder charge that drives the bullet, and that the varying range of the weapon is only determined by the greater or lesser dissipation of energy according to the length of the barrel, the form of the projectile, and the tightness of its fitting. But it is the same for steam power and for the electric force of separation. Two steam engines - other conditions being equal, i.e. assuming the quantity of energy liberated in equal periods of time to be equal in both - or two galvanic batteries, of which the same thing holds good, differ as regards performance of work only owing to their greater or lesser dissipation of energy. And if until now all armies have been able to develop the technique of firearms without the assumption of a special shooting force of weapons, the science of electricity has absolutely no excuse for assuming an "electric force of separation" analogous to this shooting force, a force which embodies absolutely no energy and which therefore of itself cannot perform a millionth of a milligram-metre of work. The same thing holds good for the second form of this "force of separation," the "electric force of contact of metals" mentioned by Helmholtz. It is nothing but the property of metals to convert on their contact the existing energy of another form into electricity. Hence it is likewise a force that does not contain a particle of energy. If we assume with Wiedemann that the source of energy of contact electricity lies in the vis viva of the motion of adhesion, then this energy exists in the first place in the form of this mass motion and on its vanishing becomes converted immediately into electric motion, without even for a moment assuming the form of an "electric force of contact." And now we are assured in addition that the electromotive force, i.e. the chemical energy, reappearing as electric motion is proportional to this "electric force of separation," which not only contains no energy, but owing to the very conception of it cannot contain any! This proportionality between non-energy and energy obviously belongs to the same mathematics as that in which there figures the "ratio of the unit of electricity to the milligram." But the absurd form, which owes its existence only to the conception of a simple property as a mystical force, conceals a quite simple tautology: the capacity of a given battery to convert liberated chemical energy into electricity is measured - by what? By the quantity of the energy reappearing in the circuit as electricity in relation to the chemical energy consumed in the battery. That is all. In order to arrive at an electric force of separation, one must take seriously the device of the two electric fluids. To convert this from its neutrality to its polarity, hence to split it apart, requires a certain expenditure of energy - the electric force of separation. Once separated, the two electricities can, on being reunited, again give off the same quantity of energy - electromotive force. But since nowadays no one, not even Wiedemann, regards the two electricities as having a real existence, it means that one is writing for a defunct public if one deals at length with such a point of view. The basic error of the contact theory consists in the fact that it cannot divorce itself from the idea that contact force or electric force of separation is a source of energy, which of course was difficult when the mere capacity of an apparatus to bring about transformation of energy had been converted into a force; for indeed, a force ought precisely to be a definite form of energy. Because Wiedemann cannot rid himself of this unclear notion of force, although alongside of it the modern ideas of indestructible and uncreatable energy have been forced upon him, he falls into his nonsensical explanation of the current, No. 1, and into all the later demonstrated contradictions. If the expression "electric force of separation" is directly contrary to reason, the other "electromotive force" is at least superfluous. We had heat engines long before we had electro-motors, and yet the theory of heat has been developed quite well without any special thermo-motor force. Just as the simple expression heat includes all phenomena of motion that belong to this form of energy, so also can the expression electricity in its own sphere. Moreover, very many forms of action of electricity are not at all directly "motor": the magnetisation of iron, chemical decomposition, conversion into heat. And finally, in every natural science, even in mechanics, it is always an advance if the word force can somehow be got rid of. We saw that Wiedemann did not accept the chemical explanation of the processes in the battery without a certain reluctance. This reluctance continually attacks him; where he can blame anything on the so-called chemical theory, this is certain to occur. Thus, "it is by no means established that the electromotive force is proportional to the intensity of chemical action." (I, p. 791.) Certainly not in every case; but where this proportionality does not occur, it is only a proof that the battery has been badly constructed, that dissipation of energy takes place in it. For that reason Wiedemann is quite right in paying no attention in his theoretical deductions to such subsidiary circumstances which falsify the purity of the process, but in simply assuring us that the electromotive force of a cell is equal to the mechanical equivalent of the chemical action taking place in it in unit time with unit intensity of current. In another passage we read: The question whether the combination of acid and alkali is the cause of current formation is a matter of very serious concern for our author. Put in this form it is very easy to answer. The combination of acid and alkali is first of all the cause of a salt being formed with liberation of energy. Whether this energy wholly or partly takes the form of electricity depends on the circumstances under which it is liberated. For instance, in the battery: nitric acid and potassium hydroxide between platinum electrodes, this will be at least partially the case, and it is a matter of indifference for the formation of the current whether a potassium nitrate solution is interposed between the acid and alkali or not, since this can at most delay the salt formation but not prevent it. If, however, a battery is formed like one of Worm-M ller's, to which Wiedemann constantly refers, where the acid and alkali solution is in the middle, but a solution of their salt at both ends, and in the same concentration as the solution that is formed in the battery, then it is obvious that no current can arise, because on account of the end members - since everywhere identical bodies are formed - no ions can be produced. Hence the conversion of the liberated energy into electricity has been prevented in as direct a manner as if the circuit had not been closed; it is therefore not to be wondered at that no current is obtained. But that acid and alkali can in general produce a current is proved by the battery: carbon, sulphuric acid (one part in ten of water), potassium hydroxide (one part in ten of water), carbon, which according to Raoult has a current strength of 73. And that, with suitable arrangement of the battery, acid and alkali can provide a current strength corresponding to the large quantity of energy set free on their combination, is seen from the fact that the most powerful batteries known depend almost exclusively on the formation of alkali salts, e.g. that of Wheatstone: platinum, platinic chloride, potassium amalgam - current strength 230; lead peroxide, dilute sulphuric acid, potassium amalgam==326; manganese peroxide instead of lead peroxide==280; in each case, if zinc amalgam was employed instead of potassium amalgam, the current strength fell almost exactly by 100. Similarly in the battery: manganese dioxide, potassium permanganate solution, potassium hydroxide, potassium, Beetz obtained the current strength 302, and further: platinum, dilute sulphuric acid, potassium==293.8 ; Joule: platinum, nitric acid, potassium hydroxide, potassium amalgam==302. The "cause" of these exceptionally strong current strengths is certainly the combination of acid and alkali, or alkali metal, and the large quantity of energy thereby liberated. A few pages further on it is again stated: All these processes are to be referred to loss of energy in the battery; they do not affect the fact that the electric motion arises from transformed chemical energy, but only affect the quantity of energy transformed. Electricians have devoted an endless amount of time and trouble to composing the most diverse batteries and measuring their "electromotive force." The experimental material thus accumulated contains very much of value, but certainly still more that is valueless. For instance, what is the scientific value of experiments in which "water" is employed as the electrolyte, when, as has now been proved by F. Kohlrausch, water is the worst conductor and therefore also the worst electrolyte, and where, therefore, it is not the water but its unknown impurities that caused the process? And yet, for instance, almost half of all Fechner's experiments depend on such employment of water, even his "experimentum crucis," by which he sought to establish the contact theory impregnably on the ruins of the chemical theory. As is already evident from this, in almost all such experiments, a few only excepted, the chemical processes in the battery, which however form the source of the so-called electromotive force, remain practically disregarded. There are, however, a number of batteries whose chemical composition does not allow of any certain conclusion being drawn as to the chemical changes proceeding in them when the current circuit is closed. On the contrary, as Wiedemann (I, p. 797) says, it is "not to be denied that we are by no means in all cases able to obtain an insight into the chemical attractions in the battery." Hence, from the ever more important chemical aspect, all such experiments are valueless in so far as they are not repeated with these processes under control. In these experiments it is indeed only quite by way of exception that any account is taken of the energy changes taking place in the battery. Many of them were made before the law of the equivalence of motion was recognised in natural science, but as a matter of custom they continue to be dragged from one textbook into another without being controlled or their value summed up. It has been said that electricity has no inertia (which has about as much sense as saying velocity has no specific gravity), but this certainly cannot be said of the theory of electricity. So far, we have regarded the galvanic cell as all arrangement in which, in consequence of the contact relations established, chemical energy is liberated in some way for the time being unknown, and converted into electricity. We have likewise described the decomposition cell as an apparatus in which the reverse process is set up, electric motion being converted into chemical energy and used up as such. In so doing we had to put in the foreground the chemical side of the process that has been so much neglected by electricians, because this was the only way of getting rid of the lumber of notions handed down from the old contact theory and the theory of the two electric fluids. This once accomplished, the question was whether the chemical process in the battery takes place under the same conditions as outside it, or whether special phenomena make their appearance that are dependent on the electric excitation. In every science, incorrect notions are, in the last resort, apart from errors of observation, incorrect notions of correct facts. The latter remain even when the former are shown to be false. Although we have discarded the old contact theory, the established facts remain, of which they were supposed to be the explanation. Let us consider these and with them the electric aspect proper of the process in the battery. It is not disputed that on the contact of heterogeneous bodies, with or without chemical changes, an excitation of electricity occurs which can be demonstrated by means of an electroscope or a galvanometer. As we have already seen at the outset, it is difficult to establish in a particular battery the source of energy of these in themselves extremely minute phenomena of motion; it suffices that the existence of such an external source is generally conceded. In 1850-53, Kohlrausch published a series of experiments in which he assembled the separate components of a battery in pairs and tested the static electric stresses produced in each case; the electromotive force of the cell should then be composed of the algebraic sum of these stresses. Thus, taking the stress of Zn/Cu==100, he calculates the relative strengths of the Daniell and Grove cells as follows: For the Daniell cell: Zn/Cu+amalg.Zn/H2SO4+Cu/SO4==100+149-21==228. For the Grove cell: Zn/Pt+amalg.Zn/H2SO4+Pt/HNO3==107+149+149==405, If the two exciting plates of a battery are immersed in the liquid and then joined into a circuit by the terminals of a galvanometer, according to Wiedemann, "the initial deflection of its magnetic needle, before chemical changes have altered the strength of the electric excitation, is a measure of the sum of electromotive forces in the circuit." Batteries of various strengths, therefore, give initial deflections of various strengths, and the magnitude of these initial deflections is proportional to the current strength of the corresponding batteries. It looks as if we had here tangibly before our eyes the "electric force of separation," the "contact force," which causes motion independently of any chemical action. And this in fact is the opinion of the whole contact theory. In reality we are confronted here by a relation between electric excitation and chemical action that we have not yet investigated. In order to pass to this subject, we shall first of all examine rather more closely the so- called electromotive law; in so doing, we shall find that here also the traditional contact notions not only provide no explanation, but once again directly bar the way to an explanation. If in any cell consisting of two metals and a liquid, e.g. zinc, dilute hydrochloric acid, and copper, one inserts a third metal such as a platinum plate, without connecting it to the external circuit by a wire, then the initial deflection of the galvanometer will be exactly the same as without the platinum plate. Consequently it has no effect on the excitation of electricity. But it is not permissible to express this so simply in electromotive language. Hence one reads: In saying that in this combination the platinum does not act at all as an exciter of electricity, one expresses what is simply a fact. If one says that it does act as an exciter of electricity, but in two opposite directions with equal strength so that the effect is neutralised, the fact is converted into a hypothesis merely for the sake of doing honour to the "electromotive force." In both cases the platinum plays the role of a fictitious person. During the first deflection there is still no closed circuit. The acids, being undecomposed, do not conduct; they can only conduct by means of the ions. If the third metal has no influence on the first deflection, this is simply the result of the fact that it is still isolated. How does the third metal behave after the establishment of the constant current and during the latter? In the voltaic series of metals in most liquids, zinc lies after the alkali metals fairly close to the positive end and platinum at the negative end, copper being between the two. Hence, if platinum is put as above between copper and zinc it is negative to them both. If the platinum had any effect at all, the current in the liquid would have to flow to the platinum both from the zinc and from the copper, that is away from both electrodes to the unconnected platinum; which would be a contradictio in adjectio. The basic condition for the action of several different metals in the battery consists precisely in their being connected among themselves externally to the circuit. An unconnected, superfluous metal in the battery acts as a non-conductor; it can neither form ions nor allow them to pass through, and without ions we know of no conduction in electrolytes. Hence it is not merely a fictitious person, it even stands in the way by forcing the ions to go round it. The same thing holds good if we connect the zinc and platinum, leaving the copper unconnected in the middle; here the latter, if it had any effect at all, would produce a current from the zinc to the copper and another from the copper to the platinum; hence it would have to act as a sort of intermediary electrode and give off hydrogen on the side turned towards the zinc, which again is impossible. If we discard the traditional electromotive mode of expression the case becomes extremely simple. As we have seen, the galvanic battery is an apparatus in which chemical energy is liberated and transformed into electricity. It consists as a rule of one or more liquids and two metals as electrodes, which must be connected together by a conductor outside the liquids. This completes the apparatus. Anything else that is dipped unconnected into the exciting liquid, whether metal, glass, resin, or whatever you like, cannot participate in the chemico-electric process taking place in the battery, in the formation of the current, so long as the liquid is not chemically altered; it can at most hinder the process. Whatever the capacity for exciting electricity of a third metal dipped into the liquid may be, or that of one or both electrodes of the battery, it cannot have any effect so long as this metal is not connected to the circuit outside the liquid. Consequently, not only is Wiedemann's derivation, as given above, of the so- called electromotive law false, but the interpretation which he gives to this law is also false. One can speak neither of a compensating electromotive activity of the unconnected metal, since the sole condition for such activity is cut off from the outset; nor can the so- called electromotive law be deduced from a fact which lies outside the sphere of this law. In 1845, old Poggendorff published a series of experiments in which he measured the electromotive force of various batteries, that is to say the quantity of electricity supplied by each of them in unit time. Of these experiments, the first twenty-seven are of special value, in each of which three given metals were one after another connected in the same exciting liquid to three different batteries, and the latter investigated and compared as regards the quantity of electricity produced. As a good adherent of the contact theory, Poggendorff also put the third metal unconnected in the battery in each experiment and so had the satisfaction of convincing himself that in all eighty-one batteries this third metal remained a pure inactive element in the combination. But the significance of these experiments by no means consists in this fact but rather in the confirmation and establishment of the correct meaning of the so-called electromotive law. Let us consider the above series of batteries in which zinc, copper, and platinum are connected together in pairs in dilute hydrochloric acid. Here Poggendorff found the quantities of electricity produced to be as follows, taking that of a Daniell cell as 100: Thus, zinc in direct connection with platinum produced almost exactly the same quantity of electricity as zinc-copper copper-platinum. The same thing occurred in all other batteries, whatever liquids and metals were employed. When, from a series of metals in the same exciting liquid, batteries were formed in such a way that in each case, according to the voltaic series valid for this liquid, the second, third, fourth, etc., one after the other were made to serve as negative electrodes for the preceding one and as positive electrodes for that which followed, then the sum of the quantities of electricity produced by all these batteries is equal to the quantity of electricity produced by a battery formed directly between the two end members of the whole metallic series. For instance, in dilute hydrochloric acid the sum total of the quantities of electricity produced by the batteries zinc-zinc, zinc-iron, iron- copper, copper-silver, and silver-platinum, would be equal to that produced by the battery: zinc-platinum. A pile formed from all the cells of the above series would, other things being equal, be exactly neutralised by the introduction of a zinc-platinum cell with a current of the opposite direction. In this form, the so-called electromotive law has a real and considerable significance. It reveals a new aspect of the inter-connection between chemical and electrical action. Hitherto, on investigating mainly the source of energy of the galvanic current, this source, the chemical change, appeared as the active side of the process; the electricity was produced from it and therefore appeared primarily as passive. Now this is reversed. The electric excitation determined by the constitution of the heterogeneous bodies put into contact in the battery can neither add nor subtract energy from the chemical action (other than by conversion of liberated energy into electricity). It can, however, according as the battery is made up, accelerate or slow down this action. If the battery, zinc-dilute hydrochloric acid-copper, produced in unit time only half as much electricity for the current as the battery, zinc-dilute hydrochloric acid-platinum, this means in chemical terms that the first battery produces in unit time only half as much zinc chloride and hydrogen as the second. Hence the chemical action has been doubled, although the purely chemical conditions for this action have remained the same. The electric excitation has become the regulator of the chemical action; it appears now as the active side, the chemical action being the passive side. Thus, it becomes comprehensible that a number of processes previously regarded as purely chemical now appear as electro-chemical. Chemically pure zinc is not attacked at all by dilute acid, or only very weakly; ordinary commercial zinc, on the other hand, is rapidly dissolved with formation of a salt and production of hydrogen; it contains an admixture of other metals and carbon, which make their appearance in unequal amounts at various places of the surface. Local currents are formed in the acid between them and the zinc itself, the zinc areas forming the positive electrodes and the other metals the negative electrodes, the hydrogen bubbles being given off on the latter. Likewise the phenomenon that when iron is dipped into a solution of copper sulphate it becomes covered with a layer of copper is now seen to be an electro-chemical phenomenon, one determined by the currents which arise between the heterogeneous areas of the surface of the iron. In accordance with this we find also that the voltaic series of metals in liquids corresponds on the whole to the series in which metals replace one another from their compounds with halogens and acid radicles. At the extreme negative end of the voltaic series we regularly find the metals of the gold group, gold, platinum, palladium, rhodium, which oxidise with difficulty, are little or not at all attacked by acids, and which are easily precipitated from their salts by other metals. At the extreme positive end are the alkali metals which exhibit exactly the opposite behaviour: they are scarcely to be split off from their oxides except with the greatest expenditure of energy; they occur in nature almost exclusively in the form of salts, and of all the metals they have by far the greatest affinity for halogens and acid radicles. Between these two come the other metals in somewhat varying sequence, but such that on the whole electrical and chemical behaviour correspond to one another. The sequence of the separate members varies according to the liquids and has hardly been finally established for any single liquid. It is even permissible to doubt whether there exists such an absolute voltaic series of metals for any single liquid. Given suitable batteries and decomposition cells, two pieces of the same metal can act as positive and negative electrodes respectively, hence the same metal can be both positive and negative towards itself. In thermocells which convert heat into electricity, with large temperature differences at the two junctions, the direction of the current is reversed; the previously positive metal becomes negative and vice versa. Similarly, there is no absolute series according to which the metals replace one another from their chemical compounds with a particular halogen or acid radicle; in many cases by supplying energy in the form of heat we are able almost at will to alter and reverse the series valid for ordinary temperatures. Hence we find here a peculiar interaction between chemical action and electricity. The chemical action in the battery, which provides the electricity with the total energy for current formation, is in many cases first brought into operation, and in all cases quantitatively regulated, by the electric charges developed in the battery. If previously the processes in the battery seemed to be chemico-electric in nature, we see here that they are just as much electro-chemical. From the point of view of formation of the constant current, chemical action appears to be the primary thing: from the point of view of excitation of current it appears as secondary and accessory. The reciprocal action excludes any absolute primary or absolute secondary; but it is just as much a double-sided process which from its very nature can be regarded from two different standpoints; to be understood in its totality it must even be investigated from both standpoints one after the other, before the total result can be arrived at. If, however, we adhere onesidedly to a single standpoint as the absolute one in contrast to the other, or if we arbitrarily jump from one to the other according to the momentary needs of our argument, we shall remain entangled in the onesidedness of metaphysical thinking; the interconnection escapes us and we become involved in one contradiction after another. We saw above that, according to Wiedemann, the initial deflection of the galvanometer, immediately after dipping the exciting plates into the liquid of the battery and before chemical changes have altered the strength of the electric excitation, is "a measure of the sum of electromotive forces in the circuit." So far we have become acquainted with the so-called electromotive force as a form of energy, which in our case was produced in an equivalent amount from chemical energy, and which in the further course of the process became reconverted into equivalent quantities of heat, mass motion, etc. Here we learn all at once that the "sum of the electromotive forces in the circuit" is already in existence before this energy has been liberated by chemical changes; in other words, that the electromotive force is nothing but the capacity of a particular cell to liberate a particular quantity of chemical energy in unit time and to convert it into electric motion. As previously in the case of the electric force of separation, so here also the electromotive force appears as a force which does not contain a single spark of energy. Consequently, Wiedemann understands by "electromotive force" two totally different things: on the one hand, the capacity of a battery to liberate a definite quantity of given chemical energy and to convert it into electric motion, on the other hand, the quantity of electric motion itself that is developed. The fact that the two are proportional, that the one is a measure for the other, does not do away with the distinction between them. The chemical action in the battery, the quantity of electricity developed, and the heat in the circuit derived from it, when no other work is performed, are even more than proportional, they are equivalent; but that does not infringe the diversity between them. The capacity of a steam engine with a given cylinder bore and piston stroke to produce a given quantity of mechanical motion from the heat supplied is very different from this mechanical motion itself, however proportional to it it may be. And while such a mode of speech was tolerable at a time when natural science had not yet said anything of the conservation of energy, nevertheless it is obvious that since the recognition of this basic law it is no longer permissible to confuse real active energy in any form with the capacity of an apparatus to impart this form to energy which is being liberated. This confusion is a corollary of the confusion of force and energy in the case of the electric force of separation; these two confusions provide a harmonious background for Wiedemann's three mutually contradictory explanations of the current, and in the last resort are the basis in general for all his errors and confusions in regard to so-called "electromotive force." Besides the above-considered peculiar interaction between chemical action and electricity there is also a second point that they have in common which likewise indicates a closer kinship between these two forms of motion. Both can exist only for an infinitesimal period. The chemical process takes place suddenly for each group of atoms undergoing it. It can be prolonged only by the presence of new material that continually renews it. The same thing holds for electric motion. Hardly has it been produced from some other form of motion before it is once more converted into a third form; only the continual readiness of available energy can produce the constant current, in which at each moment new quantities of motion assume the form of energy and lose it again. An insight into this close connection of chemical and electric action and vice versa will lead to important results in both spheres of investigation. Such an insight is already becoming more and more widespread. Among chemists, Lothar Meyer, and after him Kekul , have plainly stated that a revival of the electro-chemical theory in a rejuvenated form is impending. Among electricians also, as indicated especially by the latest works of F. Kohlrausch, the conviction seems finally to have taken hold that only exact attention to the chemical processes in the battery and decomposition cell can help their science to emerge from the blind alley of old traditions. And in fact one cannot see how else a firm foundation is to be given to the theory of galvanism and so secondarily to that of magnetism and static electricity, other than by a chemically exact general revision of all traditional uncontrolled experiments made from an obsolete scientific standpoint, with exact attention to establishing the energy changes and preliminary rejection of all traditional theoretical notions about electricity. In Nature, June 15, 1882, there is a reference to this "admirable treatise, which in its forthcoming shape, with electrostatics added, will be the greatest experimental treatise on electricity in existence." [Note by F. Engels.]

1883: Dialectics of Nature chapter 6

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1883/don/ch06.htm

The successive development of the separate branches of natural science should be studied. First of all, astronomy, which, if only on account of the seasons, was absolutely indispensable for pastoral and agricultural peoples. Astronomy can only develop with the aid of mathematics. Hence this also had to be tackled. Further, at a certain stage of agriculture and in certain regions (raising of water for irrigation in Egypt), and especially with the origin of towns. big building structures and the development of handicrafts, mechanics also arose. This was soon needed also for navigation and war. Moreover, it requires the aid of mathematics and so promotes the latter s development. Thus, from the very beginning the origin and development of the sciences has been determined by production. Throughout antiquity, scientific investigation proper remained restricted to these three branches, and indeed in the form of exact, systematic research it occurs for the first time in the post-classical period (the Alexandrines, Archimedes, etc.). In physics and chemistry, which were as yet hardly separated in. men s minds (theory of the elements, absence of the concept of a chemical element), in botany, zoology, human and animal anatomy, it had only been possible until then to collect facts and arrange them as systematically as possible. Physiology was sheer guess-work, as soon as one went beyond the most tangible things e.g., digestion and excretion and it could not be otherwise when even the circulation of the blood was not known. At the end of the period, chemistry makes its appearance in the primitive form of alchemy. If, after the dark night of the Middle Ages was over the sciences suddenly arose anew with undreamt-of force, developing at a miraculous rate, once again we owe this miracle to production. In the first place, following the crusades, industry developed enormously and brought to light a quantity of new mechanical (weaving, clockmaking, milling), chemical (dyeing, metallurgy, alcohol), and physical (spectacles) facts, and this not only gave enormous material for observation, but also itself provided quite other means for experimenting than previously existed, and allowed the construction of new instruments; it can be said that really systematic. experimental science now became possible for the first time. Secondly, the whole of West and Middle Europe, including Poland, now developed in a connected fashion, even though Italy was still at the head owing to its old-inherited civilisation. Thirdly, geographical discoveries made purely for the sake of gain and, therefore, in the last resort, of production opened up an infinite and hitherto inaccessible amount of material of a meteorological, zoological, botanical, and physiological (human) bearing. Fourthly, there was the printing press. [In margin: Hitherto, what has been boasted of is what production owes to science, but science owes infinitely more to production."] Now apart from mathematics, astronomy, and mechanics, which were already in existence physics becomes definitely separate from chemistry (Torricelli, Galileo the former in connection with industrial waterworks studied first of all the movement of liquids, see Clerk Maxwell). Boyle put chemistry on a stable basis as a science. Harvey did the same for physiology (human and animal) by the discovery of the blood circulation. Zoology and botany remain at first collecting sciences, until palaeontology appeared on the scene Cuvier and shortly afterwards came the discovery of the cell and the development of organic chemistry. Therewith comparative morphology and physiology became possible and from then on both are true sciences. Geology was founded at the end of the last [18th] century, and recently anthropology, badly so-called, enabling the transition from the morphology and physiology of man and human races to history. This to be studied further in detail and to be developed. [Hegel, Geschichte der Philosophie, Vol. I, Greek Philosophy] Of the first philosophers, Aristotle says (Metaphysics, 1, 3) that they assert: Here, therefore, is already the whole original spontaneous materialism which at its beginning quite naturally regards the unity of the infinite diversity of natural phenomena as a matter of course, and seeks it in something definitely corporeal, a particular thing, as Thales does in water. Cicero says: Hegel quite rightly declares that this is an addition of Cicero s, and says: The oldest Greek philosophers were at the same time investigators of nature: Thales, a geometrician, fixed the year at 365 days, and is said to have predicted a solar eclipse. Anaximander constructed a sun clock, a kind of map (perimetron) of land and sea, and various astronomical instruments. Pythagoras was a mathematician. Anaximander of Miletos, according to Plutarch (Quoestiones convivales [Table Talk], VIII, p. 8), makes man come from a fish, emerging from the water on to the land, p. 213. For him the arch kai stoiceion to apeiron [beginning and element is the infinite], without determining (diorizwn) it as air or water or anything else (Diogenes Laertius II, paragraph 1). This infinite correctly reproduced by Hegel, p. 215, as undetermined matter (ca. 580). Anaximenes of Miletos takes air as principle and basic element, declaring it to be infinite (Cicero, De Natura Deorum, 1, p. 10) and that Here air ahr = pneuma [breath, spirit]; Soul and air conceived as a general medium (ca. 555). Aristotle already says that these ancient philosophers put the primordial essence in a form of matter: air and water (and perhaps Anaximander in something midway between both), later Heraclitus in fire, but none in earth on account of its multiple composition (dia thn megalomereian) Metaphysics, I, 8. (p. 217.) Aristotle correctly remarks of all of them that they leave the origin of motion unexplained (p. 218 et seq.). Pythagoras of Samos (ca. 540): number is the basic principle. Hegel justly points out Just as number is subject to definite laws, so also the universe; hereby its obedience to law was expressed for the first time. To Pythagoras is ascribed the reduction of musical harmonies to mathematical relations. Likewise: This fire, however, is not the sun; nevertheless this is the first inkling that the earth moves. Hegel on the planetary system: For all the naive materialism of the total outlook, the kernel of the later split is already to be found among the ancient Greeks. For Thales, the soul is already something special, something different from the body (just as he ascribes a soul also to the magnet), for Anaximenes it is air (as in Genesis), for the Pythagoreans it is already immortal and migratory, the body being purely accidental to it. For the Pythagoreans, also, the soul is a chip of the ether (apospasma aiqeros) (Diogenes Laertius, VIII, p. 26-28), where the cold ether is the air, the dense ether the sea and moisture. [pp. 279-80.] Aristotle correctly reproaches the Pythagoreans also: Pythagoras is supposed to have discovered the identity of the morning and evening star, that the moon gets its light from the sun, and finally the Pythagorean theorem. The Eleatics. Leucippus and Democritus. The following about Epicurus. Aristarchus of Samos, 270 B. C., already held the Copernican theory of the Earth and Sun. (Madler, p. 44, Wolf, pp. 35-37.) Democritus had already surmised that the Milky Way sheds on us the combined light of innumerable small stars. (Wolf, p. 313.) (See No. 11 [sheet of manuscript, see below] concerning inventions.) In addition material provided by travels (Marco Polo, ca. 1272, etc.). General education, even though still bad, much more widespread owing to the universities. With the rise of Constantinople and the fall of Rome, antiquity comes to an end. The end of the Middle Ages is indissolubly linked with the fall of Constantinople. The new age begins with the return to the Greeks Negation of the negation! B. C.: A. D.: Modern natural science the only one which can come into consideration qua science as against the brilliant intuitions of the Greeks and the sporadic unconnected investigations of the Arabs -begins with that mighty epoch when feudalism was smashed by the burghers. In the background of the struggle between the burghers of the towns and the feudal nobility this epoch showed the peasant in revolt, and behind the peasant the revolutionary beginnings of the modern proletariat, already red flag in hand and with communism on its lips. It was the epoch which brought into being the great monarchies in Europe, broke the spiritual dictatorship of the Pope, evoked the revival of Greek antiquity and with it the highest artistic development of the new age, broke through the boundaries of the old world, and for the first time really discovered the world. It was the greatest revolution that the world had so far experienced. Natural science also flourished in this revolution, was revolutionary through and through, advanced hand in hand with the awakening modern philosophy of the great Italians, and provided its martyrs for the stake and the prisons. It is characteristic that Protestants and Catholics vied with one another in persecuting it. The former burned Servetus, the latter Giordano Bruno. It was a time that called for giants and produced giants, giants in learning, intellect, and character, a time that the French correctly called the Renaissance and Protestant Europe with one-sided prejudice called that of the Reformation. At that time natural science also had its declaration of independence, though it is true it did not come right at the beginning, any more than that Luther was the first Protestant. What Luther s burning of the papal bull was in the religious field, in the field of natural science was the great work of Copernicus, in which he, although timidly, after thirty-six years hesitation and so to say on his deathbed, threw down a challenge to ecclesiastical superstition. From then on natural science was in essence emancipated from religion, although the complete settlement of accounts in all details has gone on to the present day and in many minds is still far from being complete. But from. then on the development of science went forward with giant strides, increasing, so to speak, proportionately to the square of the distance in time from its point of departure, as if it wanted to show the world that for the motion of the highest product of organic matter, the human mind, the law that holds good is the reverse of that for the motion of inorganic matter. The first period of modern natural science ends in the inorganic sphere with Newton. It is the period in which the available subject-matter was mastered; it performed a great work in the fields of mathematics, mechanics and astronomy, statics and dynamics, especially owing to Kepler and Galileo, from whose work Newton drew the conclusions. In the organic sphere, however, there was no progress beyond the first beginnings. The investigation of the forms of life historically succeeding one another and replacing one another, as well as the changing conditions of life corresponding to them paloeontology and geology did not yet exist. Nature was not at all regarded as something that developed historically, that had a history in time; only extension in space was taken into account; the various forms were grouped not one after the other, but only one beside the other; natural history was valid for all periods, like the elliptical orbits of the planets. For any closer analysis of organic structure both the immediate bases were lacking, viz., chemistry and knowledge of the essential organic structure, the cell. Natural science, at the outset revolutionary, was confronted by an out-and-out conservative nature, in which everything, remained today as it was at the beginning of the world, and in which right to the end of the world everything would remain as it had been in the beginning. It is characteristic that this conservative outlook on nature both in the inorganic and in the organic sphere [...] The first breach: Kant and Laplace. The second: geology and palaeontology (Lyell, slow development). The third: organic chemistry, which prepares organic bodies and shows the validity of chemical laws for living bodies. The fourth: 1842, mechanical (theory of) heat, Grove. The fifth: Darwin, Lamarck, the cell, etc. (struggle, Cuvier and Agassiz). The sixth: the comparative element in anatomy, climatology (isotherms), animal and plant geography (scientific travel expeditions since the middle of the eighteenth century), physical geography in general (Humboldt), the assembling of the material in its inter-connection. Morphology (embryology, Baer). [Up to this point, the text of the note has been crossed out in the manuscript by a vertical stroke as having been used by Engels in the first part of the Introduction (see this volume, pp. 20-31). The two further paragraphs, partially used in the second part of the Introduction (pp. 31-39), were not crossed out. Ed.] The old teleology has gone to the devil, but it is now firmly established that matter in its eternal cycle moves according to laws which at a definite stage now here, now there necessarily give rise to the thinking mind in organic beings. The normal existence of animals is given by the contemporary conditions in which they live and to which they adapt themselves those of man, as soon as he differentiates himself from the animal in the narrower sense, have as yet never been present, and are only to be elaborated by the ensuing historical development. Man is the sole animal capable of working his way out of the merely animal state his normal state is one appropriate to his consciousness, one that has to be created by himself. [The vulgarising peddlers who dealt in materialism in the Germany of the fifties in no wise went beyond these limits of their teachers.[ i.e., the French materialists of the eighteenth century.] All the advances made by natural science since then served them merely] as fresh arguments against the belief in a creator of the universe; and in fact the further development of theory was quite outside their line of business. Idealism was hard hit. owing to 1848 but materialism in this renovated form of it sank still lower. Feuerbach was absolutely right in repudiating responsibility for this materialism; only he had no right to confuse the doctrine of the itinerant preachers with materialism in general. At about the same time, however, empirical natural science made such an advance and arrived at such brilliant results that not only did it become possible to overcome completely the mechanical one-sidedness of the eighteenth century, but also natural science itself, owing to the proof of the inter-connections existing in nature itself between the various fields of investigation (mechanics, physics, chemistry, biology, etc.), was transformed from an empirical into a theoretical science and, by generalising the results achieved, into a system of the materialist knowledge of nature. The mechanics of gases; newly-created organic chemistry, which stripped the last remnants of incomprehensibility from one so-called organic compound after another by preparing them from inorganic substances; scientific embryology dating from 1818; geology and palaeontology; comparative anatomy of plants and animals all these furnished new material in an unprecedented measure. Three great discoveries, however,, were of decisive importance. The first was the proof of the transformation of energy arising out of the discovery of the mechanical equivalent of heat (by Robert Mayer, Joule and Colding). All the innumerable acting causes in nature, which had hitherto led a mysterious, inexplicable existence as so-called forces mechanical force, heat, radiation (light and radiant heat), electricity, magnetism, chemical force of association and dissociation have now been proved to be special forms, modes of existence of one and the same energy, i.e., motion. We can not only demonstrate its conversion from one form into another, which continually takes place in nature, but we can carry out this conversion in the laboratory and in industry, and indeed in such a way that a given quantity of energy in one form always corresponds to a given quantity of energy in some other form. Thus we can express the unit of heat in kilogram-metres and the units or any quantity of electrical or chemical energy once more in heat-units and vice versa; we can likewise measure the energy consumption and energy intake of a living organism and express it in any desired unit, e.g., in heat-units. The unity of all motion in nature is no longer a philosophical assertion, but a natural-scientific fact. The second discovery earlier in point of time was that of the organic cell by Schwann and Schleiden, as being the unit out of which, by its multiplication and differentiation, all organisms with the exception of the lowest are formed and develop. This discovery for the first time gave a firm basis to the investigation of the organic, living products of nature both comparative anatomy and physiology, and embryology. The origin, growth and structure of organisms were deprived of their mysterious character; the hitherto incomprehensible miracle was merged in a process which takes place according to a law that is essentially identical for all multicellular organisms. But an essential gap still remained. If all multicellular organisms both plants and animals, including man in each case grow out of a single cell according to the law of cell division, what then is the source of the infinite diversity of these organisms? This question was answered by the third great discovery, the theory of evolution, which for the first time was comprehensively worked out and substantiated by Darwin. However many transformations this theory will still undergo as regards details, in the main it has already solved the problem in a more than adequate manner. The evolutionary series of organisms from a few simple forms to increasingly multifarious and complicated ones, as it confronts us today, and extending right up to man, has been established as far as its main features are concerned. Thanks to this, not only has it become possible to explain the existing stock of organic products of nature but the basis has also been provided for the pre-history of the human mind, for tracing the various stages of its development, from the simple protoplasm structureless but sensitive to stimuli of the lowest organisms right up to the thinking human brain. Without this pre-history, however, the existence of the thinking human brain remains a miracle. By means of these three great discoveries, the main processes of nature were explained and referred to natural causes. One thing still remains to be done here: to explain the origin of life from inorganic nature. At the present stage of science that implies nothing less than the preparation of protein bodies from inorganic substances. Chemistry is approaching closer and closer to the solution of this task, but it is still a long way from it. If, however, we bear in mind that it was only in 1828 that Wohler prepared the first organic body, urea, from inorganic materials, and what an innumerable number of so-called organic compounds are now artificially prepared without any organic materials, we shall not be inclined to bid chemistry halt when confronted by protein. So far chemistry has been able to prepare every organic substance, the composition of which is accurately known. As soon as the composition of the protein bodies becomes known, chemistry will be able to set about the preparation of living protein. But to demand that it should achieve overnight what nature itself succeeds in doing only under very favourable circumstances on a few cosmic bodies after millions of years, would be to demand a miracle. Thus the materialist outlook on nature rests today on much firmer foundation than it did in the previous century. At that time only the motion of the heavenly bodies and that of terrestrial solid bodies under the influence of gravity was at all exhaustively understood; almost the entire field of chemistry and the whole of organic nature remained mysterious and not understood. Today the whole of nature lies spread out before us as a system of inter-connections and processes that, at least in its main features, has been explained and understood. At all events, the materialist outlook on nature means nothing more than the simple conception of nature just as it is, without alien addition, and hence among the Greek philosophers it was originally understood in this way as a matter of course. But between those ancient Greeks and us lie more than two thousand years of an essentially idealist outlook on the world, and so the return to self-evident understanding is more difficult than it appears to be at first sight. For it is by no means a matter of simply throwing overboard the entire thought content of those two thousand years, but of a criticism of it, of extracting the results that had been won within a form that was false and idealistic but which was inevitable for its time and for the course of evolution itself from this transitory form. And how difficult that is, is proved for us by those numerous natural scientists who are inexorable materialists within their science but outside it are not merely idealists, but even pious and indeed orthodox Christians. All these epoch-making advances of natural science passed Feuerbach by without affecting him in any essential respect. This was not so much his fault as that of the miserable German conditions, owing to which the university chairs were occupied by empty-headed, eclectic hair-splitters, while Feuerbach, who towered high above them, was compelled almost to rusticate in lonely village isolation. That is why, on the subject of nature, he wastes so much labour except for a few brilliant generalizations on empty belletristic writing. Thus he says: That life is a result of the whole of nature in no way contradicts the fact that protein, which is the exclusive independent bearer of life, arises under definite conditions determined by the whole inter-connection of nature, but arises precisely as the product of a chemical process. [Had Feuerbach lived in conditions Which permitted him to follow even superficially the development of natural science, it would never have happened that he would speak of a chemical process as the effect of an isolated force of nature.] To the same solitariness must be ascribed the fact that Feuerbach loses himself in a circle of barren speculations on the relation of thought to the thinking organ, the brain a sphere in which Starcke follows him willingly. Enough, Feuerbach revolts against the name materialism. And not entirely without reason; for he never completely ceases to be an idealist. In the field of nature he is a materialist; but in the human field [...]. [Page 19 of the original manuscript of L. Feuerbach ends here. The end of this sentence occurs on the following page, which has not come down to us. On the basis of the printed text of L. Feuerbach it may be supposed that this sentence read approximately as follows: In the sphere of human history he is an idealist. Ed.] God is nowhere treated worse than by the natural scientists who believe in him. Materialists simply explain the facts, without making use of such phrases, they do this first when importunate pious believers try to force God upon them, and then they answer curtly, either like Laplace: Sire, je n avais pas, etc., or more rudely in the manner of the Dutch merchants who, when German commercial travellers press their shoddy goods on them, are accustomed to turn them away with the words: Ik kan die zaken niet gebruiken [I have no use for the things] and that is the end of the matter: But what God has had to suffer at the hands of his defenders! In the history of modern natural science, God is treated by his defenders as Frederick William III was treated by his generals and officials in the Jena campaign. One division of the army after another lays down its arms, one fortress after another capitulates before the march of science, until at last the whole infinite realm of nature is conquered by science, and there is no place left in it for the Creator. Newton still allowed Him the first impulse but forbade Him any further interference in his solar system. Father Secchi bows Him out of the solar system altogether, with all canonical honours it is true, but none the less categorically for all that, and he only allows Him a creative act as regards the primordial nebula. And so in all spheres. In biology, his last great Don Quixote, Agassiz, even ascribes positive nonsense to Him; He is supposed to have created not only the actual animals but also abstract animals, the fish as such! And finally Tyndall totally forbids Him any entry into nature and relegates Him to the world of emotional processes, only admitting Him because, after all, there must be somebody who knows more about all these things (nature) than John Tyndall! What a distance from the old God the Creator of heaven and earth, the maintainer of all things without whom not a hair can fall from the head! Tyndall s emotional need proves nothing. The Chevalier des Grieux also had an emotional need to love and possess Marion Lescaut, who sold herself and him over and over again; for her sake he became a cardsharper and pimp, and if Tyndall wants to reproach him, he would reply with his emotional need"! God=nescio; but ignorantia non est argumentum (Spinoza).

Notes and Fragments for Dialectics of Nature, Frederick Engels 1883

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1883/don/ch07a.htm

Rise of the tendency. The passing of German philosophy into materialism control over science abolished outbreak of shallow materialist popularisation, in which the materialism had to make up for the lack of science. Its flourishing at the time of the deepest degradation of bourgeois Germany and official German science 1850-60. Vogt, Moleschott, B chner. Mutual assurance. New impetus by the coming into fashion of Darwinism, which was immediately monopolised by these gentlemen. One could let them alone and leave them to their not unpraiseworthy if narrow occupation of teaching atheism, etc., to the German philistine but for: 1, abuse directed against philosophy (passages to be quoted), [B chner is acquainted with philosophy only as a dogmatist, just as he himself is a dogmatist of the shallowest reflection of the German would-be Enlightenment, which missed the spirit and movement of the great French materialists (Hegel on this) just as Nicolai had that of Voltaire. Lessing s dead dog Spinoza. ([Hegel] Enzyklop die. Preface, p. 19.) Note by Engels.] which in spite of everything is the glory of Germany, and 2, the presumption of applying the theories about nature to society and of reforming socialism. Thus they compel us to take note of them. First of all, what do they achieve in their own sphere? Quotations. 2. Turning point, pages 170-171. Whence this sudden Hegelianism? Transition to dialectics. Two philosophical tendencies, the metaphysical with fixed categories, the dialectical (Aristotle and especially Hegel) with fluid categories; the proofs that these fixed opposites of basis and consequence, cause and effect, identity and difference, appearance and essence are untenable, that analysis shows one pole already present in the other in nuce, that at a definite point the one pole becomes transformed into the other, and that all logic develops only from these progressing contradictions. This mystical in Hegel himself, because the categories appear as pre-existing and the dialectics of the real world as their mere reflection. In reality it is the reverse: the dialectics of the mind is only the reflection of the forms of motion of the real world, both of nature and of history. Until the end of the last century, indeed until 1830, natural scientists could manage pretty well with the old metaphysics, because real science did not go beyond mechanics terrestrial and cosmic. Nevertheless confusion had already been introduced by higher mathematics, which regards the eternal truth of lower mathematics as a superseded point of view, often asserting the contrary, and putting forward propositions which appear sheer nonsense to the lower mathematician. The rigid categories disappeared here; mathematics arrived at a field where even such simple relations as those of mere abstract quantity, bad infinity, assumed a completely dialectical form and compelled the mathematicians to become dialectical, unconsciously and against their will. There is nothing more comical than the twistings, subterfuges, and expedients employed by the mathematicians to solve this contradiction, to reconcile higher and lower mathematics, to make clear to their understanding that what they had arrived at as an undeniable result is not sheer nonsense, and in general rationally to explain the starting-point, method, and result of the mathematics of the infinite. Now, however, everything is quite different. Chemistry, the abstract divisibility of physical things, bad infinity atomistics. Physiology the cell (the organic process of development, both of the individual and of species, by differentiation, the most striking test of rational dialectics), and finally the identity of the forces of nature and their mutual convertibility, which put an end to all fixity of categories. Nevertheless, the bulk of natural scientists are still held fast in the old metaphysical categories and helpless when these modern facts, which so to say prove the dialectics in nature, have to be rationally explained and brought into relation with one another. And here thinking is necessary: atoms and molecules, etc., cannot be observed under the microscope, but only by the process of thought. Compare the chemists (except for Schorlemmer, who is acquainted with Hegel) and Virchow s Cellular Pathology, where in the end the helplessness has to be concealed by general phrases. Dialectics divested of mysticism becomes an absolute necessity for natural science, which has forsaken the field where rigid categories sufficed, which represent as it were the lower mathematics of logic, its everyday weapons. Philosophy takes its revenge posthumously on natural science for the latter having deserted it; and yet the scientists could have seen even from the successes in natural science achieved by philosophy that the latter possessed something that was superior to them even in their own special sphere (Leibniz the founder of the mathematics of the infinite, in contrast to whom the inductive ass Newton appears as a plagiarist and corrupter; Kant the theory of the origin of the universe before Laplace; Oken the first in Germany to accept the theory of evolution; Hegel whose [undeciperable] comprehensive treatment and rational grouping of the natural sciences is a greater achievement than all the materialistic nonsense put together). On B chner s claim to pronounce judgement on socialism and political economy on the basis of the struggle for existence: Hegel (Enzyklop die, 1, p. 9), on cobbling. On politics and socialism. The understanding for. which the world has waited, p. 11. Separation, coexistence, and succession. Hegel, Enzyklopddie, p. 35! as determination of the sensuous, of the idea. Hegel, Enzyklop die, p. 40. Natural phenomena but in B chner not thought about, merely copied out, hence it is superfluous. Page 42. Solon s laws were produced out of his head B chner is able to do the same for modern society. Page 45. Metaphysics the science of things not of movements. Page 53. In experience everything depends upon the mind we bring to bear upon actuality. A great mind is great in its experience; and in the motley play of phenomena at once perceives the point of real significance. Page 56. The parallelism between the human individual and history the parallelism between embryology and palaeontology. Just as Fourier is a mathematical poem and yet still used, so Hegel a dialectical poem. The incorrect theory of porosity (according to which the various false matters, caloric, etc., are situated in the pores of one another and yet do not penetrate one another) is presented by Hegel as a pure figment of the mind (Enzyklop die, I, p. 259. See also his Logik). Hegel, Enzyklopadie, I, pp. 205-206, a prophetic passage on atomic weights in contrast to the physical views of the time, and on atoms and molecules as thought determinations, on which thinking has to decide. If Hegel regards nature as a manifestation of the eternal idea in its alienation, and if this is such a serious crime, what are we to say of the morphologist Richard Owen: If that is said by a mystical natural scientist, who means nothing by it, it is calmly allowed to pass, but if a philosopher says the same thing, and one who means something by it, and indeed au fond something correct, although in inverted form, then it is mysticism and a terrible crime. Natural-scientific thought. Agassiz s plan of creation, according to which God proceeded in creation from the general to the particular and individual, first creating the vertebrate as such, then the mammal as such, the animal of prey as such, the cat as such, and only finally the lion, etc.! That is to say, first of all abstract ideas in the shape of concrete things and then concrete things! (See Haeckel, p. 59.) In Oken (Haeckel, p. 85: et seq.) the nonsense that has arisen from the dualism between natural science and philosophy is evident. By the path of thought, Oken discovers protoplasm and the cell, but it does not occur to anyone to follow up the matter along the lines of natural-scientific investigation it is to be accomplished by thinking! And when protoplasm and the cell were discovered, Oken was in general disrepute! Hofmann (Ein Jahrhundert Chemie unter den Hohenzollern) cites the philosophy of nature. A quotation from Rosenkranz, the belletrist, whom no real Hegelian recognises. To make the philosophy of nature responsible for Rosenkranz is as foolish as Hofmann making the Hohenzollerns responsible for Marggraf s discovery of beet sugar. Theory and empiricism. The oblateness of the earth was theoretically established by Newton. The Cassinis and other Frenchmen maintained a long time afterwards, on the basis of their empirical measurements, that the earth is ellipsoidal and the polar axis the longest one. The contempt of the empiricists for the Greeks receives a peculiar illustration if one reads, for instance, Th. Thomson (On Electricity ), where people like Davy and even Faraday grope in the dark (the electric spark, etc.), and make experiments that quite remind one of the stories of Aristotle and Pliny about physico-chemical phenomena. It is precisely in this new science that the empiricists entirely reproduce the blind groping of the ancients. And when Faraday with his genius gets on the right track, the philistine Thomson has to protest against it. (p. 397). Haeckel, Anthropogenie, p. 707. Where does he get his materialism from? Causae finales and efficientes transformed by Haeckel (pp. 89, 90) into purposively acting and mechanically acting causes, because for him causa finalis=God! Likewise for him mechanical, adopted out of hand from Kant, =monistic, not =mechanical in the sense of mechanics. With such confusion of language, nonsense is inevitable. What Haeckel says here of Kant s Kritik der Urteilskraft does not agree with Hegel. (Geschichte der Philosophie (Vol. III], S. 603.) Another example [This word refers to the note Polarity, which was written immediately before the present note on the same sheet] of polarity in Haeckel: mechanism= monism, and vitalism or teleology = dualism. Already in Kant and Hegel inner purpose is a protest against dualism. Mechanism applied to life is a helpless category, at the most we could speak of chemism, if we do not want to renounce all understanding of names. Purpose: Hegel, V, p. 205: The point is, however, that mechanism (and also the materialism of the eighteenth century) does not get away from abstract necessity, and hence not from chance either. That matter evolves out of itself the thinking human brain is for mechanism a pure accident, although necessarily determined, step by step, where it happens. But the truth is that it is the nature of matter to advance to the evolution of thinking beings, hence this always necessarily occurs wherever the conditions for it (not necessarily identical at all places and times) are present. Further, Hegel, V, p. 206: Here, again, the colossal waste of matter and motion in nature. In the solar system there are perhaps three planets at most on which life and thinking beings could! exist under present conditions. And the whole enormous apparatus for their sake! The inner purpose in the organism, according to Hegel (V, p. 244),154 operates through impulse. Pas trop fort. Impulse is supposed to bring the single living being more or less into harmony with the idea of it. From this it is seen how much the whole inner purpose is itself an ideological determination. And yet Lamarck is contained in this. Natural scientists believe that they free themselves from philosophy by ignoring it or abusing it. They cannot, however, make any headway without thought, and for thought they need thought determinations. But they take these categories unreflectingly from the common consciousness of so-called educated persons, which is dominated by the relics of long obsolete philosophies or from the little bit of philosophy compulsorily listened to at the University (which is not only fragmentary, but also a medley of views of people belonging to the most varied. and usually the worst schools), or from uncritical and unsystematic reading of philosophical writings of all kinds. Hence they are no less in bondage philosophy but unfortunately in most cases to the worst philosophy, and those who abuse philosophy most are slaves to precisely the worst vulgarized relics of the worst philosophies. Natural scientists may adopt whatever attitude they please, they are still under the domination of philosophy. It is only a question whether they want to be dominated by a bad, fashionable philosophy or by a form of theoretical thought which rests on acquaintance with the history of thought and its achievements. Natural scientists allow philosophy to prolong an illusory existence by making shift with the dregs of the old metaphysics. Only when natural and historical science has become imbued with dialectics will all the philosophical rubbish other than the pure theory of thought be superfluous, disappearing in positive science.

Notes and Fragments for Dialectics of Nature, Frederick Engels 1883

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1883/don/ch07b.htm

Dialectics, so-called objective dialectics, prevails throughout nature, and so-called subjective dialectics, dialectical thought, is only the reflection of the motion through opposites which asserts itself everywhere in nature, and which by the continual conflict of the opposites and their final passage into one another, or into higher forms, determines the life of nature. Attraction and repulsion. Polarity begins with magnetism, it is exhibited in one and the same body; in the case of electricity it distributes itself over two or more bodies which become oppositely charged. All chemical processes reduce themselves to processes of chemical attraction and repulsion. Finally, in organic life the formation of the cell nucleus is likewise to be regarded as a polarisation of the living protein material, and from the simple cell onwards the theory of evolution demonstrates how each advance up to the most complicated plant on the one side, and up to man on the other, is effected by the continual conflict between heredity and adaptation. In this connection it becomes evident how little applicable to such forms of evolution are categories like positive and negative. One can conceive of heredity as the positive, conservative side, adaptation as the negative side that continually destroys what has been inherited, but one can just as well take adaptation as the creative, active, positive activity, and heredity as the resisting, passive, negative activity. But just as in history progress makes its appearance as the negation of the existing state of things, so here also on purely practical grounds adaptation is better conceived as negative activity. In history, motion through opposites is most markedly exhibited in all critical epochs of the foremost peoples. At such moments a people has only the choice between the two horns of a dilemma: either-or! and indeed the question is always put in a way quite different from that in which the philistines, who dabble in politics in every age, would have liked it put. Even the liberal German philistine of 1848 found himself in 1849 suddenly, unexpectedly, and against his will confronted by the question: a return to the old reaction in an intensified form, or continuance of the revolution up to the republic, perhaps even the one and indivisible republic with a socialist background. He did not spend long in reflection and helped to create the Manteuffel reaction as the flower of German liberalism. Similarly, in 1851, the French bourgeois when faced with the dilemma which he certainly did not expect: a caricature of the empire, pretorian rule, and the exploitation of France by a gang of scoundrels, or a social-democratic republic and he bowed down before the going of scoundrels so as to be able, under their protection, to go on exploiting the workers. Hard and fast lines are incompatible with the theory of evolution. Even the border-line between vertebrates and invertebrates is now no longer rigid, just as little is that between fishes and amphibians, while that between birds and reptiles dwindles more and more every day. Between Compsognathus and Archaopteryx only a few intermediate links are wanting, and birds beaks with teeth crop up in both hemispheres. Either-or becomes more and more inadequate. Among lower animals the concept of the individual cannot be established at all sharply. Not only as to whether a particular animal is an individual or a colony, but also where in development one individual ceases and the other begins (nurses). For a stage in the outlook on nature where all differences become merged in intermediate steps, and all opposites pass into one another through intermediate links, the old metaphysical method of thought no longer suffices. Dialectics, which likewise knows no hard and fast lines, no unconditional, universally valid either-or and which bridges the fixed metaphysical differences, and besides either-or recognises also in the right place both this-and that and reconciles the opposites, is the sole method of thought appropriate in the highest degree to this stage. Of course, for everyday use, for the small change of science, the metaphysical categories retain their validity. The transformation of quantity into quality= mechanical world outlook, quantitative change alters quality. The gentlemen never suspected that! The character of mutual opposites belonging to the thought determinations of reason: polarisation. Just as electricity, magnetism, etc., become polarised and move in opposites, so do thoughts. Just as in the former it is not possible to maintain any one-sidedness, and no natural scientist would think of doing so, so also in the latter. The true nature of the determinations of essence is expressed by Hegel himself (Enzyklop die, I, paragraph III, addendum): In essence everything is relative (e.g., positive and negative, which have meaning only in their relation, not each for itself). Part and whole, for instance, are already categories which become inadequate in organic nature. The ejection of seeds the embryo and the new-born animal are not to be conceived as a part that is separated from the whole ; that would give a distorted treatment. It becomes a part only in a dead body. (Enzyklop die, I, p. 268.) Simple and compound. Categories which even in organic nature likewise lose their meaning and become inapplicable. An animal is expressed neither by its mechanical composition from bones, blood, gristle, muscles, tissues, etc., .nor by its chemical composition from the elements. Hegel (Enzyklop die, I, p. 256). The organism is neither simple nor compound, however complex it may be. Abstract identity (a=a; and negatively, a cannot be simultaneously equal and unequal to a) is likewise inapplicable in organic nature. The plant, the animal, every cell is at every moment of its life identical with itself and yet becoming distinct from itself, by absorption and excretion of substances, by respiration, by cell formation and death of cells, by the process of circulation taking place, in short, by a sum of incessant molecular changes which make up life and the sum-total of whose results is evident to our eyes in the phases of life embryonic life, youth, sexual maturity, process of reproduction, old age, death. The further physiology develops, the more important for it become these incessant, infinitely small changes, and hence the more important for it also the consideration of difference within identity, and the old abstract standpoint of formal identity, that an organic being is to be treated as something simply identical with itself, as something constant, becomes out of date. [In the margin of the manuscript occurs the remark: Apart, moreover, from the evolution of species. ] Nevertheless, the mode of thought based thereon, together with its categories, persists. But even in inorganic nature identity as such is in reality non-existent. Every body is continually exposed to mechanical, physical, and chemical influences, which are always changing it and modifying its identity. Abstract identity, with its opposition to difference, is in place only in mathematics an abstract science which is concerned with creations of thought, even though they are reflections of reality and even there it is continually being sublated. Hegel, Enzyklop die, I, p. 235. The fact that identity contains difference within itself is expressed in every sentence, where the predicate is necessarily different from the subject; the lily is a plant, the rose, is red, where, either in the subject or in the predicate, there is something that is not covered by the predicate or the subject. Hegel, p. 231. That from the outset identity with itself requires difference from everything else as its complement, is self-evident. Continual change, i.e., sublation of abstract identity with itself, is also found in so-called inorganic nature. Geology is its history. On the surface, mechanical changes (denudation, frost), chemical changes (weathering); internally, mechanical changes (pressure), heat (volcanic), chemical (water, acids, binding substances); on a large scale upheavals, earthquakes, etc. The slate of today is fundamentally different from the ooze from which it is formed, the chalk from the loose microscopic shells that compose it, even more so limestone, which indeed according to some is of purely organic origin, and sandstone from the loose sea sand, which again is derived from disintegrated granite, etc., not to speak of coal. The law of identity in the old metaphysical sense is the fundamental law of the old outlook: a=a. Each thing is equal to itself. Everything was permanent, the solar system, stars, organisms. This law has been refuted by natural science bit by bit in each separate case, but theoretically it still prevails and is still put forward by the supporters of the old in opposition to the new: a thing cannot simultaneously be itself and something else. And yet the fact that true, concrete identity includes difference, change, has recently been shown in detail by natural science (see above). Abstract identity, like all metaphysical categories, suffices for everyday use, where small dimensions or brief periods of time are in question; the limits within which it is usable differ in almost every case and are determined by the nature of the object; for a planetary system, where in ordinary astronomical calculation the ellipse can be taken as the basic form for practical purposes without error, they are much wider than for an insect that completes its metamorphosis in a few weeks. (Give other examples, e.g., alteration of species, which is reckoned in periods of thousands of years.) For natural science in its comprehensive role, however, even in each single branch, abstract identity is totally inadequate, and although on the whole it has now been abolished in practice, theoretically it still dominates people s minds, and most natural scientists imagine that identity and difference are irreconcilable opposites, instead of one-sided poles which represent the truth only in their reciprocal action, in the inclusion of difference within identity. Identity and difference necessity and chance cause and effect the two main opposites [In the manuscript: die beiden Hauptgegensatze (the two main opposites). Engels has in mind: (1) The antithesis of identity and difference, and (2) the antithesis of cause and effect. The words necessity and chance were written between the lines afterwards.] which, treated separately, become transformed into one another. And then first principles must help. Positive and negative. Can also be given the reverse names: in electricity, etc.; North and South ditto. If one reverses this and alters the rest of the terminology accordingly, everything remains correct. We can call West East and East West. The sun rises in the West, and planets revolve from East to West, etc., the names alone are changed. Indeed, in physics we call the real South pole of the magnet, which is attracted by the North pole, of the earth s magnetism, the North pole, and it does not matter. That positive and negative are equivalent, irrespective of which side is positive and which negative, (holds good) not only in analytical geometry, but still more in physics (see Clausius, p. 87 et seq.). Polarity. A magnet, on being cut through, polarises the neutral middle portion, but in such a way that the old poles remain. On the other hand a worm, on being cut into two, retains the receptive mouth at the positive pole and forms a new negative pole at the other end with excretory anus; but the old negative pole (the anus) now becomes positive, becoming a mouth, and a new anus or negative pole is formed at the cut end. Voila transformation of positive into negative. Polarisation. For J. Grimm it was still a firmly established law that a German dialect must be either High German or Low German. In this he totally lost sight of the Frankish dialect. Because the written Frankish of the later Carlovingian period was High German (since the High German shifting of consonants had taken possession of the Frankish South-East), he imagined that Frankish passed in one place into old High German, in another place into French. It then remained absolutely impossible to explain the source of the Netherland dialect in the ancient Salic regions. Frankish was only rediscovered after Grimm s death: Salic in its rejuvenation as the Netherland dialect, Ripuaric in the Middle and Lower Rhine dialects, which in part have been shifted to various stages of High German, and in part have remained Low German, so that Frankish is a dialect that is both High German and Low German. Another opposition in which metaphysics is entangled is that of chance and necessity. What can be more sharply contradictory than these two thought determinations? How is it possible that both are identical, that the accidental is necessary, and the necessary is also accidental? Common sense, and with it the majority of natural scientists, treats necessity and chance as determinations that exclude each other once for all. A thing, a circumstance, a process is either accidental or necessary, but not both. Hence both exist side by side in nature; nature contains all sorts of objects and processes, of which some are accidental, the others necessary, and it is only a matter of not confusing the two sorts with each other. Thus, for instance, one assumes the decisive specific characters to be necessary, other differences between individuals of the same species being termed accidental, and this holds good of crystals as it does for plants and animals. Then again the lower group becomes accidental in relation to the higher, so that it is declared to be a matter of chance how many different species are included in the genus felis or equus, or how many genera and orders there are in a class, and how many individuals of each of these species exist, or how many different species of animals occur in a given region, or what in general the fauna and flora are like. And then it is declared that the necessary is the sole thing of scientific interest and that the accidental is a matter of indifference to science. That is to say: what can be brought under laws, hence what one knows, is interesting; what cannot be brought under laws, and therefore what one does not know, is a matter of indifference and can be ignored. Thereby all science comes to an end, for it has to investigate precisely that which we do not know. That is to say: what can be brought under general laws is regarded as necessary, and what cannot be so brought as accidental. Anyone can see that this is the same sort of science as that which proclaims natural what it can explain, and ascribes what it cannot explain to supernatural causes; whether I term the cause of the inexplicable chance, or whether I term it God, is a matter of complete indifference as far as the thing itself is concerned. Both are only equivalents for: I do not know, and therefore do not belong to science. The latter ceases where the requisite connection is wanting. In opposition to this view there is determinism, which passed from French materialism into natural science, and which tries to dispose of chance by denying it altogether. According to this conception only simple, direct necessity prevails in nature. That a particular pea-pod contains five peas and not four or six, that a particular dog s tail is five inches long and not a whit longer or shorter, that this year a particular clover flower was fertilised by a bee and another not, and indeed by precisely one particular bee and at a particular time, that a particular windblown dandelion seed has sprouted and another not, that last night I was bitten by a flea at four o clock in the morning, and not at three or five o clock, and on the right shoulder and not on the left calf these are all facts which have been produced by an irrevocable concatenation of cause and effect, by an unshatterable necessity of such a nature indeed that the gaseous sphere, from which the solar system was derived, was already so constituted that these events had to happen thus and not otherwise. With this kind of necessity we likewise do not get away from the theological conception of nature. Whether with Augustine and Calvin we call it the eternal decree of God, or Kismet as the Turks do, or whether we call it necessity, is all pretty much the same. for science. There is no question of tracing the chain of causation in any of these cases; so we are just as wise in one as in another, the so-called necessity remains an empty phrase, and with it chance also remains what it was before. As long as we are not able to show on what the number of peas in the pod depends, it remains just a matter of chance, and the assertion that the case was foreseen already in the primordial constitution of the solar system does not get us a step further. Still more. A science which was to set about the task of following back the casus of this individual pea-pod in its causal concatenation would be no longer science but pure trifling; for this same peapod alone has in addition innumerable other individual, accidentally appearing qualities: shade of colour, thickness and hardness of the pod, size of the peas, not to speak of the individual peculiarities revealed by the microscope. The one pea-pod, therefore, would already provide more causal connections for following up than all the botanists in the world could solve. Hence chance is not here explained by necessity, but rather necessity is degraded to the production of what is merely accidental. If the fact that a particular pea-pod contains six peas, and not five or seven, is of the same order as the law of motion of the solar system, or the law of the transformation of energy, then as a matter of fact chance is not elevated into necessity, but rather necessity degraded into chance. Furthermore, however much the diversity of the organic and inorganic species and individuals existing side by side in a given area may be asserted to be based on irrefragable necessity, for the separate species and individuals it remains what it was before, a matter of chance. For the individual animal it is a matter of chance, where it happens to be born, what environment it finds for living, what enemies and how many of them threaten it. For the mother plant it is a matter of chance whither the wind scatters its seeds, and, for the daughter plant, where the seed finds soil for germination; and to assure us that here also everything rests on irrefragable necessity is a poor consolation. The jumbling together of natural objects in a given region, still more in the whole world, for all the primordial determination from eternity, remains what it was before a matter of chance. In contrast to both conceptions, Hegel came forward with the hitherto quite unheard-of propositions that the accidental has a cause because it is accidental, and just as much also has no cause because it is accidental; that the accidental is necessary, that necessity determines itself as chance, and, on the other hand, this chance is rather absolute necessity. (Logik, II, Book III, 2: Reality.) Natural science has simply ignored these propositions as paradoxical trifling, as self-contradictory nonsense, and, as regards theory, has persisted on the one hand in the barrenness of thought of Wolffian metaphysics, according to which a thing is either accidental or necessary, but not both at once; or, on the other hand, in the hardly less thoughtless mechanical determinism which in words denies chance in general only to recognise it in practice in each particular case. While natural science continued to think in this way, what did it do in the person of Darwin? Darwin in his epoch-making work, set out from the widest existing basis of chance. Precisely the infinite, accidental differences between individuals within a single species, differences which become accentuated until they break through the character of the species, and whose immediate causes even can be demonstrated only in extremely few cases, compelled him to question the previous basis of all regularity in biology, viz., the concept of species in its previous metaphysical rigidity and unchangeability. Without the concept of species, however, all science was nothing. All its branches needed the concept of species as basis: human anatomy and comparative anatomy embryology, zoology, palaeontology, botany, etc., what were they without the concept of species? All their results were not only put in question but directly set aside. Chance overthrows necessity, as conceived hitherto. [Note in the margin of the manuscript: The material on chance occurrences accumulated in the meantime has suppressed and shattered the old idea of necessity. ] The previous idea of necessity breaks down. To retain it means dictatorially to impose on nature as a law a human arbitrary determination that is in contradiction to itself and to reality, it means to deny thereby all inner necessity in living nature, it means generally to proclaim the chaotic kingdom of chance to be the sole law of living nature. Gilt nichts mehr der Tausves Jontof, cried out quite logically the biologists of all schools. Darwin. Negation of the negation. Phanomenologie, Preface, p. 4. Bud, flower, fruit, etc. Unity of nature and mind. To the Greeks it was self-evident that nature could not be unreasonable, but even today the stupidest empiricists prove by their reasoning (however wrong it may be) that they are convinced from the outset that nature cannot be unreasonable or reason contrary to nature. The evolution of a concept, or of a conceptual relation (positive and negative, cause and effect, substance and accidency) in the history of thought, is related to its development in the mind of the individual dialectician, just as the evolution of an organism in palaeontology is related to its development in embryology (or rather in history and in the single embryo). That this is so was first discovered for concepts by Hegel. In historical development, chance plays its part, which in dialectical thinking, as in the development of the embryo, is summed up in necessity. Abstract and concrete. The general law of the change of form of motion is much more concrete than any single concrete example of it. Understanding and reason. This Hegelian distinction, according to which only dialectical thinking is reasonable, has a definite meaning. We have in common with animals all activity of the understanding: induction, deduction, and hence also abstraction (Dido s, generic concepts: quadrupeds and bipeds), analysis of unknown objects (even the cracking of a nut is a beginning of analysis), synthesis (in animal tricks), and, as the union of both, experiment (in the case of new obstacles and unfamiliar situations). In their nature all these modes of procedure hence all means of scientific investigation that ordinary logic recognises are absolutely the same in men and higher animals. They differ only in degree (of development of the method in each case) The basic features of the method are the same and lead to the same results in man and animals, so long as both operate or make shift, merely with these elementary methods. On the other hand, dialectical thought precisely because it presupposes investigations of the nature, of concepts themselves is only possible for man, and for him only at a comparatively high stage of development (Buddhists and Greeks), and it attains its full development much later still through modern philosophy and yet we have the colossal results already among the Greeks which by far anticipate investigation! Dialectical logic, in contrast to the old, merely formal logic, is not, like the latter, content with enumerating the forms of motion of thought, i.e., the various forms of judgment and conclusion, and placing them side by side without any connection. On the contrary, it derives these forms out of one another, it makes one subordinate to another instead of putting them on an equal level, it develops the higher forms out of the lower. Faithful to his division. of the whole of logic, Hegel groups judgments as: 1. Judgment of inherence, the simplest form of judgment, in which a general property is affirmatively or negatively predicated of a single thing (positive judgment: the rose is red; negative judgment: the rose is not blue; infinite judgment: the rose is not a camel); 2. Judgment of subsumption, in which a relation determination is predicated of the subject (singular judgment: this man is mortal; particular judgment: some, many men are mortal; universal judgment: all men are mortal, or man is mortal); 3. Judgment of necessity, in which its substantial determination is predicated of the subject (categorical judgment: the rose is a plant; hypothetical judgment: when the sun rises it is day-time; disjunctive judgment: Lepidosiren is either a fish or an amphibian); 4. Judgment of the notion, in which is predicated of the subject how far it corresponds to its general nature or, as Hegel says, to the notion of it (assertoric judgment: this house is bad; problematic judgment: if a house is constituted in such and such a way, it is good apodeictic judgment: the house that is constituted in such and such a way is good. 1. Individual Judgment. 2 and 3. Special. 4. General. However dry this sounds here, and however arbitrary at first sight this classification of judgments may here and there appear, yet the inner truth and necessity of this grouping will become clear to anyone who studies the brilliant exposition in Hegel s Larger Logic. (Works, V, pp. 63-115.) To show how much this grouping is based not only on the laws of thought but also on the laws of nature, we should like to put forward here a very wellknown example outside this connection. That friction produces heat was already known practically to prehistoric man, who discovered the making of fire by friction perhaps more than 100,000 years ago, and who still earlier warmed cold parts of the body by rubbing. But from that to the discovery that friction is in general a source of heat, who knows how many thousands of years elapsed? Enough that the time came when the human brain was sufficiently developed to be able to formulate the judgment: friction is a source of heat, a judgment of inherence, and indeed a positive one. Still further thousands of years passed until, in 1842, Mayer, Joule, and Colding investigated this special process in its relation to other processes of a similar kind that had been discovered in the meantime, i.e., as regards its immediate general conditions, and formulated the judgment: all mechanical motion is capable of being converted into heat by means of friction. So much time and an enormous amount of empirical knowledge were required before we could make the advance in knowledge of the object from the above positive judgment of inherence to this universal judgment of subsumption. But from now on things went quickly. Only three years later, Mayer was able, at least in substance, to raise the judgment of subsumption to the level at which it now stands: any form of motion, under conditions fixed for each case, is both able and compelled to undergo transformation, indirectly, into any other form of motion a judgment of the notion, and moreover an apodeictic one, the highest form of judgment altogether. What, therefore, in Hegel appears as a development of the thought form of judgment as such, confronts us here as, the development of our empirically based theoretical knowledge of the nature of motion in general. This shows, however, that laws of thought and laws of nature are necessarily in agreement with one another, if only they are correctly known. We can regard the first judgment as that of individuality; the isolated fact that friction produces heat is registered. The second judgment is that of particularity: a special form of motion, mechanical motion, exhibits the property, under special conditions (through friction), of passing into another special form of motion, viz., heat. The third judgment is that of universality: any form of motion proves able and compelled to undergo transformation into any other form of motion. In this form the law attains its final expression. By new discoveries we can give new illustrations of it, we can give it a new and richer content. But we cannot add anything to the law itself as here formulated. In its universality, equally universal in form and content, it is not susceptible of further extension: it is an absolute law of nature. Unfortunately we are in a difficulty about the form of motion of protein, alias life, so long as we are not able to make protein. Above, however, it has also been proved that to make judgments involves not merely Kant s power of judgment, but a [This unfinished note closes the fourth page of the double sheet of which the second and third pages and the beginning of the fourth page constitute the preceding large fragment on the classification of judgments. Engels apparently meant to finish the note by counterposing his thesis on the empirical basis of all knowledge to the Kantian apriorism.] Individuality, particularity, universality these are the three determinations in which the whole Doctrine of the Notion moves. Under these heads, progression from the individual to the particular and from the particular to the universal takes place not in one but in many modalities, and this is often enough exemplified by Hegel as the progression: individual, species, genus. And now the Haeckels come forward with their induction and trumpet it as a great fact against Hegel that progression must be from the individual to the particular and then to the universal (!), from the individual to the species and then to the genus and then permit deductive conclusions which are supposed to lead further. These people have got into such a dead lock over the opposition between induction and deduction that they reduce all logical forms of conclusion to these two, and in so doing do not notice that they (1) unconsciously employ quite different forms of conclusion under those names, (2) deprive themselves of the whole wealth of forms of conclusion in so far as it cannot be forced under these two, and (3) thereby convert both forms, induction and deduction, into sheer nonsense. Induction and deduction. Haeckel, p. 75 et seq., where Goethe draws the inductive conclusion that man, who does not normally have a premaxillary bone, must have one, hence by incorrect induction arrives at something correct! Haeckel s nonsense: induction against deduction. As if it were not the case that deduction=conclusion, and therefore induction is also a deduction. This comes from polarisation. Haeckel s Schopfungsgeschichte, pp. 76-77. The conclusion polarised into induction and deduction! By induction it was discovered 100 years ago that crayfish and spiders were insects and all lower animals were worms. By induction it has now been found that this is nonsense and there exist x classes. Wherein then lies the advantage of the so-called inductive conclusion, which can be just as false as the so-called deductive conclusion, the basis of which is nevertheless classification? Induction can never prove that there will never be a mammal without lacteal glands. Formerly nipples were the mark of a mammal. But the platypus has none. The whole swindle of induction (is derived) from the Englishmen; Whewell, inductive sciences, comprising the purely mathematical [sciences], and so the antithesis to deduction invented. Logic, old or new, knows nothing of this. All forms of conclusion that start from the individual are experimental and based on experience, indeed the inductive conclusion even starts from U I P (universal). It is also characteristic of the thinking capacity of our natural scientists that Haeckel fanatically champions induction at the very moment when the results of induction the classifications are everywhere put in question (Limulus a spider, Ascidia a vertebrate or chordate, the Dipnoi, however, being fishes, in opposition to all original definitions of amphibia) and daily new facts are being discovered which overthrow the entire previous classification by induction. What a beautiful confirmation of Hegel s thesis that the inductive conclusion is essentially a problematic one! Indeed, owing to the theory of evolution, even the whole classification of organisms has been taken away from induction and brought back to deduction, to descent one species being literally deduced from another by descent and it is impossible to prove the theory of evolution by induction alone, since it is quite anti-inductive. The concepts with which induction operates: species, genus, class, have been rendered fluid by the theory of evolution and so have become relative: but one cannot use relative concepts for induction. To the Pan-Inductionists. [In the manuscript: Den Allinduktionisten, i.e., to those who regard induction as the only correct method.] With all the induction in the world we would never have got to the point of becoming clear about the process of induction. Only the analysis of this process could accomplish this. Induction and deduction belong together as necessarily as synthesis and analysis. [Note in the margin: Chemistry, in which analysis is the predominant form of investigation, is nothing without its opposite synthesis.] Instead of one-sidedly lauding one to the skies at the expense of the other, we should seek to apply each of them in its place, and that can only be done by bearing in mind that they belong together, that they supplement each other. According to the inductionists, induction is an infallible method. It is so little so that its apparently surest results are every day overthrown by new discoveries. Light corpuscles and caloric were results of induction. Where are they now? Induction taught us that all vertebrates have a central nervous system differentiated into brain and spinal cord, and that the spinal cord is enclosed in cartilaginous or bony vertebrae whence indeed the name is derived. Then Amphioxus was revealed as a vertebrate with an undifferentiated central nervous strand and without vertebrae. Induction established that fishes are those vertebrates which throughout life breathe exclusively by means of gills. Then animals come to light whose fish character is almost universally recognised, but which, besides gills, have also well-developed lungs, and it turns out that every fish carries a potential lung in the swim bladder. Only by audacious application of the theory of evolution did Haeckel rescue the inductionists, who were feeling quite comfortable in these contradictions. If induction were really so infallible, whence come the rapid successive revolutions in classification of the organic world? They are the most characteristic product of induction, and yet they annihilate one another. Induction and analysis. A striking example of how little induction can claim to be the sole or even the predominant form of scientific discovery occurs in thermodynamics: the steam-engine provided the most striking proof that one can impart heat and obtain mechanical motion. 100,000 steam-engines did not prove this more than one, but only more and more forced the physicists into the necessity of explaining it. Sadi Carnot was the first seriously to set about the task. But not by induction. He studied the steam engine, analysed it, and found that in it the process which mattered does not appear in pure form but is concealed by all sorts of subsidiary processes. He did away with these subsidiary circumstances that have no bearing on the essential process, and an ideal steam-engine (or gas engine), which it is true is as little capable of being realised as, for instance, a geometrical line or surface but in Its way performs the same service as these mathematical abstractions: it presents the process in a pure, independent, and unadulterated form. And he came right up against the mechanical equivalent of heat (see the significance of his function C), which he only failed to discover and see because he believed in caloric. Here also proof of the damage done by false theories. The empiricism of observation alone can never adequately prove necessity. Post hoc but not propter hoc. (Enzyklop die, I, S, 84.) This is so very correct that it does not follow from the continual rising of the sun in the morning that it will rise again tomorrow, and in fact we know now that a time will come when one morning the sun will not rise. But the proof of necessity lies in human activity, in experiment, in work: if I am able to make the post hoc, it becomes identical with the propter hoc. Causality. The first thing that strikes us in considering matter in motion is the inter-connection of the individual motions of separate bodies, their being determined by one another. But not only do we find that a particular motion is followed by another, we find also that we can evoke a particular motion by setting up, the conditions in which it takes place in nature, that we can even produce motions which do not occur at all in nature (industry), at least not in this way, and that we can give these motions a predetermined direction and extent. In this way, by the activity of human beings the idea of causality becomes established, the idea that one motion is the cause of another. True, the regular sequence of certain natural phenomena can by itself give rise to the idea of causality: the heat and light that come with the sun; but this affords no proof, and to that extent Hume s scepticism was correct in saying that a regular post hoc can never establish a propter hoc. But the activity of human beings forms the test of and make them by prove that heat comes from the sun. If we bring together in a rifle the priming, the explosive charge, and the bullet and then fire it, we count upon the effect known in advance from previous experience, because we can follow in all its details the whole process of ignition, combustion, explosion by the sudden conversion into gas and pressure of the gas on the bullet. And here the sceptic cannot even say that because of previous experience it does not follow that it will be the same next time. For, as a matter of fact, it does sometimes happen that it is not the same, that the priming or the gunpowder fails to work, that the barrel bursts, etc. But surely this which proves causality instead of refuting it, because we can find out the cause of each such deviation from the rule by appropriate investigation: chemical decomposition of the priming, dampness, etc., of the gunpowder, defect in the barrel, etc., etc., so that here the test of causality is so to say a double one. Natural science, like philosophy, has hitherto entirely neglected the in influence of activity on their thought; both know only nature on the one hand and thought on the other. But it is precisely the alteration of nature by men, not solely nature as such, which is most essential and immediate basis of human thought, and it is in the measure that man has learned to change nature that his intelligence has increased. The naturalistic conception of history, as found, for instance to a greater or lesser extent in Draper and other scientists, as if nature exclusively reacts on man, and natural conditions everywhere exclusively determined his historical development, is therefore one-sided and forgets that man also reacts on nature, changing it and creating new conditions of existence for himself. There is devilishly little left of nature as it was in Germany at the time when the Germanic peoples immigrated into it. The earth s surface, climate, vegetation, fauna, and the human beings themselves have infinitely changed, and all this owing to human activity, while the changes of nature in Germany which have occurred in this period of time without human interference are incalculably small. Reciprocal action is the first thing that we encounter when we consider matter in motion as A whole from the standpoint of modern natural science. We see a series of forms of motion, mechanical motion, heat, light, electricity, magnetism, chemical union and decomposition, transitions of states of aggregation, organic life, all of which, if at present we still make an exception of organic life, pass into one another, mutually determine one another, are in one place cause and in another effect, the sum-total of the motion in all its changing forms remaining the same (Spinoza: substance is causa sui strikingly expresses the reciprocal action). Mechanical motion becomes transformed into heat, electricity, magnetism, light, etc., and vice versa. Thus natural science confirms what Hegel has said (where?), that reciprocal action is the true causa finalis of things. We cannot go back further than to knowledge of this reciprocal action, for the very reason that there is nothing behind to know. If we know the forms of motion of matter (for which it is true there is still very much lacking, in view of the short time that natural science has existed), then we know matter itself, and therewith our knowledge is complete. (Grove s whole misunderstanding about causality rests on the fact that he does not succeed in arriving at the category of reciprocal action; he has the thing, but not the abstract thought, and hence the confusion pp. 10-14.) Only from this universal reciprocal action do we arrive at the real causal relation. In order to understand the separate phenomena, we have to tear them out of the general inter-connection and consider them in isolation, and then the changing motions appear, one as cause and the other as effect. For one who denies causality every natural law is a hypothesis, among others also the chemical analysis of heavenly bodies by means of the prismatic spectrum. What shallowness of thought to remain at such a viewpoint! N geli first of all says that we cannot know real qualitative differences, and immediately afterwards says that such absolute differences do not occur in nature! (p. 12.) Firstly, every quality has infinitely many quantitative gradations, e.g., shades of colour, hardness and softness, length of life, etc., and these, although qualitatively distinct, are measurable and knowable. Secondly, qualities do not exist but only things with qualities and indeed with infinitely many qualities. Two different things always have certain qualities (properties of corporeality at least) in common, others differing in degree, while still others may be entirely absent in one of them. If we consider two such extremely different things e.g., a meteorite and a man in separation, we get very little out of it, at most that heaviness and other general properties of bodies are common to both. But an infinite series of other natural objects and natural processes can be put between the two things, permitting us to complete the series from meteorite to man and to allocate to each its place in the inter-connection of nature and thus to know them. N geli himself admits this.. Thirdly, our various senses might give us impressions differing absolutely as regards quality. In that case, properties which we experience by means of sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch would be absolutely different. But even here the differences disappear with the progress of investigation. Smell and taste have long ago been recognised as allied senses belonging together, which perceive conjoint if not identical properties. Sight and hearing both perceive wave oscillations. Touch and sight supplement each other to such an extent that from. the appearance of an object we can often enough predict its tactile properties. And, finally, it is always the same I that receives and elaborates all these different sense impressions, that therefore comprehends them into a unity, and likewise these various. impressions are provided by the same thing, appearing as its common properties, and therefore helping us to know it. To explain these different properties accessible only to different senses, to bring them into connection with one another, is precisely the task of science, which so far has not complained because we have not a general sense in place of the five special senses, or because we are not able to see or hear tastes and smells. Wherever we look, nowhere in nature are there to be found such qualitatively* or absolutely distinct fields, [p.. 12) which are alleged to be incomprehensible. The whole confusion springs from the confusion about quality and quantity. In accordance with the prevailing mechanical view, N geli regards all qualitative differences as explained only in so far as they can be reduced to quantitative differences (on which what is necessary is said elsewhere), or because quality and quantity are for him absolutely distinct categories. Metaphysics. This is quite correct in so far as only finite objects enter the sphere of our knowledge. But the proposition needs to be supplemented by this: fundamentally we can know only the infinite. In fact all real, exhaustive knowledge consists solely in raising the individual thing in thought from individuality into particularity and from this into universality, in seeking and establishing the infinite in the finite, the eternal in the transitory. The form of universality, however, is the form of self-completeness, hence of infinity; it is the comprehension of the many finites in the infinite. We know that chlorine and hydrogen, within certain limits of temperature and pressure and under the influence of light, combine with an explosion to form hydrochloric acid gas, and as soon as we know this, we know also, that this takes place everywhere and at all times where the above conditions are present, and it can be a matter of indifference, whether this occurs once or is repeated a million times, or on how many heavenly bodies. The form of universality in nature is law, and no one talks more of the eternal character of the laws of nature than the natural scientists. Hence when N geli says that the finite is made impossible to understand by not desiring to investigate merely this finite, but instead adding something eternal to it, then he denies either the possibility of knowing the laws of nature or their eternal character. All true knowledge of nature is knowledge of the eternal, the infinite, and hence essentially absolute. But this absolute knowledge has an important drawback. Just as the infinity of knowable matter is composed of the purely finite things, so the infinity of the thought which knows the absolute is composed of an infinite number of finite human minds, working side by side and successively at this infinite knowledge, committing practical and theoretical blunders, setting out from erroneous, one-sided, and false premises, pursuing false, tortuous, and uncertain paths, and often not even finding what is right when they run their noses against it (Priestley). The cognition of the infinite is therefore beset with double difficulty and from its very nature can only take place in an infinite asymptotic progress. And that fully suffices us in order to be able to say: the infinite is just as much knowable as unknowable, and that is all that we need. Curiously enough, N geli says the same thing: The finite that comes into the sphere, etc., constitutes in sum precisely the infinite, for it is just from this that N geli has derived his idea of the infinite! Without this finite, etc., he would have indeed no idea of the infinite! (Bad infinity, as such, to be dealt with elsewhere.) Before this investigation of infinity comes the following: It is the old story. First of all one makes sensuous things into abstractions and then one wants to know them through, the senses, to see time and smell space. The empiricist becomes so steeped in the habit of empirical experience, that he believes that he is still in the field of sensuous experience when he is operating with abstractions. We know what an hour is, or a metre, but not what time and space are! As if time was anything other than just hours, and space anything but just cubic metres! The two forms of existence of matter are naturally nothing without matter, empty concepts, abstractions which exist only in our minds. But, of course, we are supposed not to know what matter and motion are! Of course not, for matter as such and motion as such have not yet been seen or otherwise experienced by anyone, only the various existing material things and forms of motions. Matter is nothing but the totality of material things from which this concept is abstracted and motion as such nothing but the totality of all sensuously perceptible forms of motion; words like matter and motion are nothing but abbreviations in which we comprehend many different sensuous perceptible things according to their common properties. Hence matter and motion can be known in no other way than by investigation of the separate material things and forms of motion, and by knowing these, we also pro tanto know matter and motion as such. Consequently, in saying that we do not know what time, space, matter, motion, cause and effect are, N geli merely says that first of all we make abstractions of the real world through our minds, and then can not know these self-made abstractions because they are creations of thought and not sensuous objects, while all knowing is sensuous measurement! This is just like the difficulty mentioned by Hegel; we can eat cherries and plums, but not fruit, because no one has so far eaten fruit as such. When N geli asserts that there are probably a whole number of forms of motion in nature which we cannot perceive by our senses, that is a poor apology, equivalent to the suspension at least for our knowledge of the law of the uncreatability of motion. For they could certainly be transformed into motion perceptible to us! That would be an easy explanation of, for instance, contact electricity. Ad vocem N geli. Impossibility of conceiving the infinite. When we say that matter and motion are not created and are indestructible, we are saying, that the world exists as infinite progress, i.e., in the form of bad infinity, and thereby we have understood all of this process that is to be understood. At the most the question still arises whether this process is an eternal repetition in great cycles or whether the cycles have descending and ascending branches. Bad infinity. True infinity was already correctly put by Hegel in filled space and time, in the process of nature and in history. The whole of nature also is now merged in history, and history is only differentiated from natural history as the evolutionary process of self-conscious organisms. This infinite complexity of nature and history has within it the infinity of space and time bad infinity only as a sublated factor, essential but not predominant. The extreme limit of our natural science until now has been our universe, and we do not need the infinitely numerous universes outside it to have knowledge of nature. Indeed, only a single sun among millions, with its solar system, forms the essential basis of our astronomical researches. For terrestrial mechanics, physics, and chemistry we are more or less restricted to our little earth, and for organic science entirely so. Yet this does not do any essential injury to the practically infinite diversity of phenomena and natural knowledge, any more than history is harmed by the similar, even greater limitation to a comparatively short period and small portion of the earth. 1. According to Hegel, infinite progress is a barren waste because it appears only as eternal repetition of the same thing: 1+1+1, etc. 2. In reality, however, it is no repetition, but a development, an advance or regression, and thereby it becomes a necessary form of motion. This apart from the fact that it is not infinite: the end of the earth s lifetime can already be foreseen. But then, the earth is not the whole universe. In Hegel s system, any development was excluded from the temporal history of nature, otherwise nature would not be the being-beyond-self of spirit. But in human history infinite progress is recognised by Hegel as the, sole true form of existence of spirit, except that fantastically this development is assumed to have an end in the production of the Hegelian philosophy. 3. There is also infinite knowing (Quantity, p. 259. Astronomy): questa infinita che le cose non hanno in progresso, la hanno in giro. [This infinite, which things do not have in progress, they have In circling.] Thus the law of the change of form of motion is an infinite one, including itself in itself. Such infinities, however, are in their turn smitten with finiteness, and only occur piecemeal. So also 1/r2. The eternal laws of nature also become transformed more and more into historical ones. That water is fluid from 0 -100 C. is an eternal law of nature, but for it to be valid, there must be (1) water, (2) the given temperature, (3) normal pressure. On the moon there is no water, in the sun only its elements, and the law does not exist for these two heavenly bodies. The laws of meteorology are also eternal, but only for the earth or for a body of the size, density, axial inclination, and temperature of the earth, and on condition that it has an atmosphere of the same mixture of oxygen and nitrogen and with the same amounts of water vapour being evaporated and precipitated. The moon has no atmosphere, the sun one of glowing metallic vapours; the former has no meteorology, that of the latter is quite different from ours. Our whole official physics, chemistry, and biology are exclusively geocentric, calculated only for the earth. We are still quite ignorant of the conditions of electric and magnetic tensions on the sun, fixed stars, and nebulae, even on the planets of a different density from ours. On the sun, owing to high temperature, the laws of chemical combination of the elements are suspended or only momentarily operative at the limits of the solar atmosphere, the compounds becoming dissociated again on approaching the sun. The chemistry of the sun is just in process of arising, and is necessarily quite different from that of the earth, not overthrowing the latter but standing outside it. In the nebulae perhaps there do not exist even those of the 65 elements which are possibly themselves of compound nature. Hence, if we wish to speak of general laws of nature that are uniformly applicable to all bodies from the nebula to man we are left only with gravity and perhaps the most general form of the theory of the transformation of energy, vulgo the mechanical theory of heat. But, on its general, consistent application to all phenomena of nature, this theory itself becomes converted into a historical presentation of the successive changes occurring in a system of the universe from its origin to its passing away, hence into a history in which at each stage different laws, i.e., different phenomenal forms of the same universal motion, predominate, and so nothing remains as absolutely universally valid except motion. The geocentric standpoint in astronomy is prejudiced and has rightly been abolished. But as we go deeper in our investigations, it comes more and more into its own. The sun, etc., serve the earth (Hegel, Naturphilosophie, p. 155). (The whole huge sun exists merely for the sake of the little planets.) Anything other than geocentric physics, chemistry, biology, meteorology, etc., is impossible for us, and these sciences lose nothing by saying that they only hold good for the earth and are therefore only relative. If one takes that seriously and demands a centreless science, one puts a stop to all science. It suffices us to know that under the same conditions everywhere the same must take place, at a distance to the right or the left of us that is a million million times as great as the distance from the earth to the sun. Cognition. Ants have eyes different from ours, they can see chemical (?) light-rays (Nature, June 8, 1882, Lubbock), but as regards knowledge of these rays that are invisible to, us, we are considerably more advanced than the ants, and the very fact that we are able to demonstrate that ants can see things invisible to us, and that this proof is based solely on perceptions made with our eyes, shows that the special construction of the human eye sets no absolute barrier to human cognition. In addition to the eye, we have not only the other senses but also our thought activity. With regard to the latter, matters stand exactly as with the eye. To know what can be discovered by our thinking, it is no use, a hundred years after Kant, to try and find out the range of thought from the critique of reason or the investigation of the instrument of knowing. It is as little use as when Helmholtz uses the imperfection of our sight (indeed a necessary imperfection, for an eye that could see all rays would for that very reason see nothing at all), and the construction of our eye which restricts sight to definite limits and even so does not give quite correct reproduction as proof that the eye acquaints us incorrectly or unreliably with the nature of what is seen. What can be discovered by our thought is more evident from what it has already discovered and is every day still discovering. And that is already enough both as regards quantity and quality. On the other hand, the investigation of the forms of thought, the thought determinations, is very profitable and necessary, and since Aristotle this has been systematically undertaken only by Hegel. In any case we shall never And out how chemical rays appear to ants. Anyone who is distressed by this is simply beyond help. The form of development of natural science, in so far as it thinks, is the hypothesis. A new fact is observed which makes impossible the previous method of explaining the facts belonging to the same group. From this moment onwards new methods of explanation are required at first based on only a limited number of facts and observations. Further observational material weeds out these hypotheses, doing away with some and correcting others, until finally the law is established in a pure form. If one should wait until the material for a law was in a pure form, it would mean suspending the process of thought in investigation until then and, if only for this, reason, the law would never come into being. The number and succession of hypotheses supplanting one another given the lack of logical and dialectical education among natural scientists easily gives rise to the idea that we cannot know the essence of things (Haller and Goethe). This is not peculiar to natural science since all human knowledge develops in a much twisted curve; and in the historical sciences also, including philosophy, theories displace one another, from which, however, nobody concludes that formal logic, for instance, is nonsense. The last form of this outlook is the thing-in-itself In the first place, this assertion that we cannot know the thing-in-itself (Hegel, Enzyklopadie, paragraph 44) passes out of the realm of science into that of fantasy. Secondly, it does not add a word to our scientific knowledge, for if we cannot occupy ourselves with things, they do not exist for us. And, thirdly, it is a mere phrase and is never applied. Taken in the abstract it sounds quite sensible. But suppose one applies it. What would one think of a zoologist who said: A dog seems to have four legs, but we do not know whether in reality it has four million legs or none at all ? Or of a mathematician who first of all defines a triangle as having three sides, and then declares that he does not know whether it might not have 25? That 2 2 seems to be 4? But scientists take care not to apply the phrase about the thing-in-itself in natural science, they permit themselves this only in passing into philosophy. This is the best proof how little seriously they take it and what little value it has itself. If they did take it seriously, what would be the good of investigating anything? Taken historically the thing would have a certain meaning: we can only know under the conditions of our epoch and as far as these allow. The thing-in-itself: Hegel, Logik, II, p. 10, also later a whole section on it: Hegel, therefore, is here a much more resolute materialist than the modern natural scientists. Valuable self-criticism of the Kantian thing-in-itself, which shows that Kant suffers shipwreck also on the thinking ego and likewise discovers in it an unknowable thing-in-itself. (Hegel, V. p. 256 et seq.)

Notes and Fragments. Dialectics of Nature

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1883/don/ch07c.htm

Causa finalis matter and its inherent motion. This matter is no abstraction. Even in the sun the different substances are dissociated and without distinction in their action. But in the gaseous sphere of the nebula all substances, although separately present, become merged in pure matter as such, acting only as matter, not according to their specific properties. (Moreover already in Hegel the antithesis of causa efficiens and causa finalis is sublated in reciprocal action.) Primordial matter. We find this chaos again in Laplace, and approximately in the nebula which also has only the beginning of form. Differentiation comes afterwards. Gravity as the most general determination of materiality is commonly accepted. That is to say, attraction is a necessary property of matter, but not repulsion. But attraction and repulsion are as inseparable as positive and negative, and hence from dialectics itself it can already be predicted that the true theory of matter must assign as important a place to repulsion as to attraction, and that a theory of matter based on mere attraction is false, inadequate, and one-sided. In fact sufficient phenomena occur that demonstrate this in advance. If only on account of light, the ether is not to be dispensed with. Is the ether of material nature? If it exists at all, it must be of material nature, it must come under the concept of matter. But it is not affected by gravity. The tail of a comet is granted to be of material nature. It shows a powerful repulsion. Heat in a gas produces repulsion, etc. Attraction and gravitation. The whole theory of gravitation rests on saying that attraction is the essence of matter. This is necessarily false. Where there is attraction, it must be complemented by repulsion. Hence already Hegel was quite right in saying that the essence of matter is attraction and repulsion. And in fact we are more and more becoming forced to recognise that the dissipation of matter has a. limit where attraction is transformed into repulsion,. and conversely the condensation of the repelled matter has a limit where it becomes attraction. The transformation of attraction into repulsion and vice versa is mystical in Hegel, but in substance he anticipated by it the scientific discovery that came later. Even in a gas there is repulsion of the molecules, still more so in more finely-divided matter, for instance in the tail of a comet, where it even operates with enormous force. Hegel shows his genius even in the fact that he derives attraction as something secondary from repulsion as something preceding it: a solar system is only formed by the gradual preponderance of attraction over the originally prevailing repulsion. Expansion by heat=repulsion. The kinetic theory of gases. The divisibility of matter. For science the question is in practice a matter of indifference. We know that in chemistry there is a definite limit to divisibility, beyond which bodies can no longer act chemically the atom; and that several atoms are always in combination the molecule. Ditto in physics we are driven to the acceptance of certain for physical analysis smallest particles, the arrangement of which determines the form and cohesion of bodies, their vibrations becoming evident as heat, etc. But whether the physical and chemical molecules are identical or different, we do not yet know. Hegel very easily gets over this question of divisibility by saying that matter is both divisible and continuous, and at the same time neither of the two, which is no answer but is now almost proved (see sheet 5,3 below: Clausius). Divisibility. The mammal is indivisible, the reptile can regrow a foot. Ether waves, divisible and measurable to the infinitesimally small. Every body divisible, in practice, within certain limits, e.g., in chemistry. The indestructibility of motion in Descartes principle that the universe always contains the same quantity of motion. Natural scientists express this imperfectly as the indestructibility of force. The merely quantitative expression of Descartes is likewise inadequate: motion as such, as essential activity, the mode of existence of matter, is indestructible as the latter itself, this formulation includes the quantitative element. So here again the philosopher has been confirmed by the natural scientist after 200 years. The indestructibility of motion. A pretty passage in Grove p. 20 et seq. Motion and equilibrium. Equilibrium is inseparable from motion. [In margin: Equilibrium=predominance of attraction over repulsion."] In the motion of the heavenly bodies there is motion in equilibrium and equilibrium in motion (relative). But all specifically relative motion, i.e., here all separate motion of individual bodies on one of the heavenly bodies in motion, is an effort to establish relative rest, equilibrium. The possibility of bodies being at relative rest, the possibility of temporary states of equilibrium, is the essential condition for the differentiation of matter and hence for life. On the sun there is no equilibrium of the various substances, only of the mass as a whole, or at any rate only a very restricted one, determined by considerable differences of density; on the surface there is eternal motion and unrest, dissociation. On the moon, equilibrium appears to prevail exclusively, without any relative motion-death (moon=negativity). On the earth motion has become differentiated into interchange of motion and equilibrium: the individual motion strives towards equilibrium, the motion as a whole once more destroys the individual equilibrium. The rock comes to rest, but weathering, the action of the ocean surf, of rivers and glacier ice continually destroy the equilibrium. Evaporation and rain, wind, heat, electric and magnetic phenomena offer the same spectacle. Finally, in the living organism we see continual motion of all the smallest particles as well as of the larger organs, resulting in the continual equilibrium of the total organism during the normal period of life, which yet always remains in motion, the living unity of motion and equilibrium. All equilibrium is only relative and temporary. (1) Motion of the heavenly bodies. Approximate equilibrium of attraction and repulsion in motion. (2) Motion on one heavenly body. Mass. In so far as this motion comes from pure mechanical causes, here also there is equilibrium. The masses are at rest on their foundation. On the moon this is apparently complete. Mechanical attraction has overcome mechanical repulsion. From the standpoint of pure mechanics, we do not know what has become of the repulsion, and pure mechanics just as little explains whence come the forces, by which nevertheless masses on the earth, for example, are set in motion against gravity. It takes the fact for granted. Here therefore there is simple communication of repelling, displacing motion from mass to mass, with equality of attraction and repulsion. (3) The overwhelming majority of all terrestrial motions, however, are made up of the conversion of one form of motion into another mechanical motion into heat, electricity, chemical motion and of each form into any other; hence either the transformation of attraction into repulsion mechanical motion into heat, electricity, chemical decomposition (the transformation is the conversion of the original lifting mechanical on into heat, not of the falling motion, which is only the semblance) [ or transformation of repulsion into attraction]. (4) All energy now active on the earth is transformed heat from the sun. Mechanical motion. Among natural scientists motion is always as a matter of course taken to mean mechanical motion, change of place. This has been handed down from the pre-chemical eighteenth century and makes a clear conception of the processes much more difficult. Motion, as applied to matter, is change in general. From the same misunderstanding is derived also the craze to reduce everything to mechanical motion even Grove is which obliterates the specific character of the other forms of motion. This is not to say that each of the higher forms of motion is not always necessarily connected with some real mechanical (external or molecular) motion, just as the higher forms of motion simultaneously also produce other forms, and just as chemical action is not possible without change of temperature and electric changes, organic life without mechanical, molecular, chemical, thermal, electric, etc., changes. But the presence of these subsidiary forms does not exhaust the essence of the main form in each case. One day we shall certainly reduce thought experimentally to molecular and chemical motions in the brain; but does that exhaust the essence of thought? Dialectics of natural science: Subject-matter matter in motion. The different forms and varieties of matter itself can likewise only be known through motion, only in this are the properties of bodies exhibited; of a body that does not move there is nothing to be said. Hence the nature of bodies in motion results from the forms of motion. 1. The first, simplest form of motion is the mechanical form, pure change of place: 2. These different forces (with the exception of sound) physics of heavenly bodies 3. Physics had to leave out of consideration the living organic body, or could do so; chemistry finds only in the investigation of organic compounds the real key to the true nature of the most important bodies, and, on the other hand, it synthesises bodies which only occur in organic nature. Here chemistry leads to organic life, and it has gone far enough to assure us that it alone will explain to us the dialectical transition to the organism. 4. The real transition, however, is in history of the solar system, the earth; the real pre-condition for organic nature. 5. Organic nature. Classification of the sciences, each of which analyses a single form of motion, or a series of forms of motion that belong together and pass into one another, is therefore the classification, the arrangement, of these forms of motion themselves according to their inherent sequence, and herein lies its importance. At the end of the last (18th) century, after the French materialists, who were predominantly mechanical, the need became evident for an encyclopedic summing up of the entire natural science of the old Newton-Linnaeus school, and two men of the greatest genius undertook this, Saint-Simon (uncompleted) and Hegel. Today, when the new outlook on nature is complete in its basic features, the same need makes itself felt, and attempts are being made in this direction. But since the general evolutionary connection in nature has now been demonstrated, an external side by side arrangement is as inadequate as Hegel s artificially constructed dialectical transitions. The transitions must make themselves, they must be natural. Just as one form of motion develops out of another, so their reflections, the various sciences, must arise necessarily out of one another. How little Comte can have been the author of his encyclopaedic arrangement of the natural sciences, which he copied from Saint-Simon, is already evident from the fact that it only serves him for the purpose of arranging the means of instruction and course of instruction, and so leads to the crazy enseignement int gral, where one science is always exhausted before another is even broached, where a basically correct idea is pushed to a mathematical absurdity. Hegel s division (the original one) into mechanics, chemics, and organics, fully adequate for the time. Mechanics: the movement of masses. Chemics: molecular (for physics is also included in this and, indeed, both physics as well as chemistry belong to the same order) motion and atomic motion. Organics: the motion of bodies in which the two are inseparable. For the organism is certainly the higher unity which within itself unites mechanics, physics, and chemistry into a whole where the trinity can no longer be separated. In the organism, mechanical motion is effected directly by physical and chemical change, in the form of nutrition, respiration, secretion, etc., just as much as pure muscular movement. Each group in turn is twofold. Mechanics: (1) celestial, (2) terrestrial. Molecular motion: (1) physics, (2) chemistry. Organics: (1) plant, (2) animal. Physiography. After the transition from chemistry to life has been made, then in the first place it is necessary to analyse the conditions in which life has been produced and continues to exist, i.e., first of all geology, meteorology, and the rest. Then the various forms of life themselves, which indeed without this are incomprehensible. Since the above article appeared (Vorw rts, Feb. 9, 1877), Kekul (Die wissenschaftlichen Ziele und Leistungen der Chemie) has defined mechanics, physics, and chemistry in a quite similar way: It will be seen that this formulation differs from that in the text and in the previous note only by being rather less definite. But when an English journal (Nature) put the above statement of Kekul in the form that mechanics is the statics and dynamics of masses, physics the statics and dynamics of molecules, and chemistry the statics and dynamics of atoms, then it seems to me that this unconditional reduction of even chemical processes to merely mechanical ones unduly restricts the field, at least of chemistry. And yet it is so much the fashion that, for instance, Haeckel continually uses mechanical and monistic as having the same meaning, and in his opinion If I term physics the mechanics of molecules, chemistry the physics of atoms, and furthermore biology the chemistry of proteins, I wish thereby to express the passing of each of these sciences into another, hence both the connection, the continuity, and the distinction, the discrete separation, between the two of them. To go further and to define chemistry as likewise a kind of mechanics seems to me inadmissible. Mechanics in the wider or narrower sense knows only quantities, it calculates with velocities and masses, and at most with volumes. Where the quality of bodies comes across its path, as in hydrostatics and aerostatics, it cannot achieve anything without going into molecular states and molecular motions, it is itself only an auxiliary science, the prerequisite for physics. In physics, however, and still more in chemistry, not only does continual qualitative change take place in consequence of quantitative change, the transformation of quantity into quality, but there are also many qualitative changes to be taken into account whose dependence on quantitative change is by no means proven. That the present tendency of science goes in this direction can be readily granted, but does not prove that this direction is the exclusively correct one, that the pursuit of this tendency will exhaust the whole of physics and chemistry. All motion includes mechanical motion, change of place of the largest or smallest portions of matter, and the first task of science, but only the first, is to obtain knowledge of this motion. But this mechanical motion does not exhaust motion as a whole. Motion is not merely change of place, in fields higher than mechanics it is also change of quality. The discovery that heat is a molecular motion was epoch-making. But if I have nothing more to say of heat than that it is a certain displacement of molecules, I should best be silent. Chemistry seems to be well on the way to explaining a number of chemical and physical properties of elements from the ratio of the atomic volumes to the atomic weights. But no chemist would assert that all the properties of an element are exhaustively expressed by its position in the Lothar Meyer curve, that it will ever be possible by this alone to explain, for instance, the peculiar constitution of carbon that makes it the essential bearer of organic life, or the necessity for phosphorus in the brain. Yet the mechanical conception amounts to nothing else. It explains all change from change of place, all qualitative differences from quantitative ones, and overlooks that the relation of quality and quantity is reciprocal, that quality can become transformed into quantity just as much as quantity into quality, that, in fact, reciprocal action takes place. If all differences and changes of quality are to be reduced to quantitative differences and changes, to mechanical displacement, then we inevitably arrive at the proposition that all matter consists of identical smallest particles, and that all qualitative differences of the chemical elements of matter are caused by quantitative differences in number and by the spatial grouping of those smallest particles to form atoms. But we have not got so far yet. It is our modern natural scientists lack of acquaintance with any other philosophy than the most mediocre vulgar philosophy, like that now rampant in the German universities, which allows them to use expressions like mechanical in this way, without taking into account, or even suspecting, the consequences with which they thereby necessarily burden themselves. The theory of the absolute qualitative identity of matter has its supporters empirically it is equally impossible to refute it or to prove it. But if one asks these people who want to explain everything mechanically whether they are conscious of this consequence and accept the identity of matter, what a variety of answers will be heard! The most comical part about it is that to make materialist equivalent to mechanical derives from Hegel, who wanted to throw contempt on materialism by the addition mechanical. Now the materialism criticised by Hegel the French materialism of the eighteenth century was in fact exclusively mechanical, and indeed for the very natural reason that at that time physics, chemistry, and biology were still in their infancy, and were very far from being able to offer the basis for a general outlook on nature. Similarly Haeckel takes from Hegel the translation: causae efficientes = mechanically acting causes, and causae finales = purposively acting causes ; where Hegel, therefore, puts mechanical as equivalent to blindly acting, unconsciously acting, and not as equivalent to mechanical in Haeckel s sense of the word. But this whole antithesis is for Hegel himself so much a superseded standpoint that he does not even mention it in either of his two expositions of causality in his Logic but only in his History of Philosophy, in the place where it comes historically (hence a sheer misunderstanding on Haeckel s part due to superficiality!) and quite incidentally in dealing with teleology (Logik, III, ii, 3) where he mentions it as the form in which the old metaphysics conceived the antithesis of mechanism and teleology, but otherwise treating it as a long superseded standpoint. Hence Haeckel copied incorrectly in his joy at finding a confirmation of his mechanical conception and so arrived at the beautiful result that if a particular change is produced in an animal or plant by natural selection it has been effected by a causa efficiens, but if the same change arises by artificial selection then it has been effected by a causa finalis! The breeder a causa finalis! Of course a dialectician of Hegel s calibre could not be caught in the vicious circle of the narrow antithesis of causa efficiens and causa finalis. And for the modern standpoint the whole hopeless rubbish about this antithesis is put an end to because we know from experience and from theory that both matter and its mode of existence, motion, are uncreatable and are, therefore, their own final cause; while to give the name effective causes to the individual causes which momentarily and locally become isolated in the mutual interaction of the motion of the universe, or which are isolated by our reflecting mind, adds absolutely no new determination but only a confusing element. A cause that is not effective is no cause. N. B. Matter as such is a pure creation of thought and an abstraction. We leave out of account the qualitativative differences of things in lumping them together as corporeally existing things under the concept matter. Hence matter as such, as distinct from definite existing pieces of matter, is not anything sensuously existing. When natural science directs its efforts to seeking out uniform matter as such, to reducing qualitative differences to merely quantitative differences in combining identical smallest particles, it is doing the same thing as demanding to see fruit as such instead of cherries, pears, apples, or the mammal as such instead of cats, dogs, sheep, etc., gas as such, metal, stone, chemical compound as such, motion as such. The Darwinian theory demands such a primordial mammal, Haeckel s pro-mammal, but, at the same time, it has to admit that if this pro-mammal contained within itself in germ all future and existing mammals, it was in reality lower in rank than all existing mammals and primitively crude, hence more transitory than any of them. As Hegel has already shown (Enzyklop die, I, S. 199), this view, this one-sided mathematical view, according to which matter must be looked upon as having only quantitative determination, but, qualitatively, as identical originally, is no other standpoint than that of the French materialism of the eighteenth century. It is even a retreat to Pythagoras, who regarded number, quantitative determination as the essence of things. In the first place, Kekul . Then: the systematising of natural science, which is now becoming more and more necessary, cannot be found in any other way than in the inter-connections of phenomena themselves. Thus the mechanical motion of small masses on any heavenly body ends in the contact of two bodies, which has two forms, differing only in degree, viz., friction and impact. So we investigate first of all the mechanical effect of friction and impact. But we find that the effect is not thereby exhausted: friction produces heat, light, and electricity, impact produces heat and light if not electricity also hence conversion of motion of masses into molecular motion. We enter the realm of molecular motion, physics, and investigate further. But here too we find that molecular motion does not represent the conclusion of the investigation. Electricity passes into and arises from chemical transformation. Heat and light, ditto. Molecular motion becomes transformed into motion of atoms chemistry. The investigation of chemical processes is confronted by the organic world as a field for research, that is to say, a world in which chemical processes take place, although under different conditions, according to the same laws as in the inorganic world, for the explanation of which chemistry suffices. In the organic world, on the other hand, all chemical investigations lead back in the last resort to a body protein which, while being the result of ordinary chemical processes, is distinguished from all others by being a self-acting, permanent chemical process. If chemistry succeeds in preparing this protein, in the specific form in which if obviously arose, that of a so-called protoplasm, a specificity, or rather absence of specificity, such that it contains potentially within itself all other forms of protein (though it is not necessary to assume that there is only one kind of protoplasm), then the dialectical transition will have been proved in reality, hence completely proved. Until then, it remains a matter of thought, alias of hypothesis. When chemistry produces protein, the chemical process will reach out beyond itself, as in the case of the mechanical process above, that is, it will come into a more comprehensive realm, that of the organism. Physiology is, of course, the physics and especially the chemistry of the living body, but with that it. ceases to be specially chemistry: on the one hand its domain becomes restricted but, on the other hand, inside this domain it becomes raised to a higher power.

Notes and Fragments by Dialectics of

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1883/don/ch07d.htm

The so-called axioms of mathematics are the few thought determinations which mathematics needs for its point of departure. Mathematics is the science of magnitudes; its point of departure is the concept of magnitude. It defines this lamely and then adds the other elementary determinations of magnitude, not contained in the definition, from outside as axioms, so that they appear as unproved, and naturally also as mathematically unprovable. The analysis of magnitude would yield all these axiom determinations as necessary determinations of magnitude. Spencer is right in as much as what thus appears to us to be the self-evidence of these axioms is inherited. They are provable dialectically, in so far as they are not pure tautologies. Mathematics. Nothing appears more solidly based than the difference between the four species of arithmetical operations, the elements of all mathematics. Yet right at the outset multiplication is seen to be an abbreviated addition, and division an abbreviated subtraction, of a definite number of equal numerical magnitudes; and in one case when the divisor is a fraction division is even carried out by multiplying by the inverted fraction. In algebraic calculation the thing is carried much further. Every subtraction (a-b) can be represented as an addition (-b+a), every division a/b as a multiplication a 1/b. In calculations with powers of magnitudes one goes much further still. All rigid differences between the kinds of calculation disappear, everything can be presented in the opposite form. A power can be put as a root (x2= x4;), a root as a power ( x=x ). Unity divided by a power or root can be put as a power of the denominator (1/ x =x- ; 1/x3=x-3) Multiplication or division of the powers of a magnitude becomes converted into addition or subtraction of their exponents. Any number can be conceived and expressed as the power of any other number (logarithms, y =ax). And this transformation of one form into the opposite one is no idle trifling, it is one of the most powerful levers of mathematical science, without which today hardly any of the more difficult calculations are carried out. If negative and fractional powers alone were abolished from mathematics, how far could one get? ( . =+, / =+, -1, etc., to be expounded earlier.) The turning point in mathematics was Descartes variable magnitude. With that came motion and hence dialectics in mathematics, and at once, too, of necessity the differential and integral calculus, which moreover immediately begins, and which on the whole was completed by Newton and Leibniz, not discovered by them. Quantity and quality. Number is the purest quantitative determination that we know. But it is chock-full of qualitative differences. 1. Hegel, number and unity, multiplication, division, raising to a higher power, extraction of roots. Thereby, and this is not shown in Hegel, qualitative differences already make their appearance: prime numbers and products, simple roots and powers. 16 is not merely the sum of 16 ones, it is also the square of 4, the fourth power of 2. Still more. Prime numbers communicate new, definitely determined qualities to numbers derived from them by multiplication with other numbers; only even numbers are divisible by 2, and there is a similar determination in the case of 4 and 8. For 3 there is the rule of the sum of the figures, and the same thing for 9 and also for 6, in the last case in combination with the even number. For 7 there is a special rule. These form the basis for tricks with numbers which seem incomprehensible to the uninitiated. Hence what Hegel says (Quantity, p. 237) on the absence of thought in arithmetic is incorrect. Compare, however, Measure. When mathematics speaks of the infinitely large and infinitely small, it introduces a qualitative difference which even takes the form of an unbridgeable qualitative opposition: quantities so enormously different from one another that every rational relation, every comparison, between them ceases, that they become quantitatively incommensurable. Ordinary incommensurability, for instance of the circle and the straight line, is also a dialectical qualitative difference; but here it is the difference in quantity of similar magnitudes that increases the difference of quality to the point of incommensurability. Number. The individual number becomes endowed with quality already in the numerical system itself, and the quality depends on the system used. 9 is not only 1 added together 9 times, but also the basis for 90, 99, 900,000, etc. All numerical laws depend upon and are determined by the system adopted. In dyadic and triadic systems 2 multiplied by 2 does not equal 4, but=100 or=11. In all systems with an odd basic number, the difference between odd and even numbers falls to the ground, e.g., in the system based on 5, 5=10, 10=20, 15=30. Likewise in the same system the sums of digits 3n of products of 3 or 9 (6=11, 9=14). Hence the basic number determines not only its own quality but also that of all the other numbers. With powers of numbers, the matter goes still further: any number can be conceived as the power of any other number-there are as many logarithmic systems as there are whole and fractional numbers. One. Nothing looks simpler than quantitative unity, and nothing is more manifold than it, as soon as we investigate it in connection with the corresponding plurality and according to its various modes of origin from plurality. First of all, one is the basic number of the whole positive and negative system of numbers, all other numbers arising by the successive addition of one to itself. One is the expression of all positive, negative, and fractional powers of one: 12, 1, 1-2 are all equal to one. It is the content of all fractions in which the numerator and denominator prove to be equal. It is the expression of every number that is raised to the power of zero, and therewith the sole number the logarithm of which is the same in all systems, viz.,=0. Thus one is the boundary that divides all possible systems of logarithms into two parts: if the base is greater than one, then the logarithms of all numbers more than one are positive, and of all numbers less than one negative; if it is smaller than one, the reverse is the case. Hence, if every number contains unity in itself in as much as it is compounded entirely of ones added together, unity likewise contains all other numbers in itself. This is not only a possibility, in as much as we can construct any number solely of ones, but also a reality, in as much as one is a definite power of every other number. But the very same mathematicians who, without turning a hair, interpolate into their calculations, wherever it suits them, x0=1, or a fraction whose numerator and denominator are equal and which therefore likewise represents one, who therefore apply mathematically the plurality contained in unity, turn up their noses and grimace if they are told in general terms that unity and plurality are inseparable, mutually penetrating concepts and that plurality is not less contained in unity than unity is in plurality. How much this is the case we see as soon as we forsake the field of pure numbers. Already in the measurement of lines, surfaces, and the volumes of bodies it becomes apparent that we can take any desired magnitude of the appropriate order as unity, and the same thing holds for measurement of time, weight, motion, etc. For the measurement of cells even millimetres and milligrams are too large, for the measurement of stellar distances or the velocity of light even the kilometre is uncomfortably small, just as the kilogram for planetary or, even more so, solar masses, Here is seen very clearly what diversity and multiplicity is contained in the concept of unity, at first sight so simple. Zero, because it is the negation of any definite quantity, is not therefore devoid of content. On the contrary, zero has a very definite content. As the border-line between all positive and negative magnitudes, as the sole really neutral number, which can be neither positive nor negative, it is not only a very definite number, but also in itself more important than all other numbers bounded by it. In fact, zero is richer in content than any other number. Put on the right of any other number, it gives to the latter, in our system of numbers, the tenfold value. Instead of zero one could use here any other sign, but only on the condition that this sign taken by itself signifies zero, =0. Hence it is part of the nature of zero itself that it finds this application and that it alone can be applied in this way. Zero annihilates every other number with which it is multiplied; united with any other number as divisor or dividend, in the former case it makes this infinitely large, in the latter infinitely small; it is the only number that stands in a relation of infinity to every other number. 0/0 can express every number between and + , and in each case represents a real magnitude. The real content of an equation first clearly emerges when all its members have been brought to one side, and the equation is thus reduced to zero value, as already happens for quadratic equations, and is almost the general rule in higher algebra. The function F (x, y)=O can then also be put equal to z, and this z, although it is =0, differentiated like an ordinary dependent variable and its partial derivative determined. The nothing of every quantity, however, is itself quantitatively determined, and only on that account is it possible to calculate with zero. The very same mathematicians who are quite unembarrassed in reckoning with zero in the above manner, i.e., in operating with it as a definite quantitative concept, bringing it into quantitative relation to other quantitative concepts, clutch their heads in desperation when they read this in Hegel generalised as: the nothing of a something is a determinate nothing. But now for (analytical) geometry. Here zero is a definite point from which measurements are taken along a line, in one direction positively, in the other negatively. Here, therefore, the zero point has not only just as much significance as any point denoted by a positive or negative magnitude, but a much greater significance than all of them: it is the point on which they are all dependent, to which they are all related, and by which they are all determined. In many cases it can even be taken quite arbitrarily. But once adopted, it remains the central point of the whole operation, often determining even the direction of the line along which the other points-the end points of the abscissae are to be inserted. If, for example, in order to arrive at the equation of the circle, we choose any point of the periphery as the zero point, then the line of the abscissae must go through the centre of the circle. All this finds just as much application in mechanics, where likewise in the calculation of the motions the point taken as zero in each case forms the main point and pivot for the entire operation. The zero point of the thermometer is the very definite lower limit of the temperature section that is divided into any desired number of degrees, thereby serving as a measure both for temperature stages within the section as also for higher or lower temperatures. Hence in this case also it is a very essential point. And even the absolute zero of the thermometer in no way represents pure abstract negation, but a very definite state of matter: the limit at which the last trace of independent molecular motion vanishes and matter acts only as mass. Wherever we come upon zero, it represents something very definite, and its practical application in geometry, mechanics, etc., proves that - as limit - it is more important than all the real magnitudes bounded by it. Zero powers. Of importance in the logarithmic series: 0123log 100101102103. All variables pass somewhere through unity; hence also a constant raised to a variable power (ax)=1, if x=0. a0=1 means nothing more than conceiving unity in its connection with the other members of the series of powers of a, only there has it any meaning and can lead to results (Sx0 =x/w) , otherwise not at all. From this it follows that unity also, however much it may appear identical with itself, includes within it an infinite manifoldness, since it can be the zero power of any other possible number, and that this manifoldness is not merely imaginary is proved on each occasion where unity is conceived as a determined unity, as one of the variable results of a process (as a momentary magnitude or form of a variable) in connection with this process. 1. The negative magnitudes of algebra are real only in so far as they are connected with positive magnitudes and only within the relation to the latter; outside this relation, taken by themselves, they are purely imaginary. In trigonometry and analytical geometry, together with the branches of higher mathematics of which these are the basis, they express a definite direction of motion, opposite to the positive direction. But the sine and tangent of the circle can be reckoned from the upper right-hand quadrant just as well as from the lower right-hand quadrant, thus directly reversing plus and minus. Similarly, in analytical geometry, abscissae can be calculated from the periphery or from the centre of the circle, indeed in all curves they can be reckoned from the curve in the direction usually denoted as minus, (or) in any desired direction, and still give a correct rational equation of the curve. Here plus exists only as the complement of minus, and vice versa. But algebraic abstraction treats them (negative magnitudes) as real and independent, even outside the relation to a larger, positive magnitude. Mathematics. To common sense it appears an absurdity to resolve a definite magnitude, e.g., a binomial expression, into an infinite series, that is, into something indefinite. But where would we be without infinite series and the binomial theorem? Asymptotes. Geometry begins with the discovery that straight and curved are absolute opposites, that straight is absolutely inexpressible in curved, and curved in straight, that the two are incommensurable. Yet even the calculation of the circle is only possible by expressing its periphery in straight lines. For curves with asymptotes, however, straight becomes completely merged in curved, and curved in straight, just as much as the notion of parallelism: the lines are not parallel, they continually approach one another and yet never meet; the arm of the curve becomes more and more straight, without ever becoming entirely so, just as in analytical geometry the straight line is regarded as a curve of the first order with an infinitely small curvature. However large the x of the logarithmic curve may become, y can never=0. Straight and curved in the differential calculus are in the last resort put as equal: in the differential triangle, the hypotenuse of which forms the differential of the arc (in the tangent method), this hypotenuse can be regarded Here, therefore, although the ratio continually approaches equality, but asymptotically in accordance with the nature of the curve, yet, since the contact is limited to a single point which has no length, it is finally assumed that equality of straight and curved has been reached. (Bossut, Calcul diff rentiel et int gral, Paris, An VI, 1, p. 149.) In polar curves the differential imaginary abscissae are even taken as parallel to the real abscissae and operations based on this, although both meet at the pole; indeed, from it is deduced the similarity of two triangles, one of which has an angle precisely at the point of intersection of the two lines, the parallelism of which is the whole basis of the similarity! (Fig. 17.) When the mathematics of straight and curved lines has thus pretty well reached exhaustion a new almost infinite field is opened up by the mathematics that conceives curved as straight (the differential triangle) and straight as curved (curve of the first order with infinitely small curvature). O metaphysics! Trigonometry. After synthetic geometry has exhausted the properties of a triangle, regarded as such, and has nothing new to say, a more extensive horizon is opened up by a very simple, thoroughly dialectical procedure. The triangle is no longer considered in and for itself but in connection with another figure, the circle. Every right-angled triangle can be regarded as belonging to a circle: if the hypotenuse =r, then the sides enclosing the right angle are sin and cos; if one of these sides =r, then the other =tan, the hypotenuse =sec. In this way the sides and angles are given quite different, definite relationships which without this relation of the triangle to the circle would be impossible to discover and use, and quite a new theory of the triangle arises, far surpassing the old and universally applicable, because every triangle can be resolved into two right-angled triangles. This development of trigonometry from synthetic geometry is a good example of dialectics, of the way in which it comprehends things in their interconnection instead of in isolation. Identity and difference the dialectical relation is already seen in the differential calculus, where dx is infinitely small, but yet is effective and does everything. Molecule and differential. Wiedemann (III, p. 636) puts finite and molecular distances as directly opposed to one another. The fact that our subjective thought and the objective world are subject to the same laws, and hence, too, that in the final analysis they cannot contradict each other in their results, but must coincide, governs absolutely our whole theoretical thought. It is the unconscious and unconditional premise for theoretical thought. Eighteenth-century materialism, owing to its essentially metaphysical character, investigated this premise only as regards content. It restricted itself to the proof that the content of all thought and knowledge must derive from sensuous experience, and revived the principle: nihil est in intellectu, quod non fuerit in sensu. It was modern idealistic, but at the same time dialectical, philosophy, and especially Hegel, which for the first time investigated it also as regards form. In spite of all the innumerable arbitrary constructions and fantasies that we encounter here, in spite of the idealist, topsy-turvy form of its result-the unity of thought and being-it is undeniable that this philosophy proved the analogy of the processes of thought to those of nature and history and vice versa, and the validity of similar laws for all these processes, in numerous cases and in the most diverse fields. On the other hand, modern natural science has extended the principle of the origin of all thought content from experience in a way that breaks down its old metaphysical limitation and formulation. By recognising the inheritance of acquired characters, it extends the subject of experience from the individual to the genus; the single individual that must have experience is no longer necessary, its individual experience can be replaced to a certain extent by the results of the experiences of a number of its ancestors. If, for instance, among us the mathematical axioms seem self-evident to every eight-year-old child, and in no need of proof from experience, this is solely the result of accumulated inheritance. It would be difficult to teach them by a proof to a bushman or Australian Negro. In the present work [Anti-D hring] dialectics is conceived as the science of the most general laws of all motion. This implies that its laws must be valid just as much for motion in nature and human, history as for the motion of thought. Such a law can be recognised in two of these three spheres, indeed even in all three, without the metaphysical philistine being clearly aware that it is one and the same law that he has come to know. Let us take an example. Of all theoretical advances there is surely none that ranks so high as a triumph of the human mind as the discovery of the infinitesimal calculus in the last half of the seventeenth century. If anywhere, it is here that we have a pure and exclusive feat of human intelligence. The mystery which even today surrounds the magnitudes employed in the infinitesimal calculus, the differentials and infinites of various degrees, is the best proof that it is still imagined that what are dealt with here- are pure free creations and imaginations" of the human mind, to which there is nothing corresponding in the objective world. Yet the contrary is the case Nature offers prototypes for all these imaginary magnitudes. Our geometry takes as its starting-point space relations, and our arithmetic and algebra numerical magnitudes, which correspond to our terrestrial conditions, which therefore correspond to the magnitude of bodies that mechanics terms masses-masses such as occur on earth and are moved by men. In comparison with these masses, the mass of the earth seems infinitely large and indeed terrestrial mechanics treats it as infinitely large. The radius of the earth==oo, this is the basic principle of all mechanics in the law of falling. But not merely the earth but the whole solar system and the distances occurring in the latter in their turn appear infinitely small as soon as we have to deal with the distances reckoned in light years in the stellar system visible to us through the telescope. We have here, therefore, already an infinity, not only of the first but of the second degree, and we can leave it to the imagination of our readers to construct further infinities of a higher degree in infinite space, if they feel inclined to do so. According to the view prevailing in physics and chemistry today, however, the terrestrial masses, the bodies with which mechanics operates, consist of molecules, of smallest particles which cannot be further divided without abolishing the physical and chemical identity of the body concerned. According to W. Thomson s calculations, the diameter of the smallest of these molecules cannot be smaller than a fifty-millionth of a millimetre. But even if we assume that the largest molecule itself attains a diameter of a twenty-five-millionth of a millimetre, it still remains an infinitesimally small magnitude compared with the smallest mass dealt with by mechanics, physics, or even chemistry. Nevertheless, it is endowed with all the properties peculiar to the mass in question, it can represent the mass physically and chemically, and does actually represent it in all chemical equations. In short, it has the same properties in relation to the corresponding mass as the mathematical differential has in relation to its variables. The only difference is that what seems mysterious and inexplicable to us in the case of the differential, in the mathematical abstraction, here seems a matter of course and as it were obvious. Nature operates with these differentials, the molecules, in exactly the same way and according to the same laws as mathematics does with its abstract differentials. Thus, for instance, the differential of x3=3x2dx, where 3xdx2 and dx3 are neglected. If we put this in geometrical form, we have a cube with sides of length x, the length being increased by the infinitely small amount dx. Let us suppose that this cube consists of a sublimated element, say sulphur; and that three of the surfaces around one corner are protected, the other three being free. Let us now expose this sulphur cube to an atmosphere of sulphur vapour and lower the temperature sufficiently; sulphur will be deposited on the three free sides of the cube. We remain quite within the ordinary mode of procedure of physics and chemistry in supposing, in order to picture the process in its pure form, that in the first place a layer of the thickness of a single molecule is deposited on each of these three sides. The length x of the sides of the cube has increased by the diameter of a molecule dx. The content of the cube x3 has increased by the difference between x3 and x3+3x2dx+3xdx2+dx3, where dx3, a single molecule, and 3xdx2, three rows of length x+dx, consisting simply of lineally arranged molecules, can be neglected with the same justification as in mathematics. The result is the same, the increase in mass of the cube is 3x2dx. Strictly speaking dx3 and 3xdx2 do not occur in the case of the sulphur cube, because two or three molecules cannot occupy the same space, and the cube s increase of bulk is therefore exactly 3x2dx+3xdx+dx. This is explained by the fact that in mathematics dx is a linear magnitude, while it is well known that such lines, without thickness or breadth, do not occur independently in nature, hence also the mathematical abstractions have unrestricted validity only in pure mathematics. And since the latter neglects 3xdx2+dx3, it makes no difference. Similarly in evaporation. When the uppermost molecular layer in a glass of water evaporates, the height of the water layer, x, is decreased by dx, and the continual flight of one molecular layer after another is actually a continued differentiation. And when the hot vapour is once more condensed to water in a vessel by pressure and cooling, and one molecular layer is deposited on another (it is permissible to leave out of account secondary circumstances that make the process an impure one) until the vessel is full, then literally an integration has been performed which differs from the mathematical one only in that the one is consciously carried out by the human brain, while the other is unconsciously carried out by nature. But it is not only in the transition from the liquid to the gaseous state and vice versa that processes occur which are completely analogous to those of the infinitesimal calculus. When mass motion, as such, is abolished-by impact-and becomes transformed into heat, molecular motion, what is it that happens but that the mass motion is differentiated? And when the movements of the molecules of steam in the cylinder of the steam-engine become added together so that they lift the piston by a definite amount, so that they become transformed into mass motion, have they not been integrated? Chemistry dissociates molecules into atoms, magnitudes of lesser mass and spatial extension, but magnitudes of the same order, so that the two stand in definite, finite relations to one another. Hence, all the chemical equations which express the molecular composition of bodies are in their form differential equations. But in reality they are already integrated owing to the atomic weights which figure in them. For chemistry calculates with differentials, the mutual relation of the magnitudes of which is known. Atoms, however, are in no wise regarded as simple, or in general as the smallest known particles of matter. Apart from chemistry itself, which is more and more inclining to the view that atoms are compound, the majority of physicists assert that the universal ether, which transmits light and heat radiations, likewise consists of discrete particles, which, however, are so small that they have the same relation to chemical atoms and physical molecules as these have to mechanical masses, that is to say as d2x to dx. Here, therefore, in the now usual notion of the constitution of matter, we have likewise a differential of the second degree, and there is no reason at all why anyone, to whom it would give satisfaction, should not imagine that analogies of d3x, d4x, etc., also occur in nature. Hence, whatever view one may hold of the constitution of matter, this much is certain, that it is divided up into a series of big, well-defined groups of a relatively different mass character in such a way that the members of each separate group stand to one another in definite finite mass ratios, in contrast to which those of the next group stand to them in the ratio of the infinitely large or infinitely small in the mathematical sense. The visible system of stars, the solar system, terrestrial masses, molecules and atoms, and finally ether particles, form each of them such a group. It does not alter the case that intermediate links can be found between the separate groups. Thus, between the masses of the solar system and terrestrial masses come the asteroids (some of which have a diameter no greater than, for example, that of the younger branch of the Reuss principality), meteorites, etc. Thus, in the organic world the cell stands between terrestrial masses and molecules. These intermediate links prove only that there are no leaps in nature, precisely because nature is composed entirely of leaps. In so far as mathematics calculates with real magnitudes, it also employs this mode of outlook without hesitation. For terrestrial mechanics the mass of the earth is regarded As infinitely large, just as for astronomy terrestrial masses and the meteorites corresponding to them are regarded as infinitely small, and just as the distances and masses of the planets of the solar system dwindle to nothing as soon as astronomy investigates the constitution of our stellar system extending beyond the nearest fixed stars. As soon, however, as the mathematicians withdraw into their impregnable fortress of abstraction, so-called pure mathematics, all these analogies are forgotten, infinity becomes something totally mysterious, and the manner in which operations are carried out with it in analysis appears as something absolutely incomprehensible, contradicting all experience and all reason. The stupidities and absurdities by which mathematicians have rather excused than explained their mode of procedure, which remarkably enough always leads to correct results, exceed the worst apparent and real fantasies, e.g., of the Hegelian philosophy of nature, about which mathematicians and natural scientists can never adequately express their horror. What they charge Hegel with doing, viz., pushing abstractions to the extreme limit, they do themselves on a far greater scale. They forget that the whole of so-called pure mathematics is concerned with abstractions, that all its magnitudes, strictly speaking, are imaginary, and that all abstractions when pushed to extremes are transformed into nonsense or into their opposite. Mathematical infinity is taken from reality, although unconsciously, and therefore can only be explained from reality and not from itself, from mathematical abstraction. And, as we have seen, if we investigate reality in this regard we come also upon the real relations from which the mathematical relation of infinity is taken, and even the natural analogies of the mathematical way in which this relation operates. And thereby the matter is explained. (Haeckel s bad reproduction of the identity of thinking and being. But also the contradiction between continuous and discrete matter; see Hegel.) The differential calculus for the first time makes it possible for natural science to represent mathematically processes and not only states: motion. Application of mathematics: in the mechanics of solid bodies it is absolute, in that of gases approximate, in that of fluids already more difficult; in physics more tentative and relative; in chemistry, simple equations of the first order and of the simplest nature; in biology=0

Dialectics of Nature. Notes and Fragments by Frederick Engels

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1883/don/ch07e.htm

An example of the necessity of dialectical thought and of the non-rigid categories and relations in nature; the law of falling, which already in the case of a period-of-fall of some minutes becomes incorrect, since then the radius of the earth can no longer without error be put= , and the attraction of the earth increases instead of remaining constant as Galileo s law of falling assumes. Nevertheless, this law is still continually taught, but the reservation omitted! Newtonian attraction and centrifugal force an example of metaphysical thinking: the problem not solved but only posed, and this preached as the solution. Ditto Clausius dissipation of heat. Newtonian gravitation. The best that can be said of it is that it does not explain but pictures the present state of planetary motion. The motion is given. Ditto the force of attraction of the sun. With these data, how is the motion to be explained? By the parallelogram of forces, by a tangential force which now becomes a necessary postulate that we must accept. That is to say, assuming the eternal character of the existing state, we need a first impulse, God. But neither is the existing planetary state eternal nor is the motion originally compound, but simple rotation, and the parallelogram of forces applied here is wrong, because it did not merely make evident the unknown magnitude, the x, that had still to be found, that is to say in so far as Newton claimed not merely to put the question but to solve it. Newton s parallelogram of forces in the solar system is true at best for the moment when the annular bodies separate, because then the rotational motion comes into contradiction with itself, appearing on the one hand as attraction, and on the other hand as tangential force. As soon as the separation is complete, however, the motion is again a unity. That this separation must occur is a proof of the dialectical process. Laplace s theory presupposes only matter in motionrotation necessary for all bodies suspended in universal space. Halley, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, from the difference between the data of Hipparchus and Flamsteed on three stars, first arrived at the idea of proper motion (p. 410). Flamsteed s British Catalogue, the first fairly accurate and comprehensive one (p. 420), then ca. 1750, Bradley, Maskelyne, and Lalande. Crazy theory of the range of light rays in the case of enormous bodies and M dlers calculation based on this as crazy as anything in Hegel s Philosophy of Nature (pp. 424-25). The strongest (apparent) proper motion of a star=701" a century= 11'41" =one-third of the sun s diameter; smallest average of 921 telescopic stars 8.65" some of them 4'. Milky Way is a series of rings, all with a common centre of gravity (p. 434). The Pleiades Group, and in it Alcyone, h Tauri, the centre of motion for our island universe as far as the most remote regions of the Milky Way (p. 448). Periods of revolution within the Pleiades Group on the average ca. two million years (p. 449). About the Pleiades are annular groups alternately poor in stars and rich in stars. Secchi contests the possibility of fixing a centre at the present time. According to Bessel, Sirius and Procyon describe an orbit about a dark body, as well as the general motion (p. 450). Eclipse of Algol every 3 days, duration 8 hours, confirmed by spectral analysis (Secchi, p. 786). In the region of the Milky Way, but deep within it, a dense ring of stars of magnitudes 7-11; a long way outside this ring are the concentric Milky Way rings, of which we see two. In the Milky Way, according to Herschel, ca. 18 million stars visible through his telescope, those lying within the ring being ca. 2 million or more, hence over 20 million in all. In addition there is always a non-resolvable glow in the Milky Way, even behind the resolved stars, hence perhaps still further rings concealed owing to perspective? (Pp. 451-52.) Alcyone distant from the sun 573 light years. Diameter of the Milky Way ring of separate visible stars, at least 8,000 light years (pp. 462-63). The mass of the bodies moving within the sun Alcyone radius of 573 light years is calculated at 118 million sun masses (p. 462), not at all in agreement with the at most 2 million stars moving therein. Dark bodies? At any rate something wrong. A proof of how imperfect our observational bases still are. For the outermost ring of the Milky Way, M dler assumes a distance of thousands, perhaps of hundreds of thousands, of light years (p. 464). A beautiful argument against the so-called absorption of light: That light, decreasing in intensity according to the square of the distance, must reach a point where it is no longer visible to our eyes, however much the latter may be strengthened and equipped, is quite obvious, and suffices for refuting the view of Olbers that only light absorption is capable of explaining the darkness of the sky that nevertheless is filled in all directions with shining stars to an infinite distance. That is not to say that there does not exist a distance at which the ether allows no further light to penetrate. Nebulae. Of all forms, strictly circular, elliptical, or irregular and jagged. All decrees of, resolvability, merging into total non-resolvability, where only a thickening towards the centre can be distinguished. In some of the resolvable nebulae, up to ten thousand stars are perceptible, the middle mostly denser, very rarely a central star of greater brilliance. Rosse s giant telescope has, however, resolved many of them. Herschel I enumerates 197 star aggregations and 2,300 nebulae, to which must be added those catalogued by Herschel II in the southern heavens. The irregular ones must be distant island universes, since masses of vapour can only exist in equilibrium in globular or ellipsoidal form. Most of them, moreover, are only just visible even through the most powerful telescopes. At any rate the circular ones can be vapour masses: there are 78 of them among the above 2,500. Herschel assumes 2 million, M dler on the assumption of a true diameter equal to 8,000 light years 30 million light years distant from us. Since the distance of each astronomical system of bodies from the next one amounts to at least a hundredfold the diameter of the system, the distance of our island universe from the next one would be at least 50 times 8,000 light years=400,000 light years, in which case with the several thousands of nebulae we get far beyond Herschel I s 2 million ([M dler, loc cit., p. 485-]492). Secchi: (The nebula in Andromeda according to M dler, p. 495, is unresolvable. The nebula in Orion is irregular, flocculent and, as it were, puts out arms, p. 495. Those of Lyra are ring-shaped, only slightly elliptical, p. 498.) Huggins found in the spectrum of Herschel s nebula No. 4374, three bright lines, from this it follows immediately that this nebula does not consist of an aggregate of separate stars, but is a true nebula, a glowing substance in the gaseous state [p. 787]. The lines belong to nitrogen (1) and hydrogen (I), the third is unknown. Similarly for the nebula in Orion. Even nebulae that contain gleaming points (Hydra, Sagittarius) have these bright lines, so that star masses in course of aggregation are still not solid or liquid (p. 789). The nebula in Lyra has only a nitrogen line (p. 789). The densest place of the nebula in Orion is P, its whole extension 4 [pp. 790-91]. Secchi: Sirius: Secchi: Fixed stars: According to Secchi, the stars of the 16th magnitude (still distinguishable in Herschel s big telescope) are 7,560 light years distant, those distinguishable in Rosse s telescope are at least 20,900 light years distant (p. 802). Secchi (p. 810) himself asks: Secchi and the Pope. Descartes discovered that the ebb and flow of tides are caused by the attraction of the moon. Ile also discovered simultaneously with Snell the basic law of the refraction of light [In the margin: Contested by Wolf, p. 325."] and this in a form peculiar to himself and different from that of Snell. Mayer, Mechanische Theorie der W rme, p. 328. Kant has already stated that the ebb and flow of tides exert a retarding pressure on the rotating earth. (Adam s calculation that the duration of the sidereal day is now increasing by 1/100 second in 1,000 years.) Impact and friction. Mechanics regards the effect of impact as taking place in a pure form. But in reality things are different. On every impact part of the mechanical motion is transformed into heat, and friction is nothing more than a form of impact that continually converts mechanical motion into heat (fire by friction known from primeval times). The consumption of kinetic energy as such in the field of dynamics is always of a twofold nature and has a twofold result: (1) the kinetic work done, production of a corresponding quantity of potential energy, which, however, is always less than the applied kinetic energy; (2) overcoming besides gravity frictional and other resistances that convert the remainder of the used-up kinetic energy into heat. Likewise on reconversion: according to the way this takes place, a part of the loss through friction, etc., is dissipated as heat and that is all very ancient! The first, na ve outlook is as a rule more correct than the later, metaphysical one. Thus already Bacon (and after him Boyle, Newton, and almost all the Englishmen) said heat is motion (Boyle even said molecular motion). It was only in the eighteenth century that the caloric theory arose in France and became more or less accepted on the Continent. Conservation of energy. The quantitative constancy of motion was already enunciated by Descartes, and indeed almost in the same words as now by? (Clausius, Robert Mayer?) On the other hand, the transformation of the form of motion was only discovered in 1842 and this, not the law of quantitative constancy, is what is new. Force and conservation of force. The passages of J. R. Mayer in his two first papers to be cited against Helmholtz. Force. Hegel (Geschichte der Philosophie, 1, S. 208) says. Hegel s conception of force and its manifestation, of cause and effect as identical, is proved in the change of form of matter, where the equivalence is proved mathematically. This had already been recognised in measurement: force is measured by its manifestation, cause by effect. Force. If any kind of motion is transferred from one body to another, then one can regard the motion, in so far as it transfers itself, i.e., is active, as the cause of motion, in so far as the latter becomes transferred, i.e., is passive, and then this cause, the active motion, appears as force and the passive as its manifestation. From the law of the indestructibility of motion, it follows automatically that the force is exactly as great as its manifestation, since indeed it is the same motion in both cases. Motion that transfers itself, however, is more or less quantitatively determinable, because it appears in two bodies, of which one can serve as a unit of measurement in order to measure the motion in the other. The measurability of motion gives the category force its value, otherwise it has none. Hence the more this is the case, the more are the categories of force and its manifestation usable in research. Hence this is so especially in mechanics, where one resolves the forces still further, regarding them as compound, and thereby often arriving at new results, although one should not forget that this is merely a mental operation; by applying the analogy of forces that are really compound, as expressed in the parallelogram of forces, to forces that are really simple, the latter still do not thereby really become compound. Similarly in statics. Then, again, in the transformation of other forms of motion into mechanical motion (heat, electricity, magnetism in the attraction of iron), where the original motion can be measured by the mechanical effect produced. But here, where various forms of motion are considered simultaneously, the limitation of the category or abbreviation, force, already stands revealed. No regular physicist any longer terms electricity, magnetism, or heat mere forces, any more than substances or imponderabilia. When we know into how much mechanical motion a definite quantity of heat motion is converted, we still do not know anything of the nature of heat, however much the examination of these transformations may be necessary for investigating this nature of heat. To conceive heat as a form of motion is the latest advance of physics, and by so doing the category of force is sublated in it: in certain connections those of transition they can appear as forces and so be measured. Thus heat is measured by the expansion of a body on warming. If heat did not pass here from one body to the other the measuring rod i.e., if the heat of the body acting as a measuring rod did not alter, there could be no talk of measurement, of a change of magnitude. One says simply: heat expands a body, whereas to say: heat has the force to expand a body, would be a mere tautology, and to say: heat is the force which expands bodies, would not be correct, since 1. expansion, e.g., in gases, is produced also by other means, and 2. heat is not exhaustively characterised in this way. Some chemists speak also of chemical force, as the force that makes and maintains compounds. Here, however, there is no real transference, but a combination of the motion of various bodies into a single whole, and so force here reaches its limit. It is, however, still measurable by the heat production, but so far without much result. Here it becomes a phrase, as everywhere where, instead of investigating the uninvestigated forms of motion, one invents a so-called force for their explanation (as, for instance, explaining the floating of wood in water by a buoyancy force the refraction of light by a refractive force, etc.), in which case as many forces are obtained as there are unexplained phenomena, the external phenomenon being indeed merely translated into an internal phrase. (Attraction and repulsion are easier to excuse; here a number of phenomena inexplicable to the physicist are embraced under a common name, which gives an inkling of an inner connection.) Finally in organic nature the category of force is completely inadequate and yet continually applied. True, it is possible to characterise the action of the muscles, in accordance with its mechanical effect, as muscular force, and also to measure it. One can even conceive of other measurable functions as forces, e.g., the digestive capacity of various stomachs, but one quickly arrives ad absurdum (e.g., nervous force), and in any case one can speak here of forces only in a very restricted and figurative sense (the ordinary phrase: to regain one s forces). This misuse, however, has led to speaking of a vital force. If by this is meant that the form of motion in the organic body is different from the mechanical, physical, or chemical form, and contains them all sublated in itself, then it is a very lax manner of expression, and especially so because the force presupposing transference of motion appears here as something pumped into the organism from outside. not as inherent in it and inseparable from it, and therefore this vital force has been the last refuge of all supernaturalists. The defect: (1) Force usually treated as having independent existence. (Hegel, Naturphilosophie, S. 79.) (2) Latent, dormant force this to be explained from the relation of motion and rest (inertia, equilibrium), where also arousing of forces to be dealt with. Force (see above). The transference of motion takes place, of course, only in the presence of all the various conditions, which are often multiple and complex, especially in machines (the steam-engine, the shotgun with lock, trigger, percussion cap, and gunpowder). If one of them is missing, then the transference does not take place until this condition is supplied. In that case one can imagine this as if the force must first be aroused by the introduction of this last condition, as if it lay latent in a body, the so-called carrier of force (gunpowder, charcoal), whereas in reality not only this body but all the other conditions must be present in order to evoke precisely this special transference. The notion of force comes to us quite automatically in that we possess in our own body means for transferring motion, which within certain limits can be brought into action by our will; especially the muscles of the arms through which we produce mechanical change of place and motion of other bodies, lifting, carrying, throwing, hitting, etc., resulting in definite useful effects. The motion is here apparently produced, not transferred, and this gives rise to the notion of force in general producing motion. That muscular force is also merely transference has only now been proved physiologically. Force. The negative side also has to be analysed: the resistance which is opposed to the transference of motion. Radiation of heat into universal space. All the hypotheses cited by Lavrov of the renewal of extinct heavenly bodies (p. 109) involve loss of motion. The heat once radiated, i.e., the infinitely greater part of the original motion, is and remains lost. Helmholtz says, up to now, 453/454. Hence one finally arrives after all at the exhaustion and cessation of motion. The question is only finally solved when it has been shown how the heat radiated into space becomes utilisable again. The theory of the transformation of motion puts this question categorically, and it cannot be got over by postponing the answer or by evasion. That, however, with the posing of the question the conditions for its solution are simultaneously given c est autre chose. The transformation of motion and its indestructibility were first discovered hardly thirty years ago, and it is only quite recently that the consequences have been further-elaborated and worked out. The question as to what becomes of the apparently lost heat has, as it were, only been nettement pos e since 1867 (Clausius). No wonder that it has not yet been solved; it may still be a long time before we will arrive at a solution with our small means. But it will be solved just as surely as it is certain that there are no miracles in nature and that the original heat of the nebular ball is not communicated to it miraculously from outside the universe. The general assertion that a the total amount (die Masse) of motion is infinite, and hence inexhaustible, is of equally little assistance in overcoming the difficulties of each individual case; it too does not suffice for the revival of extinct universes, except in the cases provided for in the above hypotheses, which are always bound up with loss of force and are therefore only temporary cases. The cycle has not been traced and will not be until the possibility of the re-utilisation of the radiated heat is discovered. Clausius if correct proves that the universe has been created, ergo that matter is creatable, ergo that it is destructible, ergo that also force, or motion, is creatable and destructible, ergo that the whole theory of the conservation of force is nonsense, ergo that all his conclusions from it are also nonsense. Clausius second law, etc., however it may be formulated, shows energy as lost, qualitatively if not quantitatively. Entropy cannot be destroyed by natural means but it can certainly be created. The world clock has to be wound up, then it goes on running until it arrives at a state of equilibrium from which only a miracle can set it going again. The energy expended in winding has disappeared, at least qualitatively, and can only be restored by an impulse from outside. Hence, an impulse from outside was necessary at the beginning also, hence, the quantity of motion, or energy, existing in the universe was not always the same, hence, energy must have been created, i.e., it must be creatable, and therefore destructible. Ad absurdum! Conclusion for Thomson, Clausius, Loschmidt: The reversion consists in repulsion repelling itself and thereby returning out of the medium into extinct heavenly bodies. But just therein lies also the proof that repulsion is the really active aspect of motion, and attraction the passive aspect. In the motion of gases in the process of evaporation the motion of masses passes directly into molecular motion. Here, therefore, the transition has to be made. States of aggregation nodal points where quantitative change is transformed into qualitative. Cohesion already negative in gases transformation of attraction into repulsion, the latter only real in gas and ether (?). At absolute 0 no gas is possible, all motion of the molecules ceases; the slightest pressure, and hence their own attraction, forces them together. Consequently, a permanent gas is an impossibility. mv2 has been proved also for gas molecules by the kinetic theory of gases. Hence there is the same law for molecular motion as for the motion of masses: the difference between the two is here abolished. The kinetic theory has to show how molecules that strive upwards can at the same time exert a downward pressure and assuming the atmosphere as more or less permanent in relation to universal space how in spite of gravity they can move to a distance from the centre of the earth, but nevertheless, at a certain distance, although the force of gravity has decreased according to the square of the distance, are yet compelled by this force to come to a stop or to return. The kinetic theory of gases: What fills up the spaces between them? Ditto ether. Hence here the postulate of a matter that is not articulated into molecular or atomic cells. The character of mutual opposites belonging to theoretical development; from the horror vacui the transition was made at once to absolutely empty universal space, only afterwards the ether. Ether. If the ether offers resistance at all, it must also offer resistance to light, and so at a certain distance be impenetrable to light. That however ether propagates light, being its medium, necessarily involves that it should also offer resistance to light, otherwise light could not set it in vibration. This the solution of the controversial questions raised by M dler and mentioned by Lavrov [Lavrov]. Light and darkness are certainly the most conspicuous and definite opposites in nature; they have always served as a rhetorical phrase for religion and philosophy from the time of the fourth Gospel to the lumi res of the eighteenth century. Hence there exist dark light-rays, and the famous opposition between light and darkness disappears from natural science as an absolute opposition. Incidentally, the deepest darkness and the brightest, most glaring light have the same effect of dazzling our eyes, and in this way are for us identical. The fact is, the sun s rays have different effects according to the length of the vibration: those with the greatest wave-length communicate heat, those with medium wave length, light, and those with the shortest wave-length, chemical action (Secchi, p. 632 et seq.), the maxima of the three actions being closely approximated, the inner minima of the outer groups of rays, as regards their action, coming within the light-ray group. What is light and what is non-light depends on the structure of the eye. Night animals may be able to see even a part, not of the heat-rays, but of the chemical rays, since their eyes are adapted for shorter wave-lengths than ours. The difficulty disappears if one assumes, instead of three kinds, only a single kind of ray (and scientifically we know only one and everything else is a premature conclusion), which has different, but within narrow limits compatible, effects according to the wave-length. Hegel constructs the theory of light and colour out of pure thought, and in so doing falls into the grossest empiricism of home-bred philistine experience (although with a certain justification, since this point had not been cleared up at that time), e.g., where he adduces against Newton the mixtures of colours used by painters (p. 314, below). Electricity. In regard to Thomson s cock-and-bull stories, c.f. Hegel, pp. 346-47, where there is exactly the same thing. On the other hand, Hegel already conceives frictional electricity quite clearly as tension, in contrast to the fluid theory and the electrical matter theory (p. 347). When Coulomb says that particles of electricity repel each other inversely as the square of their distance, Thomson calmly takes this as proved (p. 358). Ditto (p. 366) the hypothesis that electricity consists of two fluids, positive and negative, whose particles repel each other. It is said (p. 360) that electricity in a charged body is retained merely by the pressure of the atmosphere. Faraday put the seat of electricity in the opposed poles of the atoms (or molecules, there is still confusion about it), and thus for the first time expressed the idea that electricity is not a fluid but a form of motion, a force (p. 378). What old Thomson cannot get into his head at all is that it is precisely the spark that is of a material nature! Already in 1822, Faraday had discovered that the momentary induced current the first as well as the second, reversed current participates more of the current produced by the discharge of the Leyden jar than that produced by the voltaic battery herein lay the whole secret (p. 385). The spark has been the subject of all sorts of cock-and-bull stories, which are now known to be special cases or illusions: the spark from a positive body is said to be a pencil of rays, brush, or cone, the point of which is the point of discharge; the negative spark, on the other hand, is said to be a star (p. 396). A short spark is said to be always white, a long one usually reddish or purplish. (Wonderful nonsense of Faraday on the spark, p. 400.) The spark drawn from the prime conductor [of an electric machine) by a metal sphere is said to be white, by the hand purple, by aqueous moisture red (p. 405). The spark, i.e., light, is said to be not inherent in electricity but merely the result of the compression of the air. That air is violently and suddenly compressed when an electric spark passes through it is proved by the experiment of Kinnersley in Philadelphia, according to which the spark produces a sudden rarefaction of the air in the tube, and drives the water into the tube (p. 407). In Germany, 30 years ago, Winterl and others believed that the spark, or electric light, was of the same nature with fire and arises by the union of two electricities. Against which Thomson seriously proves that the place where the two electricities unite is precisely that where the light is least, and that it is two-thirds from the positive and one-third from the negative end! (Pp. 409-10.) That fire is here still something quite mythical is obvious. With the same seriousness Thomson quotes the experiments of Dessaignes, according to which, with a rising barometer and falling temperature, glass, amber, silk, etc., become negatively electrified on being plunged into mercury, but positively electrified if the barometer is falling and the temperature rising, and in summer always become positive in impure, and always negative in pure, mercury; that in summer gold and various other metals become positive on warming and negative on cooling, the reverse being the case in winter; that they are highly electric with a high barometer and northerly wind, positive if the temperature is rising, negative if falling, etc. (p. 416). How matters stood in regard to heat: In order to produce thermo-electric effects, it is not necessary to apply heat. Any thing which alters the temperature in one part of the chain ... occasions a deviation in the declination of the magnet. For instance, the cooling of a metal by ice or evaporation of ether! (P. 419.) The electro-chemical theory (p. 438) is accepted as at least exceedingly ingenious and plausible. Fabroni and Wollaston had already long ago, and Faraday recently, asserted that voltaic electricity is the simple consequence of chemical processes, and Faraday had even given the correct explanation of the shifting of atoms taking place in the liquid, and established that the quantity of electricity is to be measured by the quantity of the electrolytic product. With the help of Faraday, Thomson arrives at the law Static and dynamic electricity. Static or frictional electricity is the putting into a state of tension of the electricity already existing in nature in the form of electricity but in an equilibrated, neutral state. Hence the removal of this tension if and in so far as the electricity during propagation can be conducted also occurs at one stroke, by a spark, which re-establishes the neutral state. Dynamic or voltaic electricity, on the other hand, is electricity produced by the conversion of chemical motion into electricity. Under certain definite conditions, it is produced by the solution of zinc, copper, etc. Here the tension is not acute, but chronic. At every moment new + and - electricity is produced from some other form of motion. and not already existing electricity separated into + and-. The process is a continuous one, and therefore too its result, electricity, does not take the form of instantaneous tension and discharge, but of a continuous current which can be reconverted at the poles into the chemical motion from which it arose, a process that is termed electrolysis. In this process, as well as in the production of electricity by chemical combination (in which electricity is liberated instead of heat, and in fact as much electricity as under other circumstances heat is set free, Guthrie, p. 210), the current can be traced in the liquid (exchange of atoms in adjacent molecules this is the current). This electricity, being of the nature of a current, for that very reason cannot be directly converted into static electricity. By means of induction, however, neutral electricity already existing as such can be de-neutralised. In the nature of things the induced electricity has to follow that which induces it, and therefore must likewise be of a flowing character. On the other hand, this obviously gives the possibility of condensing the current and of converting it into static electricity, or rather into a higher form that combines the property of a current with that of tension. This is solved by Ruhmkorff s machine. It provides an inductional electricity, which achieves this result. A pretty example of the dialectics of nature is the way in which according to present-day theory the repulsion of like magnetic poles is explained by the attraction of like electric currents, (Guthrie, p. 264.) Electro-chemistry. In describing the effect of the electric spark in chemical decomposition and synthesis, Wiedemann declares that this is more the concern of chemistry. In the same case the chemists declare that it is rather a matter which concerns physics. Thus at the point of contact of molecular and atomic science, both declare themselves incompetent, while it is precisely at this point that the greatest results are to be expected. Friction and impact produce an internal motion of the bodies concerned, molecular motion, differentiated as warmth, electricity, etc., according to circumstances. This motion, however, is only temporary: cessante causa cessat effectus. At a definite stage they all become transformed into a permanent molecular change, a chemical change. The motion of an actual chemically uniform matter ancient as it is fully corresponds to the childish view, widely held even up to Lavoisier, that the chemical affinity of two bodies depends on each one containing a common third body. (Kopp, Entwickelung, p. 105.) How old, convenient methods, adapted to previously customary practice, become transferred to other branches and there are a hindrance: in chemistry, the calculation of the composition of compounds in percentages, which was the most suitable method of all for making it impossible to discover the laws of constant proportion and multiple proportion in combination, and indeed did make them undiscoverable for long enough. The new epoch begins in chemistry with atomistics (hence Dalton, not Lavoisier, is the father of modern chemistry), and correspondingly in physics with the molecular theory (in a different form, but essentially representing only the other side of this process, with the discovery of the transformation of the forms of motion). The new atomistics is distinguished from all previous to it by the fact that it does not maintain (idiots excepted) that matter is merely discrete, but that the discrete parts at various stages (ether atoms, chemical atoms masses, heavenly bodies) are various nodal points which determine the various qualitative modes of existence of matter in general right down to weightlessness and repulsion. Transformation of quantity into quality: the simplest example oxygen and ozone, where 2:3 produces quite different properties, even in regard to smell. Chemistry likewise explains the other allotropic bodies merely by a difference in the number of atoms in the molecule. The significance of names. In organic chemistry the significance of a body, hence also its name, is no longer determined merely by its composition, but rather by its position in the series to which it belongs. If we find, therefore, that a body belongs to such a series, its old name becomes an obstacle to understanding it and must be replaced by a series name (paraffins, etc.).

Notes and Fragments by Dialectics of Nature 1883

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1883/don/ch07f.htm

Reaction. Mechanical, physical (alias heat, etc.) reaction is exhausted with each occurrence of reaction. Chemical reaction alters the composition of the reacting body and is only renewed if a further quantity of the latter is added. Only the organic body reacts independently of course within its sphere of power (sleep), and assuming the supply of nourishment but this supply of nourishment is effective only after it has been assimilated, not immediately as at lower stages, so that here the organic body has an independent power of reaction, the new reaction must be mediated by it. Life and death. Already no physiology is held to be scientific if it does not consider death as an essential element of life (note, Hegel, Enzyklop die, I, pp. 152-53), the negation of life as being essentially contained in life itself, so that life is always thought of in relation to its necessary result, death, which is always contained in it in germ. The dialectical conception of life is nothing more than this. But for anyone who has once understood this, all talk of the immortality of the soul is done away with. Death is either the dissolution of the organic body, leaving nothing behind but the chemical constituents that formed its substance, or it leaves behind a vital principle, more or less the soul, that then survives all living organisms, and not only human beings. Here, therefore, by means of dialectics, simply becoming clear about the nature of life and death suffices to abolish an ancient superstition. Living means dying. Generatio quivoca.[spontaneous generation] All investigations hitherto amount to the following: in fluids containing organic matter in decomposition and accessible to the air, lower organisms arise, Protista, Fungi, Infusoria. Where do they come from? Have they arisen by generatio quivoca, or from germs brought in from the atmosphere? Consequently the investigation is limited to a quite narrow field, to the question of plasmogony. The assumption that new living organisms can arise by the decomposition of others belongs essentially to the epoch of immutable species. At that time men found themselves compelled to assume the origin of all organisms, even the most complicated, by original generation from non-living materials, and if they did not want to resort to the aid of an act of creation, they easily arrived at the view that this process is more readily explicable given a formative material already derived from the organic world; no one any longer believed in the production of a mammal directly from inorganic matter by chemical means. This assumption, however, directly conflicts with the present state of science. By the analysis of the process of decomposition in dead organic bodies chemistry proves that at each successive step this process necessarily produces products that are more and more dead, that are more and more close to the inorganic world, products that are less and less capable of being used by the organic world, and that this process can be given another direction, such utilisation being able to occur only when these products of decomposition are absorbed early enough in an appropriate, already existing, organism. It is precisely the most essential vehicle of cell-formation, protein, that decomposes first of all, and so far it has never been built up again. Still more. The organisms whose original generation from organic fluids is the question at issue in these investigations, while being of a comparatively low order, are nevertheless definitely differentiated, bacteria, yeasts, etc., with a life-cycle composed of various phases and in part, as in the case of the Infusoria, equipped with fairly well developed organs. They are all at least unicellular. But ever since we have been acquainted with the structureless Monera, it has become foolish to desire to explain the origin of even a single cell directly from dead matter instead of from structureless living protein, to believe it is possible by means of a little stinking water to force nature to accomplish in twenty-four hours what it has cost her thousands of years to bring about. Pasteur s experiments in this direction are useless; for those who believe in this possibility he will never be able to prove the impossibility by these experiments alone, but they are important because they furnish much enlightenment on these organisms, their life, their germs, etc. Liebig s statement to Wagner towards the end of his life (1868): Liebig said further (Wagner believes November 1868) Helmholtz (Preface to Thomson s Handbuch der theoretischen Physik, German edition, part II): Wagner: Worth noting is the proof how much of a dilettante Liebig was in biology, although the latter is a science bordering on chemistry. Comments. The above hypothesis of eternal life and of importation presupposes: Ad. 1. Liebig s assertion that carbon compounds are just as eternal as carbon itself, is doubtful, if not false. (a) Is carbon simple? If not, it is as such not eternal. (b) The compounds of carbon are eternal in the sense that under the same conditions of mixture, temperature, pressure, electric potential, etc., they are always reproduced. But that, for instance, only the simplest carbon compounds, CO2 or CH4, should be eternal in the sense that they exist at all times and more or less in all places, and not rather that they are continually produced anew and pass out of existence again in fact, out of the elements and into the elements has hitherto not been asserted. If living protein is eternal in the same sense as other carbon compounds, then it must not only continually be dissolved into its elements, as is well known to happen, but it must also continually be produced anew from the elements and without the collaboration of previously existing protein and that is the exact opposite of the result at which Liebig arrives. (c) Protein is the most unstable carbon compound known to us. It decomposes as soon as it loses the capacity of carrying out the functions peculiar to it, which we call life, and it is inherent in its nature that this incapacity should sooner or later make its appearance. And it is just this compound which is supposed to be eternal and able to endure all the changes of temperature, pressure, lack of nourishment, and air, etc., in space, although even its upper temperature limit is so low less than 100 C! The conditions for the existence of protein are infinitely more complicated than those of any other known carbon compound, because not only physical and chemical functions, but in addition nutritive and respiratory functions, enter, requiring a medium which is narrowly delimited, physically and chemically and is it this medium that one must suppose has maintained itself from eternity under all possible changes? Liebig prefers, ceteris paribus, the simpler of two hypotheses, but a thing may appear very simple and yet be very complicated. The assumption of innumerable continuous series of living protein bodies, tracing their descent from one another through all eternity, and which under all circumstances always leave sufficient over for the stock to remain well assorted, is the most complicated assumption possible. Moreover, the atmospheres of the heavenly bodies, and especially nebular atmospheres, were originally glowing hot and therefore no place for protein bodies; hence in the last resort space must serve as the great reservoir a reservoir in which there is neither air nor nourishment, and with a temperature at which certainly no protein can function or maintain itself! Ad. 2. The vibrios, micrococci, etc., which are referred to here, are beings already considerably differentiated protein granules that have excreted an outer membrane, but no nucleus. The series of protein bodies capable of development, however, forms a nucleus first of all and becomes a cell the cell membrane is then a further advance (Am ba Sph rococcus). Hence the organisms under consideration here belong to a series which, by all previous analogy, proceeds barrenly into a blind alley, and they cannot be numbered among the ancestors of the higher organisms. What Helmholtz says of the sterility of attempts to produce life artificially is pure childishness. Life is the mode of existence of protein bodies, the essential element of which consists in continual metabolic interchange with the natural environment outside them, and which ceases with the cessation of this metabolism, bringing about the decomposition of the protein. [Such metabolism can also occur in the case of inorganic bodies and in the long run it occurs everywhere, since chemical reactions take place, even if extremely slowly, everywhere. The difference, however, is that inorganic bodies are destroyed by this metabolism, while in organic bodies it is the necessary condition for their existence. Note by Engels.] If success is ever attained in preparing protein bodies chemically, they will undoubtedly exhibit the phenomena of life and carry out metabolism, however weak and short-lived they may be. But it is certain that such bodies could at most have the form of the very crudest Monera, and probably much lower forms, but by no means the form of organisms that have become differentiated by an evolution lasting thousands of years, and in which the cell membrane has become separated from the contents and a definite inherited form assumed. So long, however, as we know no more of the chemical composition of protein than we do at present, and therefore for probably another hundred years to come cannot think of its artificial preparation, it is ridiculous to complain that all our efforts, etc., have failed! Against the above assertion that metabolism is the characteristic activity of protein bodies may be put the objection of the growth of Traube s artificial cells. But here there is merely unaltered absorption of a liquid by endosmosis, while metabolism consists in the absorption of substances, the chemical composition of which is altered, which are assimilated by the organism, and the residua of which are excreted together with the decomposition products of the organism itself resulting from the life process. [N.B. Just as we have to speak of invertebrate vertebrates, so also here the unorganised, formless, undifferentiated granule of protein is termed an organism dialectically this is permissible because just as the vertebral column is implicit in the notochord so in the protein granule on its first origin the whole infinite series of higher organisms lies included in itself as if in embryo Note by Engels] The significance of Traube s cells lies in the fact that they show endosmosis and growth as two things which can be produced also in inorganic nature and without any carbon. The newly arisen protein granule must have had the capacity of nourishing itself from oxygen, carbon dioxide, ammonia, and some of the salts dissolved in the surrounding water. Organic nutritive substances were not present, for the granules surely could not devour one another. This proves how high above them are the present-day Monera, even without nuclei, living on diatoms, etc., and therefore presupposing a whole series of differentiated organisms. Dialectics of Nature references. Nature No. 294 et seq. Allman on Infusoria. Unicellular character, important. Croll on Ice Periods and Geological Time. Nature No. 326, Tyndall on Generatio. Specific decay and fermentation experiments. Protista. 1. Non-cellular, begin with a simple granule of protein which extends and withdraws pseudopodia in one form or another, including the Monera. The Monera of the present day are certainly very different from the original forms, since for the most part they live on organic matter, swallowing diatoms and Infusoria (i.e., bodies higher than themselves and which only arose after them), and, as H ckel s plate 1 shows, have a developmental history and pass through the form of non-cellular ciliate swarm-spores. The tendency towards form which characterises all protein bodies is already evident here. This tendency is more prominent in the non-cellular Foraminifera, which excrete highly artistic shells (anticipating colonies? corals, etc.) and anticipate the higher molluscs in form just as the tubular Alg (Siphone ) anticipate the trunk, stem, root, and leaf form of higher plants, although they are merely structureless protein. Hence Protam ba is to be separated from Am ba. [in the margin: Individualisation small, they divide and also fuse."] 2. On the one hand there arises the distinction of skin (ectosarc) and medullary layer (endosarc) in the sun animalcule Actinophrys sol (Nicholson, p. 49). The epidermal layer puts out pseudopodia (in Protomyxa aurantiaca, this stage is already a transitional one, see H ckel, plate I). Along this line of evolution protein does not appear to have got very far. 3. On the other hand, the nucleus and nucleolus become differentiated in the protein naked Am b . From now on the development of form proceeds apace. Similarly, the development of the young cell in the organism, c.f. Wundt on this (at the beginning). In Am ba Sph rococcus, as in Protomyxa, the formation of the cell membrane is only a transitional phase, but even here there is already the beginning of the circulation in the contractile vacuole. (H ckel, p. 380.) Sometimes we find either a shell of sand grains stuck together (Difflugia, Nicholson, p. 47) as in worms and insect larv , sometimes a genuinely excreted shell. Finally, 4. The cell with a permanent cell membrane. According to H ckel (p. 382), out of this has arisen, depending on the hardness of the cell membrane, either plant, or in the case of a soft membrane, animal (? it certainly cannot be conceived so generally). With the cell membrane, definite and at the same time plastic form makes its appearance. Here again a distinction between simple cell membrane and excreted shell. But (in contrast to No. 3) the putting out of pseudopodia stops with this cell membrane and this shell. Repetition of earlier forms (ciliate swarm-spores) and diversity of form. The transition is provided by the Labyrinthule (H ckel, p. 385), which deposit their pseudopodia outside and creep about in this network with alteration of the normal spindle shape kept within definite limits. The Gregarin anticipate the mode of life of higher parasites some are already no longer single cells but chains of cells (H ckel, p. 451), but only containing 2-3 cells a weak beginning. The highest development of unicellular organisms is in the Infusoria, in so far as these are really unicellular. Here a considerable differentiation (see Nicholson). Once again colonies and zoophytes (Epistylis). Among unicellular plants likewise a high development of form (Desmidiace , H ckel, p. 410). [In the margin: Rudiment of higher differentiation"] 5. The next advance is the union of several cells into one body, no longer colony. First of all, the Katallakt of H ckel, Magosph ra Planula (H ckel, p. 384), where the union of the cells is only a phase in development. But here also there are already no pseudopodia (whether there are any as a transitional phase H ckel does not state exactly). On the other hand, the Radiolaria, also undifferentiated masses of cells, have retained their pseudopodia and have developed to the highest extent the geometric regularity of the shell, which plays a part even among the genuinely noncellular rhizopods. The protein surrounds itself, so to speak, with its crystalline form. 6. Magosph ra Planula forms the transition to the true Planula and Gastrula, etc. Further details in H ckel (p. 452 et seq.). Bathybius. The stones in its flesh are proof that the original form of protein, still lacking any differentiation of form, already bears within it the germ of and capacity for skeletal formation. The individual. This concept also has been dissolved into something purely relative. Cormus, colony, tapewormon the other hand, cell and metamere as individuals in a certain sense (anthropogeny and morphology). The whole of organic nature is one continuous proof of the identity or inseparability of form and content. Morphological and physiological phenomena, form and function, mutually determine one another. The differentiation of form (the cell) determines differentiation of substance into muscle, skin, bone, epithelium, etc., and the differentiation of substance in turn determines difference of form. Repetition of morphological forms at all stages of evolution: cell forms (the two essential ones already in Gastrula) metamere formation at a certain stage: annelids, arthropods, vertebrates. In the tadpoles of amphibians the primitive form of ascidian larv is repeated. Various forms of marsupials, which recur among placentals (even counting only existing marsupials). For the entire evolution of organism the law of acceleration according to the square of the distance in time from the point of departure is to be accepted. Cf. H ckel, Sch pfungsgeschichte and Anthropogenie, the organic forms corresponding to the various geological periods. The higher, the more rapid the process. The Darwinian theory to be demonstrated as the practical proof of Hegel s account of the inner connection between necessity and chance. The struggle for existence. Above all this must be strictly limited to the struggles resulting from plant and animal over-population, which do in fact occur at certain stages of plant and lower animal life. But one must keep sharply distinct from it the conditions in which species alter, old ones die out and newly evolved ones take their place, without this over-population: e.g., on the migration of animals and plants into new regions where new conditions of climate, soil, etc., bring about the alteration. If there the individuals which become adapted survive and develop into a new species by continually increasing adaptation, while the other more stable individuals die away and finally die out, and with them the imperfect intermediate stages, then this can and does proceed without any Malthusianism, and if the latter should occur here at all it makes no change to the process, at most it can accelerate it. Similarly with the gradual alteration of the geographical, climatic, etc., conditions in a given region (drying up of Central Asia for instance). Whether the members of the animal or plant population there exert pressure on one another is a matter of indifference; the process of evolution of the organisms that is determined by this alteration proceeds all the same. It is the same for sexual selection, in which case, too, Malthusianism is quite unconcerned. Hence also H ckel s adaptation and heredity can bring about the whole process of evolution, without need for selection and Malthusianism. Darwin s mistake lies precisely in lumping together in natural selection or the survival of the fittest two absolutely separate things: The main thing: that each advance in organic evolution is at the same time a regression, fixing one-sided evolution and excluding the possibility of evolution in many other directions. This, however, a basic law. The struggle for life. Until Darwin, what was stressed by his present adherents was precisely the harmonious cooperative working of organic nature, how the plant kingdom supplies animals with nourishment and oxygen, and animals supply plants with manure, ammonia, and carbonic acid. Hardly was Darwin recognised before these same people saw everywhere nothing but struggle. Both views are justified within narrow limits, but both are equally one-sided and prejudiced. The interaction of bodies in nonliving nature includes both harmony and collisions, that of living bodies conscious and unconscious co-operation as well as conscious and unconscious struggle. Hence, even in regard to nature, it is not permissible one-sidedly to inscribe only struggle on one s banners. But it is absolutely childish to desire to sum up the whole manifold wealth of historical evolution and complexity in the meagre and one-sided phrase struggle for existence. That says less than nothing. The whole Darwinian theory of the struggle for existence is simply the transference from society to organic nature of Hobbes theory of bellum omnium contra omnes and of the bourgeois economic theory of competition, as well as the Malthusian theory of population. When once this feat has been accomplished (the unconditional justification for which, especially as regards the Malthusian theory, is still very questionable), it is very easy to transfer these theories back again from natural history to the history of society, and altogether too naive to maintain that thereby these assertions have been proved as eternal natural laws of society. Let us accept for a moment the phrase struggle for existence, for argument s sake. The most that the animal can achieve is to collect; man produces, he prepares the means of life, in the widest sense of the words, which without him nature would not have produced. This makes impossible any unqualified transference of the laws of life in animal societies to human society. Production soon brings it about that the so-called struggle for existence no longer turns on pure means of existence, but on means of enjoyment and development. Here where the means of development are socially produced the categories taken from the animal kingdom are already totally inapplicable. Finally, under the capitalist mode of production, production reaches such a high level that society can no longer consume the means of life, enjoyment and development that have been produced, because for the great mass of producers access to these means is artificially and forcibly barred; and therefore every ten years a crisis restores the equilibrium by destroying not only the means of life, enjoyment and development that have been produced, but also a great part of the productive forces themselves. Hence the so-called struggle for existence assumes the form: to protect the products and productive forces produced by bourgeois capitalist society against the destructive, ravaging effect of this capitalist social order, by taking control of social production and distribution out of the hands of the ruling capitalist class, which has become incapable of this function, and transferring it to the producing masses and that is the socialist revolution. The conception of history as a series of class struggles is already much richer in content and deeper than merely reducing it to weakly distinguished phases of the struggle for existence. Vertebrates. Their essential character: the grouping of the whole body about the nervous system. Thereby the development of self-consciousness, etc., becomes possible. In all other animals the nervous system is a secondary affair, here it is the basis of the whole organisation; the nervous system, when developed to a certain extent by posterior elongation of the head ganglion of the worms takes possession of the whole body and organises it according to its needs. When Hegel makes the transition from life to cognition by means of propagation (reproduction), there is to be found in this the germ of the theory of evolution, that, organic life once given, it must evolve by the development of the generations to a genus of thinking beings. What Hegel calls reciprocal action is the organic body, which, therefore, also forms the transition to consciousness, i.e., from necessity to freedom, to the idea. See Logik, II, conclusion. Rudiments in nature. Insect states (the ordinary ones do not go beyond purely natural conditions), here even a social rudiment. Ditto productive animals with tools (bees, etc., beavers), but still only subsidiary things and without total effect. Even earlier: colonies of corals and Hydrozoa, where the individual is at most an intermediate stage and the fleshy community mostly a stage of the full development. See Nicholson. Similarly, the Infusoria, the highest, and in part very much differentiated, form which a single cell can achieve. Work. The mechanical theory of heat has transferred this category from economics into physics (for physiologically it is still a long way from having been scientifically determined), but in so doing it becomes defined in quite a different way, as seen even from the fact that only a very slight, subordinate part of economic work (lifting of loads, etc.) can be expressed in kilogram-metres. Nevertheless, there is an inclination to re-transfer the thermodynamical definition of work to the sciences from which the category was derived, with a different determination. For instance, without further ado, to identify it crudely with physiological work, as in Fick and Wislicenus Faulhorn experiment, in which the lifting of a human body, of say 60 kgs., to a height of say 2,000 metres, i.e., 120,000 kilogram-metres, is supposed to express the physiological work done. In the physiological work done, however, it makes an enormous difference how this lifting is effected: whether by positive lifting of the load, by mounting vertical ladders, or whether along a road or stair with 45o slope (=militarily impracticable terrain), or along a road with a slope of 1/18, hence a length of about 36 kms. (but this is questionable, if the same time is allowed in all cases). At any rate, however, in all practicable cases a forward motion also is combined with the lifting, and indeed where the road is quite level this is fairly considerable and as physiological work it cannot be put equal to zero. In some places there even appears to be not a little desire to re-import the thermodynamical category of work back into economics (as with the Darwinists and the struggle for existence), the result of which would be nothing but nonsense. Let someone try to convert any skilled labour into kilogram-metres and then to determine wages on this basis! Physiologically considered, the human body contains organs which in their totality, from one aspect, can be regarded as a thermodynamical machine, where heat is supplied and converted into motion. But even if one presupposes constant conditions as regards the other bodily organs, it is questionable whether physiological work done, even lifting, can be at once fully expressed in kilogram-metres, since within the body internal work is performed at the same time which does not appear in the result. For the body is not a steam-engine, which only undergoes friction and wear and tear. Physiological work is only Possible with continued chemical changes in the body itself, depending also on the process of respiration and the work of the heart. Along with every muscular contraction or relaxation, chemical changes occur in the nerves and muscles, and these changes cannot be treated as parallel to those of coal in a steam-engine. One can, of course, compare two instances of physiological work that have taken place under other wise identical conditions, but one cannot measure the physical work of a man according to the work of a steam engine, etc.; their external results, yes, but not the processes themselves without considerable reservations. (All this has to be thoroughly revised.)

Notes and Fragments for Dialectics of Nature. Engels 1883

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THOMSON and Tait, Nat. Philos., I, p. 191 (paragraph .276): The average plane of the former is the ecliptic; and therefore the axes of the two moments are inclined to one another at the average angle of 23 27.5', which, as we are neglecting the sun's influence on the plane of the moon's motion, may be taken as the actual inclination of the two axes at present. The resultant, or whole moment of momentum, is therefore 5.38 times that of the earth's present rotation, and its axis is inclined 19 13' to the axis of the earth. Hence the ultimate tendency of the tides is to reduce the earth and moon to a simple uniform rotation with this resultant moment round this resultant axis, as if they were two parts of one rigid body: in which condition the moon's distance would be increased (approximately) in the ratio 1:1.46, being the ratio of the square of the present moment of momentum of the centres of inertia to the square of the whole moment of momentum; and the period of revolution in the ratio 1:1.77, being that of the cubes of the same quantities. The distance would therefore be increased to 847,100 miles, and the period lengthened to 48.36 days. Were there no other body in the universe but the earth and the moon, these two bodies might go on moving thus for ever, in circular orbits round their common centre of inertia, and the earth rotating about its axis in the same period, so as always to turn the same face to the moon, and, therefore, to have all the liquids at its surface at rest relatively to the solid. But the existence of the sun would prevent any such state of things from being permanent. There would be solar tides - twice high water and twice low water - in the period of the earth's revolution relatively to the sun (that is to say, twice in the solar day, or, which would be the same thing, the month). This could not go on without loss of energy by fluid friction. It is not easy to trace the whole course of the disturbance in the earth's and moon's motions which this cause would produce, but its ultimate effect must be to bring the earth, moon, and sun to rotate round their common centre of inertia, like parts of one rigid body." Kant, in 1754, was the first to put forward the view that the rotation of the earth is retarded by tidal friction and that this effect will only reach its conclusion "when its (the earth's) surface will be at relative rest in relation to the moon, i.e. when it will rotate on its axis in the same period that the moon takes to revolve round the earth, and consequently will always turn the same side to the latter." He held the view that this retardation had its origin in tidal friction alone, arising, therefore, from the presence of fluid masses on the earth: This more general conception of the matter is just that which has been developed by Thomson and Tait. The attraction of the moon and sun affects not only the fluids of the terrestrial body or its surface, but the whole mass of the earth in general in a manner that hinders the rotation of the earth. As long as the period of the earth's rotation does not coincide with the period of the moon's revolution round the earth, so long the attraction of the moon - to deal with this alone first of all - has the effect of bringing the two periods closer and closer together. If the rotational period of the (relative) central body were longer than the period of revolution of. the satellite, the former would be gradually lengthened; if it were shorter, as is the case for the earth, it would be slowed down. But neither in the one case will kinetic energy be created out of nothing, nor in the other will it be annihilated. In the first case, the satellite would approach closer to the central body and shorten its period of revolution, in the second it would increase its distance from it and acquire a longer period of revolution. In the first case, the satellite by approaching the central body loses exactly as much potential energy as the central body gains in kinetic energy from the accelerated rotation; in the second case the satellite, by increasing its distance gains exactly the same amount of potential energy as the central body loses in kinetic energy of rotation. The total amount of dynamic energy, potential and kinetic, present in the earth-moon system remains the same; the system is fully conservative. It is seen that this theory is entirely independent of the physico-chemical constitution of the bodies concerned. It is derived from the general laws of motion of free heavenly bodies, the connection between them being produced by attraction in proportion to their masses and inverse proportion to the square of the distances between them. The theory has obviously arisen as a generalisation of Kant's theory of tidal friction, and is even presented here by Thomson and Tait as its substantiation on mathematical lines. But in reality - and remarkably enough the authors have simply no inkling of this - in reality it excludes the special case of tidal friction. Friction is hindrance to the motion of mass, and for centuries it was regarded as the destruction of such motion, and therefore of kinetic energy. We now know that friction and impact are the two forms in which kinetic energy is converted into molecular energy, into heat. In all friction, therefore, kinetic energy as such is lost in order to re-appear, not as potential energy in the sense of dynamics, but as molecular motion in the definite form of heat. The kinetic energy lost by friction is, therefore, in the first place really lost for the dynamic aspects of the system concerned. It can only become dynamically effective again if it is re-converted from the form of heat into kinetic energy. How then does the matter stand in the case of tidal friction? It is obvious that here also the whole of the kinetic energy communicated to the masses of water on the earth's surface by lunar attraction is converted into heat, whether by friction of the water particles among themselves in virtue of the viscosity of the water, or by friction at the rigid surface of the earth and the comminution of rocks which stand up against the tidal motion. Of this heat there is re-converted into kinetic energy only the infinitesimally small part that contributes to evaporation at the surface of the water. But even this infinitesimally small amount of kinetic energy, leaving the total system earth-moon at a part of the earth's surface, remains first of all subject to the conditions prevailing at the earth's surface, and these conditions lead to all energy active there reaching one and the same final destiny: final conversion into heat and radiation into space. Consequently, to the extent that tidal friction indisputably acts in an impeding manner on the rotation of the earth, the kinetic energy used for this purpose is absolutely lost to the dynamic system earth-moon. It can therefore not re-appear within this system as dynamic potential energy. In other words, of the kinetic energy expended in impeding the earth's rotation by means of the attraction of the moon, only that part that acts on the solid mass of the earth's body can entirely re-appear as dynamic potential energy, and hence be compensated for by a corresponding increase of the distance of the moon. On the other hand, the part that acts on the fluid masses of the earth can do so only in so far as it does not set these masses themselves into a motion opposite in direction to that of the earth's rotation, for such a motion is wholly converted into heat and is finally lost to the system by radiation. What holds good for tidal friction at the surface of the earth is equally valid for the so often hypothetically assumed tidal friction of a supposed fluid nucleus of the earth's interior. The most peculiar part of the matter is that Thomson and Tait do not notice that in order to establish the theory of tidal friction they are putting forward a theory that proceeds from the tacit assumption that the earth is an entirely rigid body, and so exclude any possibility of tidal flow and hence also of tidal friction.

1883-Dialectics of Nature-ch8

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LABOUR is the source of all wealth, the economists assert. It is this next to nature, which supplies it with the material that it converts into wealth. But it is also infinitely more than this. It is the primary basic condition for all human existence, and this to such an extent that, in a sense, we have to say that labour created man himself. Many hundreds of thousands of years ago, during an epoch, not yet definitely determined, of that period of the earth's history which geologists call the Tertiary period, most likely towards the end of it, a specially highly-developed race of anthropoid apes lived somewhere in the tropical zone - probably on a great continent that has now sunk to the bottom of the Indian Ocean. Darwin has given us an approximate description of these ancestors of ours. They were completely covered with hair, they had beards and pointed ears, and they lived in bands in the trees. Almost certainly as an immediate consequence of their mode of life, for in climbing the hands fulfil quite different functions from the feet, these apes when moving on level ground began to drop the habit of using their hands and to adopt a more and more erect posture in walking. This was the decisive step in the transition from ape to man. All anthropoid apes of the present day can stand erect and move about on their feet alone, but only in case of need and in a very clumsy way. Their natural gait is in a half-erect posture and includes the use of the hands. The majority rest the knuckles of the fist on the ground and, with legs drawn up, swing the body through their long arms, much as a cripple moves with the aid of crutches. In general, we can to-day still observe among apes all the transition stages from walking on all fours to walking on two legs. But for none of them has the latter method become more than a makeshift. For erect gait among our hairy ancestors to have become first the rule and in time a necessity presupposes that in the meantime the hands became more and more devoted to other functions. Even among the apes there already prevails a certain separation in the employment of the hands and feet. As already mentioned, in climbing the hands are used differently from the feet. The former serve primarily for collecting and holding food, as already occurs in the use of the fore paws among lower mammals. Many monkeys use their hands to build nests for themselves in the trees or even, like the chimpanzee, to construct roofs between the branches for protection against the weather. With their hands they seize hold of clubs to defend themselves against enemies, or bombard the latter with fruits and stones. In captivity, they carry out with their hands a number of simple operations copied from human beings. But it is just. here that one sees how great is the gulf between the undeveloped hand of even the most anthropoid of apes and the human hand that has been highly perfected by the labour of hundreds of thousands of years. The number and general arrangement of the bones and muscles are the same in both; but the hand of the lowest savage can perform hundreds of operations that no monkey's hand can imitate. No simian hand has ever fashioned even the crudest stone knife. At first, therefore, the operations, for which our ancestors gradually learned to adapt their hands during the many thousands of years of transition from ape to man, could only have been very simple. The lowest savages, even those in whom a regression to a more animal-like condition, with a simultaneous physical degeneration, can be assumed to have occurred, are nevertheless far superior to these transitional beings. Before the first flint could be fashioned into a knife by human hands, a period of time must probably have elapsed in comparison with which the historical period known to us appears insignificant. But the decisive step was taken: the hand became free and could henceforth attain ever greater dexterity and skill, and the greater flexibility thus acquired was inherited and increased from generation to generation. Thus the hand is not only the organ of labour, it is also the product of labour. Only by labour, by adaptation to ever new operations, by inheritance of the resulting special development of muscles, ligaments, and, over longer periods of time, bones as well, and by the ever-renewed employment of these inherited improvements in new, more and more complicated operations, has the human hand attained the high degree of perfection that has enabled it to conjure into being the pictures of Raphael, the statues of Thorwaldsen, the music of Paganini. But the hand did not exist by itself. It was only one member of an entire, highly complex organism. And what benefited the hand, benefited also the whole body it served; and this in two ways. In the first place, the body benefited in consequence of the law of correlation of growth, as Darwin called it. According to this law, particular forms of the individual parts of an organic being are always bound up with certain forms of other parts that apparently have no connection with the first. Thus all animals that have red blood cells without a cell nucleus, and in which the neck is connected to the first vertebra by means of a double articulation (condyles), also without exception possess lacteal glands for suckling their young. Similarly cloven hooves in mammals are regularly associated with the possession of a multiple stomach for rumination. Changes in certain forms involve changes in the form of other parts of the body, although we cannot explain this connection. Perfectly white cats with blue eyes are always, or almost always, deaf. The gradual perfecting of the human hand, and the development that keeps pace with it in the adaptation of the feet for erect gait, has undoubtedly also, by virtue of such correlation, reacted on other parts of the organism. However, this action has as yet been much too little investigated for us to be able to do more here than to state the fact in general terms. Much more important is the direct, demonstrable reaction of the development of the hand on the rest of the organism. As already said, our simian ancestors were gregarious; it is obviously impossible to seek the derivation of man, the most social of all animals, from non- gregarious immediate ancestors. The mastery over nature, which begins with the development of the hand, with labour, widened man's horizon at every new advance. He was continually discovering new, hitherto unknown, properties of natural objects. On the other hand, the development of labour necessarily helped to bring the members of society closer together by multiplying cases of mutual support, joint activity, and by making clear the advantage of this joint activity to each individual. In short, men in the making arrived at the point where they had something to say to one another. The need led to the creation of its organ; the undeveloped larynx of the ape was slowly but surely transformed by means of gradually increased modulation, and the organs of the mouth gradually learned to pronounce one articulate letter after another. Comparison with animals proves that this explanation of the origin of language from and in the process of labour is the only correct one. The little that even the most highly- developed animals need to communicate to one another can be communicated even without the aid of articulate speech. In a state of nature, no animal feels its inability to speak or to understand human speech. It is quite different when it has been tamed by man. The dog and the horse, by association with man, have developed such a good ear for articulate speech that they easily learn to understand any language within the range of their circle of ideas. Moreover they have acquired the capacity for feelings, such as affection for man, gratitude, etc., which were previously foreign to them. Anyone who has had much to do with such animals will hardly be able to escape the conviction that there are plenty of cases where they now feel their inability to speak is a defect, although, unfortunately, it can no longer be remedied owing to their vocal organs being specialised in a definite direction. However, where the organ exists, within certain limits even this inability disappears. The buccal organs of birds are of course radically different from those of man, yet birds are the only animals that can learn to speak; and it is the bird with the most hideous voice, the parrot, that speaks best of all. It need not be objected that the parrot does not understand what it says. It is true that for the sheer pleasure of talking and associating with human beings, the parrot will chatter for hours at a time, continuing to repeat its whole vocabulary. But within the limits of its circle of ideas it can also learn to understand what it is saying. Teach a parrot swear words in such a way that it gets an idea of their significance (one of the great amusements of sailors returning from the tropics); on teasing it one will soon discover that it knows how to use its swear words just as correctly as a Berlin costermonger. Similarly with begging for titbits. First comes labour, after it, and then side by side with it, articulate speech - these were the two most essential stimuli under the influence of which the brain of the ape gradually changed into that of man, which for all its similarity to the former is far larger and more perfect. Hand in hand with the development of the brain went the development of its most immediate instruments - the sense organs. Just as the gradual development of speech is inevitably accompanied by a corresponding refinement of the organ of hearing, so the development of the brain as a whole is accompanied by a refinement of all the senses. The eagle sees much farther than man, but the human eye sees considerably more in things than does the eye of the eagle. The dog has a far keener sense of smell than man, but it does not distinguish a hundredth part of the odours that for man are definite features of different things. And the sense of touch, which the ape hardly possesses in its crudest initial form, has been developed side by side with the development of the human hand itself, through the medium of labour. The reaction on labour and speech of the development of the brain and its attendant senses, of the increasing clarity of consciousness, power of abstraction and of judgement, gave an ever-renewed impulse to the further development of both labour and speech. This further development did not reach its conclusion when man finally became distinct from the monkey, but, on the whole, continued to make powerful progress, varying in degree and direction among different peoples and at different times, and here and there even interrupted by a local or temporary regression. This further development has been strongly urged forward, on the one hand, and has been guided along more definite directions on the other hand, owing to a new element which came into play with the appearance of fully-fledged man, viz. society. Hundreds of thousands of years - of no greater significance in the history of the earth than one second in the life of man - certainly elapsed before human society arose out of a band of tree-climbing monkeys. Yet it did finally appear. And what do we find once more as the characteristic difference between the band of monkeys and human society ? Labour. The ape horde was satisfied to browse over the feeding area determined for it by geographical conditions or the degree of resistance of neighbouring hordes; it undertook migrations and struggles to win new feeding grounds, but it was incapable of extracting from the area which supplied it with food more than the region offered in its natural state, except, perhaps, that the horde unconsciously fertilised the soil with its own excrements. As soon as all possible feeding grounds were occupied, further increase of the monkey population could not occur; the number of animals could at best remain stationary. But all animals waste a great deal of food, and, in addition, destroy in embryo the next generation of the food supply. Unlike the hunter, the wolf does not spare the doe which would provide it with young deer in the next year; the goats in Greece, which graze down the young bushes before they can grow up, have eaten bare all the mountains of the country. This "predatory economy" of animals plays an important part in the gradual transformation of species by forcing them to adapt themselves to other than the usual food, thanks to which their blood acquires a different chemical composition and the whole physical constitution gradually alters, while species that were once established die out. There is no doubt that this predatory economy has powerfully contributed to the gradual evolution of our ancestors into men. In a race of apes that far surpassed all others in intelligence and adaptability, this predatory economy could not help leading to a continual increase in the number of plants used for food and to the devouring of more and more edible parts of these plants. In short, it led to the food becoming more and more varied, hence also the substances entering the body, the chemical premises for the transition to man. But all that was not yet labour in the proper sense of the word. The labour process begins with the making of tools. And what are the most ancient tools that we find - the most ancient judging by the heirlooms of prehistoric man that have been discovered, and by the mode of life of the earliest historical peoples and of the most primitive of contemporary savages? They are hunting and fishing implements, the former at the same time serving as weapons. But hunting and fishing presuppose the transition from an exclusively vegetable diet to the concomitant use of meat, and this is an important step in the transition to man. A meat diet contains in an almost ready state the most essential ingredients required by the organism for its metabolism. It shortened the time required, not only for digestion, but also for the other vegetative bodily processes corresponding to those of plant life, and thus gained further time, material, and energy for the active manifestation of animal life in the proper sense of the word. And the further that man in the making became removed from the plant kingdom, the higher he rose also over animals. Just as becoming accustomed to a plant diet side by side with meat has converted wild cats and dogs into the servants of man, so also adaptation to a flesh diet, side by side with a vegetable diet, has considerably contributed to giving bodily strength and independence to man in the making. The most essential effect, however, of a flesh diet was on the brain, which now received a far richer flow of the materials necessary for its nourishment and development, and which therefore could become more rapidly and perfectly developed from generation to generation. With all respect to the vegetarians, it has to be recognised that man did not come into existence without a flesh diet, and if the latter, among all peoples known to us, has led to cannibalism at some time or another (the forefathers of the Berliners, the Weletabians or Wilzians, used to eat their parents as late as the tenth century), that is of no consequence to us to-day. A meat diet led to two new advances of decisive importance: to the mastery of fire and the taming of animals. The first still further shortened the digestive process, as it provided the mouth with food already as it were semi-digested; the second made meat more copious by opening up a new, more regular source of supply in addition to hunting, and moreover provided, in milk and its products, a new article of food at least as valuable as meat in its composition. Thus, both these advances became directly new means of emancipation for man. It would lead us too far to dwell here in detail on their indirect effects notwithstanding the great importance they have had for the development of man and society. Just as man learned to consume everything edible, he learned also to live in any climate. He spread over the whole of the habitable world, being the only animal that by its very nature had the power to do so. The other animals that have become accustomed to all climates - domestic animals and vermin- did not become so independently, but only in the wake of man. And the transition from the uniformly hot climate of the original home of man to colder regions, where the year is divided into summer and winter, created new requirements: shelter and clothing as protection against cold and damp, new spheres for labour and hence new forms of activity, which further and further separated man from the animal. By the co-operation of hands, organs of speech, and brain, not only in each individual, but also in society, human beings became capable of executing more and more complicated operations, and of setting themselves, and achieving, higher and higher aims. With each generation, labour itself became different, more perfect, more diversified. Agriculture was added to hunting and cattle-breeding, then spinning, weaving, metal-working, pottery, and navigation. Along with trade and industry, there appeared finally art and science. From tribes there developed nations and states. Law and politics arose, and with them the fantastic reflection of human things in the human mind: religion. In the face of all these creations, which appeared in the first place to be products of the mind, and which seemed to dominate human society, the more modest productions of the working hand retreated into the background, the more so since the mind that plans the labour process already at a very early stage of development of society (e.g. already in the simply family), was able to have the labour that had been planned carried out by other hands than its own. All merit for the swift advance of civilisation was ascribed to the mind, to the development and activity of the brain. Men became accustomed to explain their actions from their thoughts, instead of from their needs - (which in any case are reflected and come to consciousness in the mind) - and so there arose in the course of time that idealistic outlook on the world which, especially since the decline of the ancient world, has dominated men's minds. It still rules them to such a degree that even the most materialistic natural scientists of the Darwinian school are still unable to form any clear idea of the origin of man, because under this ideological influence they do not recognise the part that has been played therein by labour. Animals, as already indicated, change external nature by their activities just as man does, if not to the same extent, and these changes made by them in their environment, as we have seen, in turn react upon and change their originators. For in nature nothing takes place in isolation. Everything affects every other thing and vice versa, and it is usually because this many-sided motion and interaction is forgotten that our natural scientists are prevented from clearly seeing the simplest things. We have seen how goats have prevented the regeneration of forest in Greece; on the island of St. Helena, goats and pigs brought by the first arrivals have succeeded in exterminating almost completely the old vegetation of the island, and so have prepared the soil for the spreading of plants brought by later sailors and colonists. But if animals exert a lasting effect on their environment, it happens unintentionally, and, as far as the animals themselves are concerned, it is an accident. The further men become removed from animals, however, the more their effect on nature assumes the character of a premeditated, planned action directed towards definite ends known in advance. The animal destroys the vegetation of a locality without realising what it is doing. Man destroys it in order to sow field crops on the soil thus released, or to plant trees or vines which he knows will yield many times the amount sown. He transfers useful plants and domestic animals from one country to another and thus changes the flora and fauna of whole continents. More than this. Under artificial cultivation, both plants and animals are so changed by the hand of man that they become unrecognisable. The wild plants from which our grain varieties originated are still being sought in vain. The question of the wild animal from which our dogs are descended, the dogs themselves being so different from one another, or our equally numerous breeds of horses, is still under dispute. In any case, of course, we have no intention of disputing the ability of animals to act in a planned and premeditated fashion. On the contrary, a planned mode of action exists in embryo wherever protoplasm, living protein, exists and reacts, i.e. carries out definite, even if extremely simple, movements as a result of definite external stimuli. Such reaction takes place even where there is as yet no cell at all, far less a nerve cell. The manner in which insectivorous plants capture their prey appears likewise in a certain respect as a planned action, although performed quite unconsciously. In animals the capacity for conscious, planned action develops side by side with the development of the nervous system and among mammals it attains quite a high level. While fox-hunting in England, one can daily observe how unerringly the fox knows how to make use of its excellent knowledge of the locality in order to escape from its pursuers, and how well it knows and turns to account all favourable features of the ground that cause the scent to be interrupted. Among our domestic animals, more highly developed thanks to association with man, every day one can note acts of cunning on exactly the same level as those of children. For, just as the developmental history of the human embryo in the mother's womb is only an abbreviated repetition of the history, extending over millions of years, of the bodily evolution of our animal ancestors, beginning from the worm, so the mental development of the human child is only a still more abbreviated repetition of the intellectual development of these same ancestors, at least of the later ones. But all the planned action of all animals has never resulted in impressing the stamp of their will upon nature. For that, man was required. In short, the animal merely uses external nature, and brings about changes in it simply by his presence; man by his changes makes it serve his ends, masters it. This is the final, essential distinction between man and other animals, and once again it is labour that brings about this distinction. Let us not, however, flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human conquest over nature. For each such conquest takes its revenge on us. Each of them, it is true, has in the first place the consequences on which we counted, but in the second and third places it has quite different, unforeseen effects which only too often cancel out the first. The people who, in Mesopotamia, Greece, Asia Minor, and elsewhere, destroyed the forests to obtain cultivable land, never dreamed that they were laying the basis for the present devastated condition of these countries, by removing along with the forests the collecting centres and reservoirs of moisture. When, on the southern slopes of the mountains, the Italians of the Alps used up the pine forests so carefully cherished on the northern slopes, they had no inkling that by doing so they were cutting at the roots of the dairy industry in their region; they had still less inkling that they were thereby depriving their mountain springs of water for the greater part of the year, with the effect that these would be able to pour still more furious flood torrents on the plains during the rainy seasons. Those who spread the potato in Europe were not aware that they were at the same time spreading the disease of scrofula. Thus at every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature - but that we, with flesh, blood, and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst, and that all our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the advantage over all other beings of being able to know and correctly apply its laws. And, in fact, with every day that passes we are learning to understand these laws more correctly, and getting to know both the more immediate and the more remote consequences of our interference with the traditional course of nature. In particular, after the mighty advances of natural science in the present century, we are more and more getting to know, and hence to control, even the more remote natural consequences at least of our more ordinary productive activities. But the more this happens, the more will men not only feel, but also know, their unity with nature, and thus the more impossible will become the senseless and antinatural idea of a contradiction between mind and matter, man and nature, soul and body, such as arose in Europe after the decline of classic antiquity and which obtained its highest elaboration in Christianity. But if it has already required the labour of thousands of years for us to learn to some extent to calculate the more remote natural consequences of our actions aiming at production, it has been still more difficult in regard to the more remote social consequences of these actions. We mentioned the potato and the resulting spread of scrofula. But what is scrofula in comparison with the effect on the living conditions of the masses of the people in whole countries resulting from the workers being reduced to a potato diet, or in comparison with the famine which overtook Ireland in 1847 in consequence of the potato disease, and which put under the earth a million Irishmen, nourished solely or almost exclusively on potatoes, and forced the emigration overseas of two million more? When the Arabs learned to distil alcohol, it never entered their heads that by so doing they were creating one of the chief weapons for the annihilation of the original inhabitants of the still undiscovered American continent. And when afterwards Columbus discovered America, he did not know that by doing so he was giving new life to slavery, which in Europe had long ago been done away with, and laying the basis for the Negro slave traffic. The men who in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries laboured to create the steam engine had no idea that they were preparing the instrument which more than any other was to revolutionise social conditions throughout the world. Especially in Europe, by concentrating wealth in the hands of a minority, the huge majority being rendered propertyless, this instrument was destined at first to give social and political domination to the bourgeoisie, and then, however, to give rise to a class struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat, which can end only in the otherthrow of the bourgeoisie and the abolition of all class contradictions. But even in this sphere, by long and often cruel experience and by collecting and analysing the historical material, we are gradually learning to get a clear view of the indirect, more remote, social effects of our productive activity, and so the possibility is afforded us of mastering and controlling these effects as well. To carry out this control requires something more than mere knowledge. It requires a complete revolution in our hitherto existing mode of production, and with it of our whole contemporary social order. All hitherto existing modes of production have aimed merely at achieving the most immediately and directly useful effect of labour. The further consequences, which only appear later on and become effective through gradual repetition and accumulation, were totally neglected. Primitive communal ownership of land corresponded, on the one hand, to a level of development of human beings in which their horizon was restricted in general to what lay immediately at hand, and presupposed, on the other hand, a certain surplus of available land, allowing a certain latitude for correcting any possible bad results of this primitive forest type of economy. When this surplus land was exhausted, communal ownership also declined. All higher forms of production, however, proceeded in their development to the division of the population into different classes and thereby to the contradiction of ruling and oppressed classes. But thanks to this, the interest of the ruling class became the driving factor of production, in so far as the latter was not restricted to the barest means of subsistence of the oppressed people. This has been carried through most completely in the capitalist mode of production prevailing to-day in Western Europe. The individual capitalists, who dominate production and exchange, are able to concern themselves only with the most immediate useful effect of their actions. Indeed, even this useful effect - in as much as it is a question of the usefulness of the commodity that is produced or exchanged - retreats right into the background, and the sole incentive becomes the profit to be gained on selling. The social science of the bourgeoisie, classical political economy, is predominantly occupied only with the directly intended social effects of human actions connected with production and exchange. This fully corresponds to the social organisation of which it is the theoretical expression. When individual capitalists are engaged in production and exchange for the sake of the immediate profit, only the nearest, most immediate results can be taken into account in the first place. When an individual manufacturer or merchant sells a manufactured or purchased commodity with only the usual small profit, he is satisfied, and he is not concerned as to what becomes of the commodity afterwards or who are its purchasers. The same thing applies to the natural effects of the same actions. What did the Spanish planters in Cuba, who burned down forests the slopes of the mountains and obtained from the ashes sufficient fertiliser for one generation of very highly profitable coffee trees, care that the tropical rainfall afterwards washed away the now unprotected upper stratum of the soil, leaving behind only bare rock? In relation to nature, as to society, the present mode of production is predominantly concerned only about the first, tangible success; and then surprise is expressed that the more remote effects of actions directed to this end turn out to be of quite a different, mainly even of quite an opposite, character; that the harmony of demand and supply becomes transformed into their polar opposites, as shown by the course of each ten years' industrial cycle, and of which even Germany has experienced a little preliminary in the "crash"; that private ownership based on individual labour necessarily develops into the propertylessness of the workers, while all wealth becomes more and more concentrated in the hands of non-workers; that ...

1883-Dialectics of Nature-ch09

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1883/don/ch09.htm

The first natural scientist belonging here is the very eminent zoologist and botanist, Alfred Russell Wallace, the man who simultaneously with Darwin put forward the theory of the evolution of species by natural selection. In his little work, On Miracles and Modern Spiritualism, London, Burns, 1875, he relates that his first experiences in this branch of natural knowledge date from 1844, when he attended the lectures of Mr. Spencer Hall on mesmerism and as a result carried out similar experiments on his pupils. I was extremely interested in the subject and pursued it with ardour. He not only produced magnetic sleep together with the phenomena of articular rigidity, and local loss of sensation, he also confirmed the correctness of Gall s map of the skull, because on touching any one of Gall s organs the corresponding activity was aroused in the magnetised patient and exhibited by appropriate and lively gestures. Further, he established that his patient, merely by being touched, partook of all the sensations of the operator; he made him drunk with a glass of water as soon as he told him that it was brandy. He could make one of the young men so stupid, even in the waking condition, that he no longer knew his own name, a feat, however, that other schoolmasters are capable of accomplishing without any mesmerism. And so on. Now it happens that I also saw this Mr. Spencer Hall in the winter of 1843-4 in Manchester. He was a very mediocre charlatan, who travelled the country under the patronage of some parsons and undertook magnetico-phrenological performances with a young girl in order to prove thereby the existence of God, the immortality of the soul, and the incorrectness of the materialism that was being preached at that time by the Owenites in all big towns. The lady was sent into a magnetico-sleep and then, as soon as the operator touched any part of the skull corresponding to one of Gall s organs, she gave a bountiful display of theatrical, demonstrative gestures and poses representing the activity of the organ concerned; for instance, for the organ of philoprogenitiveness she fondled and kissed an imaginary baby, etc. Moreover, the good Mr. Hall had enriched Gall s geography of the skull with a new island of Barataria: right at the top of the skull he had discovered an organ of veneration, on touching which his hypnotic miss sank on to her knees, folded her hands in prayer, and depicted to the astonished, philistine audience an angel wrapt in veneration. That was the climax and conclusion of the exhibition. The existence of God had been proved. The effect on me and one of my acquaintances was exactly the same as on Mr. Wallace; the phenomena interested us and we tried to find out how far we could reproduce them. A wideawake young boy of 12 years old offered himself as subject. Gently gazing into his eyes, or stroking, sent him without difficulty into the hypnotic condition. But since we were rather less credulous than Mr. Wallace and set to work with rather less fervour, we arrived at quite different results. Apart from muscular rigidity and loss of sensation, which were easy to produce, we found also a state of complete passivity of the will bound up with a peculiar hypersensitivity of sensation. The patient, when aroused from his lethargy by any external stimulus, exhibited very much greater liveliness than in the waking condition. There was no trace of any mysterious relation to the operator; anyone else could just as easily set the sleeper into activity. To set Gall s cranial organs into action was the least that we achieved; we went much further, we could not only exchange them for one another, or make their seat anywhere in the whole body, but we also fabricated any amount of other organs, organs of singing, whistling, piping, dancing, boxing, sewing, cobbling, tobacco-smoking, etc., and we could make their seat wherever we wanted. Wallace made his patients drunk on water, but we discovered in the great toe an organ of drunkenness which only had to be touched in order to cause the finest drunken comedy to be enacted. But it must be well understood, no organ showed a trace of action until the patient was given to understand what was expected of him; the boy soon perfected himself by practice to such an extent that the merest indication sufficed. The organs produced in this way then retained their validity for later occasions of putting to sleep, as long as they were not altered in the same way. The patient had even a double memory, one for the waking state and a second quite separate one for the hypnotic condition., As regards the passivity of the will and its absolute subjection to the will of a third person, this loses all its miraculous appearance when we bear in mind that the whole condition began with the subjection of the will of the patient to that of the operator, and cannot be restored without it. The most powerful magician of a magnetiser in the world will come to the end of his resources as soon as his patient laughs him in the face. While we with our frivolous scepticism thus found that the basis of magnetico- phrenological charlatanry lay in a series of phenomena which for the most part differ only in degree from those of the waking state and require no mystical interpretation, Mr. Wallace s ardour led him into a series of self-deceptions, in virtue of which he confirmed Gall s map of the skull in all its details and noted a mysterious relation between operator and patient. Everywhere in Mr. Wallace s account, the sincerity of which reaches the degree of naiv t , it becomes apparent that he was much less concerned in investigating the factual background of charlatanry than in reproducing all the phenomena at all costs. Only this frame of mind is needed for the man who was originally a scientist to be quickly converted into an adept by means of simple and facile self-deception. Mr. Wallace ended up with faith in magnetico-phrenological miracles and so already stood with one foot in the world of spirits. He drew the other foot after him in 1865. On returning from his twelve years of travel in the tropical zone, experiments in table-turning introduced him to the society of various mediums. How rapid his progress was, and how complete his mastery of the subject, is testified to by the above-mentioned booklet. He expects us to take for good coin not only all the alleged miracles of Home, the brothers Davenport, and other mediums who all more or less exhibit themselves for money and who have for the most part been frequently exposed as impostors, but also a whole series of allegedly authentic spirit histories from early times. The Pythonesses of the Greek oracle, the witches of the Middle Ages, were all mediums, and Iamblichus in his De divinatione already described quite accurately the most astonishing phenomena of modern spiritualism." Just one example to show how lightly Mr. Wallace deals with the scientific corroboration and authentication of these miracles. It is certainly a strong assumption that we should believe that the aforesaid spirits should allow themselves to be photographed, and we have surely the right to demand that such spirit photographs should be authenticated in the most indubitable manner before we accept them as genuine. Now Mr. Wallace recounts on p.187 that in March, 1872, a leading medium, Mrs. Guppy, n e Nicholls, had herself photographed together with her husband and small boy at Mr. Hudson s in Notting Hill, and on two different photographs a tall female figure, finely draped in white gauze robes, with somewhat Eastern features, was to be seen behind her in a pose as if giving a benediction. Here, then, one of two things are absolutely certain. Either there was a living intelligent, but invisible being present, or Mr. and Mrs. Guppy, the photographer, and some fourth person planned a wicked imposture and have maintained it ever since. Knowing Mr. and Mrs. Guppy so well as I do, I feel an absolute conviction that they are as incapable of an imposture of this kind as any earnest inquirer after truth in the department of natural science." Consequently, either deception or spirit photography. Quite so. And, if deception, either the spirit was already on the photographic plates, or four persons must have been concerned, or three if we leave out as weak-minded or duped old Mr. Guppy who died in January, 1875, at the age of 84 (it only needed that he should be sent behind the Spanish screen of the background). That a photographer could obtain a model for the spirit without difficulty does not need to be argued. But the photographer Hudson, shortly afterwards, was publicly prosecuted for habitual falsification of spirit photographs, so Mr. Wallace remarks in mitigation: One thing is clear, if an imposture has occurred, it was at once detected by spiritualists themselves. Hence there is not much reliance to be placed on the photographer. Remains Mrs. Guppy, and for her there is only the absolute conviction of our friend Wallace and nothing more. Nothing more? Not at all. The absolute trustworthiness of Mrs. Guppy is evidenced by her assertion that one evening, early in June, 1871, she was carried through the air in a state of unconsciousness from her house in Highbury Hill Park to 69, Lamb s Conduit Street three English miles as the crow flies and deposited in the said house of No. 69 on the table in the midst of a spiritualistic s ance. The doors of the room were closed, and although Mrs. Guppy was one of the stoutest women in London, which is certainly saying a good deal, nevertheless her sudden incursion did not leave behind the slightest hole either in the doors or in the ceiling. (Reported in the London .Echo, June 8, 1871.) And if anyone still does not believe in the genuineness of spirit photography, there s no helping him. The second eminent adept among English natural scientists is Mr. William Crookes, the discoverer of the chemical element thallium and of the radiometer (in Germany also called Lichtm hle [light-mill] ). Mr. Crookes began to investigate spiritualistic manifestations about 1871, and employed for this purpose a number of physical and mechanical appliances, spring balances, electric batteries, etc. Whether he brought to his task the main apparatus required, a sceptically critical mind, or whether he remained to the end in a fit state for working, we shall see. At any rate, within a not very long period, Mr. Crookes was just as completely captivated as Mr. Wallace. For some years, he relates, a young lady, Miss Florence Cook, has exhibited remarkable mediumship, which latterly culminated in the production of an entire female form purporting to be of spiritual origin, and which appeared barefooted and in white flowing robes while she lay entranced in dark clothing and securely bound in a cabinet or adjoining room. This spirit, which called itself Katie, and which looked remarkably like Miss Cook, was one evening suddenly seized round the waist by Mr. Volckmann the present husband of Mrs. Guppy and held fast in order to see whether it was not indeed Miss Cook in another edition. The spirit proved to be a quite sturdy damsel, it defended itself vigorously, the onlookers intervened, the gas was turned out, and when, after some scuffling, peace was reestablished and the room re-lit, the spirit had vanished and Miss Cook lay bound and unconscious in her corner. Nevertheless, Mr. Volckmann is said to maintain up to the present day that he had seized hold of Miss Cook and nobody else. In order to establish this scientifically, Mr. Varley, a well-known electrician, on the occasion of a new experiment, arranged for the current from a battery to flow through the medium, Miss Cook, in such a way that she could not play the part of the spirit without interrupting the current. Nevertheless, the spirit made its appearance. It was, therefore, indeed a being different from Miss Cook. To establish this further was the task of Mr. Crookes. His first step was to win the confidence of the spiritualistic lady. This confidence, so he says himself in the Spiritualist, June 5, 1874, increased gradually to such an extent that she refused to give a s ance unless I made the arrangements. She said that she always wanted me to be near her and in the neighbourhood of the cabinet; I found that when this confidence had been established and she was sure that I would not break any promise made to her the phenomena increased considerably in strength and there was freely forthcoming evidence that would have been unobtainable in any other way. She frequently consulted me in regard to the persons present at the s ances and the places to be given them, for she had recently become very nervous as a result of certain ill-advised suggestions that, besides other more scientific methods of investigation, force also should be applied. The spirit lady rewarded this confidence, which was as kind as it was scientific, in the highest measure. She even made her appearance which can no longer surprise us in Mr. Crookes house, played with his children and told them anecdotes from her adventures in India, treated Mr. Crookes to an account of some of the bitter experiences of her past life, allowed him to take her by the arm so that he could convince himself of her evident materiality, allowed him to take her pulse and count the number of her respirations per minute, and finally allowed herself to be photographed next to Mr. Crookes. This figure, says Mr. Wallace, after she had been seen, touched, photographed, and conversed with, vanished absolutely out of a small room from which there was no other exit than an adjoining room filled with spectators which was not such a great feat, provided that the spectators were polite enough to show as much faith in Mr. Crookes, in whose house this happened, as Mr. Crookes did in the spirit. Unfortunately these fully authenticated phenomena are not immediately credible even for spiritualists. We saw above how the very spiritualistic Mr. Volckmann permitted himself to make a very material grab. And now a clergyman, a member of the committee of the British National Association of Spiritualists, has also been present at a s ance with Miss Cook, and he established the fact without difficulty that the room through the door of which the spirit came and disappeared communicated with the outer world by a second door. The behaviour of Mr. Crookes, who was also present, gave the final death blow to my belief that there might be something in the manifestations. (Mystic London, by the Rev. C. Maurice Davies, London, Tinsley Brothers). And, over and above that, it came to light in America how Katies were materialised. A married couple named Holmes held s ances in Philadelphia in which likewise a Katie appeared and received bountiful presents from the believers. However, one sceptic refused to rest until he got on the track of the said Katie, who, anyway, had already gone on strike once because of lack of pay; he discovered her in a boarding-house as a young lady of unquestionable flesh and bone, and in possession of all the presents that had been given to the spirit. Meanwhile the Continent also had its scientific spiritseers. A scientific association at St. Petersburg I do not know exactly whether the University or even the Academy itself charged the Councillor of State, Aksakov, and the chemist, Butlerov, to examine the basis of the spiritualistic phenomena, but it dbes not seem that very much came of this. On the other hand if the noisy announcements of the spiritualists are to be believed Germany has now also put forward its man in the person of Professor Z llner in Leipzig. For years, as is well known, Herr Z llner has been hard at work on the fourth dimension of space, and has discovered that many things that are impossible in a space of three dimensions, are a simple matter of course in a space of four dimensions. Thus, in the latter kind of space, a closed metal sphere can be turned inside out like a glove, without making a hole in it; similarly a knot can be tied in an endless string or one which has both ends fastened, and two separate closed rings can be interlinked without opening either of them, and many more such feats. According to the recent triumphant reports from the spirit world, it is said now that Professor Z llner has addressed himself to one or more mediums in order with their aid to determine more details of the locality of the fourth dimension. The success is said to have been surprising. After the session the arm of the chair, on which he rested his arm while his hand never left the table, was found to have become interlocked with his arm, a string that had both ends sealed to the table was found tied into four knots, and so on. In short, all the miracles of the fourth dimension are said to have been performed by the spirits with the utmost ease. It must be borne in mind: relata refero, I do not vouch for the correctness of the spirit bulletin, and if it should contain any inaccuracy, Herr Z llner ought to be thankful that I am giving him the opportunity to make a correction. If, however, it reproduces the experiences of Herr Z llner without falsification, then it obviously signifies a new era both in the science of spiritualism and that of mathematics. The spirits prove the existence of the fourth dimension, just as the fourth dimension vouches for the existence of spirits. And this once established, an entirely new, immeasurable field is opened to science. All previous mathematics and natural science will be only a preparatory school for the mathematics of the fourth and still higher dimensions, and for the mechanics, physics, chemistry, and physiology of the spirits dwelling in these higher dimensions. Has not Mr. Crookes scientifically determined how much weight is lost by tables and other articles of furniture on their passage into the fourth dimension as we may now well be permitted to call it and does not Mr. Wallace declare it proven that fire there does no harm to the human body? And now we have even the physiology of the spirit bodies! They breathe, they have a pulse, therefore lungs, heart, and a circulatory apparatus, and in consequence are at least as admirably equipped as our own in regard to the other bodily organs. For breathing requires carbohydrates which undergo combustion in the lungs, and these carbohydrates can only be supplied from without; hence, stomach, intestines, and their accessories and if we have once established so much, the rest follows without difficulty. The existence of such organs, however, implies the possibility of their falling a prey to disease, hence it may still come to pass that Herr Virchow will have to compile a cellular pathology of the spirit world. And since most of these spirits are very handsome young ladies, who are not to be distinguished in any respect whatsoever from terrestrial damsels, other than by their supra-mundane beauty, it could not be very long before they come into contact with men who feel the passion of love"; and since, as established by Mr. Crookes from the beat of the pulse, the female heart is not absent, natural selection also has opened before it the prospect of a fourth dimension, one in which it has no longer any need to fear of being confused with wicked social-democracy. Enough. Here it becomes palpably evident which is the most certain path from natural science to mysticism. It is not the extravagant theorising of the philosophy of nature, but the shallowest empiricism that spurns all theory and distrusts all thought. It is not a priori necessity that proves the existence .of spirits, but the empirical observations of Messrs. Wallace, Crookes, and Co. If we trust the spectrum-analysis observations of Crookes, which led to the discovery of the metal thallium, or the rich zoological discoveries of Wallace in the Malay Archipelago, we are asked to place the same trust in the spiritualistic experiences and discoveries of these two scientists. And if we express the opinion that, after all, there is a little difference between the two, namely, that we can verify the one but not the other, then the spirit-seers retort that this is not the case, and that they are ready to give us the opportunity of verifying also the spirit phenomena. Indeed, dialectics cannot be despised with impunity. However great one s contempt for all theoretical thought, nevertheless one cannot bring two natural facts into relation with one another, or understand the connection existing between them, without theoretical thought. The only question is whether one s thinking is correct or not, and contempt of theory is evidently the most certain way to think naturalistically, and therefore incorrectly. But, according to an old and well-known dialectic law, incorrect thinking, carried to its logical conclusion, inevitably arrives at the opposite of its point of departure. Hence, the empirical contempt of dialectics on the part of some of the most sober empiricists is punished by their being led into the most barren of all superstitions, into modern spiritualism. It is the same with mathematics. The ordinary metaphysical mathematicians boast with enormous pride of the absolute irrefutability of the results of their science. But these results include also imaginary magnitudes, which thereby acquire a certain reality. When one has once become accustomed to ascribe some kind of reality outside of our minds to -1, or to the fourth dimension, then it is not a matter of much importance if one goes a step further and also accepts the spirit world of the mediums. It is as Ketteler said about D llinger: The man has defended so much nonsense in his life, he really could have accepted infallibility into the bargain! In fact, mere empiricism is incapable of refuting the spiritualists. In the first place, the higher phenomena always show themselves only when the investigator concerned is already so far in the toils that he now only sees what he is meant to see or wants to see as Crookes himself describes with such inimitable naiv t . In the second place, however, the spiritualist cares nothing that hundreds of alleged facts are exposed as imposture and dozens of alleged mediums as ordinary tricksters. As long as every single alleged miracle has not been explained away, they have still room enough to carry on, as indeed Wallace says clearly enough in connection with the falsified spirit photographs. The existence of falsifications proves the genuineness of the genuine ones. And so empiricism finds itself compelled to refute the importunate spirit-seers not by means of empirical experiments, but by theoretical considerations, and to say, with Huxley: The only good that I can see in the demonstration of the truth of spiritualism is to furnish an additional argument against suicide. Better live a crossing-sweeper than die and be made to talk twaddle by a medium hired at a guinea a s ance!"

1883-Dialectics of Nature-ch10

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1883/don/ch10.htm

MARXISM has a two-fold bearing on science. In the first place Marxists study science among other human activities. They show how the scientific activities of any society depend on its changing needs, and so in the long run on its productive methods, and how science changes the productive methods, and therefore the whole society. This analysis is needed for any scientific approach to history, and even non-Marxists are now accepting parts of it. But secondly Marx and Engels were not content to analyse the changes in society. In dialectics they saw the science of the general laws of change, not only in society and in human thought, but in the external world which is mirrored by human thought. That is to say it can be applied to problems of "pure" science as well as to the social relations of science. Scientists are becoming familiar with the application of Marxist ideas to the place of science in society. Some accept it in whole or in part, others fight against it vigorously, and say that they are pursuing pure knowledge for its own sake. But many of them are unaware that Marxism has any bearing on scientific problems considered out of their relation to society, for example to the problems of tautomerism in chemistry or individuality in biology. And certain Marxists are inclined to regard the study of such scientific and philosophical problems as unimportant. Yet they have before them the example of Lenin. In 1905 the Russian Revolution had failed. It was necessary to build up the revolutionary movement afresh. Lenin saw that this could only be done on a sound theoretical basis. So he wrote Materialism and Empirio- criticism. This involved a study, not only of philosophers such as Mach and Pearson, whom he criticised, but of physicists such as Hertz, J. J. Thomson, and Becquerel, whose discoveries could be interpreted from a materialistic or an idealistic point of view. However, Lenin did not attempt to cover the whole of science. He was mainly concerned with the revolution in physics which was then in progress, and had little to say on astronomy, geology, chemistry, or biology. But thirty years before Lenin, Engels had tried to discuss the whole of science from a Marxist standpoint. He had always been a student of science. Since 1861 he had been in close touch with the chemist Schorlemmer at Manchester, and had discussed scientific problems with him and Marx for many years. In 1871 he came to London, and started reading scientific books and journals on a large scale. He intended to write a great book to show "that in nature the same dialectical laws of movement are carried out in the confusion of its countless changes, as also govern the apparent contingency of events in history." If this book had been written, it would have been of immense importance for the development of science. But apart from political work, other intellectual tasks lay before Engels. D hring had to be answered, and perhaps Anti-D hring, which covers the whole field of human knowledge, is a greater book than Dialectics of Nature would have been had Engels completed it. After Marx's death in 1883 he had the gigantic task of editing and completing Capital, besides which he wrote Feuerbach and The Origin of the Family. So Dialectics of Nature was never finished. The manuscript consists of four bundles, all in Engels' handwriting, save for a number of quotations from Greek philosophers in that of Marx. Part of the manuscript is ready for publication, though, as we shall see, it would almost certainly have been revised. Much of it merely consists of rough notes, which Engels hoped to work up later. They are often hard to read, and full of abbreviations, e.g. Mag. for magnet and magnetism. There are occasional scribbles and sketches in the margin. Finally, although the bulk of the manuscript is in German, Engels thought equally well in English and French, and occasionally produced a hybrid sentence, such as "Wenn Coulomb von particles of electricity spricht, which repel each other inversely as the square of the distance, so nimmt Thomson das ruhig hin als bewiesen." Or "In der heutigen Gesellschaft, dans le m chanisme civilis , herrscht duplicit d'action, contrari t de l'inter t individuel avec le collectif; es ist une queue universelle des individus contre les masses." The translation has been a very difficult task, and the order of the different parts is somewhat uncertain. Most of the manuscript seems to have been written between 1872 and 1882, that is to say it refers to the science of sixty years ago. Hence it is often hard to follow if one does not know the history of the scientific practice and theory of that time. The idea of what is now called the conservation of energy was beginning to permeate physics, chemistry, and biology. But it was still very incompletely realised, and still more incompletely applied. Words such as "force," "motion," and "vis viva" were used where we should now speak of energy. The essays on "Basic forms of motion," "The measure of motion - work," and "Heat" are largely concerned with the controversies which arose from incomplete or faulty theories about energy. They are interesting as showing how ideas on this subject developed, and how Engels tackled the controversies of his day. However many of these controversies are now settled. The expression vis viva is no longer used for double the kinetic energy, and "force" has acquired a definite meaning in physics. Engels would not have published them in their present form, if only because, in the later essay on tidal friction, he uses a more modern terminology. Their interest lies not so much in their detailed criticism of theories, many of which have ceased to be of importance, but in showing how Engels grappled with intellectual problems. The essay on electricity "dates" even more. As a criticism of Wiedemann's inconsistencies it is interesting, and it ends with a plea for a closer investigation of the connection between chemical and electrical action, which, as Engels said, "will lead to important results in both spheres of investigation." This prophecy has, of course, been amply fulfilled. Arrhenius' ionic theory has transformed chemistry, and Thomson's electron theory has revolutionised physics. Here again, the manuscript would certainly have been revised before publication. In a letter to Marx on November 23rd, 1882, he points out that Siemens, in his presidential address to the British Association, has defined a new unit, that of electric power, the Watt, which is proportional to the resistance multiplied by the square of the current whereas the electromotive force is proportional to the resistance multiplied by the current. He compares these with the expressions for momentum and energy, discussed in the essay on "The measure of motion - work," and points out that in each case we have simple proportionality (momentum as velocity and electromotive force as current) when we are not dealing with transformation of one form of energy into another. But when the energy is transformed into heat or work the correct value is found by squaring the velocity or current. "So it is a general law of motion which I was the first to formulate." We can now see why this is so. The momentum and the electromotive force, having directions, are reversed when the speed and current are reversed. But the energy remains unaltered. So the speed or the current must come into the formula as the square (or some even power) since (-x) 2 = x2. In the essay on " Tidal friction," Engels made a serious mistake, or more accurately a mistake which would have been serious had he published it. But I very much doubt whether he would have done so. In the manuscript notes for Anti-D hring, he supported the view, quite commonly held in the nineteenth century, that we find truths such as mathematical axioms self-evident because our ancestors have been convinced of their validity, while they would not appear self-evident to a Bushman or Australian black. Now this view is almost certainly incorrect, and Engels presumably saw the fallacy, and did not have it printed. I have little doubt that either he or one of his scientific friends such as Schorlemmer would have detected the mistake in the essay on "Tidal friction." But even as a mistake it is interesting, because it is one of the mistakes which lead to a correct result (namely that the day would shorten even if there were no oceans) by incorrect reasoning. Such mistakes have been extremely fruitful in the history of science. Elsewhere there are statements which are certainly untrue, for example in the sections on stars and Protozoa. But here Engels cannot be blamed for following some of the best astronomers and zoologists of his day. The technical improvement of the telescope and microscope has of course led to great increases in our knowledge here in the last sixty years. On the other hand, Engels' remarks on the differential calculus, though inapplicable to that branch of mathematics as now taught, were correct in his own day, and for some time after. He points out that it actually developed by contradiction, and is none the worse for that. To-day "rigorous" proofs are given of many of the theorems to which he refers, and some mathematicians claim to have eliminated the contradictions. Actually they have only pushed the contradictions into the background, where they remain in the field of mathematical logic. Not only has every effort to deduce all mathematics from a set of axioms, and rules for applying them, failed, but G del has proved that they must fail. So the fact that the calculus can be taught without involving the particular contradictions mentioned by Engels in no way impugns the validity of his dialectical argument. When all such criticisms have been made, it is astonishing how Engels anticipated the progress of science in the sixty years which have elapsed since he wrote. He certainly did not like the atomic theory of electricity, which held sway from 1900 to 1930, and until it turned out that the electron behaved not only like a particle but like a system of moving waves he might well have been thought to have "backed the wrong horse." His insistence that life is the characteristic mode of behaviour of proteins appeared to be very one-sided to most biochemists since every cell contains many other complicated organ substances besides proteins. Only in the last four years has it turned out that certain pure proteins do exhibit one of the most essential features of living things, reproducing themselves in a variety of environments. While we can everywhere study Engels' method of thinking with advantage, I believe that the sections of the book which deal with biology are the most immediately valuable to scientists to-day. This may of course be because as a biologist I can detect subtleties of Engels' thought which I have missed in the physical sections. It may be because biology has undergone less spectacular changes than physics in the last two generations. In order to help readers to follow the development of science since Engels' time, I have added some notes. A few readers may object to my pointing out that Engels was occasionally wrong. Engels would not have objected. He was well aware that he was not infallible, and that the Labour Movement wants no popes or inspired scriptures. The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, of which an English translation had been published in America in 1885, was first published in England in 1892. In his preface written after forty-eight years he says: "I have taken great care not to strike out of the text the many prophecies, amongst others that of an imminent social revolution in England, which my youthful ardour induced me to venture upon. The wonder is, not that a good many of them proved wrong, but that so many of them have proved right." I think that readers of Dialectics of Nature will come to a similar conclusion. I have not yet mentioned the sections on the history of science. These are among the most brilliant passages in the whole book, but they represent a line of thought which was followed by Marx and Engels in many of their books and which has since been developed by others, so most readers will find them less novel. Finally, there is the delightful essay on "Scientific research into the spirit world." There is a tendency among materialists to neglect the problems here dealt with. It is worthwhile noticing that Engels did not do so. On the contrary he produced a number of phenomena which were regarded as "occult" and mysterious in his day, and arrived at the same conclusions as most scientific investigators in this field have reached, provided that, like Engels, they brought to their work robust common sense, and also a sense of humour. It was a great misfortune, not only for Marxism, but for all branches of natural science, that Bernstein, into whose hands the manuscript came when Engels died in 1895, did not publish it. In 1924 he submitted it (or part of it) to Einstein, who, though he did not think it of great interest from the standpoint of modern physics, was on the whole in favour of publication. If, as seems likely, Einstein only saw the essay on electricity, his hesitation can easily be understood, since this deals almost wholly with questions which now seem remote. The manuscript was first edited by Riazanov, and printed in 1927. However, Adoratski's edition of 1935 is more satisfactory, as several passages which made nonsense in the earlier edition have now been deciphered. Had Engels' method of thinking been more familiar, the transformations of our ideas on physics which have occurred during the last thirty years would have been smoother. Had his remarks on Darwinism been generally known, I for one would have been saved a certain amount of muddled thinking. I therefore welcome wholeheartedly the publication of an English translation of Dialectics of Nature, and hope that future generations of scientists will find that it helps them to elasticity of thought. But it must not be thought that Dialectics of Nature is only of interest to scientists. Any educated person, and, above all, anyone who is a student of philosophy, will find much to interest him or her throughout the book, though particularly in Chapters I, II, VII, IX, and X. One reason why Engels was such a great writer is that he was probably the most widely educated man of his day. Not only had he a profound knowledge of economics and history, but he knew enough to discuss the meaning of an obscure Latin phrase concerning Roman marriage law, or the processes taking place when a piece of impure zinc was dipped into sulphuric acid. And he contrived to accumulate this immense knowledge, not by leading a life of cloistered learning, but while playing an active part in politics, running a business, and even fox-hunting! He needed this knowledge because dialectical materialism, the philosophy which, along with Marx, he founded, is not merely a philosophy of history, but a philosophy which illuminates all events whatever, from the falling of a stone to a poet's imaginings. And it lays particular emphasis on the inter-connection of all processes, and the artificial character of the distinctions which men have drawn, not merely between vertebrates and invertebrates or liquids and gases, but between the different fields of human knowledge such as economics, history, and natural science. Chapter II contains an outline of this philosophy in its relation to natural science. A very careful and condensed summary of it is given in Chapter IV of the History of the C.P.S.U.(B), but the main sources for its study are Engels' Feuerbach and Anti-D hring, Lenin's Materialism and Empirio-criticism, and a number of passages in the works of Marx. Just because it is a living philosophy with innumerable concrete applications its full power and importance can only be gradually understood, when we see it applied to history, science, or whatever field of study interests us most. For this reason a reader whose concern lies primarily in the political or economic field will come back to his main interest a better dialectical materialist, and therefore a clearer-sighted politician or economist, after studying how Engels applied Dialectics to Nature. At the present moment, clear thinking is vitally necessary if we are to understand the extremely complicated situation in which the whole human race, and our own nation in particular, is placed, and to see the way out of it to a better world. A study of Engels will warn us against some of the facile solutions which are put forward to-day, and help us to play an intelligent and courageous part in the great events of our own time. J. B. S. HALDANE. November, 1939.

1883-Dialectics of Nature-Preface

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1883/don/preface.htm

1169-1171: Leinster (Ireland) in the hands of English adventurers ; Richard of Clare, Earl of Pembroke, does homage for Leinster as an English lordship to Henry II, who, accompanied by Pembroke, visited his new dominion which the adventurers had won. [Fourteen years earlier, Pope Adrian IV had made him a present of Ireland. He (Henry) wanted to use the trade in English slaves (with Bristol) as a pretext for invasion, but nothing came of it at the time, because of the resistance of the English baronage.] ... After Henry II left Ireland, nothing indeed but the feuds and weakness of the Irish tribes enabled the adventurers to hold the districts of Drogheda, Dublin, Wexford, Waterford, and Cork, which now formed the so-called English Pale. For their part, the adventurers were compelled to preserve their fealty to the English Grown. John (Lackland) came with an army, stormed its strongholds and drove its leading barons into exile, divided the Pale into counties, ordered the observance of the English law; but the departure of John and his army to England was a signal for a return of disorder within the Pale. ... Within the Pale itself, the English settlers were harried and oppressed by their own baronage as much as by the Irish marauders. ... After their victory at Bannockburn, Robert Bruce sent a Scotch force to Ireland with his brother [Edward Bruce] at its head; general rising of Ireland welcomed him; but the danger united pro nunc [for a time] the barons of the Pale, and in 1316 they emerged victors on the bloody field of Athenree by the slaughter of 11,000 of their foes and almost complete annihilation of the sept of the O'Connors. Thereafter, the barons of the Pale sank more and more into Irish chieftains; the Fitz-Maurices, who became Earls of Desmond and whose vast territory in Munster was erected into a County Palatine, adopted the dress and manners of the natives around them. Kilkenny Statute of Edward III: this Statute forbade the adoption of the Irish language or name or dress by any man of English blood; it enforced within the Pale the exclusive use of the English law, and made the use of the native or Brehon law, which was gaining ground, an act of treason; it made treasonable any marriage of the Englishry with persons of Irish race, or any adoption of English children by Irish foster-fathers. ... However, this did not prevent the fusion of the two races, with the lords of the Pale almost completely denying obedience to English government.... In 1394 Richard II landed with an army at Waterford and received the general submission of the native chiefs. But the lords of the Pale held aloof: no sooner Richard quitted the island, than the Irish in turn refused to carry out their promise of quitting Leinster, and engaged in a fresh contest with the Earl of March, whom the King had proclaimed as his heir and left behind him as his lieutenant in Ireland. In the summer of 1398 March was beaten and slain in battle; now Richard II was eager to avenge his cousin s death, and complete the work he had begun by a first invasion (with him as hostage was Henry of Lancaster s son, later Henry V). The Percies (Earl of Northumberland and his son Henry Percy or Hotspur) refused to serve in his army. He banished the Percies, who withdrew into Scotland. MAY 1399: Richard II [went] to Ireland and left his uncle, Duke of York, as regent in his stead. JUNE 1399: Henry of Lancaster entered the Humber and landed at Ravenspur. IN THE BEGINNING OF AUGUST 1399 Henry of Lancaster master of the realm when Richard II at last sailed from Waterford and landed at Milford Haven. By the treacherous pledges of the Earl of Northumberland the ass Richard was lured to Flint for a meeting with Henry of Lancaster, who took him to London as prisoner, where he was coffered in the Tower.

On History of the English People. Marx 1883

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1883/history/ireland.htm

... We were very glad about the answers of Grillenberger and the Sozialdemokrat to Puttkamer s hypocrisy. That s the way to do it. Not to twist and turn under the blows of the opponent, not to whine and moan and stammer excuses that you did not mean any harm as so many still do. One must hit back, and return two or three blows for every one the enemy strikes. That has always been our tactic and so far I believe we have got the best of almost every one of our opponents. Moreover the genius of our soldiers lies in their attack and that is a very good thing , old Fritz said in one of his instructions to his generals, and that s the way our workers act in Germany. But when Kayser for instance withdraws during the discussion of all the Exceptional Laws provided the summary of is correct and wails that we are revolutionaries only in the Pickwickian sense, what then? It should have been said: that the entire Reichstag and the Bundesrat are sitting there only by virtue of a revolution; that when old William swallowed three crowns and one free city he was also a revolutionary; that the whole idea of legitimacy, the whole so-called basis of legality, is nothing but the product of countless revolutions made against the will of the people and directed against the people. O, that accursed German flabbiness of thought and will which was brought into the party with so much effort together with the eddicated'! When at last shall we be rid of it! ...

Letters: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence 1883

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1883/letters/83_01_18.htm

... We belong to the German party scarcely more than to the French, American or Russian party and can consider ourselves as little bound by the German programme as by the minimum programme. We lay stress upon this special status of ours as representatives of international socialism. But it also forbids us to belong to any particular national party until we return to Germany and take a direct part in the struggle there. It would be pointless now... We have always done our utmost to combat the petty-bourgeois and philistine mentality within the party, because this mentality, developed since the time of the Thirty Years War, has infected all classes in Germany and become a hereditary German evil, sister to servility and submissiveness and to all the hereditary German vices. This is what has made us ridiculous and contemptible abroad. It is the main cause of the slackness and the weakness of character which predominate among us; it reigns on the throne as often as in the cobbler s lodging. Only since a modern proletariat has been formed in Germany has a class developed there which is hardly affected at all by this hereditary German malady, a class which has demonstrated that it possesses clear insight, energy, humour, tenacity in struggle. And ought we not to fight against every attempt artificially to inculcate the old hereditary poison of philistine slackness and philistine narrow-mindedness in this healthy class, the only healthy class in Germany? But in their fright right after the criminal attempts and the Anti-Socialist Law, the leaders exhibited so much anxiety which merely proved that they had lived much too long among philistines and were influenced by the views of the philistines. They intended at that time that the party should seem to be philistine if not actually become philistine. All this has now fortunately been overcome, but the philistine elements, which were drawn into the party shortly before the Anti-Socialist Law and prevail particularly among college graduates and undergraduates who did not get as far as the examinations, are still there and have to be carefully watched...

Letters: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence 1883

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1883/letters/83_02_27.htm

You will have received my telegram. It all happened terribly quickly. After the best prospects there was a sudden collapse of strength this morning, then he simply fell asleep. In two minutes this genius had ceased to think, and exactly at the time when the physicians encouraged us to hope for the best. What this man was for us as regards theory, and at all decisive moments also with regard to practical matters, can be understood only by one who was constantly with him. His wide horizons will disappear with him from the scene for many years. These are matters we are not yet equal to. The movement will proceed along its course but it will miss his calm, timely and considered intervention, which hitherto saved it from many a wearisome erroneous path. Further particulars soon. It is now 12 o'clock at night and I have had to write letters and attend to all kinds of things the whole afternoon and evening.

Letters: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence 1883

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1883/letters/83_03_14.htm

Shortly before his wife's death, in October of 81, he had an attack of pleurisy. He recovered from this but when, in February '82, he was sent to Algiers, he came in for cold, wet weather on the journey and arrived with another attack of pleurisy. The atrocious weather continued, and then when he got better, he was sent to Monte Carlo (Monaco) to avoid the heat of the approaching summer. He arrived there with another, though this time a milder, attack of pleurisy. Again abominable weather. When he was at last better, he went to Argenteuil near Paris to stay with his daughter, Madame Longuet. He went to the sulphur springs near by at Enghien, in order to relieve the bronchitis from which he had suffered for so long. Here again the weather was awful, but the cure did some good. Then he went to Vevey for six weeks and came back in September, having apparently almost completely recovered his health. He was allowed to spend the winter on the south coast of England, and he himself was so tired of wandering about with nothing to do, that another period of exile to the south of Europe would probably have harmed him in spirit as much as it would have benefited him in health. When the foggy season commenced in London, he was sent to the Isle of Wight. There it did nothing but rain and he caught another cold. Schorlemmer and I were intending to pay him a visit at the New Year when news came which made it necessary for Tussy to join him at once. Then followed Jenny's death and he had another attack of bronchitis. After all that had gone before, and at his age, this was dangerous. A number of complications set in, the most serious being an abscess on the lung and a terribly rapid loss of strength. Despite this, however, the general course of the illness was proceeding favourably, and last Friday the chief doctor who was attending him, one of the foremost young doctors in London, specially recommended to him by Ray Lankester, gave us the most brilliant hope for his recovery. But anyone who has but once examined the lung tissue under the microscope, realises how great is the danger of a blood vessel being broken if the lung is purulent. And so every morning for the last six weeks I had a terrible feeling of dread that I might find the curtains down when I turned the corner of the street. Yesterday afternoon at 2.30 which is the best time for visiting him I arrived to find the house in tears. It seemed that the end was near. I asked what had happened, tried to get to the bottom of the matter, to offer comfort. There had been only a slight haemorrhage but suddenly he had begun to sink rapidly. Our good old Lenchen, who had looked after him better than a mother cares for her child, went upstairs to him and then came down. He was half asleep, she said, I might come in. When we entered the room he lay there asleep, but never to wake again. His pulse and breathing had stopped. In those two minutes he had passed away, peacefully and without pain. All events which take place by natural necessity bring their own consolation with them, however dreadful they may be. So in this case. Medical skill might have been able to give him a few more years of vegetative existence, the life of a helpless being, dying to the triumph of the doctors' art not suddenly, but inch by inch. But our Marx could never have borne that. To have lived on with all his uncompleted works before him, tantalised by the desire to finish them and yet unable to do so, would have been a thousand times more bitter than the gentle death which overtook him. Death is not a misfortune for him who dies, but for him who survives, he used to say, quoting Epicurus. And to see that mighty genius lingering on as a physical wreck to the greater glory of medicine and to the scorn of the philistines whom in the prime of his strength he had so often put to rout no, it is better, a thousand times better, as it is a thousand times better that we shall in two days' time carry him to the grave where his wife lies at rest. And after all that had gone before, about which the doctors do not know as much as I do, there was in my opinion no other alternative. Be that as it may, mankind is shorter by a head, and the greatest head of our time at that. The proletarian movement goes on, but gone is its central figure to which Frenchmen, Russians, Americans and Germans spontaneously turned at critical moments, to receive always that clear incontestable counsel which only genius and a perfect understanding of the situation could give. Local lights and lesser minds, if not the humbugs, will now have a free hand. The final victory is certain, but circuitious paths, temporary and local errors things which even now are so unavoidable will become more common than ever. Well, we must see it through. What else are we here for? And we are not near losing courage yet.

Letters: Marx-Engels Correspondence 1883

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1883/letters/83_03_15.htm

... My statement in reply to your inquiry of 2 April as to Karl Marx s position with regard to the Anarchists in general and Johann Most in particular shall be short and clear. Since 1845 Marx and I have held the view that one of the ultimate results of the future proletarian revolution will be the gradual dissolution of the political organisation known by the name of state. The main object of this organisation has always been to secure, by armed force, the economic oppression of the labouring majority by the minority which alone possesses wealth. With the disappearance of an exclusively wealth-possessing minority there also disappears the necessity for the power of armed oppression, or state power. At the same time, however, it was always our view that in order to attain this and the other far more important aims of the future social revolution, the working class must first take possession of the organised political power of the state and by its aid crush the resistance of the capitalist class and organise society anew. This is to be found already in The Communist Manifesto of 1847, Chapter II, conclusion. The anarchists put the thing upside down. They declare that the proletarian revolution must begin by doing away with the political organisation of the state. But after its victory the sole organisation which the proletariat finds already in existence is precisely the state. This state may require very considerable alterations before it can fulfil its new functions. But to destroy it at such a moment would be to destroy the only organism by means of which the victorious proletariat can assert its newly-conquered power, hold down its capitalist adversaries and carry out that economic revolution of society without which the whole victory must end in a new defeat and in a mass slaughter of the workers similar to those after the Paris Commune. Does it require my express assurance that Marx opposed this anarchist nonsense from the first day it was put forward in its present form by Bakunin? The whole internal history of the International Workingmen's Association is evidence of this. From 1867 onwards the anarchists were trying, by the most infamous methods, to conquer the leadership of the International; the main hindrance in their way was Marx. The five-year struggle ended, at the Hague Congress of September 1872, with the expulsion of the anarchists from the International; and the man who did most to achieve this expulsion was Marx. Our old friend, F. A. Sorge, in Hoboken, who was present as a delegate, can give you further details if you wish. And now for Johann Most. If anyone asserts that Most, since he became an anarchist, has had any relations with Marx whatever or has received any kind of assistance from Marx, he has either been deceived or is deliberately lying. After the publication of the first number of the London Freiheit, Most did not visit Marx or me more than once, or at most twice. Equally little did we visit him--we did not even meet him by chance anywhere or at any time. In the end we did not even subscribe to his paper any more, because "there was really nothing" in it. We had the same contempt for his anarchism and his anarchistic tactics as for the people from whom he had learnt both. While he was still in Germany Most published a "popular" account of Marx's Capital. Marx was asked to look through it for a second edition. I did this work in common with Marx. We found that it was impossible to do more than expunge Most's very worst blunders unless we were to rewrite the whole thing from beginning to end. Marx also allowed his corrections to be included only on the express condition that his name should never be brought into any connection even with this corrected edition of Johann Most's compilation. . . . You are perfectly at liberty to publish this letter in the Voice of the People, if you like to do so.

Letters: Marx-Engels Correspondence 1883

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1883/letters/83_04_18.htm

To translate the Manifesto is fearfully hard. The Russian translations are by far the best I ve seen.

Letters: Marx-Engels Correspondence 1873

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1883/letters/83_06_29.htm

Do not on any account whatever let yourself be deluded into thinking there is a real proletarian movement going on here. I know Liebknecht tries to delude himself and all the world about this, but it is not the case. The elements at present active may become important since they have accepted our theoretical programme and so acquired a basis, but only if a spontaneous movement breaks out here among the workers and they succeed in getting control of it. Till then they will remain individual minds, with a hotch-potch of confused sects, remnants of the great movement of the 'forties, standing behind them and nothing more. And--apart from the unexpected--a really general workers' movement will only come into existence here when the workers are made to feel the fact that England's world monopoly is broken. Participation in the domination of the world market was and is the basis of the political nullity of the English workers. The tail of the bourgeoisie in the economic exploitation of this monopoly but nevertheless sharing in its advantages, politically they are naturally the tail of the "great Liberal Party," which for its part pays them small attentions, recognises trade unions and strikes as legitimate factors, has relinquished the fight for an unlimited working day and has given the mass of better placed workers the vote. But once America and the united competition of the other industrial countries have made a decent breach in this monopoly (and in iron this is coming rapidly, in cotton unfortunately not as yet) you will see something here.

Letters: Marx-Engels Correspondence 1883

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... As to your former inquiry concerning the passage in the preface of the Manifesto taken from Der B rgerkrieg in Frankreich you will most likely agree with the reply given in the original (Der B rgerkrieg..., p 19 et seq) I am sending you a copy in case you do not have one there. It is simply a question of showing that the victorious proletariat must first refashion the old bureaucratic, administratively centralised state power before it can use it for its own purposes; whereas all bourgeois republicans since 1848 inveighed against this machinery so long as they were in the opposition, but once they were in the government they took it over without altering it and used it partly against the reaction but still more against the proletariat. That in The Civil War the instinctive tendencies of the Commune were put down to its credit as more or less deliberate plans was justified and even necessary under the circumstances. The Russians have very properly appended this passage from The Civil War to their translation of the Manifesto. If at that time the publication did not have to be finished in such a hurry we could also have done this and various other things too...

Letters: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence 1884

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Here too industry has taken on a different character. The ten-year cycle seems to have been broken down now that, since 1870, American and German competition have been putting an end to English monopoly in the world market. In the main branches of industry a depressed state of business has prevailed since 1868, while production has been slowly increasing, and now we seem both here and in America to be standing on the verge of a new crisis which in England has not been preceded by a period of prosperity. That is the secret of the sudden though it has been slowly preparing for three years but the present sudden emergence of a socialist movement here. So far the organised workers trade unions remain quite remote from it, the movement is proceeding among "educated" elements sprung from the bourgeoisie, who here and there seek contact with the masses and in places find it. These people are of very varying moral and intellectual value and it will take some time before they sort themselves out and the thing becomes clarified. But that it will all go entirely to sleep again is hardly likely. Many thanks for your book, Die Frau. I have read it with great interest, it contains much valuable material. Especially lucid and fine is what you say about the development of industry in Germany. I have also done some research on this subject recently, and if I had time I would write something about it for the Sozialdemokrat. How strange that the philistines don t understand that the vagabond trouble they so lament is the necessary consequence of the rise of large-scale industry under the conditions obtaining in German agriculture and handicraft, and that the development of large-scale industry in Germany because she arrives late everywhere is bound to take place under the continuous pressure of adverse market conditions. For the Germans are able to compete only as a result of low wages, reduced to starvation level, and an ever increasing exploitation of the cottage industry which serves as a background to their factory production. The transformation of the handicrafts into cottage industry and the gradual transformation of the cottage industry, in so far as this is profitable, into factory and machine industry that is the course taken in Germany. The only really big industry we have up to now is iron. The hand-loom still predominates in the textile industry, thanks to the starvation wages and the fact that the weavers have potato plots. Henry George with his nationalisation of the land is likely to play a meteoric role, because this point here is of importance traditionally, and also actually on account of the vast extent of big landed property. But in the long run attention will not be concentrated on this point alone in the foremost industrial country in the world. Henry George, moreover, is a genuine bourgeois and his plan of defraying all governmental expenditures out of rent of land is only a repetition of the plan of the Ricardo school, that is purely bourgeois.

Letters: Marx-Engels Correspondence 1884

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/letters/84_01_18.htm

One thing you can be sure of: I wish for no better translator than you. In the first folio, in endeavouring to reproduce the sense correctly and accurately, you somewhat neglected the syntax voil tout. In addition, I wanted to render Marx s peculiar style, to which you are unaccustomed; hence the numerous alterations. If, having once conveyed the sense in German, you read through the manuscript once more with a view to simplifying the syntax, and at the same time remember to avoid wherever possible clumsy, schoolmasterish syntax, which continually places the verb right at the end of the subordinate clause (and which we have all had crammed into. us), then you will encounter little difficulty and will yourself put everything in order.

Letters: Marx-Engels Correspondence 1893

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The police have opened up a really splendid field for our people: the ever-present and uninterrupted struggle with the police themselves. This is being carried on everywhere and always, with great success and, the best thing about it, with great humour. The police are defeated--and made to look foolish into the bargain. And I consider this struggle the most useful in the circumstances. Above all it keeps the contempt for the enemy alive among our lads. Worse troops could not be sent into the field against us than the German police; even where they have the upper hand they suffer a moral defeat, and confidence in victory is growing among our lads every day. This struggle will bring it about that as soon as the pressure is at last relaxed (and that will happen on the day the dance in Russia begins) we shall no longer count our numbers in hundreds of thousands but in millions. There is a lot of rotten stuff among the so-called leaders but I have unqualified confidence in our masses, and what they lack in revolutionary tradition they are gaining more and more from this little war with the police. And you can say what you like, but we have never seen a proletariat yet which has learnt to act collectively and to march together in so short a time. For this reason, even though nothing appears on the surface, we can, I think, calmly await the moment when the call to arms is given. You will see how they muster!

Letters: Marx-Engels Correspondence 1884

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... It would be a good thing if somebody took the trouble to explain state socialism, which is now so prevalent, by the example of Java where its practice is in full bloom. All the material for that can be found in Java, or How to Manage a Colony, by JWB Money, Barrister at Law, London, 1861, two volumes. Here it will be seen how on the basis of the old community communism the Dutch organised production under state control and secured for the people what they considered a quite comfortable existence. The result: the people are kept at the stage of primitive stupidity and 70 million marks (by now presumably more) are annually collected by the Dutch national treasury. This case is highly interesting and the practical conclusions can easily be drawn. Incidentally this demonstrates that today primitive communism (so long as it has not been stirred up by some element of modern communism) furnishes the finest and broadest basis of exploitation and despotism there, as well as in India and Russia, and that in the conditions of modern society it turns out to be a crying anachronism (which has either to be removed or almost made to retrograde) as much as were the independent mark communities of the original cantons. There exists an important book on the conditions of primitive society, as important as Darwin is in biology, and of course it is again Marx who discovered it: Morgan, Ancient Society, 1877. Marx spoke about it but my head was full of other things at that time and he never returned to it. This must have suited him for he himself wanted to publicise the book among the Germans, as I see from the quite extensive extracts he made. Morgan has quite independently discovered the Marxian materialist conception of history within the limits prescribed by his subject and he concludes with directly communist propositions in relation to present-day society. The Roman and Greek gens is for the first time fully explained on the basis of that of savages, particularly American Indians, thus creating a firm foundation for the history of primitive times. If I had the time I would work up the material, with Marx s notes, for a feature article in the Sozialdemokrat or the Neue Zeit, but that is out of the question. All that humbug by Tylor, Lubbock & Co about endogamy, exogamy and whatever else that rubbish is called has now been definitely squashed. These gentlemen suppress the book here as much as they can. It was printed in America. I ordered it five weeks ago but can t get it, although a London firm appears on the title page as co-publisher. Best regards

Letters: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence 1884

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/letters/84_02_16.htm

It will be a great day for Marx s daughters and me when the Russian version of Mis re de la philosophie comes out. It goes without saying that it will be a pleasure to me to place at your disposal all the material that may be useful to you for that purpose. I propose to do the following: Besides the German translation a new French edition is at present being printed in Paris. I am preparing some explanatory notes for these two editions and shall send you the text. For the preface an article by Marx on Proudhon can be used which appeared in the Berlin Social-Demokrat (1865) and contains almost all that is needed. It will head the two new editions, French and German. There is only one copy extant and that belongs to the archives of our party in Zurich. If no other copy is found among Marx s papers or mine (I shall know this in a few weeks) you could easily get a transcript through Bernstein. I shall have to write a special preface for the German edition in order to refute the absurd assertion of the reactionary Socialists that Marx plagiarised Rodbertus in Capital and to prove that on the contrary Marx had criticised Rodbertus in The Poverty before Rodbertus wrote his Sociale Briefe. This seems to me to be of no interest to the Russian public as our pseudo-Socialists have not yet penetrated there. But judge of that for yourself. The preface is at your disposal if you want to use it. What you tell me about the increasing study in Russia of books on socialist theory has given me great pleasure. Theoretical and critical thought, which has almost vanished from our German schools, seems to have taken refuge in Russia. You ask me to suggest books to you for translation. But you have already translated or promised to translate almost all the works of Marx. You have taken the cream of mine. The rest of our German books are either poor in theory or deal with questions confined more or less to Germany. Lately the French have produced a number of rather good things, but they are still only beginnings. Deville s summary of Capital is good so far as the theoretical part is concerned but the descriptive part was done too cursorily and is almost unintelligible for anyone who does not know the original. The book as a whole moreover is too bulky for a summary. Still I believe that if worked over a good thing could be made of it; and a summary of Capital is always useful in a country where it is difficult even to obtain the book. When I spoke of the situation in Russia it was of course her financial position which, among other things, I had especially but not exclusively in mind. For a government that does not know which way to turn as that of Petersburg and for a tsar who is a prisoner as the hermit of Gatchina is, the situation can only become more and more tense. Both the nobles and peasants are ruined, the chauvinist sentiments of the army offended and it itself scandalised by the daily spectacle of a sovereign in hiding; a war abroad has become a necessity in order to provide an outlet for evil passions and the general discontent, and at the same time lack of money and of favourable political prospects make it impossible to start one; a powerful national intelligentsia burning with desire to break the fetters that hold it enchained and added to all this the direst need of money and the knife of revolutionaries at the throat of the government it seems to me that with each month the position must become worse and that if a constitutionally-minded and courageous grand duke could be found, Russian society ought to see the best way out of this impasse in a palace revolution. Will Bismarck and Bleichr der save their new friends now? I doubt it. I feel more like asking myself which of the two contracting parties will be robbed by the other. Enclosed herewith is a manuscript (copy) by Marx of which please make such use as you deem best. I do not recall whether it was the Slovo or the Otechestvenniye Zapiski where he found the article Karl Marx Before the Tribunal of Mr Zhukovsky . He drew up this reply which bears the imprint of something written for publication in Russia, but he never sent it off to Petersburg for fear that his name alone would be sufficient to jeopardise the existence of the journal that would publish his reply. I find your translation of my pamphlet excellent. How beautiful the Russian language is! It has all the good points of the German without its horrible coarseness.

Letters: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence 1884

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/letters/84_03_06.htm

... The March article was in spite of everything very good and the essential points are properly emphasised. The same applies to the article in the next issue on the sermon to the peasants delivered by the member of the People s Party; the only sore point there is that the concept of democracy is invoked. That concept changes every time the Demos changes and so does not get us one step further. In my opinion what should have been said is the following: The proletariat too needs democratic forms for the seizure of political power but they are for it, like all political forms, mere means. But if today democracy is wanted as an end it is necessary to rely on the peasantry and petty bourgeoisie, that is, on classes that are in process of dissolution and reactionary in relation to the proletariat when they try to maintain themselves artificially. Furthermore it must not be forgotten that it is precisely the democratic republic which is the logical form of bourgeois rule; a form however that has become too dangerous only because of the level of development the proletariat has already reached; but France and America show that it is still possible as purely bourgeois rule. The principle of liberalism considered as something definite, historically evolved , is thus really only an inconsistency. The liberal constitutional monarchy is an adequate form of bourgeois rule: 1) at the beginning, when the bourgeoisie has not yet quite finished with the absolute monarchy, and 2) at the end, when the proletariat has already made the democratic republic too dangerous. And yet the democratic republic always remains the last form of bourgeois rule, that in which it goes to pieces. With this I conclude this rigmarole. Nim sends her regards. I did not see Tussy yesterday.

Letters: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence 1884

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/letters/84_03_24.htm

I made up my mind, as I told everybody here, to play a trick on Bismarck and write something (Morgan) that he simply could not prohibit. But it won t work, in spite of all my efforts. I simply cannot word the chapter on monogamy and the concluding chapter on private property as a source of class antagonisms and also as a lever for the disintegration of the ancient community system in a way to get them through under the Anti-Socialist Law. Let the devil take me, I can do no other, as Luther said. There would be no point in writing it if I merely wanted to give an objective report on Morgan without treating him critically, without utilising the new results and presenting them in connection with our views and the conclusions already reached. Our workers would gain nothing by this. Hence: either good but bound to be prohibited; or allowed but lousy. The latter I cannot do. I shall probably finish it next week (Schorlemmer is here again till Monday). There will be fully four printer s sheets or more. If you people want to take the chance after reading it of printing it in the Neue Zeit, you must assume responsibility for all the blood that will be shed and don t blame me afterwards. But if you exercise prudence and will not risk the whole journal because of one article, then have the thing printed as a pamphlet, either in Zurich or like Die Frau. That is for you to decide. I believe that thing will be of special importance for our general world outlook. Morgan makes it possible for us to look at things from entirely new points of view by supplying us in his prehistory with a factual foundation that was missing hitherto. Whatever doubts you may still have about details in the history of primitive times and savages , the gens settles the case in the main and explains the history of ancient society. And that is why the thing wants to be worked out seriously, carefully considered, demonstrated in all its interconnections but also treated without paying any heed to the Anti-Socialist Law. There is still another important point: I must show how Fourier s genius anticipated Morgan in very many things. It is Morgan s work which throws into bold relief the whole brilliance of Fourier s critique of civilisation. And that takes a lot of work...

Letters: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence 1884

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/letters/84_04_26.htm

... Actually I am rather glad that the Anti-Socialist Law was left in force and not repealed. The liberal philistine would have won a great victory for the conservatives at the elections for he is prepared to go not only through fire and water but even through the deepest muck-pit to keep the Anti-Socialist Law in operation. And then a new and stricter law would have been the result. As it looks now it has been extended most likely for the last time, and if old Wilhelm should kick the bucket from his renal colic it will soon cease to exist in practice. That the German liberals and the Centre thoroughly disgraced themselves when the vote was taken is also worth something, but still more Bismarck s right to work. Ever since that muddlehead took hold of this there are prospects of our getting rid of wailers like Geiser. Incidentally it takes a Bismarck to do such a stupid thing in face of a labour movement that cannot be held in check even with exceptional laws. In the meantime our people are quite justified in getting him more and more involved in this matter by pressing him for fulfilment. As soon as that fellow has committed himself a little more (which he is sure not to do so soon) the whole flimflam will resolve itself into Prussian police rule. Empty phrases will help him damned little as an election programme The right to work was first advanced by Fourier, but with him it is realised only in the phalanstery and therefore presupposes the adoption of the latter. The Fourierists peace-loving philistines of the D mocratie pacifique, as their paper was called, disseminated that phrase precisely because it sounded innocuous. The Paris workers of 1848 with their utter confusion in theoretical matters allowed this phrase to be palmed off on them because it looked so practical, so non-utopian, so readily realisable. The government put it into practice in the only way capitalist society could put it into practice by building nonsensical national workshops. In the same way the right to work was realised here in Lancashire during the cotton crisis of 1861-64 by building municipal workshops. And in Germany it is also put into operation by establishing starvation and flogging colonies for the workers, which are now arousing the enthusiasm of the philistines. Put forward as a separate demand the right to work cannot be realised in any other way. One demands that capitalist society should make that right effective but this society can do that only within the framework of its conditions of existence and if one demands the right to work in this society one demands it subject to these definite conditions; hence one demands national workshops, workhouses and colonies. But if the demand of the right to work is supposed to include indirectly the demand for the transformation of the capitalist mode of production, it is a cowardly regression in comparison with the present state of the movement, a concession to the Anti-Socialist Law, a phrase that can serve no other purpose than to confuse and muddle up the workers with regard to the aims they have to pursue and the sole conditions under which they can achieve their aims...

Letters: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence 1884

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/letters/84_05_23.htm

... We shall never be able to pry the masses loose from the liberal parties so long as the latter are not given an opportunity of discrediting themselves in practice, of getting at the helm of state and showing that they cannot do a thing. We are still, as we were in 1848, the opposition of the future and it is therefore necessary that the most extreme of the present parties shall be at the helm before we can become a present opposition in relation to it. Political stagnation, that is, aimless and purposeless struggle among the official parties, as now, cannot be of service to us in the long run. But a progressive struggle of these parties with a gradual shifting of the centre of gravity to the left can be so. That is what is now happening in France where the political struggle is being waged as always in classical form. The governments succeeding each other are moving more and more to the left and a Clemenceau Cabinet is already in sight. It will not be the most extreme bourgeois one. At each shift leftward concessions come the way of the workers (cf the last strike in Denain where for the first time the military did not intervene) and, what is more important, the field is being swept clean with increasing energy for the decisive battle and the position of the parties is becoming clearer and more distinct. I consider this slow but incessant development of the French Republic to its necessary outcome antithesis between radical, sham-socialist bourgeois and really revolutionary workers one of the most important events and hope it will not be interrupted; and I am glad that our people are not yet strong enough in Paris (but all the stronger in the provinces) to be misled into making putsches with the aid of revolutionary phrases. In confused Germany developments are naturally not following the classically pure lines exhibited in France. We are much too backward for that and experience everything only after it has become obsolete elsewhere. But although our official parties are so rotten political life of any sort is much more favourable to us than the present political lifelessness with nothing afoot except intrigues in the field of foreign politics...

Letters: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence 1884

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/letters/84_06_06.htm

The lithographed journal you write to me about is already known to me by reputation although I have never had a chance of seeing a copy of it. Are you not being somewhat unjust to your fellow-countrymen? The two of us, Marx and I, had no grounds for complaint against them. If certain schools were more notable for their revolutionary ardour than for their scientific study, if there was and still is a certain groping here and there, on the other hand a critical spirit has evinced itself there and a devotion to research even in pure theory worthy of the nation that produced a Dobrolyubov and a Chernyshevsky. I am not speaking only of active revolutionary Socialists but also of the historical and critical school in Russian literature, which is greatly surpassing anything produced in this line in Germany or France by official historical science. ... And even among active revolutionaries our ideas and the science of political economy recast by Marx have always met with sympathetic understanding. You no doubt know that quite recently several of our works were translated into and published in Russian and that others are going to follow, particularly Marx s Mis re de la philosophie . His smaller work, Lohnarbeit und Kapital , published before 1848, also belongs to that series and has been published under that title. I feel extremely flattered by your belief that it would be useful to translate my Outlines etc. Although I am still a bit proud of this my first work in social science I know only too well that it is now completely out of date and full not only of mistakes but of actual blunders. I am afraid it will cause more misunderstanding than do good. I am sending you by mail a copy of D hring s Umw lzung etc. As for our old newspaper articles, it would be difficult to find them after so long a time. The majority of them are not topical today. When the publication of the manuscripts left by Marx leaves me sufficient leisure I intend to publish them in the form of a collection with explanatory notes, etc. But that is a matter of the distant future. I am not quite sure what Address to the English workers you speak of. Could it be The Civil War in France, the Address of the International on the Paris Commune? I could send you that. If my health allowed I would ask you for permission to visit you. Though I feel tolerably well when at home I am unfortunately forbidden to walk about in the city. If you should do me the honour of paying me a visit you will always find me at your disposal about seven or eight o'clock in the evening.

Letters: Marx-Engels Correspondence 1884

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/letters/84_06_26.htm

For the rest, don t allow yourself to be drawn by pinpricks, that is the first rule in battle. Remember that:

Letters: Marx-Engels Correspondence 1884

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/letters/84_06_29.htm

Herewith I am returning the manuscripts registered. As far as economics is concerned your article on Rodbertus is very good. What I object to again is apodictic assertions in fields where you do not feel yourself sure and where you have exposed your weak spots to Schramm who has been skilled enough to nail them. This refers particularly to the abstraction which you have certainly run down much too much in general. In this case the difference is as follows: Marx summarises the actual content common to things and relations and reduces it to its general logical expression. His abstraction therefore only reflects, in rational form, the content already existing in the things. Rodbertus on the contrary invents a more or less imperfect logical expression and measures things by this conception to which the things must conform. He is seeking a true, eternal content of things and of social relations whose content however is essentially transient. Hence true capital. This is not present-day capital, which is only an imperfect manifestation of the concept. Instead of deducing the concept capital from the present, the only really existing capital, he has recourse to isolated man in order to arrive from present-day capital at true capital and asks what could function as capital in the productive process of such a man. Of course, simple means of production. Thus true capital is lumped together unceremoniously with the means of production, which depending on circumstances may or may not be capital. Thereby all bad properties, that is, all real properties of capital are eliminated from capital. Now he can demand that real capital should conform to this concept, that is, it should function only as simple social means of production, should discard everything that makes it capital and still remain capital and even just on that account become true capital...

Letters: Marx-Engels Correspondence 1884

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/letters/84_09_20.htm

In my opinion the case is like this : Throughout the whole of Europe the existing political situation is the product of revolutions. The legal basis, historic right, legitimacy, have been everywhere riddled through and through a thousand times or entirely overthrown. But it is in the nature of all parties or classes which have come to power through revolution, to demand that the new basis of right created by the revolution should also be unconditionally recognised and regarded as holy. The right to revolution did exist--otherwise the present rulers would not be rightful--but from now onwards it is to exist no more. In Germany the existing situation rests on the revolution which began in 1848 and ended in 1866. 1866 was a complete revolution. Just as Prussia only became anything by treachery and war against the German Empire, in alliance with foreign powers (1740, 1756, 1785), so it only achieved the German-Prussian Empire by the forcible overthrow of the German Confederation and by civil war. Its assertion that the others broke the Confederation makes no difference. The others say the opposite. There has never been a revolution yet which lacked a legal pretext--as in France in 1830 when both the king and the bourgeoisie asserted they were in the right. Enough, Prussia provoked the civil war and with it the revolution. After its victory it overthrew three thrones "by God's grace" and annexed their territories, together with those of the former free city of Frankfort. If that was not revolutionary I do not know the meaning of the word. And as this was not enough it confiscated the private property of the princes who had been driven out. That this was unlawful, revolutionary therefore, it admitted by getting the action endorsed later by an assembly--the Reichstag--which had as little right to dispose of these funds as the government. The German-Prussian Empire, as the completion of the North German Confederation which 1866 forcibly created, is a thoroughly revolutionary creation. I make no complaint about that. What I reproach the people who made it with is that they were only poor-spirited revolutionaries who did not go much further and at once annex the whole of Germany to Prussia. But those who operate with blood and iron, swallow up whole states, overthrow thrones and confiscate private property, should not condemn other people as revolutionaries. If the Party only retains the right to be no more and no less revolutionary than the Imperial Government has been, it has got all it needs. Recently it was officially stated that the Imperial Constitution was not a contract between the princes and the people but only one between the princes and free cities, which could at any time replace the constitution by another. The government organs which laid this down demanded, therefore, that the governments should have the right to overthrow the Imperial Constitution. No Exceptional Law was enacted against them, they were not persecuted. Very well, in the most extreme case we do not demand more for ourselves than is here demanded for the governments. The Duke of Cumberland is the legitimate and unquestioned heir to the throne of Brunswick. The right claimed by Cumberland in Brunswick is no other than that by which the King of Prussia is seated in Berlin. Whatever else may be required of Cumberland can only be claimed after he has taken possession of his lawful and legitimate throne. But the revolutionary German Imperial Government prevents him from doing so by force. A fresh revolutionary action. What is the position of the parties? In November 1848 the Conservative Party broke through the new legal basis created in March 1848 without a tremor. In any case it only recognises the constitutional position as a provisional one and would hail any feudal-absolutist coup d'etat with delight. The Liberal Parties of all shades co-operated in the revolution of 1848-1866, nor would they deny themselves the right to-day to counter any forcible overthrow of the constitution by force. The Centre recognises the church as the highest power, above the state, a power which might in a given case, therefore, make revolution a duty. And these are the parties which demand from us that we, we alone of them all, should declare that in no circumstances will we resort to force and that we will submit to every oppression, to every act of violence, not only as soon as it is merely formally legal--legal according to the judgment of our adversaries--but also when it is directly illegal. Indeed no party has renounced the right to armed resistance, in certain circumstances, without lying. None has ever been able to relinquish this ultimate right. But once it comes to the question of discussing the circumstances for which a party reserves to itself this right, then the game is won. Then one can talk nineteen to the dozen. And especially a party which has been declared to have no rights, a party therefore which has had revolution directly indicated to it from above. Such a declaration of outlawry can be daily repeated in the fashion it has once occurred. To require an unconditional declaration of this kind from such a party is sheer absurdity. For the rest, the gentlemen can keep calm. With military conditions as they are at present we shall not start our attack so long as there is still an armed force against us. We can wait until the armed force itself ceases to be a force against us. Any earlier revolution, even if victorious, would not bring us to power, but the most radical of the bourgeoisie, and of the petty bourgeoisie. Meanwhile the elections have shown that we have nothing to expect from yielding, i.e., from concessions to our adversaries. We have only won respect and become a power by defiant resistance. Only power is respected, and only so long as we are a power shall we be respected by the philistine. Anyone who makes him concessions can no longer be a power and is despised by him. The iron hand can make itself felt in a velvet glove but it must make itself felt. The German proletariat has become a mighty party; may its representatives be worthy of it.

Letters: Marx-Engels Correspondence 1884

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/letters/84_11_18.htm

Friday last the Social Democratic Federation had a benefit. Tussy and Edward played in a piece I did not go, as I do not as yet see my way to sitting three hours consecutively in a stiff chair. Nim says they played very well the piece was more or less, she says, their own history. Mother Wright read very well Bax played the piano rather long Morris who was here the other night and quite delighted to find the Old Norse Edda on my table he is an Icelandic enthusiast Morris read a piece of his poetry (a refonte of the eddaic Helreid Brynhildar (the description of Brynhild burning herself with Sigurd s corpse), etc., etc., it went off very well their art seems to be rather better than their literature and their poetry better than their prose.

Letters: Marx-Engels Correspondence 1884

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/letters/84_11_23.htm

Our great advantage is that with us the industrial revolution is only just in full swing, while in France and England, so far as the main point is concerned, it is closed. There the division into town and country, industrial district and agricultural district is so far concluded that it only changes slowly. The great mass of the people grow up in the conditions in which they have later to live, are accustomed to them; even the fluctuations and crises have become something they take practically for granted. Added to this is the remembrance of the unsuccessful attempts of former movements. With us, on the other hand, everything is in full flow. Remnants of the old peasant industrial production for the satisfaction of personal needs are being supplanted by capitalistic domestic industry, while in other places capitalistic domestic industry is already succumbing in its turn to machinery. And the very nature of our industry, limping behind at the very end, makes the social upheaval all the more fundamental. As the great mass production articles, both mass commodities and articles of luxury, have already been appropriated by the French and English, all that remains for our export industry is chiefly small stuff, which, however, also runs into masses all the same, and is at first produced by domestic industry and only later, when the production is on a mass scale, by machines. Domestic industry (capitalistic) is introduced by this means into much wider regions and clears its way all the more thoroughly. If I except the East Elbe district of Prussia, that is to say East Prussia, Pomerania, Posen and the greater part of Brandenburg, and further Old Bavaria, there are few districts where the peasant has not been swept more and more into domestic industry. The region industrially revolutionised, therefore, becomes larger with us than anywhere else. Furthermore. Since for the most part the worker in domestic industry carries on his little bit of agriculture, it becomes possible to depress wages in a fashion unequalled elsewhere. What formerly constituted the happiness of the small man, the combination of agriculture and industry, now becomes the most powerful means of capitalist exploitation. The potato patch, the cow, the little bit of agriculture make it possible for the labour power to be sold below its price; they oblige this to be so by tying the worker to his piece of land, which yet only partially supports him. Hence it becomes possible to put our industry on an export basis owing to the fact that the buyer is generally presented with the whole of the surplus value, while the capitalist's profit consists in a deduction from the normal wage. This is more or less the case with all rural domestic industry, but nowhere so much as with us. Added to this is the fact that our industrial revolution, which was set in motion by the revolution of 1848 with its bourgeois progress (feeble though this was), was enormously speeded up (1) by getting rid of internal hindrances in 1866 to 1870, and (2) by the French milliards, which were ultimately to be invested capitalistically. So we achieved an industrial revolution which is more deep and thorough and spatially more extended and comprehensive than that of the other countries, and this with a perfectly fresh and intact proletariat, undemoralised by defeats and finally--thanks to Marx--with an insight into the causes of economic and political development and into the conditions of the impending revolution such as none of our predecessors possessed. But for that very reason it is our duty to be victorious. As to pure democracy and its role in the future I do not share your opinion. Obviously it plays a far more subordinate part in Germany than in countries with an older industrial development. But that does not prevent the possibility, when the moment of revolution comes, of its acquiring a temporary importance as the most radical bourgeois party (it has already played itself off as such in Frankfort) and as the final sheet-anchor of the whole bourgeois and even feudal regime. At such a moment the whole reactionary mass falls in behind it and strengthens it; everything which used to be reactionary behaves as democratic. Thus between March and September 1848 the whole feudal-bureaucratic mass strengthened the liberals in order to hold down the revolutionary masses, and, once this was accomplished, in order, naturally, to kick out the liberals as well. Thus from May 1848 until Bonaparte's election in France in December, the purely republican party of the National, the weakest of all the parties, was in power, simply owing to the whole collective reaction organised behind it. This has happened in every revolution: the tamest party still remaining in any way capable of government comes to power with the others just because it is only in this party that the defeated see their last possibility of salvation. Now it cannot be expected that at the moment of crisis we shall already have the majority of the electorate and therefore of the nation behind us. The whole bourgeois class and the remnants of the feudal landowning class, a large section of the petty bourgeoisie and also of the rural population will then mass themselves around the most radical bourgeois party, which will then make the most extreme revolutionary gestures, and I consider it very possible that it will be represented in the provisional government and even temporarily form its majority. How, as a minority, one should not act in that case, was demonstrated by the social-democratic minority in the Paris revolution of February 1848. However, this is still an academic question at the moment. Now of course the thing may take a different turn in Germany, and that for military reasons. As things are at present, an impulse from outside can scarcely come from anywhere but Russia. If it does not do so, if the impulse arises from Germany, then the revolution can only start from the army. From the military point of view an unarmed nation against an army of to-day is a purely vanishing quantity. In this case--if our twenty to twenty-five-year-old reserves which have no vote but are trained, came into action--pure democracy might be leapt over. But this question is still equally academic at present, although I, as a representative, so to speak, of the great general staff of the Party, am bound to take it into consideration. In any case our sole adversary on the day of the crisis and on the day after the crisis will be the whole collective reaction which will group itself around pure democracy, and this, I think, should not be lost sight of. If you are bringing forward motions in the Reichstag, there is one which should not be forgotten. The state lands are mostly let out to big farmers; the smallest portion of them is sold to peasants, whose holdings are, however, so small that the new peasants have to resort to working as day labourers on the big farms. The demand should be made that the great demesnes which are not yet broken up should be let out to co-operative societies of agricultural labourers for joint farming. The Imperial Government has no state lands and will therefore no doubt find a pretext for shelving such a proposition put in the form of a motion. But I think this firebrand must be thrown among the agricultural day labourers. Which can indeed be done in one of the many debates on state socialism. This and this alone is the way to get hold of the agricultural workers this is the best method of drawing their attention to the fact that later on it is to he their task to cultivate the great estates of our present gracious gentlemen for the common account. And this will give friend Bismarck, who demands positive proposals from you, enough for some time.

Letters: Marx-Engels Correspondence 1884

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/letters/84_12_11.htm

It should further be observed that this report again confirms what I said in The Origin of the Family, 4th edition, pp. 28-29: that group marriage does not look at all like what our brother-obsessed philistine imagines; that the partners in group marriage do not lead in public the same kind of lascivious life as he practices in secret, but that this form of marriage, at least in the instances still known to occur today, differs in practice from a loose pairing marriage or from polygamy only in the fact that custom permits sexual intercourse in a number of cases where otherwise it would be severely punished. That the actual exercise of these rights is gradually dying out only proves that this form of marriage is itself destined to die out, which is further confirmed by its infrequency. The whole description, moreover, is interesting because it again demonstrates the similarity, even the identity in their main characteristics, of the social institutions of primitive peoples at approximately the same stage of development. Most of what the report states about these Mongoloids on the island of Sakhalin also holds for the Dravidian tribes of India, the South Sea Islanders at the time of their discovery, and the American Indians. The report runs: One can readily understand that a gens so constituted may comprise an enormous number of people. Life within the gens proceeds according to the following principles. Marriage within the gens is unconditionally prohibited. When a Gilyak dies, his wife passes by decision of the gens to one of his brothers, own or nominal. The gens provides for the maintenance of all of its members who are unable to work. 'We have no poor,' said a Gilyak to the writer. 'Whoever is in need, is fed by the khal [gens].' The members of the gens are further united by common sacrificial ceremonies and festivals, a common burial place, etc.

Origins of the Family-- Appendix

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/origin-family/appen.htm

Of the three main epochs savagery, barbarism, and civilization he is concerned, of course, only with the first two and the transition to the third. He divides both savagery and barbarism into lower, middle, and upper stages according to the progress made in the production of food; for, he says: The development of the family takes a parallel course, but here the periods have not such striking marks of differentiation. (a.) LOWER STAGE. Childhood of the human race. Man still lived in his original habitat, in tropical or subtropical forests, and was partially at least a tree-dweller, for otherwise his survival among huge beasts of prey cannot be explained. Fruit, nuts and roots served him for food. The development of articulate speech is the main result of this period. Of all the peoples known to history none was still at this primitive level. Though this period may have lasted thousands of years, we have no direct evidence to prove its existence; but once the evolution of man from the animal kingdom is admitted, such a transitional stage must necessarily be assumed.[A] (b.) MIDDLE STAGE. Begins with the utilization of fish for food (including crabs, mussels, and other aquatic animals), and with the use of fire. The two are complementary, since fish becomes edible only by the use of fire. With this new source of nourishment, men now became independent of climate and locality; even as savages, they could, by following the rivers and coasts, spread over most of the earth. Proof of these migrations is the distribution over every continent of the crudely worked, unsharpened flint tools of the earlier Stone Age, known as palaeoliths, all or most of which date from this period. New environments, ceaseless exercise of his inventive faculty, and the ability to produce fire by friction, led man to discover new kinds of food: farinaceous roots and tubers, for instance, were baked in hot ashes or in ground ovens. With the invention of the first weapons, club and spear, game could sometimes be added to the fare. But the tribes which figure in books as living entirely, that is, exclusively, by hunting never existed in reality; the yield of the hunt was far too precarious. At this stage, owing to the continual uncertainty of food supplies, cannibalism seems to have arisen, and was practiced from now onwards for a long time. The Australian aborigines and many of the Polynesians are still in this middle stage of savagery today.[B] (c.) UPPER STAGE. Begins with the invention of the bow and arrow, whereby game became a regular source of food, and hunting a normal form of work. Bow, string, and arrow already constitute a very complex instrument, whose invention implies long, accumulated experience and sharpened intelligence, and therefore knowledge of many other inventions as well. We find, in fact, that the peoples acquainted with the bow and arrow but not yet with pottery (from which Morgan dates the transition to barbarism) are already making some beginnings towards settlement in villages and have gained some control over the production of means of subsistence; we find wooden vessels and utensils, finger-weaving (without looms) with filaments of bark; plaited baskets of bast or osier; sharpened (neolithic) stone tools. With the discovery of fire and the stone ax, dug-out canoes now become common; beams and planks arc also sometimes used for building houses. We find all these advances, for instance, among the Indians of northwest America, who are acquainted with the bow and arrow but not with pottery. The bow and arrow was for savagery what the iron sword was for barbarism and fire-arms for civilization the decisive weapon.[C] (a.) LOWER STAGE. Dates from the introduction of pottery. In many cases it has been proved, and in all it is probable, that the first pots originated from the habit of covering baskets or wooden vessels with clay to make them fireproof; in this way it was soon discovered that the clay mold answered the purpose without any inner vessel. Thus far we have been able to follow a general line of development applicable to all peoples at a given period without distinction of place. With the beginning of barbarism, however, we have reached a stage when the difference in the natural endowments of the two hemispheres of the earth comes into play. The characteristic feature of the period of barbarism is the domestication and breeding of animals and the cultivation of plants. Now, the Eastern Hemisphere, the so-called Old World, possessed nearly all the animals adaptable to domestication, and all the varieties of cultivable cereals except one; the Western Hemisphere, America, had no mammals that could be domesticated except the llama, which, moreover, was only found in one part of South America, and of all the cultivable cereals only one, though that was the best, namely, maize. Owing to these differences in natural conditions, the population of each hemisphere now goes on its own way, and different landmarks divide the particular stages in each of the two cases. (b.) MIDDLE STAGE. Begins in the Eastern Hemisphere with domestication of animals; in the Western, with the cultivation, by means of irrigation, of plants for food, and with the use of adobe (sun-dried) bricks and stone for building. We will begin with the Western Hemisphere, as here this stage was never superseded before the European conquest. At the time when they were discovered, the Indians at the lower stage of barbarism (comprising all the tribes living east of the Mississippi) were already practicing some horticulture of maize, and possibly also of gourds, melons, and other garden plants, from which they obtained a very considerable part of their food. They lived in wooden houses in villages protected by palisades. The tribes in the northwest, particularly those in the region of the Columbia River, were still at the upper stage of savagery and acquainted neither with pottery nor with any form of horticulture. The so-called Pueblo Indians of New Mexico, however, and the Mexicans, Central Americans, and Peruvians at the time of their conquest were at the middle stage of barbarism. They lived in houses like fortresses, made of adobe brick or of stone, and cultivated maize and other plants, varying according to locality and climate, in artificially irrigated plots of ground, which supplied their main source of food; some animals even had also been domesticated the turkey and other birds by the Mexicans, the llama by the Peruvians. They could also work metals, but not iron; hence they were still unable to dispense with stone weapons and tools. The Spanish conquest then cut short any further independent development. In the Eastern Hemisphere the middle stage of barbarism began with the domestication of animals providing milk and meat, but horticulture seems to have remained unknown far into this period.[D] It was, apparently, the domestication and breeding of animals and the formation of herds of considerable size that led to the differentiation of the Aryans and Semites from the mass of barbarians. The European and Asiatic Aryans still have the same names for cattle, but those for most of the cultivated plants are already different. In suitable localities, the keeping of herds led to a pastoral life: the Semites lived upon the grassy plains of the Euphrates and Tigris, and the Aryans upon those of India and of the Oxus and Jaxartes, of the Don and the Dnieper. It must have been on the borders of such pasture lands that animals were first domesticated. To later generations, consequently, the pastoral tribes appear to have come from regions which, so far from being the cradle of mankind, were almost uninhabitable for their savage ancestors and even for man at the lower stages of barbarism. But having once accustomed themselves to pastoral life in the grassy plains of the rivers, these barbarians of the middle period would never have dreamed of returning willingly to the native forests of their ancestors. Even when they were forced further to the north and west, the Semites and Aryans could not move into the forest regions of western Asia and of Europe until by cultivation of grain they had made it possible to pasture and especially to winter their herds on this less favorable land. It is more than probable that among these tribes the cultivation of grain originated from the need for cattle fodder and only later became important as a human food supply. The plentiful supply of milk and meat and especially the beneficial effect of these foods on the growth of the children account perhaps for the superior development of the Aryan and Semitic races. It is a fact that the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico, who are reduced to an almost entirely vegetarian diet, have a smaller brain than the Indians at the lower stage of barbarism, who eat more meat and fish.[E] In any case, cannibalism now gradually dies out, surviving only as a religious act or as a means of working magic, which is here almost the same thing. (c.) UPPER STAGE. Begins with the smelting of iron ore, and passes into civilization with the invention of alphabetic writing and its use for literary records. This stage (as we have seen, only the Eastern Hemisphere passed through it independently) is richer in advances in production than all the preceding stages together. To it belong the Greeks of the heroic age, the tribes of Italy shortly before the foundation of Rome, the Germans of Tacitus and the Norsemen of the Viking age.[F] Above all, we now first meet the iron plowshare drawn by cattle, which made large-scale agriculture, the cultivation of fields, possible, and thus created a practically unrestricted food supply in comparison with previous conditions. This led to the clearance of forest land for tillage and pasture, which in turn was impossible on a large scale without the iron ax and the iron spade. Population rapidly increased in number, and in small areas became dense. Prior to field agriculture, conditions must have been very exceptional if they allowed half a million people to be united under a central organization; probably such a thing never occurred. We find the upper stage of barbarism at its highest in the Homeric poems, particularly in the Iliad. Fully developed iron tools, the bellows, the hand-mill, the potter s wheel, the making of oil and wine, metal work developing almost into a fine art, the wagon and the war-chariot, ship-building with beams and planks, the beginnings of architecture as art, walled cities with towers and battlements, the Homeric epic and a complete mythology these are the chief legacy brought by the Greeks from barbarism into civilization. When we compare the descriptions which Caesar and even Tacitus give of the Germans, who stood at the beginning of the cultural stage from which the Homeric Greeks were just preparing to make the next advance, we realize how rich was the development of production within the upper stage of barbarism. The sketch which I have given here, following Morgan, of the development of mankind through savagery and barbarism to the beginnings of civilization, is already rich enough in new features; what is more, they cannot be disputed, since they are drawn directly from the process of production. Yet my sketch will seem flat and feeble compared with the picture to be unrolled at the end of our travels; only then will the transition from barbarism to civilization stand out in full light and in all its striking contrasts. For the time being, Morgan s division may be summarized thus: The intent of these footnotes are both to help the modern reader critically assess this work in face of recent scientific evidence and to show how effective Engels' dialectical method was that many of his conclusions remain true to this day. The following chapters do not have editorial footnotes because they are not needed as much as they are in this chapter (and this editor is not as knowledgable on those other subjects!). It should be noted that Engels predominant focus on European cultures is due to his lack of data on other cultures. These notes were written by MIA volunteer Brian Baggins (July, 2000). There are however two significant mistakes. Australian Aborigines and Polynesians were not in a "middle stage of savagery . This was a false characterization used by Europeans to justify the colonization of those people. Similarly, cannibalism is an accusation often made to justify exploitation, and its existence is extremely rare.

Origins of the Family. Chapter 1

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/origin-family/ch01.htm

How is this to be explained? In view of the decisive part played by consanguinity in the social structure of all savage and barbarian peoples, the importance of a system so widespread cannot be dismissed with phrases. When a system is general throughout America and also exists in Asia among peoples of a quite different race, when numerous instances of it are found with greater or less variation in every part of Africa and Australia, then that system has to be historically explained, not talked out of existence, as McLennan, for example, tried to do. The names of father, child, brother, sister are no mere complimentary forms of address; they involve quite definite and very serious mutual obligations which together make up an essential part of the social constitution of the peoples in question. The explanation was found. In the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii) there still existed in the first half of the nineteenth century a form of family in which the fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, sons and daughters, uncles and aunts, nephews and nieces were exactly what is required by the American and old Indian system of consanguinity. But now comes a strange thing. Once again, the system of consanguinity in force in Hawaii did not correspond to the actual form of the Hawaiian family. For according to the Hawaiian system of consanguinity all children of brothers and sisters are without exception brothers and sisters of one another and are considered to be the common children not only of their mother and her sisters or of their father and his brothers, but of all the brothers and sisters of both their parents without distinction. While, therefore, the American system of consanguinity presupposes a more primitive form of the family which has disappeared in America, but still actually exists in Hawaii, the Hawaiian system of consanguinity, on the other hand, points to a still earlier form of the family which, though we can nowhere prove it to be still in existence, nevertheless must have existed; for otherwise the corresponding system of consanguinity could never have arisen. And, adds Marx, the same is true of the political, juridical, religious, and philosophical systems in general. While the family undergoes living changes, the system of consanguinity ossifies; while the system survives by force of custom, the family outgrows it. But just as Cuvier could deduce from the marsupial bone of an animal skeleton found near Paris that it belonged to a marsupial animal and that extinct marsupial animals once lived there, so with the same certainty we can deduce from the historical survival of a system of consanguinity that an extinct form of family once existed which corresponded to it. The systems of consanguinity and the forms of the family we have just mentioned differ from those of today in the fact that every child has more than one father and mother. In the American system of consanguinity, to which the Hawaiian family corresponds, brother and sister cannot be the father and mother of the same child; but the Hawaiian system of consanguinity, on the contrary, presupposes a family in which this was the rule. Here we find ourselves among forms of family which directly contradict those hitherto generally assumed to be alone valid. The traditional view recognizes only monogamy, with, in addition, polygamy on the part of individual men, and at the very most polyandry on the part of individual women; being the view of moralizing philistines, it conceals the fact that in practice these barriers raised by official society are quietly and calmly ignored. The study of primitive history, however, reveals conditions where the men live in polygamy and their wives in polyandry at the same time, and their common children are therefore considered common to them all and these conditions in their turn undergo a long series of changes before they finally end in monogamy. The trend of these changes is to narrow more and more the circle of people comprised within the common bond of marriage, which was originally very wide, until at last it includes only the single pair, the dominant form of marriage today. Reconstructing thus the past history of the family, Morgan, in agreement with most of his colleagues, arrives at a primitive stage when unrestricted sexual freedom prevailed within the tribe, every woman belonging equally to every man and every man to every woman. Since the eighteenth century there had been talk of such a primitive state, but only in general phrases. Bachofen and this is one of his great merits was the first to take the existence of such a state seriously and to search for its traces in historical and religious survivals. Today we know that the traces he found do not lead back to a social stage of promiscuous sexual intercourse, but to a much later form namely, group marriage. The primitive social stage of promiscuity, if it ever existed, belongs to such a remote epoch that we can hardly expect to prove its existence directly by discovering its social fossils among backward savages. Bachofen's merit consists in having brought this question to the forefront for examination. Lately it has become fashionable to deny the existence of this initial stage in human sexual life. Humanity must be spared this shame. It is pointed out that all direct proof of such a stage is lacking, and particular appeal is made to the evidence from the rest of the animal world; for, even among animals, according to the numerous facts collected by Letourneau (L' volution du mariage et de la famille, 1888), complete promiscuity in sexual intercourse marks a low stage of development. But the only conclusion I can draw from all these facts, so far as man and his primitive conditions of life are concerned, is that they prove nothing whatever. That vertebrates mate together for a considerable period is sufficiently explained by physiological causes in the case of birds, for example, by the female s need of help during the brooding period; examples of faithful monogamy among birds prove nothing about man, for the simple reason that men are not descended from birds. And if strict monogamy is the height of all virtue, then the palm must go to the tapeworm, which has a complete set of male and female sexual organs in each of its 50-200 proglottides, or sections, and spends its whole life copulating in all its sections with itself. Confining ourselves to mammals, however, we find all forms of sexual life promiscuity, indications of group marriage, polygyny, monogamy. Polyandry alone is lacking it took human beings to achieve that. Even our nearest relations, the quadrumana, exhibit every possible variation in the grouping of males and females; and if we narrow it down still more and consider only the four anthropoid apes, all that Letourneau has to say about them is that they are sometimes monogamous, sometimes polygamous, while Saussure, quoted by Giraud-Teulon, maintains that they are monogamous. The more recent assertions of the monogamous habits of the anthropoid apes which are cited by Westermarck (The History of Human Marriage, London 1891), are also very far from proving anything. In short, our evidence is such that honest Letourneau admits: Among mammals there is no strict relation between the degree of intellectual development and the form of sexual life. And Espinas (Des soci t s animates, 1877), says in so many words: As the above shows, we know practically nothing definite about the family and other social groupings of the anthropoid apes; the evidence is flatly contradictory. Which is not to be wondered at. The evidence with regard to savage human tribes is contradictory enough, requiring very critical examination and sifting; and ape societies are far more difficult to observe than human. For the present, therefore, we must reject any conclusion drawn from such completely unreliable reports. The sentence quoted from Espinas, however, provides a better starting point. Among the higher animals the herd and the family are not complementary to one another, but antagonistic. Espinas shows very well how the jealousy of the males during the mating season loosens the ties of every social herd or temporarily breaks it up. Here we see that animal societies are, after all, of some value for drawing conclusions about human societies; but the value is only negative. So far as our evidence goes, the higher vertebrates know only two forms of family polygyny or separate couples; each form allows only one adult male, only one husband. The jealousy of the male, which both consolidates and isolates the family, sets the animal family in opposition to the herd. The jealousy of the males prevents the herd, the higher social form, from coming into existence, or weakens its cohesion, or breaks it up during the mating period; at best, it attests its development. This alone is sufficient proof that animal families and primitive human society are incompatible, and that when primitive men were working their way up from the animal creation, they either had no family at all or a form that does not occur among animals. In small numbers, an animal so defenseless as evolving man might struggle along even in conditions of isolation, with no higher social grouping than the single male and female pair, such as Westermarck, following the reports of hunters, attributes to the gorillas and the chimpanzees. For man's development beyond the level of the animals, for the achievement of the greatest advance nature can show, something more was needed: the power of defense lacking to the individual had to be made good by the united strength and co-operation of the herd. To explain the transition to humanity from conditions such as those in which the anthropoid apes live today would be quite impossible; it looks much more as if these apes had strayed off the line of evolution and were gradually dying out or at least degenerating. That alone is sufficient ground for rejecting all attempts based on parallels drawn between forms of family and those of primitive man. Mutual toleration among the adult males, freedom from jealousy, was the first condition for the formation of those larger, permanent groups in which alone animals could become men. And what, in fact, do we find to be the oldest and most primitive form of family whose historical existence we can indisputably prove and which in one or two parts of the world we can still study today? Group marriage, the form of family in which whole groups of men and whole groups of women mutually possess one another, and which leaves little room for jealousy. And at a later stage of development we find the exceptional form of polyandry, which positively revolts every jealous instinct and is therefore unknown among animals. But as all known forms of group marriage are accompanied by such peculiarly complicated regulations that they necessarily point to earlier and simpler forms of sexual relations, and therefore in the last resort to a period of promiscuous intercourse corresponding to the transition from the animal to the human, the references to animal marriages only bring us back to the very point from which we were to be led away for good and all. What, then, does promiscuous sexual intercourse really mean? It means the absence of prohibitions and restrictions which are or have been in force. We have already seen the barrier of jealousy go down. If there is one thing certain, it is that the feeling of jealousy develops relatively late. The same is true of the conception of incest. Not only were brother and sister originally man and wife; sexual intercourse between parents and children is still permitted among many peoples today. Bancroft (The Native Races of the Pacific States of North America, 1875, Vol. I), testifies to it among the Kadiaks on the Behring Straits, the Kadiaks near Alaska, and the Tinneh in the interior of British North America; Letourneau compiled reports of it among the Chippewa Indians, the Cucus in Chile, the Caribs, the Karens in Burma; to say nothing of the stories told by the old Greeks and Romans about the Parthians, Persians, Scythians, Huns, and so on. Before incest was invented for incest is an invention, and a very valuable one, too sexual intercourse between parents and children did not arouse any more repulsion than sexual intercourse between other persons of different generations, and that occurs today even in the most philistine countries without exciting any great horror; even old maids of over sixty, if they are rich enough, sometimes marry young men in their thirties. But if we consider the most primitive known forms of family apart from their conceptions of incest conceptions which are totally different from ours and frequently in direct contradiction to them-then the form of sexual intercourse can only be described as promiscuous promiscuous in so far as the restrictions later established by custom did not yet exist. But in everyday practice that by no means necessarily implies general mixed mating. Temporary pairings of one man with one woman were not in any way excluded, just as in the cases of group marriages today the majority of relationships are of this character. And when Westermarck, the latest writer to deny the existence of such a primitive state, applies the term marriage to every relationship in which the two sexes remain mated until the birth of the offspring, we must point out that this kind of marriage can very well occur under the conditions of promiscuous intercourse without contradicting the principle of promiscuity the absence of any restriction imposed by custom on sexual intercourse. Westermarck, however, takes the standpoint that promiscuity involves a suppression of individual inclinations, and that therefore the most genuine form of it is prostitution. In my opinion, any understanding of primitive society is impossible to people who only see it as a brothel. We will return to this point when discussing group marriage. According to Morgan, from this primitive state of promiscuous intercourse there developed, probably very early: Here the marriage groups are separated according to generations: all the grandfathers and grandmothers within the limits of the family are all husbands and wives of one another; so are also their children, the fathers and mothers; the latter s children will form a third circle of common husbands and wives; and their children, the great-grandchildren of the first group, will form a fourth. In this form of marriage, therefore, only ancestors and progeny, and parents and children, are excluded from the rights and duties (as we should say) of marriage with one another. Brothers and sisters, male and female cousins of the first, second, and more remote degrees, are all brothers and sisters of one another, and precisely for that reason they are all husbands and wives of one another. At this stage the relationship of brother and sister also includes as a matter of course the practice of sexual intercourse with one another. In its typical form, such a family would consist of the descendants of a single pair, the descendants of these descendants in each generation being again brothers and sisters, and therefore husbands and wives, of one another. The consanguine family is extinct. Even the most primitive peoples known to history provide no demonstrable instance of it. But that it must have existed, we are compelled to admit: for the Hawaiian system of consanguinity still prevalent today throughout the whole of Polynesia expresses degrees of consanguinity which could only arise in this form of family; and the whole subsequent development of the family presupposes the existence of the consanguine family as a necessary preparatory stage.

Origins of the Family-- Chapter II

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/origin-family/ch02.htm

After a few generations at most, every original family was bound to split up. The practice of living together in a primitive communistic household, which prevailed without exception till late in the middle stage of barbarism, set a limit, varying with the conditions but fairly definite in each locality, to the maximum size of the family community. As soon as the conception arose that sexual intercourse between children of the same mother was wrong, it was bound to exert its influence when the old households split up and new ones were founded (though these did not necessarily coincide with the family group). One or more lines of sisters would form the nucleus of the one household and their own brothers the nucleus of the other. It must have been in some such manner as this that the form which Morgan calls the punaluan family originated out of the consanguine family. According to the Hawaiian custom, a number of sisters, own or collateral (first, second or more remote cousins) were the common wives of their common husbands, from among whom, however, their own brothers were excluded; these husbands now no longer called themselves brothers, for they were no longer necessarily brothers, but punalua that is, intimate companion, or partner. Similarly, a line of own or collateral brothers had a number of women, not their sisters, as common wives, and these wives called one another punalua. This was the classic form of a type of family, in which later a number of variations was possible, but whose essential feature was: mutually common possession of husbands and wives within a definite family circle, from which, however, the brothers of the wives, first own and later also collateral, and conversely also the sisters of the husbands, were excluded. This form of the family provides with the most complete exactness the degrees of consanguinity expressed in the American system. The children of my mother s sisters are still her children, just as the children of my father s brothers are also his children; and they are all my brothers and sisters. But the children of my mother s brothers are now her nephews and nieces, the children of my father's sisters are his nephews and nieces, and they are all my male and female cousins. For while the husbands of my mother s sisters are still her husbands, and the wives of my father&rquo;s brothers are still his wives (in right, if not always in fact), the social ban on sexual intercourse between brothers and sisters has now divided the children of brothers and sisters, who had hitherto been treated as own brothers and sisters, into two classes: those in the one class remain brothers and sisters as before (collateral, according to our system); those in the other class, the children of my mother s brother in the one case and of my father s sister in the other, cannot be brothers and sisters any longer, they can no longer have common parents, neither father nor mother nor both, and therefore now for the first time the class of nephews and nieces, male and female cousins becomes necessary, which in the earlier composition of the family would have been senseless. The American system of consanguinity, which appears purely nonsensical in any form of family based on any variety of monogamy, finds, down to the smallest details, its rational explanation and its natural foundation in the punaluan family. The punaluan family or a form similar to it must have been at the very least as widespread as this system of consanguinity. Evidence of this form of family, whose existence has actually been proved in Hawaii, would probably have been received from all over Polynesia if the pious missionaries, like the Spanish monks of former days in America, had been able to see in such unchristian conditions anything more than a sheer abomination. Caesar s report of the Britons, who were at that time in the middle stage of barbarism, every ten or twelve have wives in common, especially brothers with brothers and parents with children, is best explained as group marriage. Barbarian mothers do not have ten or twelve sons of their own old enough to keep wives in common, but the American system of consanguinity, which corresponds to the punaluan family, provides numerous brothers, because all a man s cousins, near and distant, are his brothers. Caesar s mention of parents with children may be due to misunderstanding on his part; it is not, however, absolutely impossible under this system that father and son or mother and daughter should be included in the same marriage group, though not father and daughter or mother and son. This or a similar form of group marriage also provides the simplest explanation of the accounts in Herodotus and other ancient writers about community of wives among savages and barbarian peoples. The same applies also to the reports of Watson and Kaye in their book, The People of India, about the Teehurs in Oudh (north of the Ganges): Both sexes have but a nominal tie on each other, and they change connection without compunction; living together, almost indiscriminately, in many large families. In the very great majority of cases the institution of the gens seems to have originated directly out of the punaluan family. It is true that the Australian classificatory system also provides an origin for it: the Australians have gentes, but not yet the punaluan family; instead, they have a cruder form of group marriage. In all forms of group family it is uncertain who is the father of a child; but it is certain who its mother is. Though she calls all the children of the whole family her children and has a mother s duties towards them, she nevertheless knows her own children from the others. It is therefore clear that in so far as group marriage prevails, descent can only be proved on the mother s side and that therefore only the female line is recognized. And this is in fact the case among all peoples in the period of savagery or in the lower stage of barbarism. It is the second great merit of Bachofen that he was the first to make this discovery. To denote this exclusive recognition of descent through the mother and the relations of inheritance which in time resulted from it, he uses the term mother-right, which for the sake of brevity I retain. The term is, however, ill-chosen, since at this stage of society there cannot yet be any talk of right in the legal sense. If we now take one of the two standard groups of the punaluan family, namely a line of own and collateral sisters (that is, own sisters children in the first, second or third degree), together with their children and their own collateral brothers on the mother s side (who, according to our assumption, are not their husbands), we have the exact circle of persons whom we later find as members of a gens, in the original form of that institution. They all have a common ancestral mother, by virtue of their descent from whom the female offspring in each generation are sisters. The husbands of these sisters, however, can no longer be their brothers and therefore cannot be descended from the same ancestral mother; consequently, they do not belong to the same consanguine group, the later gens. The children of these sisters, however, do belong to this group, because descent on the mother s side alone counts, since it alone is certain. As soon as the ban had been established on sexual intercourse between all brothers and sisters, including the most remote collateral relatives on the mother s side, this group transformed itself into a gens that is, it constituted itself a firm circle of blood relations in the female line, between whom marriage was prohibited; and henceforward by other common institutions of a social and religious character it increasingly consolidated and differentiated itself from the other gentes of the same tribe. More of this later. When we see, then, that the development of the gens follows, not only necessarily, but also perfectly naturally from the punaluan family, we may reasonably infer that at one time this form of family almost certainly existed among all peoples among whom the presence of gentile institutions can be proved that is, practically all barbarians and civilized peoples. At the time Morgan wrote his book, our knowledge of group marriage was still very limited. A little information was available about the group marriages of the Australians, who were organized in classes, and Morgan had already, in 1871, published the reports he had received concerning the punaluan family in Hawaii. The punaluan family provided, on the one hand, the complete explanation of the system of consanguinity in force among the American Indians, which had been the starting point of all Morgan s researches; on the other hand, the origin of the matriarchal gens could be derived directly from the punaluan family; further, the punaluan family represented a much higher stage of development than the Australian classificatory system. It is therefore comprehensible that Morgan should have regarded it as the necessary stage of development before pairing marriage and should believe it to have been general in earlier times. Since then we have become acquainted with a number of other forms of group marriage, and we now know that Morgan here went too far. However, in his punaluan family he had had the good fortune to strike the highest, the classic form of group marriage, from which the transition to a higher stage can be explained most simply. For the most important additions to our knowledge of group marriage we are indebted to the English missionary, Lorimer Fison, who for years studied this form of the family in its classic home, Australia. He found the lowest stage of development among the Australian aborigines of Mount Gambier in South Australia. Here the whole tribe is divided into two great exogamous classes or moieties, Kroki and Kumite. Sexual intercourse within each of these moieties is strictly forbidden; on the other hand, every man in the one moiety is the husband by birth of every woman in the other moiety and she is by birth his wife. Not the individuals, but the entire groups are married, moiety with moiety. And observe that there is no exclusion on the ground of difference in age or particular degrees of affinity, except such as is entailed by the division of the tribe into two exogamous classes. A Kroki has every Kumite woman lawfully to wife; but, as his own daughter according to mother-right is also a Kumite, being the daughter of a Kumite woman, she is by birth the wife of every Kroki, including, therefore, her father. At any rate, there is no bar against this in the organization into moieties as we know it. Either, then, this organization arose at a time when, in spite of the obscure impulse towards the restriction of inbreeding, sexual intercourse between parents and children was still not felt to be particularly horrible in which case the moiety system must have originated directly out of a state of sexual promiscuity; or else intercourse between parents and children was already forbidden by custom when the moieties arose, and in that case the present conditions point back to the consanguine family and are the first step beyond it. The latter is more probable. There are not, to my knowledge, any instances from Australia of sexual cohabitation between parents and children, and as a rule the later form of exogamy, the matriarchal gens, also tacitly presupposes the prohibition of this relationship as already in force when the gens came into being. The system of two moieties is found, not only at Mount Gambier in South Australia, but also on the Darling River further to the east and in Queensland in the northeast; it is therefore widely distributed. It excludes marriages only between brothers and sisters, between the children of brothers and between the children of sisters on the mother's side, because these belong to the same moiety; the children of sisters and brothers, however, may marry. A further step towards the prevention of inbreeding was taken by the Kamilaroi on the Darling River in New South Wales; the two original moieties are split up into four, and again each of these four sections is married en bloc to another. The first two sections are husbands and wives of one another by birth; according to whether the mother belonged to the first or second section, the children go into the third or fourth; the children of these last two sections, which are also married to one another, come again into the first and second sections. Thus one generation always belongs to the first and second sections, the next to the third and fourth, and the generation after that to the first and second again. Under this system, first cousins (on the mother s side) cannot be man and wife, but second cousins can. This peculiarly complicated arrangement is made still more intricate by having matriarchal gentes grafted onto it (at any rate later), but we cannot go into the details of this now. What is significant is how the urge towards the prevention of inbreeding asserts itself again and again, feeling its way, however, quite instinctively, without clear consciousness of its aim. Group marriage which in these instances from Australia is still marriage of sections, mass marriage of an entire section of men, often scattered over the whole continent, with an equally widely distributed section of women this group marriage, seen close at hand, does not look quite so terrible as the philistines, whose minds cannot get beyond brothels, imagine it to be. On the contrary, for years its existence was not even suspected and has now quite recently been questioned again. All that the superficial observer sees in group marriage is a loose form of monogamous marriage, here and there polygyny, and occasional infidelities. It takes years, as it took Fison and Howlett, to discover beneath these marriage customs, which in their actual practice should seem almost familiar to the average European, their controlling law: the law by which the Australian aborigine, wandering hundreds of miles from his home among people whose language he does not understand, nevertheless often finds in every camp and every tribe women who give themselves to him without resistance and without resentment; the law by which the man with several wives gives one up for the night to his guest. Where the European sees immorality and lawlessness, strict law rules in reality. The women belong to the marriage group of the stranger, and therefore they are his wives by birth; that same law of custom which gives the two to one another forbids under penalty of outlawry all intercourse outside the marriage groups that belong together. Even when wives are captured, as frequently occurs in many places, the law of the exogamous classes is still carefully observed. Marriage by capture, it may be remarked, already shows signs of the transition to monogamous marriage, at least in the form of pairing marriage. When the young man has captured or abducted a girl, with the help of his friends, she is enjoyed by all of them in turn, but afterwards she is regarded as the wife of the young man who instigated her capture. If, on the other hand, the captured woman runs away from her husband and is caught by another man, she becomes his wife and the first husband loses his rights. Thus while group marriage continues to exist as the general form, side by side with group marriage and within it exclusive relationships begin to form, pairings for a longer or shorter period, also polygyny; thus group marriage is dying out here, too, and the only question is which will disappear first under European influence: group marriage or the Australian aborigines who practice it. Marriage between entire sections, as it prevails in Australia, is in any case a very low and primitive form of group marriage, whereas the punaluan family, so far as we know, represents its highest stage of development. The former appears to be the form corresponding to the social level of vagrant savages, while the latter already presupposes relatively permanent settlements of communistic communities and leads immediately to the successive higher phase of development. But we shall certainly find more than one intermediate stage between these two forms; here lies a newly discovered field of research which is still almost completely unexplored.

Origins of the Family-- Chapter 2 (II)

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/origin-family/ch02b.htm

In this ever extending exclusion of blood relatives from the bond of marriage, natural selection continues its work. In Morgan s words: Tribes with gentile constitution were thus bound to gain supremacy over more backward tribes, or else to carry them along by their example. Thus the history of the family in primitive times consists in the progressive narrowing of the circle, originally embracing the whole tribe, within which the two sexes have a common conjugal relation. The continuous exclusion, first of nearer, then of more and more remote relatives, and at last even of relatives by marriage, ends by making any kind of group marriage practically impossible. Finally, there remains only the single, still loosely linked pair, the molecule with whose dissolution marriage itself ceases. This in itself shows what a small part individual sex-love, in the modern sense of the word, played in the rise of monogamy. Yet stronger proof is afforded by the practice of all peoples at this stage of development. Whereas in the earlier forms of the family men never lacked women, but, on the contrary, had too many rather than too few, women had now become scarce and highly sought after. Hence it is with the pairing marriage that there begins the capture and purchase of women widespread symptoms, but no more than symptoms, of the much deeper change that had occurred. These symptoms, mere methods of procuring wives, the pedantic Scot, McLennan, has transmogrified into special classes of families under the names of marriage by capture and marriage by purchase. In general, whether among the American Indians or other peoples (at the same stage), the conclusion of a marriage is the affair, not of the two parties concerned, who are often not consulted at all, but of their mothers. Two persons entirely unknown to each other are often thus affianced; they only learn that the bargain has been struck when the time for marrying approaches. Before the wedding the bridegroom gives presents to the bride's gentile relatives (to those on the mother's side, therefore, not to the father and his relations), which are regarded as gift payments in return for the girl. The marriage is still terminable at the desire of either partner, but among many tribes, the Iroquois, for example, public opinion has gradually developed against such separations; when differences arise between husband and wife, the gens relatives of both partners act as mediators, and only if these efforts prove fruitless does a separation take place, the wife then keeping the children and each partner being free to marry again. The pairing family, itself too weak and unstable to make an independent household necessary or even desirable, in no wise destroys the communistic household inherited from earlier times. Communistic housekeeping, however, means the supremacy of women in the house; just as the exclusive recognition of the female parent, owing to the impossibility of recognizing the male parent with certainty, means that the women the mothers are held in high respect. One of the most absurd notions taken over from eighteenth-century enlightenment is that in the beginning of society woman was the slave of man. Among all savages and all barbarians of the lower and middle stages, and to a certain extent of the upper stage also, the position of women is not only free, but honorable. As to what it still is in the pairing marriage, let us hear the evidence of Ashur Wright, for many years missionary among the Iroquois Senecas: The communistic household, in which most or all of the women belong to one and the same gens, while the men come from various gentes, is the material foundation of that supremacy of the women which was general in primitive times, and which it is Bachofen s third great merit to have discovered. The reports of travelers and missionaries, I may add, to the effect that women among savages and barbarians are overburdened with work in no way contradict what has been said. The division of labor between the two sexes is determined by quite other causes than by the position of woman in society. Among peoples where the women have to work far harder than we think suitable, there is often much more real respect for women than among our Europeans. The lady of civilization, surrounded by false homage and estranged from all real work, has an infinitely lower social position than the hard-working woman of barbarism, who was regarded among her people as a real lady (lady, frowa, Frau mistress) and who was also a lady in character. Whether pairing marriage has completely supplanted group marriage in America today is a question to be decided by closer investigation among the peoples still at the upper stage of savagery in the northwest, and particularly in South America. Among the latter, so many instances of sexual license are related that one can hardly assume the old group marriage to have been completely overcome here. At any rate, all traces of it have not yet disappeared. In at least forty North American tribes the man who marries an eldest sister has the right to take all her other sisters as his wives as soon as they are old enough a relic of the time when a whole line of sisters had husbands in common. And Bancroft reports of the Indians of the California peninsula (upper stage of savagery) that they have certain festivals when several tribes come together for the purpose of promiscuous sexual intercourse. These tribes are clearly gentes, who preserve in these feasts a dim memory of the time when the women of one gens had all the men of the other as their common husbands, and conversely. The same custom still prevails in Australia. We find among some peoples that the older men, the chieftains and the magician-priests, exploit the community of wives and monopolize most of the women for themselves; at certain festivals and great assemblies of the people, however, they have to restore the old community of women and allow their wives to enjoy themselves with the young men. Westermarck (History of Human Marriage, 1891, pp. 28, 29) quotes a whole series of instances of such periodic Saturnalian feasts, when for a short time the old freedom of sexual intercourse is again restored: examples are given among the Hos, the Santals, the Punjas and Kotars in India, among some African peoples, and so forth. Curiously enough, Westermarck draws the conclusion that these are survivals, not of the group marriage, which he totally rejects, but of the mating season which primitive man had in common with the other animals. Here we come to Bachofen s fourth great discovery the widespread transitional form between group marriage and pairing. What Bachofen represents as a penance for the transgression of the old divine laws the penance by which the woman purchases the right of chastity is in fact only a mystical expression of the penance by which the woman buys herself out of the old community of husbands and acquires the right to give herself to one man only. This penance consists in a limited surrender: the Babylonian women had to give themselves once a year in the temple of Mylitta; other peoples of Asia Minor sent their girls for years to the temple of Anaitis, where they had to practice free love with favorites of their own choosing before they were allowed to marry. Similar customs in religious disguise are common to almost all Asiatic peoples between the Mediterranean and the Ganges. The sacrifice of atonement by which the woman purchases her freedom becomes increasingly lighter in course of time, as Bachofen already noted: Among other peoples the religious disguise is absent. In some cases among the Thracians, Celts, and others, in classical times, many of the original inhabitants of India, and to this day among the Malayan peoples, the South Sea Islanders and many American Indians the girls enjoy the greatest sexual freedom up to the time of their marriage. This is especially the case almost everywhere in South America, as everyone who has gone any distance into the interior can testify. Thus Agassiz (A Journey in Brazil, Boston and New York, 1868, p. 266) tells this story of a rich family of Indian extraction: when he was introduced to the daughter, he asked after her father, presuming him to be her mother's husband, who was fighting as an officer in the war against Paraguay; but the mother answered with a smile: "Na tem pai, filha da fortuna" (She has no father. She is a child of chance): What seems strange here to civilized people is simply the rule according to mother-right and in group marriage. Among other peoples, again, the friends and relatives of the bridegroom, or the wedding guests, claim their traditional right to the bride at the wedding itself, and the bridegroom's turn only comes last; this was the custom in the Balearic Islands and among the Augilers of Africa in ancient times; it is still observed among the Bareas of Abyssinia. In other cases, an official personage, the head of the tribe or the gens, cacique, shaman, priest, prince or whatever he may be called, represents the community and exercises the right of the first night with the bride. Despite all necromantic whitewashing, this jus prime noctis [Right of first night. Ed.] still persists today as a relic of group marriage among most of the natives of the Alaska region (Bancroft, Native Races, I, p. 8i), the Tahus of North Mexico (Ibid., p. 584) and other peoples; and at any rate in the countries originally Celtic, where it was handed down directly from group marriage, it existed throughout the whole of the middle ages, for example, in Aragon. While in Castile the peasants were never serfs, in Aragon there was serfdom of the most shameful kind right up till the decree of Ferdinand the Catholic in 1486. This document states: Bachofen is also perfectly right when he consistently maintains that the transition from what he calls Hetaerism or Sumpfzeugung to monogamy was brought about primarily through the women. The more the traditional sexual relations lost the native primitive character of forest life, owing to the development of economic conditions with consequent undermining of the old communism and growing density of population, the more oppressive and humiliating must the women have felt them to be, and the greater their longing for the right of chastity, of temporary or permanent marriage with one man only, as a way of release. This advance could not in any case have originated with the men, if only because it has never occurred to them, even to this day, to renounce the pleasures of actual group marriage. Only when the women had brought about the transition to pairing marriage were the men able to introduce strict monogamy though indeed only for women. The first beginnings of the pairing family appear on the dividing line between savagery and barbarism; they are generally to be found already at the upper stage of savagery, but occasionally not until the lower stage of barbarism. The pairing family is the form characteristic of barbarism, as group marriage is characteristic of savagery and monogamy of civilization. To develop it further, to strict monogamy, other causes were required than those we have found active hitherto. In the single pair the group was already reduced to its final unit, its two-atom molecule: one man and one woman. Natural selection, with its progressive exclusions from the marriage community, had accomplished its task; there was nothing more for it to do in this direction. Unless new, social forces came into play, there was no reason why a new form of family should arise from the single pair. But these new forces did come into play. We now leave America, the classic soil of the pairing family. No sign allows us to conclude that a higher form of family developed here, or that there was ever permanent monogamy anywhere in America prior to its discovery and conquest. But not so in the Old World. Here the domestication of animals and the breeding of herds had developed a hitherto unsuspected source of wealth and created entirely new social relations. Up to the lower stage of barbarism, permanent wealth had consisted almost solely of house, clothing, crude ornaments and the tools for obtaining and preparing food boat, weapons, and domestic utensils of the simplest kind. Food had to be won afresh day by day. Now, with their herds of horses, camels, asses, cattle, sheep, goats, and pigs, the advancing pastoral peoples the Semites on the Euphrates and the Tigris, and the Aryans in the Indian country of the Five Streams (Punjab), in the Ganges region, and in the steppes then much more abundantly watered of the Oxus and the Jaxartes had acquired property which only needed supervision and the rudest care to reproduce itself in steadily increasing quantities and to supply the most abundant food in the form of milk and meat. All former means of procuring food now receded into the background; hunting, formerly a necessity, now became a luxury. But to whom did this new wealth belong? Originally to the gens, without a doubt. Private property in herds must have already started at an early period, however. It is difficult to say whether the author of the so-called first book of Moses regarded the patriarch Abraham as the owner of his herds in his own right as head of a family community or by right of his position as actual hereditary head of a gens. What is certain is that we must not think of him as a property owner in the modern sense of the word. And it is also certain that at the threshold of authentic history we already find the herds everywhere separately owned by heads of families, as are the artistic products of barbarism metal implements, luxury articles and, finally, the human cattle the slaves. For now slavery had also been invented. To the barbarian of the lower stage, a slave was valueless. Hence the treatment of defeated enemies by the American Indians was quite different from that at a higher stage. The men were killed or adopted as brothers into the tribe of the victors; the women were taken as wives or otherwise adopted with their surviving children. At this stage human labor-power still does not produce any considerable surplus over and above its maintenance costs. That was no longer the case after the introduction of cattle-breeding, metalworking, weaving and, lastly, agriculture. just as the wives whom it had formerly been so easy to obtain had now acquired an exchange value and were bought, so also with the forces of labor, particularly since the herds had definitely become family possessions. The family did not multiply so rapidly as the cattle. More people were needed to look after them; for this purpose use could be made of the enemies captured in war, who could also be bred just as easily as the cattle themselves. Once it had passed into the private possession of families and there rapidly begun to augment, this wealth dealt a severe blow to the society founded on pairing marriage and the matriarchal gens. Pairing marriage had brought a new element into the family. By the side of the natural mother of the child it placed its natural and attested father, with a better warrant of paternity, probably, than that of many a father today. According to the division of labor within the family at that time, it was the man s part to obtain food and the instruments of labor necessary for the purpose. He therefore also owned the instruments of labor, and in the event of husband and wife separating, he took them with him, just as she retained her household goods. Therefore, according to the social custom of the time, the man was also the owner of the new source of subsistence, the cattle, and later of the new instruments of labor, the slaves. But according to the custom of the same society, his children could not inherit from him. For as regards inheritance, the position was as follows: At first, according to mother-right so long, therefore, as descent was reckoned only in the female line and according to the original custom of inheritance within the gens, the gentile relatives inherited from a deceased fellow member of their gens. His property had to remain within the gens. His effects being insignificant, they probably always passed in practice to his nearest gentile relations that is, to his blood relations on the mother's side. The children of the dead man, however, did not belong to his gens, but to that of their mother; it was from her that they inherited, at first conjointly with her other blood relations, later perhaps with rights of priority; they could not inherit from their father, because they did not belong to his gens, within which his property had to remain. When the owner of the herds died, therefore, his herds would go first to his brothers and sisters and to his sister s children, or to the issue of his mother s sisters. But his own children were disinherited. Thus, on the one hand, in proportion as wealth increased, it made the man s position in the family more important than the woman s, and on the other hand created an impulse to exploit this strengthened position in order to overthrow, in favor of his children, the traditional order of inheritance. This, however, was impossible so long as descent was reckoned according to mother-right. Mother-right, therefore, had to be overthrown, and overthrown it was. This was by no means so difficult as it looks to us today. For this revolution one of the most decisive ever experienced by humanity could take place without disturbing a single one of the living members of a gens. All could remain as they were. A simple decree sufficed that in the future the offspring of the male members should remain within the gens, but that of the female should be excluded by being transferred to the gens of their father. The reckoning of descent in the female line and the matriarchal law of inheritance were thereby overthrown, and the male line of descent and the paternal law of inheritance were substituted for them. As to how and when this revolution took place among civilized peoples, we have no knowledge. It falls entirely within prehistoric times. But that it did take place is more than sufficiently proved by the abundant traces of mother-right which have been collected, particularly by Bachofen. How easily it is accomplished can be seen in a whole series of American Indian tribes, where it has only recently taken place and is still taking place under the influence, partly of increasing wealth and a changed mode of life (transference from forest to prairie), and partly of the moral pressure of civilization and missionaries. Of eight Missouri tribes, six observe the male line of descent and inheritance, two still observe the female. Among the Shawnees, Miamis and Delawares the custom has grown up of giving the children a gentile name of their father's gens in order to transfer them into it, thus enabling them to inherit from him. The result was hopeless confusion, which could only be remedied and to a certain extent was remedied by the transition to father-right. In general, this seems to be the most natural transition. (Marx.) For the theories proffered by comparative jurisprudence regarding the manner in which this change was effected among the civilized peoples of the Old World though they are almost pure hypotheses see M. Kovalevsky, Tableau des origines et de l' volution de la famille et de la propri t . Stockholm, 1890. The overthrow of mother-right was the world historical defeat of the female sex. The man took command in the home also; the woman was degraded and reduced to servitude, she became the slave of his lust and a mere instrument for the production of children. This degraded position of the woman, especially conspicuous among the Greeks of the heroic and still more of the classical age, has gradually been palliated and glozed over, and sometimes clothed in a milder form; in no sense has it been abolished. Its essential features are the incorporation of unfree persons, and paternal power; hence the perfect type of this form of family is the Roman. The original meaning of the word family (familia) is not that compound of sentimentality and domestic strife which forms the ideal of the present-day philistine; among the Romans it did not at first even refer to the married pair and their children, but only to the slaves. Famulus means domestic slave, and familia is the total number of slaves belonging to one man. As late as the time of Gaius, the familia, id est patrimonium (family, that is, the patrimony, the inheritance) was bequeathed by will. The term was invented by the Romans to denote a new social organism, whose head ruled over wife and children and a number of slaves, and was invested under Roman paternal power with rights of life and death over them all. Marx adds: Such a form of family shows the transition of the pairing family to monogamy. In order to make certain of the wife s fidelity and therefore of the paternity of the children, she is delivered over unconditionally into the power of the husband; if he kills her, he is only exercising his rights. With the patriarchal family, we enter the field of written history a field where comparative jurisprudence can give valuable help. And it has in fact brought an important advance in our knowledge. We owe to Maxim Kovalevsky (Tableau etc. de la mine et de propri t , Stockholm, 1890, pp. 60-100), the proof that the patriarchal household community, as we still find it today among the Serbs and the Bulgars under the name of z druga (which may be roughly translated "bond of friendship") or bratstvo (brotherhood), and in a modified form among the Oriental peoples, formed the transitional stage between the matriarchal family deriving from group marriage and the single family of the modern world. For the civilized peoples of the Old World, for the Aryans and Semites at any rate, this seems to be established. The Southern Slav z druga provides the best instance of such a family community still in actual existence. It comprises several generations of the descendants of one father, together with their wives, who all live together in one homestead, cultivate their fields in common, feed and clothe themselves from a common stock, and possess in common the surplus from their labor. The community is under the supreme direction of the head of the house (dom cin), who acts as its representative outside, has the right to sell minor objects, and controls the funds, for which, as for the regular organization of business, he is responsible. He is elected, and it is not at all necessary that he should be the oldest in the community. The women and their work are under the control of the mistress of the house (dom cica), who is generally the wife of the dom cin. She also has an important and often a decisive voice in the choice of husbands for the girls. Supreme power rests, however, with the family council, the assembly of all the adult members of the household, women as well as men. To this assembly the master of the house renders account; it takes all important decisions, exercises jurisdiction over the members, decides on sales and purchases of any importance, especially of land and so on. It is only within the last ten years or so that such great family communities have been proved to be still in existence in Russia; it is now generally recognized that they are as firmly rooted in the customs of the Russian people as the obshchina or village community. They appear in the oldest Russian code of laws, the Pravda of Yaroslav, under the same name as in the Dalmatian laws (vervj), and references to them can also be traced in Polish and Czech historical sources. Among the Germans also, according to Heusler (Institutionen des deutschen Rechts), the economic unit was originally not the single family in the modern sense, but the house community, which consisted of several generations or several single families, and often enough included unfree persons as well. The Roman family is now also considered to have originated from this type, and consequently the absolute power of the father of the house, and the complete absence of rights among the other members of the family in relation to him, have recently been strongly questioned. It is supposed that similar family communities also existed among the Celts in Ireland; in France, under the name of parconneries, they survived in Nivernais until the French Revolution, and in the Franche Comte they have not completely died out even today . In the district of Louhans (Sa ne et Loire) large peasant houses can be seen in which live several generations of the same family; the house has a lofty common hall reaching to the roof, and surrounding it the sleeping-rooms, to which stairs of six or eight steps give access. In India, the household community with common cultivation of the land is already mentioned by Nearchus in the time of Alexander the Great, and it still exists today in the same region, in the Punjab and the whole of northwest India. Kovalevsky was himself able to prove its existence in the Caucasus. In Algeria it survives among the Kabyles. It is supposed to have occurred even in America, and the calpullis which Zurita describes in old Mexico have been identified with it; on the other hand, Cunow has proved fairly clearly (in the journal Ausland, 1890, Nos. 42-44) that in Peru at the time of the conquest there was a form of constitution based on marks (called, curiously enough, marca), with periodical allotment of arable land and consequently with individual tillage. In any case, the patriarchal household community with common ownership and common cultivation of the land now assumes an entirely different significance than hitherto. We can no longer doubt the important part it played, as a transitional form between the matriarchal family and the single family, among civilized and other peoples of the Old World. Later we will return to the further conclusion drawn by Kovalevsky that it was also the transitional form out of which developed the village, or mark, community with individual tillage and the allotment, first periodical and then permanent, of arable and pasture land. With regard to the family life within these communities, it must be observed that at any rate in Russia the master of the house has a reputation for violently abusing his position towards the younger women of the community, especially his daughters-in-law, whom he often converts into his harem; the Russian folk-songs have more than a little to say about this. Before we go on to monogamy, which developed rapidly with the overthrow of mother-right, a few words about polygyny and polyandry. Both forms can only be exceptions, historical luxury products, as it were, unless they occur side by side in the same country, which is, of course, not the case. As the men excluded from polygyny cannot console themselves with the women left over from polyandry, and as hitherto, regardless of social institutions, the number of men and women has been fairly equal, it is obviously impossible for either of these forms of marriage to be elevated to the general form. Polygyny on the part of one individual man was, in fact, obviously a product of slavery and confined to a few people in exceptional positions. In the Semitic patriarchal family it was only the patriarch himself, and a few of his sons at most, who lived in polygyny; the rest had to content themselves with one wife. This still holds throughout the whole of the Orient; polygyny is the privilege of the wealthy and of the nobility, the women being recruited chiefly through purchase as slaves; the mass of the people live in monogamy. A similar exception is the polyandry of India and Tibet, the origin of which in group marriage requires closer examination and would certainly prove interesting. It seems to be much more easy-going in practice than the jealous harems of the Mohammedans. At any rate, among the Nairs in India, where three or four men have a wife in common, each of them can have a second wife in common with another three or more men, and similarly a third and a fourth and so on. It is a wonder that McLennan did not discover in these marriage clubs, to several of which one could belong and which he himself describes, a new class of club marriage! This marriage-club system, however, is not real polyandry at all; on the contrary, as Giraud-Teulon has already pointed out, it is a specialized form of group marriage; the men live in polygyny, the women in polyandry.

Origins of the Family-- Chapter 2 (III)

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/origin-family/ch02c.htm

We meet this new form of the family in all its severity among the Greeks. While the position of the goddesses in their mythology, as Marx points out, brings before us an earlier period when the position of women was freer and more respected, in the heroic age we find the woman already being humiliated by the domination of the man and by competition from girl slaves. Note how Telemachus in the Odyssey silences his mother. [The reference is to a passage where Telemachus, son of Odysseus and Penelope, tells his mother to get on with her weaving and leave the men to mind their own business Ed.] In Homer young women are booty and are handed over to the pleasure of the conquerors, the handsomest being picked by the commanders in order of rank; the entire Iliad, it will be remembered, turns on the quarrel of Achilles and Agamemnon over one of these slaves. If a hero is of any importance, Homer also mentions the captive girl with whom he shares his tent and his bed. These girls were also taken back to Greece and brought under the same roof as the wife, as Cassandra was brought by Agamemnon in AEschylus; the sons begotten of them received a small share of the paternal inheritance and had the full status of freemen. Teucer, for instance, is a natural son of Telamon by one of these slaves and has the right to use his father s name. The legitimate wife was expected to put up with all this, but herself to remain strictly chaste and faithful. In the heroic age a Greek woman is, indeed, more respected than in the period of civilization, but to her husband she is after all nothing but the mother of his legitimate children and heirs, his chief housekeeper and the supervisor of his female slaves, whom he can and does take as concubines if he so fancies. It is the existence of slavery side by side with monogamy, the presence of young, beautiful slaves belonging unreservedly to the man, that stamps monogamy from the very beginning with its specific character of monogamy for the woman only, but not for the man. And that is the character it still has today. Coming to the later Greeks, we must distinguish between Dorians and Ionians. Among the former Sparta is the classic example marriage relations are in some ways still more archaic than even in Homer. The recognized form of marriage in Sparta was a pairing marriage, modified according to the Spartan conceptions of the state, in which there still survived vestiges of group marriage. Childless marriages were dissolved; King Anaxandridas (about 650 B.C.), whose first wife was childless, took a second and kept two households; about the same time, King Ariston, who had two unfruitful wives, took a third, but dismissed one of the other two. On the other hand, several brothers could have a wife in common; a friend who preferred his friend s wife could share her with him; and it was considered quite proper to place one s wife at the disposal of a sturdy stallion, as Bismarck would say, even if he was not a citizen. A passage in Plutarch, where a Spartan woman refers an importunate wooer to her husband, seems to indicate, according to Schamann, even greater freedom. Real adultery, secret infidelity by the woman without the husband s knowledge, was therefore unheard of. On the other hand, domestic slavery was unknown in Sparta, at least during its best period; the unfree helots were segregated on the estates and the Spartans were therefore less tempted to take the helots wives. Inevitably in these conditions women held a much more honored position in Sparta than anywhere else in Greece. The Spartan women and the elite of the Athenian hetairai are the only Greek women of whom the ancients speak with respect and whose words they thought it worth while to record. The position is quite different among the Ionians; here Athens is typical. Girls only learned spinning, weaving, and sewing, and at most a little reading and writing. They lived more or less behind locked doors and had no company except other women. The women s apartments formed a separate part of the house, on the upper floor or at the back, where men, especially strangers, could not easily enter, and to which the women retired when men visited the house. They never went out without being accompanied by a female slave; indoors they were kept under regular guard. Aristophanes speaks of Molossian dogs kept to frighten away adulterers, and, at any rate in the Asiatic towns, eunuchs were employed to keep watch over the women-making and exporting eunuchs was an industry in Chios as early as Herodotus time, and, according to Wachsmuth, it was not only the barbarians who bought the supply. In Euripides a woman is called an oikourema, a thing (the word is neuter) for looking after the house, and, apart from her business of bearing children, that was all she was for the Athenian his chief female domestic servant. The man had his athletics and his public business, from which women were barred; in addition, he often had female slaves at his disposal and during the most flourishing days of Athens an extensive system of prostitution which the state at least favored. It was precisely through this system of prostitution that the only Greek women of personality were able to develop, and to acquire that intellectual and artistic culture by which they stand out as high above the general level of classical womanhood as the Spartan women by their qualities of character. But that a woman had to be a hetaira before she could be a woman is the worst condemnation of the Athenian family. This Athenian family became in time the accepted model for domestic relations, not only among the Ionians, but to an increasing extent among all the Greeks of the mainland and colonies also. But, in spite of locks and guards, Greek women found plenty of opportunity for deceiving their husbands. The men, who would have been ashamed to show any love for their wives, amused themselves by all sorts of love affairs with hetairai; but this degradation of the women was avenged on the men and degraded them also, till they fell into the abominable practice of pederasty [Knabenliebe] and degraded alike their gods and themselves with the myth of Ganymede. This is the origin of monogamy as far as we can trace it back among the most civilized and highly developed people of antiquity. It was not in any way the fruit of individual sex-love, with which it had nothing whatever to do; marriages remained as before marriages of convenience. It was the first form of the family to be based, not on natural, but on economic conditions on the victory of private property over primitive, natural communal property. The Greeks themselves put the matter quite frankly: the sole exclusive aims of monogamous marriage were to make the man supreme in the family, and to propagate, as the future heirs to his wealth, children indisputably his own. Otherwise, marriage was a burden, a duty which had to be performed, whether one liked it or not, to gods, state, and one s ancestors. In Athens the law exacted from the man not only marriage but also the performance of a minimum of so-called conjugal duties. Thus when monogamous marriage first makes its appearance in history, it is not as the reconciliation of man and woman, still less as the highest form of such a reconciliation. Quite the contrary. Monogamous marriage comes on the scene as the subjugation of the one sex by the other; it announces a struggle between the sexes unknown throughout the whole previous prehistoric period. In an old unpublished manuscript, written by Marx and myself in 1846, [The reference here is to the German Ideology, published after Engels death Ed.] I find the words: The first division of labor is that between man and woman for the propagation of children. And today I can add: The first class opposition that appears in history coincides with the development of the antagonism between man and woman in monogamous marriage, and the first class oppression coincides with that of the female sex by the male. Monogamous marriage was a great historical step forward; nevertheless, together with slavery and private wealth, it opens the period that has lasted until today in which every step forward is also relatively a step backward, in which prosperity and development for some is won through the misery and frustration of others. It is the cellular form of civilized society, in which the nature of the oppositions and contradictions fully active in that society can be already studied. The old comparative freedom of sexual intercourse by no means disappeared with the victory of pairing marriage or even of monogamous marriage: By hetaerism Morgan understands the practice, co-existent with monogamous marriage, of sexual intercourse between men and unmarried women outside marriage, which, as we know, flourishes in the most varied forms throughout the whole period of civilization and develops more and more into open prostitution. This hetaerism derives quite directly from group marriage, from the ceremonial surrender by which women purchased the right of chastity. Surrender for money was at first a religious act; it took place in the temple of the goddess of love, and the money originally went into the temple treasury. The temple slaves of Anaitis in Armenia and of Aphrodite in Corinth, like the sacred dancing-girls attached to the temples of India, the so-called bayaderes (the word is a corruption of the Portuguese word bailadeira, meaning female dancer), were the first prostitutes. Originally the duty of every woman, this surrender was later performed by these priestesses alone as representatives of all other women. Among other peoples, hetaerism derives from the sexual freedom allowed to girls before marriage again, therefore, a relic of group marriage, but handed down in a different way. With the rise of the inequality of property already at the upper stage of barbarism, therefore wage-labor appears sporadically side by side with slave labor, and at the same time, as its necessary correlate, the professional prostitution of free women side by side with the forced surrender of the slave. Thus the heritage which group marriage has bequeathed to civilization is double-edged, just as everything civilization brings forth is double-edged, double-tongued, divided against itself, contradictory: here monogamy, there hetaerism, with its most extreme form, prostitution. For hetaerism is as much a social institution as any other; it continues the old sexual freedom to the advantage of the men. Actually not merely tolerated, but gaily practiced, by the ruling classes particularly, it is condemned in words. But in reality this condemnation never falls on the men concerned, but only on the women; they are despised and outcast, in order that the unconditional supremacy of men over the female sex may be once more proclaimed as a fundamental law of society. But a second contradiction thus develops within monogamous marriage itself. At the side of the husband who embellishes his existence with hetaerism stands the neglected wife. And one cannot have one side of this contradiction without the other, any more than a man has a whole apple in his hand after eating half. But that seems to have been the husbands notion, until their wives taught them better. With monogamous marriage, two constant social types, unknown hitherto, make their appearance on the scene the wife s attendant lover and the cuckold husband. The husbands had won the victory over the wives, but the vanquished magnanimously provided the crown. Together with monogamous marriage and hetaerism, adultery became an unavoidable social institution denounced, severely penalized, but impossible to suppress. At best, the certain paternity of the children rested on moral conviction as before, and to solve the insoluble contradiction the Code Napol on, Art- 312, decreed: L enfant con u pendant le marriage a pour p re le mari, the father of a child conceived during marriage is-the husband. Such is the final result of three thousand years of monogamous marriage. Thus, wherever the monogamous family remains true to its historical origin and clearly reveals the antagonism between the man and the woman expressed in the man s exclusive supremacy, it exhibits in miniature the same oppositions and contradictions as those in which society has been moving, without power to resolve or overcome them, ever since it split into classes at the beginning of civilization. I am speaking here, of course, only of those cases of monogamous marriage where matrimonial life actually proceeds according to the original character of the whole institution, but where the wife rebels against the husband s supremacy. Not all marriages turn out thus, as nobody knows better than the German philistine, who can no more assert his rule in the home than he can in the state, and whose wife, with every right, wears the trousers he is unworthy of. But, to make up for it, he considers himself far above his French companion in misfortune, to whom, oftener than to him, something much worse happens. However, monogamous marriage did not by any means appear always and everywhere in the classically harsh form it took among the Greeks. Among the Romans, who, as future world-conquerors, had a larger, if a less fine, vision than the Greeks, women were freer and more respected. A Roman considered that his power of life and death over his wife sufficiently guaranteed her conjugal fidelity. Here, moreover, the wife equally with the husband could dissolve the marriage at will. But the greatest progress in the development of individual marriage certainly came with the entry of the Germans into history, and for the reason that the German on account of their poverty, very probably were still at a stage where monogamy seems not yet to have become perfectly distinct from pairing marriage. We infer this from three facts mentioned by Tacitus. First, though marriage was held in great reverence they content themselves with one wife, the women live hedged round with chastity polygamy was the rule for the distinguished members and the leaders of the tribe, a condition of things similar to that among the Americans, where pairing marriage was the rule. Secondly, the transition from mother-right to father-right could only have been made a short time previously, for the brother on the mother s side -the nearest gentile male relation according to mother-right was still considered almost closer of kin than the father, corresponding again to the standpoint of the American Indians, among whom Marx, as he often said, found the key to the understanding of our own primitive age. And, thirdly, women were greatly respected among the Germans, and also influential in public affairs, which is in direct contradiction to the supremacy of men in monogamy. In almost all these points the Germans agree with the Spartans, among whom also, as we saw, pairing marriage had not yet been completely overcome. Thus, here again an entirely new influence came to power in the world with the Germans. The new monogamy, which now developed from the mingling of peoples amid the ruins of the Roman world, clothed the supremacy of the men in milder forms and gave women a position which, outwardly at any rate, was much more free and respected than it had ever been in classical antiquity. Only now were the conditions realized in which through monogamy-within it, parallel to it, or in opposition to it, as the case might be-the greatest moral advance we owe to it could be achieved: modern individual sex-love, which had hitherto been unknown to the entire world. This advance, however, undoubtedly sprang from the fact that the Germans still lived in pairing families and grafted the corresponding position of women onto the monogamous system, so far as that was possible. It most decidedly did not spring from the legendary virtue and wonderful moral purity of the German character, which was nothing more than the freedom of the pairing family from the crying moral contradictions of monogamy. On the contrary, in the course of their migrations the Germans had morally much deteriorated, particularly during their southeasterly wanderings among the nomads of the Black Sea steppes, from whom they acquired, not only equestrian skill, but also gross, unnatural vices, as Ammianus expressly states of the Taifalians and Procopius of the Herulians. But if monogamy was the only one of all the known forms of the family through which modern sex-love could develop, that does not mean that within monogamy modern sexual love developed exclusively or even chiefly as the love of husband and wife for each other. That was precluded by the very nature of strictly monogamous marriage under the rule of the man. Among all historically active classes that is, among all ruling classes matrimony remained what it had been since the pairing marriage, a matter of convenience which was arranged by the parents. The first historical form of sexual love as passion, a passion recognized as natural to all human beings (at least if they belonged to the ruling classes), and as the highest form of the sexual impulse and that is what constitutes its specific character this first form of individual sexual love, the chivalrous love of the middle ages, was by no means conjugal. Quite the contrary. In its classic form among the Proven als, it heads straight for adultery, and the poets of love celebrated adultery. The flower of Proven al love poetry are the Albas (aubades, songs of dawn). They describe in glowing colors how the knight lies in bed beside his love-the wife of another man-while outside stands the watchman who calls to him as soon as the first gray of dawn (alba) appears, so that he can get away unobserved; the parting scene then forms the climax of the poem. The northern French and also the worthy Germans adopted this kind of poetry together with the corresponding fashion of chivalrous love; old Wolfram of Eschenbach has left us three wonderfully beautiful songs of dawn on this same improper subject, which I like better than his three long heroic poems. Nowadays there are two ways of concluding a bourgeois marriage. In Catholic countries the parents, as before, procure a suitable wife for their young bourgeois son, and the consequence is, of course, the fullest development of the contradiction inherent in monogamy: the husband abandons himself to hetaerism and the wife to adultery. Probably the only reason why the Catholic Church abolished divorce was because it had convinced itself that there is no more a cure for adultery than there is for death. In Protestant countries, on the other hand, the rule is that the son of a bourgeois family is allowed to choose a wife from his own class with more or less freedom; hence there may be a certain element of love in the marriage, as, indeed, in accordance with Protestant hypocrisy, is always assumed, for decency s sake. Here the husband s hetaerism is a more sleepy kind of business, and adultery by the wife is less the rule. But since, in every kind of marriage, people remain what they were before, and since the bourgeois of Protestant countries are mostly philistines, all that this Protestant monogamy achieves, taking the average of the best cases, is a conjugal partnership of leaden boredom, known as domestic bliss." The best mirror of these two methods of marrying is the novel-the French novel for the Catholic manner, the German for the Protestant. In both, the hero gets them: in the German, the young man gets the girl; in the French, the husband gets the horns. Which of them is worse off is sometimes questionable. This is why the French bourgeois is as much horrified by the dullness of the German novel as the German philistine is by the immorality of the French. However, now that Berlin is a world capital, the German novel is beginning with a little less timidity to use as part of its regular stock-in-trade the hetaerism and adultery long familiar to that town. In both cases, however, the marriage is conditioned by the class position of the parties and is to that extent always a marriage of convenience. In both cases this marriage of convenience turns often enough into crassest prostitution-sometimes of both partners, but far more commonly of the woman, who only differs from the ordinary courtesan in that she does not let out her body on piece-work as a wage-worker, but sells it once and for all into slavery. And of all marriages of convenience Fourier s words hold true: As in grammar two negatives make an affirmative, so in matrimonial morality two prostitutions pass for a virtue. [Charles Fourier, Theorie de l Uniti Universelle. Paris, 1841-45, Vol. III, p. 120. Ed.] Sex-love in the relationship with a woman becomes, and can only become, the real rule among the oppressed classes, which means today among the proletariat-whether this relation is officially sanctioned or not. But here all the foundations of typical monogamy are cleared away. Here there is no property, for the preservation and inheritance of which monogamy and male supremacy were established; hence there is no incentive to make this male supremacy effective. What is more, there are no means of making it so. Bourgeois law, which protects this supremacy, exists only for the possessing class and their dealings with the proletarians. The law costs money and, on account of the worker s poverty, it has no validity for his relation to his wife. Here quite other personal and social conditions decide. And now that large-scale industry has taken the wife out of the home onto the labor market and into the factory, and made her often the bread-winner of the family, no basis for any kind of male supremacy is left in the proletarian household except, perhaps, for something of the brutality towards women that has spread since the introduction of monogamy. The proletarian family is therefore no longer monogamous in the strict sense, even where there is passionate love and firmest loyalty on both sides, and maybe all the blessings of religious and civil authority. Here, therefore, the eternal attendants of monogamy, hetaerism and adultery, play only an almost vanishing part. The wife has in fact regained the right to dissolve the marriage, and if two people cannot get on with one another, they prefer to separate. In short, proletarian marriage is monogamous in the etymological sense of the word, but not at all in its historical sense. Our jurists, of course, find that progress in legislation is leaving women with no further ground of complaint. Modern civilized systems of law increasingly acknowledge, first, that for a marriage to be legal, it must be a contract freely entered into by both partners, and, secondly, that also in the married state both partners must stand on a common footing of equal rights and duties. If both these demands are consistently carried out, say the jurists, women have all they can ask. This typically legalist method of argument is exactly the same as that which the radical republican bourgeois uses to put the proletarian in his place. The labor contract is to be freely entered into by both partners. But it is considered to have been freely entered into as soon as the law makes both parties equal on paper. The power conferred on the one party by the difference of class position, the pressure thereby brought to bear on the other party the real economic position of both that is not the law s business. Again, for the duration of the labor contract both parties are to have equal rights, in so far as one or the other does not expressly surrender them. That economic relations compel the worker to surrender even the last semblance of equal rights here again, that is no concern of the law. In regard to marriage, the law, even the most advanced, is fully satisfied as soon as the partners have formally recorded that they are entering into the marriage of their own free consent. What goes on in real life behind the juridical scenes, how this free consent comes about that is not the business of the law and the jurist. And yet the most elementary comparative jurisprudence should show the jurist what this free consent really amounts to. In the countries where an obligatory share of the paternal inheritance is secured to the children by law and they cannot therefore be disinherited in Germany, in the countries with French law and elsewhere the children are obliged to obtain their parents consent to their marriage. In the countries with English law, where parental consent to a marriage is not legally required, the parents on their side have full freedom in the testamentary disposal of their property and can disinherit their children at their pleasure. It is obvious that, in spite and precisely because of this fact, freedom of marriage among the classes with something to inherit is in reality not a whit greater in England and America than it is in France and Germany. As regards the legal equality of husband and wife in marriage, the position is no better. The legal inequality of the two partners, bequeathed to us from earlier social conditions, is not the cause but the effect of the economic oppression of the woman. In the old communistic household, which comprised many couples and their children, the task entrusted to the women of managing the household was as much a public and socially necessary industry as the procuring of food by the men. With the patriarchal family, and still more with the single monogamous family, a change came. Household management lost its public character. It no longer concerned society. It became a private service; the wife became the head servant, excluded from all participation in social production. Not until the coming of modern large-scale industry was the road to social production opened to her again and then only to the proletarian wife. But it was opened in such a manner that, if she carries out her duties in the private service of her family, she remains excluded from public production and unable to earn; and if she wants to take part in public production and earn independently, she cannot carry out family duties. And the wife s position in the factory is the position of women in all branches of business, right up to medicine and the law. The modern individual family is founded on the open or concealed domestic slavery of the wife, and modern society is a mass composed of these individual families as its molecules. In the great majority of cases today, at least in the possessing classes, the husband is obliged to earn a living and support his family, and that in itself gives him a position of supremacy, without any need for special legal titles and privileges. Within the family he is the bourgeois and the wife represents the proletariat. In the industrial world, the specific character of the economic oppression burdening the proletariat is visible in all its sharpness only when all special legal privileges of the capitalist class have been abolished and complete legal equality of both classes established. The democratic republic does not do away with the opposition of the two classes; on the contrary, it provides the clear field on which the fight can be fought out. And in the same way, the peculiar character of the supremacy of the husband over the wife in the modern family, the necessity of creating real social equality between them, and the way to do it, will only be seen in the clear light of day when both possess legally complete equality of rights. Then it will be plain that the first condition for the liberation of the wife is to bring the whole female sex back into public industry, and that this in turn demands the abolition of the monogamous family as the economic unit of society. We thus have three principal forms of marriage which correspond broadly to the three principal stages of human development. For the period of savagery, group marriage; for barbarism, pairing marriage; for civilization, monogamy, supplemented by adultery and prostitution. Between pairing marriage and monogamy intervenes a period in the upper stage of barbarism when men have female slaves at their command and polygamy is practiced. As our whole presentation has shown, the progress which manifests itself in these successive forms is connected with the peculiarity that women, but not men, are increasingly deprived of the sexual freedom of group marriage. In fact, for men group marriage actually still exists even to this day. What for the woman is a crime, entailing grave legal and social consequences, is considered honorable in a man or, at the worse, a slight moral blemish which he cheerfully bears. But the more the hetaerism of the past is changed in our time by capitalist commodity production and brought into conformity with it, the more, that is to say, it is transformed into undisguised prostitution, the more demoralizing are its effects. And it demoralizes men far more than women. Among women, prostitution degrades only the unfortunate ones who become its victims, and even these by no means to the extent commonly believed. But it degrades the character of the whole male world. A long engagement, particularly, is in nine cases out of ten a regular preparatory school for conjugal infidelity. We are now approaching a social revolution in which the economic foundations of monogamy as they have existed hitherto will disappear just as surely as those of its complement-prostitution. Monogamy arose from the concentration of considerable wealth in the hands of a single individual a man and from the need to bequeath this wealth to the children of that man and of no other. For this purpose, the monogamy of the woman was required, not that of the man, so this monogamy of the woman did not in any way interfere with open or concealed polygamy on the part of the man. But by transforming by far the greater portion, at any rate, of permanent, heritable wealth the means of production into social property, the coming social revolution will reduce to a minimum all this anxiety about bequeathing and inheriting. Having arisen from economic causes, will monogamy then disappear when these causes disappear? One might answer, not without reason: far from disappearing, it will, on the contrary, be realized completely. For with the transformation of the means of production into social property there will disappear also wage-labor, the proletariat, and therefore the necessity for a certain statistically calculable number of women to surrender themselves for money. Prostitution disappears; monogamy, instead of collapsing, at last becomes a reality also for men. In any case, therefore, the position of men will be very much altered. But the position of women, of all women, also undergoes significant change. With the transfer of the means of production into common ownership, the single family ceases to be the economic unit of society. Private housekeeping is transformed into a social industry. The care and education of the children becomes a public affair; society looks after all children alike, whether they are legitimate or not. This removes all the anxiety about the consequences, which today is the most essential social moral as well as economic factor that prevents a girl from giving herself completely to the man she loves. Will not that suffice to bring about the gradual growth of unconstrained sexual intercourse and with it a more tolerant public opinion in regard to a maiden s honor and a woman s shame? And, finally, have we not seen that in the modern world monogamy and prostitution are indeed contradictions, but inseparable contradictions, poles of the same state of society? Can prostitution disappear without dragging monogamy with it into the abyss? Here a new element comes into play, an element which, at the time when monogamy was developing, existed at most in germ: individual sex-love. Before the Middle Ages we cannot speak of individual sex-love. That personal beauty, close intimacy, similarity of tastes and so forth awakened in people of opposite sex the desire for sexual intercourse, that men and women were not totally indifferent regarding the partner with whom they entered into this most intimate relationship that goes without saying. But it is still a very long way to our sexual love. Throughout the whole of antiquity, marriages were arranged by the parents, and the partners calmly accepted their choice. What little love there was between husband and wife in antiquity is not so much subjective inclination as objective duty, not the cause of the marriage, but its corollary. Love relationships in the modern sense only occur in antiquity outside official society. The shepherds of whose joys and sorrows in love Theocratus and Moschus sing, the Daphnis and Chloe of Longus are all slaves who have no part in the state, the free citizen s sphere of life. Except among slaves, we find love affairs only as products of the disintegration of the old world and carried on with women who also stand outside official society, with hetairai that is, with foreigners or freed slaves: in Athens from the eve of its decline, in Rome under the Caesars. If there were any real love affairs between free men and free women, these occurred only in the course of adultery. And to the classical love poet of antiquity, old Anacreon, sexual love in our sense mattered so little that it did not even matter to him which sex his beloved was. Our sexual love differs essentially from the simple sexual desire, the Eros, of the ancients. In the first place, it assumes that the person loved returns the love; to this extent the woman is on an equal footing with the man, whereas in the Eros of antiquity she was often not even asked. Secondly, our sexual love has a degree of intensity and duration which makes both lovers feel that non-possession and separation are a great, if not the greatest, calamity; to possess one another, they risk high stakes, even life itself. In the ancient world this happened only, if at all, in adultery. And, finally, there arises a new moral standard in the judgment of a sexual relationship. We do not only ask, was it within or outside marriage? But also, did it spring from love and reciprocated love or not? Of course, this new standard has fared no better in feudal or bourgeois practice than all the other standards of morality it is ignored. But neither does it fare any worse. It is recognized just as much as they are in theory, on paper. And for the present it cannot ask anything more. At the point where antiquity broke off its advance to sexual love, the Middle Ages took it up again: in adultery. We have already described the knightly love which gave rise to the songs of dawn. From the love which strives to break up marriage to the love which is to be its foundation there is still a long road, which chivalry never fully traversed. Even when we pass from the frivolous Latins to the virtuous Germans, we find in the Nibelungenlied that, although in her heart Kriemhild is as much in love with Siegfried as he is with her, yet when Gunther announces that he has promised her to a knight he does not name, she simply replies: You have no need to ask me; as you bid me, so will I ever be; whom you, lord, give me as husband, him will I gladly take in troth. It never enters her head that her love can be even considered. Gunther asks for Brunhild in marriage, and Etzel for Kriemhild, though they have never seen them. Similarly, in Gutrun, Sigebant of Ireland asks for the Norwegian Ute, whom he has never seen, Hetel of Hegelingen for Hilde of Ireland, and, finally, Siegfried of Moorland, Hartmut of Ormany and Herwig of Seeland for Gutrun, and here Gutrun s acceptance of Herwig is for the first time voluntary. As a rule, the young prince s bride is selected by his parents, if they are still living, or, if not, by the prince himself, with the advice of the great feudal lords, who have a weighty word to say in all these cases. Nor can it be otherwise. For the knight or baron, as for the prince of the land himself, marriage is a political act, an opportunity to increase power by new alliances; the interest of the house must be decisive, not the wishes of an individual. What chance then is there for love to have the final word in the making of a marriage? The same thing holds for the guild member in the medieval towns. The very privileges protecting him, the guild charters with all their clauses and rubrics, the intricate distinctions legally separating him from other guilds, from the members of his own guild or from his journeymen and apprentices, already made the circle narrow enough within which he could look for a suitable wife. And who in the circle was the most suitable was decided under this complicated system most certainly not by his individual preference but by the family interests. In the vast majority of cases, therefore, marriage remained, up to the close of the middle ages, what it had been from the start a matter which was not decided by the partners. In the beginning, people were already born married married to an entire group of the opposite sex. In the later forms of group marriage similar relations probably existed, but with the group continually contracting. In the pairing marriage it was customary for the mothers to settle the marriages of their children; here, too, the decisive considerations are the new ties of kinship, which are to give the young pair a stronger position in the gens and tribe. And when, with the preponderance of private over communal property and the interest in its bequeathal, father-right and monogamy gained supremacy, the dependence of marriages on economic considerations became complete. The form of marriage by purchase disappears, the actual practice is steadily extended until not only the woman but also the man acquires a price not according to his personal qualities, but according to his property. That the mutual affection of the people concerned should be the one paramount reason for marriage, outweighing everything else, was and always had been absolutely unheard of in the practice of the ruling classes; that sort of thing only happened in romance or among the oppressed classes, who did not count. Such was the state of things encountered by capitalist production when it began to prepare itself, after the epoch of geographical discoveries, to win world power by world trade and manufacture. One would suppose that this manner of marriage exactly suited it, and so it did. And yet there are no limits to the irony of history capitalist production itself was to make the decisive breach in it. By changing all things into commodities, it dissolved all inherited and traditional relationships, and, in place of time-honored custom and historic right, it set up purchase and sale, free contract. And the English jurist, H. S. Maine, thought he had made a tremendous discovery when he said that our whole progress in comparison with former epochs consisted in the fact that we had passed from status to contract," from inherited to freely contracted conditions which, in so far as it is correct, was already in The Communist Manifesto [Chapter II]. But a contract requires people who can dispose freely of their persons, actions, and possessions, and meet each other on the footing of equal rights. To create these free and equal people was one of the main tasks of capitalist production. Even though at the start it was carried out only half-consciously, and under a religious disguise at that, from the time of the Lutheran and Calvinist Reformation the principle was established that man is only fully responsible for his actions when he acts with complete freedom of will, and that it is a moral duty to resist all coercion to an immoral act. But how did this fit in with the hitherto existing practice in the arrangement of marriages? Marriage, according to the bourgeois conception, was a contract, a legal transaction, and the most important one of all, because it disposed of two human beings, body and mind, for life. Formally, it is true, the contract at that time was entered into voluntarily: without the assent of the persons concerned, nothing could be done. But everyone knew only too well how this assent was obtained and who were the real contracting parties in the marriage. But if real freedom of decision was required for all other contracts, then why not for this? Had not the two young people to be coupled also the right to dispose freely of themselves, of their bodies and organs? Had not chivalry brought sex-love into fashion, and was not its proper bourgeois form, in contrast to chivalry s adulterous love, the love of husband and wife? And if it was the duty of married people to love each other, was it not equally the duty of lovers to marry each other and nobody else? Did not this right of the lovers stand higher than the right of parents, relations, and other traditional marriage-brokers and matchmakers? If the right of free, personal discrimination broke boldly into the Church and religion, how should it halt before the intolerable claim of the older generation to dispose of the body, soul, property, happiness, and unhappiness of the younger generation? These questions inevitably arose at a time which was loosening all the old ties of society and undermining all traditional conceptions. The world had suddenly grown almost ten times bigger; instead of one quadrant of a hemisphere, the whole globe lay before the gaze of the West Europeans, who hastened to take the other seven quadrants into their possession. And with the old narrow barriers of their homeland f ell also the thousand-year-old barriers of the prescribed medieval way of thought. To the outward and the inward eye of man opened an infinitely wider horizon. What did a young man care about the approval of respectability, or honorable guild privileges handed down for generations, when the wealth of India beckoned to him, the gold and the silver mines of Mexico and Potosi? For the bourgeoisie, it was the time of knight-errantry; they, too, had their romance and their raptures of love, but on a bourgeois footing and, in the last analysis, with bourgeois aims. So it came about that the rising bourgeoisie, especially in Protestant countries, where existing conditions had been most severely shaken, increasingly recognized freedom of contract also in marriage, and carried it into effect in the manner described. Marriage remained class marriage, but within the class the partners were conceded a certain degree of freedom of choice. And on paper, in ethical theory and in poetic description, nothing was more immutably established than that every marriage is immoral which does not rest on mutual sexual love and really free agreement of husband and wife. In short, the love marriage was proclaimed as a human right, and indeed not only as a droit de l homme, one of the rights of man, but also, for once in a way, as droit de la femme, one of the rights of woman. This human right, however, differed in one respect from all other so-called human rights. While the latter, in practice, remain restricted to the ruling class (the bourgeoisie), and are directly or indirectly curtailed for the oppressed class (the proletariat), in the case of the former the irony of history plays another of its tricks. The ruling class remains dominated by the familiar economic influences and therefore only in exceptional cases does it provide instances of really freely contracted marriages, while among the oppressed class, as we have seen, these marriages are the rule. Full freedom of marriage can therefore only be generally established when the abolition of capitalist production and of the property relations created by it has removed all the accompanying economic considerations which still exert such a powerful influence on the choice of a marriage partner. For then there is no other motive left except mutual inclination. And as sexual love is by its nature exclusive although at present this exclusiveness is fully realized only in the woman the marriage based on sexual love is by its nature individual marriage. We have seen how right Bachofen was in regarding the advance from group marriage to individual marriage as primarily due to the women. Only the step from pairing marriage to monogamy can be put down to the credit of the men, and historically the essence of this was to make the position of the women worse and the infidelities of the men easier. If now the economic considerations also disappear which made women put up with the habitual infidelity of their husbands concern for their own means of existence and still more for their children s future then, according to all previous experience, the equality of woman thereby achieved will tend infinitely more to make men really monogamous than to make women polyandrous. But what will quite certainly disappear from monogamy are all the features stamped upon it through its origin in property relations; these are, in the first place, supremacy of the man, and, secondly, indissolubility. The supremacy of the man in marriage is the simple consequence of his economic supremacy, and with the abolition of the latter will disappear of itself. The indissolubility of marriage is partly a consequence of the economic situation in which monogamy arose, partly tradition from the period when the connection between this economic situation and monogamy was not yet fully understood and was carried to extremes under a religious form. Today it is already broken through at a thousand points. If only the marriage based on love is moral, then also only the marriage in which love continues. But the intense emotion of individual sex-love varies very much in duration from one individual to another, especially among men, and if affection definitely comes to an end or is supplanted by a new passionate love, separation is a benefit for both partners as well as for society only people will then be spared having to wade through the useless mire of a divorce case. What we can now conjecture about the way in which sexual relations will be ordered after the impending overthrow of capitalist production is mainly of a negative character, limited for the most part to what will disappear. But what will there be new? That will be answered when a new generation has grown up: a generation of men who never in their lives have known what it is to buy a woman s surrender with money or any other social instrument of power; a generation of women who have never known what it is to give themselves to a man from any other considerations than real love, or to refuse to give themselves to their lover from fear of the economic consequences. When these people are in the world, they will care precious little what anybody today thinks they ought to do; they will make their own practice and their corresponding public opinion about the practice of each individual and that will be the end of it. Let us, however, return to Morgan, from whom we have moved a considerable distance. The historical investigation of the social institutions developed during the period of civilization goes beyond the limits of his book. How monogamy fares during this epoch, therefore, only occupies him very briefly. He, too, sees in the further development of the monogamous family a step forward, an approach to complete equality of the sexes, though he does not regard this goal as attained. But, he says:

Origins of the Family. Chapter 2 (IV)

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/origin-family/ch02d.htm

The Latin word gens, which Morgan uses as a general term for such kinship organizations, comes, like its Greek equivalent, genos, from the common Aryan root gan (in German, where, following the law Aryan g is regularly replaced by k, kan), which means to beget. Gens, Genos, Sanscrit j nas, Gothic kuni (following the same law as above), Old Norse and Anglo-Saxon kyn, English kin, Middle High German k nne, all signify lineage, descent. Gens in Latin and genos in Greek are, however, used specifically to denote the form of kinship organization which prides itself on its common descent (in this case from a common ancestral father) and is bound together by social and religious institutions into a distinct community, though to all our historians its origin and character have hitherto remained obscure. We have already seen, in connection with the punaluan family, what is the composition of a gens in its original form. It consists of all the persons who in punaluan marriage, according to the conceptions necessarily prevailing under it, form the recognized descendants of one particular ancestral mother, the founder of the gens. In this form of family, as paternity is uncertain, only the female line counts. Since brothers may not marry their sisters but only women of different descent, the children begotten by them with these alien women cannot, according to mother-right, belong to the father's gens. Therefore only the offspring of the daughters in each generation remain within the kinship organization; the offspring of the sons go into the gentes of their mothers. What becomes of this consanguine group when it has constituted itself a separate group, distinct from similar groups within the tribe? As the classic form of this original gens, Morgan takes the gens among the Iroquois, and especially in the Seneca tribe. In this tribe there are eight gentes, named after animals: (1) Wolf, (2) Bear, (3) Turtle, (4) Beaver, (5) Deer, (6) Snipe, (7) Heron, (8) Hawk. In every gens the following customs are observed: The Indians of the whole of North America at the time of its discovery were organized in gentes under mother-right. The gentes had disappeared only in some tribes, as among the Dakotas; in others, as among the Ojibwas and the Omahas, they were organized according to father-right. Among very many Indian tribes with more than five or six gentes, we find every three, four, or more gentes united in a special group, which Morgan, rendering the Indian name faithfully by its Greek equivalent, calls a "phratry" (brotherhood). Thus the Senecas have two phratries: the first comprises gentes 1 to 4, the second gentes 5 to 8. Closer investigation shows that these phratries generally represent the original gentes into which the tribe first split up; for since marriage was prohibited within the gens, there had to be at least two gentes in any tribe to enable it to exist independently. In the measure in which the tribe increased, each gens divided again into two or more gentes, each of which now appears as a separate gens, while the original gens, which includes all the daughter gentes, continues as the phratry. Among the Senecas and most other Indians, the gentes within one phratry are brother gentes to one another, while those in the other phratry are their cousin gentes-terms which in the American system of consanguinity have, as we have seen, a very real and expressive meaning. Originally no Seneca was allowed to marry within his phratry, but this restriction has long since become obsolete and is now confined to the gens. According to Senecan tradition, the Bear and the Deer were the two original gentes, from which the others branched off. After this new institution had once taken firm root, it was modified as required; if the gentes in one phratry died out, entire gentes were sometimes transferred into it from other phratries to make the numbers even. Hence we find gentes of the same name grouped in different phratries in different tribes. Among the Iroquois, the functions of the phratry are partly social, partly religious. The great majority of the American Indians did not advance to any higher form of association than the tribe. Living in small tribes, separated from one another by wide tracts between their frontiers, weakened by incessant wars, they occupied an immense territory with few people. Here and there alliances between related tribes came into being in the emergency of the moment and broke up when the emergency had passed. But in certain districts tribes which were originally related and had then been dispersed, joined together again in permanent federations, thus taking the first step towards the formation of nations. In the United States we find the most developed form of such a federation among the Iroquois. Emigrating from their homes west of the Mississippi, where they probably formed a branch of the great Dakota family, they settled after long wanderings in what is now the State of New York. They were divided into five tribes: Senecas, Cayugas, Onondagas, Oneidas and Mohawks. They subsisted on fish, game, and the products of a crude horticulture, and lived in villages, which were generally protected by a stockade. Never more than twenty thousand strong, they had a number of gentes common to all the five tribes, spoke closely related dialects of the same language, and occupied a continuous stretch of territory which was divided up among the five tribes. As they had newly conquered this territory, these tribes were naturally accustomed to stand together against the Inhabitants they had driven out. From this developed, at the beginning of the fifteenth century at latest, a regular everlasting league, a sworn confederacy, which in the consciousness of its new strength immediately assumed an aggressive character, and at the height of its power, about 1675, conquered wide stretches of the surrounding country, either expelling the inhabitants or making them pay tribute. The Iroquois confederacy represents the most advanced social organization achieved by any Indians still at the lower stage of barbarism (excluding, therefore, the Mexicans, New Mexicans and Peruvians). The main provisions of the confederacy were as follows: But once the gens is given as the social unit, we also see how the whole constitution of gentes, phratries, and tribes is almost necessarily bound to develop from this unit, because the development is natural. Gens, phratry, and tribe are all groups of different degrees of consanguinity, each self-contained and ordering its own affairs, but each supplementing the other. And the affairs which fall within their sphere comprise all the public affairs of barbarians of the lower stage. When we find a people with the gens as their social unit, we may therefore also look for an organization of the tribe similar to that here described; and when there are adequate sources, as in the case of the Greeks and the Romans, we shall not only find it, but we shall also be able to convince ourselves that where the sources fail us, comparison with the American social constitution helps us over the most difficult doubts and riddles. And a wonderful constitution it is, this gentile constitution, in all its childlike simplicity! No soldiers, no gendarmes or police, no nobles, kings, regents, prefects, or judges, no prisons, no lawsuits and everything takes its orderly course. All quarrels and disputes are settled by the whole of the community affected, by the gens or the tribe, or by the gentes among themselves; only as an extreme and exceptional measure is blood revenge threatened-and our capital punishment is nothing but blood revenge in a civilized form, with all the advantages and drawbacks of civilization. Although there were many more matters to be settled in common than today the household is maintained by a number of families in common, and is communistic, the land belongs to the tribe, only the small gardens are allotted provisionally to the households yet there is no need for even a trace of our complicated administrative apparatus with all its ramifications. The decisions are taken by those concerned, and in most cases everything has been already settled by the custom of centuries. There cannot be any poor or needy the communal household and the gens know their responsibilities towards the old, the sick, and those disabled in war. All are equal and free the women included. There is no place yet for slaves, nor, as a rule, for the subjugation of other tribes. When, about the year 1651, the Iroquois had conquered the Eries and the Neutral Nation, they offered to accept them into the confederacy on equal terms; it was only after the defeated tribes had refused that they were driven from their territory. And what men and women such a society breeds is proved by the admiration inspired in all white people who have come into contact with unspoiled Indians, by the personal dignity, uprightness, strength of character, and courage of these barbarians. We have seen examples of this courage quite recently in Africa. The Zulus a few years ago and the Nubians a few months ago both of them tribes in which gentile institutions have not yet died out did what no European army can do. Armed only with lances and spears, without firearms, under a hail of bullets from the breech-loaders of the English infantry acknowledged the best in the world at fighting in close order they advanced right up to the bayonets and more than once threw the lines into disorder and even broke them, in spite of the enormous inequality of weapons and in spite of the fact that they have no military service and know nothing of drill. Their powers of endurance and performance are shown by the complaint of the English that a Kaffir travels farther and faster in twenty-four hours than a horse. His smallest muscle stands out hard and firm like whipcord, says an English painter. That is what men and society were before the division into classes. And when we compare their position with that of the overwhelming majority of civilized men today, an enormous gulf separates the present-day proletarian and small peasant from the free member of the old gentile society. That is the one side. But we must not forget that this organization was doomed. It did not go beyond the tribe. The confederacy of tribes already marks the beginning of its collapse, as will soon be apparent, and was already apparent in the attempts at subjugation by the Iroquois. Outside the tribe was outside the law. Wherever there was not an explicit treaty of peace, tribe was at war with tribe, and wars were waged with the cruelty which distinguishes man from other animals, and which was only mitigated later by self-interest. The gentile constitution in its best days, as we saw it in America, presupposed an extremely undeveloped state of production and therefore an extremely sparse population over a wide area. Man s attitude to nature was therefore one of almost complete subjection to a strange incomprehensible power, as is reflected in his childish religious conceptions. Man was bounded by his tribe, both in relation to strangers from outside the tribe and to himself; the tribe, the gens, and their institutions were sacred and inviolable, a higher power established by nature, to which the individual subjected himself unconditionally in feeling, thought, and action. However impressive the people of this epoch appear to us, they are completely undifferentiated from one another; as Marx says, they are still attached to the navel string of the primitive community. The power of this primitive community had to be broken, and it was broken. But it was broken by influences which from the very start appear as a degradation, a fall from the simple moral greatness of the old gentile society. The lowest interests base greed, brutal appetites, sordid avarice, selfish robbery of the common wealth inaugurate the new, civilized, class society. It is by the vilest means theft, violence, fraud, treason that the old classless gentile society is undermined and overthrown. And the new society itself, during all the two and a half thousand years of its existence, has never been anything else but the development of the small minority at the expense of the great exploited and oppressed majority; today it is so more than ever before.

Origins of the Family-- Chapter 3

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/origin-family/ch03.htm

According to Grote's History of Greece, the Athenian gens, in particular, was held together by the following institutions and customs: Not only Grote, but also Niebuhr, Mommsen and all the other historians of classical antiquity, have come to grief over the gens. Though they correctly noted many of its characteristics, they always took it to be a group of families, thus making it impossible for themselves to understand the nature and origin of the gens. Under the gentile constitution, the family was never an organizational unit, and could not be so, for man and wife necessarily belonged to two different gentes. The whole gens was incorporated within the phratry, and the whole phratry within the tribe; but the family belonged half to the gens of the man and half to the gens of the woman. In public law the state also does not recognize the family; up to this day, the family only exists for private law. And yet all our histories have hitherto started from the absurd assumption, which, since the eighteenth century in particular, has become inviolable, that the monogamous single family, which is hardly older than civilization, is the core around which society and state have gradually crystallized. Morgan prefers to quote Grote because he is not only an impressive but also a trustworthy witness. Grote goes on to say that every Athenian gens had a name derived from its supposed ancestor; that it was the general custom before Solon, and even after Solon, in the absence of a will, for the property of a deceased person to pass to the members of his gens (gennetai), and that in the case of a murder it was the light and the duty, first of the relatives of the murdered man, then of the members of his gens, and lastly of his phratry, to prosecute the criminal before the tribunals: All that we hear of the most ancient Athenian laws is based upon the gentile and phratric divisions. (Grote.) The descent of the gentes from common ancestors has caused the pedantic philistines, as Marx calls them, a lot of brain-racking. As they of course declare the common ancestors to be pure myths, they are at an utter loss to explain how the gens originated out of a number of separate and originally quite unrelated families; yet they have to perform this feat in order to explain how the gentes exist at all. So they argue in circles, with floods of words, never getting any further than the statement: the ancestral tree is a fairy tale, but the gens is a reality. And finally Grote declares (interpolations by Marx): Marx summarizes Morgan's reply to this as follows: As among the Americans, the phratry was a mother gens, split up into several daughter gentes, and uniting them, often tracing them all to a common ancestor. Thus, according to Grote, Hence, all the gentes of this phratry were literally brother gentes. The phratry still occurs in Homer as a military unit in that famous passage where Nestos advises Agamemnon: Draw up people by tribes and by phratries so that phratry may support phratry, and tribe tribe. The phratry has further the right and the duty of prosecuting for blood-guilt incurred against a phrator; hence in earlier times it also had the obligation of blood revenge. Further, it had common shrines and festivals; in fact the elaboration of the whole Greek mythology out of the traditional old Aryan nature-cult was essentially conditioned by the phratries and gentes, and took place within them. The phratry also had a chief (the phratriarchos) and, according to de Coulanges, assemblies. It could pass binding resolutions, and act as a judicial and administrative body. Even the later state, while it ignored the gens, left certain public offices in the hands of the phratry. Several related phratries form a tribe. In Attica there were four tribes, each consisting of three phratries, each phratry numbering thirty gentes. Such a rounded symmetry of groups presupposes conscious, purposeful interference with the naturally developed order. As to how, when, and why this occurred,. Greek history is silent; the historical memory of the Greeks only went back to the heroic age. As the Greeks were crowded together in a relatively small territory, differences of dialect were less developed than in the wide American forests; yet in Greece also it was only tribes of the same main dialect that united in a larger organization, and even Attica, small as it was, had a dialect of its own, which later, through its general use as the language of prose, became the dominant dialect. In the Homeric poems we find most of the Greek tribes already united into small nations, within which, however, gentes, phratries, and tribes retained their full independence. They already lived in towns fortified with walls; the population increased with the increase of the herds, the extension of agriculture and the beginnings of handicraft. The differences in wealth thus became more pronounced, and with them the aristocratic element within the old primitive democracy. The various small nations waged incessant wars for the possession of the best land and doubtless also for booty; the use of prisoners of war as slaves was already a recognized institution. The constitution of these tribes and small nations was as follows: In addition to his military functions, the basileus also held those of priest and judge, the latter not clearly defined, the former exercised in his capacity as supreme representative of the tribe or confederacy of tribes. There is never any mention of civil administrative powers; he seems, however, to be a member of the council ex officio. It is there fore quite correct etymologically to translate basileus as king, since king (kuning) is derived from kuni, kunne, and means head of a gens. But the old Greek basileus does not correspond in any way to the present meaning of the word king. Thucydides expressly refers to the old basileia as patrike, i.e. derived from gentes, and says it had strictly defined, and therefore limited, functions. And Aristotle says that the basileia of the heroic age was a leadership over free men and that the basileus was military leader, judge and high priest; he thus had no governmental power in the later sense. Thus in the Greek constitution of the heroic age we see the old gentile order as still a living force. But we also see the beginnings of its disintegration: father-right, with transmission of the property to the children, by which accumulation of wealth within the family was favored and the family itself became a power as against the gens; reaction of the inequality of wealth on the constitution by the formation of the first rudiments of hereditary nobility and monarchy; slavery, at first only of prisoners of war, but already preparing the way for the enslavement of fellow-members of the tribe and even of the gens; the old wars between tribe and tribe already degenerating into systematic pillage by land and sea for the acquisition of cattle, slaves and treasure, and becoming a regular source of wealth; in short, riches praised and respected as the highest good and the old gentile order misused to justify the violent seizure of riches. Only one thing was wanting: an institution which not only secured the newly acquired riches of individuals against the communistic traditions of the gentile order, which not only sanctified the private property formerly so little valued, and declared this sanctification to be the highest purpose of all human society; but an institution which set the seal of general social recognition on each new method of acquiring property and thus amassing wealth at continually increasing speed; an institution which perpetuated, not only this growing cleavage of society into classes, but also the right of the possessing class to exploit the non-possessing, and the rule of the former over the latter. And this institution came. The state was invented.

Origins of the Family-- Chapter IV

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/origin-family/ch04.htm

In the Heroic age the four tribes of the Athenians were still settled in Attica in separate territories; even the twelve phratries composing them seem still to have had distinct seats in the twelve towns of Cecrops. The constitution was that of the heroic age: assembly of the people, council of the people, basileus. As far as written history takes us back, we find the land already divided up and privately owned, which is in accordance with the relatively advanced commodity production and the corresponding trade in commodities developed towards the end of the upper stage of barbarism. In addition to grain, wine and oil were produced; to a continually increasing extent, the sea trade in the Aegean was captured from the Phoenicians, and most of it passed into Athenian hands. Through the sale and purchase of land, and the progressive division of labor between agriculture and handicraft, trade, and shipping, it was inevitable that the members of the different gentes, phratries, and tribes very soon became intermixed, and that into the districts of the phratry and tribe moved inhabitants, who, although fellow countrymen, did not belong to these bodies and were therefore strangers in their own place of domicile. For when times were quiet, each tribe and each phratry administered its own affairs without sending to Athens to consult the council of the people or the basileus. But anyone not a member of the phratry or tribe was, of course, excluded from taking any part in this administration, even though living in the district. The smooth functioning of the organs of the gentile constitution was thus thrown so much out of gear that even in the heroic age remedies had to be found. The constitution ascribed to Theseus was introduced. The principal change which it made was to set up a central authority in Athens that is, part of the affairs hitherto administered by the tribes independently were declared common affairs and entrusted to the common council sitting in Athens. In taking this step, the Athenians went further than any native people of America had ever done: instead of neighboring tribes forming a simple confederacy, they fused together into one single nation. Hence arose a common Athenian civil law, which stood above the legal customs of the tribes and gentes. The Athenian citizen, as such, acquired definite rights and new protection in law even on territory which was not that of his tribe. The first step had been taken towards undermining the gentile constitution; for this was the first step to the later admission of citizens who did not belong to any tribe in all Attica, but were, and remained, completely outside the Athenian gentile constitution. By a second measure ascribed to Theseus, the entire people, regardless of gens, phratry or tribe, was divided into three classes: eupatridai, or nobles, geomoroi, or farmers, and demiourgoi, or artisans, and the right to hold office was vested exclusively in the nobility. Apart from the tenure of offices by the nobility, this division remained inoperative, as it did not create any other legal distinctions between the classes. It is, however, important because it reveals the new social elements which had been developing unobserved. It shows that the customary appointment of members of certain families to the offices of the gens had already grown into an almost uncontested right of these families to office; it shows that these families, already powerful through their wealth, were beginning to form groupings outside their gentes as a separate, privileged class, and that the state now taking form sanctioned this presumption. It shows further that the division of labor between peasants and artisans was now firmly enough established in its social importance to challenge the old grouping of gentes and tribes. And, finally, it proclaims the irreconcilable opposition between gentile society and the state; the first attempt at forming a state consists in breaking up the gentes by dividing their members into those with privileges and those with none, and by further separating the latter into two productive classes and thus setting them one against the other. The further political history of Athens up to the time of Solon is only imperfectly known. The office of basileus fell into disuse; the positions at the head of the state were occupied by archons elected from the nobility. The power of the nobility continuously increased, until about the year 600 B.C. it became insupportable. And the principal means for suppressing the common liberty were money and usury. The nobility had their chief seat in and around Athens, whose maritime trade, with occasional piracy still thrown in, enriched them and concentrated in their hands the wealth existing in the form of money. From here the growing money economy penetrated like corrosive acid into the old traditional life of the rural communities founded on natural economy. The gentile constitution is absolutely irreconcilable with money economy; the ruin of the Attic small farmers coincided with the loosening of the old gentile bonds which embraced and protected them. The debtorA s bond and the lien on property (for already the Athenians had invented the mortgage also) respected neither gens nor phratry, while the old gentile constitution, for its part, knew neither money nor advances of money nor debts in money. Hence the money rule of the aristocracy now in full flood of expansion also created a new customary law to secure the creditor against the debtor and to sanction the exploitation of the small peasant by the possessor of money. All the fields of Attica were thick with mortgage columns bearing inscriptions stating that the land on which they stood was mortgaged to such and such for so and so much. The fields not so marked had for the most part already been sold on account of unpaid mortgages or interest, and had passed into the ownership of the noble usurer; the peasant could count himself lucky if he was allowed to remain on the land as a tenant and live on one-sixth of the produce of his labor, while he paid five-sixths to his new master as rent. And that was not all. If the sale of the land did not cover the debt, or if the debt had been contracted without any security, the debtor, in order to meet his creditor's claims, had to sell his children into slavery abroad. Children sold by their father such was the first fruit of father-right and monogamy! And if the blood-sucker was still not satisfied, he could sell the debtor himself as a slave. Thus the pleasant dawn of civilization began for the Athenian people. Formerly, when the conditions of the people still corresponded to the gentile constitution, such an upheaval was impossible; now it had happened nobody knew how. Let us go back for a moment to our Iroquois, amongst whom the situation now confronting the Athenians, without their own doing, so to speak, and certainly against their will, was inconceivable. Their mode of producing the necessities of life, unvarying from year to year, could never generate such conflicts as were apparently forced on the Athenians from without; it could never create an opposition of rich and poor, of exploiters and exploited. The Iroquois were still very far from controlling nature, but within the limits imposed on them by natural forces they did control their own production. Apart from bad harvests in their small gardens, the exhaustion of the stocks of fish in their lakes and rivers or of the game in their woods, they knew what results they could expect, making their living as they did. The certain result was a livelihood, plentiful or scanty; but one result there could never be social upheavals that no one had ever intended, sundering of the gentile bonds, division of gens and tribe into two opposing and warring classes. Production was limited in the extreme, but the producers controlled their product. That was the immense advantage of barbarian production, which was lost with the coming of civilization; to reconquer it, but on the basis of the gigantic control of nature now achieved by man and of the free association now made possible, will be the task of the next generations. Not so among the Greeks. The rise of private property in herds and articles of luxury led to exchange between individuals, to the transformation of products into commodities. And here lie the seeds of the whole subsequent upheaval. When the producers no longer directly consumed their product themselves, but let it pass out of their hands in the act of exchange, they lost control of it. They no longer knew what became of it; the possibility was there that one day it would be used against the producer to exploit and oppress him. For this reason no society can permanently retain the mastery of its own production and the control over the social effects of its process of production unless it abolishes exchange between individuals. But the Athenians were soon to learn how rapidly the product asserts its mastery over the producer when once exchange between individuals has begun and products have been transformed into commodities. With the coming of commodity production, individuals began to cultivate the soil on their own account, which soon led to individual ownership of land. Money followed, the general commodity with which all others 101 were exchangeable. But when men invented money, they did not think that they were again creating a new social power, the one general power before which the whole of society must bow. And it was this new power, suddenly sprung to life without knowledge or will of its creators, which now, in all the brutality of its youth, gave the Athenians the first taste of its might. What was to be done? The old gentile constitution had not only shown itself powerless before the triumphal march of money; it was absolutely incapable of finding any place within its framework for such things as money, creditors, debtors, and forcible collection of debts. But the new social power was there; pious wishes, and yearning for the return of the good old days would not drive money and usury out of the world. Further, a number of minor breaches had also been made in the gentile constitution. All over Attica, and especially in Athens itself, the members of the different gentes and phratries became still more indiscriminately mixed with every generation, although even now an Athenian was only allowed to sell land outside his gens, not the house in which he lived. The division of labor between the different branches of production agriculture, handicrafts (in which there were again innumerable subdivisions), trade, shipping, and so forth had been carried further with every advance of industry and commerce; the population was now divided according to occupation into fairly permanent groups, each with its new common interests; and since the gens and the phratry made no provision for dealing with them, new offices had to be created. The number of slaves had increased considerably, and even at that time must have far exceeded the number of free Athenians; the gentile constitution originally knew nothing of slavery and therefore had no means of keeping these masses of bondsmen in order. Finally, trade had brought to Athens a number of foreigners who settled there on account of the greater facilities of making money; they also could claim no rights or protection under the old constitution; and, though they were received with traditional tolerance, they remained a disturbing and alien body among the people. In short, the end of the gentile constitution was approaching. Society was outgrowing it more every day; even the worst evils that had grown up under its eyes were beyond its power to check or remove. But in the meantime the state had quietly been developing. The new groups formed by the division of labor, first between town and country, then between the different branches of town labor, had created new organs to look after their interests; official posts of all kinds had been set up. And above everything else the young state needed a power of its own, which in the case of the seafaring Athenians could at first only be a naval power, for the purpose of carrying on small wars and protecting its merchant ships. At some unknown date before Solon, the naukrariai were set up, small territorial districts, twelve to each tribe; each naukraria had to provide, equip and man a warship and also contribute two horsemen. This institution was a twofold attack on the gentile constitution. In the first place, it created a public force which was now no longer simply identical with the whole body of the armed people; secondly, for the first time it divided the people for public purposes, not by groups of kinship, but by common place of residence. We shall see the significance of this. The gentile constitution being incapable of bringing help to the exploited people, there remained only the growing state. And the state brought them its help in the form of the constitution of Solon, thereby strengthening itself again at the expense of the old constitution. Solon the manner in which his reform, which belongs to the year 594 B.C., was carried through does not concern us here opened the series of so-called political revolutions; and he did so with an attack on property. All revolutions hitherto have been revolutions to protect one kind of property against another kind of property. They cannot protect the one without violating the other. In the great French Revolution feudal property was sacrificed to save bourgeois property; in that of Solon, the property of the creditors had to suffer for the benefit of the property of the debtors. The debts were simply declared void. We do not know the exact details, but in his poems Solon boasts of having removed the mortgage columns from the fields and brought back all the people who had fled or been sold abroad on account of debt. This was only possible by open violation of property. And, in fact, from the first to the last, all so-called political revolutions have been made to protect property of one kind; and they have been carried out by confiscating, also called stealing, property of another kind. The plain truth is that for two and a half thousand years it has been possible to preserve private property only by violating property. But now the need was to protect the free Athenians against the return of such slavery. The first step was the introduction of general measures for example, the prohibition of debt contracts pledging the person of the debtor. Further, in order to place at least some check on the nobles ravening hunger for the land of the peasants, a maximum limit was fixed for the amount of land that could be owned by one individual. Then changes were made in the constitution, of which the most important for us are the following: The council was raised to four hundred members, one hundred for each tribe; here, therefore, the tribe was still taken as basis. But that was the one and only feature of the new state incorporating anything from the old constitution. For all other purposes Solon divided the citizens into four classes according to their property in land and the amount of its yield: five hundred, three hundred and one hundred fifty medimni of grain (one medimnus equals about 1.16 bushels) were the minimum yields for the first three classes; those who owned less land or none at all were placed in the fourth class. All offices could be filled only from the three upper classes, and the highest offices only from the first. The fourth class only had the right to speak and vote in the assembly of the people; but it was in this assembly that all officers were elected, here they had to render their account, here all laws were made; and here the fourth class formed the majority. The privileges of the aristocracy were partially renewed in the form of privileges of wealth, but the people retained the decisive power. Further, the four classes formed the basis of a new military organization. The first two classes provided the cavalry; the third had to serve as heavy infantry; the fourth served either as light infantry without armor or in the fleet, for which they probably received wages. A completely new element is thus introduced into the constitution: private ownership. According to the size of their property in land, the rights and duties of the citizens of the state are now assessed, and in the same degree to which the classes based on property gain influence, the old groups of blood relationship lose it; the gentile constitution had suffered a new defeat. However, the assessment of political rights on a property basis was not an institution indispensable to the existence of the state. In spite of the great part it has played in the constitutional history of states, very many states, and precisely those most highly developed, have not required it. In Athens also its role was only temporary; from the time of Aristides all offices were open to every citizen. During the next eighty years Athenian society gradually shaped the course along which it developed in the following centuries. Usury on the security of mortgaged land, which had been rampant in the period before Solon, had been curbed, as had also the inordinate concentration of property in land. Commerce and handicrafts, including artistic handicrafts, which were being increasingly developed on a large scale by the use of slave labor, became the main occupations. Athenians were growing more enlightened. Instead of exploiting their fellow citizens in the old brutal way, they exploited chiefly the slaves and the non-Athenian customers. Movable property, wealth in the form of money, of slaves and ships, continually increased, but it was no longer a mere means to the acquisition of landed property, as in the old slow days: it had become an end in itself. On the one hand the old power of the aristocracy now had to contend with successful competition from the new class of rich industrialists and merchants; but, on the other hand, the ground was also cut away from beneath the last remains of the old gentile constitution. The gentes, phratries, and tribes, whose members were now scattered over all Attica and thoroughly intermixed, had thus become useless as political bodies; numbers of Athenian citizens did not belong to any gens at all; they were immigrants, who had indeed acquired rights of citizenship, but had not been adopted into any of the old kinship organizations; in addition, there was the steadily increasing number of foreign immigrants who only had rights of protection. Meanwhile, the fights went on between parties; the nobility tried to win back their former privileges and for a moment regained the upper hand, until the revolution of Cleisthenes (509 B.C.) overthrew them finally, but with them also the last remnants of the gentile constitution. In his new constitution, Cleisthenes ignored the four old tribes founded on gentes and phratries. In their place appeared a completely new organization on the basis of division of the citizens merely according to their place of residence, such as had been already attempted in the naukrariai. Only domicile was now decisive, not membership of a kinship group. Not the people, but the territory was now divided: the inhabitants became a mere political appendage of the territory. The whole of Attica was divided into one hundred communal districts, called demes, each of which was self-governing. The citizens resident in each deme (demotes) elected their president (demarch) and treasurer, as well as thirty judges with jurisdiction in minor disputes. They were also given their own temple and patron divinity or hero, whose priests they elected. Supreme power in the deme was vested in the assembly of the demotes. As Morgan rightly observes, here is the prototype of the self-governing American township. The modern state, in its highest development, ends in the same unit with which the rising state in Athens began. Ten of these units (demes) formed a tribe, which, however, is now known as a local tribe to distinguish it from the old tribe of kinship. The local tribe was not only a self-governing political body, but also a military body; it elected its phylarch, or tribal chief, who commanded the cavalry, the taxiarch commanding the infantry, and the strategos, who was in command over all the forces raised in the tribal area. It further provided five warships with their crews and commanders, and received as patron deity an Attic hero, after whom it was named. Lastly, it elected fifty councilors to the Athenian council. At the summit was the Athenian state, governed by the council composed of the five hundred councilors elected by the ten tribes, and in the last instance by the assembly of the people, at which every Athenian citizen had the right to attend and to vote; archons and other officials managed the various departments of administration and justice. In Athens there was no supreme official with executive power. Through this new constitution and the admission to civil rights of a very large number of protected persons, partly immigrants, partly freed slaves, the organs of the gentile constitution were forced out of public affairs; they sank to the level of private associations and religious bodies. But the moral influence of the old gentile period and its traditional ways of thought were still handed down for a long time to come, and only died out gradually. We find evidence of this in another state institution. We saw that an essential characteristic of the state is the existence of a public force differentiated from the mass of the people. At this time, Athens still had only a people s army and a fleet provided directly by the people; army and fleet gave protection against external enemies and kept in check the slaves, who already formed the great majority of the population. In relation to the citizens, the public power at first existed only in the form of the police force, which is as old as the state itself; for which reason the naive French of the eighteenth century did not speak of civilized peoples, but of policed peoples (nations polic es). The Athenians then instituted a police force simultaneously with their state, a veritable gendarmerie of bowmen, foot and mounted Landj ger [the country's hunters] as they call them in South Germany and Switzerland. But this gendarmerie consisted of slaves. The free Athenian considered police duty so degrading that he would rather be arrested by an armed slave than himself have any hand in such despicable work. That was still the old gentile spirit. The state could not exist without police, but the state was still young and could not yet inspire enough moral respect to make honorable an occupation which, to the older members of the gens, necessarily appeared infamous. Now complete in its main features, the state was perfectly adapted to the new social conditions of the Athenians, as is shown by the rapid growth of wealth, commerce, and industry. The class opposition on which the social and political institutions rested was no longer that of nobility and common people, but of slaves and free men, of protected persons and citizens. At the time of their greatest prosperity, the entire free-citizen population of Athens, women and children included, numbered about ninety thousand; besides them there were three hundred and sixty-five thousand slaves of both sexes and forty-five thousand protected persons aliens and freedmen. There were therefore at least eighteen slaves and more than two protected persons to every adult male citizen. The reason for the large number of slaves was that many of them worked together in manufactories, in large rooms, under overseers. But with the development of commerce and industry wealth was accumulated and concentrated in a few hands, and the mass of the free citizens were impoverished. Their only alternatives were to compete against slave labor with their own labor as handicraftsman, which was considered base and vulgar and also offered very little prospect of success, or to become social scrap. Necessarily, in the circumstances, they did the latter, and, as they formed the majority, they thereby brought about the downfall of the whole Athenian state. The downfall of Athens was not caused by democracy, as the European lickspittle historians assert to flatter their princes, but by slavery, which banned the labor of free citizens. The rise of the state among the Athenians is a particularly typical example of the formation of a state; first, the process takes place in a pure form, without any interference through use of violent force, either from without or from within (the usurpation by Pisistratus left no trace of its short duration); second, it shows a very highly developed form of state, the democratic republic, arising directly out of gentile society; and lastly we are sufficiently acquainted with all the essential details.

Origins of the Family-- Chapter V

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/origin-family/ch05.htm

The Roman gens is recognized to be the same institution as the Greek gens; and since the Greek gens is a further development of the social unit whose original form is found among the American Indians, this, of course, holds true of the Roman gens also. Here therefore we can be more brief. The Roman gens, at least in the earliest times of Rome, had the following constitution: Such were the rights of a Roman gens. Apart from the already completed transition to father-right, they are the perfect counterpart of the rights and duties in an Iroquois gens; here again the Iroquois shows through unmistakably (p. 90). The confusion that still exists today, even among our leading historians, on the subject of the Roman gens, may be illustrated by one example. In his paper on Roman family names in the period of the Republic and of Augustus (Romische Forschungen, Berlin, 1864, Vol. I, pp. 8-11) Mommsen writes: Mommsen therefore maintains that the Roman women who belonged to a gens had originally been permitted to marry only within the gens, that the gens had therefore been endogamous, not exogamous. This view, which is in contradiction to all the evidence from other peoples, rests chiefly, if not exclusively, on one much disputed passage from Livy (Book XXXIX, Ch. 19), according to which the senate in the year 568 after the foundation of the city, or 186 B.C., decreed: Uti Feceniae Hispallae datio, deminutio, gentis enuptio, tutoris optio item esset quasi ei vir testamento dedisset; utique ei ingenuo nubere liceret, neu quid ei qui eam duxisset ob id fraudi ignominiaeve esset that Fecenia Hispala shall have the right to dispose of her property, to decrease it, to marry outside the gens, and to choose for herself a guardian, exactly as if her (deceased) husband had conferred this right on her by testament; that she may marry a freeman, and that the man who takes her to wife shall not be considered to have committed a wrongful or shameful act thereby. Without a doubt, Fecenia, a freedwoman, is here granted the right to marry outside the gens. And equally without a doubt the husband possessed the right, according to this passage, to bequeath to his wife by will the right to marry outside the gens after his death. But outside which gens? If the woman had to marry within her gens, as Mommsen assumes, she remained within this gens also after her marriage. But in the first place the endogamous character of the gens which is here asserted is precisely what has to be proved. And, secondly, if the wife had to marry within the gens, then, of course, so had the man, for otherwise he could not get a wife. So we reach the position that the man could bequeath to his wife by will a right which he himself, and for himself, did not possess; we arrive at a legal absurdity. Mommsen also feels this, and hence makes the assumption: For a lawful marriage outside the gens, it was probably necessary to have the consent, not only of the chief, but of all members of the gens. That is a very bold assumption in the first place, and, secondly, it contradicts the clear wording of the passage. The senate grants her this right in the place of her husband; it grants her expressly neither more nor less than her husband could have granted her, but what it grants her is an absolute right, conditional upon no other restriction. Thus it is provided that if she makes use of this right, her new husband also shall not suffer any disability. The senate even directs the present and future consuls and praetors to see to it that no injurious consequences to her follow. Mommsen s assumption therefore seems to be completely inadmissible. Or assume that the woman married a man from another gens, but herself remained in the gens into which she had been born. Then, according to the above passage, the man would have had the right to allow his wife to marry outside her own gens. That is, he would have had the right to make dispositions in the affairs of a gens to which he did not even belong. The thing is so patently absurd that we need waste no more words on it. Hence there only remains the assumption that in her first marriage the woman married a man from another gens, and thereby immediately entered the gens of her husband, which Mommsen himself actually admits to have been the practice when the woman married outside her gens. Then everything at once becomes clear. Severed from her old gens by her marriage and accepted into the gentile group of her husband, the woman occupies a peculiar position in her new gens. She is, indeed, a member of the gens, but not related by blood. By the mere manner of her acceptance as a gentile member, she is entirely excluded from the prohibition against marrying within the gens, for she has just married into it; further, she is accepted as one of the married members of the gens, and on her husband s death inherits from his property, the property of a gentile member. What is more natural than that this property should remain within the gens and that she should therefore be obliged to marry a member of her husband s gens and nobody else? And if an exception is to be made, who is so competent to give her the necessary authorization as the man who has bequeathed her this property, her first husband? At the moment when he bequeaths to her a part of his property and at the same time allows her to transfer it into another gens through marriage or in consequence of marriage, this property still belongs to him and he is therefore literally disposing of his own property. As regards the woman herself and her relation to her husband's gens, it was he who brought her into the gens by a free act of will - the marriage; hence it also seems natural that he should be the proper person to authorize her to leave this gens by a second marriage. In a word, the matter appears simple and natural as soon as we abandon the extraordinary conception of the endogamous Roman gens and regard it, with Morgan, as originally exogamous. There still remains one last assumption which has also found adherents, and probably the most numerous. On this view, the passage only means that freed servants (libertae) could not without special permission e gente enubere (marry out of the gens) or perform any of the acts, which, involving loss of rights (capitis deminutio minima), would have resulted in the liberta leaving the gens. (Lange, R mische Altertumer, Berlin 1856, I, 195, where Huschke is cited in connection with our passage from Livy.) If this supposition is correct, the passage then proves nothing at all about the position of free Roman women, and there can be even less question of any obligation resting on them to marry within the gens. The expression enuptio gentis only occurs in this one passage and nowhere else in the whole of Latin literature; the word enubere, to marry outside, only occurs three times, also in Livy, and then not in reference to the gens. The fantastic notion that Roman women were only allowed to marry within their gens owes its existence solely to this one passage. But it cannot possibly be maintained. For either the passage refers to special restrictions for freedwomen, in which case it proves nothing about free women (ingenuae), or it applies also to free women; and then it proves, on the contrary, that the woman married as a rule outside her gens, but on her marriage entered into the gens of her husband; which contradicts Mommsen and supports Morgan. Almost three centuries after the foundation of Rome, the gentile groups were still so strong that a patrician gens, that of the Fabii, was able to undertake an independent campaign, with the permission of the senate, against the neighboring town of Veii; three hundred and six Fabii are said to have set out and to have been killed to a man, in an ambush; according to the story, only one boy who had remained behind survived to propagate the gens. As we have said, ten gentes formed a phratry, which among the Romans was called a curia and had more important public functions than the Greek phratry. Every curia had its own religious rites, shrines and priests; the latter, as a body, formed one of the Roman priestly colleges. Ten curiae formed a tribe, which probably, like the rest of the Latin tribes, originally had an elected president-military leader and high priest. The three tribes together formed the Roman people, the Populus Romanus. Thus no one could belong to the Roman people unless he was a member of a gens and through it of a curia and a tribe. The first constitution of the Roman people was as follows: Public affairs were managed in the first instance by the senate, which, as Niebuhr first rightly saw, was composed of the presidents of the three hundred gentes; it was because they were the elders of the gens that they were called fathers, patres, and their body, the senate (council of the elders, from senex, old). Here again the custom of electing always from the same family in the gens brought into being the first hereditary nobility; these families called themselves patricians, and claimed for themselves exclusive right of entry into the senate and tenure of all other offices. The acquiescence of the people in this claim, in course of time, and its transformation into an actual right, appear in legend as the story that Romulus conferred the patriciate and its privileges on the first senators and their descendants. The senate, like the Athenian boul , made final decisions in many matters and held preparatory discussions on those of greater importance, particularly new laws. With regard to these, the decision rested with the assembly of the people, called the comitia curiata (assembly of the curiae). The people assembled together, grouped in curiae, each curia probably grouped in gentes; each of the thirty curiae had one vote in the final decision. The assembly of the curiae accepted or rejected all laws, elected all higher officials, including the rex (so-called king), declared war (the senate, however, concluded peace), and, as supreme court, decided, on the appeal of the parties concerned, all cases involving death sentence on a Roman citizen. Lastly, besides the senate and the assembly of the people, there was the rex, who corresponded exactly to the Greek basileus and was not at all the almost absolute king which Mommsen made him out to be. He also was military leader, high priest, and president of certain courts. He had no civil authority whatever, nor any power over the life, liberty, or property of citizens, except such as derived from his disciplinary powers as military leader or his executive powers as president of a court. The office of rex was not hereditary; on the contrary, he was first elected by the assembly of the curiae, probably on the nomination of his predecessor, and then at a second meeting solemnly installed in office. That he could also be deposed is shown by the fate of Tarquinius Superbus. Like the Greeks of the heroic age, the Romans in the age of the so-called kings lived in a military democracy founded on gentes, phratries, and tribes and developed out of them. Even if the curiae and tribes were to a certain extent artificial groups, they were formed after the genuine, primitive models of the society out of which they had arisen and by which they were still surrounded on all sides. Even if the primitive patrician nobility had already gained ground, even if the reges were endeavoring gradually to extend their power, it does not change the original, fundamental character of the constitution, and that alone matters. Meanwhile, Rome and the Roman territory, which had been enlarged by conquest, increased in population, partly through immigration, partly through the addition of inhabitants of the subjugated, chiefly Latin, districts. All these new citizens of the state (we leave aside the question of the clients) stood outside the old gentes, curiae, and tribes, and therefore formed no part of the populus Romanus, the real Roman people. They were personally free, could own property in land, and had to pay taxes and do military service. But they could not hold any office, nor take part in the assembly of the curiae, nor share in the allotment of conquered state lands. They formed the class that was excluded from all public rights, the plebs. Owing to their continually increasing numbers, their military training and their possession of arms, they became a powerful threat to the old populus, which now rigidly barred any addition to its own ranks from outside. Further, landed property seems to have been fairly equally divided between populus and plebs, while the commercial and industrial wealth, though not as yet much developed, was probably for the most part in the hands of the plebs. The great obscurity which envelops the completely legendary primitive history of Rome an obscurity considerably deepened by the rationalistically pragmatical interpretations and accounts given of the subject by later authors with legalistic minds makes it impossible to say anything definite about the time, course, or occasion of the revolution which made an end of the old gentile constitution. All that is certain is that its cause lay in the struggles between plebs and populus. The new constitution, which was attributed to the rex Servius Tullius and followed the Greek model, particularly that of Solon, created a new assembly of the people, in which populus and plebeians without distinction were included or excluded according to whether they performed military service or not. The whole male population liable to bear arms was divided on a property basis into six classes. The lower limit in each of the five classes was: (1) 100,000 asses; (2) 75,000 asses; (3) 50,000 asses; (4) 25,000 asses; (5) 11,000 asses; according to Dureau de la Malle, the equivalent to about 14,000; 10,500; 7,000; 3,600; and 1,570 marks respectively. The sixth class, the proletarians, consisted of those with less property than the lower class and those exempt from military service and taxes. In the new popular assembly of the centuries (comitia centuriata) the citizens appeared in military formation, arranged by companies in their centuries of a hundred men, each century having one vote. Now the first class put eighty centuries in the field, the second twenty-two, the third twenty, the fourth twenty-two, the fifth thirty, and the sixth also on century for the sake of appearances. In addition, there was the cavalry, drawn from the wealthiest men, with eighteen centuries; total, 193; ninety-seven votes were thus required for a clear majority. But the cavalry and the first class alone had together ninety-eight votes, an therefore the majority; if they were agreed, they did not ask the others; they made their decision, and it stood. This new assembly of the centuries now took over all political rights of the former assembly of the curiae, with the exception of a few nominal privileges. The curiae and the gentes of which they were composed were thus degraded, as in Athens, to mere private and religious associations and continued to vegetate as such for a long period while the assembly of the curiae soon became completely dormant. In order that the three old tribes of kinship should also be excluded from the state, four local tribes were instituted, each of which inhabited one quarter of the city and possessed a number of political rights. Thus in Rome also, even before the abolition of the so-called monarchy, the old order of society based on personal ties of blood was destroyed and in its place was set up a new and complete state constitution based on territorial division and difference of wealth. Here the public power consisted of the body of citizens liable to military service, in opposition not only to the slaves, but also to those excluded from service in the army and from possession of arms, the so-called proletarians. The banishment of the last rex, Tarquinius Superbus, who usurped real monarchic power, and the replacement of the office of rex by two military leaders (consuls) with equal powers (as among the Iroquois) was simply a further development of this new constitution. Within this new constitution, the whole history of the Roman Republic runs its course, with all the struggles between patricians and plebeians for admission to office and share in the state lands, and the final merging of the patrician nobility in the new class of the great land and money owners, who, gradually swallowing up all the land of the peasants ruined by military service, employed slave labor to cultivate the enormous estates thus formed, depopulated Italy and so threw open the door, not only to the emperors, but also to their successors, the German barbarians.

Origins of the Family - Chapter VI

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The oldest Celtic laws which have been preserved show the gens still fully alive: in Ireland, after being forcibly broken up by the English, it still lives today in the consciousness of the people, as an instinct at any rate; in Scotland it was still in full strength in the middle of the eighteenth century, and here again it succumbed only to the weapons, laws, and courts of the English. The old Welsh laws, which were recorded in writing several centuries before the English conquest, at the latest in the eleventh century, still show common tillage of the soil by whole villages, even if only as an exceptional relic of a once general custom; each family had five acres for its own cultivation; a piece of land was cultivated collectively as well and the yield shared. In view of the analogy of Ireland and Scotland, it cannot be doubted that these village communities represent gentes or subdivisions of gentes, even though further examination of the Welsh laws, which I cannot undertake for lack of time (my notes date from 1869), should not provide direct proof. But what is directly proved by the Welsh sources and by the Irish is that among the Celts in the eleventh century pairing marriage had not by any means been displaced by monogamy. In Wales a marriage only became indissoluble, or rather it only ceased to be terminable by notification, after seven years had elapsed. If the time was short of seven years by only three nights, husband and wife could separate. They then shared out their property between them; the woman divided and the man chose. The furniture was divided according to fixed and very humorous rules. If it was the man who dissolved the marriage, he had to give the woman back her dowry and some other things; if it was the woman, she received less. Of the children the man took two and the woman one, the middle child. If after the separation the woman took another husband and the first husband came to fetch her back again, she had to follow him even if she had already one foot in her new marriage bed. If, on the other hand, the man and woman had been together for seven years, they were husband and wife, even without any previous formal marriage. Chastity of girls before marriage was not at all strictly observed, nor was it demanded; the provisions in this respect are of an extremely frivolous character and not at all in keeping with bourgeois morality. If a woman committed adultery, the husband had the right to beat her (this was one of the three occasions when he was allowed to do so; otherwise he was punished), but not then to demand any other satisfaction, since for the one offense there shall be either atonement or vengeance, but not both. The grounds on which the wife could demand divorce without losing any of her claims in the subsequent settlement were very comprehensive; if the husband had bad breath, it was enough. The money which had to be paid to the chief of the tribe or king to buy off his right of the first night (gobr merch, whence the medieval name, marcheta; French marquette), plays a large part in the code of laws. The women had the right to vote in the assemblies of the people. When we add that the evidence shows similar conditions in Ireland; that there, also, temporary marriages were quite usual and that at the separation very favorable and exactly defined conditions were assured to the woman, including even compensation for her domestic services; that in Ireland there was a first wife as well as other wives, and that in the division of an inheritance no distinction was made between children born in wedlock or outside it we then have a picture of pairing marriage in comparison with which the form of marriage observed in North America appears strict. This is not surprising in the eleventh century among a people who even so late as Caesar s time were still living in group marriage. The existence of the Irish gens (sept; the tribe was called clainne, clan) is confirmed and described not only by the old legal codes, but also by the English jurists of the seventeenth century who were sent over to transform the clan lands into domains of the English crown. Until then, the land had been the common property of the clan or gens, in so far as the chieftains had not already converted it into their private domains. When a member of the gens died and a household consequently came to an end, the gentile chief (the English jurists called him caput cognationis) made a new division of the whole territory among the remaining households. This must have been done, broadly speaking, according to the rules in force in Germany. Forty or fifty years ago village fields were very numerous, and even today a few of these rundales, as they are called, may still be found. The peasants of a rundale, now individual tenants on the soil that had been the common property of the gens till it was seized by the English conquerors, pay rent for their respective piece of land, but put all their shares in arable and meadowland together, which they then divide according to position and quality into Gewanne, as they are called on the Moselle, each receiving a share in each Gewann; moorland and pasture-land are used in common. Only fifty years ago new divisions were still made from time to time, sometimes annually. The field-map of such a village looks exactly like that of a German Geh ferschaft [peasant community] on the Moselle or in the Mittelwald. The gens also lives on in the factions. The Irish peasants often divide themselves into parties based apparently on perfectly absurd or meaningless distinctions; to the English they are quite incomprehensible and seem to have no other purpose than the favorite ceremony of two factions hammering one another. They are artificial revivals, modern substitutes for the dispersed gentes, manifesting in their own peculiar manner the persistence of the inherited gentile instinct. In some districts the members of the gens still live pretty much together on the old territory; in the thirties the great majority of the inhabitants of County Monaghan still had only four family names, that is, they were descended from four gentes or clans. In Scotland the decay of the gentile organization dates from the suppression of the rising of 1745. The precise function of the Scottish clan in this organization still awaits investigation; but that the clan is a gentile body is beyond doubt. In Walter Scott's novels the Highland clan lives before our eyes. It is, says Morgan: But that formerly mother-right prevailed in Scotland is proved by the fact that, according to Bede, in the royal family of the Picts succession was in the female line. Among the Scots, as among the Welsh, a relic even of the punaluan family persisted into the Middle Ages in the form of the right of the first night, which the head of the clan or the king, as last representative of the former community of husbands, had the right to exercise with every bride, unless it was compounded for money. That the Germans were organized in gentes until the time of the migrations is beyond all doubt. They can have occupied the territory between the Danube, Rhine, Vistula, and the northern seas only a few centuries before our era; the Cimbri and Teutons were then still in full migration, and the Suevi did not find any permanent habitation until Caesar's time. Caesar expressly states of them that they had settled in gentes and kindreds (gentibus cognationtbusque), and in the mouth of a Roman of the Julian gens the word gentibus has a definite meaning which cannot be argued away. The same was true of all the Germans; they seem still to have settled by gentes even in the provinces they conquered from the Romans. The code of laws of the Alemanni confirms that the people settled by kindreds (genealogiae) in the conquered territory south of the Danube; genealogia is used in exactly the same sense as Markgenossenschaft or Dorfgenossenschaft [Mark or village community Ed.] later. Kovalevsky has recently put forward the view that these genealogia are the large household communities among which the land was divided, and from which the village community only developed later. This would then probably also apply to the fara, with which expression the Burgundians and the Lombards that is, a Gothic and a Herminonian or High German tribe designated nearly, if not exactly, the same thing as the genealogiae in the Alemannian code of laws. Whether it is really a gens or a household community must be settled by further research. The records of language leave us in doubt whether all the Germans had a common expression for gens, and what that expression was. Etymologically, the Gothic kuni, Middle High German kunne, corresponds to the Greek genos and the Latin gens, and is used in the same sense. The fact that the term for woman comes from the same root Greek gyne, Slav zena, Gothic qvino, Old Norse kona, kuna points back to the time of mother-right. Among the Lombards and Burgundians we find, as already mentioned, the term fara, which Grimm derives from an imaginary root fisan, to beget. I should prefer to go back to the more obvious derivation from faran (fahren), to travel or wander; fara would then denote a section of the migrating people which remained permanently together and almost as a matter of course would be composed of relatives. In the several centuries of migration, first to the east and then to the west, the expression came to be transferred to the kinship group itself. There are, further, the Gothic sibia, Anglo-Saxon sib, Old High German sippia, sima, kindred. Old Norse only has the plural sifiar, relatives; the singular only occurs as the name of a goddess, Sif. Lastly, still another expression occurs in the Hildebrandslied, where Hildebrand asks Hadubrand: Who is thy father among the men of the people ... or of what kin art thou? (eddo hu l hes cnuosles du s s). In as far as there was a common German name for the gens, it was probably the Gothic kuni that was used; this is rendered probable, not only by its identity with the corresponding expression in the related languages, but also by the fact that from it is derived the word kuning, K nig (king), which originally denotes the head of a gens or of a tribe. Sibia, kindred, does not seem to call for consideration; at any rate, sifiar in Old Norse denotes not only blood relations, but also relations by marriage; thus it includes the members of at least two gentes, and hence sif itself cannot have been the term for the gens. As among the Mexicans and Greeks, so also among the Germans, the order of battle, both the cavalry squadrons and the wedge formations of the infantry, was drawn up by gentes. Tacitus use of the vague expression by families and kindreds is to be explained through the fact that in his time the gens in Rome had long ceased to be a living body. A further passage in Tacitus is decisive. It states that the maternal uncle looks upon his nephew as his own son, and that some even regard the bond of blood between the maternal uncle and the nephew as more sacred and close than that between father and son, so that when hostages are demanded the sister's son is considered a better security than the natural son of the man whom it is desired to bind. Here we have living evidence, described as particularly characteristic of the Germans, of the matriarchal, and therefore primitive, gens. If a member of such a gens gave his own son as a pledge of his oath and the son then paid the penalty of death for his father's breach of faith, the father had to answer for that to himself. But if it was a sister's son who was sacrificed, then the most sacred law of the gens was violated. The member of the gens who was nearest of kin to the boy or youth, and more than all others was bound to protect him, was guilty of his death; either he should not have pledged him or he should have kept the agreement. Even if we had no other trace of gentile organization among the Germans, this one passage would suffice. Still more decisive, because it comes about eight hundred years later, is a passage from the Old Norse poem of the twilight of the gods and the end of the world, the V lusp . In this "vision of the seeress," into which Christian elements are also interwoven, as Bang and Bugge have now proved, the description of the period of universal degeneration and corruption leading up to the great catastrophe contains the following passage: Brothers will make war upon one another and become one another s murderers, the children of sisters will break kinship. Systrungar means the son of the mother s sister, and that these sisters sons should betray the blood-bond between them is regarded by the poet as an even greater crime than that of fratricide. The force of the climax is in the word systrungar, which emphasizes the kinship on the mother s side; if the word had been syskina-b rn, brothers' or sisters' children, or syskinasynir, brothers' or sisters' sons, the second line would not have been a climax to the first, but would merely have weakened the effect. Hence even in the time of the Vikings, when the V lusp was composed, the memory of mother-right had not yet been obliterated in Scandinavia. In the time of Tacitus, however, mother-right had already given way to father-right, at least among the Germans with whose customs he was more familiar. The children inherited from the father; if there were no children, the brothers, and the uncles on the father's and the mother's side. The fact that the mother s brother was allowed to inherit is connected with the survivals of mother-right already mentioned, and again proves how new father-right still was among the Germans at that time. Traces of mother-right are also found until late in the Middle Ages. Apparently even at that time people still did not have any great trust in fatherhood, especially in the case of serfs. When, therefore, a feudal lord demanded from a town the return of a fugitive serf, it was required for example, in Augsburg, Basle and Kaiserslautern that the accused person's status as serf should be sworn to by six of his nearest blood relations, and that they should all be relations on the mother s side. (Maurer, St dteverfassung, I, p. 381.) Another relic of mother-right, which was still only in process of dying out, was the respect of the Germans for the female sex, which to the Romans was almost incomprehensible. Young girls of noble family were considered the most binding hostages in treaties with the Germans. The thought that their wives and daughters might be taken captive and carried into slavery was terrible to them and more than anything else fired their courage in battle; they saw in a woman something holy and prophetic, and listened to her advice even in the most important matters. Veleda, the priestess of the Bructerians on the River Lippe, was the very soul of the whole Batavian rising in which Civilis, at the head of the Germans and Belgae, shook the foundations of Roman rule in Gaul. In the home, the woman seems to have held undisputed sway, though, together with the old people and the children, she also had to do all the work, while the man hunted, drank, or idled about. That, at least, is what Tacitus says; but as he does not say who tilled the fields, and definitely declares that the serfs only paid tribute, but did not have to render labor dues, the bulk of the adult men must have had to do what little work the cultivation of the land required. The form of marriage, as already said, was a pairing marriage which was gradually approaching monogamy. It was not yet strict monogamy, as polygamy was permitted for the leading members of the tribe. In general, strict chastity was required of the girls (in contrast to the Celts), and Tacitus also speaks with special warmth of the sacredness of the marriage tie among the Germans. Adultery by the woman is the only ground for divorce mentioned by him. But there are many gaps here in his report, and it is also only too apparent that he is holding up a mirror of virtue before the dissipated Romans. One thing is certain: if the Germans were such paragons of virtue in their forests, it only required slight contact with the outside world to bring them down to the level of the average man in the rest of Europe. Amidst the Roman world, the last trace of moral austerity disappeared far more rapidly even than the German language. For proof, it is enough to read Gregory of Tours. That in the German primeval forests there could be no such voluptuous abandonment to all the refinements of sensuality as in Rome is obvious; the superiority of the Germans to the Roman world in this respect also is sufficiently great, and there is no need to endow them with an ideal continence in things of the flesh, such as has never yet been practiced by an entire nation. Also derived from the gentile organization is the obligation to inherit the enmities as well as the friendships of the father or the relatives; likewise the Wergeld, the fine for idling or injuring, in place of blood revenge. The Wergeld, which only a generation ago was regarded as a specifically German institution, has now been shown to be general among hundreds of peoples as a milder form of the blood revenge originating out of the gentile organization. We find it, for example, among the American Indians, who also regard hospitality as an obligation. Tacitus description of hospitality as practiced among the Germans (Germania, Ch. XXI) is identical almost to the details with that given by Morgan of his Indians. The endless, burning controversy as to whether the Germans of Tacitus time had already definitely divided the land or not, and how the relevant passages are to be interpreted, now belongs to the past. No more words need be wasted in this dispute, since it has been established that among almost all peoples the cultivated land was tilled collectively by the gens, and later by communistic household communities such as were still found by Caesar among the Suevi, and that after this stage the land was allotted to individual families with periodical repartitions, which are shown to have survived as a local custom in Germany down to our day. If in the one hundred and fifty years between Caesar and Tacitus the Germans had changed from the collective cultivation of the land expressly attributed by Caesar to the Suevi (they had no divided or private fields whatever, he says) to individual cultivation with annual repartition of the land, that is surely progress enough. The transition from that stage to complete private property in land during such a short period and without any outside interference is a sheer impossibility. What I read in Tacitus is simply what he says in his own dry words: they change (or divide afresh) the cultivated land every year, and there is enough common land left over. It is the stage of agriculture and property relations in regard to the land which exactly corresponds to the gentile constitution of the Germans at that time. I leave the preceding paragraph unchanged as it stood in the former editions. Meanwhile the question has taken another turn. Since Kovalevsky has shown (cf. pages 51-52) that the patriarchal household community was a very common, if not universal, intermediate form between the matriarchal communistic family and the modern isolated family, it is no longer a question of whether property in land is communal or private, which was the point at issue between Maurer and Waitz, but a question of the form of the communal property. There is no doubt at all that the Suevi in Caesar's time not only owned the land in common, but also cultivated it in common for the common benefit. Whether the economic unit was the gens or the household community or a communistic kinship group intermediate between the two; or whether all three groups occurred according to the conditions of the soil these questions will be in dispute for a long time to come. Kovalevsky maintains, however, that the conditions described by Tacitus presuppose the existence, not of the mark or village community, but of the household community and that the village community only develops out of the latter much later, as a result of the increase in population. According to this view, the settlements of the Germans in the territory of which they were already in possession at the time of the Romans, and also in the territory which they later took from the Romans, were not composed of villages but of large household communities, which included several generations, cultivated an amount of land proportionate to the number of their members, and had common use with their neighbors of the surrounding waste. The passage in Tacitus about changing the cultivated land would then have to be taken in an agronomic sense: the community cultivated a different piece of land every year, and allowed the land cultivated the previous year to lie fallow or run completely to waste; the population being scanty, there was always enough waste left over to make any disputes about land unnecessary. Only in the course of centuries, when the number of members in the household communities had increased so much that a common economy was no longer possible under the existing conditions of production did the communities dissolve. The arable and meadow lands which had hitherto been common were divided in the manner familiar to us, first temporarily and then permanently, among the single households which were now coming into being, while forest, pasture land, and water remained common. In the case of Russia this development seems to be a proved historical fact. With regard to Germany, and, secondarily, the other Germanic countries, it cannot be denied that in many ways this view provides a better explanation of the sources and an easier solution to difficulties than that held hitherto, which takes the village community back to the time of Tacitus. On the whole, the oldest documents, such as the Codex Laureshamensis, can be explained much better in terms of the household community than of the village community. On the other hand, this view raises new difficulties and new questions, which have still to be solved. They can only be settled by new investigations; but I cannot deny that in the case also of Germany, Scandinavia and England there is very great probability in favor of the intermediate form of the household community. While in Caesar s time the Germans had only just taken up or were still looking for settled abodes, in Tacitus time they already had a full century of settled life behind them; correspondingly, the progress in the production of the necessities of life is unmistakable. They live in log-houses; their clothing is still very much that of primitive people of the forests: coarse woolen mantles, skins; for women and notable people underclothing of linen. Their food is milk, meat, wild fruits, and, as Pliny adds, oatmeal porridge (still the Celtic national food in Ireland and Scotland). Their wealth consists in cattle and horses, but of inferior breed; the cows are small, poor in build and without horns; the horses are ponies, with very little speed. Money was used rarely and in small amounts; it was exclusively Roman. They did not work gold or silver, nor did they value it. Iron was rare, and, at least, among the tribes on the Rhine and the Danube, seems to have been almost entirely imported, not mined. Runic writing (imitated from the Greek or Latin letters) was a purely secret form of writing, used only for religious magic. Human sacrifices were still offered. In short, we here see a people which had just raised itself from the middle to the upper stage of barbarism. But whereas the tribes living immediately on the Roman frontiers were hindered in the development of an independent metal and textile industry by the facility with which Roman products could be imported, such industry undoubtedly did develop in the northeast, on the Baltic. The fragments of weapons found in the Schleswig marshes long iron sword, coat of mail, silver helmet, and so forth, together with Roman coins of the end of the second century and the German metal objects distributed by the migrations, show quite a pronounced character of their own, even when they derive from an originally Roman model. Emigration into the civilized Roman world put an end to this native industry everywhere except in England. With what uniformity this industry arose and developed, can be seen, for example, in the bronze brooches; those found in Burgundy, Rumania and on the Sea of Azov might have come out of the same workshop as those found in England and Sweden, and are just as certainly of Germanic origin. The constitution also corresponds to the upper stage of barbarism. According to Tacitus, there was generally a council of chiefs (principes), which decided minor matters, but prepared more important questions for decision by the assembly of the people; at the lower stage of barbarism, so far as we have knowledge of it, as among the Americans, this assembly of the people still comprises only the members of the gens, not yet of the tribe or of the confederacy of tribes. The chiefs (principes) are still sharply distinguished from the military leaders (duces) just as they are among the Iroquois; they already subsist partially on gifts of cattle, corn, etc., from the members of the tribe; as in America, they are generally elected from the same family. The transition to father-right favored, as in Greece and Rome, the gradual transformation of election into hereditary succession, and hence the rise of a noble family in each gens. This old so-called tribal nobility disappeared for the most part during the migrations or soon afterwards. The military leaders were chosen without regard to their descent, solely according to their ability. They had little power and had to rely on the force of example. Tacitus expressly states that the actual disciplinary authority in the army lay with the priests. The real power was in the hands of the assembly of the people. The king or the chief of the tribe presides; the people decide: No by murmurs; Yes by acclamation and clash of weapons. The assembly of the people is at the same time an assembly of justice; here complaints are brought forward and decided and sentences of death passed, the only capital crimes being cowardice, treason against the people, and unnatural lust. Also in the gentes and other subdivisions of the tribe all the members sit in judgment under the presidency of the chief, who, as in all the early German courts, can only have guided the proceedings and put questions; the actual verdict was always given among Germans everywhere by the whole community. Confederacies of tribes had grown up since the time of Caesar; some of them already had kings; the supreme military commander was already aiming at the position of tyrant, as among the Greeks and Romans, and sometimes secured it. But these fortunate usurpers were not by any means absolute rulers; they were, however, already beginning to break the fetters of the gentile constitution. Whereas freed slaves usually occupied a subordinate position, since they could not belong to any gens, as favorites of the new kings they often won rank, riches and honors. The same thing happened after the conquest of the Roman Empire by these military leaders, who now became kings of great countries. Among the Franks, slaves and freedmen of the king played a leading part first at the court and then in the state; the new nobility was to a great extent descended from them. One institution particularly favored the rise of kingship: the retinues. We have already seen among the American Indians how, side by side with the gentile constitution, private associations were formed to carry on wars independently. Among the Germans, these private associations had already become permanent. A military leader who had made himself a name gathered around him a band of young men eager for booty, whom he pledged to personal loyalty, giving the same pledge to them. The leader provided their keep, gave them gifts, and organized them on a hierarchic basis; a bodyguard and a standing troop for smaller expeditions and a regular corps of officers for operations on a larger scale. Weak as these retinues must have been, and as we in fact find them to be later for example, under Odoacer in Italy they were nevertheless the beginnings of the decay of the old freedom of the people and showed themselves to be such during and after the migrations. For in the first place they favored the rise of monarchic power. In the second place, as Tacitus already notes, they could only be kept together by continual wars and plundering expeditions. Plunder became an end in itself. If the leader of the retinue found nothing to do in the neighborhood, he set out with his men to other peoples where there was war and the prospect of booty. The German mercenaries who fought in great numbers under the Roman standard even against Germans were partly mobilized through these retinues. They already represent the first form of the system of Landsknechte, the shame and curse of the Germans. When the Roman Empire had been conquered, these retinues of the kings formed the second main stock, after the unfree and the Roman courtiers, from which the later nobility was drawn. In general, then, the constitution of those German tribes which had combined into peoples was the same as had developed among the Greeks of the Heroic Age and the Romans of the so-called time of the kings: assembly of the people, council of the chiefs of the gentes, military leader, who is already striving for real monarchic power. It was the highest form of constitution which the gentile order could achieve; it was the model constitution of the upper stage of barbarism. If society passed beyond the limits within which this constitution was adequate, that meant the end of the gentile order; it was broken up and the state took its place.

Origins of the Family-- Chapter VII

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/origin-family/ch07.htm

After permanent settlements had been founded in Germany, the population must have grown with increasing rapidity; the advances in industry we mentioned are in themselves proof of this. The objects found in the Schleswig marshes date from the third century, according to the Roman coins discovered with them. At this time, therefore, there was already a developed metal and textile industry on the Baltic, brisk traffic with the Roman Empire and a certain degree of luxury among the more wealthy all signs of denser population. But also at this time begins the general attack by the Germans along the whole line of the Rhine, the Roman wall and the Danube, from the North Sea to the Black Sea direct proof of the continual growth and outward thrust of the population. For three centuries the fight went on, during which the whole main body of the Gothic peoples (with the exception of the Scandinavian Goths and the Burgundians) thrust south-east, forming the left wing on the long front of attack, while in the center the High Germans (Hermionians) pushed forward down the upper Danube, and on the right wing the Ischovonians, now called Franks, advanced along the Rhine; the Ingoevonians carried out the conquest of Britain. By the end of the fifth century an exhausted and bleeding Roman Empire lay helpless before the invading Germans. In earlier chapters we were standing at the cradle of ancient Greek and Roman civilization. Now we stand at its grave. Rome had driven the leveling plane of its world rule over all the countries of the Mediterranean basin, and that for centuries. Except when Greek offered resistance, all natural languages had been forced to yield to a debased Latin; there were no more national differences, no more Gauls, Iberians, Ligurians, Noricans; all had become Romans. Roman administration and Roman law had everywhere broken up the old kinship groups, and with them the last vestige of local and national independence. The half-baked culture of Rome provided no substitute; it expressed no nationality, only the lack of nationality. The elements of new nations were present everywhere; the Latin dialects of the various provinces were becoming increasingly differentiated; the natural boundaries which once had made Italy, Gaul, Spain, Africa independent territories, were still there and still made themselves felt. But the strength was not there to fuse these elements into new nations; there was no longer a sign anywhere of capacity for development, or power of resistance, to say nothing of creative energy. The enormous mass of humanity in the whole enormous territory was held together by one bond only: the Roman state; and the Roman state had become in the course of time their worst enemy and oppressor. The provinces had annihilated Rome; Rome itself had become a provincial town like the rest privileged, but no longer the ruler, no longer the hub of the world empire, not even the seat of the emperors or sub-emperors, who now lived in Constantinople, Treves, Milan. The Roman state had become a huge, complicated machine, exclusively for bleeding its subjects, Taxes, state imposts and tributes of every kind pressed the mass of the people always deeper into poverty; the pressure was intensified until the exactions of governors, tax-collectors, and armies made it unbearable. That was what the Roman state had achieved with its world rule. It gave as the justification of its existence that it maintained order within the empire and protected it against the barbarians without. But its order was worse than the worst disorder, and the citizens whom it claimed to protect against the barbarians longed for the barbarians to deliver them. Social conditions were no less desperate. Already in the last years of the republic the policy of Roman rule had been ruthlessly to exploit the provinces; the empire, far from abolishing this exploitation, had organized it. The more the empire declined, the higher rose the taxes and levies, the more shamelessly the officials robbed and extorted. The Romans had always been too occupied in ruling other nations to become proficient in trade and industry; it was only as usurers that they beat all who came before or after. What commerce had already existed and still survived was now ruined by official extortion; it struggled on only in the eastern, Greek part of the empire, which lies outside the present study. General impoverishment; decline of commerce, handicrafts and art; fall in the population; decay of the towns; relapse of agriculture to a lower level-such was the final result of Roman world rule. Agriculture, always the decisive branch of production throughout the ancient world, was now more so than ever. In Italy, the enormous estates (latifundia) which, since the end of the republic, occupied almost the whole country, had been exploited in two different ways. They had been used either as pastures, the population being displaced by sheep and cattle, which could be tended by a few slaves, or as country estates (villae), where large-scale horticulture was carried on with masses of slaves, partly as a luxury for the owner, partly for sale in the town markets. The great grazing farms had kept going and had probably even extended; the country estates and their gardens had been ruined through the impoverishment of their owners and the decay of the towns. The system of latifundia run by slave labor no longer paid; but at that time no other form of large-scale agriculture was possible. Small production had again become the only profitable form. One country estate after another was cut up into small lots, which were handed over either to tenants, who paid a fixed sum and had hereditary rights, or to partiarii, stewards rather than tenants, who received a sixth or even only a ninth of the year's product in return for their labor. For the most part, however, these small lots of land were given out to coloni, who paid for them a definite yearly amount, were tied to the soil and could be sold together with their lot. True, they were not slaves, but neither were they free; they could not marry free persons, and their marriages with one another were not regarded as full marriages, but, like those of slaves, as mere concubinage (contubernium). They were the forerunners of the medieval serfs. The slavery of classical times had outlived itself. Whether employed on the land in large-scale agriculture or in manufacture in the towns, it no longer yielded any satisfactory return the market for its products was no longer there. But the small-scale agriculture and the small handicraft production to which the enormous production of the empire in its prosperous days was now shrunk had no room for numbers of slaves. Only for the domestic and luxury slaves of the wealthy was there still a place in society. But though it was dying out, slavery was still common enough to make all productive labor appear to be work for slaves, unworthy of free Romans and everybody was a free Roman now. Hence, on the one side, increasing manumissions of the superfluous slaves who were now a burden; on the other hand, a growth in some parts in the numbers of the coloni, and in other parts of the declassed freemen (like the poor whites in the ex-slave states of America). Christianity is completely innocent of the gradual dying out of ancient slavery; it was itself actively involved in the system for centuries under the Roman Empire, and never interfered later with slave-trading by Christians: not with the Germans in the north, or with the Venetians in the Mediterranean, or with the later trade in Negroes. Slavery no longer paid; it was for that reason it died out. But in dying it left behind its poisoned sting the stigma attaching to the productive labor of freemen. This was the blind alley from which the Roman world had no way out: slavery was economically impossible, the labor of freemen was morally ostracized. The one could be the basic form of social production no longer; the other, not yet. Nothing could help here except a complete revolution. Things were no better in the provinces. We have most material about Gaul. Here there was still a free small peasantry in addition to coloni. In order to be secured against oppression by officials, judges, and usurers, these peasants often placed themselves under the protection, the patronage, of a powerful person; and it was not only individuals who did so, but whole communities, so that in the fourth century the emperors frequently prohibited the practice. But what help was this protection to those who sought it? Their patron made it a condition that they should transfer to him the rights of ownership in their pieces of land, in return for which he guaranteed them the use of the land for their lifetime a trick which the Holy Church took note of and in the ninth and tenth centuries lustily imitated, to the increase of God s glory and its own lands. At this time, it is true, about the year 475, Bishop Salvianus of Marseilles still inveighs indignantly against such theft. He relates that oppression by Roman officials and great landlords had become so heavy that many Romans fled into districts already occupied by the barbarians, and that the Roman citizens settled there feared nothing so much as a return to Roman rule. That parents owing to their poverty often sold their children into slavery at this time is proved by a decree prohibiting the practice. In return for liberating the Romans from their own state, the German barbarians took from them two-thirds of all the land and divided it among themselves. The division was made according to the gentile constitution. The conquerors being relatively few in number, large tracts of land were left undivided, as the property partly of the whole people, partly of the individual tribes and gentes. Within each gens the arable and meadow land was distributed by lot in equal portions among the individual households. We do not know whether reallotments of the land were repeatedly carried out at this time, but in any event they were soon discontinued in the Roman provinces and the individual lots became alienable private property, allodium. Woods and pastures remained undivided for common use; the provisions regulating their common use, and the manner in which the divided land was to be cultivated, were settled in accordance with ancient custom and by the decision of the whole community. The longer the gens remained settled in its village and the more the Germans and the Romans gradually merged, the more the bond of union lost its character of kinship and became territorial. The gens was lost in the mark community, in which, however, traces of its origin in the kinship of its members are often enough still visible. Thus, at least in those countries where the mark community maintained itself northern France, England, Germany and Scandinavia the gentile constitution changed imperceptibly into a local constitution and thus became capable of incorporation into the state. But it nevertheless retained that primitive democratic character which distinguishes the whole gentile constitution, and thus even in its later enforced degeneration and up to the most recent times it kept something of the gentile constitution alive, to be a weapon in the hands of the oppressed. This weakening of the bond of blood in the gens followed from the degeneration of the organs of kinship also in the tribe and in the entire people as a result of their conquests. As we know, rule over subjugated peoples is incompatible with the gentile constitution. Here we can see this on a large scale. The German peoples, now masters of the Roman provinces, had to organize what they had conquered. But they could neither absorb the mass of Romans into the gentile bodies nor govern them through these bodies. At the head of the Roman local governing bodies, many of which continued for the time being to function, had to be placed a substitute for the Roman state, and this substitute could only be another state. The organs of the gentile constitution had to be transformed into state organs, and that very rapidly, for the situation was urgent. But the immediate representative of the conquering people was their military leader. To secure the conquered territory against attack from within and without, it was necessary to strengthen his power. The moment had come to transform the military leadership into kingship: the transformation was made. Let us take the country of the Franks. Here the victorious Salian people had come into complete possession, not only of the extensive Roman state domains, but also of the very large tracts of land which had not been distributed among the larger and smaller district and mark communities, in particular all the larger forest areas. On his transformation from a plain military chief into the real sovereign of a country, the first thing which the king of the Franks did was to transform this property of the people into crown lands, to steal it from the people and to give it, outright or in fief, to his retainers. This retinue, which originally consisted of his personal following of warriors and of the other lesser military leaders, was presently increased not only by Romans Romanized Gauls, whose education, knowledge of writing, familiarity with the spoken Romance language of the country and the written Latin language, as well as with the country's laws, soon made them indispensable to him, but also by slaves, serfs and freedmen, who composed his court and from whom he chose his favorites. All these received their portions of the people's land, at first generally in the form of gifts, later of benefices, usually conferred, to begin with, for the king's lifetime. Thus, at the expense of the people the foundation of a new nobility was laid. And that was not all. The wide extent of the kingdom could not be governed with the means provided by the old gentile constitution; the council of chiefs, even if it had not long since become obsolete, would have been unable to meet, and it was soon displaced by the permanent retinue of the king; the old assembly of the people continued to exist in name, but it also increasingly became a mere assembly of military leaders subordinate to the king, and of the new rising nobility. By the incessant civil wars and wars of conquest (the latter were particularly frequent under Charlemagne), the free land-owning peasants, the mass of the Frankish people, were reduced to the same state of exhaustion and penury as the Roman peasants in the last years of the Republic. Though they had originally constituted the whole army and still remained its backbone after the conquest of France, by the beginning of the ninth century they were so impoverished that hardly one man in five could go to the wars. The army of free peasants raised directly by the king was replaced by an army composed of the serving-men of the new nobles, including bondsmen, descendants of men who in earlier times had known no master save the king and still earlier no master at all, not even a king. The internal wars under Charlemagne's successors, the weakness of the authority of the crown, and the corresponding excesses of the nobles (including the counts instituted by Charlemagne, who were now striving to make their office hereditary), had already brought ruin on the Frankish peasantry, and the ruin was finally completed by the invasions of the Norsemen. Fifty years after the death of Charlemagne, the Empire of the Franks lay as defenseless at the feet of the Norsemen as the Roman Empire, four hundred years earlier, had lain at the feet of the Franks. Not only was there the same impotence against enemies from without, but there was almost the same social order or rather disorder within. The free Frankish peasants were in a plight similar to their predecessors, the Roman coloni. Plundered, and ruined by wars, they had been forced to put themselves under the protection of the new nobles or of the Church, the crown being too weak to protect them. But they had to pay dearly for it. Like the Gallic peasants earlier, they had to transfer their rights of property in land to their protecting lord and received the land back from him in tenancies of various and changing forms, but always only in return for services and dues. Once in this position of dependence, they gradually lost their personal freedom also; after a few generations most of them were already serfs. How rapid was the disappearance of the free peasantry is shown by Irminon s records of the monastic possessions of the Abbey of Saint Germain des Pr s, at that time near, now in, Paris. On the huge holdings of this Abbey, which were scattered in the surrounding country, there lived in Charlemagne s time 2,788 households, whose members were almost without exception Franks with German names. They included 2,080 coloni, 35 lites [semi-free peasants Ed.], 220 slaves, and only eight freehold tenants! The godless practice, as Salvianus had called it, by which the protecting lord had the peasant s land transferred to himself as his own property, and only gave it back to the peasant for use during life, was now commonly employed by the Church against the peasants. The forced services now imposed with increasing frequency had had their prototype as much in the Roman angariae, compulsory labor for the state, as in the services provided by members of the German marks for bridge and road-making and other common purposes. To all appearances, therefore, after four hundred years, the mass of the people were back again where they had started. But that only proved two things: first, that the social stratification and the distribution of property in the declining Roman Empire completely correspond to the level of agricultural and industrial production at that time, and had therefore been inevitable; secondly, that this level of production had neither risen nor fallen significantly during the following four centuries and had therefore with equal necessity again produced the same distribution of property and the same classes in the population. In the last centuries of the Roman Empire the town had lost its former supremacy over the country, and in the first centuries of German rule it had not regained it. This implies a low level of development both in agriculture and industry. This general situation necessarily produces big ruling landowners and a dependent small peasantry. How impossible it was to graft onto such a society either the Roman system of latifundia worked by slave-labor or the newer large-scale agriculture worked by forced services is proved by Charlemagne's experiments with the famous imperial country estates (villae). These experiments were gigantic in scope, but they left scarcely a trace. They were continued only by the monasteries, and only for them were they fruitful. But the monasteries were abnormal social bodies, founded on celibacy; they could produce exceptional results, but for that very reason necessarily continued to be exceptional themselves. And yet progress was made during these four hundred years. Though at the end we find almost the same main classes as at the beginning, the human beings who formed these classes were different. Ancient slavery had gone, and so had the pauper freemen who despised work as only fit for slaves. Between the Roman colonus and the new bondsman had stood the free Frankish peasant. The useless memories and aimless strife of decadent Roman culture were dead and buried. The social classes of the ninth century had been formed, not in the rottenness of a decaying civilization, but in the birth-pangs of a new civilization. Compared with their Roman predecessors, the new breed, whether masters or servants, was a breed of men. The relation of powerful landowners and subject peasants which had meant for the ancient world the final ruin, from which there was no escape, was for them the starting-point of a new development. And, further, however unproductive these four centuries appear, one great product they did leave: the modern nationalities, the new forms and structures through which west European humanity was to make coming history. The Germans had, in fact, given Europe new life, and therefore the break-up of the states in the Germanic period ended, not in subjugation by the Norsemen and Saracens, but in the further development of the system of benefices and protection into feudalism, and in such an enormous increase of the population that scarcely two centuries later the severe blood-letting of the Crusades was borne without injury. But what was the mysterious magic by which the Germans breathed new life into a dying Europe? Was it some miraculous power innate in the Germanic race, such as our chauvinist historians romance about? Not a bit of it. The Germans, especially at that time, were a highly gifted Aryan tribe, and in the full vigor of development. It was not, however, their specific national qualities which rejuvenated Europe, but simply their barbarism, their gentile constitution. Their individual ability and courage, their sense of freedom, their democratic instinct which in everything of public concern felt itself concerned; in a word, all the qualities which had been lost to the Romans and were alone capable of forming new states and making new nationalities grow out of the slime of the Roman world-what else were they than the characteristics of the barbarian of the upper stage, fruits of his gentile constitution? If they recast the ancient form of monogamy, moderated the supremacy of the man in the family, and gave the woman a higher position than the classical world had ever known, what made them capable of doing so if not their barbarism, their gentile customs, their living heritage from the time of mother-right? If in at least three of the most important countries, Germany, northern France and England, they carried over into the feudal state a genuine piece of gentile constitution, in the form of mark communities, thus giving the oppressed class, the peasants, even under the harshest medieval serfdom, a local center of solidarity and a means of resistance such as neither the slaves of classical times nor the modern proletariat found ready to their hand to what was this due, if not to their barbarism, their purely barbarian method of settlement in kinship groups? Lastly: they were able to develop and make universal the milder form of servitude they had practiced in their own country, which even in the Roman Empire increasingly displaced slavery; a form of servitude which, as Fourier first stressed, gives to the bondsmen the means of their gradual liberation as a class ( fournit aux cultivateurs des moyens d'affranchissement collectif et progressif ); a form of servitude which thus stands high above slavery, where the only possibility is the immediate release, without any transitional stage, of individual slaves (abolition of slavery by successful rebellion is unknown to antiquity), whereas the medieval serfs gradually won their liberation as a class. And to what do we owe this if not to their barbarism, thanks to which they had not yet reached the stage of fully developed slavery, neither the labor slavery of the classical world nor the domestic slavery of the Orient? All the vigorous and creative life which the Germans infused into the Roman world was barbarism. Only barbarians are able to rejuvenate a world in the throes of collapsing civilization. And precisely the highest stage of barbarism, to which and in which the Germans worked their way upwards before the migrations, was the most favorable for this process. That explains everything.

Origins of the Family-- Chapter VIII

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/origin-family/ch08.htm

Arising in the middle stage of savagery, further developed during its upper stage, the gens reaches its most flourishing period, so far as our sources enable us to judge, during the lower stage of barbarism. We begin therefore with this stage. Here the American Indians must serve as our example we find the gentile constitution fully formed. The tribe is now grouped in several gentes, generally two. With the increase in population, each of these original gentes splits up into several daughter gentes, their mother gens now appearing as the phratry. The tribe itself breaks up into several tribes, in each of which we find again, for the most part, the old gentes. The related tribes, at least in some cases, are united in a confederacy. This simple organization suffices completely for the social conditions out of which it sprang. It is nothing more than the grouping natural to those conditions, and it is capable of settling all conflicts that can arise within a society so organized. War settles external conflicts; it may end with the annihilation of the tribe, but never with its subjugation. It is the greatness, but also the limitation, of the gentile constitution that it has no place for ruler and ruled. Within the tribe there is as yet no difference between rights and duties; the question whether participation in public affairs, in blood revenge or atonement, is a right or a duty, does not exist for the Indian; it would seem to him just as absurd as the question whether it was a right or a duty to sleep, eat, or hunt. A division of the tribe or of the gens into different classes was equally impossible. And that brings us to the examination of the economic basis of these conditions. The population is extremely sparse; it is dense only at the tribe s place of settlement, around which lie in a wide circle first the hunting grounds and then the protective belt of neutral forest, which separates the tribe from others. The division of labor is purely primitive, between the sexes only. The man fights in the wars, goes hunting and fishing, procures the raw materials of food and the tools necessary for doing so. The woman looks after the house and the preparation of food and clothing, cooks, weaves, sews. They are each master in their own sphere: the man in the forest, the woman in the house. Each is owner of the instruments which he or she makes and uses: the man of the weapons, the hunting and fishing implements, the woman of the household gear. The housekeeping is communal among several and often many families. What is made and used in common is common property the house, the garden, the long-boat. Here therefore, and here alone, there still exists in actual fact that property created by the owner s labor which in civilized society is an ideal fiction of the jurists and economists, the last lying legal pretense by which modern capitalist property still bolsters itself up. But humanity did not everywhere remain at this stage. In Asia they found animals which could be tamed and, when once tamed, bred. The wild buffalo-cow had to be hunted; the tame buffalo-cow gave a calf yearly and milk as well. A number of the most advanced tribes the Aryans, Semites, perhaps already also the Turanians now made their chief work first the taming of cattle, later their breeding and tending only. Pastoral tribes separated themselves from the mass of the rest of the barbarians: the first great social division of labor. The pastoral tribes produced not only more necessities of life than the other barbarians, but different ones. They possessed the advantage over them of having not only milk, milk products and greater supplies of meat, but also skins, wool, goat-hair, and spun and woven fabrics, which became more common as the amount of raw material increased. Thus for the first time regular exchange became possible. At the earlier stages only occasional exchanges can take place; particular skill in the making of weapons and tools may lead to a temporary division of labor. Thus in many places undoubted remains of workshops for the making of stone tools have been found, dating from the later Stone Age. The artists who here perfected their skill probably worked for the whole community, as each special handicraftsman still does in the gentile communities in India. In no case could exchange arise at this stage except within the tribe itself, and then only as an exceptional event. But now, with the differentiation of pastoral tribes, we find all the conditions ripe for exchange between branches of different tribes and its development into a regular established institution. Originally tribes exchanged with tribe through the respective chiefs of the gentes; but as the herds began to pass into private ownership, exchange between individuals became more common, and, finally, the only form. Now the chief article which the pastoral tribes exchanged with their neighbors was cattle; cattle became the commodity by which all other commodities were valued and which was everywhere willingly taken in exchange for them in short, cattle acquired a money function and already at this stage did the work of money. With such necessity and speed, even at the very beginning of commodity exchange, did the need for a money commodity develop. Horticulture, probably unknown to Asiatic barbarians of the lower stage, was being practiced by them in the middle stage at the latest, as the forerunner of agriculture. In the climate of the Turanian plateau, pastoral life is impossible without supplies of fodder for the long and severe winter. Here, therefore, it was essential that land should be put under grass and corn cultivated. The same is true of the steppes north of the Black Sea. But when once corn had been grown for the cattle, it also soon became food for men. The cultivated land still remained tribal property; at first it was allotted to the gens, later by the gens to the household communities and finally to individuals for use. The users may have had certain rights of possession, but nothing more. Of the industrial achievements of this stage, two are particularly important. The first is the loom, the second the smelting of metal ores and the working of metals. Copper and tin and their alloy, bronze, were by far the most important. Bronze provided serviceable tools and weapons, though it could not displace stone tools; only iron could do that, and the method of obtaining iron was not yet understood. Gold and silver were beginning to be used for ornament and decoration, and must already have acquired a high value as compared with copper and bronze. The increase of production in all branches cattle-raising, agriculture, domestic handicrafts gave human labor-power the capacity to produce a larger product than was necessary for its maintenance. At the same time it increased the daily amount of work to be done by each member of the gens, household community or single family. It was now desirable to bring in new labor forces. War provided them; prisoners of war were turned into slaves. With its increase of the productivity of labor, and therefore of wealth, and its extension of the field of production, the first great social division of labor was bound, in the general historical conditions prevailing, to bring slavery in its train. From the first great social division of labor arose the first great cleavage of society into two classes: masters and slaves, exploiters and exploited. As to how and when the herds passed out of the common possession of the tribe or the gens into the ownership of individual heads of families, we know nothing at present. But in the main it must have occurred during this stage. With the herds and the other new riches, a revolution came over the family. To procure the necessities of life had always been the business of the man; he produced and owned the means of doing so. The herds were the new means of producing these necessities; the taming of the animals in the first instance and their later tending were the man s work. To him, therefore, belonged the cattle, and to him the commodities and the slaves received in exchange for cattle. All the surplus which the acquisition of the necessities of life now yielded fell to the man; the woman shared in its enjoyment, but had no part in its ownership. The savage warrior and hunter had been content to take second place in the house, after the woman; the gentler shepherd, in the arrogance of his wealth, pushed himself forward into the first place and the woman down into the second. And she could not complain. The division of labor within the family had regulated the division of property between the man and the woman. That division of labor had remained the same; and yet it now turned the previous domestic relation upside down, simply because the division of labor outside the family had changed. The same cause which had ensured to the woman her previous supremacy in the house that her activity was confined to domestic labor this same cause now ensured the man's supremacy in the house: the domestic labor of the woman no longer counted beside the acquisition of the necessities of life by the man; the latter was everything, the former an unimportant extra. We can already see from this that to emancipate woman and make her the equal of the man is and remains an impossibility so long as the woman is shut out from social productive labor and restricted to private domestic labor. The emancipation of woman will only be possible when woman can take part in production on a large, social scale, and domestic work no longer claims anything but an insignificant amount of her time. And only now has that become possible through modern large-scale industry, which does not merely permit of the employment of female labor over a wide range, but positively demands it, while it also tends towards ending private domestic labor by changing it more and more into a public industry. The man now being actually supreme in the house, the last barrier to his absolute supremacy had fallen. This autocracy was confirmed and perpetuated by the overthrow of mother-right, the introduction of father-right, and the gradual transition of the pairing marriage into monogamy. But this tore a breach in the old gentile order; the single family became a power, and its rise was a menace to the gens. The next step leads us to the upper stage of barbarism, the period when all civilized peoples have their Heroic Age: the age of the iron sword, but also of the iron plowshare and ax. Iron was now at the service of man, the last and most important of all the raw materials which played a historically revolutionary role until the potato. Iron brought the tillage of large areas, the clearing of wide tracts of virgin forest; iron gave to the handicraftsman tools so hard and sharp that no stone, no other known metal could resist them. All this came gradually; the first iron was often even softer than bronze. Hence stone weapons only disappeared slowly; not merely in the Hildebrandslied, but even as late as Hastings in 1066, stone axes were still used for fighting. But progress could not now be stopped; it went forward with fewer checks and greater speed. The town, with its houses of stone or brick, encircled by stone walls, towers and ramparts, became the central seat of the tribe or the confederacy of tribes an enormous architectural advance, but also a sign of growing danger and need for protection. Wealth increased rapidly, but as the wealth of individuals. The products of weaving, metal-work and the other handicrafts, which were becoming more and more differentiated, displayed growing variety and skill. In addition to corn, leguminous plants and fruit, agriculture now provided wine and oil, the preparation of which had been learned. Such manifold activities were no longer within the scope of one and the same individual; the second great division of labor took place: handicraft separated from agriculture. The continuous increase of production and simultaneously of the productivity of labor heightened the value of human labor-power. Slavery, which during the preceding period was still in its beginnings and sporadic, now becomes an essential constituent part of the social system; slaves no longer merely help with production they are driven by dozens to work in the fields and the workshops. With the splitting up of production into the two great main branches, agriculture and handicrafts, arises production directly for exchange, commodity production; with it came commerce, not only in the interior and on the tribal boundaries, but also already overseas. All this, however, was still very undeveloped; the precious metals were beginning to be the predominant and general money commodity, but still uncoined, exchanging simply by their naked weight. The distinction of rich and poor appears beside that of freemen and slaves with the new division of labor, a new cleavage of society into classes. The inequalities of property among the individual heads of families break up the old communal household communities wherever they had still managed to survive, and with them the common cultivation of the soil by and for these communities. The cultivated land is allotted for use to single families, at first temporarily, later permanently. The transition to full private property is gradually accomplished, parallel with the transition of the pairing marriage into monogamy. The single family is becoming the economic unit of society. The denser population necessitates closer consolidation both for internal and external action. The confederacy of related tribes becomes everywhere a necessity, and soon also their fusion, involving the fusion of the separate tribal territories into one territory of the nation. The military leader of the people rex, basileus, thiudans becomes an indispensable, permanent official. The assembly of the people takes form, wherever it did not already exist. Military leader, council, assembly of the people are the organs of gentile society developed into military democracy military, since war and organization for war have now become regular functions of national life. Their neighbors' wealth excites the greed of peoples who already see in the acquisition of wealth one of the main aims of life. They are barbarians: they think it more easy and in fact more honorable to get riches by pillage than by work. War, formerly waged only in revenge for injuries or to extend territory that had grown too small, is now waged simply for plunder and becomes a regular industry. Not without reason the bristling battlements stand menacingly about the new fortified towns; in the moat at their foot yawns the grave of the gentile constitution, and already they rear their towers into civilization. Similarly in the interior. The wars of plunder increase the power of the supreme military leader and the subordinate commanders; the customary election of their successors from the same families is gradually transformed, especially after the introduction of father-right, into a right of hereditary succession, first tolerated, then claimed, finally usurped; the foundation of the hereditary monarchy and the hereditary nobility is laid. Thus the organs of the gentile constitution gradually tear themselves loose from their roots in the people, in gens, phratry, tribe, and the whole gentile constitution changes into its opposite: from an organization of tribes for the free ordering of their own affairs it becomes an organization for the plundering and oppression of their neighbors; and correspondingly its organs change from instruments of the will of the people into independent organs for the domination and oppression of the people. That, however, would never have been possible if the greed for riches had not split the members of the gens into rich and poor, if the property differences within one and the same gens had not transformed its unity of interest into antagonism between its members (Marx), if the extension of slavery had not already begun to make working for a living seem fit only for slaves and more dishonorable than pillage. We have now reached the threshold of civilization. Civilization opens with a new advance in the division of labor. At the lowest stage of barbarism men produced only directly for their own needs; any acts of exchange were isolated occurrences, the object of exchange merely some fortuitous surplus. In the middle stage of barbarism we already find among the pastoral peoples a possession in the form of cattle which, once the herd has attained a certain size, regularly produces a surplus over and above the tribe s own requirements, leading to a division of labor between pastoral peoples and backward tribes without herds, and hence to the existence of two different levels of production side by side with one another and the conditions necessary for regular exchange. The upper stage of barbarism brings us the further division of labor between agriculture and handicrafts, hence the production of a continually increasing portion of the products of labor directly for exchange, so that exchange between individual producers assumes the importance of a vital social function. Civilization consolidates and intensifies all these existing divisions of labor, particularly by sharpening the opposition between town and country (the town may economically dominate the country, as in antiquity, or the country the town, as in the middle ages), and it adds a third division of labor, peculiar to itself and of decisive importance: it creates a class which no longer concerns itself with production, but only with the exchange of the products the merchants. Hitherto whenever classes had begun to form, it had always been exclusively in the field of production; the persons engaged in production were separated into those who directed and those who executed, or else into large-scale and small-scale producers. Now for the first time a class appears which, without in any way participating in production, captures the direction of production as a whole and economically subjugates the producers; which makes itself into an indispensable middleman between any two producers and exploits them both. Under the pretext that they save the producers the trouble and risk of exchange, extend the sale of their products to distant markets and are therefore the most useful class of the population, a class of parasites comes into being, genuine social ichneumons, who, as a reward for their actually very insignificant services, skim all the cream off production at home and abroad, rapidly amass enormous wealth and correspondingly social influence, and for that reason receive under civilization ever higher honors and ever greater control of production, until at last they also bring forth a product of their own the periodical trade crises. At our stage of development, however, the young merchants had not even begun to dream of the great destiny awaiting them. But they were growing and making themselves indispensable, which was quite sufficient. And with the formation of the merchant class came also the development of metallic money, the minted coin, a new instrument for the domination of the non-producer over the producer and his production. The commodity of commodities had been discovered, that which holds all other commodities hidden in itself, the magic power which can change at will into everything desirable and desired. The man who had it ruled the world of production and who had more of it than anybody else? The merchant. The worship of money was safe in his hands. He took good care to make it clear that, in face of money, all commodities, and hence all producers of commodities, must prostrate themselves in adoration in the dust. He proved practically that all other forms of wealth fade into mere semblance beside this incarnation of wealth as such. Never again has the power of money shown itself in such primitive brutality and violence as during these days of its youth. After commodities had begun to sell for money, loans and advances in money came also, and with them interest and usury. No legislation of later times so utterly and ruthlessly delivers over the debtor to the usurious creditor as the legislation of ancient Athens and ancient Rome and in both cities it arose spontaneously, as customary law, without any compulsion other than the economic. Alongside wealth in commodities and slaves, alongside wealth in money, there now appeared wealth in land also. The individuals rights of possession in the pieces of land originally allotted to them by gens or tribe had now become so established that the land was their hereditary property. Recently they had striven above all to secure their freedom against the rights of the gentile community over these lands, since these rights had become for them a fetter. They got rid of the fetter but soon afterwards of their new landed property also. Full, free ownership of the land meant not only power, uncurtailed and unlimited, to possess the land; it meant also the power to alienate it. As long as the land belonged to the gens, no such power could exist. But when the new landed proprietor shook off once and for all the fetters laid upon him by the prior right of gens and tribe, he also cut the ties which had hitherto inseparably attached him to the land. Money, invented at the same time as private property in land, showed him what that meant. Land could now become a commodity; it could be sold and pledged. Scarcely had private property in land been introduced than the mortgage was already invented (see Athens). As hetaerism and prostitution dog the heels of monogamy, so from now onwards mortgage dogs the heels of private land ownership. You asked for full, free alienable ownership of the land and now you have got it tu l'as voulu, Georges Dandin. [It's your fault, Georges Dandin, from Moli re s play]. With trade expansion, money and usury, private property in land and mortgages, the concentration and centralization of wealth in the hands of a small class rapidly advanced, accompanied by an increasing impoverishment of the masses and an increasing mass of impoverishment. The new aristocracy of wealth, in so far as it had not been identical from the outset with the old hereditary aristocracy, pushed it permanently into the background (in Athens, in Rome, among the Germans). And simultaneous with this division of the citizens into classes according to wealth there was an enormous increase, particularly in Greece, in the number of slaves, whose forced labor was the foundation on which the superstructure of the entire society was reared. Let us now see what had become of the gentile constitution in this social upheaval. Confronted by the new forces in whose growth it had had no share, the gentile constitution was helpless. The necessary condition for its existence was that the members of a gens or at least of a tribe were settled together in the same territory and were its sole inhabitants. That had long ceased to be the case. Every territory now had a heterogeneous population belonging to the most varied gentes and tribes; everywhere slaves, protected persons and aliens lived side by side with citizens. The settled conditions of life which had only been achieved towards the end of the middle stage of barbarism were broken up by the repeated shifting and changing of residence under the pressure of trade, alteration of occupation and changes in the ownership of the land. The members of the gentile bodies could no longer meet to look after their common concerns; only unimportant matters, like the religious festivals, were still perfunctorily attended to. In addition to the needs and interests with which the gentile bodies were intended and fitted to deal, the upheaval in productive relations and the resulting change in the social structure had given rise to new needs and interests, which were not only alien to the old gentile order, but ran directly counter to it at every point. The interests of the groups of handicraftsmen which had arisen with the division of labor, the special needs of the town as opposed to the country, called for new organs. But each of these groups was composed of people of the most diverse gentes, phratries, and tribes, and even included aliens. Such organs had therefore to be formed outside the gentile constitution, alongside of it, and hence in opposition to it. And this conflict of interests was at work within every gentile body, appearing in its most extreme form in the association of rich and poor, usurers and debtors, in the same gens and the same tribe. Further, there was the new mass of population outside the gentile bodies, which, as in Rome, was able to become a power in the land and at the same time was too numerous to be gradually absorbed into the kinship groups and tribes. In relation to this mass, the gentile bodies stood opposed as closed, privileged corporations; the primitive natural democracy had changed into a malign aristocracy. Lastly, the gentile constitution had grown out of a society which knew no internal contradictions, and it was only adapted to such a society. It possessed no means of coercion except public opinion. But here was a society which by all its economic conditions of life had been forced to split itself into freemen and slaves, into the exploiting rich and the exploited poor; a society which not only could never again reconcile these contradictions, but was compelled always to intensify them. Such a society could only exist either in the continuous open fight of these classes against one another, or else under the rule of a third power, which, apparently standing above the warring classes, suppressed their open conflict and allowed the class struggle to be fought out at most in the economic field, in so-called legal form. The gentile constitution was finished. It had been shattered by the division of labor and its result, the cleavage of society into classes. It was replaced by the state. The three main forms in which the state arises on the ruins of the gentile constitution have been examined in detail above. Athens provides the purest, classic form; here the state springs directly and mainly out of the class oppositions which develop within gentile society itself. In Rome, gentile society becomes a closed aristocracy in the midst of the numerous plebs who stand outside it, and have duties but no rights; the victory of plebs breaks up the old constitution based on kinship, and erects on its ruins the state, into which both the gentile aristocracy and the plebs are soon completely absorbed. Lastly, in the case of the German conquerors of the Roman Empire, the state springs directly out of the conquest of large foreign territories, which the gentile constitution provides no means of governing. But because this conquest involves neither a serious struggle with the original population nor a more advanced division of labor; because conquerors and conquered are almost on the same level of economic development, and the economic basis of society remains therefore as before for these reasons the gentile constitution is able to survive for many centuries in the altered, territorial form of the mark constitution and even for a time to rejuvenate itself in a feebler shape in the later noble and patrician families, and indeed in peasant families, as in Ditmarschen. The state is therefore by no means a power imposed on society from without; just as little is it the reality of the moral idea, the image and the reality of reason, as Hegel maintains. Rather, it is a product of society at a particular stage of development; it is the admission that this society has involved itself in insoluble self-contradiction and is cleft into irreconcilable antagonisms which it is powerless to exorcise. But in order that these antagonisms, classes with conflicting economic interests, shall not consume themselves and society in fruitless struggle, a power, apparently standing above society, has become necessary to moderate the conflict and keep it within the bounds of order ; and this power, arisen out of society, but placing itself above it and increasingly alienating itself from it, is the state. In contrast to the old gentile organization, the state is distinguished firstly by the grouping of its members on a territorial basis. The old gentile bodies, formed and held together by ties of blood, had, as we have seen, become inadequate largely because they presupposed that the gentile members were bound to one particular locality, whereas this had long ago ceased to be the case. The territory was still there, but the people had become mobile. The territorial division was therefore taken as the starting point and the system introduced by which citizens exercised their public rights and duties where they took up residence, without regard to gens or tribe. This organization of the citizens of the state according to domicile is common to all states. To us, therefore, this organization seems natural; but, as we have seen, hard and protracted struggles were necessary before it was able in Athens and Rome to displace the old organization founded on kinship. The second distinguishing characteristic is the institution of a public force which is no longer immediately identical with the people s own organization of themselves as an armed power. This special public force is needed because a self-acting armed organization of the people has become impossible since their cleavage into classes. The slaves also belong to the population: as against the 365,000 slaves, the 90,000 Athenian citizens constitute only a privileged class. The people s army of the Athenian democracy confronted the slaves as an aristocratic public force, and kept them in check; but to keep the citizens in check as well, a police-force was needed, as described above. This public force exists in every state; it consists not merely of armed men, but also of material appendages, prisons and coercive institutions of all kinds, of which gentile society knew nothing. It may be very insignificant, practically negligible, in societies with still undeveloped class antagonisms and living in remote areas, as at times and in places in the United States of America. But it becomes stronger in proportion as the class antagonisms within the state become sharper and as adjoining states grow larger and more populous. It is enough to look at Europe today, where class struggle and rivalry in conquest have brought the public power to a pitch that it threatens to devour the whole of society and even the state itself. In order to maintain this public power, contributions from the state citizens are necessary taxes. These were completely unknown to gentile society. We know more than enough about them today. With advancing civilization, even taxes are not sufficient; the state draws drafts on the future, contracts loans state debts. Our old Europe can tell a tale about these, too. In possession of the public power and the right of taxation, the officials now present themselves as organs of society standing above society. The free, willing respect accorded to the organs of the gentile constitution is not enough for them, even if they could have it. Representatives of a power which estranges them from society, they have to be given prestige by means of special decrees, which invest them with a peculiar sanctity and inviolability. The lowest police officer of the civilized state has more authority than all the organs of gentile society put together; but the mightiest prince and the greatest statesman or general of civilization might envy the humblest of the gentile chiefs the unforced and unquestioned respect accorded to him. For the one stands in the midst of society; the other is forced to pose as something outside and above it. As the state arose from the need to keep class antagonisms in check, but also arose in the thick of the fight between the classes, it is normally the state of the most powerful, economically ruling class, which by its means becomes also the politically ruling class, and so acquires new means of holding down and exploiting the oppressed class. The ancient state was, above all, the state of the slave-owners for holding down the slaves, just as the feudal state was the organ of the nobility for holding down the peasant serfs and bondsmen, and the modern representative state is the instrument for exploiting wage-labor by capital. Exceptional periods, however, occur when the warring classes are so nearly equal in forces that the state power, as apparent mediator, acquires for the moment a certain independence in relation to both. This applies to the absolute monarchy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which balances the nobility and the bourgeoisie against one another; and to the Bonapartism of the First and particularly of the Second French Empire, which played off the proletariat against the bourgeoisie and the bourgeoisie against the proletariat. The latest achievement in this line, in which ruler and ruled look equally comic, is the new German Empire of the Bismarckian nation; here the capitalists and the workers are balanced against one another and both of them fleeced for the benefit of the decayed Prussian cabbage Junkers. [German:Krautjunker, translated as country squire , but with pejorative overtones.] Further, in most historical states the rights conceded to citizens are graded on a property basis, whereby it is directly admitted that the state is an organization for the protection of the possessing class against the non-possessing class. This is already the case in the Athenian and Roman property classes. Similarly in the medieval feudal state, in which the extent of political power was determined by the extent of landownership. Similarly, also, in the electoral qualifications in modern parliamentary states. This political recognition of property differences is, however, by no means essential. On the contrary, it marks a low stage in the development of the state. The highest form of the state, the democratic republic, which in our modern social conditions becomes more and more an unavoidable necessity and is the form of state in which alone the last decisive battle between proletariat and bourgeoisie can be fought out the democratic republic no longer officially recognizes differences of property. Wealth here employs its power indirectly, but all the more surely. It does this in two ways: by plain corruption of officials, of which America is the classic example, and by an alliance between the government and the stock exchange, which is effected all the more easily the higher the state debt mounts and the more the joint-stock companies concentrate in their hands not only transport but also production itself, and themselves have their own center in the stock exchange. In addition to America, the latest French republic illustrates this strikingly, and honest little Switzerland has also given a creditable performance in this field. But that a democratic republic is not essential to this brotherly bond between government and stock exchange is proved not only by England, but also by the new German Empire, where it is difficult to say who scored most by the introduction of universal suffrage, Bismarck or the Bleichroder bank. And lastly the possessing class rules directly by means of universal suffrage. As long as the oppressed class in our case, therefore, the proletariat is not yet ripe for its self-liberation, so long will it, in its majority, recognize the existing order of society as the only possible one and remain politically the tail of the capitalist class, its extreme left wing. But in the measure in which it matures towards its self-emancipation, in the same measure it constitutes itself as its own party and votes for its own representatives, not those of the capitalists. Universal suffrage is thus the gauge of the maturity of the working class. It cannot and never will be anything more in the modern state; but that is enough. On the day when the thermometer of universal suffrage shows boiling-point among the workers, they as well as the capitalists will know where they stand. The state, therefore, has not existed from all eternity. There have been societies which have managed without it, which had no notion of the state or state power. At a definite stage of economic development, which necessarily involved the cleavage of society into classes, the state became a necessity because of this cleavage. We are now rapidly approaching a stage in the development of production at which the existence of these classes has not only ceased to be a necessity, but becomes a positive hindrance to production. They will fall as inevitably as they once arose. The state inevitably falls with them. The society which organizes production anew on the basis of free and equal association of the producers will put the whole state machinery where it will then belong into the museum of antiquities, next to the spinning wheel and the bronze ax. Civilization is, therefore, according to the above analysis, the stage of development in society at which the division of labor, the exchange between individuals arising from it, and the commodity production which combines them both, come to their full growth and revolutionizes the whole of previous society. At all earlier stages of society production was essentially collective, just as consumption proceeded by direct distribution of the products within larger or smaller communistic communities. This collective production was very limited; but inherent in it was the producers control over their process of production and their product. They knew what became of their product: they consumed it; it did not leave their hands. And so long as production remains on this basis, it cannot grow above the heads of the producers nor raise up incorporeal alien powers against them, as in civilization is always and inevitably the case. But the division of labor slowly insinuates itself into this process of production. It undermines the collectivity of production and appropriation, elevates appropriation by individuals into the general rule, and thus creates exchange between individuals how it does so, we have examined above. Gradually commodity production becomes the dominating form. With commodity production, production no longer for use by the producers but for exchange, the products necessarily change hands. In exchanging his product, the producer surrenders it; he no longer knows what becomes of it. When money, and with money the merchant, steps in as intermediary between the producers, the process of exchange becomes still more complicated, the final fate of the products still more uncertain. The merchants are numerous, and none of them knows what the other is doing. The commodities already pass not only from hand to hand; they also pass from market to market; the producers have lost control over the total production within their own spheres, and the merchants have not gained it. Products and production become subjects of chance. But chance is only the one pole of a relation whose other pole is named necessity. In the world of nature, where chance also seems to rule, we have long since demonstrated in each separate field the inner necessity and law asserting itself in this chance. But what is true of the natural world is true also of society. The more a social activity, a series of social processes, becomes too powerful for men's conscious control and grows above their heads, and the more it appears a matter of pure chance, then all the more surely within this chance the laws peculiar to it and inherent in it assert themselves as if by natural necessity. Such laws also govern the chances of commodity production and exchange. To the individuals producing or exchanging, they appear as alien, at first often unrecognized, powers, whose nature Must first be laboriously investigated and established. These economic laws of commodity production are modified with the various stages of this form of production; but in general the whole period of civilization is dominated by them. And still to this day the product rules the producer; still to this day the total production of society is regulated, not by a jointly devised plan, but by blind laws, which manifest themselves with elemental violence, in the final instance in the storms of the periodical trade crises. We saw above how at a fairly early stage in the development of production, human labor-power obtains the capacity of producing a considerably greater product than is required for the maintenance of the producers, and how this stage of development was in the main the same as that in which division of labor and exchange between individuals arise. It was not long then before the great truth was discovered that man also can be a commodity; that human energy can be exchanged and put to use by making a man into a slave. Hardly had men begun to exchange than already they themselves were being exchanged. The active became the passive, whether the men liked it or not. With slavery, which attained its fullest development under civilization, came the first great cleavage of society into an exploiting and an exploited class. This cleavage persisted during the whole civilized period. Slavery is the first form of exploitation, the form peculiar to the ancient world; it is succeeded by serfdom in the middle ages, and wage-labor in the more recent period. These are the three great forms of servitude, characteristic of the three great epochs of civilization; open, and in recent times disguised, slavery always accompanies them. The stage of commodity production with which civilization begins is distinguished economically by the introduction of (1) metal money, and with it money capital, interest and usury; (2) merchants, as the class of intermediaries between the producers; (3) private ownership of land, and the mortgage system; (4) slave labor as the dominant form of production The form of family corresponding to civilization and coming to definite supremacy with it is monogamy, the domination of the man over the woman, and the single family as the economic unit of society. The central link in civilized society is the state, which in all typical periods is without exception the state of the ruling class, and in all cases continues to be essentially a machine for holding down the oppressed, exploited class. Also characteristic of civilization is the establishment of a permanent opposition between town and country as basis of the whole social division of labor; and, further, the introduction of wills, whereby the owner of property is still able to dispose over it even when he is dead. This institution, which is a direct affront to the old gentile constitution, was unknown in Athens until the time of Solon; in Rome it was introduced early, though we do not know the date; among the Germans it was the clerics who introduced it, in order that there might be nothing to stop the pious German from leaving his legacy to the Church. With this as its basic constitution, civilization achieved things of which gentile society was not even remotely capable. But it achieved them by setting in motion the lowest instincts and passions in man and developing them at the expense of all his other abilities. From its first day to this, sheer greed was the driving spirit of civilization; wealth and again wealth and once more wealth, wealth, not of society, but of the single scurvy individual here was its one and final aim. If at the same time the progressive development of science and a repeated flowering of supreme art dropped into its lap, it was only because without them modern wealth could not have completely realized its achievements. Since civilization is founded on the exploitation of one class by another class, its whole development proceeds in a constant contradiction. Every step forward in production is at the same time a step backwards in the position of the oppressed class, that is, of the great majority. Whatever benefits some necessarily injures the others; every fresh emancipation of one class is necessarily a new oppression for another class. The most striking proof of this is provided by the introduction of machinery, the effects of which are now known to the whole world. And if among the barbarians, as we saw, the distinction between rights and duties could hardly be drawn, civilization makes the difference and antagonism between them clear even to the dullest intelligence by giving one class practically all the rights and the other class practically all the duties. But that should not be: what is good for the ruling class must also be good for the whole of society, with which the ruling-class identifies itself. Therefore the more civilization advances, the more it is compelled to cover the evils it necessarily creates with the cloak of love and charity, to palliate them or to deny them in short, to introduce a conventional hypocrisy which was unknown to earlier forms of society and even to the first stages of civilization, and which culminates in the pronouncement: the exploitation of the oppressed class is carried on by the exploiting class simply and solely in the interests of the exploited class itself; and if the exploited class cannot see it and even grows rebellious, that is the basest ingratitude to its benefactors, the exploiters. And now, in conclusion, Morgan s judgment of civilization:

Origins of the Family - Chapter IX

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/origin-family/ch09.htm

In the Lower Status, the higher attributes of mankind begin to develop: personal dignity, eloquence, religious sensibility, rectitude, manliness and courage, now common traits of character; but there was also cruelty, treachery and fanaticism. Element worship in religion, with a dim conception of personal gods, and of a Great Spirit, rude verse-making, joint tenement houses, and bread from maize belong to this period. It produced also syndiasmian family and confederacy of tribes, organised into phratries and gentes. The imagination, that great faculty so largely contributing to the elevation of mankind, was now producing an unwritten literature of myths, legends and traditions, already become a powerful stimulus upon the race. Danaus and AEgyptus were brothers and descendants of the Argive Io. Danaus had fifty daughters by different wives and AEgyptus fifty sons; the latter sought the first in marriage; these, according to the Turanian system, were brothers and sisters, and so not intermarriable. If there had been descent in male line, they would also have belonged to the same gens, and this would have been another obstacle to marriage. The fifty daughters of Danaus the Danaides fled from Egypt to Argos to escape unlawful and incestuous wedlock. This event was foretold to Io by Prometheus Aeschylus, 853). In AEschylus play The Supplices the Danaides declare to the kindred Argives (in Argos) that they had not been exiled from Egypt (The passage seems spoiled, grammatically; see Sch tz, AEschylus (Vol. 2, p. 378). Further: After they heard the case of the suppliants, the Argives decided in council to grant them protection, which implies the existence of a ban on such marriages and the validity of their objection. At the time this tragedy was performed, in Athens, Athenian law itself facilitated and promoted marriage between children of brothers in the case of heiresses and orphans, although this rule seems to have been confined to such exceptional cases.

Conspectus of Lewis Morgan's Ancient Society, Marx

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/origin-family/marx-conspectus.htm

According to the materialistic conception, the determining factor in history is, in the final instance, the production and reproduction of the immediate essentials of life. This, again, is of a twofold character. On the one side, the production of the means of existence, of articles of food and clothing, dwellings, and of the tools necessary for that production; on the other side, the production of human beings themselves, the propagation of the species. The social organization under which the people of a particular historical epoch and a particular country live is determined by both kinds of production: by the stage of development of labor on the one hand and of the family on the other. The lower the development of labor and the more limited the amount of its products, and consequently, the more limited also the wealth of the society, the more the social order is found to be dominated by kinship groups. However, within this structure of society based on kinship groups the productivity of labor increasingly develops, and with it private property and exchange, differences of wealth, the possibility of utilizing the labor power of others, and hence the basis of class antagonisms: new social elements, which in the course of generations strive to adapt the old social order to the new conditions, until at last their incompatibility brings about a complete upheaval. In the collision of the newly-developed social classes, the old society founded on kinship groups is broken up; in its place appears a new society, with its control centered in the state, the subordinate units of which are no longer kinship associations, but local associations; a society in which the system of the family is completely dominated by the system of property, and in which there now freely develop those class antagonisms and class struggles that have hitherto formed the content of all written history. It is Morgan s great merit that he has discovered and reconstructed in its main lines this prehistoric basis of our written history, and that in the kinship groups of the North American Indians he has found the key to the most important and hitherto insoluble riddles of earliest Greek, Roman and German history. His book is not the work of a day. For nearly forty years he wrestled with his material, until he was completely master of it. But that also makes his book one of the few epoch-making works of our time. In the following presentation, the reader will in general easily distinguish what comes from Morgan and what I have added. In the historical sections on Greece and Rome I have not confined myself to Morgan s evidence, but have added what was available to me. The sections on the Celts and the Germans are in the main my work; Morgan had to rely here almost entirely on secondary sources, and for German conditions apart from Tacitus on the worthless and liberalistic falsifications of Mr. Freeman. The treatment of the economic aspects, which in Morgan s book was sufficient for his purpose but quite inadequate for mine, has been done afresh by myself. And, finally, I am, of course, responsible for all the conclusions drawn, in so far as Morgan is not expressly cited.

Origins of the Family— Preface (1884)

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/origin-family/preface.htm

I have accordingly submitted the whole text to a careful revision and made a number of additions which, I hope, take due account of the present state of knowledge. I also give in the course of this preface a short review of the development of the history of the family from Bachofen to Morgan; I do so chiefly because the chauvinistically inclined English anthropologists are still striving their utmost to kill by silence the revolution which Morgan s discoveries have effected in our conception of primitive history, while they appropriate his results without the slightest compunction. Elsewhere also the example of England is in some cases followed only too closely. My work has been translated into a number of other languages. First, Italian: L origine delta famiglia, delta proprieta privata e dello stato, versions riveduta dall autore, di Pasquale Martignetti, Benevento, 1885. Then, Rumanian: Origina famdei, proprietatei private si a statului, traducere de Joan Nadeide, in the Yassy periodical Contemporanul, September, 1885, to May, 1886. Further, Danish: Familjens, Privatejendommens og Statens Oprindelse, Dansk, af Forfattern gennemgaaet Udgave, besorget af Gerson Trier, Kobenhavn, 1888. A French translation by Henri Rave, based on the present German edition, is on the press. Before the beginning of the sixties, one cannot speak of a history of the family. In this field, the science of history was still completely under the influence of the five books of Moses. The patriarchal form of the family, which was there described in greater detail than anywhere else, was not only assumed without question to be the oldest form, but it was also identified minus its polygamy with the bourgeois family of today, so that the family had really experienced no historical development at all; at most it was admitted that in primitive times there might have been a period of sexual promiscuity. It is true that in addition to the monogamous form of the family, two other forms were known to exist polygamy in the Orient and polyandry in India and Tibet; but these three forms could not be arranged in any historical order and merely appeared side by side without any connection. That among some peoples of ancient history, as well as among some savages still alive today, descent was reckoned, not from the father, but from the mother, and that the female line was therefore regarded as alone valid; that among many peoples of the present day in every continent marriage is forbidden within certain large groups which at that time had not been closely studied these facts were indeed known and fresh instances of them were continually being collected. But nobody knew what to do with them, and even as late as E. B. Tylor s Researches into the Early History of Mankind, etc. (1865) they are listed as mere curious customs , side by side with the prohibition among some savages against touching burning wood with an iron tool and similar religious mumbo-jumbo. The history of the family dates from 1861, from the publication of Bachofen s Mutterrecht. [Mother-right, matriarchate Ed.] In this work the author advances the following propositions: Bachofen finds the proofs of these assertions in innumerable passages of ancient classical literature, which he collected with immense industry. According to him, the development from hetaerism to monogamy and from mother-right to father-right is accomplished, particularly among the Greeks, as the consequence of an advance in religious conceptions, introducing into the old hierarchy of the gods, representative of the old outlook, new divinities, representative of the new outlook, who push the former more and more into the background. Thus, according to Bachofen, it is not the development of men s actual conditions of life, but the religious reflection of these conditions inside their heads, which has brought about the historical changes in the social position of the sexes in relation to each other. In accordance with this view, Bachofen interprets the Oresteia of Aschylus as the dramatic representation of the conflict between declining mother-right and the new father-right that arose and triumphed in the heroic age. For the sake of her paramour, gisthus, Clytemnestra slays her husband, Agamemnon, on his return from the Trojan War; but Orestes, the son of Agamemnon and herself, avenges his father s murder by slaying his mother. For this act he is pursued by the Furies, the demonic guardians of mother-right, according to which matricide is the gravest and most inexpiable crime. But Apollo, who by the voice of his oracle had summoned Orestes to this deed, and Athena, who is called upon to give judgment the two deities who here represent the new patriarchal order take Orestes under their protection; Athena hears both sides. The whole matter of the dispute is briefly summed up in the debate which now takes place between Orestes and the Furies. Orestes contends that Clytemnestra has committed a double crime; she has slain her husband and thus she has also slain his father. Why should the Furies pursue him, and not her, seeing that she is by far the more guilty? The answer is striking: She was not kin by blood to the man she slew. The murder of a man not related by blood, even if he be the husband of the murderess, is expiable and does not concern the Furies; their office is solely to punish murder between blood relations, and of such murders the most grave and the most inexpiable, according to mother-right, is matricide. Apollo now comes forward in Orestes defense; Athena calls upon the Areopagites the Athenian jurors to vote; the votes for Orestes condemnation and for his acquittal are equal; Athena, as president, gives her vote for Orestes and acquits him. Father-right has triumphed over mother-right, the gods of young descent, as the Furies themselves call them, have triumphed over the Furies; the latter then finally allow themselves to be persuaded to take up a new office in the service of the new order. This new but undoubtedly correct interpretation of the Oresteia is one of the best and finest passages in the whole book, but it proves at the same time that Bachofen believes at least as much as schylus did in the Furies, Apollo, and Athena; for, at bottom, he believes that the overthrow of mother-right by father-right was a miracle wrought during the Greek heroic age by these divinities. That such a conception, which makes religion the lever of world history, must finally end in pure mysticism, is clear. It is therefore a tough and by no means always a grateful task to plow through Bachofen s solid tome. But all that does not lessen his importance as a pioneer. He was the first to replace the vague phrases about some unknown primitive state of sexual promiscuity by proofs of the following facts: that abundant traces survive in old classical literature of a state prior to monogamy among the Greeks and Asiatics when not only did a man have sexual intercourse with several women, but a woman with several men, without offending against morality; that this custom did not disappear without leaving its traces in the limited surrender which was the price women had to pay for the right to monogamy; that therefore descent could originally be reckoned only in the female line, from mother to mother; that far into the period of monogamy, with its certain or at least acknowledged paternity, the female line was still alone recognized; and that the original position of the mothers, as the only certain parents of their children, secured for them, and thus for their whole sex, a higher social position than women have ever enjoyed since. Bachofen did not put these statements as clearly as this, for he was hindered by his mysticism. But he proved them; and in 1861 that was a real revolution. Bachofen s massive volume was written in German, the language of the nation which at that time interested itself less than any other in the prehistory of the modern family. Consequently, he remained unknown. His first successor in the same field appeared in 1865, without ever having heard of Bachofen. This successor was J. F. McLennan, the exact opposite of his predecessor. Instead of a mystic of genius, we have the dry-as-dust jurist; instead of the exuberant imagination of a poet, the plausible arguments of a barrister defending his brief. McLennan finds among many savage, barbarian, and even civilized peoples of ancient and modern times a form of marriage in which the bridegroom, alone or with his friends, must carry off the bride from her relations by a show of force. This custom must be the survival of an earlier custom when the men of one tribe did in fact carry off their wives by force from other tribes. What was the origin of this marriage by capture ? So long as men could find enough women in their own tribe, there was no reason whatever for it. We find, however, no less frequently that among undeveloped peoples there are certain groups (which in 1865 were still often identified with the tribes themselves) within which marriage is forbidden, so that the men are obliged to take their wives, and women their husbands, from outside the group; whereas among other peoples the custom is that the men of one group must take their wives only from within their own group. McLennan calls the first peoples exogamous and the second endogamous ; he then promptly proceeds to construct a rigid opposition between exogamous and endogamous tribes. And although his own investigations into exogamy force the fact under his nose that in many, if not in most or even in all, cases, this opposition exists only in his own imagination, he nevertheless makes it the basis of his whole theory. According to this theory, exogamous tribes can only obtain their wives from other tribes; and since in savagery there is a permanent state of war between tribe and tribe, these wives could only be obtained by capture. McLennan then goes on to ask: Whence this custom of exogamy? The conception of consanguinity and incest could not have anything to do with it, for these things only came much later. But there was another common custom among savages the custom of killing female children immediately after birth. This would cause a surplus of men in each individual tribe, of which the inevitable and immediate consequence would be that several men possessed a wife in common: polyandry. And this would have the further consequence that it would be known who was the mother of a child, but not who its father was: hence relationship only in the female line, with exclusion of the male line mother-right. And a second consequence of the scarcity of women within a tribe a scarcity which polyandry mitigated, but did not remove was precisely this systematic, forcible abduction of women from other tribes. It is McLennan s merit to have directed attention to the general occurrence and great importance of what he calls exogamy. He did not by any means discover the existence of exogamous groups; still less did he understand them. Besides the early, scattered notes of many observers (these were McLennan s sources), Latham (Descriptive Ethnology, 1859) had given a detailed and accurate description of this institution among the Indian Magars, and had said that it was very widespread and occurred in all parts of the world a passage which McLennan himself cites. Morgan, in 1847, in his letters on the Iroquois (American Review) and in 1851 in The League of the Iroquois, had already demonstrated the existence of exogamous groups among this tribe and had given an accurate account of them; whereas McLennan, as we shall see, wrought greater confusion here with his legalistic mind than Bachofen wrought in the field of mother-right with his mystical fancies. It is also a merit of McLennan that he recognized matrilineal descent as the earlier system, though he was here anticipated by Bachofen, as he later acknowledged. But McLennan is not clear on this either; he always speaks of kinship through females only, and this term, which is correct for an earlier stage, he continually applies to later stages of development when descent and inheritance were indeed still traced exclusively through the female line, but when kinship on the male side was also recognized and expressed. There you have the pedantic mind of the jurist, who fixes on a rigid legal term and goes on applying it unchanged when changed conditions have made it applicable no longer. Apparently McLennan s theory, plausible though it was, did not seem any too well established even to its author. At any rate, he himself is struck by the fact that it is observable that the form of capture is now most distinctly marked and impressive just among those races which have male kinship (should be descent in the male line ). (Ibid., p. 140) And again: It is a curious fact that nowhere now, that we are aware of, is infanticide a system where exogamy and the earliest form of kinship co-exist. (Ibid., p. 146.) Both these facts flatly contradict his method of explanation, and he can only meet them with new and still more complicated hypotheses. Nevertheless, his theory found great applause and support in England. McLennan was here generally regarded as the founder of the history of the family and the leading authority on the subject. However many exceptions and variations might be found in individual cases, his opposition of exogamous and endogamous tribes continued to stand as the recognized foundation of the accepted view, and to act as blinders, obstructing any free survey of the field under investigation and so making any decisive advance impossible. Against McLennan s exaggerated reputation in England and the English fashion is copied elsewhere it becomes a duty to set down the fact that he has done more harm with his completely mistaken antithesis between exogamous and endogamous tribes than he has done good by his research. Facts were now already coming to light in increasing number which did not fit into his neat framework. McLennan knew only three forms of marriage: polygyny, polyandry and monogamy. But once attention had been directed to the question, more and more proofs were found that there existed among undeveloped peoples forms of marriage in which a number of men possessed a number of women in common, and Lubbock (The Origin of Civilization, 1870) recognized this group marriage ( communal marriage ) as a historical fact. Immediately afterwards, in 1871, Morgan came forward with new and in many ways decisive evidence. He had convinced himself that the peculiar system of consanguinity in force among the Iroquois was common to all the aboriginal inhabitants of the United States and therefore extended over a whole continent, although it directly contradicted the degrees of relationship arising out of the system of marriage as actually practiced by these peoples. He then induced the Federal government to collect information about the systems of consanguinity among the other peoples of the world and to send out for this purpose tables and lists of questions prepared by himself. He discovered from the replies: (1) that the system of consanguinity of the American Indians was also in force among numerous peoples in Asia and, in a somewhat modified form, in Africa and Australia; (2) that its complete explanation was to be found in a form of group marriage which was just dying out in Hawaii and other Australasian islands; and (3) that side by side with this form of marriage a system of consanguinity was in force in the same islands which could only be explained through a still more primitive, now extinct, form of group marriage. He published the collected evidence, together with the conclusions he drew from it, in his Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity, 1871, and thus carried the debate on to an infinitely wider field. By starting from the systems of consanguinity and reconstructing from them the corresponding forms of family, he opened a new line of research and extended our range of vision into the prehistory of man. If this method proved to be sound, McLennan s pretty theories would be completely demolished. McLennan defended his theory in a new edition of Primitive Marriage (Studies in Ancient History, 1876). Whilst he himself constructs a highly artificial history of the family out of pure hypotheses, he demands from Lubbock and Morgan not merely proofs for every one of their statements, but proofs as indisputably valid as if they were to be submitted in evidence in a Scottish court of law. And this is the man who, from Tacitus report on the close relationship between maternal uncle and sister s son among the Germans (Germania, Chap. 20), from Caesar s report that the Britons in groups of ten or twelve possessed their wives in common, from all the other reports of classical authors on community of wives among barbarians, calmly draws the conclusion that all these peoples lived in a state of polyandry! One might be listening to a prosecuting counsel who can allow himself every liberty in arguing his own case, but demands from defending counsel the most formal, legally valid proof for his every word. He maintains that group marriage is pure imagination, and by so doing falls far behind Bachofen. He declares that Morgan s systems of consanguinity are mere codes of conventional politeness, the proof being that the Indians also address a stranger or a white man as brother or father. One might as well say that the terms father, mother, brother, sister are mere meaningless forms of address because Catholic priests and abbesses are addressed as father and mother, and because monks and nuns, and even freemasons and members of English trade unions and associations at their full sessions are addressed as brother and sister. In a word, McLennan s defense was miserably feeble. But on one point he had still not been assailed. The opposition of exogamous and endogamous tribes on which his whole system rested not only remained unshaken, but was even universally acknowledged as the keystone of the whole history of the family. McLennan s attempt to explain this opposition might be inadequate and in contradiction with his own facts. But the antithesis itself, the existence of two mutually exclusive types of self-sufficient and independent tribes, of which the one type took their wives from within the tribe, while the other type absolutely forbade it that was sacred gospel. Compare, for example, Giraud-Teulon s Origines de la Famille (1874) and even Lubbock s Origin of Civilization (fourth edition, 1882). Here Morgan takes the field with his main work, Ancient Society (1877), the work that underlies the present study. What Morgan had only dimly guessed in 1871 is now developed in full consciousness. There is no antithesis between endogamy and exogamy; up to the present, the existence of exogamous tribes has not been demonstrated anywhere. But at the time when group marriage still prevailed and in all probability it prevailed everywhere at some time the tribe was subdivided into a number of groups related by blood on the mother s side, gentes, within which it was strictly forbidden to marry, so that the men of a gens, though they could take their wives from within the tribe and generally did so, were compelled to take them from outside their gens. Thus while each gens was strictly exogamous, the tribe embracing all the gentes was no less endogamous. Which finally disposed of the last remains of McLennan s artificial constructions. But Morgan did not rest here. Through the gens of the American Indians, he was enabled to make his second great advance in his field of research. In this gens, organized according to mother-right, he discovered the primitive form out of which had developed the later gens organized according to father-right, the gens as we find it among the ancient civilized peoples. The Greek and Roman gens, the old riddle of all historians, now found its explanation in the Indian gens, and a new foundation was thus laid for the whole of primitive history. This rediscovery of the primitive matriarchal gens as the earlier stage of the patriarchal gens of civilized peoples has the same importance for anthropology as Darwin s theory of evolution has for biology and Marx s theory of surplus value for political economy. It enabled Morgan to outline for the first time a history of the family in which for the present, so far as the material now available permits, at least the classic stages of development in their main outlines are now determined. That this opens a new epoch in the treatment of primitive history must be clear to everyone. The matriarchal gens has become the pivot on which the whole science turns; since its discovery we know where to look and what to look for in our research, and how to arrange the results. And, consequently, since Morgan s book, progress in this field has been made at a far more rapid speed. Anthropologists, even in England, now generally appreciate, or rather appropriate, Morgan s discoveries. But hardly one of them has the honesty to admit that it is to Morgan that we owe this revolution in our ideas. In England they try to kill his book by silence, and dispose of its author with condescending praise for his earlier achievements; they niggle endlessly over details and remain obstinately silent about his really great discoveries. The original edition of Ancient Society is out of print; in America there is no sale for such things; in England, it seems, the book was systematically suppressed, and the only edition of this epochmaking work still circulating in the book trade is the German translation. Why this reserve? It is difficult not to see in it a conspiracy of silence; for politeness sake, our recognized anthropologists generally pack their writings with quotations and other tokens of camaraderie. Is it, perhaps, because Morgan is an American, and for the English anthropologists it goes sorely against the grain that, despite their highly creditable industry in collecting material, they should be dependent for their general points of view in the arrangement and grouping of this material, for their ideas in fact, on two foreigners of genius, Bachofen and Morgan? They might put up with the German but the American? Every Englishman turns patriotic when he comes up against an American, and of this I saw highly entertaining instances in the United States. Moreover, McLennan was, so to speak, the officially appointed founder and leader of the English school of anthropology. It was almost a principle of anthropological etiquette to speak of his artificially constructed historical series child-murder, polygyny, marriage by capture, matriarchal family in tones only of profoundest respect. The slightest doubt in the existence of exogamous and endogamous tribes of absolute mutual exclusiveness was considered rank heresy. Morgan had committed a kind of sacrilege in dissolving all these hallowed dogmas into thin air. Into the bargain, he had done it in such a way that it only needed saying to carry immediate conviction; so that the McLennanites, who had hitherto been helplessly reeling to and fro between exogamy and endogamy, could only beat their brows and exclaim: How could we be such fools as not to think of that for ourselves long ago? As if these crimes had not already left the official school with the option only of coldly ignoring him, Morgan filled the measure to overflowing by not merely criticizing civilization, the society of commodity production, the basic form of present-day society, in a manner reminiscent of Fourier, but also by speaking of a future transformation of this society in words which Karl Marx might have used. He had therefore amply merited McLennan s indignant reproach that the historical method is antipathetical to Mr. Morgan s mind, and its echo as late as 1884 from Mr. Professor Giraud-Teulon of Geneva. In 1874 (Origines de la Famille) this same gentleman was still groping helplessly in the maze of the McLennanite exogamy, from which Morgan had to come and rescue him! Of the other advances which primitive anthropology owes to Morgan, I do not need to speak here; they are sufficiently discussed in the course of this study. The fourteen years which have elapsed since the publication of his chief work have greatly enriched the material available for the study of the history of primitive human societies. The anthropologists, travelers and primitive historians by profession have now been joined by the comparative jurists, who have contributed either new material or new points of view. As a result, some of Morgan s minor hypotheses have been shaken or even disproved. But not one of the great leading ideas of his work has been ousted by this new material. The order which he introduced into primitive history still holds in its main lines today. It is, in fact, winning recognition to the same degree in which Morgan s responsibility for the great advance is carefully concealed.

Origins of the Family. Preface (1891)

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Chartism was dying out. The revival of commercial prosperity, natural after the revulsion of 1847 had spent itself, was put down altogether to the credit of Free Trade. Both these circumstances had turned the English working-class, politically, into the tail of the great Liberal Party, the party led by the manufacturers. This advantage, once gained, had to be perpetuated. And the manufacturing capitalists, from the Chartist opposition, not to Free Trade, but to the transformation of Free Trade into the one vital national question, had learnt, and were learning more and more, that the middle-class can never obtain full social and political power over the nation except by the help of the working-class. Thus a gradual change came over the relations between both classes. The Factory Acts, once the bugbear of all manufacturers, were not only willingly submitted to, but their expansion into acts regulating almost all trades was tolerated. Trades Unions, hitherto considered inventions of the devil himself, were now petted and patronised as perfectly legitimate institutions, and as useful means of spreading sound economical doctrines amongst the workers. Even strikes, than which nothing had been more nefarious up to 1848, were now gradually found out to be occasionally very useful, especially when provoked by the masters themselves, at their own time. Of the legal enactments, placing the workman at a lower level or at a disadvantage with regard to the master, at least the most revolting were repealed. ... And the condition of the working-class during this period? There was temporary improvement even for the great mass. But this improvement always was reduced to the old level by the influx of the great body of the unemployed reserve, by the constant superseding of hands by new machinery, by the immigration of the agricultural population, now, too, more and more superseded by machines. A permanent improvement can be recognised for two protected sections only of the working-class. Firstly, the factory-hands. The fixing by Act of Parliament of their working-day within relatively rational limits has restored their physical constitution and endowed them with a moral superiority, enhanced by their local concentration. They are undoubtedly better off than before 1848. The best proof is that, out of ten strikes they make, nine are provoked by the manufacturers in their own interests, as the only means of securing a reduced production. You can never get the masters to agree to work short time, let manufactured goods be ever so unsaleable; but get the work-people to strike, and the masters shut their factories to a man. Secondly, the great Trades Unions. They are the organisations of those trades in which the labour of grown-up men predominates, or is alone applicable. Here the competition neither of women and children nor of machinery has so far weakened their organised strength. The engineers, the carpenters and joiners, the bricklayers, are each of them a power, to that extent that, as in the case of the bricklayers and bricklayers labourers, they can even successfully resist the introduction of machinery. That their condition has remarkably improved since 1848 there can be no doubt, and the best proof of this is in the fact that for more than fifteen years not only have their employers been with them, but they with their employers, upon exceedingly good terms. They form an aristocracy among the working-class; they have succeeded in enforcing for themselves a relatively comfortable position, and they accept it as final. They are the model working-men of Messrs. Leone Levi & Giffen, and they are very nice people indeed nowadays to deal with, for any sensible capitalist in particular and for the whole capitalist class in general. But as to the great mass of working-people, the state of misery and insecurity in which they live now is as low as ever, if not lower. The East End of London is an ever-spreading pool of stagnant misery and desolation, of starvation when out of work, and degradation, physical and moral, when in work.... The truth is this: during the period of England s industrial monopoly the English working-class have, to a certain extent, shared in the benefits of the monopoly. These benefits were very unequally parcelled out amongst them; the privileged minority pocketed most, but even the great mass had, at least, a temporary share now and then. And that is the reason why, since the dying-out of Owenism, there has been no Socialism in England. With the breakdown of that monopoly, the English working-class will lose that privileged position; it will find itself generally the privileged and leading minority not excepted on a level with its fellow-workers abroad. And that is the reason why there will be Socialism again in England.

Works of Engels 1885

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Forty years ago England stood face to face with a crisis, solvable to all appearance by force only. The immense and rapid development of manufactures had outstripped the extension of foreign markets and the increase of demand. Every ten years the march of industry was violently interrupted by a general commercial crash, followed, after a long period of chronic depression, by a few short years of prosperity, and always ending in feverish over production and renewed collapsed. The capitalist class clamoured for Free Trade in corn, and threatened to enforce it by sending the starving population of the towns back to the country districts, whence they came: to invade them, as John Bright said, not as paupers begging for bread, but as an army quartered upon the enemy. The working masses of the towns demanded their share of political power the People s Charter; they were supported by the majority of the small trading class, and the only difference between the two was whether the Charter should be carried out by physical or by moral force. Then came the commercial crash of 1847 and the Irish famine, and with both the prospect of revolution. The French Revolution of 1848 saved the English middle class. The Socialistic pronunciamentoes of the victorious French workmen frightened the small middle class of England and disorganised the narrower, but more matter-of-fact, movement of the English working class. At the very moment Chartism was bound to assert itself in its full strength, it collapsed internally before even it collapsed externally on the 10th of April, 1848. The action of the working class was thrust into the background. The capitalist class triumphed along the whole line. The Reform Bill of 1831 had been the victory of the whole capitalist class over the landed aristocracy. The repeal of the Corn Laws was the victory of the manufacturing capitalists not only over the landed aristocracy, but over those sections of capitalists too whose interests were more or less bound up with the landed interest; bankers, stock-jobbers, fundholders, etc. Free Trade meant the re-adjustment of the whole home and foreign commercial and financial policy of England in accordance with the interests of the manufacturing capitalists the class which now represented the nation. And they set about this task with a will. Every obstacle to industrial production was mercilessly removed. The tariff and the whole system of taxation were revolutionised, Everything was made subordinate to one end, but that end of the utmost importance to the manufacturing capitalist: the cheapening of all raw produce, and especially of the means of living of the working class,reduction of the cost of raw material, and the keeping down if not as yet the bringing down of wages. England was to become the workshop of the world ; all other countries were to become for England what Ireland already was markets for her manufactured goods, supplying her in return with raw materials and food. England the great manufacturing centre of an agriculturalworld, with an ever-increasing number of corn and cotton-growing Irelands, revolving around her, the industrial sun. What a glorious project! The manufacturing capitalists set about the realisation of this their great object with that strong common sense and that contempt for traditional principles which has ever distinguished them from their more narrow-minded compeers on the Continent: Chartism was dying out. The revival of commercial prosperity, natural after the revolution of 1847 had spent itself, was put down altogether to the credit of Free Trade. Both these circumstances had turned the English working class politically into the tail of the great Liberal party, the party led by the manufacturers. This advantage, once gained, had to be perpetuated. And the manufacturing capitalists, from the Chartist opposition not to Free Trade, but to the transformation of Free Trade into the one vital national question, had learnt and were learning more and more that the middle class can never obtain full social and political power over the nation except by the help of the working class. Thus a gradual change came over the relations between both classes. The Factory Acts, once the bugbear of all manufacturers, were not only willingly submitted to, but their expansion into acts regulating almost all trades, was tolerated. Trade Unions, lately considered inventions of the devil himself, were now petted and patronised as perfectly legitimate institutions and as useful means of spreading sound economical doctrines amongst the workers. Even strikes, than which nothing had been more nefarious up to 1848, were gradually foundout to be occasionally very useful, especially when provoked by the masters themselves at their own time. Of the legal enactments, placing the workman at a lower level or at a disadvantage with regard to the master, at least the most revolting were repealed. And, practically, that horrid People s Charter" actually became the political programme of the very manufacturers who had opposed it to the last. The Abolition of the Property Qualification and Vote by Ballot are now the law of the land. The Reform Acts of 1867 and 1884 make a near approach to universal suffrage, at least such as it now exists in Germany; the Redistribution Bill now before Parliament creates equal electoral districts on the whole not more unequal than those of France or Germany; payment of members and shorter if not actually annual parliaments are visibly looming in the distance and yet, there are people who say that Chartism is dead The Revolution of 1848, not less than many of its predecessors, has had strange bedfellows and successors.The very people who put it down, have become as Karl Marx used to say, its testamentary successors. Louis Napoleon had to create an independent and united Italy, Bismark had to revolutionize Germany and to restore Hungarian independence and English manufacturers had to enact the People s Charter. For England, the effects of this domination of the manufacturing capitalists were at first sight startling. Trade revived and extended to a degree unheard of even in this cradle of modern industry; the previous astounding creations of steam and machinery dwindled into nothing compared with the immense mass of productions of the twenty years from 1850 to 1870, with the overwhelming figures of exports, and imports, of wealth accumulated in the hands of capitalists and of human working power concentrated in the large towns. The progress was indeed interrupted, as before, by a crisis every ten years, in 1857 as well us in 1868; but these revulsions were now considered as natural, inevitable events which must be fatalistically submitted to, and which always set themselves right in the end. And the condition of the working class during this period? There was temporary improvement even for the great mass. But this improvement always was reduced to the old level by the influx of the great body of the unemployed reserve, by the constant superseding of hands by new machinery, by the immigration of the agricultural population, now, too, more and more superseded by machines. A permanent improvement can be recognised for two protected sections only of the working class, Firstly, the factory hands. The fixing by Act of Parliament of their working day within relatively rational limits, has restored their physical constitution and endowed them with a moral superiority, enhanced by their local concentration. They are undoubtedly better off than before 1848. The best proof is that out of ten strikes they make, nine are provoked by the manufacturers in their own interests, as the only means of securing a reduced production. You can never get the masters to agree to work short time, let manufactured goods be ever so unsaleable; but get the workpeople to strike, and the masters shut their factories to a man. Secondly, the great Trades Unions. They are the organisations of those trades in which the labour of grown-up men predominates, or is alone applicable. Here the competition neither of women and children nor of machinery has so far weakened their organised strength. The engineers, the carpenters and joiners, the bricklayers are each of them a power, to that extent that, as in the case of the bricklayers and bricklayers labourers, they can even successfully resist the introduction of machinery. That their condition has remarkably improved since 1848 there can be no doubt, and the best proof of this is in the fact that for more than fifteen years not only have their employers been with them, but they with their employers, upon exceedingly good terms. They form an aristocracy among the working class; they have succeeded in enforcing in enforcing for themselves a relatively comfortable position and they accept it as final. They are the model working men of Messrs Leone Levi and Giffen, and they are very nice people indeed nowadays to deal with, for any sensible capitalist in particular and for the whole capitalist class in general. But as to the great mass of working people, the state of misery and insecurity in which they live now is a low as ever, if not lower. The East end of London is an over-spreading pool of stagnant misery and desolation, of starvation when out of work, and degradation, physical and moral, when in work. And so in all other largo towns abstraction made of the privileged minority of the workers; and so in the smaller towns and in the agricultural districts. The law which reduces the value of labour-power to the value of the necessary means of subsistence, and the other law which reduces its average price as a rule to the minimum of those means of subsistence: these laws act upon, them with the irresistible force of an automatic engine, which crushes them between its wheels. This then, was the position created by the Free Trade policies of 1847, and by twenty years of the rule of the manufacturing capitalists. But then a change came. The crash of 1868 was, indeed, followed by a slight and short revival about 1873; but that did not last. We did not, indeed, pass through the full crisis at the time it was due, in 1877 or 1878; but we have had, ever since 1876, a chronic state of stagnation in all the dominant branches of industry. Neither will the full crash come; nor will the period of longed-for prosperity to which we used to be entitled before and after it. A dull depression, a chronic glut of all markets for all trades, that is what we have been living in for nearly ten years. How is this? The Free Trade theory was based upon one assumption: that England was to be the one great manufacturing centre of an agricultural world. And the actual fact is that this assumption has turned out to be a pure delusion. The conditions of modern industry, steam-power and machinery, can be established where-ever there is fuel, especially coals. And other countries beside England: France, Belgium, Germany, America, even Russia, have coals. And the people over there did not see the advantage of being turned into Irish pauper farmers merely for the greater wealth and glory of English capitalists. They set resolutely about manufacturing, not only for themselves but for the rest of the world; and the consequence is that the manufacturing monopoly enjoyed by England for nearly a century is irretrievably broken up. But the manufacturing monopoly of England is the pivot of the present social system of England. Even while that monopoly lasted the markets could not keep pace with the increasing productivity of English manufactures; the decennial crises were the consequence. And new markets are getting scarcer every day, so much so that even the negroes of the Congo are now to be forced into the civilisation attendant upon Manchester calicoes, Staffordshire pottery and Birmingham hardware. How will it be when Continental and, especially American goods, flow in ever increasing quantities when the predominating share, still held by British manufactures, will become reduced from year to year? Answer, Free Trade, thou universal panacea? I am not the first to point this out. Already, in 1883, at the Southport meeting of the British Association, Mr Inglis Palgrave, The President of the Economical section, stated plainly that the days of great trade profits in England were over, and there was a pause in the progress of several great branches of industrial labour. The country might almost be said to be entering the non-progressive state. But what is to be the consequence? Capitalist production cannot stop. It must go on increasing and expanding, or it must die. Even now the mere reduction of England s lion s share in the supply of the world s markets means stagnation, distress, excess of capital here, excess of unemployed workmen there. What will it be when the increase of yearly production is brought to a complete stop? Here is the vulnerable place, the heel of Achilles for capitalist production. Its very basis is the necessity for constant expansion, and this constant expansion now becomes impossible. It ends in a deadlock. Every year England is brought nearer face to face with the question: either the country must go to pieces, or capitalism must. Which is it to be? And the working class? If even under the unparalleled commercial and industrial expansion, from 1848 to 1868, they have had to undergo such misery; if even the great bulk of them experienced at best a temporary improvement of their condition, while only a small, privileged protected minority was permanently benefited, what will it be when this dazzling period is brought finally to a close; when the present dreary stagnation shall not only become intensified, but this intensified condition shall become the permanent and normal state of British trade? The truth is this: during the period of England s industrial monopoly the English working-class have, to a certain extent, shared in the benefits of the monopoly. These benefits were very unequally parcelled out amongst them; the privileged minority pocketed most, but even the great mass had, at least, a temporary share now and then. And that is the reason why, since the dying-out of Owenism, there has been no Socialism in England. With the breakdown of that monopoly, the English working-class will lose that privileged position; it will find itself generally the privileged and leading minority not excepted on a level with its fellow-workers abroad. And that is the reason why there will be Socialism again in England. FREDERICK ENGELS

England in 1845 and in 1885 by Frederick Engels 1885

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1885/03/england-1845-1855.htm

To use an illustration. When some Oxford Undergraduates rowed in a four-oar boat across the straits of Dover, it was stated in the Press reports that one of them caught a crab. The London correspondent of the Cologne Gazette took this literally, and faithfully reported to his paper, that a crab had got entangled in the oar of one of the rowers. If a man who has been living for years in the midst of London is capable of such a ludicrous blunder as soon as he comes across the technical terms of an art unknown to him. what must we expect from a man who with a passable knowledge of mere book-German, undertakes to translate the most untranslatable of German prose writers? And indeed we shall see that Mr. Broadhouse is an excellent hand at catching crabs. But there is something more required. Marx is one of the most vigorous and concise writers of the age. To render him adequately, a man must be a master, not only of German, but of English too. Mr. Broadhouse, however, though evidently a man of respectable journalistic accomplishments, commands but that limited range of English used by and for conventional literary respectability. Here he moves with ease; but this sort of English is not a language into which Das Kapital can ever be translated. Powerful German requires powerful English to render it; the best resources of the language have to be drawn upon; new-coined German terms require the coining of corresponding new terms in English. But as soon as Mr. Broadhouse is faced by such a difficulty, not only his resources fail him, but also his courage. The slightest extension of his limited stock-in-trade, the slightest innovation upon the conventional English of everyday literature frightens him, and rather than risk such a heresy, he renders the difficult German word by a more or less indefinite term which does not grate upon his ear but obscures the meaning of the author; or, worse still, he translates it, as it recurs, by a whole series of different terms, forgetting that a technical term has to be rendered always by one and the same equivalent. See the whole article.

How Not To Translate Marx by Frederick Engels 1885

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1885/11/translating-marx.htm

The first few pages of such a translation by John Broadhouse, are published in the October number of To-Day. I say distinctly that it is very far from being a faithful rendering of the text, and that because Mr. Broadhouse is deficient in every quality required in a translator of Marx. To translate such a book, a fair knowledge of literary German is not enough. Marx uses freely expressions of everyday life and idioms of provincial dialects; he coins new words, he takes his illustrations from every branch of science, his allusions from the literatures of a dozen languages; to understand him, a man must be a master of German indeed, spoken as well as written, and must know something of German life too. To use an illustration. When some Oxford Undergraduates rowed in a four-oar boat across the straits of Dover, it was stated in the Press reports that one of them "caught a crab." The London correspondent of the Cologne Gazette took this literally, and faithfully reported to his paper, that "a crab had got entangled in the oar of one of the rowers." If a man who has been living for years in the midst of London is capable of such a ludicrous blunder as soon as he comes across the technical terms of an art unknown to him, what must we expect from a man who with a passable knowledge of mere book-German, undertakes to translate the most untranslateable of German prose writers? And indeed we shall see that Mr. Broadhouse is an excellent hand at "catching crabs." But there is something more required. Marx is one of the most vigorous and concise writers of the age. To render him adequately, a man must be a master, not only of German, but of English too. Mr. Broadhouse, however, though evidently a man of respectable journalistic accomplishments, commands but that limited range of English used by and for conventional literary respectability. Here lie moves with ease; but this sort of English is not a language into which "Das Kapital" can ever be translated. Powerful German requires powerful English to render it; the best resources of the language have to be drawn upon; new-coined German terms require the coining of corresponding new terms in English. But as soon as Mr. Broadhouse is faced by such a difficulty, not only his resources fail him, but also his courage. The slightest extension of his limited stock-in-trade, the slightest innovation upon the conventional English of everyday literature frightens him, and rather than risk such a heresy, he renders the difficult German word by a more or less indefinite term which does not grate upon his ear but obscures the meaning of the author; or, worse still, he translates it, as it recurs, by a whole series of different terms, forgetting that a technical term has to be rendered always by one and the same equivalent. Thus, in the very heading of the first section, he translates Werthgroesse by "extent of value," ignoring that groesse is a definite mathematical term, equivalent to magnitude, or determined quantity, while extent may mean many things besides. Thus even the simple innovation of "labour-time" for Arbeitszeit, is too much for him ; he renders it by (1) "time-labour," which means, if anything, labour paid by time or labour done by a man "serving" time at hard labour; (2) "time of labour," (3) "labour-time," and (4) "period of labour," by which term (Arbeitsperiode) Marx, in the second volume, means something quite different. Now as is well known, the "category" of labour-time is one of the most fundamental of the whole book, and to translate it by four different terms in less than ten pages is more than unpardonable. Marx begins with the analysis of what a commodity is. The first aspect under which a commodity presents itself, is that of an object of utility; as such it may be considered with regard either to its quality or its quantity. "Any such thing is a whole in itself, the sum of many qualities or properties, and may therefore be useful in different ways. To discover these different ways and therefore the various uses to which a thing may be put, is the act of history. So, too, is the finding and fixing of socially recognised standards of measure for the quantity of useful things. The diversity of the modes of measuring commodities arises partly from the diversity of the nature of the objects to be measured, partly from convention." This is rendered by Mr. Broadhouse as follows: "To discover these various ways, and consequently the multifarious modes in which an object may be of use, is a work of time. So, consequently, is the finding of the social measure for the quantity of useful things. The diversity in the bulk of commodities arises partly from the different nature," etc. With Marx, the finding out of the various utilities of things constitutes an essential part of historic progress; with Mr. Broadhouse, it is merely a work of time. With Marx the same qualification applies to the establishment of recognised common standards of measure. With Mr. B., another "work of time" consists in the "finding of the social measure for the quantity of useful things," about which sort of measure Marx certainly never troubled himself. And then he winds up by mistaking Masse (measures) for Masse (bulk), and thereby saddling Marx with one of the finest crabs that was ever caught. Further on, Marx says: "Use-values form the material out of which wealth is made up, whatever may be the social form of that wealth" (the specific form of appropriation by which it is held and distributed). Mr. Broadhouse has: "Use values constitute the actual basis of wealth which is always their social form" which is either a pretentious platitude or sheer nonsense. The second aspect under which a commodity presents itself, is its exchange-value. That all commodities are exchangeable, in certain varying proportions, one against the other, that they have exchange-values, this fact implies that they contain something which is common to all of them. I pass over the slovenly way in which Mr. Broadhouse here reproduces one of the most delicate analyses in Marx's book, and at once proceed to the passage where Marx says: "This something common to all commodities cannot be a geometrical, physical, chemical or other natural property. In fact their material properties come into consideration only in so far as they make them useful, that is, in so far as they turn them into use-values." And he continues: "But it is the very act of making abstraction from their use-values which evidently is the characteristic point of the exchange-relation of commodities. Within this relation, one use-value is equivalent to any other, so long as it is provided in sufficient proportion." Now Mr. Broadhouse: "But on the other hand, it is precisely these Use-values in the abstract which apparently characterise the exchange-ratio of the commodities. In itself, one Use-value is worth just as much as another if it exists in the same proportion." Thus, leaving minor mistakes aside, Mr. Broadhouse makes Marx say the very reverse of what he does say. With Marx, the characteristic of the exchange-relation of commodities is the fact, that total abstraction is made of their use-values, that they are considered as having no use-values at all. His interpreter makes him say, that the characteristic of the exchange ratio (of which there is no question here) is precisely their use-value, only taken "in the abstract"! And then, a few lines further on, he gives the sentence of Marx: "As Use-values, commodities can only be of different quality, as exchange-values they can only be of different quantity, containing not an atom of Use-value," neither abstract nor concrete. We may well ask: "Understandest thou what thou readest?" To this question it becomes impossible to answer in the affirmative, when we find Mr. Broadhouse repeating the same misconception over and over again. After the sentence just quoted, Marx continues: "Now, if we leave out of consideration" (that is, make abstraction from) "the use-values of the commodities, there remains to them but one property: that of being the products of labour. But even this product of labour has already undergone a change in our hands. If we make abstraction from its use-value, we also make abstraction from the bodily components and forms which make it into a use-value." This is Englished by Mr. Broadhouse as follows: "If we separate Use-values from the actual material of the commodities, there remains" (where? with the use-values or with the actual material?) "one property only, that of the product of labour. But the product of labour is already transmuted in our hands. If we abstract from it its use-value, we abstract also the stamina and form which constitute its use-value." Again, Marx: "In the exchange-relation of commodities, their exchange-value presented itself to us as something perfectly independent of their use-values. Now, if we actually make abstraction from the use-value of the products of labour, we arrive at their value, as previously determined by us." This is made by Mr. Broadhouse to sound as follows: "In the exchange-ratio of commodities their exchange-value appears to us as something altogether independent of their use-value. If we now in effect abstract the use-value from the labour-products, we have their value as it is then determined." There is no doubt of it. Mr. Broadhouse has never heard of any other acts and modes of abstraction but bodily ones, such as the abstraction of money from a till or a safe. To identify abstraction and subtraction, will, however, never do for a translator of Marx. Another specimen of the turning of German sense into English nonsense. One of the finest researches of Marx is that revealing the duplex character of labour. Labour, considered as a producer of use-value, is of a different character, has different qualifications from the same labour, when considered as a producer of value. The one is labour of a specified kind, spinning, weaving, ploughing, etc.; the other is the general character of human productive activity, common to spinning, weaving, ploughing, etc., which comprises them all under the one common term, labour. The one is labour in the concrete, the other is labour in the abstract. The one is technical labour, the other is economical labour. In short for the English language has terms for both the one is work, as distinct from labour; the other is labour, as distinct from work. After this analysis, Marx continues: "Originally a commodity presented itself to us as something duplex: Use-value and Exchange-value. Further on we saw that labour, too, as far as it is expressed in value, does no longer possess the same characteristics which belong to it in its capacity as a creator of use-value." Mr. Broadhouse insists on proving that he has not understood a word of Marx's analysis, and translates the above passage as follows: "We saw the commodity at first as a compound of Use-value and Exchange-value. Then we saw that labour, so far as it is expressed in value, only possesses that character so far as it is a generator of use-value." When Marx says: White, Mr. Broadhouse sees no reason why he should not translate: Black. But enough of this. Let us turn to something more amusing. Marx says: "In civil society, the fictio juris prevails that everybody, in his capacity as a buyer of commodities, possesses an encyclopaedical knowledge of all such commodities." Now, although the expression, Civil Society, is thoroughly English, and Ferguson's "History of Civil Society" is more than a hundred years old, this term is too much for Mr. Broadhouse. He renders it "amongst ordinary people," and thus turns the sentence into nonsense. For it is exactly "ordinary people who are constantly grumbling at being cheated by retailers, etc., in consequence of their ignorance of the nature and values of the commodities they have to buy. The production (Herstellung) of a Use-value is rendered by "the establishing of a Use-value." When Marx says "If we succeed in transforming, with little labor, coal into diamonds, their value may fall below that of bricks," Mr. Broadhouse, apparently not aware that diamond is an allotropic form of carbon, turns coal into coke. Similarly he transmutes the "total yield of the Brazilian diamond mines" into "the entire profits of the whole yield." "The primitive communities of India" in his hands become "venerable communities." Marx says: "In the use-value of a commodity is contained" (steckt, which had better be translated: For the production of the use-value of a commodity there has been spent) "a certain productive activity, adapted to the peculiar purpose, or a certain useful labour." Mr. Broadhouse must say: "In the use-value of a commodity is contained a certain quantity of productive power or useful labour," thus turning not only quality into quantity, but productive activity which has been spent, into productive power which is to be spent. But enough. I could give tenfold this number of instances, to show that Mr. Broadhouse is in every respect not a fit and proper man to translate Marx, and especially so because he seems perfectly ignorant of what is really conscientious scientific work. From the above it will be evident that "Das Kapital" is not a book the translation of which can be done by contract. The work of translating it is in excellent hands, but the translators cannot devote all their time to it. This is the reason of the delay. But while the precise time of publication cannot as yet be stated, we may safely say that the English edition will be in the hands of the public in the course of next year.

How Not To Translate Marx by Frederick Engels 1885

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1885/11/translation-marx.htm

Dear Madam: I herewith return Mr. Putnam s letter of course it would be a splendid success if we could secure publication by that firm but I am afraid Mr. Putnam will stick to his objections, the great strength of which, from a publisher s standpoint, I fully recognize. Perhaps the fact that a new German edition of my work is in actual preparation may shake him a little. My friends in Germany say that the book is important to them just now because it describes a state of things which is almost exactly reproduced at the present moment in Germany; and as the development of manufacturing industry, steam and machinery, and their social outcrop in the creation of a proletariat, in America corresponds at the present moment as nearly as possible to the English status of 1844 (though your go-ahead people are sure to outstrip the old world in the next 15-20 years altogether), the comparison of industrial England of 1841 with industrial America of 1885 might have its interest too. Of course in the new preface to the English translation I shall refer as fully as space will permit to the change in the condition of the British working class which has taken place in the interval; to the improved position of a more or less privileged minority, to the certainly not alleviated misery of the great body, and especially to the impending change for the worse which must necessarily follow the breakdown of the industrial monopoly of England in consequence of the increasing competition, in the markets of the world, of Continental Europe and especially of America.

Letters: Marx-Engels Correspondence 1885

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1885/letters/85_02_10.htm

I still owe you a reply to your letter of 14 February. The delay, certainly not to be ascribed to laziness on my part, was due to the following circumstances. You asked for my judgment of Plekhanov's book, Nashi Raznoglassiya [Our Differences]. To deliver this I should have to read the book, and I can read Russian fairly easily when I have occupied myself with it for a week. But there are full half-years in which this is impossible for me; then I lose practice and am obliged to learn it over again, so to speak. This has been the case with me over Our Differences. Marx's manuscripts, which I am dictating to a secretary, keep me busy the whole day; in the evening come visitors whom one cannot after all turn out; there are proofs to be read and much correspondence to be dealt with, and finally there are the translations of my Origin, etc. (Italian, Danish, etc.) which I am asked to revise and the revision of which is at times neither superfluous nor easy. Well, all these interruptions have prevented me from getting further than to page 60 of Our Differences. If I had three days to myself the thing would be finished with and I should have refreshed my knowledge of Russian as well. Meanwhile the piece of the book which I have read is enough, I think, to acquaint me more or less with the differences in question. First of all I repeat to you that I am proud to know that there is a party among the youth of Russia which frankly and without ambiguity accepts the great economic and historic theories of Marx and which has decisively broken with all the anarchist and slightly Slavophil traditions of its predecessors. And Marx himself would have been equally proud of this had he lived a little longer. It is an advance which will be of great importance for the revolutionary development of Russia. To me the historic theory of Marx is the fundamental condition of all reasoned and consistent revolutionary tactics; to discover these tactics one has only to apply the theory to the economic and political conditions of the country in question. But to do this one must know these conditions; and so far as I am concerned I know too little about the actual situation in Russia to presume myself competent to judge the details of the tactics demanded by this situation at a given moment. Moreover, the internal and intimate history of the Russian revolutionary party, especially that of the last years, is almost entirely unknown to me. My friends among the Narodovoltsy have never spoken to me about it. And this is an indispensable element towards forming one's opinion. What I know or believe about the situation in Russia impels me to the opinion that the Russians are approaching their 1789. The revolution must break out there in a given time; it may break out there any day. In these circumstances the country is like a charged mine which only needs a fuse to be laid to it. Especially since March 13. This is one of the exceptional cases where it is possible for a handful of people to make a revolution, i.e., with one small push to cause a whole system, which (to use a metaphor of Plekhanov's) is in more than labile equilibrium, to come crashing down, and thus by one action, in itself insignificant, to release uncontrollable explosive forces. Well now, if ever Blanquism the phantasy of overturning an entire society through the action of a small conspiracy had a certain justification for its existence, that is certainly in Petersburg. Once the spark has been put to the powder, once the forces have been released and national energy has been transformed from potential into kinetic energy (another favourite image of Plekhanov's and a very good one) the people who laid the spark to the mine will be swept away by the explosion, which will be a thousand times as strong as themselves and which will seek its vent where it can, according as the economic forces and resistances determine. Supposing these people imagine they can seize power, what does it matter? Provided they make the hole which will shatter the dyke, the flood itself will soon rob them of their illusions. But if by chance these illusions resulted in giving them a superior force of will, why complain of that? People who boasted that they had made a revolution have always seen the next day that they had no idea what they were doing, that the revolution made did not in the least resemble the one they would have liked to make. That is what Hegel calls the irony of history, an irony which few historic personalities escape. Look at Bismarck, the revolutionary against his will, and Gladstone who has ended in quarrelling with his adored Tsar. To me the most important thing is that the impulse should be given in Russia, that the revolution should break out. Whether this fraction or that fraction gives the signal, whether it happens under this flag or that flag matters little to me. If it were a palace conspiracy it would be swept away tomorrow. There where the position is so strained, where the revolutionary elements are accumulated to such a degree, where the economic situation of the enormous mass of the people becomes daily more impossible, where every stage of social development is represented, from the primitive commune to modern large-scale industry and high finance, and where all these contradictions are violently held together by an unexampled despotism, a despotism which is becoming more and more unbearable to the youth in whom the national worth and intelligence are united there, when 1789 has once been launched, 1793 will not be long in following. I shall now bid you farewell, dear Citizen. It is half past two at night and tomorrow I shall have no time to add anything before the mail leaves. If you prefer, write to me in Russian, but please do not forget that Russian script is something I do not get to read every day.

Letters: Marx-Engels Correspondence 1885

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1885/letters/85_04_23.htm

Dear Schl ter: ... As for the poems: The Marseillaise of the Peasant War was: Eine feste Burg ist unser Gott, and conscious of victory as the text and melody of this song are, it cannot nor need it be taken in this today. Other songs of the time are to be found in collections of folksongs, Des Knaben Wunderhorn, and the like. More may perhaps be found there. But the mercenary soldier largely pre-empted our folk poetry even at that time. Of foreign songs I know only the pretty Danish song of Herr Tidmann, which I translated in the Berlin Sozialdemokrat in 1865. There were all sorts of Chartist songs, but they aren t to be had any more. One began: Britannia s sons, though slaves you be, God your creator made you free; To all he life and freedom gave, But never, never made a slave. I don t know any others. All that has vanished, nor was this poetry worth much. In 1848 there were two songs sung to the same melody: Schleswig-Holstein, The Hecker Song: Hecker, hoch dein Name schalle An dem ganzen deutschen Rhein. Deine Grossmut, ja dein Auge Flossen schon Vertrauen ein. Hecker, der als deutscher Mann Vor der Freiheit sterben kann. I think that s enough. Then the variant: Hecker, Struve, Blenker, Zitz und Blum Bringt die deitsche Ferschte um! In general, the poetry of past revolutions (the Marseillaise always excepted) rarely has a revolutionary effect for later times because it must also reproduce the mass prejudices of the period in order to affect the masses. Hence the religious nonsense even among the Chartists ...

Letters: Marx-Engels Correspondence 1885

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1885/letters/85_05_15.htm

Dear Madam In reply to your inquiry I can only tell you that I have no right to give out information ultimately intended for publication on Marx s and my confidential collaboration in certain political works. Nor can I assume any responsibility, either in Marx s or my own name, for a French general programme on which in the nature of things we could at most have been asked our advice. However, I can tell you in confidence that the Preamble of the Programme of the Parti ouvrier of the Roanne trend originated with Marx. The French are less insistent than the Germans on limiting female labour for the reason that in France, and particularly in Paris, the work women do in factories plays only a comparatively minor role. Equal wages for equal work to either sex are, until abolished in general, demanded, as far as I know, by all Socialists. That the working woman needs special protection against capitalist exploitation because of her special physiological functions seems obvious to me. The English women who championed the formal right of members of their sex to permit themselves to be as thoroughly exploited by the capitalists as the men are mostly, directly or indirectly, interested in the capitalist exploitation of both sexes. I admit I am more interested in the health of the future generations than in the absolute formal equality of the sexes during the last years of the capitalist mode of production. It is my conviction that real equality of women and men can come true only when the exploitation of either by capital has been abolished and private housework has been transformed into a public industry.

Letters: Marx-Engels Correspondence 1885

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1885/letters/85_07_05.htm

But it will have to come in the end, all the same, and then it will make an end of the old trade unions here, let us hope. These unions have peacefully retained the craft character which clung to them from the first and which is becoming more unbearable every day. No doubt you suppose that the engineers, joiners, bricklayers, etc., will admit any worker in their branch of industry without more ado? Not at all. Whoever wants admission must be attached as an apprentice for a period of years (usually seven) to some worker belonging to the union. This was intended to keep the number of workers limited, but had otherwise no point at all except that it brought in money to the apprentice's instructor, for which he did absolutely nothing in return. This was all right up to 1848. But since then the colossal growth of industry has produced a class of workers of whom there are as many or more as there are "skilled" workers in the trade unions and who can do all that the "skilled" workers can or more, but who can never become members. These people have been regularly penalised by the craft rules of the trade unions. But do you suppose the unions ever dreamt of doing away with this silly bunk? Not in the least. I can never remember reading of a single proposal of the kind at a Trade Union Congress. The fools want to reform society to suit themselves and not to reform themselves to suit the development of society. They cling to their traditional superstition, which does them nothing but harm themselves, instead of getting quit of the rubbish and thus doubling their numbers and their power and really becoming again what at present they daily become less associations of all the workers in a trade against the capitalists. This will I think explain many things in the behaviour of these privileged workers to you. What is most necessary of all here is that masses of the official labour leaders should get into Parliament. Then things will soon go finely; they will expose themselves quickly enough. The elections in November will help a lot towards this. Ten or twelve of them are certain to get in, if their Liberal friends do not play them a trick at the last moment. The first elections under a new system are always a sort of lottery and only reveal the smallest part of the revolution they have introduced. But universal suffrage and with the absence of a peasant class and the start England had in industrialisation the new franchise here gives the workers as much power as universal suffrage would give them in Germany universal suffrage is the best lever for a proletarian movement at the present time and will prove to be so here. That is why it is so important to break up the Social Democratic Federation as quickly as possible, its leaders being nothing but careerists, adventurers and literary people. Hyndman, their head, is doing his very best in this way; he cannot wait for the clock to strike twelve, as it says in the folk song, and in his chase after successes discredits himself more every day. He is a wretched caricature of Lassalle.

Letters: Marx-Engels Correspondence 1885

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I received your two letters 6 (18) and 9 (21) August while I was in Jersey and immediately sent you the letter you desired for the Severny Vestnik. Since then I have been prevented by press of work from replying more fully to these letters as well as that of the 25 August (5 September). I had no doubt that the second volume would afford you the same pleasure as it has done to me. The developments it contains are indeed of such a superior order that the vulgar reader will not take the trouble to fathom them and to follow them out. This is actually the case in Germany where all historical science, including political economy, has fallen so low that it can scarcely fall any lower. Our Katheder-Sozialisten have never been much more, theoretically, than slightly philanthropic Vulg r konomen, and now they have sunk to the level of simple apologists of Bismarck s Staatssozialismus. To them, the second volume will always remain a sealed book. It is a fine piece of what Hegel calls die Ironie der Weltgeschichte, that German historical science, by the fact of the elevation of Germany to the position of the first European power, should be again reduced to the same vile state to which it was reduced by the deepest political degradation of Germany, after the Thirty Years War. But such is the fact. And thus, German science stares at this new volume without being able to understand it; only a wholesome fear of the consequences prevents them from criticising it in public, and so official economic literature observes a cautious silence with regard to it. The third volume will however compel them to speak out. Of that third volume, I have completed the first transcript from the original into a legible manuscript. Three-fourths of it are almost fit for publication as they are; but the last fourth, or perhaps third, will require a great deal of work: the first section (relation of Mehrwertsrate to Profitrate) and then the subsequent sections on Kredit and partly also on Grundrente; besides certain portions of almost all the other sections. For the last two months I have been compelled to attend to a good deal of other work which had been neglected by my exclusive attention to the second and third volumes. This will continue for some time yet, and then, maybe, the revision of the English translation of Volume 1, which is nearly completed, will occupy me for a month longer, but then I shall start with the third volume and carry it out to the end. Maybe it will be published in two sections, as it will contain about 1000 pages. I thank you very much for your extracts from the author s letters from 1879 to 1881. I could not read them without a sorrowful smile. Alas, we are so used to these excuses for the non-completion of the work! Whenever the state of his health made it impossible for him to go on with it, this impossibility preyed heavily upon his mind, and he was only too glad if he could only find out some theoretical excuse why the work should not then be completed. All these arguments he had at the time made use of vis- -vis de moi; they seemed to ease his conscience. After completing the third volume and selecting from the other MSs the portions fit for publication, I shall very likely try to collect such of the author s correspondence as is scientifically important, and there his letters to you rank amongst the first. When that time comes, I shall therefore avail myself of your kind offer of placing at my disposal copies of these letters. I am often in the case of forwarding to you pamphlets, etc republications of the author s and my own writings, etc, but do not know whether it would be safe to send them direct to you. I should be much obliged if you would tell me what to do. I hope our mutual friend s health is improving, notwithstanding the bad prognosis of his doctors. Any news with regard to him will always be welcome. That crisis of which the author speaks in his letter was indeed an exceptional one. The fact is it continues still, all Europe and America suffer under it to this day. The absence of the financial crash is one cause of it. But the principal cause is undoubtedly the totally changed state of the Weltmarkt. Since 1870, Germany and especially America have become England s rivals in modern industry, while most other European countries have so far developed their own manufactures as to cease to be dependent on England. The consequence has been the spreading of the process of over-production over a far larger area than when it was mainly confined to England, and has taken up to now a chronic instead of an acute character. By thus delaying the thunderstorm which formerly cleared the atmosphere every ten years, this continued chronic depression must prepare a crash of a violence and extent such as we have never known before. And the more so as the agricultural crisis of which the author speaks has also continued up to now, has been extended to almost all European countries, and must continue while the virgin chernozem of the Western American prairies remains unexhausted.

Letters: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence 1885

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1885/letters/85_11_13.htm

The novel itself reveals the origins of this shortcoming. You obviously felt a desire to take a public stand in your book, to testify to your convictions before the entire world. This has now been done; it is a stage you have passed through and need not repeat in this form. I am by no means opposed to partisan poetry as such. Both Aeschylus, the father of tragedy, and Aristophanes, the father of comedy, were highly partisan poets, Dante and Cervantes were so no less, and the best thing that can be said about Schiller s Kabale und Liebe is that it represents the first German political problem drama. The modern Russians and Norwegians, who produce excellent novels, all write with a purpose. I think however that the purpose must become manifest from the situation and the action themselves without being expressly pointed out and that the author does not have to serve the reader on a platter the future historical resolution of the social conflicts which he describes. To this must be added that under, our conditions novels are mostly addressed to readers from bourgeois circles, i.e., circles which are not directly ours. Thus the socialist problem novel in my opinion fully carries out its mission if by a faithful portrayal of the real conditions it dispels the dominant conventional illusions concerning them, shakes the optimism of the bourgeois world, and inevitably instils doubt as to the eternal validity of that which exists, without itself offering a direct solution of the problem involved, even without at times ostensibly taking sides. Here your exact knowledge and admirably fresh and lifelike presentation of both the Austrian peasants and Vienna society find ample material, and in Stefan you have demonstrated that you are capable of treating your characters with the fine irony which attests to the author s dominion over the beings he has created. But now I must finish, or I shall bore you to tears. Everything here is as before. Karl and his wife [Karl and Louise Kautsky] are studying physiology in Aveling s evening classes, and are also working diligently; I am likewise engrossed in work; Lenchen, Pumps and her husband are going to the theatre this evening to see a sensational play, and meanwhile old Europe is preparing to set itself in motion again and not before time, perhaps. I simply hope that it gives me time to finish the third volume of Capital, then it can begin! In cordial friendship and with sincere respect I am Yours,

Letters: Marx-Engels Correspondence 1885

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1885/letters/85_11_26.htm

The elections here are proceeding very nicely. It is the first time that the Irish in England have voted en masse for one side, and in fact for the Tories. They have thus shown the Liberals the extent to which they can decide the issue even in England. The 80 to 85 Home Rulers Liverpool, too, has elected one who occupy the same position here as the Centre Party does in the Reichstag can wreck any government. Parnell must now show what he really is. Incidentally, a victory has also been won by the new Manchester School , that is, the theory of aggressive tariffs, although it is here even more absurd than in Germany, but after eight years of commercial stagnation the idea has taken possession of the young manufacturers. Then there is Gladstone s opportunist weakness and the clumsy manner of Chamberlain, who first throws his weight about and then draws in his horns; this has called forth the cry: the Church in danger! Finally, Gladstone s lamentable foreign policy. The Liberals profess to believe that the new county voters will vote for them. There is, indeed, no telling how these voters will act, but in order to obtain an absolute majority the Liberals would have to win 180 of the 300 still outstanding districts, and that will hardly happen. Parnell will almost certainly wield dictatorial powers in Great Britain and Ireland.

Letters: Marx-Engels Correspondence 1885. Ireland

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1885/letters/85_12_01.htm

The elections in France placed the Radicals next in the running for control, thereby improving our prospects a good deal, too. The elections here have temporarily made the Irish masters of England and Scotland, for not one of the two parties can rule without them. Though the results in nearly 100 seats are not yet known they will change little. Thus the Irish problem will at last be settled, if not immediately then in the near future, and then the way will have been cleared there, too. At the same time some eight to ten workers have been elected some are bought by the bourgeoisie, others are strict trade-unionists. They will probably make fools of themselves and hence greatly advance the formation of an independent labour party by destroying the traditional self-deception of the workers. Here history moves slowly, but it moves.

Letters: Marx-Engels Correspondence 1885. Ireland

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It was in truth a work of genius. Immediately after the event that struck the whole political world like a thunderbolt from the blue, that was condemned by some with loud cries of moral indignation and accepted by others as salvation from the revolution and as punishment for its errors, but was only wondered at by all and understood by none-immediately after this event Marx came out with a concise, epigrammatic exposition that laid bare the whole course of French history since the February days in its inner interconnection, reduced the miracle of December 2 to a natural, necessary result of this interconnection and in so doing did not even need to treat the hero of the coup d' tat otherwise than with the contempt he so well deserved. And the picture was drawn with such a master hand that every fresh disclosure since made has only provided fresh proofs of how faithfully it reflected reality. This eminent understanding of the living history of the day, this clear-sighted appreciation of events at the moment of happening, is indeed without parallel. But for this, Marx s thorough knowledge of French history was needed. France is the land where, more than anywhere else, the historical class struggles were each time fought out to a decision, and where, consequently, the changing political forms within which they move and in which their results are summarised have been stamped in the sharpest outlines. The centre of feudalism in the Middle Ages, the model country of unified monarchy, resting on estates, since the Renaissance, France demolished feudalism in the Great Revolution and established the unalloyed rule of the bourgeoisie in a classical purity unequalled by any other European land. And the struggle of the upward-striving proletariat against the ruling bourgeoisie appeared here in an acute form unknown elsewhere. This was the reason why Marx not only studied the past history of France with particular predilection, but also followed her current history in every detail, stored up the material for future use and, consequently, events never took him by surprise. In addition, however, there was still another circumstance. It was precisely Marx who had first discovered the great law of motion of history, the law according to which all historical struggles, whether they proceed in the political, religious, philosophical or some other ideological domain, are in fact only the more or less clear expression of struggles of social classes, and that the existence and thereby the collisions, too, between these classes are in turn conditioned by the degree of development of their economic position, by the mode of their production and of their exchange determined by it. This law, which has the same significance for history as the law of the transformation of energy has for natural science - this law gave him here, too, the key to an understanding of the history of the Second French Republic. He put his law to the test on these historical events, and even after thirty-three years we must still say that it has stood the test brilliantly.

Preface to The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Engels 1885

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1885/prefaces/18th-brumaire.htm

I have contented myself with reproducing these manuscripts as literally as possible, changing the style only in places where Marx would have changed it himself and interpolating explanatory sentences or connecting statements only where this was absolutely necessary, and where, besides, the meaning was clear beyond any doubt. Sentences whose interpretation was susceptible of the slightest doubt were preferably copied word for word. The passages which I have remodelled or interpolated cover barely ten pages in print and concern only matters of form. The mere enumeration of the manuscript material left by Marx for Book II proves the unparalleled conscientiousness and strict self-criticism with which he endeavoured to elaborate his great economic discoveries to the point of utmost completion before he published them. This self-criticism rarely permitted him to adapt his presentation of the subject, in content as well as in form, to his ever widening horizon, the result of incessant study. The above material consists of the following: First, a manuscript entitled Zur Kritik der politischen Oekonomie, containing 1,472 quarto pages in 23 notebooks, written in August 1861 to June 1863. It is the continuation of a work of the same title, the first part of which appeared in Berlin, in 1859. It treats, on pages 1-220 (Notebooks I-V) and again on pages 1,159-1,472 (Notebooks XIX-XXIII), of the subjects examined in Book I of Capital, from the transformation of money into capital to the end, and is the first extant draft there of. Pages 973-1,158 (Notebooks XVI-XVIII) deal with capital and profit, rate of profit, merchant s capital and money-capital, that is to say with subjects which later were developed in the manuscript for Book III. The themes treated in Book II and very many of those which are treated later, in Book III, are not yet arranged separately. They are treated in passing, to be specific, in the section which makes up the main body of the manuscript, viz., pages 220-972 (Notebooks VI-XV), entitled Theories of Surplus-Value. This section contains a detailed critical history of the pith and marrow of Political Economy, the theory of surplus-value and develops parallel with it, in polemics against predecessors, most of the points later investigated separately and in their logical connection in the manuscript for Books II and III. After eliminating the numerous passages covered by Books II and III, I intend to publish the critical part of this manuscript as Capital, Book IV. This manuscript, valuable though it is, could be used only very little in the present edition of Book II. The manuscript chronologically following next is that of Book III. It was written, at least the greater part of it, in 1864 and 1865. Only after this manuscript had been completed in its essential parts did Marx undertake the elaboration of Book I which was published in 1867. I am now getting this manuscript of Book III in shape for press. The following period after the publication of Book I is represented by a collection of four folio manuscripts for Book II, numbered I-IV by Marx himself. Manuscript I (150 pages), presumably written in 1865 or 1867, is the first separate, but more or less fragmentary, elaboration of Book II as now arranged. Here too nothing could be used. Manuscript III is partly a compilation of quotations and references to the notebooks containing Marx s extracts, most of them relating to Part I of Book II, partly elaborations of particular points, especially a critique of Adam Smith s propositions on fixed and circulating capital and the source of profit; furthermore an exposition of the relation of the rate of surplus-value to the rate of profit, which belongs in Book III. Little that was new could be garnered from the references, while the elaborations for volumes II and III were superseded by subsequent revisions and had also to be discarded for the greater part. Manuscript IV is an elaboration, ready for press, of Part I and the first chapters of Part II of Book II, and has been used where suitable. Although it was found that this manuscript had been written earlier than Manuscript II, yet, being far more finished in form, it could be used with advantage for the corresponding part of this book. All that was needed was a few addenda from Manuscript II. The latter is the only somewhat complete elaboration of Book II and dates from the year 1870. The notes for the final editing, which I shall mention immediately, say explicitly: The second elaboration must be used as the basis. There was another intermission after 1870, due mainly to Marx s ill health. Marx employed this time in his customary way, by studying agronomics, rural relations in America and, especially, Russia, the money-market and banking, and finally natural sciences such as geology and physiology. Independent mathematical studies also figure prominently in the numerous extract notebooks of this period. In the beginning of 1877 he had recovered sufficiently to resume his main work. Dating back to the end of March 1877 there are references and notes from the above-named four manuscripts intended as the basis of a new elaboration of Book II, the beginning of which is represented by Manuscript V (56 folio pages). It comprises the first four chapters and is still little worked out. Essential points are treated in footnotes. The material is rather collected than sifted, but it is the last complete presentation of this, the most important section of Part I. A first attempt to prepare from it a manuscript ready for press was made in Manuscript VI (after October 1877 and before July 1878), embracing only 17 quarto pages, the greater part of the first chapter. A second and last attempt was made in Manuscript VII, July 2, 1878, only 7 folio pages. About this time Marx seems to have realised that be would never be able to finish the elaboration of the second and third books in a manner satisfactory to himself unless a complete revolution in his health took place. Indeed, manuscripts V-VIII show far too frequent traces of an intense struggle against depressing ill health. The most difficult bit of Part I had been worked over in Manuscript V. The remainder of Part I and all of Part II, with the exception of Chapter XVII, presented no great theoretical difficulties. But Part III, dealing with the reproduction and circulation of social capital, seemed to him to be very much in need of revision; for Manuscript II had first treated reproduction without taking into consideration money-circulation, which is instrumental in effecting it, and then gone over the same question again, but with money-circulation taken into account. This was to be eliminated and the whole part to be reconstructed in such a way as to conform to the author s enlarged horizon. Thus Manuscript VIII came into existence, a notebook containing only 70 quarto pages. But the vast amount of matter Marx was able to compress into this space is clearly demonstrated on comparing that manuscript with Part III, in print, after leaving out the pieces inserted from Manuscript II. This manuscript is likewise merely a preliminary treatment of the subject, its main object having been to ascertain and develop the points of view newly acquired in comparison with Manuscript II, with those points ignored about which there was nothing new to say. An essential portion of Chapter XVII, Part II, which anyhow is more or less relevant to Part III, was once more reworked and expanded. The logical sequence is frequently interrupted, the treatment of the subject gappy in places and very fragmentary, especially the conclusion. But what Marx intended to say on the subject is said there, somehow or other. This is the material for Book II, out of which I was supposed to make something, as Marx remarked to his daughter Eleanor shortly before his death. I have construed this task in its narrowest meaning. So far as this was at all possible, I have confined my work to the mere selection of a text from the available variants. I always based my work on the last available edited manuscript, comparing this with the preceding ones. Only the first and third parts offered any real difficulties, i.e., of more than a mere technical nature, and these were indeed considerable. I have endeavoured to solve them exclusively in the spirit of the author. I have translated quotations in the text whenever they are cited in confirmation of facts or when, as in passages from Adam Smith, the original is available to everyone who wants to go thoroughly into the matter. This was impossible only in Chapter X, because there it is precisely the English text that is criticised. The quotations from Book I are paged according to its second edition, the last one to appear in Marx s lifetime. For Book III, only the following materials are available, apart from the first elaboration in manuscript form of Zur Kritik, from the above-mentioned parts of Manuscript III, and from a few occasional short notes scattered through various extract notebooks: The folio manuscript of 1864-65, referred to previously, which is about as fully worked out as Manuscript II of Book II; furthermore, a notebook dated 1875: The Relation of the Rate of Surplus-Value to the Rate of Profit, which treats the subject mathematically (in equations). The preparation of this Book for publication is proceeding rapidly. So far as I am able to judge up to now, it will present mainly technical difficulties, with the exception of a few but very important sections. I consider this an opportune place to refute a certain charge which has been raised against Marx, first in only whispers, sporadically, but more recently, after his death, proclaimed an established fact by German Socialists of the Chair and of the State and by their hangers-on. It is claimed that Marx plagiarised the work of Rodbertus. I have already stated elsewhere what was most urgent in this regard, but not until now have I been able to adduce conclusive proof. As far as I know this charge was made for the first time in R. Meyer s Emancipationskampf des vierten Standes, p. 43: I may well assume, until further evidence is produced, that the whole proof of this assertion consists in Rodbertus having assured Herr Meyer that this was so. In 1879 Rodbertus himself appears on the scene and writes the following to J. Zeller (Zeitschrift f r die gesammte Staatswissenschaft, T bingen, 1879, p. 219), with reference to his work Zur Erkenntniss unsrer staatswirtschaftlichen Zust nde, 1842: The posthumous publisher of Rodbertus s works, Th. Kozak, repeats his insinuation without further ceremony. (Das Kapital von Rodbertus. Berlin, 1884, Introduction, p. XV.) Finally in the Briefe und Sozialpolitische Aufs tze von Dr. Rodbertus-Jagetzow, published by R. Meyer in 1881, Rodbertus says point-blank: And in another place, Rodbertus s claim assumes a more definite form: Marx had never heard anything about any of these charges of plagiarism. In his copy of the Emancipationskampf only that part had been cut open which related to the International. The remaining pages were not opened until I cut them myself after his death. He never looked at the T bingen Zeitschrift. The Briefe, etc., to R. Meyer likewise remained unknown to him, and I did not learn of the passage referring to the robbery until Dr. Meyer himself was good enough to call my attention to it in 1884. However, Marx was familiar with letter No. 48. Dr. Meyer had been so kind as to present the original to the youngest daughter of Marx. When some of the mysterious whispering about the secret source of his criticism having to be sought in Rodbertus reached the ear of Marx, he showed me that letter with the remark that here he had at last authentic information as to what Rodbertus himself claimed; if that was all Rodbertus asserted he, Marx, had no objection, and he could well afford to let Rodbertus enjoy the pleasure of considering his own version the briefer and clearer one. In fact, Marx considered the matter settled by this letter of Rodbertus. He could so all the more since I know for certain that he was not in the least acquainted with the literary activity of Rodbertus until about 1859, when his own critique of Political Economy had been completed, not only in its fundamental outlines, but also in its more important details. Marx began his economic studies in Paris, in 1843, starting with the great Englishmen and Frenchmen. Of German economists he knew only Rau and List, and he did not want any more of them. Neither Marx nor I heard a word of Rodbertus s existence until we had to criticise, in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, 1848, the speeches he made as Berlin Deputy and his actions as Minister. We were both so ignorant that we had to ask the Rhenish deputies who this Rodbertus was that had become a Minister so suddenly. But these deputies too could not tell us anything about the economic writings of Rodbertus. That on the other hand Marx had known very well already at that time, without the help of Rodbertus, not only whence but also how the surplus-value of the capitalist came into existence is proved by his Poverty of Philosophy, 1847, and by his lectures on wage-labour and capital, delivered in Brussels the same year and published in Nos. 264-69 of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, in 1849. It was only in 1859, through Lassalle, that Marx learned of the existence of a certain economist named Rodbertus and thereupon Marx looked up the third social letter in the British Museum. These were the actual circumstances. And now let us see what there is to the content, of which Marx is charged with robbing Rodbertus. Says Rodbertus: This, then, is the crux of the matter: The theory of surplus-value. And indeed, it would be difficult to say what else there is in Marx that Rodbertus might claim as his property. Thus Rodbertus declares here he is the real originator of the theory of surplus-value and that Marx robbed him of it. And what has the third social letter to say in regard to the origin of surplus-value? Simply this: That rent, his term which lumps together ground-rent and profit, does not arise from an addition of value to the value of a commodity, but and if labour is sufficiently productive We are not informed however what sort of a natural exchange-value of a product it is that leaves nothing for the replacing of capital, consequently, for the replacement of raw material and the wear and tear of tools. It is our good fortune to be able to state what impression was produced on Marx by this stupendous discovery of Rodbertus. In the manuscript Zur Kritik, notebook X, pp. 445 et seqq. we find a Digression. Herr Rodbertus. A New Ground-Rent Theory. This is the only point of view from which Marx there looks upon the third social letter. The Rodbertian theory of surplus-value in general is dismissed with the ironical remark: Mr. Rodbertus first analyses the slate of affairs in a country where property in land and property in capital are not separated and then arrives at the important conclusion that rent (by which he means the entire surplus-value) is only equal to the unpaid labour or to the quantity of products in which this labour is expressed. Capitalistic man has been producing surplus-value for several hundred years and has gradually arrived at the point of pondering over its origin. The view first propounded grew directly out of commercial practice: surplus-value arises out of an addition to the value of the product. This idea was current among the mercantilists. But James Steuart already realised that in that case the one would necessarily lose what the other would gain. Nevertheless, this view persisted for a long time afterwards, especially among the Socialists. But it was thrust out of classical science by Adam Smith. He says in the Wealth of Nations, Vol. I, Ch. VI: Marx comments on this passage in the above-named manuscript Zur Kritik, etc., p. 253: Thus Adam Smith conceives surplus-value that is, surplus-labour, the excess of labour performed and realised in the commodity over and above the paid labour, the labour which has received its equivalent in the wages as the general category, of which profit in the strict sense and rent of land are merely branches. Adam Smith says furthermore (Vol. I, Ch. VIII): Marx s comment (Manuscript, p. 256): Here therefore Adam Smith in plain terms describes rent and profit on capital as mere deductions from the workman s product or the value of his product, which is equal to the quantity of labour added by him to the material. This deduction however, as Adam Smith has himself previously explained, can only consist of that part of the labour which the workman adds to the materials, over and above the quantity of labour which only pays his wages, or which only provides an equivalent for his wages; that is, the surplus-labour, the unpaid part of his labour. Thus even Adam Smith knew the source of the surplus-value of the capitalist, and furthermore also of that of the landlord. Marx acknowledged this as early as 1861, while Rodbertus and the swarming mass of his admirers, who grew like mushrooms under the warm summer showers of state socialism, seem to have forgotten all about that. Nevertheless, Marx continues, he [Adam Smith] does not distinguish surplus-value as such as a category on its own, distinct from the specific forms it assumes in profit and rent. This is the source of much error and inadequacy in his inquiry, and of even more in the work of Ricardo. This statement fits Rodbertus to a T. His rent is simply the sum of ground-rent and profit. He builds up an entirely erroneous theory of ground-rent, and he accepts profit without any examination of it, just as he finds it among his predecessors. Marx s surplus-value, on the contrary, represents the general form of the sum of values appropriated without any equivalent by the owners of the means of production, and this form splits into the distinct, converted forms of profit and ground-rent in accordance with very peculiar laws which Marx was the first to discover. These laws will be expounded in Book III. We shall see there that many intermediate links are required to arrive from an understanding of surplus-value in general at an understanding of its transformation into profit and ground-rent; in other words at an understanding of the laws of the distribution of surplus-value within the capitalist class. Ricardo goes considerably further than Adam Smith. He bases his conception of surplus-value on a new theory of value contained in embryo in Adam Smith, but generally forgotten when it comes to applying it. This theory of value became the starting-point of all subsequent economic science. From the determination of the value of commodities by the quantity of labour embodied in them he derives the distribution, between the labourers and capitalists, of the quantity of value added by labour to the raw materials, and the division of this value into wages and profit (i.e., here surplus-value). He shows that the value of the commodities remains the same no matter what may be the proportion of these two parts, a law which he holds has but few exceptions. He even establishes a few fundamental laws, although couched in too general terms, on the mutual relations of wages and surplus-value (taken in the form of profit) (Marx, Das Kapital, Buch I, Kap. XV, A), and shows that ground-rent is a surplus over and above profit, which under certain circumstances does not accrue. In none of these points did Rodbertus go beyond Ricardo. He either remained wholly unfamiliar with the internal contradictions of the Ricardian theory which caused the downfall of that school, or they only misled him into raising utopian demands (his Zur Erkenntnis, etc., p. 130) instead of inducing him to find economic solutions. But the Ricardian theory of value and surplus-value did not have to wait for Rodbertus s Zur Erkenntnis in order to be utilised for socialist purposes. On page 609 of the first volume (Das Kapital, 2nd ed.) we find the following quotation, The possessors of surplus-produce or capital, taken from a pamphlet entitled The Source and Remedy of the National Difficulties. A Letter to Lord John Russell, London, 1821. In this pamphlet of 40 pages, the importance of which should have been noted if only on account of the one expression surplus-produce or capital, and which Marx saved from falling into oblivion, we read the following statements: But how the labourer lives and hence how much the surplus-labour appropriated by the capitalist can amount to are very relative things. Here we have exactly the same idea of rent as Rodbertus has, except that interest is used instead of rent. Marx makes the following comment (manuscript Zur Kritik, p. 852): This little known pamphlet published at a time when the incredible cobbler MacCulloch began to be talked about represents an essential advance over Ricardo. It directly designates surplus-value, or profit in the language of Ricardo (often also surplus-produce), or interest, as the author of this pamphlet calls it, as surplus-labour, the labour which the labourer performs gratuitously, which he performs in excess of that quantity of labour by which the value of his labour-power is replaced, i.e., an equivalent of his wages is produced. It was no more important to reduce value to labour than to reduce surplus-value, represented by a surplus-produce, to surplus-labour. This has already been stated by Adam Smith and forms a main factor in Ricardo s analysis. But they did not say so nor fix it anywhere in absolute form. We read furthermore, on page 859 of the manuscript: Moreover, the author is a prisoner of the economic categories as they have come down to him. Just as the confounding of surplus-value and profit misleads Ricardo into unpleasant contradictions, so this author fares no better by baptising surplus-value with the name of interest of capital. True, he advances beyond Ricardo by having been the first to reduce all surplus-value to surplus-labour. Furthermore, while calling surplus-value interest of capital, he emphasises at the same time that by this term he means the general form of surplus-labour as distinguished from its special forms: rent, interest on money, and profit of enterprise. And yet he picks the name of one of these special forms, interest, for the general form. And this sufficed to cause his relapse into economic slang. This last passage fits Rodbertus like a glove. He, too, is a prisoner of the economic categories as they have come down to him. He, too, applies to surplus-value the name of one of its converted sub-forms, rent, and makes it quite indefinite at that. The result of these two mistakes is that he relapses into economic slang, that he does not follow up his advance over Ricardo critically, and that instead he is misled into using his unfinished theory, even before it got rid of its egg-shell, as the basis for a utopia with which, as always, he comes too late. The pamphlet appeared in 1821 and anticipated completely Rodbertus s rent of 1842. Our pamphlet is but the farthest outpost of an entire literature which in the twenties turned the Ricardian theory of value and surplus-value against capitalist production in the interest of the proletariat, fought the bourgeoisie with its own weapons. The entire communism of Owen, so far as it engages in polemics on economic questions, is based on Ricardo. Apart from him, there are still numerous other writers, some of whom Marx quoted as early as 1847 against Proudhon (Mis re de la Philosophie, p. 49), such as Edmonds, Thompson, Hodgskin, etc., etc., and four more pages of etceteras. I select the following at random from among this multitude of writings: An Inquiry into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth, Most Conducive to Human Happiness, by William Thompson; a new edition, London, 1850. This work, written in 1822, first appeared in 1824. Here likewise the wealth appropriated by the non-producing classes is described everywhere as a deduction from the product of the labourer and rather strong words are used. The author says: I must admit that I do not write these lines without a certain mortification. I will not make so much of the fact that the anti-capitalist literature of England of the twenties and thirties is so totally unknown in Germany, in spite of Marx s direct references to it even in his Poverty of Philosophy, and his repeated quotations from it, as for instance the pamphlet of 1821, Ravenstone, Hodgskin, etc., in Volume I of Capital. But it is proof of the grave deterioration of official Political Economy that not only the Literatus vulgaris, who clings desperately to the coattails of Rodbertus and really has not learned anything, but also the officially and ceremoniously installed professor, who boasts of his erudition, has forgotten his classical Political Economy to such an extent that he seriously charges Marx with having purloined things from Rodbertus which may be found even in Adam Smith and Ricardo. But what is there new in Marx s utterances on surplus-value? How is it that Marx s theory of surplus-value struck home like a thunderbolt out of a clear sky, and that in all civilised countries, while the theories of all his socialist predecessors, Rodbertus included, vanished without having produced any effect? The history of chemistry offers an illustration which explains this. We know that late in the past century the phlogistic theory still prevailed. It assumed that combustion consisted essentially in this: that a certain hypothetical substance, an absolute combustible named phlogiston, separated from the burning body. This theory sufficed to explain most of the chemical phenomena then known, although it had to be considerably strained in some cases. But in 1774 Priestley produced a certain kind of air He called it dephlogisticated air. Shortly after him Scheele obtained the same kind of air in Sweden and demonstrated its existence in the atmosphere. He also found that this kind of air disappeared whenever some body was burned in it or in ordinary air and therefore he called it fire-air. Priestley and Scheele had produced oxygen without knowing what they had laid their hands on. They remained prisoners of the phlogistic categories as they came down to them. The element which was destined to upset all phlogistic views and to revolutionise chemistry remained barren in their hands. But Priestley had immediately communicated his discovery to Lavoisier in Paris, and Lavoisier, by means of this discovery, now analysed the entire phlogistic chemistry and came to the conclusion that this new kind of air was a new chemical element, and that combustion was not a case of the mysterious phlogiston departing from the burning body, but of this new element combining with that body. Thus he was the first to place all chemistry, which in its phlogistic form had stood on its head, squarely on its feet. And although he did not produce oxygen simultaneously and independently of the other two, as he claimed later on, he nevertheless is the real discoverer of oxygen vis- -vis the others who had only produced it without knowing what they had produced. Marx stands in the same relation to his predecessors in the theory of surplus-value as Lavoisier stood to Priestley and Scheele. The existence of that part of the value of products which we now call surplus-value had been ascertained long before Marx. It had also been stated with more or less precision what it consisted of, namely, of the product of the labour for which its appropriator had not given any equivalent. But one did not get any further. Some the classical bourgeois economists investigated at most the proportion in which the product of labour was divided between the labourer and the owner of the means of production. Others the Socialists found that this division was unjust and looked for utopian means of abolishing this injustice. They all remained prisoners of the economic categories as they had come down to them. Now Marx appeared upon the scene. And he took a view directly opposite to that of all his predecessors. What they had regarded as a solution, he considered but a problem. He saw that he had to deal neither with dephlogisticated air nor with fire-air, but with oxygen that here it was not simply a matter of stating an economic fact or of pointing out the conflict between this fact and eternal justice and true morality, but of explaining a fact which was destined to revolutionise all economics, and which offered to him who knew how to use it the key to an understanding of all capitalist production. With this fact as his starting-point he examined all the economic categories which he found at hand, just as Lavoisier proceeding from oxygen had examined the categories of phlogistic chemistry which he found at hand. In order to understand what surplus-value was, Marx had to find out what value was. He had to criticise above all the Ricardian theory of value. Hence he analysed labour s value-producing property and was the first to ascertain what labour it was that produced value, and why and how it did so. He found that value was nothing but congealed labour of this kind, and this is a point which Rodbertus never grasped to his dying day. Marx then investigated the relation of commodities to money and demonstrated how and why, thanks to the property of value immanent in commodities, commodities and commodity-exchange must engender the opposition of commodity and money. His theory of money, founded on this basis, is the first exhaustive one and has been tacitly accepted everywhere. He analysed the transformation of money into capital and demonstrated that this transformation is based on the purchase and sale of labour-power. By substituting labour-power, the value-producing property, for labour he solved with one stroke one of the difficulties which brought about the downfall of the Ricardian school, viz., the impossibility of harmonising the mutual exchange of capital and labour with the Ricardian law that value is determined by labour. By establishing the distinction of capital into constant and variable he was enabled to trace the real course of the process of the formation of surplus-value in its minutest details and thus to explain it, a feat which none of his predecessors had accomplished. Consequently he established a distinction inside of capital itself with which neither Rodbertus nor the bourgeois economists knew in the least what to do, but which furnishes the key for the solution of the most complicated economic problems, as is strikingly proved again by Book II and will be proved still more by Book III. He analysed surplus-value further and found its two forms, absolute and relative surplus-value. And he showed that they had played a different, and each time a decisive role, in the historical development of capitalist production. On the basis of this surplus-value he developed the first rational theory of wages we have, and for the first time drew up an outline of the history of capitalist accumulation and an exposition of its historical tendency. And Rodbertus? After he has read all that, he like the tendentious economist he always is regards it as an assault on society, finds that he himself has said much more briefly and clearly what surplus-value evolves from, and finally declares that all this does indeed apply to the present form of capital, that is to say to capital as it exists historically, but not to the conception of capital, namely the utopian idea which Herr Rodbertus has of capital. Just like old Priestly, who swore by phlogiston to the end of his days and refused to have anything to do with oxygen. The only thing is that Priestly had actually produced oxygen first, while Rodbertus had merely rediscovered a commonplace in his surplus-value, or rather his rent, and that Marx, unlike Lavoisier, disdained to claim that he was the first to discover the fact of the existence of surplus-value. The other economic feats performed by Rodbertus are on about the same plane. His elaboration of surplus-value into a utopia has already been unintentionally criticised by Marx in his Poverty of Philosophy. What else may be said about it I have said in my preface to the German edition of that work. Rodbertus s explanation of commercial crises as outgrowths of the underconsumption of the working-class may already be found in Sismondi s Nouveaux Principes de l conomie Politique, Book IV, Ch. IV. However, Sismondi always had the world-market in mind, while Rodbertus s horizon does not extend beyond the Prussian border. His speculations as to whether wages are derived from capital or income belong to the domain of scholasticism and are definitely settled in Part III of this second book of Capital. His theory of rent has remained his exclusive property and may rest in peace until the manuscript of Marx criticising it is published. Finally his suggestions for the emancipation of the old Prussian landed property from the oppression of capital are also entirely utopian; for they evade the only practical question raised in this connection, viz.: How can the old Prussian landed junker have a yearly income of, say, 20,000 marks and a yearly expenditure of, say, 30,000 marks, without running into debt? The Ricardian school suffered shipwreck about the year 1830 on the rock of surplus-value. And what this school could not solve remained still more insoluble for its successor, Vulgar Economy. The two points which caused its failure were these: 1. Labour is the measure of value. However, living labour in its exchange with capital has a lower value than materialised labour for which it is exchanged. Wages, the value of a definite quantity of living labour, are always less than the value of the product begotten by this same quantity of living labour or in which this quantity is embodied. The question is indeed insoluble, if put in this form. It has been correctly formulated by Marx and thereby been answered. It is not labour which has a value. As an activity which creates values it can no more have any special value than gravity can have any special weight, heat any special temperature, electricity any special strength of current. It is not labour which is bought and sold as a commodity, but labour-power. As soon as labour-power becomes a commodity, its value is determined by the labour embodied in this commodity as a social product. This value is equal to the labour socially necessary for the production and reproduction of this commodity. Hence the purchase and sale of labour-power on the basis of its value thus defined does not at all contradict the economic law of value. 2. According to the Ricardian law of value, two capitals employing equal quantities of equally paid living labour all other conditions being equal, produce commodities of equal value and likewise surplus-value, or profit, of equal quantity in equal periods of time. But if they employ unequal quantities of living labour, they cannot produce equal surplus-values, or, as the Ricardians say, equal profits. Now in reality the opposite takes place. In actual fact, equal capitals, regardless of how much or how little living labour is employed by them, produce equal average profits in equal times. Here there is therefore a contradiction of the law of value which had been noticed by Ricardo himself, but which his school also was unable to reconcile. Rodbertus likewise could not but note this contradiction. But instead of resolving it, he made it one of the starting-points of his utopia. (Zur Erkenntnis, p. 131.) Marx had resolved this contradiction already in the manuscript of his Zur Kritik. According to the plan of Capital, this solution will be provided in Book III. Months will pass before that will be published. Hence those economists who claim to have discovered in Rodbertus the secret source and a superior predecessor of Marx have now an opportunity to demonstrate what the economics of a Rodbertus can accomplish. If they can show in which way an equal average rate of profit can and must come about, not only without a violation of the law of value, but on the very basis of it, I am willing to discuss the matter further with them. In the meantime they had better make haste. The brilliant investigations of the present Book II and their entirely new results in fields hitherto almost untrod are merely introductory to the contents of Book III, which develops the final conclusions of Marx s analysis of the process of social reproduction on a capitalist basis. When this Book III appears, little mention will be made of the economist called Rodbertus. The second and third books of Capital were to be dedicated as Marx had stated repeatedly, to his wife. The present second edition is, in the main, a faithful reprint of the first. Typographical errors have been corrected, a few stylistic blemishes eliminated, and a few short paragraphs that contain only repetitions struck out. The third book, which presented quite unforeseen difficulties, is now also nearly ready in manuscript. If my health holds out it will be ready for press this autumn.

Economic Manuscripts: Capital: Volume Two

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1885-c2/ch00.htm

Hence the formula for the circuit of money-capital is: M C ... P ... C' M', the dots indicating that the process of circulation is interrupted, and C' and M' designating C and M increased by surplus-value. The first and third stages were discussed in Book I only in so far as this was necessary for the understanding of the second stage, the process of production of capital. For this reason, the various forms which capital takes on in its different stages, and which now assumes and now strips off in the repetition of its circuit, were not considered. These forms are now the direct object of our study. In order to conceive these forms in their pure state, one must first of all discard all factors which have nothing to do with the changing or building of forms as such. It is therefore taken for granted here not only that the commodities are sold at their values but also that this takes place under the same conditions throughout. Likewise disregarded therefore are any changes of value which might occur during the movement in circuits. Aside from this qualitative division of the sum of commodities into which M is transformed, the formula M C<LMP also represents a most characteristic quantitative relation. We know that the value, or price, of labour-power is paid to its owner, who offers it for sale as a commodity, in the form of wages, that is to say as the price of a sum of labour containing surplus-labour. For instance if the daily value of labour-power is equal to the product of five hours labour valued at three shillings, this sum figures in the contract between the buyer and seller as the price, or wages, for, say, ten hours of labour. If such a contract is made for instance with 50 labourers, they are supposed to work altogether 500 hours per day for the purchaser, and one half of this time, or 250 hours equal to 25 days of labour of 10 hours each, represents nothing but surplus labour. The quantity and the volume of the means of production to be purchased must be sufficient for the utilisation of this mass of labour. M C<LMP, then, does not merely express the qualitative relation indicating that a certain sum of money, say 422, is exchanged for a corresponding sum of means of production and labour-power, but also a quantitative relation between L, the part of the money spent for labour-power, and MP, the part spent for means of production. This relation is determined at the outset by the quantity of excess labour, of surplus-labour to be expended by a certain number of labourers. If for instance in a spinning-mill the weekly wage of its 50 labourers amounts to 50, 372 must be spent for means of production, if this is the value of the means of production which a weekly labour of 3,000 hours, 1,500 of which are surplus-labour, transforms into yarn. It is immaterial here how much additional value in the form of means of production is required in the various lines of industry by the utilisation of additional labour. The point merely is that the part of the money spent for means of production the means of production bought in M MP must absolutely suffice, i.e., must at the outset be calculated accordingly, must be procured in corresponding proportion. To put it another way, the quantity of means of production must suffice to absorb the amount of labour, to be transformed by it into products. If the means of production at hand were insufficient, the excess labour at the disposal of the purchaser could not be utilised; his right to dispose of it is futile. If there were more means of production than available labour, they would not be saturated with labour, would not be transformed into products. As soon as M C<LMP is completed, the purchaser has at his disposal more than simply the means of production and labour-power required for the production of some useful article. He disposes of a greater capacity to render labour-power fluent, or a greater quantity of labour than is necessary for the replacement of the value of this labour-power, and he has at the same time the means of production requisite for the realisation or materialisation of this quantity of labour. In other words, he has at his disposal the factors making for the production of articles of a greater value than that of the elements of production the factors of production of a mass of commodities containing surplus-value. The value advanced by him in money-form has now assumed a bodily form in which it can be incarnated as a value generating surplus-value (in the shape of commodities). In brief, value exists here in the condition or form of productive capital, which has the factor of creating value and surplus-value. Let us call capital in this form P. Now the value of P is equal to that of L + MP, it is equal to M exchanged for L and MP. M is the same capital-value as P, only it has a different mode of existence, it is capital-value in the state or form of money money-capital. M C<LMP, or its general form M C, a sum of purchases of commodities, an act of the general circulation of commodities, is therefore at the same time as a stage in the independent circuit of capital a transformation of capital-value from its money-form into its productive form. More briefly, it is the transformation of money-capital into productive capital. In the diagram of the circuit which we are here discussing, money appears as the first depository of capital-value, and money-capital therefore represents the form in which capital is advanced. Capital in the form of money-capital is in a state in which it can perform the functions of money, in the present case the functions of a universal means of purchase and universal means of payment. (The last-named inasmuch as labour-power though first bought is not paid for until it has been put into operation. To the extent that the means of production are not found ready on the market but have to be ordered first, money in M MP likewise serves as a means of payment.) This capacity is not due to the fact that money-capital is capital but that it is money. On the other hand capital-value in the form of money cannot perform any other functions but those of money. What turns the money-functions into functions of capital is the definite role they play in the movement of capital, and therefore also the interrelation of the stage in which these functions are performed with the other stages of the circuit of capital. Take, for instance, the case with which we are here dealing. Money is here converted into commodities the combination of which represents the bodily form of productive capital, and this form already contains latently, potentially, the result of the process of capitalist production. A part of the money performing the function of money-capital in M C<LMP assumes, by consummating the act of circulation, a function in which it loses its capital character but preserves its money-character. The circulation of money-capital M is divided into M MP and M L, into the purchase of means of production and the purchase of labour-power. Let us consider the last-named process by itself. M L is the purchase of labour-power by the capitalist. It is also the sale of labour-power we may here say of labour, since the form of wages is assumed by the laborer who owns it. What is M C ( = M L) for the buyer is here, as in every other purchase, L M ( = C M) for the seller (the laborer). It is the sale of his labour-power. This is the first stage of circulation, or the first metamorphosis, of the commodity (Buch I, Kap. III, 2a).[English edition: Ch. III, 2a Ed.] It is for the seller of labour a transformation of his commodity into the money-form. The laborer spends the money so obtained gradually for a number of commodities required for the satisfaction of his needs, for articles of consumption. The complete circulation of his commodity therefore appears as L M C, that is to say first as L M ( = C M) and secondly as M C; hence in the general form of the simple circulation of commodities, C M C. Money is in this case merely a passing means of circulation, a mere medium in the exchange of one commodity for another. M L is the characteristic moment in the transformation of money-capital into productive capital, because it is the essential condition for the real transformation of value advanced in the form of money into capital, into a value producing surplus-value. M MP is necessary only for the purpose of realising the quantity of labour bought in the process M L, which was discussed from this point of view in Book I, Part II, under the head of The Transformation of Money into Capital. We shall have to consider the matter at this point also from another angle, relating especially to money-capital the form in which capital manifests itself. Generally M L is regarded as characteristic of the capitalist mode of production. However not at all for the reason given above, that the purchase of labour-power represents a contract of purchase which stipulates for the delivery of a quantity of labour in excess of that needed to replace the price of the labour-power, the wages; hence delivery of surplus-labour, the fundamental condition for the capitalisation of the value advanced, or for the production of surplus-value, which is the same thing. On the contrary, it is so regarded because of its form, since money in the form of wages buys labour, and this is the characteristic mark of the money system. Nor is it the irrationality of the form which is taken as characteristic. On the contrary, one overlooks the irrational. The irrationality consists in the fact that labour itself as a value-creating element cannot have any value, nor can therefore any definite amount of labour have any value expressed in its price, in its equivalence to a definite quantity of money. But we know that wages are but a disguised form, a form in which for instance the price of one day s labour-power presents itself as the price of the labour rendered fluent by this labour-power in one day. The value produced by this labour-power in, say, six hours of labour is thus expressed as the value of twelve hours functioning or operation of the labour-power. M L is regarded as the characteristic feature, the hallmark of the so-called money system, because labour there appears as the commodity of its owner, and money therefore as the buyer hence on account of the money-relation (i.e., the sale and purchase of human activity). Money however appears very early as a buyer of so-called services, without the transformation of M into money-capital, and without any change in the general character of the economic system. It makes no difference to money into what sort of commodities it is transformed. It is the universal equivalent of all commodities which show, if only by their prices, that ideally they represent a certain sum of money, anticipate their transformation into money, and do not acquire the form in which they may be converted into use-values for their owners until they change places with money. Once labour-power has come into the market as the commodity of its owner and its sale takes the form of payment for labour, assumes the shape of wages, its purchase and sale is no more startling than the purchase and sale of any other commodity. The characteristic thing is not that the commodity labour-power is purchasable but that labour-power appears as a commodity. By means of M C<LMP, the transformation of money-capital into productive capital, the capitalist effects the combination of the objective and personal factors of production so far as they consist of commodities. If money is transformed into productive capital for the first time or if it performs for the first time the function of money-capital for its owner, he must begin by buying means of production, such as buildings, machinery, etc., before he buys any labour-power. For as soon as he compels labour-power to act in obedience to his sway, he must have means of production to which he can apply it as labour-power. This is the capitalist s presentation of the case. The labourer s case is as follows: The productive application of his labour-power is not possible until it is sold and brought into connection with means of production. Before its sale, labour-power exists therefore separately from the means of production, from the material conditions of its application. In this state of separation it cannot be used either directly for the production of use-values for its owner or for the production of commodities, by the sale of which he could live. But from the moment that as a result of its sale it is brought into connection with means of production, it forms part of the productive capital of its purchaser, the same as the means of production. True, in the act M L the owner of money and the owner of labour-power enter only into the relation of buyer and seller, confront one another only as money-owner and commodity-owner. In this respect they enter merely into a money-relation. Yet at the same time the buyer appears also from the outset in the capacity of an owner of means of production, which are the material conditions for the productive expenditure of labour-power by its owner. In other words, these means of production are in opposition to the owner of the labour-power, being property of another. On the other hand the seller of labour faces its buyer as labour-power of another which must be made to do his bidding, must be integrated into his capital, in order that it may really become productive capital. The class relation between capitalist and wage-laborer therefore exists, is presupposed from the moment the two face each other in the act M L (L M on the part of the laborer). It is a purchase and sale, a money-relation, but a purchase and sale in which the buyer is assumed to be a capitalist and the seller a wage-laborer. And this relation arises out of the fact that the conditions required for the realisation of labour-power, viz., means of subsistence and means of production, are separated from the owner of labour-power, being the property of another. We are not concerned here with the origin of this separation. It exists as soon as M L goes on. The thing which interests us here is this: If M L appears here as a function of money-capital or money as the form of existence of capital, the sole reason that money here assumes the role of a means of paying for a useful human activity or service; hence by no means in consequence of the function of money as a means of payment. Money can be expended in this form only because labour-power finds itself in a state of separation from its means of production (including the means of subsistence as means of production of the labour-power itself), and because this separation can be overcome only by the sale of the labour-power to the owner of the means of production; because therefore the functioning of labour-power, which is not at all limited to the quantity of labour required for the reproduction of its own price, is likewise the concern of its buyer. The capital-relation during the process of production arises only because it is inherent in the act of circulation, in the different fundamental economic conditions in which buyer and seller confront each other, in their class relation. It is not money which by its nature creates this relation; it is rather the existence of this relation which permits of the transformation of a mere money-function into a capital-function. In the conception of money-capital (for the time being we deal with the latter only within the confines of the special function in which it faces us here) two errors run parallel to each other or cross each other. In the first place the functions performed by capital-value in its capacity as money-capital, which it can perform precisely owing to its money-form, are erroneously derived from its character as capital, whereas they are due only to the money-form of capital-value, to its form of appearance as money. In the second place, on the contrary, the specific content of the money-function, which renders it simultaneously a capital-function, is traced to the nature of money (money being here confused with capital), while the money function premises social conditions, such as are here indicated by the act M L, which do not at all exist in the mere circulation of commodities and the corresponding circulation of money. The purchase and sale of slaves is formally also a purchase and sale of commodities. But money cannot perform this function without the existence of slavery. If slavery exists, then money can be invested in the purchase of slaves. On the other hand the mere possession of money cannot make slavery possible. In order that the sale of one s own labour-power (in the form of the sale of one s own labour or in the form of wages) may constitute not an isolated phenomenon but a socially decisive premise for the production of commodities, in order that money-capital may therefore perform, on a social scale , the above-discussed function M C<LMP, historical processes are assumed by which the original connection of the means of production with labour-power was dissolved processes in consequence of which the mass of the people, the labourers, have, as non-owners, come face to face with non-labourers as the owners of these means of production. It makes no difference in this case whether the connection before its dissolution was such in form that the laborer, being himself a means of production, belonged to the other means of production or whether he was their owner. What lies back of M C<LMP is distribution; not distribution in the ordinary meaning of a distribution of articles of consumption, but the distribution of the elements of production itself, the material factors of which are concentrated on one side, and labour-power, isolated, on the other. The means of production, the material part of productive capital, must therefore face the laborer as such, as capital, before the act M L can become a universal, social one. We have seen on previous occasions [English edition: Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Part VII, Moscow, 1954. Ed.] that in its further development capitalist production, once it is established, not only reproduces this separation but extends its scope further and further until it becomes the prevailing condition. However, there is still another side to this question. In order that capital may be able to arise and take control of production, a definite stage in the development of trade is assumed. This applies therefore also to the circulation of commodities, and hence to the production of commodities; for no articles can enter circulation as commodities unless they are produced for sale, hence as commodities. But the production of commodities does not become the normal, dominant type of production until capitalist production serves as its basis. The Russian landowners, who as a result of the so-called emancipation of the peasants are now compelled to carry on agriculture with the help of wage-labourers instead of the forced labour of serfs, complain about two things: First, about the lack of money-capital. They say for instance that comparatively large sums must be paid to wage-labourers before the crops are sold, and just then there is a dearth of ready cash, the prime condition. Capital in the form of money must always be available, particularly for the payment of wages, before production can be carried on capitalistically. But the landowners may take hope. Everything comes to those who wait, and in due time the industrial capitalist will have at his disposal not alone his own money but also that of others. The second complaint is more characteristic. It is to the effect that even if one has money, not enough labourers are to be had at any time. The reason is that the Russian farm-laborer, owing to the common ownership of land in the village community, has not yet been fully separated from his means of production and hence is not yet a free wage-laborer in the full sense of the word. But the existence of the latter on a social scale is a sine qua non for M C, the conversion of money into commodities, to be able to represent the transformation of money-capital into productive capital. It is therefore quite clear that the formula for the circuit of money-capital, M C ... C' M', is the matter-of-course form of the circuit of capital only on the basis of already developed capitalist production, because it presupposes the existence of a class of wage-labourers on a social scale. We have seen that capitalist production does not only create commodities and surplus-value, but also reproduces to an ever increasing extent the class of wage-labourers, into whom it transforms the vast majority of direct producers. Since the first condition for its realisation is the permanent existence of a class of wage-labourers, M C ... P ... C' M' presupposes a capital in the form of productive capital, and hence the form of the circuit of productive capital. This movement is represented by M C<LMP ... P, in which the dots indicate that the circulation of capital is interrupted, while its circular movement continues, since it passes from the sphere of circulation of commodities into that of production. The first stage, the transformation of money-capital into productive capital, is therefore merely the harbinger and introductory phase of the second stage, the functioning of productive capital. M C<LMP presupposes that the individual performing this act not only has at his disposal values in any use-form, but also that he has them in the form of money, that he is the owner of money. But as the act consists precisely in giving away money, the individual can remain the owner of money only in so far as the act of giving away implies a return of money. But money can return to him only through the sale of commodities. Hence the above act assumes him to be a producer of commodities. M L. The wage-laborer lives only by the sale of his labour-power. Its preservation his preservation requires daily consumption. Hence payment for it must be continuously repeated at rather short intervals in order that he may be able to repeat acts L M C or C M C, repeat the purchases needed for his self-preservation. For this reason the capitalist must always meet the wage-laborer in the capacity of a money-capitalist, and his capital as money-capital. On the other hand if the wage-labourers, the mass of direct producers, are to perform the act L M C, they must constantly be faced with the necessary means of subsistence in purchasable form, i.e., in the form of commodities. This state of affairs necessitates a high degree of development of the circulation of products in the form of commodities, hence also of the volume of commodities produced. When production by means of wage-labour becomes universal, commodity production is bound to be the general form of production. This mode of production, once it is assumed to be general, carries in its wake an ever increasing division of social labour, that is to say an ever growing differentiation of the articles which are produced in the form of commodities by a definite capitalist, ever greater division of complementary processes of production into independent processes. M MP therefore develops to the same extent as M L does, that is to say the production of means of production is divorced to that extent from the production of commodities whose means of production they are. And the latter then stand opposed to every producer of commodities which he does not produce but buys for his particular process of production. They come from branches of production which, operated independently, are entirely divorced from his own, enter into his own branch as commodities, and must therefore be bought. The material conditions of commodity production face him more and more as products of other commodity producers, as commodities. And to the same extent the capitalist must assume the role of money-capitalist, in other words there is an increase in the scale on which his capital must assume the functions of money-capital. On the other hand, the same conditions which give rise to the basic condition of capitalist production, the existence of a class of wage-workers, facilitate the transition of all commodity production to capitalist commodity production. As capitalist production develops, it has a disintegrating, resolvent effect on all older forms of production, which, designed mostly to meet the direct needs of the producer, transform only the excess produced into commodities. Capitalist production makes the sale of products the main interest, at first apparently without affecting the mode of production itself. Such was for instance the first effect of capitalist world commerce on such nations as the Chinese, Indians, Arabs, etc. But, secondly, wherever it takes root capitalist production destroys all forms of commodity production which are based either on the self-employment of the producers, or merely on the sale of the excess product as commodities. Capitalist production first makes the production of commodities general and then, by degrees, transforms all commodity production into capitalist commodity production. Whatever the social form of production, labourers and means of production always remain factors of it. But in a state of separation from each other either of these factors can be such only potentially. For production to go on at all they must unite. The specific manner in which this union is accomplished distinguishes the different economic epochs of the structure of society from one another. In the present case, the separation of the free worker from his means of production is the starting-point given, and we have seen how and under what conditions these two elements are united in the hands of the capitalist, namely, as the productive mode of existence of his capital. The actual process which the personal and material creators of commodities enter upon when thus brought together, the process of production, becomes therefore itself a function of capital, the capitalist process of production, the nature of which has been fully analysed in the first book of this work. Every enterprise engaged in commodity production becomes at the same time an enterprise exploiting labour-power. But only the capitalist production of commodities has become an epoch-making mode of exploitation, which, in the course of its historical development, revolutionises, through the organisation of the labour-process and the enormous improvement of technique, the entire structure of society in a manner eclipsing all former epochs. The means of production and labour-power, in so far as they are forms of existence of advanced capital-value, are distinguished by the different roles assumed by them during the process of production in the creation of value, hence also of surplus-value, into constant and variable capital. Being different components of productive capital they are furthermore distinguished by the fact that the means of production in the possession of the capitalist remain his capital even outside of the process of production, while labour-power becomes the form of existence of an individual capital only within this process. Whereas labour-power is a commodity only in the hands of its seller, the wage-labourer, it becomes capital only in the hands of its buyer, the capitalist who acquires the temporary use of it. The means of production do not become the material forms of productive capital, or productive capital, until labour-power, the personal form of existence of productive capital, is capable of being embodied in them. Human labour-power is by nature no more capital than by means of production. They acquire this specific social character only under definite, historically developed conditions, just as only under such conditions the character of money is stamped upon precious metals, or that of money-capital upon money. Productive capital, in performing its functions, consumes its own component parts for the purpose of transforming them into a mass of products of a higher value. Since labour-power acts merely as one of its organs, the excess of the product s value engendered by its surplus-labour over and above the value of productive capital s constituent elements is also the fruit of capital. The surplus-labour of labour-power is the gratuitous labour performed for capital and thus forms surplus-value for the capitalist, a value which costs him no equivalent return. The product is therefore not only a commodity, but a commodity pregnant with surplus-value. Its value is equal to P + s, that is to say equal to the value of the productive capital P consumed in the production of the commodity plus the surplus values created by it. Let us assume that this commodity consists of 10,000 lbs. of yarn, and that means of production worth 372 and labour power worth 50 were consumed in the fabrication of this quantity of yarn. During the process of spinning, the spinners transmitted to the yarn the value of the means of production consumed by their labour, amounting to 372, and at the same time they created, in proportion with the labour-power expended by them, new value to the amount of, say, 128. The 10,000 lbs. of yarn therefore represent a value of 500. Capital in the form of commodities has to perform the function of commodities. The articles of which capital is composed are produced especially for the market and must be sold, transformed into money, hence go through the process C M. Suppose the commodity of the capitalist to consist of 10,000 lbs. of cotton yarn. If 372 represent the value of the means of production consumed in the spinning process, and new value to the amount of 128 has been created, the yarn has a value of 500, which is expressed in its price of the same amount. Suppose further that this price is realised by the sale C M. What is it that makes of this simple act of all commodity circulation at the same time a capital-function? No change that takes place inside of it, neither in the use-character of the commodity for it passes into the hands of the buyer as an object of use nor in its value, for this value has not experienced any change of magnitude, but only of form. It first existed in the form of yarn, while now it exists in the form of money. Thus a substantial distinction is evident between the first stage M C and the last stage C M. There the advanced money functions as money-capital, because it is transformed by means of the circulation into commodities of a specific use-value. Here the commodities can serve as capital only to the extent that they bring this character with them in ready shape from the process of production before their circulation begins. During the spinning process, the spinners create yarn value to the amount of 128. Of this sum, say 50 represent to the capitalist merely an equivalent for his outlay for labour-power, while 78 when the degree of exploitation of labour-power is 156 per cent form surplus-value. The value of the 10,000 lbs. of yarn therefore embodies first the value of the consumed productive capital P, the constant part of which amounts to 372 and the variable to 50, their sum being 422, equal to 8,440 lbs. of yarn. Now the value of the productive capital P is equal to C, the value of its constituent elements, which in the stage M C confronted the capitalist as commodities in the hands of their sellers. In the second place, however, the value of the yarn contains a surplus-value of 78, equal to 1,560 lbs. of yarn. C as an expression of the value of the 10,000 lbs. of yarn is therefore equal to C plus DC, or C plus an increment of C (equal to 78), which we shall call c, since it exists in the same commodity-form as now the original value C. The value of the 10,000 lbs. of yarn, equal to 500, is therefore represented by C + c = C'. What turns C, the expression of the value of 10,000 lbs. of yarn, into C' is not the absolute magnitude of its value ( 500), for that is determined, as in the case of any other C standing for the expression of the value of some other sum of commodities, by the quantity of labour embodied in it. It is its relative value-magnitude, its value-magnitude as compared with that of capital P consumed in its production. This value is contained in it plus the surplus-value supplied by the productive capital. Its value is greater, exceeds that of the capital-value by this surplus-value c. The 10,000 lbs. of yarn are the bearers of the capital-value expanded, enriched by this surplus-value, and they are so by virtue of being the product of the capitalist process of production. C' expresses a value-relation, the relation of the value of the commodities produced to that of the capital spent on their production, in other words, expresses the fact that its value is composed of capital-value and surplus-value. The 10,000 lbs. of yarn represent commodity capital, C', only because they are a converted form of the productive capital P, hence in a connection which exists originally only in the circuit of this individual capital, or only for the capitalist who produced the yarn with the help of his capital. It is, so to say, only an internal, not an external relation that turns the 10,000 lbs. of yarn in their capacity of vehicles of value into a commodity-capital. They exhibit their capitalist birthmark not in the absolute magnitude of their value but in its relative magnitude, in the magnitude of their value as compared with that possessed by the productive capital embodied in them before it was transformed into commodities. If, then, these 10,000 lbs. of yarn are sold at their value of 500, this act of circulation, considered by itself, is identical with C M, a mere transformation of an unchanging value from the form of a commodity into that of money. But as a special stage in the circuit of an individual capital, the same act is a realisation of the capital-value embodied in the commodity to the amount of 422 plus the surplus-value, likewise embodied in it, of 78. That is to say it represents C' M', the transformation of the commodity-capital from its commodity-form into the money form. The function of C' is now that of all commodities, viz.: to transform itself into money, to be sold, to go through the circulation stage C M. So long as the capital, now expanded, remains in the form of commodity-capital, lies immovable in the market, the process of production is at rest. The commodity-capital acts neither as a creator of products nor as a creator of value. A given capital-value will serve, in widely different degrees, as a creator of products and value, and the scale of reproduction will be extended or reduced commensurate with the particular speed with which that capital throws off its commodity-form and assumes that of money, or with the rapidity of the sale. It was shown in Book I that the degree of efficiency of any given capital is conditional on the potentialities of the productive process, which to a certain extent are independent of the magnitude of its own value. [English edition: Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I, pp. 602-08. Ed.] Here it appears that the process of circulation sets in motion new forces independent of the capital s magnitude of value and determining its degree of efficiency, its expansion and contraction. The mass of commodities C', being the depository of the expanded capital, must furthermore pass in its entirety through the metamorphosis C' M'. The quantity sold is here a main determinant. The individual commodity figures only as an integral part of the total mass. The 500 worth of value exists in the 10,000 lbs. of yarn. If the capitalist succeeds in selling only 7,440 lbs. at their value of 372, he has replaced only the value of his constant capital, the value of the expanded means of production. If he sells 8,440 lbs. he recovers only the value of the total capital advanced. He must sell more in order to realise some surplus-value, and he must sell the entire 10,000 lbs. in order to realise the surplus-value of 78 (1,560 lbs. of yarn). In 500 in money he receives merely an equivalent for the commodity sold. His transaction within the circulation is simply C M. If he had paid his labourers 64 in wages instead of 50 his surplus-value would only be 64 instead of 78, and the degree of exploitation would have been only 100 per cent instead of 156. But the value of the yarn would not change; only the relation between its component parts would be different. The circulation act C M would still represent the sale of 10,000 lbs. of yarn for 500, their value. C' is equal to C + c (or 422 at 78). C equals the value of P, the productive capital, and this equals the value of M, the money advanced in M C, the purchase of the elements of production, amounting to 422 in our example. If the mass of commodities is sold at its value, then C equals 422 and c equals 78, the value of the surplus-product of 1,560 lbs. of yarn. If we call c, expressed in money, m, then C' M' = (C + c) - (M + m), and the circuit M C ... P ... C' M', in its expanded form, is therefore represented by M C<LMP ... P ... (C + c) - (M + m). In the first stage the capitalist takes articles of consumption out of the commodity-market proper and the labour-market. In the third stage he throws commodities back, but only into one market, the commodity-market proper. However the fact that he extracts from the market, by means of his commodities, a greater value than he threw upon it originally is due only to the circumstance that he throws more commodity-value back upon it than he first drew out of it. He threw value M upon it and drew out of it the equivalent C; he throws C + c back upon it, and draws out of it the equivalent M + m. M was in our example equal to the value of 8,440 lbs. of yarn. But he throws 10,000 lbs. of yarn on the market, consequently he returns a greater value than he took from it. On the other hand he threw this increased value on the market only because through the exploitation of labour-power in the process of production he had created surplus-value (as an aliquot part of the product expressed in surplus-product). It is only by virtue of being the product of this process that the mass of commodities becomes commodity-capital, the bearer of the expanded capital-value. By performing C' M' the advanced capital-value as well as the surplus-value are realised. The realisation of both takes place simultaneously in a series of sales or in a lump sale of the entire mass of commodities which is expressed by C' M'. But the same circulation act C' M' is different for capital-value and surplus-value, as it expresses for each of them a different stage of their circulation, a different section of the series of metamorphoses through which they must pass in the sphere of circulation. The surplus-value c came into the world only during the process of production. It appeared for the first time in the commodity-market, in the form of commodities. This is its first form of circulation, hence the act c m is its first circulation act, or its first metamorphosis, which remains to be supplemented by the antithetical act of circulation, or the reverse metamorphosis, m c. It is different with the circulation which the capital-value C performs in the same circulation act C' M', and which constitutes for the circulation act C M, in which C is equal to P, equal to the M originally advanced. Capital-value has opened its first circulation act in the form of M, money-capital, and returns through the act C M to the same form. It has therefore passed through the two antithetical stages of circulation, first M C, second C M, and finds itself once more in the form in which it can begin its circular movement anew. What for surplus-value constitutes the first transformation of the commodity-form into that of money, constitutes for capital-value in return, or retransformation, into its original money-form. By means of M C<LMP money capital is transformed into an equivalent mass of commodities, L and MP. These commodities no longer perform the function of commodities, of articles for sale. Their value is now in the hands of the capitalist who bought them; they represent the value of his productive capital P. And in the function of P, productive consumption, they are transformed into a kind of commodity differing materially from the means of production, into yarn, in which their value is not only preserved but increased, from 422 to 500. By means of this real metamorphosis, the commodities taken from the market in the first stage, M C, are replaced by commodities of different substance and value, which now must perform the function of commodities, must be transformed into money and sold. The process of production therefore appears to be only an interruption of the process of circulation of capital-value, of which up to that point only the first phase, M C, has been passed through. It passes through the second and concluding phase, C M, after C has been altered in substance and value. But so far as capital-value, considered by itself, is concerned, it has merely suffered an alteration of its use-form in the process of production. It existed in the form of 422 worth of L and MP, while now it exists in the form of 422 worth of, or 8,440 lbs. of yarn. If we therefore consider merely the two circulation phases of capital-value, apart from its surplus-value, we find that it passes through 1) M C and 2) C M, in which the second C has a different use-form but the same value as the first C. Hence it passes through M C M, a form of circulation which, because the commodity here changes place twice and in the opposite direction transformation from money into commodities and from commodities into money necessitates the return of the value advanced in the form of money to its money-form its reconversion into money. The same circulation act C' M' that constitutes the second and concluding metamorphosis, a return to the money-form, for the capital-value advanced in money, represents for the surplus-value borne along by the commodity-capital and simultaneously realised by its change into the money-form its first metamorphosis, its transformation from the commodity- to the money-form, C M, its first circulation phase. We have, then, two kinds of observations to make here. First, the ultimate reconversion of capital-value into its original money-form is a function of commodity-capital. Secondly, this function includes the first transformation of surplus-value from its original commodity-form to its money-form. The money-form, then, plays a double role here. On the one hand it is the form to which a value originally advanced in money returns, hence a return to the form of value which opened the process. On the other hand it is the first converted form of a value which originally enters the circulation in commodity-form. If the commodities composing the commodity-capital are sold at their values, as we assume, then C plus c is transformed into M plus m, its equivalent. The realised commodity-capital now exists in the hands of the capitalist in this form: M plus m ( 422 plus 78 = 500). Capital-value and surplus-value are now present in the form of money, the form of the universal equivalent. At the conclusion of the process capital-value has therefore resumed the form in which it entered it, and as money-capital can now open and go through a new process. Just because the initial and final forms of this process are those of money-capital, M, we call this form of the circulation process the circuit of money-capital. It is not the form but merely the magnitude of the advanced value that is changed at the close. M plus m is nothing but a sum of money of a definite magnitude, in this case 500. But as a result of the circulation of capital, as realised commodity-capital, this sum of money contains the capital-value and the surplus-value. And these values are now no longer inseparably united as they were in the yarn; they now lie side by side. Their sale has given both of them an independent money-form; 211/250 of this money represent the capital-value of 422 and 39/250 constitute the surplus-value of 78. This separation, effected by the realisation of the commodity-capital, has not only the formal content to which we shall refer presently. It becomes important in the process of the reproduction of capital, depending on whether m is entirely or partially or not at all lumped together with M, i.e., depending on whether or not it continues to function as a component part of the advanced capital-value. Both m and M may pass through quite different processes of circulation. In M' capital has returned to its original form M, to its money-form, a form however in which it is materialised as capital. There is in the first place a difference of quantity. It was M, 422. It is now M', 500, and this difference is expressed by M ... M', the quantitatively different extremes of the circuit, whose movement is indicated only by the three dots. M' > M, and M' - M = s, the surplus-value. But as a result of this circular movement M ... M' it is only M' which exists now; it is the product in which its process of formation has become extinct. M' now exists by itself, independently of the movement which brought it into existence. That movement is gone; M' is there in its place. But M', being M plus m, 500, composed of 422 advanced capital plus an increment of the same amounting to 78, represents at the same time a qualitative relation, although this qualitative relation itself exists only as a relation between the parts of one and the same sum, hence as a quantitative relation. M, the advanced capital, which is now once more present in its original form ( 422), exists as realised capital. It has not only preserved itself but also realised itself as capital by being distinguished as such from m ( 78), to which it stands in the same relation as to an increase of its own, to a fruit of its own, to an increment to which it has given birth itself. It has been realised as capital because it has been realised as a value which has created value. M' exists as a capital-relation. M no longer appears as mere money, but expressly plays the part of money-capital, expressed as a self-expanded value, hence possessing the property of self-expansion, of hatching a higher value than it itself has. M became capital by virtue of its relation to the other part of M', which it has brought about, which has been effected by it as the cause, which is the consequence of it as the ground. Thus M' appears as the sum of values differentiated within itself, functionally (conceptually) distinguished within itself, expressing the capital-relation. But this is expressed only as a result, without the intervention of the process of which it is the result. Parts of value as such are not qualitatively different from one another, except in so far as they appear as values of different articles, of concrete things, hence in various use-forms and therefore as values of different commodities a difference which does not originate with them themselves as mere parts of value. In money all differences between commodities are extinguished, because it is the equivalent form common to all of them. A sum of money in the amount of 500 consists solely of uniform elements of 1 each. Since the intermediate links of its origin are obliterated in the simple existence of this sum of money and every trace has been lost of the specific difference between the different component parts of capital in the process of production, there exists now only the distinction between the conceptual form of a principal equal to 422, the capital advanced, and an excess value of 78. Let M' be equal to, say, 110, of which 100 may be equal to M, the principal, and 10 equal to s, the surplus-value. There is an absolute homogeneity, an absence of conceptual distinctions, between the two constituent parts of the sum of 110. Any 10 of this sum always constitute 1/11 of the total sum of 1/10, whether they are 1/10 of the advanced principal of 100 or the excess of 10 above it. Principal and excess sum, capital and surplus-sum, may therefore be expressed as fractional parts of the total sum. In our illustration, 10/11 form the principal, or the capital, and 1/11 the surplus sum. In its money-expression realised capital appears therefore at the end of its process as an irrational expression of the capital-relation. True, this applies also to C' (C plus c). But there is this difference: that C', of which C and c are only proportional value-parts of the same homogeneous mass of commodities, indicates its origin P, whose immediate product it is, while in M', a form derived directly from circulation, the direct relation to P is obliterated. The irrational distinction between the principal and the incremental sum, which is contained in M', so far as that expresses the result of the movement M ... M', disappears as soon as it once more functions actively as money-capital and is therefore not fixed as a money-expression of expanded industrial capital. The circuit of capital can never begin with M' (although M' now performs the function of M). It can begin only with M, that is to say it can never begin as an expression of the capital-relation, but only as a form of advance of capital-value. As soon as the 500 are once more advanced as capital, in order again to produce s, they constitute a point of departure, not one of return. Instead of a capital of 422, a capital of 500 is now advanced. It is more money than before, more capital-value, but the relation between its two constituent parts has disappeared. In fact a sum of 500 instead of the 422 might originally have served as capital. It is not an active function of money-capital to appear as M'; to appear as M' is rather a function of C'. Even in the simple circulation of commodities, first in C1 M, secondly in M C2, money M does not figure actively until the second act, M C2. Its appearance in the form of M is only the result of the first act, by virtue of which it only then appears as a converted form of C1. True, the capital-relation contained in M', the relation of one of its parts as the capital-value to the other as its value increment, acquires functional importance in so far as, with the constantly repeated circuit M ... M', M' splits into two circulations, one of them a circulation of capital, the other of surplus-value. Consequently these two parts perform not only quantitatively but also qualitatively different functions, M others than m. But considered by itself, the form M ... M' does not include what the capitalist consumes, but explicitly only the self-expansion and accumulation, so far as the latter expresses itself above all as a periodical augmentation of ever renewed advances of money-capital. Although M', equal to M plus m, is the irrational form of capital, it is at the same time only money-capital in its realised form, in the form of money which has generated money. But this is different from the function of money-capital in the first stage, M C<LMP. In the first stage, M circulates as money. It assumes the functions of money-capital because only in its money state can it perform a money-function, can it transform itself into the elements of P, into L and MP, which stand opposed to it as commodities. In this circulation act it functions only as money. But as this act is the first stage of capital-value in process, it is simultaneously a function of money-capital, by virtue of the specific use-form of the commodities L and MP which are bought. M' on the other hand, composed of M, the capital-value, and m, the surplus-value begotten of M, stands for self-expanded capital-value the purpose and the outcome, the function of the total circuit of capital. The fact that it expresses this outcome in the form of money, as realised money-capital, does not derive from its being the money-form of capital, money-capital, but on the contrary from its being money-capital, capital in the form of money, from capital having opened the process in this form, from its having been advanced in the money-form. Its reconversion into the money-form is, as we have seen, a function of commodity-capital C', not of money-capital. As for the difference between M and M', it (m) is simply the money-form of c, the increment of C. M' is composed of M plus m only because C' was composed of C plus c. In C' therefore this difference and the relation of the capital-value to the surplus-value generated by it is present and expressed before both of them are transformed into M', into a sum of money in which both parts of the value come face to face with each other independently and may, therefore, be employed in separate and distinct functions. M' is only the result of the realisation of C'. Both M' and C' are merely different forms of self-expanded capital-value, one of them the commodity-form, the other the money-form. Both of them have this in common: that they are self-expanded capital-value. Both of them are materialised capital, because capital-value as such exists here together with the surplus-value, the fruit obtained through it and differing from it, although this relation is expressed only in the irrational form of the relation between two parts of a sum of money or of a commodity-value. But as expressions of capital in relation and contradistinction to the surplus-value produced by it, hence as expressions of self-expanded value, M' and C' are the same and express the same thing, only in different forms. They do not differ as money-capital and commodity-capital but as money and commodities. In so far as they represent self-expanded value, capital acting as capital, they only express the result of the functioning of productive capital, the only function in which capital-value generates value. What they have in common is that both of them, money-capital as well as commodity-capital, are modes of existence of capital. The one is capital in money-form, the other in commodity-form. The specific functions that distinguish them cannot therefore be anything else but differences between the functions of money and of commodities. Commodity-capital, the direct product of the capitalist process of production, is reminiscent of its origin and is therefore more rational and less incomprehensible in form than money-capital, in which every trace of this process has vanished, as in general all special use-forms of commodities disappear in money. It is therefore only when M' itself functions as commodity-capital, when it is the direct product of a productive process instead of being the converted form of this product, that it loses its bizarre form, that is to say, in the production of the money material itself. In the production of gold for instance the formula would be M C<LMP ... P ... M' (M plus m), where M' would figure as a commodity product, because P furnishes more gold than was advanced for the elements of production of the gold in the first M, the money-capital. In this case the irrational nature of the expression M ... M' (M plus m) disappears. Here a part of a sum of money appears as the mother of another part of the same sum of money. It follows furthermore that each time equally great quantities of simultaneously existing values face and replace each other in the two metamorphoses M C and C' M' belonging in circulation. The change in value pertains exclusively to the metamorphosis P, the process of production, which thus appears as a real metamorphosis of capital, as compared with the merely metamorphosis of circulation. Let us now consider the total movement, M C ... P ... C' M', or, M C<LMP ... P ... C' (C + c) M' (M + m), its more expanded form. Capital here appears as a value which goes through a series of interconnected, interdependent transformations, a series of metamorphoses which form just as many phases, or stages, of the process as a whole. Two of these phases belong in the sphere of circulation, one of them in that of production. In each one of these phases capital-value has a different form for which there is a correspondingly different, special function. Within this movement the advanced value does not only preserve itself but grows, increases in magnitude. Finally, in the concluding stage, it returns to the same form which it had at the beginning of the process as a whole. This process as a whole constitutes therefore the process of moving in circuits. The two forms assumed by capital-value at the various stages of its circulation are those of money-capital and commodity-capital. The form pertaining to the stage of production is that of productive capital. The capital which assumes these forms in the course of its total circuit and then discards them and in each of them performs the function corresponding to the particular form, is industrial capital, industrial here in the sense it comprises every branch of industry run on a capitalist basis. Money-capital, commodity-capital and productive capital, do not therefore designate independent kinds of capital whose functions form the content of likewise independent branches of industry separated from one another. They denote here only special functional forms of industrial capital, which assumes all three of them one after the other. Capital describes its circuit normally only so long as its various phases pass uninterruptedly into one another. If capital stops short in the first phase M C, money-capital assumes the rigid form of a hoard; if it stops in the phase of production, the means of production lie without functioning on the one side, while labour-power remains unemployed on the other; and if capital stops short in the last phase C' M', piles of unsold commodities accumulate and clog the flow of circulation. However, it is in the nature of things that the circuit itself necessitates the fixation of capital for certain lengths of time in its various phases. In each of its phases industrial capital is tied up with a definite form: money-capital, productive capital, commodity-capital. It does not acquire the form in which it may enter a new transformation phase until it has performed the function corresponding to each particular form. To make this plain, we have assumed in our illustration that the capital-value of the quantity of commodities created at the stage of production is equal to the total sum of the value originally advanced in the form of money; or, in other words, that the entire capital-value advanced in the form of money passes on in bulk from one stage to the next. But we have seen (Buch I, Kap. VI) [English edition: Ch. VIII. Ed.] that a part of constant capital, the labour instruments proper (e.g., machinery), continually serve anew, with more or less numerous repetitions of the same process of production, hence transfer their values piecemeal to the products. It will be seen later to what extent this circumstance modifies the circular movement of capital. For the present the following suffices: In our illustration the value of productive capital amounting to 422 contained only the average wear and tear of factory buildings, machinery, etc., that is to say only that part of value which they transferred to the yarn in the transformation of 10,600 lbs. of cotton into 10,000 lbs. of yarn, which represented the product of one week s spinning of 60 hours. In the means of production, into which the advanced constant capital of 372 was transformed, the instruments of labour, buildings, machinery, etc., figured as if they had only been rented in the market at a weekly rate. But this does not change the gist of the matter in any way. We have but to multiply the quantity of yarn produced in one week, i.e., 10,000 lbs. of yarn, by the number of weeks contained in a certain number of years, in order to transfer to the yarn the entire value of the instruments of labour bought and consumed during this period. It is then plain that the advanced money-capital must first be transformed into these instruments, hence must have gone through the first phase M C before it can function as productive capital P. And it is likewise plain in our illustration that the capital value of 422, embodied in the yarn during the process of production, cannot be part of the value of the 10,000 lbs. of yarn and enter the circulation phase C' M' until it is ready. It cannot be sold until it has been spun. In the general formula the product P is regarded as a material thing different from the elements of the productive capital, as an object existing apart from the process of production and having a use-form different from that of the elements of production. This is always the case when the result of the productive process assumes the form of a thing, even when a part of the product re-enters the resumed production as one of its elements. Grain for instance serves as seed for its own production, but the product consists only of grain and hence has a shape different from those of related elements such as labour-power, implements, fertiliser. But there are certain independent branches of industry in which the product of the productive process is not a new material product, is not a commodity. Among these only the communications industry, whether engaged in transportation proper, of goods and passengers, or in the mere transmission of communications, letters, telegrams, etc., is economically important. A. Chuprov says on this score: [his product, thrust out of the process of production when finished, passes into circulation as a commodity separated from it]. The result, whether men or goods are transported, is a change in their whereabouts. Yarn, for instance, may now be in India instead of in England, where it was produced. However, what the transportation industry sells is change of location. The useful effect is inseparably connected with the process of transportation, i.e., the productive process of the transport industry. Men and goods travel together with the means of transportation, and their traveling, this locomotion, constitutes the process of production effected by these means. The useful effect can be consumed only during this process of production. It does not exist as a utility different from this process, a use-thing which does not function as an article of commerce, does not circulate as a commodity, until after it has been produced. But the exchange-value of this useful effect is determined, like that of any other commodity, by the value of the elements of production (labour-power and means of production) consumed in it plus the surplus-value created by the surplus-labour of the labourers employed in transportation. This useful effect also entertains the very same relations to consumption that other commodities do. If it is consumed individually its value disappears during its consumption; if it is consumed productively so as to constitute by itself a stage in the production of the commodities being transported, its value is transferred as an additional value to the commodity itself. The formula for the transport industry would therefore be M C<LMP ... P M', since it is the process of production itself that is paid for and consumed, not a product separate and distinct from it. Hence this formula has almost the same form as that of the production of precious metals, the only difference being that in this case M' represents the converted form of the useful effect created during the process of production, and not the bodily form of the gold or silver produced in this process and extruded from it. Industrial capital is the only mode of existence of capital in which not only the appropriation of surplus-value, or surplus-product, but simultaneously its creation is a function of capital. Therefore with it the capitalist character of production is a necessity. Its existence implies the class antagonism between capitalists and wage-labourers. To the extent that it seizes control of social production, the technique and social organisation of the labour-process are revolutionised and with them the economico-historical type of society. The other kinds of capital, which appeared before industrial capital amid conditions of social production that have receded into the past or are now succumbing, are not only subordinated to it and the mechanism of their functions altered in conformity with it, but move solely with it as their basis, hence live and die, stand and fall with this basis. Money-capital and commodity-capital, so far as they function as vehicles of particular branches of business, side by side with industrial capital, are nothing but modes of existence of the different functional forms now assumed, now discarded by industrial capital in the sphere of circulation modes which, due to social division of labour, have attained independent existence and been developed one-sidedly. The circuit M ... M' on the one hand intermingles with the general circulation of commodities, proceeds from it and flows back into it, is a part of it. On the other hand it forms an independent movement of the capital-value for the individual capitalist, a movement of its own which takes place partly within the general circulation of commodities, partly outside of it, but which always preserves its independent character. First, because its two phases that take place in the sphere of circulation, M C and C' M', being phases of the movement of capital, have functionally definite characters. In M C, C is materially determined as labour-power and means of production; in C' M' the capital-value is realised plus the surplus-value. Secondly, because P, the process of production, embraces productive consumption. Thirdly, because the return of the money to its starting-point makes of the movement M ... M' a circuit complete in itself. Every individual capital is therefore, on the one hand, in its two circulation-halves M C and C' M', an agent of the general circulation of commodities, in which it either functions or lies concatenated as money or as a commodity, thus forming a link in the general chain of metamorphoses taking place in the world of commodities. On the other hand it describes within the general circulation its own independent circuit in which the sphere of production forms a transitional stage and in which this capital returns to its starting-point in the same form in which it left that point. Within its own circuit, which includes its real metamorphosis in the process of production, it changes at the same time the magnitude of its value. It returns not simply as money-value, but as augmented, increased money-value. Let us finally consider M C ... P ... C' M' as a special form of the circular course of capital, alongside the other forms which we shall analyse later. We shall find that it is distinguished by the following features: 1. It appears as the circuit of money-capital, because industrial capital in its money-form, as money-capital, forms the starting-point and the point of return of its total process. The formula itself expresses the fact that the money is not expended here as money but is merely advanced, hence is merely the money-form of capital, money-capital. It expresses furthermore that exchange-value, not use-value, is the determining aim of this movement. Just because the money-form of value is the independent, tangible form in which value appears, the form of circulation M ... M', the initial and terminal points of which are real money, expresses most graphically the compelling motive of capitalist production money-making. The process of production appears merely as an unavoidable intermediate link, as a necessary evil for the sake of money-making. All nations with a capitalist mode of production are therefore seized periodically by a feverish attempt to make money without the intervention of the process of production. 2. The stage of production, the function of P, represents in this circuit an interruption between the two phases of circulation M C ... C' M', which in its turn represents only the intermediate link in the simple circulation M C M'. The process of production appears in the form of a circuit-describing process, formally and explicitly as that which it is in the capitalist mode of production, as a mere means of expanding the advanced value, hence enrichment as such as the purpose of production. 3. Since the series of phases is opened by M C, the second link of the circulation is C' M'. In other words, the starting-point is M, the money-capital that is to be self-expanded; the terminal point is M', the self-expanded money-capital M plus m, in which M figures as realised capital along with its offspring m. This distinguishes the circuit of M from that of the two other circuits P and C', and does so in two ways. On the one hand by the money-form of the two extremes. And money is the independent, tangible form of existence of value, the value of the product in its independent value-form, in which every trace of the use-value of the commodities has been extinguished. On the other hand the form P ... P does not necessarily become P ... P' (P plus p), and in the form C ... C' no difference whatever in value is visible between the two extremes. It is therefore characteristic of the formula M M' that for one thing capital-value is its starting-point and expanded capital-value its point of return, so that the advance of capital-value appears as the means and expanded capital-value as the end of the entire operation; and that for another thing this relation is expressed in money-form, in the independent value-form, hence money-capital as money begetting money. The generation of surplus-value by value is not only expressed as the Alpha and Omega of the process, but explicitly in the form of glittering money. 4. Since M', the money-capital realised as a result of C' M', the complementary and concluding phase of M C, has absolutely the same form as that in which it began its first circuit, it can, as soon as it emerges from the latter, begin the same circuit over again as an increased (accumulated) money-capital; M' = M + m. And at least it is not expressed in the form M ... M' that, in the repetition of the circuit, the circulation of m separates from that of M. Considered in its one-time form, formally, the circuit of money-capital expresses therefore simply the process of self-expansion and of accumulation. Consumption is expressed in it only as productive consumption, by M C<LMP, and it is only this consumption that is included in this circuit of individual capital. M L is L M or C M on the part of the labourer. It is therefore the first phase of circulation which brings about his individual consumption, thus: L M C (means of subsistence). The second phase M C, no longer falls within the circuit of individual capital, but is initiated and premised by it, since the labourer must above all live, hence maintain himself by individual consumption, in order to always be in the market as material that the capitalist can exploit. But this consumption itself is here only assumed as a condition for the productive consumption of labour-power by capital, hence only to the extent that the worker maintains and reproduces himself as labour-power by means of his individual consumption. However the MP, the commodities proper which enter into the circuit of capital, are nutriment for the productive consumption only. The act L M promotes the individual consumption of the labourer, the transformation of the means of subsistence into his flesh and blood. True, the capitalist must also be there, must also live and consume to be able to perform the function of a capitalist. To this end, he has, indeed, to consume only as much as the labourer, and that is all this form of the circulation process presupposes. But even this is not formally expressed, since the formula concludes with M', i.e., a result which can at once resume its function as money-capital, now augmented. C' M' directly contains the sale of C'; but C' M', a sale on the one part, is M C, a purchase, on the other part, and in the last analysis a commodity is bought only for its use-value, in order to enter (leaving intermediate sales out of consideration) the process of consumption, whether this is individual or productive, according to the nature of the article bought. But this consumption does not enter the circuit of individual capital, the product of which is C'. This product is eliminated from the circuit precisely because it is a commodity for sale. C' is expressly designed for consumption by others than the producer. Thus we find that certain exponents of the mercantile system (which is based on the formula M C ... P ... C' M') deliver lengthy sermons to the effect that the individual capitalist should consume only as much as the labourer, that the nation of capitalists should leave the consumption of their own commodities, and the consumption process in general, to the other, less intelligent nations but that they themselves should make productive consumption their life s task. These sermons frequently remind one in form and content of analogous ascetic expostulations of the fathers of the church. The circuit made by money-capital is therefore the most one-sided, and thus the most striking and typical form in which the circuit of industrial capital appears, the capital whose aim and compelling motive the self-expansion of value, the making of money, and accumulation is thus conspicuously revealed (buying to sell dearer). Owing to the fact that the first phase is M C it is also revealed that the constituents of productive capital originate in the commodity-market, and in general that the capitalist process of production depends on circulation, on commerce. The circuit of money-capital is not merely the production of commodities; it is itself possible only through circulation and presupposes it. This is plain, if only from the fact that the form M belonging in circulation appears as the first and pure form of advanced capital-value, which is not the case in the other two circuit forms. The money-capital circuit always remains the general expression of industrial capital, because it always includes the self-expansion of the advanced value. In P ... P, the money-expression of capital appears only as the price of the elements of production, hence only as a value expressed in money of account and is fixed in this form in book-keeping. M ... M' becomes a special form of the industrial capital circuit when newly active capital is first advanced in the form of money and then withdrawn in the same form, either in passing from one branch of industry to another or in retiring industrial capital from a business. This includes the functioning as capital of the surplus-value first advanced in the form of money, and becomes most evident when surplus-value functions in some other business than the one in which it originated. M ... M' may be the first circuit of a certain capital; it may be the last; it may be regarded as the form of the total social capital; it is the form of capital that is newly invested, either as capital recently accumulated in the form of money, or as some old capital which is entirely transformed into money for the purpose of transfer from one branch of industry to another. Being a form always contained in all circuits, money-capital performs this circuit precisely for that part of capital which produces surplus-value, viz., variable capital. The normal form of advancing wages is payment in money; this process must be renewed in comparatively short intervals, because the labourer lives from hand to mouth. The capitalist must therefore always confront the labourer as money-capitalist, and his capital as money-capital. There can be no direct or indirect balancing of accounts in this case such as we find in the purchase of means of production and in the sale of produced commodities (so that the greater part of the money-capital actually figures only in the form of commodities, money only in the form of money of account and finally in cash only in the balancing of accounts). On the other hand, a part of the surplus-value arising out of variable capital is spent by the capitalist for his individual consumption, which pertains to the retail trade and, however circuitous the route may be, this part is always spent in cash, in the money-form of surplus-value. Variable capital always appears anew as money-capital invested in wages (M L) and m as surplus-value to defray the cost of individual consumption of the capitalist. Hence M, advanced variable capital-value, and m, its increment, are necessarily held in the form of money to be spent in this form. The formula M C ... P ... C' M', with its result M' = M + m, is deceptive in form, is illusory in character, owing to the existence of the advanced and self-expanded value in its equivalent form, money. The emphasis is not on the self-expansion of value but on the money-form of this process, on the fact that more value in money-form is finally drawn out of the circulation than was originally advanced to it; hence on the multiplication of the mass of gold and silver belonging to the capitalist. The so-called monetary system is merely an expression of the irrational form M C M', a movement which takes place exclusively in circulation and therefore can explain the two acts M C and C M' in no other way than as a sale of C above its value in the second act and therefore as C drawing more money out of the circulation than was put into it by its purchase. On the other hand M C ... P ... C' M', fixed as the exclusive form, constitutes the basis of the more highly developed mercantile system, in which not only the circulation of commodities but also their production appears as a necessary element. The illusory character of M C ... P ... C' M' and the correspondingly illusory interpretation exists whenever this form is fixed as occurring once, not as fluent and ever renewed; hence whenever this form is considered not as one of the forms of the circuit but as its exclusive form. But it itself points toward other forms. In the first place this entire circuit is premised on the capitalist character of the process of production, and therefore considers this process together with the specific social conditions brought about by it as the basis. M C = M C<LMP; but M L assumes the existence of the wage-labourer, and hence the means of production as part of productive capital. It assumes therefore that the process of labour and self-expansion, the process of production, is a function of capital. In the second place, if M ... M' is repeated, the return to the money-form appears just as evanescent as the money-form in the first stage. M C disappears to make room for P. The constantly recurrent advance in the form of money and its constant return in the form of money appear merely as fleeting moments in the circuit. In the third place On the other hand before the second circuit of P is completed, the first circuit, that of commodity-capital, C' M'.M C ... P ... C' (abridged C' ... C') has already been made. Thus the first form already contains the other two, and the money-form thus disappears, so far as it is not merely an expression of value but an expression of value in the equivalent form, in money. Finally, if we consider some newly invested individual capital describing for the first time the circuit M C ... P ... C' M', then M C is the preparatory phase, the forerunner of the first process of production gone through by this individual capital. This phase M C is consequently not presupposed but rather called for or necessitated by the process of production. But this applies only to this individual capital. The general form of the circuit of industrial capital is the circuit of money-capital, whenever the capitalist mode of production is taken for granted, hence in social conditions determined by capitalist production. Therefore the capitalist process of production is assumed as a pre-condition, if not in the first circuit of the money-capital of a newly invested industrial capital, then outside of it. The continuous existence of this process of production presupposes the constantly renewed circuit P ... P. Even in the first stage, M C, this premise plays a part, for this assumes on the one hand the existence of the class of wage-labourers; and then, on the other, that which is M C, the first stage, for the buyer of means of production, is C' M' for their seller; hence C' presupposes commodity-capital, and thus the commodities themselves as a result of capitalist production, and thereby the function of productive capital.

Economic Manuscripts: Capital: Volume Two

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1885-c2/ch01.htm

Two things are at once strikingly apparent in this form. For one thing, while in the first form, M ... M', the process of production, the function of P, interrupts the circulation of money-capital and acts only as a mediator between its two phases M C and C' M', here the entire circulation process of industrial capital, its entire movement within the phase of circulation, constitutes only an interruption and consequently only the connecting link between the productive capital, which as the first extreme opens the circuit, and that which closes it as the other extreme in the same form, hence in the form in which it starts again. Circulation proper appears but as an instrument promoting the periodically renewed reproduction, rendered continuous by the renewal. For another thing, the entire circulation presents itself in a form which is the opposite of that which it has in the circuit of money-capital. There it was: M C M (M C. C M), apart from the determination of value; here it is, again apart from the value determination: C M C (C M. M C), i.e., the form of the simple circulation of commodities. Let us first consider the process C' M' C, which takes place in the sphere of circulation between the two extremes P ... P. The starting-point of this circulation is commodity-capital; C' = C + c = P + c. The function of commodity-capital C' M' (the realisation of the capital-value contained in it equals P, which now exists as the constituent part C of C', as well as of the surplus-value contained in it, which exists as a constituent part of the same quantity of commodities and has the value c) was examined in the first form of the circuit. But there this function formed the second phase of the interrupted circulation and the concluding phase of the entire circuit. Here it forms the second phase of the circuit but the first phase of the circulation. The first circuit ends with M', and since M' as well as the original M can again open the second circuit as money-capital, it was not necessary at first to see whether M and m (surplus-value) contained in M' continue in their course together or whether each of them pursues its own course. This would only have become necessary if we had followed up further the first circuit in its renewed course. But this point must be decided in the circuit of the productive capital, because the determination of its very first circuit depends on it and because C' M' appears in it as the first phase of the circulation, which has to be complemented by M C. It depends on this decision whether the formula represents simple reproduction or reproduction on an extended scale. The character of the circuit changes according to the decision made. Let us, then, consider first the simple reproduction of productive capital, assuming that, as in the first chapter, conditions remain constant and that commodities are bought and sold at their values. On this assumption the entire surplus-value enters into the individual consumption of the capitalist. As soon as the transformation of the commodity-capital C' into money has taken place, that part of the money which represents the capital-value continues to circulate in the circuit of industrial capital; the other part, which is surplus-value changed into money, enters into the general circulation of commodities, constitutes a circulation of money emanating from the capitalist but taking place outside of the circulation of his individual capital. In our illustration we had a commodity-capital C' of 10,000 lbs. of yarn, valued at 500; 422 of this represent the value of the productive capital and continue, as the money-form of 8,440 lbs. of yarn, the capital circulation begun by C', while the surplus value of 78, the money-form of 1,560 lbs. of yarn, the excess of the commodity-product, leaves this circulation and describes a separate course within the general circulation of commodities. We have assumed that the total advanced capital always passes wholly from one of its phases to the other; and so here too we assume that the commodities produced by P represent the total value of the productive capital P, or 422 plus 78 of surplus-value created in the process of production. In our illustration, which deals with a discrete commodity, the surplus-value exists in the form of 1,560 lbs. of yarn; if computed on the basis of one pound of yarn, it would exist in the form of 2.496 ounces of yarn. But if the commodity were for instance a machine valued at 500 and having the same value-composition, one a part of the value of this machine, 78, would be surplus-value, but these 78 would exist only in the machine as a whole. This machine cannot be divided into capital-value and surplus-value without breaking it to pieces and thus destroying its value together with its use-value. For this reason the two value-components can be represented only ideally as components of the commodity, not as independent elements of the commodity C', like any pound of yarn, which represents a separable independent element of the 10,000 lbs. of commodity. In the first case the aggregate commodity, the commodity-capital, the machine, must be sold in its entirety before m can enter upon its separate circulation. On the other hand when the capitalist has sold 8,440 lbs., the sale of the remaining 1,560 lbs. would represent a wholly separate circulation of the surplus-value in the form of c (1,560 lbs. of yarn) m ( 78) c (articles of consumption). But the elements of value of each individual portion of the 10,000 lbs. of yarn, the product, can be represented by parts of the product as well as by the total product. Just as the latter, 10,000 lbs. of yarn, the product, can be represented by parts of the product as well as by the total product. Just as the latter, 10,000 lbs. of yarn, can be divided into the value of the constant capital (c), 7,440 lbs. of yarn worth 372, variable capital-value (v) of 1,000 lbs. of yarn worth 50, and surplus-value (s) of 1,560 lbs. of yarn worth 78, so every pound of yarn may be divided into c, equal to 11.904 ounces worth 8.928 d., v equal to 1.600 ounces of yarn worth 1.200 d., and s equal to 2.496 ounces of yarn worth 1.872 d. The capitalist might also sell various portions of the 10,000 lbs. of yarn successively and successively consume successive portions of the surplus-value elements contained in them, thus realising, also successively, the sum of c plus v. But in the final analysis this operation likewise premises the sale of the entire lot of 10,000 lbs., that therefore the value of c and v will be replaced by the sale of 8,440 lbs. (Buch I, Kap. VII, 2.) [English edition: Ch. IX, 2. Ed.] However that may be, by means of C' M' both the capital-value and surplus-value contained in C' acquire a separable existence, the existence of different sums of money. In both cases M and m are really a converted form of the value which originally in C' had only a peculiar, an ideal expression as the price of the commodity. c m c represents the simple circulation of commodities, the first phase of which, c m, is included in the circulation of commodity-capital, C' M', i.e., included in the circuit of capital; its complementary phase m c falls, on the contrary, outside of this circuit, being a separate act in the general circulation of commodities. The circulation of C and c, of capital-value and surplus-value, splits after the transformation of C' into M'. Hence it follows: First, while the commodity-capital is realised by C' M' = C' (M + m), the movement of capital-value and surplus-value, which in C' M' is still united and carried on by the same quantity of commodities, becomes separable, both of them henceforth possessing independent forms as separate sums of money. Secondly, if this separation takes place, m being spent as the revenue of the capitalist, while M as a functional form of capital-value continues its course determined by the circuit, the first act, C' M', in connection with the subsequent acts, M C and m c, may be represented as two different circulations C M C and c m c; and both of these series, so far as their general form is concerned, belong in the usual circulation of commodities. By the way, in the case of the continuous, indivisible commodities, it is a matter of practice to isolate the value constituents ideally. For instance in the London building-business, which is carried on mainly on credit, the building contractor receives advances in accordance with the stage of construction reached. None of these stages is a house, but only a really existing constituent part of an inchoate future house; hence, in spite of its reality, it is but an ideal fraction of the entire house, but real enough to serve as security for an additional advance. (See on this point Chapter XII below.) [See pp. 237-38 of this book. Ed.] Thirdly, if the movement of capital-value and surplus-value, which still proceeds unitedly in C and M, is separated only in part (a portion of the surplus-value not being spent as revenue) or not at all, a change takes place in the capital-value itself within its circuit, before it is completed. In our illustration the value of the productive capital was equal to 422. If that capital continues M C, as, say, 480 or 500, then it strides through the latter stages of its circuit with an increase of 58 or 78 over its initial value. This may also go hand in hand with a change in the composition of its value. C' M', the second stage of the circulation and the final stage of circuit I (M ... M'), is the second stage in our circuit and the first in the circulation of commodities. So far as the circulation is concerned, it must be complemented by M' C'. But not only has C' M' the process of self-expansion already behind it (in this case the function of P, the first stage), but its result, the commodity C'; has already been realised. The process of the self-expansion of capital and the realisation of the commodities representing the expanded capital-value are therefore completed in C' M'. And so we have premised simple reproduction, i.e., that m c separates entirely from M C. Since both circulations, c m c as well as C M C, belong in the circulation of commodities, so far as their general form is concerned (and for this reason do not show only value differences in their extremes), it is easy to conceive the process of capitalist production, after the manner of vulgar economy, as a mere production of commodities, of use-values designed for consumption of some sort, which the capitalist produces for no other purpose than that of getting in their place commodities with different use-values, or of exchanging them for such, as vulgar economy erroneously states. C' acts from the very outset as commodity-capital, and the purpose of the entire process, enrichment (the production of surplus-value), does not by any means exclude increasing consumption on the part of the capitalist as his surplus-value (and hence his capital) increases; on the contrary, it emphatically includes it. Indeed, in the circulation of the revenue of the capitalist, the produced commodity c (or the fraction of the produced commodity C' ideally corresponding to it) serves only to transform it, first into money, and from money into a number of other commodities serving private consumption. But we must not, at this point, overlook the trifling circumstance that c is commodity-value which did not cost the capitalist anything, an incarnation of surplus-labour, for which reason it originally stepped on the stage as a component part of commodity-capital C'. This c is, by the very nature of its existence, bound to the circuit of capital-value in process and if this circuit begins to stagnate or is otherwise disturbed, not only the consumption of c restricted or entirely arrested, but also the disposal of that series of commodities which serve to replace c. The same is true when C' M' ends in failure, or only a part of C' can be sold. We have seen that c m c, representing the circulation of the revenue of the capitalist, enters into the circulation of capital only so long as c is a part of the value of C', of capital in its functional form of commodity-capital; but, as soon as it acquires independence from m c, hence throughout the form c m c, the circulation of that revenue does not enter into the movement of the capital advanced by the capitalist, although it stems from it. This circulation is connected with the movement of advanced capital inasmuch as the existence of capital presupposes the existence of the capitalist, and his existence is conditioned on his consuming surplus-value. Within the general circulation C', for example yarn, functions only as a commodity; but as an element in the circulation of capital it performs the function of commodity-capital, a form which capital-value alternately assumes and discards. After the sale of the yarn to a merchant, it is extruded out of the circular movement of capital whose product it is, but nevertheless, as a commodity, it moves always in the sphere of the general circulation. The circulation of one and the same mass of commodities continues, in spite of the fact that it has ceased to be a phase in the independent circuit of the spinner s capital. Hence the real definitive metamorphosis of the mass of commodities thrown into circulation by the capitalist, C M, their final exit into consumption may be completely separated in time and space from that metamorphosis in which this mass of commodities functions as his commodity-capital. The same metamorphosis which has been accomplished in the circulation of capital still remains to be accomplished in the sphere of the general circulation. This state of things is not changed a bit if this yarn enters the circuit of some other industrial capital. The general circulation comprises as much the intertwining of the circuits of the various independent fractions of social capital, i.e., the totality of the individual capitals, as the circulation of those values which are not thrown on the market as capital but enter into individual consumption. The relation between a circuit of capital forming part of a general circulation and a circuit forming links in an independent circuit is shown further on when we examine the circulation of M, which is equal to M plus m. M as money-capital continues capital s circuit; m, being spent as revenue (m c), enters into the general circulation, but comes flying out of the circuit of capital. Only that part enters the latter circuit which performs the function of additional money-capital. In c m c money serves only as coin; the object of this circulation is the individual consumption of the capitalist. It is typical of the idiocy of vulgar economy that it gives out this circulation, which does not enter into the circuit of capital the circulation of that part of the value produced which is consumed as revenue as the characteristic circuit of capital. In the second phase M C, the capital-value M, which is equal to P (the value of the productive capital that at this point opens the circuit of industrial capital), is again present, delivered of its surplus-value, therefore having the same magnitude of value as it had in the first stage of the circuit of money-capital M C. In spite of the difference in place the function of the money-capital into which the commodity-capital has now been transformed is the same: its transformation into MP and L, into means of production and labour-power. In the functioning of commodity-capital C' M', the capital-value, simultaneously with c m, has consequently gone through the phase C M and enters now into the complementary phase M C<LMP. Its complete circulation is therefore C M C<LMP. First: Money-capital M appeared in Form I (circuit M ... M') as the original form in which capital-value is advanced; it appears here from the outset as a part of that sum of money into which commodity-capital transformed itself in the first circulation phase C' M', therefore from the outset as the transformation of P, the productive capital, through the medium of the sale of commodities, into the money-form. Money-capital exists here from the outset as that form of capital-value which is neither its original nor its final one, since the phase M C, which concludes the phase C M, can only be performed by again discarding the money-form. Therefore that part of M C which is at the same time M L appears now no longer as a mere advance of money by the purchase of labour-power, but as an advance by means of which the same 1,000 lbs. of yarn, valued at 50, which form a part of the commodity-value created by labour-power, are advanced to labour-power in the form of money. The money advanced here to the labourer is only a converted equivalent form of a part of the commodity-value produced by himself. And for that reason if no other the act M C, so far as it means M L, is by no means simply a replacement of a commodity in the form of money by a commodity in the use-form, but it includes other elements which are independent of the general commodity circulation as such. M' appears as a converted form of C', which is itself a product of a previous function of P, the process of production. The entire sum of money M' is therefore a money-expression of past labour. In our illustration, 10,000 lbs. of yarn worth 500 are the product of the spinning process. Of this quantity, 7,440 lbs. of yarn are equal to the advanced constant capital c worth 372; 1,000 lbs. of yarn are equal to the advanced variable capital v worth 50; and 1,560 lbs. of yarn represent the surplus-value s worth 78. If of M' only the original capital of 422 is again advanced, other conditions remaining the same, then the labourer is advanced the following week, in M L, only a part of the 10,000 lbs. of yarn produced in the given week (the money-value of 1,000 lbs. of yarn). As a result of C M, money is always the expression of past labour. If the complementary act M C takes place at once in the commodity-market, i.e., M is given in return for commodities existing in the market, this is again a transformation of past labour, from one form (money) into another form (commodities). But M C differs in the matter of time from C M. They may exceptionally take place at the same time, for instance when the capitalist who performs M C and the capitalist to whom this act means C M ship their commodities to each other at the same time and M is used only to square the balance. The difference in time between the performance of M C and C M may be more or less considerable. Although M, as the result of C M, represents past labour, it may, in the act M C, represent the converted form of commodities which are not as yet in the market, but will be thrown upon it in the future, since M C need not take place until C has been produced anew. M may likewise stand for commodities which are produced simultaneously with the C whose money-expression it is. For instance in the exchange M C (purchase of means of production) coal may be bought before it has been mined. In so far as m figures as an accumulation of money, is not spent as revenue, it may stand for cotton which will not be produced until the following year. The same holds good on spending the revenue of the capitalist, m c. It also applies to wages, to L equal to 50. This money is not only the money-form of past labour of the labourers but at the same time a draft on simultaneous and future labour which is just being realised or should be realised in the future. The labourer may buy with his wages a coat which will not be made until the following week. This applies especially to the vast number of necessary means of subsistence which must be consumed almost as soon as they have been produced to prevent spoilage. Thus the labourer receives, in the money which is paid to him in wages, the converted form of his own future labour or that of other labourers. By giving the labourer a part of his past labour, the capitalist gives him a draft on his own future labour. It is the labourer s own simultaneous or future labour that constitutes the not yet existing supply out of which he will be paid for his past labour. In this case the idea of hoarding disappears altogether. [Here Marx made the following note in the manuscript: All this, however, belongs to the last part of Book Two. Ed.] Secondly: In the circulation C M C<LMP the same money changes place twice; the capitalist first receives it as a seller and passes it on as a buyer; the transformation of commodities into the money-form serves only for the purpose of retransforming it from the money-form into the commodity-form; the money-form of capital, its existence as money-capital, is only a transient phase in this movement; or, so far as the movement is fluent, money-capital appears only as a medium of circulation when it serves as a means of purchase; it acts as a paying medium proper when capitalists buy from one another and therefore only have to square accounts. Thirdly, the function of money-capital, whether it is a mere circulating medium or a paying medium, effects only the replacement of C by L and MP, i.e., the replacement of the yarn, the commodity which represents the result of the productive capital (after deducting the surplus-value to be used as revenue), by its elements of production, in other words, the retransformation of capital-value from its form as a commodity into the elements that build this commodity. In the last analysis, the function of money-capital promotes only the retransformation of commodity-capital into productive capital. In order that the circuit may be completed normally, C' must be sold at its value and in its entirety. Furthermore C M C includes not merely replacement of one commodity by another, but replacement with value-relations remaining the same. We assume that this takes place here. As a matter of fact, however, the value of the means of production vary. It is precisely capitalist production to which continuous change of value-relations is peculiar, if only because of the ever changing productivity of labour that characterises this mode of production. This change in the value of the elements of production will be discussed later on, [See Section V of Chapter XV of this volume. Ed.] and we merely mention it here. The transformation of the elements of production into commodity-products, of P into C', takes place in the sphere of production, while the transformation from C' into P occurs in the sphere of circulation. It is brought about by a simple metamorphosis of commodities, but its content is a phase in the process of reproduction, regarded as a whole. C M C, being a form of circulation of capital, involves a functionally determined exchange of matter. The transformation C M C requires further that C should be equal to the elements of production of the commodity-quantum C', and that these elements should retain their original value-relations to one another. It is therefore assumed that the commodities are not only bought at their respective values, but also do not undergo any change of value during the circular movement. Otherwise this process cannot run normally. In M ... M', M represents the original form of the capital-value, which is discarded only to be resumed. In P ... C' M' C ... P, M represents a form which is only assumed in the process and which is discarded before this process is over. The money-form appears here only as a transient independent form of capital-value. Capital in the form of C' is just as anxious to assume the money-form as it is to discard it in M', after barely assuming that garb in order again to transform itself into productive capital. So long as it remains in the garb of money, it does not function as capital and its value does not therefore expand. The capital lies fallow. M serves here as a circulating medium, but as a circulating medium of capital. [Here Marx made the following note in the manuscript: Against Tooke. Ed.] The semblance of independence which the money-form of capital-value possesses in the first form of its circuit (the form of money-capital) disappears in this second form, which thus is a criticism of Form I and reduces it to merely a special form. If the second metamorphosis, M C, meets with any obstacles for instance if there are no means of production in the market the circuit, the flow of the process of reproduction, is interrupted quite as much as when capital is held fast in the form of commodity-capital. But there is this difference: It can remain longer in the money-form than in the transitory form of commodities. It does not cease to be money, if it does not perform the functions of money-capital; but it does cease to be a commodity, or a use-value in general, if it is delayed too long in the exercise of its function of commodity-capital. Furthermore, in its money-form it is capable of assuming another form in the place of its original one of productive capital while it cannot budge at all if held in the form of C'. C' M' C includes acts of circulation only for C' in accordance with its form, acts which are phrases of its reproduction; but the real reproduction of C, into which C' transforms itself, is necessary for the performance of C' M' C. This however is conditioned on processes of reproduction which lie outside of the process of reproduction of the individual capital represented by C'. In Form I the act M C<LMP prepares on the first transformation of money-capital into productive capital; in Form II it prepares the retransformation from commodity-capital into productive capital; that is to say, so far as the investment of industrial capital remains the same, retransformation of the commodity-capital into the same elements of production as those from which it originated. Consequently here as well as in Form I, the act appears as a preparatory phase of the process of production, but as a return to it, as a renewal of it, hence as a precursor of the process of reproduction, hence also of a repetition of the process of self-expansion of value. It must be noted once more that M L is not a simple exchange of commodities but the purchase of a commodity, L, which is to serve for the production of surplus-value, just as M MP is only a procedure which is materially indispensable for the attainment of this end. With the completion of M C<LMP M is reconverted into productive capital, into P, and the circuit begins anew. The expanded form of P ... C' M' C ... P is therefore: Apart from the productive consumption of M, which is transformed into L and MP, the circuit contains the first member M L, which signifies, from the standpoint of the labourer, L M, which equals C M. In the labourer s circulation, L M C, which includes his consumption, only the first member falls within the circuit of the capital as a result of M L. The second act, M C, does not fall within the circulation of individual capital, although it springs from it. But the continuous existence of the working class is necessary for the capitalist class, and so is therefore the consumption of the labourer made possible by M C. The only condition which the act C' M' stipulates for capital-value to continue its circuit and for surplus-value to be consumed by the capitalist is that C' shall have been converted into money, shall have been sold. Of course, C' is bought only because the article is a use-value, hence serviceable for consumption of any kind, productive or individual. But if C' continues to circulate for instance in the hands of the merchant who bought the yarn, this at first does not in the least affect the continuation of the circuit of the individual capital which produced the yarn and sold it to the merchant. The entire process continues and with it the individual consumption of the capitalist and the labourer made necessary by it. This point is important in a discussion of crises. For as soon as C' has been sold, been converted into money, it can be reconverted into the real factors of the labour process, and thus of the reproductive process. Whether C' is bought by the ultimate consumer or by a merchant for resale does not affect the case. The quantity of commodities created in masses by capitalist production depends on the scale of production and on the need for constantly expanding this production, and not on a predestined circle of supply and demand, on wants that have to be satisfied. Mass production can have no other direct buyer, apart from other industrial capitalists, than the wholesaler. Within certain limits, the process of reproduction may take place on the same or on an increased scale even when the commodities expelled from it did not really enter individual or productive consumption. The consumption of commodities is not included in the circuit of the capital from which they originated. For instance, as soon as the yarn is sold the circuit of the capital value represented by the yarn may begin anew, regardless of what may next become of the sold yarn. So long as the product is sold, everything is taking its regular course from the standpoint of the capitalist producer. The circuit of capital-value he is identified with is not interrupted. And if this process is expanded which includes increased productive consumption of the means of production this reproduction of capital may be accompanied by increased individual consumption (hence demand) on the part of the labourers, since this process is initiated and effected by productive consumption. Thus the production of surplus-value, and with it the individual consumption of the capitalist, may increase, the entire process of reproduction may be in a flourishing condition, and yet a large part of the commodities may have entered into consumption only apparently, while in reality they may still remain unsold in the hands of dealers, may in fact still be lying in the market. Now one stream of commodities follows another, and finally it is discovered that the previous streams had been absorbed only apparently by consumption. The commodity-capitals compete with one another for a place in the market. Late-comers, to sell at all, sell at lower prices. The former streams have not yet been disposed of when payment for them falls due. Their owners must declare their insolvency or sell at any price to meet their obligations. This sale has nothing whatever to do with the actual state of the demand. It only concerns the demand for payment, the pressing necessity of transforming commodities into money. Then a crisis breaks out. It becomes visible not in the direct decrease of consumer demand, the demand for individual consumption, but in the decrease of exchanges of capital for capital, of the reproductive process of capital. If the commodities MP and L, into which M is transformed to perform its function of money-capital, of capital-value destined to be retransformed into productive capital if those commodities are to be bought or paid for on different terms, so that M C represents a series of purchases and payments, then a part of M performs the act M C, while another part persists in the form of money and does not serve to perform simultaneous or successive acts of M C until such time as the conditions of this process itself may determine. This part is only temporarily withheld from circulation, in order to go into action, perform its function, in due time. This storing of it is then in its turn a function determined by its circulation and intended for circulation. Its existence as a fund for purchase and payment, the suspension of its movement, the interrupted state of its circulation, will then constitute a state in which money exercises one of its functions as money-capital. As money-capital; for in this case the money temporarily remaining at rest is itself a part of money-capital M (of M' minus m, equal to M), of that portion of the value of commodity-capital which is equal to P, to that value of productive capital from which the circuit starts. On the other hand all money withdrawn from circulation has the form of a hoard. Money in the form of a hoard therefore becomes here a function of money-capital, just as in M C the function of money as a means of purchase or payment becomes a function of money-capital. This is so because capital-value exists here in the form of money, because the money state here is a state in which industrial capital finds itself at one of its stages and which is prescribed by the interconnections within the circuit. At the same time it is here proved true once more that money-capital within the circuit of industrial capital performs no other functions than those of money and that these money-functions assume the significance of capital-functions only by virtue of their interconnections with the other stages of this circuit. The representation of M' as a relation of m to M, as a capital-relation, is not directly a function of money-capital but of commodity-capital C', which in its turn, as a relation of c and C, expresses but the result of the process of production, of the self-expansion of capital-value which took place in it. If the continuation of the process of circulation meets with obstacles, so that M must suspend its function M C on account of external circumstances, such as the conditions of the market, etc., and if it therefore remains for a shorter or longer time in its money-form, then we have once more money in the form of a hoard, which happens also in simple commodity circulation whenever the transition from C M to M C is interrupted by external circumstances. It is an involuntary formation of a hoard. In the case at hand money has the form of fallow, latent money-capital. But we will not discuss this point any further for the present. In either case however persistence of capital in its money state appears as the result of interrupted movement, no matter whether this is expedient or inexpedient, voluntary or involuntary, in accordance with its functions or contrary to them. If in the transaction of our capitalist the money serves as a means of payment (the commodities having to be paid for by the buyer on longer or shorter terms), then the surplus-product intended for capitalisation is not transformed into money but into creditor s claims, into titles of ownership of an equivalent which the buyer may already have in his possession or which he may expect to possess. It does not enter into the reproductive process of the circuit any more than does money in invested in interest-bearing securities, etc., although it may enter into the circuits of other individual industrial capitals. The entire character of capitalist production is determined by the self-expansion of the advanced capital-value, that is to say, in the first instance by the production of as much surplus-value as possible; in the second place however (see Buch I, Kap. XXII) [English edition: Ch. XXIV. Ed.] by the production of capital, hence by the transformation of surplus-value into capital. Accumulation, or production on an extended scale, which appears as a means for constantly more expanded production of surplus-value hence for the enrichment of the capitalist, as his personal aim and is comprised in the general tendency of capitalist production, becomes later, however, as was shown in Book I, by virtue of its development, a necessity for every individual capitalist. The constant augmentation of his capital becomes a condition of its preservation. But we need not revert more fully to what was previously expounded. We considered first simple reproduction, assuming that the entire surplus-value is spent as revenue. In reality under normal conditions a part of the surplus-value must always be spent as revenue, and another part must be capitalised. And it is quite immaterial whether a certain surplus-value produced in any particular period is entirely consumed or entirely capitalised. On the average the general formula can represent only the average movement both cases occur. But in order not to complicate the formula, it is better to assume that the entire surplus-value is accumulated. The formula: P ... C' M' C'<LMP ... P' stands for productive capital, which is reproduced on an enlarged scale and with greater value, and which as augmented productive capital begins its second circuit, or, what amounts to the same, renews its first circuit. As soon as this second circuit is begun, we once more have P as the starting-point; only this P is a larger productive capital than the first P was. Hence, if in the formula M ... M' the second circuit begins with M', M' functions as M, as an advanced money-capital of a definite magnitude. It is a larger money-capital than the one with which the first circular movement was opened, but all reference to its augmentation by the capitalisation of surplus-value ceases as soon as it assumes the function of advanced money-capital. This origin is expunged in its form of money-capital, which begins its circuit. This also applies to P' as soon as it functions as the starting-point of a new circuit. If we compare P ... P' with M ... M', or with the first circuit, we find that they have not the same significance at all. M ... M' taken by itself as an isolated circuit, expresses only that M, the money-capital (or industrial capital in its circuit as money-capital), is money generating money, value generating value, in other words, produces surplus-value. But in the P circuit the process of producing surplus-value is already completed upon the termination of the first stage, the process of production, and after going through the second stage (the first stage of the circulation), C' M', the capital-value plus surplus-value already exist as realised money-capital, as M', which appeared as the last extreme in the first circuit. That surplus-value has been produced is depicted in the first-considered formula P ... P (see expanded formula, [M C<LMP ... P ... (C + c) - (M + m)]) by c m c, which, in its second stage, falls outside of the circulation of capital and represents the circulation of surplus-value as revenue. In this form, where the entire movement is represented by P ... P, where consequently there is no difference in value between the two extremes, the self-expansion of the advanced value the production of surplus-value, is therefore represented in the same way as in M ... M', except that the act C' M', which appears as the last stage in M ... M', and as the second stage of the circuit, serves as the first stage of the circulation in P ... P. In P ... P', P' does not indicate that the surplus-value has been produced but that the produced surplus-value has been capitalised, hence that capital has been accumulated and that therefore P', in contrast to P, consists of the original capital-value plus the value of the capital accumulated because of the capital-value s movement. M', as the simple close of M ... M', and also C', as it appears within all these circuits, do not if taken by themselves express the movement but its result: the self-expansion of capital-value realised in the form of commodities or money, and hence, capital-value as M plus m, or C plus c, as a relation of capital-value to its surplus-value, as its offspring. They express this result as various circulation forms of the self-expanded capital-value. But neither in the form of C' nor of M' is the self-expansion which has taken place itself a function of money-capital or of commodity-capital. As special, differentiated forms, modes of existence corresponding to special functions of industrial capital, money-capital can perform only money-functions and commodity-capital only commodity-functions, the difference between them being merely that between money and commodity. Similarly industrial capital in its form of productive capital can consist only of the same elements as those of any other labour-process which creates products: on the one hand objective conditions of labour (means of production), on the other productively (purposively) functioning labour-power. Just as industrial capital can exist in the sphere of production only in a composition which meets the requirements of the production process in general, hence also of the non-capitalist production process, so it can exist in the sphere of circulation only in the two forms corresponding to it, viz., that of a commodity and of money. But just as the totality of the elements of production announces itself at the outset as productive capital by the fact that the labour-power is labour-power that belongs to others and that the capitalist purchased it from its proprietor, just as he purchased his means of production from other commodity-owners; just as therefore the process of production itself appears as a productive function of industrial capital, so money and commodities appear as forms of circulation of the same industrial capital, hence their functions appear as the functions of circulation, which either introduce the functions of productive capital or emanate from them. Here the money-function and the commodity-function are at the same time functions of commodity-capital, but solely because they are interconnected as forms of functions which industrial capital has to perform at the different stages of its circuit. It is therefore wrong to attempt to derive the specific properties and functions which characterise money as money and commodities as commodities from their quality as capital, and it is equally wrong to derive on the contrary the properties of productive capital from its mode of existence in means of production. As soon as M' or C' have become fixed as M plus m or C plus c, i.e., as the relation between the capital-value and surplus-value, its offspring, this relation is expressed in both of them, in the first case in the money-form, in the second case in the commodity-form, which does not change matters in the least. Consequently this relation does not have its origin in any properties or functions inherent in money as such or commodities as such. In both cases the characteristic property of capital, that of being a value, is expressed only as a result. C' is always the product of the function of P, and M' is always merely the form of C' changed in the circuit of industrial capital. As soon therefore as the realised money-capital resumes its special function of money capital, it ceases to express the capital-relation contained in M' = M plus m. After M ... M' has been passed through and M' begins the circuit anew, it does not figure as M even if the entire surplus-value contained in M' is capitalised. The second circuit begins in our case with a money-capital of 500, instead of 422, as in the first circuit. The money-capital, which opens the circuit, is 78 larger than before. This difference exists on comparing the one circuit with the other, but no such comparison is made within each particular circuit. The 500 advanced as money-capital, 78 which formerly existed as surplus-value, do not play any other role than would some other 500 with which another capitalist inaugurates his first circuit. The same happens in the circuit of the productive capital. The increased P' acts as P on recommencing, just as P did in the simple reproduction P ... P. In the stage M' C'<LMP, the augmented magnitude is indicated only by C', but not by L' or MP'. Since C is the sum of L and MP, C' indicates sufficiently that the sum of L and MP contained in it is greater than the original P. In the second place, the terms L' and MP' would be incorrect, because we know that the growth of capital involves a change in the constitution of its value and that as this change progresses the value of MP increases, that of L always decreasing relatively and often absolutely. The form of a hoard is simply the form of money not in circulation, of money whose circulation has been interrupted and which is therefore fixed in its money-form. As for the process of hoarding, it is common to all commodity production and figures as an end in itself only in the undeveloped, pre-capitalist forms of this production. In the present case, however, the hoard appears as a form of money-capital and the formation of a hoard as a process which temporarily accompanies the accumulation of capital because and so far as the money here figures as latent money-capital; because the formation of a hoard, the state of being a hoard, in which the surplus-value existing in money-form finds itself, is a functionally determined preparatory stage gone through outside of the circuit described by the capital and required for the transformation of the surplus-value into really functioning capital. By its definition it is therefore latent money-capital. Hence the size it must acquire before it can take part in the process is determined in each case by the value constitution of the productive capital. But so long as it remains in the condition of a hoard it does not yet perform the functions of money-capital but is still idle money-capital; not money-capital whose function has been interrupted, as was the case before, but money-capital not yet capable of performing it. We are here discussing the accumulation of money in its original real form of an actual hoard of money. It may also exist in the form of a mere outstanding money, of claims on debtors by capitalists who have sold C'. As for other forms in which this latent money-capital may exist in the meantime even in the shape of money-breeding money, such as interest-bearing bank deposits, bills of exchange or securities of any description, these do not belong here. Surplus-value realised in the form of money in such cases performs special capital-functions outside the circuit described by the industrial capital which originated it functions which in the first place have nothing to do with that circuit as such but which in the second place presuppose capital-functions which differ from the functions of industrial capital and which have not yet been developed here. If the process C' M' is prolonged beyond its normal duration, if therefore the commodity capital is abnormally delayed in its transformation into the money-form or if, for instance, after the completion of this transformation the price of the means of production into which the money-capital must be transformed has risen above the level prevailing at the beginning of the circuit, the hoard functioning as accumulation-fund can be used in the place of money-capital or of part of it. Thus the money-accumulation fund serves as a reserve fund for counter-balancing disturbances in the circuit. As such a reserve fund it differs from the fund of purchasing or paying media discussed in the circuit P ... P. These media are a part of functioning money-capital (hence forms of existence of a part of capital-value in general going through the process) whose parts enter upon their functions only at different times, successively. In the continuous process of production, reserve-money capital is always formed, since one day money is received and no payments have to be made until later, and another day large quantities of goods are sold while other large quantities are not due to be bought until a subsequent date. In these intervals a part of the circulating capital exists continuously in the form of money. A reserve fund on the other hand is not a part of constituent capital already performing its functions, or, to be more exact, of money-capital. It is rather a part of capital in a preliminary stage of its accumulation, of surplus-value not yet transformed into active capital. As for the rest, it needs no explaining that a capitalist in financial straits does not concern himself about what the particular functions of the money he has on hand are. He simply employs whatever money he has for the purpose of keeping his capital circulating. For instance in our illustration M is equal to 422, M' to 500. If a part of the capital of 422 exists as a fund of means of payment and purchase, as a money reserve, it is intended, other conditions remaining the same, that it should enter wholly into the circuit, and besides should suffice for this purpose. The reserve fund however is a part of the 78 of surplus-value. It can enter the circular course of the capital worth 422 only to the extent that this circuit takes place under conditions not remaining the same; for it is a part of the accumulation-fund, and figures here without any extension of the scale of reproduction. Money-accumulation fund implies the existence of latent money-capital, hence the transformation of money into money-capital. The following is the general formula for the circuit of productive capital. It combines simple reproduction and reproduction on a progressively increasing scale: The circuit of productive capital is the form in which classical Political Economy examines the circular movement of industrial capital.

Economic Manuscripts: Capital: Volume Two

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1885-c2/ch02.htm

C' M' C ... P ... C'. If reproduction takes place on an extended scale, then the final C' is greater than the initial C' and should therefore be designated here as C''. The difference between the third form and the first two is as follows: First, in this case the total circulation with its two antithetical phases opens the circuit, while in the Form I the circulation is interrupted by the process of production and in Form II the total circulation with its two complementary phases appears merely as a means of effecting the process of reproduction and therefore constitutes the movement mediating between P ... P. In the case of M ... M', the form of circulation is M C ... C' M' = M C M. In the case of P ... P it has the inverted form C' M'. M C = C M C. In the case of C' C' it likewise has this form. Secondly, when circuits I and II are repeated, even if the final points M' and P' form the starting-points of the renewed circuit, the form in which M' and P' were produced disappears. M' = M plus m and P' = P plus p begin the new process as M and P. But in the form III the starting-point C must be designated as C', even if the circuit is renewed on the same scale, for the following reason. In Form I, as soon as M' as such opens a new circuit it functions as money-capital M, as an advance in money-form of the capital-value that is to produce surplus-value. The size of the advanced money-capital, augmented by the accumulation achieved during the first circuit, has increased. But whether the size of the advanced money-capital is 422 or 500 does not alter the fact that it appears as simple capital-value. M' no longer exists as self-expanded capital or a capital pregnant with surplus-value, as a capital-relation. Indeed, it is to expand itself only during its process. The same is true of P ... P'; P' must steadily continue to function as P, as capital-value which is to produce surplus-value, and must renew its circuit. The commodity-capital circuit, on the contrary, does not open with just capital-value but with capital-value augmented in the commodity-form. Hence it includes from the start the circuit of not only capital-value existing in the form of commodities, but also of surplus-value. Consequently if simple reproduction takes place in this form, the C' at the terminal point is equal in size to the C' at the starting-point. If a part of the surplus-value enters into the capital circuit, C'', an enlarged C', appears at the close instead of C'. This is merely a larger C' than that of the proceeding circuit, with a larger accumulated capital-value. Hence it begins its new circuit with a relatively larger, newly created surplus-value. In any event C' always inaugurates the circuit as a commodity-capital which is equal to capital-value plus surplus-value. C' as C does not appear in the circuit of an individual industrial capital as a form of this capital but as a form of some other industrial capital, so far as the means of production are the product of the latter. The act M C (i.e., M MP) of the first capital is C' M' for this second capital. In the circulation act M C<LMP L and MP bear identical relations, as they are commodities in the hands of their sellers on the one hand the labourers who sell their labour-power, on the other the owner of the means of production, who sells these. For the purchaser, whose money here functions as money-capital, L and MP function merely as commodities until he has bought them, hence so long as they confront his capital, existing in the form of money, as commodities of others. MP and L differ here only in this respect, that MP may be C', hence capital, in the hands of its seller, if MP is the commodity-form of his capital, while L is always nothing else but a commodity for the labourer and becomes capital only in the hands of its purchaser as a constituent part of P. For this reason C' can never open any circuit as a mere C, as a mere commodity-form of capital-value. As commodity-capital it is always two-fold. From the point of view of use-value it is the product, in the present case yarn, of the functioning of P whose elements L and MP, coming as commodities from the sphere of circulation, have functioned only as factors in the creation of this product. Secondly, from the point of view of value, it is the capital-value P plus the surplus-value s produced by the functioning of P. It is only in the circuit described by C' itself that C equal to P and equal to the capital-value can and must separate from that part of C' in which the surplus-value is lodged. It does not matter whether the two things can be actually separated, as in the case of yarn, or whether they cannot, as in the case of a machine. They always become separable as soon as C' is transformed into M'. If the entire commodity-product can be separated into independent homogeneous partial products, as in the case of our 10,000 lbs. of yarn, and if therefore the act C' M' can be represented by a number of successive sales, then the capital-value in the form of commodities can function as C, can be separated from C', before the surplus-value, hence before C' in its entirety, has been realised. Of the 10,000 lbs. of yarn worth 500, the value of 8,440 lbs., equal to 422, is equal to the capital-value less the surplus-value. If the capitalist sells first 8,440 lbs. of yarn at 422, then these 8,440 lbs. of yarn represent C, the capital-value in commodity-form. The surplus-product of 1,560 lbs. of yarn, contained besides in C' and equal to a surplus value of 78, does not circulate until later. The capitalist could get through C M C<LMP before the circulation of the surplus-product c m c is accomplished. Or if he sells 7,440 lbs. of yarn worth 372, and then 1,000 lbs. of yarn worth 50, he might replace the means of production (the constant capital c) with the first part of C, and the variable capital v, the labour-power, with the second part of C, and then proceed as before. But if such successive sales take place and the conditions of the circuit permit it, the capitalist, instead of separating C' into c + v + s, may make such a preparation also in the case of aliquot parts of C'. For example the 7,440 lbs. of yarn equal at 372, which as parts of C' (10,000 lbs. of yarn worth 500) represent the constant part of capital, may themselves be separated into 5,535.360 lbs. of yarn worth 276.768, which replace only the constant part, the value of the means of production used up in producing 7,440 lbs. of yarn; 744 lbs. of yarn worth 37.200, which replace only the variable capital; and 1,160.640 lbs. of yarn worth 58.032, which, being surplus-product, are the depositories of surplus-value. Consequently on selling the 7,440 lbs. of yarn, he can replace the capital value contained in them out of the sale of 6,279.360 lbs. of yarn at the price of 313.968, and he can spend as his revenue the value of the surplus-product amounting to 1,160.640 lbs., or 58.032. In the same way, he may divide up another 1,000 lbs. of yarn equal to 50, equal to the variable capital-value, and sell them accordingly; 744 lbs. of yarn worth 37.200, constant capital-value contained in 1,000 lbs. of yarn; finally, 100 lbs. of yarn worth 5.000, variable capital-value ditto; hence 844 lbs. of yarn worth 42.200, replacement of the capital-value contained in the 1,000 lbs. of yarn; finally 156 lbs. of yarn worth 7.800, representing the surplus-product contained in it, which may be consumed as such. Finally, he may divide the remaining 1,560 lbs. of yarn worth 78, in such a way, provided he succeeds in selling them, that the sale of 1,160.640 lbs. of yarn, worth 58.032, replaces the value of the means of production contained in those 1,560 lbs. of yarn, and that 156 lbs. of yarn worth 7.800, replaces the variable capital-value; altogether 1,316.640 lbs. of yarn equal to 65.832, replacement of the total capital-value; finally the surplus-product of 243.360 lbs., equal to 12.168, remains to be spent as revenue. All the elements c, v and s contained in the yarn are divisible into the same component parts, and so is every individual pound of yarn, worth 1 s., or 12 d. In Form I, or M ... M', the process of production intervenes midway between the two complementary and mutually opposite phases of the circulation of capital. It is past before the concluding phase C' M' begins. Money is advanced as capital, is first transformed into the elements of production and from these into the commodity-product, and this commodity-product in its turn is changed back into money. It is a full and complete business cycle that results in money, something everyone can use for everything. A new start is therefore only a possibility. M ... P ... M' may be either be the last circuit that concludes the functioning of some individual capital being withdrawn from business, or the first circuit of some new capital entering upon its function. The general movement is here M ... M', from money to more money. In Form II, P ... C' M' C ... P (P'), the entire circulation process follows after the first P and precedes the second P; but it takes place in the opposite order from that of Form I. The first P is the productive capital, and its function is the productive process, the prerequisite of the succeeding circulation process. The concluding P on the other hand is not the productive process; it is only the renewed existence of the industrial capital in its form of productive capital. And it is such as a result of the transformation, during the last phase of circulation, of the capital-value into L plus MP, into the subjective and objective factors which by combining constitute the form of existence of the productive capital. The capital, whether P or P', is at the end once more present in a form in which it must function anew as productive capital, must again perform the productive process. The general form of the movement P ... P is the form of reproduction and, unlike M ... M', does not indicate the self-expansion of value as the object of the process. This form makes it therefore so much easier for classical Political Economy to ignore the definite capitalistic form of the process of production and to depict production as such as the purpose of this process; namely that as much as possible must be produced and as cheaply as possible, and that the product must be exchanged for the greatest variety of other products, partly for the renewal of production (M C), partly for consumption (m c). It is then possible to overlook the peculiarities of money and money-capital, for M and m appear here merely as transient media of circulation. The entire process seems simple and natural, i.e., possesses the naturalness of a shallow rationalism. In the same way profit is occasionally forgotten in commodity-capital and the latter figures merely as a commodity when the production circuit as a whole is under discussion. But as soon as the constituents of value are debated, commodity-capital figures as commodity-capital. Accumulation, of course, is seen in the same light as production. In Form III, C' M' C .... P ... C', the two phases of the circulation process open the circuit, and do so in the same order which obtains in Form II, P ... P; next follows P, with its function, the productive process, the same as in Form I; the circuit closes with the result of the process of production, C'. Just as in Form II the circuit closes with P, the merely renewed existence of productive capital, so here it closes with C', the renewed existence of commodity-capital. Just as in Form II capital, in its concluding form P, must start the process over again as a process of production, so here upon the reappearance of industrial capital in the form of commodity-capital the circuit must re-open with the circulation phase C' M'. Both forms of the circuit are incomplete because they do not close with M', the capital-value retransformed into money and self-expanded. Both must therefore be continued and consequently include the reproduction. The total circuit in Form III is C' ... C'. The third form is distinguished from the first two by the fact that it is only in this circuit that the self-expanded capital-value and not the original one, the capital-value that must still produce surplus-value appears as the starting point of its self-expansion. C as a capital-relation is here the starting point and as such relation has a determining influence on the entire circuit because it includes the circuit of the capital-value as well as that of the surplus-value in its first phase, and because the surplus-value must at least in the average, if not in every single circuit, be expended partly as revenue, go through the circulation c m c, and must perform the function of an element of capital accumulation. In the form C' ... C' the consumption of the entire commodity-product is assumed as the condition of the normal course of the circuit of capital itself. The individual consumption of the labourer and the individual consumption of the unaccumulated part of the surplus-product comprise the entire individual consumption. Hence consumption in its totality individual as well as productive enters into circuit C' as a condition of it. Productive consumption (which essentially includes the individual consumption of the labourer, since labour-power is a continuous product, with certain limits, of the labourer s individual consumption) is carried on by every individual capital. Individual consumption, except in so far as it is required for the existence of the individual capitalist, is here assumed to be only a social act, but by no means an act of the individual capitalist. In Forms I and II the aggregate movement appears as a movement of advanced capital-value. In Form III the self-expanded capital, in the shape of the total commodity-product, forms the starting-point and has the form of moving capital, commodity-capital. Not until its transformation into money has been accomplished does the movement branch out into movements of capital and of revenue. The distribution of the total social product, as well as the special distribution of the product for each individual commodity-capital, into an individual consumption-fund on the one hand and into reproduction fund on the other is included in this form in the circuit of capital. In M... M' possible enlargement of the circuit is included, depending on the volume of m entering into the renewed circuit. In P ... P the new circuit may be started by P with the same or perhaps even a smaller value and yet may represent a reproduction on an extended scale, for instance when certain elements of commodities become cheaper on account of increased productivity of labour. Vice versa, a productive capital which has increased in value may, in a contrary case, represent reproduction on a materially contracted scale as for instance when elements of production have become dearer. The same is true of C' ... C'. In C' ... C' capital in the form of commodities is the premise of production. It re-appears as a premise within this circuit in the second C. If this C has not yet been produced or reproduced the circuit is obstructed. This C must be reproduced, for the greater part of as C' of some other industrial capital. In this circuit C' exists as the point of departure, of transition, and of the conclusion of the movement; hence it is always there. It is a permanent condition of the process of reproduction. C' ... C' is distinguished from Forms I and II by still another feature. All three circuits have this in common, that capital begins its circular course in the same form in which it concludes it, and thus finds itself in the initial form in which it opens the circuit anew. The initial form M, P or C' is always the one in which capital-value (in III augmented by its surplus-value) is advanced, in other words its original form in regard to the circuit. The concluding form M', P or C' is always a changed form of a functional form which preceded in the circuit and is not the original form. Thus M' in I is a changed form of C', the final P in II is a changed form of M (and this transformation is accomplished in I and II by a simple act of commodity circulation, by a formal change of position of commodity and money); in III, C' is a changed form of the productive capital P. But here, in III, the transformation, in the first place, does not merely concern the functional form of capital but also the magnitude of its value; in the second place, however, the transformation is not the result of a merely formal change in position pertaining to the circulation process, but of a real transformation experienced by the use-form and value of the commodity constituents of the productive capital in the process of production. The form of the initial extreme M, P or C' is the premise of the corresponding circuit I, II or III. The form returning in the final extreme is premised and consequently brought about by the series of metamorphoses of the circuit itself. C', as the terminal point in the circuit of an individual industrial capital, presupposes only the non-circulation form P of the same industrial capital of which it is the product. M', as the terminal point of I, as the converted form of C' (C' M'), presupposes that M is in the hands of the buyer, exists outside of the circuit M ... M', and is drawn into it and made its own terminal form by the sale of C'. Thus the terminal P in II presupposes that L and MP (C) exist outside and are incorporated in it as its terminal form by means of M C. But apart from the last extreme, the circuit of individual money-capital does not presuppose the existence of money-capital in general, nor does the circuit of individual productive capital presuppose the existence of productive capital. In I, M may be the first money-capital; in II, P may be the first productive capital appearing on the historical scene. But in III, On the basis that the capitalist mode of production is the prevailing mode, all commodities in the hands of the seller must, besides, be commodity-capital. And they continue to be so in the hands of the merchant or become such if they were not such before. Or they have to be commodities such as imported articles which replace original commodity-capital and hence bestow upon it merely another form of existence. As forms of existence of P the commodity-elements L and MP, of which the productive capital P consists, do not possess the same form as in the various commodity markets where they are fetched. They are now united, and so combined they can perform the functions of productive capital. That C appears as the premise of C only in this Form III, within the circuit itself, is due to capital in commodity-form being its starting point. The circuit is opened by the transformation of C' (in so far as it functions as capital-value, regardless of whether it has been increased by the addition of surplus-value or not) into those commodities which are its elements of production. But this transformation comprises the entire process of circulation, C M C (equal to L plus MP), and is its result. C here stands at both extremes, but the second extreme, which receives its form C by means of M C from outside, the commodity-market, is not the last extreme of the circuit but only of its first two stages comprising the process of circulation. Its result is P, which then performs its function, the process of production. It is only as the result of this process, hence not as that of the circulation process, that C' appears as the terminal point of the circuit and in the same form as the starting-point, C'. On the other hand in M ... M' and P ... P, the final extremes M' and P are the direct results of the process of circulation. Here therefore it is presupposed only at the end that one time M' and the other time P exist in the hands of others. In so far as the circuit is made between the extremes, neither M in the one case nor P in the other the existence of M as the money of another person and of P as the production process of another capital appears as the premise of these circuits. C' ... C' on the contrary presupposes the existence of C (equal to L plus MP) as commodities of others in the hands of others commodities drawn into the circuit by the introductory process of circulation and transformed into productive capital, as a result of whose functioning C' once more becomes the concluding form of the circuit. But just because the circuit C' ... C' presupposes within its sphere the existence of other industrial capital in the form of C (equal to L + MP) and MP comprises diverse other capitals, in our case for instance machinery, coal, oil, etc. it clamours to be considered not only as the general form of the circuit, i.e., not only as a social form in which every single industrial capital (except when first invested) can be studied, hence not merely as a form of movement common to all individual industrial capitals, but simultaneously also as a form of movement of the sum of the individual capitals, consequently of the aggregate capital of the capitalist class, a movement in which that of each individual industrial capital appears as only a partial movement which intermingles with the other movements and is necessitated by them. For instance if we regard the aggregate of commodities annually produced in a certain country and analyse the movement by which a part of it replaces the productive capital in all individual businesses, while another part enters into the individual consumption of the various classes, then we consider C' ... C' as a form of movement of social capital as well as of the surplus-value, or surplus-product, generated by it. The fact that the social capital is equal to the sum of the individual capitals (including the joint-stock capital or the state capital, so far as governments employ productive wage-labour in mines, railways, etc., perform the function of industrial capitalists), and that the aggregate movement of social capital is equal to the algebraic sum of the movements of the individual capitals, does not in any way preclude the possibility that this movement as the movement of a single individual capital, may present other phenomena than the same movement does when considered from the point of view of a part of the aggregate movement of social capital, hence in its interconnections with the movements of its other parts, and that the movement simultaneously solves problems the solution of which must be assumed when studying the circuit of a separate, individual capital instead of being the result of such study. C' ... C' is the sole circuit in which the originally advanced capital-value consists only a part of the extreme that opens the movement and in which the movement from its inception thus reveals itself as the total movement of the industrial capital as the movement of that part of the product which replaces the productive capital as well as of that part which forms surplus-product and which on the average is spent in part as revenue and employed in part as an element of accumulation. Included in this circuit is the expenditure of surplus-value as revenue and to that extent individual consumption is likewise included. The latter is furthermore included for the reason that the starting-point C, commodity, exists in the form of some utility; but every article produced by capitalist methods is commodity-capital, no matter whether its use-form destines it for productive or for individual consumption, or for both. M ... M' indicates only the value side, the self-expansion of the advanced capital-value, as the purpose of the entire process; P ... P (P') indicates the process of production of capital as a process of reproduction with a productive capital of the same or of increasing magnitude (accumulation). Revealing itself already in its initial extreme as a form of capitalist commodity production, C' ... C' comprises productive and individual consumption from the start; productive consumption and the self-expansion of value therein included appear only as a branch of its movement. Finally, since C' may exist in a use-form which cannot enter any more into any process of production, it is indicated at the outset that C' s various constituents of value expressed by parts of the product must occupy a different position, according to whether C' ... C' is regarded as the form of the movement of the total social capital or as the independent movement of an individual industrial capital. All these peculiarities of the circuit lead us beyond its own confines as an isolated circuit of some merely individual capital. In the formula C' ... C', the movement of the commodity-capital, that is to say, of the total product created capitalistically, appears not only as the premise of the independent circuit of the individual capital but also as required by it. If the formula and its peculiarities are grasped, it is no longer sufficient to confine oneself to indicating that the metamorphoses C' M' and M C are on the one hand functionally defined sections in the metamorphoses of capital, on the other are links in the general circulation of commodities. It becomes necessary to elucidate the intertwining of the metamorphoses of one individual capital with those of other individual capitals and with that part of the total product which is intended for individual consumption. On analysing the circuit of an individual industrial capital, we therefore base our studies mainly on the first two forms. The circuit C' ... C' appears as a form of a single individual capital, for instance in agriculture, where calculations are made from crop to crop. In Formula II, the sowing is the starting-point, in Formula III the harvest, or, to speak with the physiocrats, Formula II starts out with the avance, and Formula III with the reprises. The movement of capital-value appears in III from the outset only as a part of the movement of the general mass of products, while in I and II the movement of C' constitutes only a phase of the movement of some isolated capital. In Formula III commodities in the market are the continuous premise of the process of production and reproduction. Hence, if attention is fixed exclusively on this formula all elements of the process of production seem to originate in commodity circulation and to consist only of commodities. This one-sided conception overlooks those elements of the process of production which are independent of the commodity-elements. Since in C' ... C' the starting-point is the total product (total value), it turns out that (if foreign trade is disregarded) reproduction on an extended scale, productivity remaining otherwise constant, can take place only when the part of the surplus-product to be capitalised already contains the material elements of the additional productive capital; that therefore, so far as the production of one year serves as the premise of the following year s production or so far as this can take place simultaneously with the process of simple reproduction within one year, surplus-product is at once produced in a form which enables it to perform the functions of additional capital. Increased productivity can increase only the substance of capital but not its value; but therewith it creates additional material for the self-expansion of that value. C' ... C' is the groundwork for Quesnay's Tableau conomique, and it shows great and true discretion on his part that in contrast to M ... M' (the isolatedly and rigidly retained form of the mercantile system) he selected this form and not P ... P.

Economic Manuscripts: Capital: Volume Two

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1885-c2/ch03.htm

All three circuits have the following in common: The self-expansion of value as the determining purpose, as the compelling motive. In I this is expressed in its form. Formula II begins with P, the very process of creating surplus-value. In III the circuit begins with the self-expanded value, even if the movement is repeated on the same scale. As C M means M C for the buyer, and M C means C M for the seller, the circulation of capital presents only the ordinary metamorphosis of commodities, and the laws evolved with regard to it (Buch I, Kap. III, 2) [English edition: Ch. III, 2. Ed.] on the mass of money in circulation are valid here. However, if we do not cling to this formal aspect but rather consider the actual connection between the metamorphoses of the various individual capitals, in other words, if we study the connection between the circuits of individual capitals as partial movements of the process of reproduction of the total social capital, then the mere change of form of money and commodities cannot explain the connection. In a constantly revolving circle every point is simultaneously a point of departure and a point of return. If we interrupt the rotation, not every point of departure is a point of return. Thus we have seen that not only does every individual circuit presuppose (implicite) the others, but also that the repetition of the circuit in one form comprises the performance of the circuit in the other forms. The entire difference thus appears to be a merely formal one, or as a merely subjective distinction existing solely for the observer. Since every one of these circuits is considered a special form of this movement in which various individual industrial capitals are engaged, this difference exists only as an individual one. But in reality every individual industrial capital is present simultaneously in all three circuits. These three circuits, the forms of reproduction assumed by the three forms of capital, are made continuously side by side. For instance, one part of the capital-value, which now performs the function of commodity-capital, is transformed into money-capital, but at the same time another part leaves the process of production and enters the circulation as a new commodity-capital. The circuit form C' ... C' is thus continuously described; and so are the other two forms. The reproduction of capital in each one of its forms and stages is just as continuous as the metamorphosis of these forms and the successive passage through the three stages. The entire circuit is thus a unity of its three forms. We assumed in our analysis that capital-value in its entire magnitude acts as money-capital, productive-capital or commodity-capital. For instance, we had those 422 first entirely as money-capital, then we transformed them wholly into productive capital, and finally into commodity-capital, into yarn of the value of 500 (containing 78 worth of surplus-value). Here the various stages are just so many interruptions. So long as, e.g., those 422 retain their money-form, that is to say, until the purchases M C (L plus MP) are made, the entire capital exists and functions only as money-capital. As soon as it is transformed into productive capital, it performs neither the function of money-capital nor of commodity-capital. Its entire process of circulation is interrupted, as soon as it functions in one of its two circulation stages, either as M or as C'. Consequently, the circuit P ... P would represent not only a periodical renewal of the productive capital but also the interruption of its function, the process of production, up to the time when the process of circulation is completed. Instead of proceeding continuously, production would take place in jerks and would be renewed only in periods of accidental duration, according to whether the two stages of the process of circulation are got through with quickly or slowly. This would apply for instance to a Chinese artisan who works only for private customers and whose process of production ceases until he receives a new order. This is indeed true of every single part of capital that is in motion, and all parts of capital go through this motion in succession. Suppose that the 10,000 lbs. of yarn are the weekly product of some spinner. These 10,000 lbs. of yarn leave the sphere of production entirely and enter the sphere of circulation; the capital-value contained in it must all be converted into money-capital, and so long as this value continues in the form of money-capital it cannot enter anew into the process of production. It must first go into circulation and be reconverted into the elements of productive capital, L plus MP. The circuit-describing process of capital means constant interruption, the leaving of one stage and the entering into the next, the discarding of one form and the assuming of another. Each one of these stages not only presupposes the next but also excludes it. But continuity is the characteristic mark of capitalist production, necessitated by its technical basis, although not always absolutely attainable. Let us see then what happens in reality. While, e.g., the 10,000 lbs. of yarn appear in the market as commodity-capital and are transformed into money (regardless of whether it is a paying or purchasing medium or only money of account), new cotton, coal, etc., take the place of the yarn in the process of production, have therefore already been reconverted from the money-form and commodity-form into that of productive capital, and begin to function as such. At the same time that these 10,000 lbs. of yarn are being reconverted into money, the preceding 10,000 lbs. of yarn are going through the second stage of their circulation and are being reconverted from money into the elements of productive capital. All parts of capital successively describe circuits, are simultaneously at its different stages. The industrial capital, continuously progressing along its orbit, thus exists simultaneously at all its stages and in the diverse functional forms corresponding to these stages. That part of industrial capital which is converted for the first time from commodity-capital into money begins the circuit C' ... C', while industrial capital as a moving whole has already passed through that circuit. One hand advances money, the other receives it. The inauguration of the circuit M ... M' at one place coincides with the return of the money at another place. The same is true of productive capital. The actual circuit of industrial capital in its continuity is therefore not alone the unity of the processes of circulation and production but also the unity of all its three circuits. But it can be such a unity only if all the different parts of capital can go through the successive stages of the circuit, can pass from one phase, from one functional form to another, so that the industrial capital, being the whole of all these parts, exists simultaneously in its various phases and functions and thus describes all three circuits at the same time. The succession ]das Nacheinander] of these parts is here governed by their co-existence [das Nebeneinander], that is to say, by the division of capital. In a ramified factory system the product is constantly in the various stages of its process of formation and constantly passes from one phase of production to another. As the individual industrial capital has a definite size which depends on the means of the capitalist and which has a definite minimum magnitude for every branch of industry, it follows that its division must proceed according to definite proportions. The magnitude of the available capital determines the dimensions of the process of production, and this again determines the dimensions of the commodity-capital and money-capital in so far as they perform their functions parallel with the process of production. However co-existence, by which continuity of production is determined, is only due to the movement of those parts of capital in which they successively pass through their different stages. Co-existence is itself merely the result of succession. If for instance C' M' as far as one part is concerned, if the commodity cannot be sold, then the circuit of this part is interrupted and no replacement by its means of reproduction takes place; the succeeding parts, which emerge from the process of production in the shape of C', find the change of their functions blocked by their predecessors. If this lasts for some time, production is restricted and the entire process brought to a halt. Every stagnation in succession carries disorder into co-existence, every stagnation in one stage causes more or less stagnation in the entire circuit of not only the stagnant part of capital but also of the total individual capital. The next form in which the process presents itself is that of a succession of phases, so that the transition of capital into a new phase is made necessary by its departure from another. Every separate circuit has therefore one of the functional forms of capital for its point of departure and point of return. On the other hand the aggregate process is in fact the unity of the three circuits, which are the different forms in which the continuity of the process expresses itself. The aggregate circuit presents itself to every functional form of capital as its specific circuit and every one of these circuits is a condition of the continuity of the total process. The cycle of each functional form is dependent upon the others. It is a necessary prerequisite of the aggregate process of production, especially for the social capital, that it is at the same time a process of reproduction and hence a circuit of each one of its elements. Various fractional parts of capital pass successively through the various stages and functional forms. Thanks to this every functional form passes simultaneously with the others through its own circuit, although always a different part of capital finds its expression in it. One part of capital, continually changing, continually reproduced, exists as a commodity-capital which is converted into money; another as money-capital which is converted into productive capital; and a third as productive capital which is transformed into commodity-capital. The continuous existence of all three forms is brought about by the circuit the aggregate capital describes in passing through precisely these three phases. Capital as a whole, then, exists simultaneously, spatially side by side, in its different phases. But every part passes constantly and successively from one phase, from one functional form, into the next and thus functions in all of them in turn. Its forms are hence fluid and their simultaneousness is brought about by their succession. Every form follows another and precedes it, so that the return of one capital part to a certain form is necessitated by the return of the other part to some other form. Every part describes continuously its own cycle, but it is always another part of capital which exists in this form, and these special cycles form only simultaneous and successive elements of the aggregate process. The continuity instead of the above-described interruption of the aggregate process is achieved only in the unity of the three circuits. The aggregate social capital always has this continuity and its process always exhibits the unity of the three circuits. The continuity of the reproduction is at times more or less interrupted so far as individual capitals are concerned. In the first place the masses of value are frequently distributed at various periods in unequal portions over the various stages and functional forms. In the second place these portions may be differently distributed, according to the character of the commodity to be produced, hence according to the particular sphere of production in which the capital is invested. In the third place the continuity may be more or less broken in those branches of production which are dependent on the seasons, either on account of natural conditions (agriculture, herring catch, etc.) or on account of conventional circumstances, as for instance in so-called seasonal work. The process goes on most regularly and uniformly in the factories and mines. But this difference in the various branches of production does not cause any difference in the general forms of the circular process. Capital as self-expanding value embraces not only class relations, a society of a definite character resting on the existence of labour in the form of wage-labour. It is a movement, a circuit-describing process going through various stages, which itself comprises three different forms of circuit-describing process. Therefore it can be understood only as a motion, not as a thing at rest. Those who regard the gaining by value of independent existence as a mere abstraction forget that the movement of industrial capital is this abstraction in actu. Value here passes through various forms, various movements in which it maintains itself and at the same time expands, augments. As we are here concerned primarily with the mere form of this movement, we shall not take into consideration the revolutions which capital-value may undergo during its circuit. But it is clear that in spite of all the revolutions of value, capitalist production exists and can endure only so long as capital-value is made to create surplus-value, that is, so long as it describes its circuit as a value that has gained independence, so long therefore as the revolutions in value are overcome and equilibrated in some way. The movements of capital appear as the action of some individual industrial capitalist who performs the functions of a buyer of commodities and labour, a seller of commodities, and an owner of productive capital, who therefore promotes the circuit by this activity. If social capital experiences a revolution in value, it may happen that the capital of the individual capitalist succumbs to it and fails, because it cannot adapt itself to the conditions of this movement of values. The more acute and frequent such revolutions in value become, the more does the automatic movement of the now independent value operate with the elemental force of a natural process, against the foresight and calculation of the individual capitalist, the more does the course of normal production become subservient to abnormal speculation, and the greater is the danger that threatens the existence of the individual capitals. These periodical revolutions in value therefore corroborate what they are supposed to refute, namely, that value as capital acquires independent existence, which it maintains and accentuates through its movement. This succession of the metamorphoses of capital in process includes continuous comparison of the change in the magnitude of value of the capital brought about in the circuit with the original value. If value s acquisition of independence of the value-creating power, labour-power, is inaugurated by the act M L (purchase of labour-power) and is effected during the process of production as exploitation of labour-power, this acquisition of independence on the part of value does not re-appear in that circuit, in which money, commodities, and elements of production are merely alternating forms of capital-value in process, and the former magnitude of value is compared with capital s present changed magnitude of value. This he says against the comparison of commodity-values of different epochs, a comparison which amounts only to comparing the expenditure of labour required in various periods for the production of the same sort of commodities, once the value of money has been fixed for every period. This comes from his general misunderstanding, for he thinks that exchange-value is equal to value, that the form if value is value itself; consequently commodity-value can no longer be compared, if they do not function actively as exchange-values and thus cannot actually be exchanged for one another. He has not the least inkling of the fact that value functions as capital-value or capital only in so far as it remains identical with itself and is compared with itself in the different phases of its circuit, which are not at all contemporary but succeed one another. In order to study the formula of the circuit in its purity it is not sufficient to postulate that commodities are sold at their value; it must also be assumed that this takes place with other things being equal. Take for instance the form P ... P, disregarding all technical revolutions within the process of production by which the productive capital of a certain capitalist might be depreciated; disregarding furthermore all reactions which a change in the elements of value of the productive capital might have on the value of the existing commodity-capital, which might appreciate or depreciate if a stock of it is on hand. Suppose the 10,000 lbs. of yarn, C', have been sold at their value of 500; 8,440 lbs. equal to 422, replace the capital-value contained in C'. But if the value of cotton, coal, etc., has increased (we do not consider mere fluctuations in price), these 422 may not suffice for the full replacement of the elements of productive capital; additional money-capital is required, money-capital is tied up. The opposite takes place when those prices fall. Money-capital is set free. The process takes a wholly normal course only when the value-relations remain constant; its course is practically normal so long as the disturbances during the repetitions of the circuit balance one another. But the greater these disturbances the greater the money-capital which the industrial capitalist must possess to tide over the period of readjustment; and as the scale of each individual process of production and with it the minimum size of the capital to be advanced increases in the process of capitalist production, we have here another circumstance to be added to those others which transform the function of the industrial capitalist more and more into a monopoly of big money-capitalists, who may operate singly or in association. We remark incidentally that if a change in the value of the elements of production occurs a difference appears between the form M...M' on one side and of P ... P and C' ... C' on the other. In M ... M', the formula of newly-invested capital, which first appears as money-capital, a fall in the value of the means of production, such as raw material, auxiliary material, etc., will permit of a smaller expenditure of money-capital than before this fall for the purpose of starting a business of a definite size, because the scale of the process of production (productive power development remaining the same) depends on the mass and volume of the means of production which a given quantity of labour-power can cope with; but it does not depend on the value of these means of production nor on that of the labour-power (the latter value affects only the magnitude of self-expansion). Take the reverse case. If there is a rise in the value of the elements of production of the commodities which constitute the elements of the productive capital, then more money-capital is needed for the establishment of a business of definite proportions. In both cases it is only the amount of the money-capital required for new investment that is affected. In the former case money-capital becomes surplus, in the latter it is tied up, provided the accession of new individual industrial capital proceeds in the usual way in a given branch of production. The circuits P ... P and C' ... C' present themselves as M ... M' only to the extent that the movement of P and C' is at the same time accumulation, hence to the extent that additional m, money, is converted into money-capital; here, too, we do not take into consideration the reaction of such changes in value on those constituent parts of capital which are engaged in the process of production. It is not the original expenditure which is directly affected here, but an industrial capital engaged in its process of reproduction and not in its first circuit; i.e., C' ... C<LMP, the reconversion of commodity-capital into its elements of production, so far as they are composed of commodities. When value (prices) fall three cases are possible: The process of reproduction is continued on the same scale; in that event a part of the money-capital existing hitherto is set free and money-capital is accumulated, although no real accumulation (production on an extended scale) or transformation of m (surplus-value) into an accumulation-fund initiating and accompanying such accumulation has previously taken place. Or the process of reproduction is carried on a more extensive scale than ordinarily would have been the case, provided the technical proportions admit it. Or, finally, a larger stock of raw materials, etc., is laid in. The opposite occurs if the value of the elements of replacement of a commodity-capital increases. In that case reproduction no longer takes place on its normal scale (e.g., the working-day gets shorter); or additional money-capital must be employed in order to maintain the old volume of work (money-capital is tied up); or the money-fund for accumulation, when one exists, is employed entirely or partially for the operation of the process of reproduction on its old scale instead of for the enlargement of this process. This is also tying up money-capital, except that here the additional money-capital does not come from the outside, from the money-market, but from the means of the industrial capitalist himself. However, there may be modifying circumstances in P ... P and C' ... C'. If our spinning-mill proprietor for example has a large stock of cotton (a large proportion of his productive capital in the form of a stock of cotton), a part of his productive capital is depreciated by a fall in the prices of cotton; but if on the contrary these prices rise, this part of his productive capital appreciates. On the other hand, if he has tied up huge quantities in the form of commodity-capital, for instance of cotton yarn, a part of his commodity-capital, hence of his circuit describing capital in general, is depreciated by a fall of cotton, or appreciated by a rise in its prices. Finally take the process C' M C<LMP. If C' M, the realisation of the commodity-capital, has taken place before a change in the value of the elements of C, then capital is affected only in the way indicated in the first case, namely in the second act of circulation, M C<LMP; but if such a change has occurred before C' M has been effected, then, other conditions remaining equal, a fall in the price of cotton causes a corresponding fall in the price of yarn, and a rise in the price of cotton means conversely a rise in the price of yarn. The effect on the various individual capitals invested in the same branch of production may differ widely, according to the circumstances in which they find themselves. Money-capital may also be set free or tied up on account of differences in the duration of the process of circulation, hence also in the speed of circulation. But this belongs in the discussion on turnover. At this point we are only interested in the real difference that becomes evident, with regard to changes of values of the elements of productive capital, between M ... M' and the other two circuit forms. In the circulation section M C<LMP, in the epoch of the already developed and hence prevailing capitalist mode of production, a large portion of the commodities composing MP, the means of production, is itself functioning as the commodity-capital of someone else. From the standpoint of the seller, therefore, C' M', the transformation of commodity-capital into money-capital, takes place. But this is not an absolute rule. On the contrary. Within its process of circulation, in which industrial capital functions either as money or as commodities, the circuit of industrial capital, whether as money-capital or as commodity-capital, crosses the commodity circulation of the most diverse modes of social production, so far as they produce commodities. No matter whether commodities are the output of production based on slavery, of peasants (Chinese, Indian ryots). of communes (Dutch East Indies), of state enterprise (such as existed in former epochs of Russian history on the basis of serfdom) or of half-savage hunting tribes, etc. as commodities and money they come face to face with the money and commodities in which the industrial capital presents itself and enter as much into its circuit as into that of the surplus-value borne in the commodity-capital, provided the surplus-value is spent as revenue; hence they enter in both branches of circulation of commodity-capital. The character of the process of production from which they originate is immaterial. They function as commodities in the market, and as commodities they enter into the circuit of industrial capital as well as into the circulation of the surplus-value incorporated in it. It is therefore the universal character of the origin of the commodities, the existence of the market as world-market, which distinguishes the process of circulation of industrial capital. What is true of the commodities of others is also true of the money of others. Just as commodity-capital faces money only as commodities, so this money functions vis- -vis commodity-capital only as money. Money here performs the functions of world-money. However two points must be noted here. First: as soon as act M MP is completed, the commodities (MP) cease to be such and become one of the modes of existence of industrial capital in its functional form of P, productive capital. Thereby however their origin is obliterated. They exist henceforth only as forms of existence of industrial capital, are embodied in it. However it still remains true that to replace them they must be reproduced, and to this extent the capitalist mode of production is conditional on modes of production lying outside of its own stage of development. But it is the tendency of the capitalist mode of production to transform all production as much as possible into commodity production. The mainspring by which this is accomplished is precisely the involvement of all production into the capitalist circulation process. And developed commodity production itself is capitalist commodity production. The intervention of industrial capital promotes this transformation everywhere, but with it also the transformation of all direct producers into wage-labourers. Secondly: the commodities entering into the circulation of industrial capital (including the requisite means of subsistence into which variable capital, after being paid to the labourers, is transformed for the purpose of reproducing their labour-power), regardless of their origin and of the social form of the productive process by which they were brought into existence, come face to face with industrial capital itself already in the form of commodity-capital, in the form of commodity-dealer s or merchant s capital. And merchant s capital, by its very nature comprises commodities of all modes of production. The capitalist mode of production presupposes not only large-scale production but also, and necessarily so, sales on a large scale, hence sale to the merchant, not to the individual consumer. If this consumer is himself a productive consumer, hence an industrial capitalist, i.e., if the industrial capital of one branch of production supplies some other branch of industry with means of production, direct sale by one industrial capitalist to many others take place (in the form of orders, etc.). To this extent every industrial capitalist is a direct seller and his own merchant, which by the way is when he sells to a merchant. Trading in commodities as the function of merchant s capital is a premise of capitalist production and develops more and more in the course of development of such production. Therefore we occasionally take its existence for granted to illustrate particular aspects of the process of capitalist circulation; but in the general analysis of this process we assume direct sale, without the intervention of a merchant, because this intervention obscures various facets of the movement. Cf. Sismondi, who presents the matter somewhat naively: In the discussion of the general forms of the circuit and in the entire second book in general, we take money to mean metallic money, with the exception of symbolic money, mere tokens of value, which are designed for specific use in certain states, and of credit-money, which is not yet developed. In the first place, this is the historical order; credit-production plays only a very minor role, or none at all, during the first epoch of capitalist production. In the second place, the necessity of this order is demonstrated theoretically by the fact that everything of a critical nature which Tooke and others hitherto expounded in regard to the circulation of credit-money compelled them to hark back again and again to the question of what would be the aspect of the matter if nothing but metal-money were in circulation. But it must not be forgotten that metal-money may serve as a purchasing medium and also as a paying medium. For the sake of simplicity, we consider it in this second book generally only in its first functional form. The process of circulation of industrial capital, which is only a part of its individual circuit, is determined by the general laws previously set forth (Buch I, Kap. III), [English edition: Ch. III. Ed.] in so far as it is only a series of acts within the general circulation of commodities. The greater the velocity of the currency of money, the more rapidly therefore every individual capital passes through the series of its commodity or money metamorphoses, the more numerous are the industrial capitals (or individual capitals in the form of commodity-capitals) started circulating successively by a given mass of money, for example 500. The more the money functions as a paying medium, the more therefore for instance in the replacement of some commodity-capital by its means of production nothing but balances have to be squared, and the shorter the periods of time when payments fall due, as for instance in paying wages, the less money a given mass of capital-value therefore requires for its circulation. On the other hand, assuming that the velocity of the circulation and all other conditions remain the same, the amount of money required to circulate as money-capital is determined by the sum of the prices of the commodities (price multiplied by the volume of commodities), or, if the quantity and value of the commodities are fixed, by the value of the money itself. But the laws of the general circulation of commodities are valid only when capital s circulation process consists of a series of simple acts of circulation; they do not apply when the latter constitute functionally determined sections of the circuit of individual industrial capitals. In order to make this plain, it is best to study the process of circulation in its uninterrupted interconnection, such as it appears in the following two forms: C M on the part of the owner of a commodity means M C on the part of its buyer; the first metamorphosis of the commodity appearing in the form of M; the opposite applies to M C. What has been shown concerning the intertwining of the metamorphosis of a certain commodity in one stage with that of another in another stage applies to the circulation of capital so far as the capitalist functions as a buyer and seller of commodities, and his capital on that account functions in the form of money opposed to the commodities of another. But this intertwining is not to be identified with the intertwining of the metamorphoses of capitals. In the first place M C (MP), as we have seen, may represent an intermingling of the metamorphoses of different individual capitals. For instance the commodity-capital of the spinning-mill owner, yarn is partly replaced by coal. One part of his capital exists in the form of money and is converted into the form of commodities, while the capital of the capitalist producer of coal is in the form of commodities and is therefore converted into the form of money; the same act of circulation represents in this case opposite metamorphoses of two industrial capitals (in different branches of production), hence an intertwining of the series of metamorphoses of these capitals. But as we have seen the MP into which M is transformed need not be commodity-capital in the categorical sense, i.e., need not be a functional form of industrial capital, need not be produced by a capitalist. It is always M C on one side and C M on the other, but not always an intermingling of metamorphoses of capitals. Furthermore M L, the purchase of labour-power, is never an intermingling of metamorphoses of capitals, for labour-power, though the commodity of the labourer, does not become capital until it is sold to the capitalist. On the other hand in the process C' M', it is not necessary that M' should represent converted commodity-capital; it may be the realisation in money of the commodity labour-power (wages), or of the product of some independent labourer, slave, serf, or community. In the second place however it is not at all required for the discharge of the functionally determined role played by every metamorphosis occurring within the process of circulation of some individual capital that this metamorphosis should represent the corresponding opposite metamorphosis in the circuit of the other capital, provided we assume that the entire production of the world-market is carried on capitalistically. For instance in the circuit P ... P, the M which converts C' into money may be to the buyer only the realisation in money of his surplus-value (if the commodity is an article of consumption); or in M' C'<LMP (where therefore already accumulated capital enters) M' may, as far as the vendor of MP is concerned, enter into the circulation of his capital only to replace his advanced capital or it may not re-enter at all by being diverted into revenue expenditure. Therefore the manner in which the various component parts of the aggregate social capital, of which the individual capitals are but constituents functioning independently, mutually replace one another in the process of circulation in regard to capital as well as surplus-value is not ascertained from the simple intertwinings of the metamorphoses in the circulation of commodities intertwinings which the acts of capital circulation have in common with all other circulation of commodities. That requires a different method of investigation. Hitherto one has been satisfied with uttering phrases which upon closer analysis are found to contain nothing but indefinite ideas borrowed from the intertwining of metamorphoses common to all commodity circulation. Natural economy, money-economy, and credit-economy have therefore been placed in opposition to one another as being the three characteristic economic forms of movement in social production. In the first place these three forms do not represent equivalent phases of development. The so-called credit-economy is merely a form of the money-economy, since both terms express functions or modes of exchange among the producers themselves. In developed capitalist production, the money-economy appears only as the basis of the credit-economy. The money-economy and credit-economy thus correspond only to different stages in the development of capitalist production, but they are by no means independent forms of exchange vis- -vis natural economy. With the same justification one might contrapose as equivalents the very different forms of natural economy to those two economies. In the second place, since it is not the economy, i.e., the process of production itself that is emphasised as the distinguishing mark of the two categories, money-economy and credit-economy, but rather the mode of exchange corresponding to that economy between the various agents of production, or producers, the same should apply to the first category. Hence exchange economy instead of natural economy. A completely isolated natural economy, such as the Inca state of Peru, would not come under any of these categories. In the third place the money-economy is common to all commodity production and the product appears as a commodity in the most varied organisms of social production. Consequently what characterises capitalist production would then be only the extent to which the product is created as an article of commerce, as a commodity, and hence the extent also to which its own constituent elements must enter again as articles of commerce, as commodities, into the economy from which it emerges. As a matter of fact capitalist production is commodity production as the general form of production. But it is so and becomes so more and more in the course of its development only because labour itself appears here as a commodity, because the labourer sells his labour, that is, the function of his labour-power, and our assumption is that he sells it at its value, determined by its cost of reproduction. To the extent that labour becomes wage-labour, the producer becomes an industrial capitalist. For this reason capitalist production (and hence also commodity production) does not reach its full scope until the direct agricultural producer becomes a wage-labourer. In the relation of capitalist and wage-labourer, the money-relation, the relation between the buyer and the seller, becomes a relation inherent in production. But this relation has its foundation in the social character of production, not in the mode of exchange. The latter conversely emanates from the former. It is, however, quite in keeping with the bourgeois horizon, everyone being engrossed in the transaction of shady business, not to see in the character of the mode of production the basis of the mode of exchange corresponding to it, but vice versa. The rate at which the capitalist makes the value of his capital expand is the greater, the greater the difference between his supply and his demand, i.e., the greater the excess of the commodity-value he supplies over the commodity-value he demands. His aim is not to equalize his supply and demand, but to make the inequality between them, the excess of his supply over his demand, as great as possible. What is true of the individual capitalist applies to the capitalist class. In so far as the capitalist merely personifies industrial capital, his own demand is confined to means of production and labour-power. In point of value, his demand for MP is smaller than his advanced capital; he buys means of production of a smaller value than that of his capital, and therefore of a still smaller value than that of the commodity-capital which he supplies. As regards his demand for labour-power, it is determined in point of value by the relation of his variable capital to his total capital, hence equals v : C. In capitalist production this demand thereby grows smaller than his demand for means of production. His purchases of MP steadily rise above his purchases of L. Since the labourer generally converts his wages into means of subsistence, and for the overwhelmingly larger part into absolute necessities, the demand of the capitalist for labour-power is indirectly also a demand for the articles of consumption essential to the working-class. But this demand is equal to v and not one iota greater (if the labourer saves a part of his wages we necessarily discard here all credit relations he converts part of his wages into a hoard and to that extent does not act as a bidder, a purchaser). The upper limit of a capitalist s demand is C, equal to c + v, but his supply is equal to c + v + s. Consequently if the composition of his commodity-capital is 80c + 20v + 20s, his demand is equal to 80c + 20v, hence, considered from the angle of the value it contains, one-fifth smaller than his supply. The greater the percentage of the mass of surplus-value produced by him (his rate of profit) the smaller becomes his demand in relation to his supply. Although with the further development of production the demand of the capitalist for labour-power, and thus indirectly for necessary means of subsistence, steadily decreases compared with his demand for means of production, it must not be forgotten on the other hand that his demand for MP is always smaller than his capital. His demand for means of production must therefore always be smaller in value than the commodity-product of the capitalist who, working with a capital of equal value and under equal conditions, furnishes him with those means of production. That many capitalists and not only one do the furnishing does not alter the case. Take it that his capital is 1,000, and its constant part 800; then his demand on all these capitalists is equal to 800. Together they supply means of production worth 1,200 for each 1,000 (regardless of what share in each 1,000 may fall to each one of them and of the fraction of his total capital which the share of each may represent), assuming that the rate of profit is the same. Consequently his demand covers only two-thirds of their supply, while his own total demand amounts to only four-fifths of his own supply, measured in value. It still remains for us, incidentally, to investigate the problem of turnover. Let the total capital of the capitalist be 5,000, of which 4,000 is fixed and 1,000 circulating capital; let this 1,000 be composed of 800c plus 200v, as assumed above. His circulating capital must be turned over five times a year for his total capital to turn over once. His commodity-product is then equal to 6,000, i.e., 1,000 more than his advanced capital, which results in the same ratio of surplus-value as above: 5,000 C : 1,000(c + v) : 20s Suppose his fixed capital has to be renewed in 10 years. So the capitalist pays every year one-tenth, or 400, into a sinking fund and thus has only a value of 3,600 of fixed capital left plus 400 in money. If the repairs are necessary and do not exceed the average, they represent nothing but capital invested later. We may look at the matter the same as if he had allowed for the cost of repairs beforehand, when calculating the value of his investment capital, so far as this enters into the annual commodity-product, so that it is included in the one-tenth sinking fund payment. (If his need for repairs is below average he is so much money to the good, and the reverse if above. But this evens out for the entire class of capitalists engaged in the same branch of industry.) At any rate, although his annual demand still remains 5,000, equal to the original capital-value he advanced (assuming his total capital is turned over once a year), this demand increases with regard to the circulating part of the capital, while it steadily decreases with regard to its fixed part. We now come to reproduction. Let us assume that the capitalist consumes the entire surplus-value m and reconverts only capital C of the original magnitude into productive capital. Then the demand of the capitalist is equal in value to his supply; but this does not refer to the movement of his capital. As a capitalist he exercises a demand for only four-fifths of his supply (in terms of value). He consumes one-fifth as a non-capitalist, not in his function as capitalist but for his private requirements or pleasures. His calculation, expressed in percentages, is then as follows: But such an assumption is impossible also technically. The capitalist must not only form a reserve capital to cushion price fluctuations and enable him to wait for favorable buying and selling conditions. He must accumulate capital in order to extend his production and build technical progress into his productive organism. In order to accumulate capital he must first withdraw in money-form from circulation a part of the surplus-value which he obtained from that circulation, and must hoard it until it has increased sufficiently for the extension of his old business or the opening of a side-line. So long as the formation of the hoard continues, it does not increase the demand of the capitalist. The money is immobilised. It does not withdraw from the commodity-market any equivalent in commodities for the money equivalent withdrawn from it for commodities supplied. Credit is not considered here. And credit includes for example deposits by the capitalist of accumulating money in a bank on current account paying interest.

Economic Manuscripts: Capital: Volume Two

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1885-c2/ch04.htm

The time of production naturally comprises the period of the labour-process, but is not comprised in it. It will be remembered first of all that a part of the constant capital exists in the form of instruments of labour, such as machinery, buildings, etc., which serve the same constantly repeated labour-processes until they are worn out. Periodical interruptions of the labour-process, by night for instance, interrupt the functioning of these instruments of labour, but not their stay at the place of production. They belong to this place when they are in function as well as when they are not. On the other hand the capitalist must have a definite supply of raw material and auxiliary material in readiness, in order that the process of production may take place for a longer or shorter time on a previously determined scale, without being dependent on the accidents of daily supply from the market. This supply of raw material, etc., is productively consumed only by degrees. There is, therefore, a difference between its time of production and its time of functioning. The time of production of the means of production in general comprises, therefore, 1) the time during which they function as means of production, hence serve in the productive process; 2) the stops during which the process of production, and thus the functioning of the means of production embodied in it, are interrupted; 3) the time during which they are held in readiness as prerequisites of that process, hence already represent productive capital but have not yet entered into the process of production. The difference so far considered has in each case been the difference between the time which the productive capital stays in the sphere of production and that it stays in the process of production. But the process of production may itself be responsible for interruptions of the labour-process, and hence of the labour-time intervals during which the subject of labour is exposed to the action of physical processes without the further intervention of human labour. The process of production, and thus the functioning of the means of production, continue in this case, although the labour-process, and thus the functioning of the means of production as instruments of labour, have been interrupted. This applies, for instance, to the grain, after it has been sown, the wine fermenting in the cellar, the labour-material of many factories, such as tanneries, where the material is exposed to the action of chemical processes. The time of production is here longer than the labour-time. The difference between the two consists in an excess of the production time over the labour-time. This excess always arises from the latent existence of productive capital in the sphere of production without functioning in the process of production itself or from its functioning in the productive process without taking part in the labour-process. That part of the latent productive capital is held in readiness only as a requisite for the productive process, such as cotton, coal, etc., in a spinning-mill, acts as a creator of neither products nor value. It is fallow capital, although its fallowness is essential for the uninterrupted flow of the process of production. The buildings, apparatus, etc., necessary for the storage of the productive supply (latent capital) are conditions of the productive process and therefore constitute component parts of the advanced productive capital. They perform their function as conservators of the productive components in the preliminary stage. Inasmuch as labour-processes are necessary in this stage, they add to the cost of raw material, etc., but are productive labour and productive surplus-value, because a part of this labour, like of all other wage-labour, is not paid for. The normal interruptions of the entire process of production, the intermissions during which the productive capital does not function, create neither value nor surplus-value. Hence the desire to the work going at night, too. (Buch I, Kap. VIII, 4.) [English edition: Ch. X, 4. Ed.] The intervals in the labour-time which the subject of labour must endure in the process of production itself create neither value nor surplus-value. But they advance the product, form a part of its life, a process through which it must pass. The value of the apparatus, etc., is transferred to the product in proportion to the entire time during which they perform their function; the product is brought to this stage by labour itself, and the employment of these apparatus is as much a condition of production as is the reduction to dust of a part of the cotton which does not enter into the product but nevertheless transfers its value to the product. The other part of the latent capital, such as buildings, machinery, etc., the instruments of labour whose functioning is interrupted only by the regular pauses of the productive process irregular interruptions caused by the restriction of production, crises, etc., are total losses adds value without entering into the creation of the product. The total value which this part of capital adds to the product is determined by its average durability; it loses value, because it loses its use-value, both during the time that it performs its functions as well as during that in which it does not. Finally the value of the constant part of capital, which continues in the productive process although the labour-process is interrupted, re-appears in the result of the productive process. Labour itself has here placed the means of production in conditions under which they pass of themselves through certain natural processes, the result of which is a definite useful effect or a change in the form of their use-value. Labour always transfers the value of the means of production to the product, in so far as it really consumes them in a suitable manner, as means of production. And it does not change the matter whether labour has to bear continually on its subject by means of the instruments of labour in order to produce this effect or whether it merely needs to give the first impulse by providing the means of production with conditions under which they undergo the intended alteration of themselves, in consequence of natural processes, without the further assistance of labour. Whatever may be the reason for the excess of production time over the labour-time whether the circumstance that means of production constitute only latent productive capital and hence are still in a stage preliminary to the actual productive process or that their own functioning is interrupted within the process of production by its pauses or finally that the process of production itself necessitates interruptions of the labour-process in none of these cases do the means of production function as absorbers of labour. And if they do not absorb labour, they do not absorb surplus-labour, either. Hence there is no expansion of the value of productive capital so long as it stays in that part of its production time which exceeds the labour-time, no matter how inseparable from these pauses the carrying on of the process of self-expansion may be. It is plain that the more the production time and labour-time cover each other the greater is the productivity and self-expansion of a given productive capital in a given space of time. Hence the tendency of the capitalist production to reduce the excess of the production time over the labour-time as much as possible. But while the time of production of a certain capital may differ from its labour-time, it always comprises the latter, and this excess is itself a condition of the process of production. The time of production, then, is always that time in which a capital produces use-values and expands, hence functions as productive capital, although it includes time in which it is either latent or produces without expanding its value. Within the sphere of circulation, capital abides as commodity-capital and money-capital. Its two processes of circulation consist in its transformation from the commodity-form into that of money and from the money-form into that of commodities. The circumstance that the transformation of commodities into money is here at the same time a realisation of the surplus-value embodied in the commodities, and that the transformation of money into commodities is at the same time a conversion or reconversion of capital-value into the form of its elements of production does not in the least alter the fact that these processes, as processes of circulation, are processes of the simple metamorphosis of commodities. Time of circulation and time of production mutually exclude each other. During its time of circulation capital does not perform the functions of productive capital and therefore produces neither commodities nor surplus-value. If we study the circuit in its simplest form, as when the entire capital-value passes in one bulk from one phase into another, it becomes palpably evident that the process of production and therefore also the self-expansion of capital-value are interrupted so long as its time of circulation lasts, and that the renewal of the process of production will proceed at a faster or a slower pace depending on the length of the circulation time. But if on the contrary the various parts of capital pass through the circuit one after another, so that the circuit of the entire capital-value is accomplished successively in the circuits of its various component parts, then it is evident that the longer its aliquot parts stay in the sphere of circulation the smaller must be the part functioning in the sphere of production. The expansion and contraction of the time of circulation operate therefore as negative limits to the contraction or expansion of the time of production or of the extent to which a capital of a given size functions as productive capital. The more the metamorphoses of circulation of a certain capital are only ideal, i.e., the more the time of circulation is equal to zero, or approaches zero, the more does capital function, the more does its productivity and the self-expansion of its value increase. For instance, if a capitalist executes an order by the terms of which he receives payment on delivery of the product, and if this payment is made in his own means of production, the time of circulation approaches zero. A capital s time of circulation therefore limits, generally speaking, its time of production and hence its process of generating surplus-value. And it limits this process in proportion to its own duration. This duration may considerably increase or decrease and hence may restrict capital s time of production in a widely varying degree. But Political Economy sees only what is apparent, namely the effect of the time of circulation on capital s process of the creation of surplus-value in general. It takes this negative effect for a positive one, because its consequences are positive. It clings the more tightly to this appearance since it seems to furnish proof that capital possesses a mystic source of self-expansion independent of its process of production and hence of the exploitation of labour, a spring which flows to it from the sphere of circulation. We shall see later that even scientific Political Economy has been deceived by this appearance of things. Various phenomena, it will turn out, give color to this semblance: 1) The capitalist method of calculating profit, in which the negative cause figures a positive one, since with capitals in different spheres of investment, where only the time of circulation are different, a longer time of circulation tends to bring about an increase in prices, in short, serves as one of the causes of equalising profits. 2) The time of circulation is but a phase of the time of turnover; the latter however includes the time of production or reproduction. What is really due to the latter seems to be due to the time of circulation. 3) The conversion of commodities into variable capital (wages) is necessitated by their previous conversion into money. In the accumulation of capital, the conversion into additional variable capital therefore takes place in the sphere of circulation, or during the time of circulation. Consequently it seems that the accumulation thus achieved is owed to the latter. Within the sphere of circulation capital passes through the two antithetical phases C M and M C; it is immaterial in what order. Hence its time of circulation is likewise divided into two parts, viz.: the time it requires for its conversion from commodities into money, and that which it requires for its conversion from money into commodities. We have already learned from the analysis of simple circulation of commodities (Buch I, Kap. III) [English edition: Ch. III. Ed.] that C M, the sale, is the most difficult part of its metamorphosis and that therefore under ordinary conditions it takes up the greater part of its time of circulation. As money, value exists in its always convertible form. As a commodity it must first be transformed into money before it can assume this form of direct convertibility and hence of constant readiness for action. However, in capital s process of circulation, its phase M C has to do with its transformation into commodities which constitute definite elements of productive capital in a given enterprise. The means of production may not be available in the market and must first be produced or they must be procured from distant markets or their ordinary supply has become irregular or prices have changed, etc., in short there are a multitude of circumstances which are not noticeable in the simple change of form M C, but which nevertheless requires now more, now less time also for this part of the circulation phase. C M and M C may be separate not only in time but also in space; the market for buying and the market for selling may be located apart. In the case of factories for instance buyer and seller are frequently different persons. In the production of commodities, circulation is as necessary as production itself, so that circulation agents are just as much needed as production agents. The process of reproduction includes both functions of capital, therefore it includes the necessity of having representatives of these functions, either in the person of the capitalist himself or of wage-labourers, his agents. But this furnishes no ground for confusing the agents of circulation with those of production, any more than it furnishes ground for confusing the functions of commodity-capital and money-capital with those of productive capital. The agents of circulation must be paid by the agents of production. But the capitalists, who sell to and buy from one another, create neither values nor products by these acts, this state of affairs is not changed if they are enabled or compelled by the volume of their business to shift this function on to others. In some businesses the buyers and sellers get paid in the form of percentages on the profits. All talk about their being paid by the consumer does not help matters. The consumers can pay only in so far as they, as agents of production, produce an equivalent in commodities for themselves or appropriate it from production agents either on the basis of some legal title (as their co-partners, etc.) or by personal services. There is a difference between C M and M C which has nothing to do with the difference in forms of commodities and money but arises from the capitalist character of production. Intrinsically both C M and M C are mere conversions of given values from one form into another. But C' M' is at the same time a realisation of the surplus-value contained in C'. M C however is not. Hence selling is more important than buying. Under normal conditions M C is an act necessary for the self-expansion of the value expressed in M, but it is not a realisation of surplus-value; it is the introduction to its production, not an afterword. The form in which a commodity exists, its existence as a use-value, sets definite limits to the circulation of commodity capital C' M'. Use-values are perishable by nature. Hence if they are not productively or individually consumed within a certain time, depending on what they are intended for, in other words, if they are not sold within a certain period, they spoil and lose with their use-value the property of being vehicles of exchange-value. The capital-value contained in them, hence also the surplus-value accrued in it, gets lost. The use-values do not remain the carriers of perennial self-expanding capital-value unless they are constantly renewed and reproduced, are replaced by new use-values of the same or of some other order. The sale of the use-values in the form of commodities, hence their entry into productive or individual consumption effected through this sale is however the ever recurring condition of their reproduction. They must change their old use-form within a definite time in order to continue their existence in a new form. Exchange-value maintains itself only by means of this constant renewal of its body. The use-values of various commodities spoil sooner or later; the interval between their production and consumption may therefore be comparatively long or short; hence they can persist without spoiling in the circulation phase C M for a shorter or longer term in the form of commodity-capital, can endure a shorter or a longer time of circulation as commodities. The limit of the circulation time of a commodity-capital imposed by the spoiling of the body of the commodity is the absolute limit of this part of the time of circulation, or of the time of circulation of commodity-capital as such. The more perishable a commodity and the sooner after its production it must therefore be consumed and hence sold, the more restricted is its capacity for removal from its place of production, the narrower therefore is the spatial sphere of its circulation, the more localised are the markets where it can be sold. For this reason the more perishable a commodity is and the greater the absolute restriction of its time of circulation as commodity on account of its physical properties, the less is it suited to be an object of capitalist production. Such a commodity can come within its grasp only in thickly populated districts or to the extent that improved transportation eliminate distance. But the concentration of the production of any article in the hands of a few and in a populous district may create a relatively large market even for such articles as are the products of large breweries, dairies, etc.

Economic Manuscripts: Capital: Volume Two

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1885-c2/ch05.htm

[Since we have assumed that commodities are bought and sold at their values, these acts constitute merely the conversion of a certain value from one form into another, from the commodity-form into the money-form or from the money-form into the commodity-form a change in the state of being. If commodities are sold at their values, then the magnitudes of value in the hands of the buyer and seller remain unchanged. Only the form of existence of value is changed. If the commodities are not sold at their values, then the sum of the converted values remains unchanged; the plus on one side is a minus on the other. The metamorphoses C M and M C are transactions between buyers and sellers; they require time to conclude bargains, the more so as the struggle goes on in which each seeks to get the best of the other, and it is businessmen who face one another here; and when Greek meets Greek then comes the tug of war. [A paraphrase of words from the 17th century tragedy The Rival Queens, or the Death of Alexander the Great by Nathaniel Lee. Ed.] To effect a change in the state of being costs of time and labour-power, not for the purpose of creating value, however, but in order to accomplish the conversion of value from one form into another. The mutual attempt to appropriate an extra slice of this value on this occasion changes nothing. This labour, increased by the evil designs on either side, creates no value, any more than the work performed in a judicial proceeding increases the value of the subject matter of the suit. Matters stand with this labour which is a necessary element in the capitalist process of production as a whole, including circulation or included by it as they stand, say, with the work of combustion of some substance used for the generation of heat. This work of combustion does not generate any heat, although it is a necessary element in the process of combustion. In order, e.g., to consume coal as fuel, I must combine it with oxygen, and for this purpose must transform it from the solid into the gaseous state (for in the carbonic acid gas, the result of the combustion, coal is in the gaseous state); consequently, I must bring about a physical change in the form of its existence or in its state of being. The separation of carbon molecules, which are united into a solid mass, and the splitting up of these molecules into their separate atoms must precede the new combination, and this requires a certain expenditure of energy which thus is not transformed into heat but taken from it. Therefore, if the owners of the commodities are not capitalists but independent direct producers, the time employed in buying and selling is a diminution of their labour-time, and for this reason such transactions used to be deferred (in ancient and medieval times) to holidays. Of course the dimensions assumed by the conversion of commodities in the hands of the capitalists cannot transform this labour which does not create any value into labour productive of value. Nor can the miracle of this transubstantiation be accomplished by a transposition, i.e., by the industrial capitalist making this "work of combustion" the exclusive business of third persons, who are paid by them, instead of performing it themselves. This third persons will of course not tender their labour-power to the capitalist out of sheer love for them. It is a matter of indifference to the rent collector of a real-estate owner or the messenger of a bank that their labour does not add one iota or tittle to the value of either the rent or the gold pieces carried to another bank by the bagful.] To the capitalist who has others working for him, buying and selling becomes a primary function. Since he appropriates the product of many on a large social scale, he must sell it on the same scale and then reconvert it from money into elements of production. Now as before neither the time of purchase nor of sale creates any value. The function of merchant s capital gives rise to an illusion. But without going into this at length here this much is plain from the start: If by a division of labour a function, unproductive in itself although a necessary element of reproduction, is transformed from an incidental occupation of many into an exclusive occupation of a few, into their special business, the nature of this function itself is not changed. One merchant (here considered a mere agent attending to the change of form of commodities, a mere buyer and seller) may by his operations shorten the time of purchase and sale for many producers. In such case he should be regarded as a machine which reduces useless expenditure of energy or helps to set production time free. In order to simplify the matter (since we shall not discuss the merchant as a capitalist and merchant s capital until later) we shall assume that this buying and selling agent is a man who sells his labour. He expends his labour-power and labour-time in the operations C M and M C. And he makes his living that way, just as another does by spinning or making pills. He performs a necessary function, because the process of reproduction itself includes unproductive functions. He works as well as the next man, but intrinsically his labour creates neither value nor product. He belongs himself to the faux frais of production. His usefulness does not consist in transforming an unproductive function into a productive one, nor unproductive into productive labour. It would be a miracle if such transformation could be accomplished by the mere transfer of a function. His usefulness consists rather in the fact that a smaller part of society s labour-power and labour-time is tied up in this unproductive function. More. We shall assume that he is a mere wage-labourer, even one of the better paid, for all the difference it makes. Whatever his pay, as a wage-labourer he works part of his time for nothing. He may receive daily the value of the product of eight working-hours, yet functions ten. But the two hours of surplus-labour he performs do not produce value anymore than his eight hours of necessary labour, although by means of the latter a part of the social product is transferred to him. In the first place, looking at it from the standpoint of society, labour-power is used up now as before for ten hours in a mere function of circulation. It cannot be used for anything else, not for productive labour. In the second place however society does not pay for those two hours of surplus-labour, although they are spent by the individual who performs this labour. Society does not appropriate any extra product or value thereby. But the costs of circulation, which he represents, are reduced by one-fifth, from ten hours to eight. Society does not pay any equivalent for one-fifth of this active time of circulation, of which he is the agent. But if this man is employed by a capitalist, then the non-payment of these two hours reduces the cost of circulation of his capital, which constitutes a deduction from his income. For the capitalist this is a positive gain, because the negative limit for the self-expansion of his capital-value is thereby reduced. So long as small independent producers of commodities spend a part of their own time in buying and selling, this represents nothing but time spent during the intervals between their productive function or diminution of their time of production. At all events the time consumed for this purpose constitutes one of the costs of circulation which adds nothing to the converted values. It is the cost of converting them from the commodity-form into the money-form. The capitalist producer of commodities acting as an agent of circulation differs from the direct producer of commodities only in the fact that he buys and sells on a larger scale and therefore his function as such agent assumes greater dimensions. And if the volume of his business compels or enables him to buy (hire) circulation agents of his own to serve as wage-labourers, the nature of the case is not changed thereby. A certain amount of labour-power and labour-time must be expended in the process of circulation (so far as it is merely a change of form). But this now appears as an additional investment of capital. A part of the variable capital must be laid out in the purchase of this labour-power functioning only in circulation. This advance capital creates neither product nor value. It reduces pro tanto the dimensions in which the advanced capital functions productively. It is as though one part of the product were transformed into a machine which buys and sells the rest of the product. This machine brings about a reduction of the product. It does not participate in the productive process, although it can diminish the labour-power, etc., spent on circulation. It constitutes merely a part of the costs of circulation. As unity within its circuits, as value in motion, whether in the sphere of production or in either phase of the sphere of circulation, capital exists ideally only in the form of money of account, primarily in the mind of the producer of commodities, the capitalist producer of commodities. This movement is fixed and controlled by book-keeping, which includes the determination of prices, or the calculation of the prices of commodities. The movement of production, especially of the production of surplus-value in which the commodities figure only as depositories of value, as the names of things whose ideal existence as values is crystallised in money of account thus is symbolically reflected in imagination. So long as the individual producer of commodities keeps account only in his head (for instance, a peasant; the book-keeping tenant-farmer was not produced until the rise of capitalist agriculture), or books his expenditures, receipts, due dates of payments, etc., only incidentally, outside of his production time, it is palpably clear that this function and the instruments of labour consumed by it, such as paper, etc., represent additional consumption of labour-time and instruments which are necessary, but constitute a deduction from the time available for productive consumption as well as from the instruments of labour which functions in the real process of production, enter into the creation of products and value. The nature of the function is not changed neither by the dimensions which it assumes on account of its concentration in the hands of the capitalist producer of commodities and the fact that instead of appearing as the function of many small commodity-producers it appears as the function of one capitalist, as a function within a process of large-scale production; nor is it altered by its divorcement from those productive functions of which it formed an appendage, nor by its conversion into an independent function of special agents exclusively entrusted with it. Division of labour and assumption of independence do not make a function one that creates products and value if it was not so intrinsically, hence before it became independent. If a capitalist invests his capital anew, he must invest a part of it in hiring a book-keeper, etc., and in the wherewithal of book-keeping. If his capital is already functioning, is engaged in the process of its own constant reproduction, he must continually reconvert a part of his product into a book-keeper, clerks, and the like, by transforming that part into money. That part of his capital is withdrawn from the process of production and belongs in the costs of circulation, deductions from the total yield (including the labour-power itself that is expended exclusively for this function). But there is a certain difference between the costs incidental to book-keeping, or the unproductive expenditure of labour-time on the one hand and those of mere buying and selling time on the other. The latter arise only from the definite social form of the process of production, from the fact that it is the process of production of commodities. Book-keeping, as the control and ideal synthesis of the process, becomes the more necessary the more the process assumes a social scale and loses its purely individual character. It is therefore more necessary in capitalist production than in the scattered production of handicraft and peasant economy, more necessary in collective production than in capitalist production. But the costs of book-keeping drop as production becomes concentrated and book-keeping becomes social. We are concerned here only with the general character of the costs of circulation, which arise out of the metamorphosis of forms alone. It is superfluous to discuss here all their forms in detail. But how forms which belong in the sphere of pure changes of the form of value and hence originate from the particular social form of the process of production, forms which in the case of the individual commodity-producer are only transient, barely perceptible elements, run alongside his productive functions or become intertwined with them how these can strike the eye as the huge costs of circulation can be seen from just the money taken in and paid out when these operations have become independent and concentrated on a large scale as the exclusive function of banks, etc., or of cashiers in individual businesses. But it must be firmly borne in mind that these costs of circulation are not changed in character by their change in appearance. The abidance of the commodity-capital as a commodity-supply in the market requires buildings, stores, storage places, warehouses, in other words, an expenditure of constant capital; furthermore the payment of labour-power for placing the commodities in storage. Besides, commodities spoil and are exposed to the injurious influences of the elements. Additional capital must be invested, partly in instruments of labour, in material form, and partly in labour-power to protect the commodities against the above. Thus the existence of capital in its form of commodity-capital and hence of commodity-supply gives rise to costs which must be classed as costs of circulation, since they do not come within the sphere of production. These costs of circulation differ from those mentioned under I by the fact that they enter to a certain extent into the value of the commodities, i.e., they increase the prices of commodities. At all events the capital and labour-power which serve the need of preserving and storing the commodity-supply are withdrawn from the direct process of production. On the other hand the capitals thus employed, including labour-power as a constituent of capital, must be replaced out of the social product. Their expenditure has therefore the effect of diminishing the productive power of labour, so that a greater amount of capital and labour is required to obtain a particular useful effect. They are unproductive costs. As the costs of circulation necessitated by the formation of a commodity-supply are due merely to the time required for the conversion of existing values from the commodity-form into the money-form, hence merely to the particular social form of the production process (i.e., are due only to the fact that the product is brought forth as a commodity and must therefore undergo the transformation into money), these costs completely share the character of the circulation costs enumerated under I. On the other hand the value of the commodities is here preserved or increased only because the use-value, the product itself, is placed in definite material conditions which cost capital outlay and is subjected to operations which bring additional labour to bear on the use-values. However the computation of the values of commodities, the book-keeping incidental to this process, the transactions of purchase and sale, do not affect the use-value in which the commodity-value exists. They have to do only with the form of the commodity-value. Although in the case submitted [i.e., Corbet s calculations given in Footnote 14. Ed.] the costs of forming a supply (which is here done involuntarily) arise only from a delay in the change of form and from its necessity, still these costs differ from those mentioned under I, in that their purpose is not a change in the form of the value, but the preservation of the value existing in the commodity as a product, a utility, and which cannot be preserved in any other way than by preserving the product, the use-value, itself. The use-value is neither raised nor increased here; on the contrary, it diminishes. But its diminution is restricted and it is preserved. Neither is the advanced value contained in the commodity increased here; but new labour, materialised and living, is added. We have now to investigate furthermore to what extent these costs arise from the peculiar nature of commodity production in general and from commodity production in its general, absolute form, i.e., capitalist commodity production; and to what extent on the other hand they are common to all social production and merely assume a special shape, a special form of appearance, in capitalist production. Adam Smith entertained the splendid notion that the formation of a supply was a phenomenon peculiar to capitalist production. More recent economists, for instance Lalor, insist on the contrary that it declines with the development of capitalist production. [See: J. Lalor, Money and Morals: A Book for the Times, London, 1852, pp. 43-44. Ed.] Sismondi even regards it as one of the drawbacks of the latter. [See: J.C.L. Sismonde de Sismondi, Etudes sur l conomie politique, Tome I. Bruxelles, 1837, p. 49, etc. Ed.] As a matter of fact, supplies exist in three forms: in the form of productive capital, in the form a fund for individual consumption, and in the form of a commodity-supply or commodity-capital. The supply in one form decreases relatively when it increases in another, although its quantity may increase absolutely in all three forms simultaneously. It is plain from the outset that wherever production is carried on for the direct satisfaction of the needs of the producer and only to a minor extent for exchange or sale, hence where the social product does not assume the form of commodities at all or only to a rather small degree, the supply in the form of commodities, or commodity-supply, forms only a small and insignificant part of wealth. But here the consumption-fund is relatively large, especially that of the means of subsistence proper. One need but take a look at old-fashioned peasant economy. There the overwhelming part of the product is transformed directly into supplies of means of production or means of subsistence, without becoming supplies of commodities, for the very reason that it remains in the hands of its owner. It does not assume the form of a commodity-supply and for this reason Adam Smith declares that there is no supply in societies based on this mode of production. He confuses the form of the supply with the supply itself and believes that society hitherto lived from hand to mouth or trusted to the hap of the morrow. This is a naive misunderstanding. A supply in the form of productive capital exists in the shape of means of production, which already are in the process of production or at least in the hands of the producer, hence latently already in the process of production. It was seen previously that with the development of the productivity of labour and therefore also with the development of the capitalist mode of production there is a steady increase in the mass of means of production (buildings, machinery, etc.) which are embodied once and for all in the process in the form of instruments of labour, and perform with steady repetition their function in it for a longer or shorter time. It was also observed that this increase is at the same time the premise and consequence of the development of the social productive power of labour. The growth, not only absolute but relative, of wealth in this form (cf. Buch I, Kap XXIII, 2) [English edition: Ch. XXV, 2. Ed.] is characteristic above all of the capitalist mode of production. The material forms of existence of constant capital, the means of production, do not however consist only of such instruments of labour but also of materials of labour in various stages of processing, and of auxiliary materials. With the enlargement of the scale of production and the increase in the productive power of labour through co-operation, division of labour, machinery, etc., grows the quantity of raw materials, auxiliary materials, etc., entering into the daily process of reproduction. These elements must be ready at hand in the place of production. The volume of this supply existing in the form of productive capital increases therefore absolutely, in order that the process may keep going apart from the fact whether this supply can be renewed daily or only at fixed intervals there must always be a greater accumulation of ready raw material, etc., at the place of production than is used up, say, daily or weekly. The continuity of the process requires that the presence of its conditions should not be jeopardised by possible interruptions when making purchases daily, nor depend on whether the product is sold daily or weekly, and hence is reconvertible into its elements of production only irregularly. But it is evident that productive capital may be latent or form a supply in quite different proportions. There is for instance a great difference whether the spinning-mill owner must have on hand a supply of cotton or coal for three months or for one. Patently this supply, while increasing absolutely, may decrease relatively. This depends on various conditions, all of which practically amount to a demand for greater rapidity, regularity, and reliability in furnishing the necessary amount of raw material, so that no interruption will ever occur. The less these conditions are complied with, hence the less rapid, regular and reliable the supplies, the greater must be the latent part of the productive capital, that is to say, the supply of raw material, etc., in the hands of the producer waiting to be worked up. These conditions are inversely proportional to the degree of development of capitalist production, and hence of the productive power of social labour. The same applies therefore to the supply in this form. However that which appears here as a decrease of the supply (for instance, in Lalor) is in part merely a decrease of the supply in the form of commodity-capital, or of the commodity-supply proper; it is consequently only a change of form of the same supply. If for instance the quantity of coal daily produced in a certain country, and therefore the scale and energy of operation of the coal industry, are great, the spinner does not need a large store of coal in order to ensure the continuity of his production. The steady and certain renewal of his coal supply makes this unnecessary. In the second place the rapidity with which the product of one process may be transferred as means of production to another process depends on the development of the transport and communication facilities. The cheapness of transportation is of great importance in this question. The continually renewed transport of coal from the mine to the spinning-mill for instance would be more expensive than the storing up of a larger supply of coal for a longer time when the price of transportation is relatively cheaper. These two circumstances examined so far arise from the process of production itself. In the third place the development of the credit-system also exerts an influence. The less the spinner is dependent on the direct sale of his yarn for the renewal of his supply of cotton, coal, etc. and this direct dependence will be the smaller, the more developed the credit-system is the smaller relatively these supplies can be and yet ensure a continuous production of yarn on a given scale, a production independent of the hazards of the sale of yarn. In the fourth place, however, many raw materials, semi-finished goods, etc., require long periods of time for their production. This applies especially to all raw materials furnished by agriculture. If no interruption of the process of production is to take place, a certain amount of raw materials must be on hand for the entire period in which no new products can take the place of the old. If this supply decreases in the hands of the industrial capitalist, it proves merely that it increases in the hands of the merchant in the form of commodity-supply. The development of transportation for instance makes it possible rapidly to ship the cotton lying, say, in Liverpool s import warehouses to Manchester, so that the manufacturer can renew his supply in comparatively small portions, as and when needed. But in that case the cotton remains in so much larger quantities as commodity-supply in the hands of the Liverpool merchants. It is therefore merely a change in the form of the supply, and this Lalor and others overlooked. And if you consider the social capital, the same quantity of products exists in either case in the form of supply. The quantity required for a single country during the period of, say, one year decreases as transportation improves. If a large number of sailing vessels and steamers ply between America and England, England s opportunities to renew its cotton supply are increased while the average quantity to be held in storage in England decreases. The same effect is produced by the development of the world market and the consequent multiplication of the sources of supply of the same merchandise. The article is supplied piecemeal from various countries and at various intervals. With the development of capitalist production, the scale of production is determined less and less by the direct demand for the product and more and more by the amount of capital available in the hands of the individual capitalist, by the urge of self-expansion inherent in his capital and by the need of continuity and expansion of the process of production. Thus in each particular branch of production there is a necessary increase in the mass of products available in the market in the shape of commodities, i.e., in search of buyers. The amount of capital fixed for a shorter or longer period in the form of commodity-capital grows. Hence the commodity-supply also grows. Finally the majority of the members of society are transformed into wage-labourers, into people who live from hand to mouth, who receive their wages weekly and spend them daily, who therefore must have their means of subsistence made available to them in the shape of a supply. Although the separate elements of this supply may be in continuous flow, a part of them must always stagnate in order that the supply as a whole may remain in a state of flux. All these characteristics have their origin in the form of production and in the incident change of form which the product must undergo in the process of circulation. Whatever may be the social form of the products-supply, its preservation requires outlays for buildings, vessels, etc., which are facilities for storing the product; also for means of production and labour, more or less of which must be expended, according to the nature of the product, in order to combat injurious influences. The more concentrated socially the supply is, the smaller relatively are the costs. These outlays always constitute a part of the social labour, in either materialised or living form hence in the capitalist form outlays of capital which do not enter into the formation of the product itself and thus are deductions from the product. They are necessary, these unproductive expenses of social wealth. They are the costs of preserving the social product regardless of whether its existence as an element of the commodity-supply stems merely from the social form of production, hence from the commodity-form and its necessary change of form, or whether we regard the commodity-supply merely as a special form of the supply of products, which is common to all societies, although not in the form of a commodity-supply that form of products-supply belonging in the process of circulation. It may now be asked to what extent these costs enhance the value of commodities. If the capitalist has converted the capital advanced by him in the form of means of production and labour-power into a product, into a definite quantity of commodities ready for sale, and these commodities remain in stock unsold, then we have a case of not only the stagnation of the process of self-expansion of his capital-value during this period. The costs of preserving this supply in buildings, of additional labour, etc., mean a positive loss. The buyer he would ultimately find would laugh in his face if he were to say to him: I could not sell my goods for six months, and their preservation during that period did not only keep so and so much of my capital idle, but also cost me so and so much extra expense. Tant pis pour vous! the buyer would say. Right here alongside of you is another seller whose wares were completed only the day before yesterday. Your articles are shop-worn and probably more or less damaged by the ravages of time. Therefore you will have to sell cheaper than your competitor. The conditions under which a commodity exists are not in the least affected by whether its producer is the real producer or a capitalist producer, hence actually only a representative of the real producer. He has to turn his product into money. The expenses incurred by him because of the fixation of the product in the form of commodities are a part of his individual speculations with which the buyer of the commodities has no concern. The latter does not pay him for the time of circulation of his commodities. Even when the capitalist keeps his goods intentionally off the market, in times of an actual or anticipated revolution of values, it depends on the advent of this revolution of values, on the correctness or incorrectness of his speculation, whether he will recover his additional costs or not. But the revolution in values does not ensue in consequence of his additional costs. Hence in so far as the formation of a supply entails a stagnation of circulation, the expense incurred thereby does not add to the value of the commodities. On the other hand there cannot be any supply without a stay in the sphere of circulation, without capital staying for a longer or shorter time in its commodity-form; hence no supply without stagnation of circulation, just as no money can circulate without the formation of a money-reserve. Hence no commodity circulation without commodity-supply. If the capitalist does not come face to face with this necessity in C' M', he will encounter it in M C; if not with regard to his own commodity-capital, then with regard to that of other capitalists, who produce means of production for him and means of subsistence for his labourers. Whether the formation of a supply is voluntary or involuntary, that is to say, whether the commodity-producer keeps a supply intentionally or whether his products form a supply in consequence of the sales resistance offered by the conditions of the process of circulation itself cannot effect the matter essentially, it would seem. But for the solution of this problem it is useful to know what distinguishes voluntary from involuntary supply formation. Involuntary formation arises from, or is identical with, a stagnation of the circulation which is independent of the knowledge of the commodity-producer and thwarts his will. And what characterises the voluntary formation of a supply? In both instances the seller seeks to get rid of his commodity as fast as ever. He always offers his product for sale as a commodity. If he were to withdraw it from sale, it would be only a potential ( ), not an actual ( ) element of the commodity-supply. To him the commodity as such is as much a depository of exchange-value as ever and as such can act only by and after stripping off its commodity-form and assuming the money-form. The commodity-supply must be of a certain volume in order to satisfy the demand during a given period. A continual extension of the circle of buyers is counted upon. For instance, in order to last for one day, a part of the commodities in the market must constantly remain in the commodity-form while the remainder is fluent, turns into money. True, the part which stagnates while the rest is fluent decreases steadily, just as the size of the supply itself decreases until it is all sold. The stagnation of commodities thus counts as a requisite condition of their sale. The volume must furthermore be larger than the average sale or the average demand. Otherwise the excess over these averages could not be satisfied. On the other hand the supply must constantly be renewed, because it is constantly being drawn on. This renewal cannot come from anywhere in the last instance except from production, from a supply of commodities. It is immaterial whether this comes from abroad or not. The renewal depends on the periods required by the commodities for their reproduction. The commodity-supply must last the whole time. The fact that it does not remain in the hands of the original producer but passes through various reservoirs, from the wholesaler to the retailer, changes merely the appearance and not the nature of the thing. From the point of view of society, a part of the capital retains in both instances the form of a commodity-supply until the commodities enter productive or individual consumption. The producer tries to keep a stock corresponding to his average demand in order not to depend directly on production and to ensure for himself a steady clientele. Purchase periods corresponding to the periods of production are formed and the commodities constitute supplies for longer or shorter time, until they can be replaced by new commodities of the same kind. Constancy and continuity of the process of circulation, and therefore of the process of reproduction, which includes the process of circulation, are safeguarded only by the formation of such supplies. It must be remembered that C' M' may have been transacted for the producer of C, even if C is still in the market. If the producer were to keep his own commodities in stock until they are sold to the ultimate consumer, he would have to set two capitals in motion, one as the producer of the commodities and one as a merchant. As far as the commodity itself is concerned, whether we look upon it as an individual commodity or as a component part of social capital, it is immaterial whether the costs of forming the supply must be borne by its producer or by a series of merchants from A to Z. Since the commodity-supply is nothing but the commodity-form of the product which at a particular level of social production would exist either as a productive supply (latent production fund) or as a consumption-fund (reserve of means of consumption) if it did not exist as a commodity-supply, the expenses required for its preservation, that is, the costs of supply formation i.e., materialised or living labour spent for this purpose are merely expenses incurred for maintaining either the social fund for production or the social fund for consumption. The increase in the value of commodities caused by them distributes these costs simply pro rata over the different commodities, since the costs differ with different kinds of commodities. And the costs of supply formation are as much as ever deductions from the social wealth, although they constitute one of the conditions of its existence. Only to the extent that the commodity-supply is a premise of commodity circulation and is itself a form necessarily arising in commodity circulation, only in so far as this apparent stagnation is therefore a form of the movement itself, just as the formation of a money-reserve is a premise of money circulation only to that extent is such stagnation normal. But as soon as the commodities lying in the reservoirs of circulation do not make room for the swiftly succeeding wave of production, so that the reservoirs become over-stocked, the commodity-supply expands in consequence of the stagnation in circulation just as the hoards increase when money-circulation is clogged. It does not make any difference whether this jam occurs in the warehouses of the industrial capitalist or in the storerooms of the merchant. The commodity-supply is in that case not a prerequisite of uninterrupted sale, but a consequence of the impossibility of selling the goods. The costs are the same, but since they now arise purely out of the form, that is to say, out of the necessity of transforming the commodities into money and out of the difficulty of going through this metamorphosis, they do not enter into the values of the commodities but constitute deductions, losses of value in the realisation of the value. Since the normal and abnormal forms of the supply do not differ in form and both clog circulation, these phenomena may be confused and deceive the agent of production himself so much the more since for the producer the process of circulation of his capital may continue while that of his commodities which have changed hands and now belong to merchants may be arrested. If production and consumption swell, other things being equal, then the commodity-supply swells likewise. It is renewed and absorbed just as fast, but its size is greater. Hence the bulging size of the commodity-supply, for which stagnant circulation is responsible, may be mistaken for a symptom of the expansion of the process of reproduction, especially when the development of the credit-system makes it possible to wrap the real movement in mystery. The costs of supply formation consist: 1) of a quantitative diminution of the mass of the products (for instance in the case of a flour supply; 2) of a deterioration of quality; 3) of the materialised and living labour required for the preservation of the supply. Within the circuit of capital and the metamorphosis of commodities, which forms a part of the circuit, an interchange of matter takes place in social labour. This interchange of matter may necessitate a change of location of products, their real motion from one place to another. Still, circulation of commodities can take place without physical motion by them, and there can be transportation of products without circulation of commodities, and even without a direct exchange of products. A house sold by A to B does not wander from one place to another, although it circulates as a commodity. Movable commodity-values, such as cotton or pig iron, may lie in the same storage dump at a time when they are passing through dozens of circulation processes, are bought and resold by speculators. What really does move here is the title of ownership in goods, not the goods themselves. On the other hand, transportation played a prominent role in the land of the Incas, although the social product neither circulated as a commodity nor was distributed by means of barter. Consequently, although the transportation industry when based on capitalist production appears as a cause of circulation costs, this special form of appearance does not alter the matter in the least. Quantities of products are not increased by transportation. Nor, with a few exceptions, is the possible alteration of their natural qualities, brought about by transportation, an intentional useful effect; it is rather an unavoidable evil. But the use-value of things is materialised only in their consumption, and their consumption may necessitate a change of location of these things, hence may require an additional process of production, in the transport industry. The productive capital invested in this industry imparts value to the transported products, partly by transferring value from the means of transportation, partly by adding value through the labour performed in transport. This last-named increment of value consists, as it does in all capitalist production, of a replacement of wages and of surplus-value. Within each process of production, a great role is played by the change of location of the subject of labour and the required instruments of labour and labour-power such as cotton trucked from the carding to the spinning room or coal hoisted from the shaft to the surface. The transition of the finished product as finished goods from one independent place of production to another located at a distance shows the same phenomenon, only on a larger scale. The transport of products from one productive establishment to another is furthermore followed by the passage of the finished products from the sphere of production to that of consumption. The product is not ready for consumption until it has completed these movements. As was shown above, the general law of commodity production holds: The productivity of labour is inversely proportional to the value created by it. This is true of the transport industry as well as of any other. The smaller the amount of dead and living labour required for the transportation of commodities over a certain distance, the greater the productive power of labour, and vice versa. The absolute magnitude of the value which transportation adds to the commodities stands in inverse proportion to the productive power of the transport industry and in direct proportion to the distance traveled, other conditions remaining the same. The relative part of the value added to the prices of commodities by the costs of transportation, other conditions remaining the same, is directly proportional to their cubic content and weight, and inversely proportional to their value. But there are many modifying factors. Transportation requires, for instance, more or less important precautionary measures, and therefore more or less expenditure of labour and instruments of labour, depending on how fragile, perishable, explosive, etc., the articles are. Here the railway kings show greater ingenuity in the invention of fantastic species than do botanists and zoologists. The classification of goods on English railways, for example, fills volumes and, in principle, rests on the general tendency to transform the diversified natural properties of goods into just as many ills of transportation and routine pretexts for fraudulent charges. The fact that furthermore the part of the value added to an article by the costs of transportation is inversely proportional to its value furnishes special grounds to the railway kings to tax articles in direct proportion to their values. The complaints of the industrialists and merchants on this score are found on every page of the testimony given in the report quoted. The capitalist mode of production reduces the costs of transportation of the individual commodity by the development of the means of transportation and communication, as well as by concentration increasing scale of transportation. It increases that part of the living and materialised social labour which is expended in the transport of commodities, firstly by converting the great majority of all products into commodities, secondly, by substituting distant for local markets. The circulation, i.e., the actual locomotion of commodities in space, resolves itself into the transport of commodities. The transport industry forms on the one hand an independent branch of production and thus a separate sphere of investment of productive capital. On the other hand its distinguishing feature is that it appears as a continuation of a process of production within the process of circulation and for the process of circulation.

Economic Manuscripts: Capital: Volume Two

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The compelling motive of capitalist production is always the creation of surplus-value by means of the advanced value, no matter whether this value is advanced in its independent form, i.e., in the money-form, or in commodities, in which case its value-form possesses only ideal independence in the price of the advanced commodities. In both cases this capital-value passes through various forms of existence during its circular movement. Its identity with itself is fixed in the books of the capitalists, or in the form of money of account. Whether we take the form of M ... M' or the form P ... P, the implication is (1) that the advanced value performs the function of capital-value and has created surplus-value; (2) that after completing its process it has returned to the form in which it began it. The self-expansion of the advanced value M and at the same time the return of capital to this form (the money-form) is plainly visible in M ... M'. But the same takes place in the second form. For the starting-point of P is the existence of the elements of production, of commodities having a given value. The form includes the self-expansion of this value (C' and M') and the return to the original form, for in the second P the advanced value has again the form of the elements of production in which it was originally advanced. We have seen previously: If production be capitalistic in form, so, too, will be reproduction. Just as in the former the labour-process figures but as a means towards the self-expansion of capital, so in the latter it figures but as a means of reproducing as capital i.e., as self-expanding value the value advanced. (Buch I, Kap. XXI, S. 588.) [English edition: Ch. XXIII, p. 566. Ed.] The three forms (I) M ... M' (II) P ... P, and (III) C' ... C', present the following distinctions: in form II, P ... P, the renewal of the process, the process of reproduction, is expressed as a reality, while in form I only as a potentiality. But both differ from form III in that with them the advanced capital-value advanced either in the form of money or of material elements of production is the starting-point and therefore also the returning point. In M ... M' the return is expressed by M' = M + m. If the process is renewed on the same scale, M is again the starting-point and m does not enter into it, but shows merely that M has self-expanded as capital and hence created a surplus-value, m, but cast it off. In the form P ... P capital-value P advanced in the form of elements of production is likewise the starting-point. This form includes its self-expansion. If simple reproduction takes place, the same capital-value renews the same process in the same form P. If accumulation takes place, then P' (equal in magnitude of value to M', equal to C') reopens the process as an expanded capital-value. But the process begins again with the advanced capital-value in its initial form, although with a greater capital-value than before. In form III, on the contrary, the capital-value does not begin the process as an advance, but as a value already expanded, as the aggregate wealth existing in the form of commodities, of which the advanced capital-value is but a part. This last form is important for Part III, in which the movements of the individual capitals are discussed in connection with the movement of the aggregate social capital. But it is not to be used in connection with the turnover of capital, which always begins with the advance of capital-value, whether in the form of money or commodities, and which always necessitates the return of the rotating capital-value in the form in which it was advanced. Of the circuits I and II, the former is of service in a study primarily of the influence of the turnover on the formation of surplus-value and the latter in a study of its influence on the creation of the product. Economists have little distinguished between the different forms of circuits, nor have they examined them individually with relation to the turnover of capital. They generally consider the form M ... M', because it dominates the individual capitalist and aids him in his calculations, even if money is the starting-point only in the shape of money of account. Others start with outlays in the form of elements of production to the point when returns are received, without alluding at all to the form of the returns, whether made in commodities or money. For instance, Others begin with C' (the third form): Says Th. Chalmers, in his work On Political Economy, 2nd ed., Glasgow, 1832, p. 85 et seq.: As soon as the entire capital-value invested by some individual capitalist in any branch of production whatever has described its circuit, it finds itself once more in its initial form and can now repeat the same process. It must repeat it, if the value is to perpetuate itself as a capital-value and to create surplus-value. An individual circuit is but a constantly repeated section in the life of a capital; hence a period. At the end of the period M ... M' capital has once more the form of money-capital, which passes anew through that series of changes of form in which its process of reproduction, or self-expansion, is included. At the end of the period P ... P capital resumes the form of elements of production, which are the prerequisites for a renewal of its circuit. A circuit performed by a capital and meant to be a periodical process, not an individual act, is called its turnover. The duration of this turnover is determined by the sum of its time of production and its time of circulation. This time total constitutes the time of turnover of the capital. It measures the interval of time between one circuit period of the entire capital-value and the next, the periodicity in the process of life of capital or, if you like, the time of the renewal, the repetition, of the process of self-expansion, or production, of one and the same capital-value. Apart from the individual adventures which may accelerate or shorten the time of turnover of certain capitals, this time differs in the different spheres of investment. Just as the working day is the natural unit for measuring the function of labour-power, so the year is the natural unit for measuring the turnovers of functioning capital. The natural basis of this unit is the circumstance that the most important crops of the temperate zone, which is the mother country of capitalist production, are annual products. If we designate the year as the unit of measure of the turnover time by T, the time of turnover of a given capital by t, and the number of its turnovers by n, then n = T/t. If, for instance, the time of turnover t is 3 months, then n is equal to 12/3, or 4; capital is turned over four times per year. If t = 18 months, then n = 12/18 = , or capital completes only two-thirds of its turnover in one year. If its time of turnover is several years, it is computed in multiples of one year. From the point of view of the capitalist, the time of turnover of his capital is the time for which he must advance his capital in order to create surplus-value with it and receive it back in its original shape. Before examining more closely the influence of the turnover on the processes of production and self-expansion, we must investigate two new forms which accrue to capital from the process of circulation and affect the form of its turnover.

Economic Manuscripts: Capital: Volume Two

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This, then, is the peculiarity of this part of constant capital, of the labour instruments proper: A part of capital has been advanced in the form of constant capital, i.e., of means of production, which function as factors of the labour-process so long as they retain the independent use-form in which they enter this process. The finished product, and therefore also the creators of the product, so far as they have been transformed into product, is thrust out of the process of production and passes as a commodity from the sphere of production to the sphere of circulation. But the instruments of labour never leave the sphere of production, once they have entered it. Their function holds them there. A portion of the advanced capital-value becomes fixed in this form determined by the function of the instruments of labour in the process. In the performance of this function, and thus by the wear and tear of the instruments of labour, a part of their value passes on to the product, while the other remains fixed in the instruments of labour and thus in the process of production. The value fixed in this way decreases steadily, until the instrument of labour is worn out, its value having been distributed during a shorter or longer period over a mass of products originating from a series of constantly repeated labour-processes. But so long as they are still effective as instruments of labour and need not yet be replaced by new ones of the same kind, a certain amount of constant capital-value remains fixed in them, while the other part of the value originally fixed in them is transferred to the product and therefore circulates as a component part of the commodity-supply. The longer an instrument lasts, the slower it wears out, the longer will its constant capital-value remains fixed in this use-form. But whatever may be its durability, the proportion in which it yields value is always inverse to the entire time it functions. If of two machines of equal value one wears out in five years and the other in ten, then the first yields twice as much value in the same time as the second. This portion of the capital-value fixed in the instrument of labour circulates as well as any other. We have seen in general that all capital-value is constantly in circulation, and that in this sense all capital is circulating capital. But the circulation of the portion of capital which we are now studying is peculiar. In the first place it does not circulate in its use-form, but it is merely its value that circulates, and this takes place gradually, piecemeal, in proportion as it passes from it to the product, which circulates as a commodity. During the entire period of its functioning, a part of its value always remain fixed in it, independently of the commodities which it helps to produce. It is this peculiarity which gives to this portion of constant capital the form of fixed capital. All the other material parts of capital advanced in the process of production form by way of contrast the circulating, or fluid, capital. Some means of production do not enter materially into the product. Such are auxiliary materials, which are consumed by the instruments of labour themselves in the performance of their functions, like coal consumed by a steam-engine; or which merely assist in the operation, like gas for lighting, etc. It is only their value which forms a part of the value of the products. The product circulates in its own circulation the value of these means of production. This feature they have in common with fixed capital. But they are entirely consumed in every labour-process which they enter and must therefore be wholly replaced by new means of production of the same kind in every new labour-process. They do not preserve their independent use-form while performing their function. Hence while they function no portion of capital-value remains fixed in their old use-form, their bodily form, either. The circumstance that this portion of the auxiliary materials does not pass bodily into the product but enters into the value of the product only according to its own value, as a portion of that value, and what hangs together with this, namely, that the function of these substances is strictly confined to the sphere of production, has misled economists like Ramsay (who at the same time got fixed capital mixed up with constant capital) to classify them as fixed capital. [Karl Marx, Theorien ber den Mehrwert (Vierter Band des Kapitals), 3. Teil, Berlin, 1962, SS. 323-25. Ed.] That part of the means of production which bodily enters into the product, i.e., raw materials, etc., thus assumes in part forms which enable it later to enter into individual consumption as articles of use. The instruments of labour properly so called, the material vehicles of the fixed capital, are consumed only productively and cannot enter into individual consumption, because they do not enter into the product, or the use-value, which they held to create but retain their independent form with reference to it until they are completely worn out. The means of transportation are an exception to this rule. The useful effect which they produce during the performance of their productive function, hence during their stay in the sphere of production, the change of location, passes simultaneously into the individual use in the same way in which he pays for the use of other articles of consumption. We have seen [Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I, pp. 181-82. Ed.] that for instance in chemical manufacture raw and auxiliary materials blend. The same applies to instruments of labour and auxiliary and raw materials. Similarly in agriculture the substances added for the improvement of the soil pass partly into the plants raised and help to form the product. On the other hand their effect is distributed over a lengthy period, say four or five years. A portion of them therefore passes bodily into the product and thus transfers its value to the product while the other portion remains fixed in its old use-form and retains its value. It persists as a means of production and consequently keeps the form of fixed capital. As a beast of toil an ox is fixed capital. If he is eaten, he no longer functions as an instrument of labour, nor as fixed capital either. What determines that a portion of the capital-value invested in means of production is endowed with the character of fixed capital is exclusively the peculiar manner in which this value circulates. This specific manner of circulation arises from the specific manner in which the instrument of labour transmits its value to the product, or in which it behaves as a creator of values during the process of production. This manner again arises from the special way in which the instruments of labour function in the labour-process. We know that a use-value which emerges as a product from one labour-process enters into another as a means of production. [Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I, p. 181. Ed.] It is only the functioning of a product as an instrument of labour in the process of production that makes it fixed capital. But when it itself only just emerges from a process, it is by no means fixed capital. For instance a machine, as a product or commodity of the machine-manufacturer, belongs to his commodity-capital. It does not become fixed capital until it is employed productively in the hands of its purchaser, the capitalist. All other circumstances being equal, the degree of fixity increases with the durability of the instrument of labour. It is this durability that determines the magnitude of the difference between the capital-value fixed in instruments of labour and that part of its value which it yields to the product in repeated labour-processes. The slower this value is yielded and value is given up by the instrument of labour in every repetition of the labour-process the larger is the fixed capital and the greater the difference between the capital employed in the process of production and the capital consumed in it. As soon as this difference has disappeared the instrument of labour has outlived its usefulness and has lost with its use-value also its value. It has ceased to be the depository of value. Since an instrument of labour, like every other material carrier of constant capital, parts with value to the product only to the extent that together with its use-value it loses its value, it is evident that the more slowly its use-value is lost, the longer it lasts in the process of production, the longer is the period in which constant capital-value remains fixed in it. If a means of production which is not an instrument of labour strictly speaking, such as auxiliary substances, raw material, partly finished articles, etc., behaves with regard to value yield and hence manner of circulation of its value in the same way as the instruments of labour, then it is likewise a material depository, a form of existence, of fixed capital. This is the case with the above-mentioned improvements of the soil, which add to it chemical substances whose influence is distributed over several periods of production or years. Here a portion of the value continues to exist alongside the product, in its independent form or in the form of fixed capital, while the other portion of the value has been delivered to the product and therefore circulates with it. In this case it is not alone a portion of the value of the fixed capital which enters into the product, but also the use-value, the substance, in which this portion of value exists. Apart from the fundamental mistake the mixing up of the categories fixed and circulating capital with the categories constant and variable capital the confusion of the economists hitherto in the definitions of concepts is based first of all on the following points: One turns certain properties materially inherent in instruments of labour into direct properties of fixed capital; for instance physical immobility, say, of a house. However it is always easy to prove in such case that other instruments of labour, which as such are likewise fixed capital, possess the opposite property: for instance physical mobility, say, of a ship. Or one confuses the economic definiteness of form which arises from the circulation of value with an objective property; as if objects which in themselves are not capital at all but rather become so only under definite social conditions could in themselves and in their very nature be capital in some definite form, fixed or circulating. We have seen (Buch I, Kap. V) [English edition: Ch. VII. Ed.] that the means of production in every labour-process, regardless of the social conditions in which it takes place, are divided into instruments of labour and subjects of labour. But both of them become capital only under the capitalist mode of production, when they become productive capital, as shown in the preceding part. Thus the distinction between instruments of labour and subject of labour, which is grounded on the nature of the labour-process, is reflected in a new form: the distinction between fixed capital and circulating capital. It is only then that a thing which performs the function of an instrument of labour becomes fixed capital. If owing to its material properties it can function also in other capacities than that of instrument of labour, it may be fixed capital or not, depending on the specific function it performs. Cattle as beasts of toil are fixed capital; as beef cattle they are raw material which finally enters into circulation as a product; hence they are circulating, not fixed capital. The mere fixation of a means of production for a considerable length of time in repeated labour-processes, which however are connected, continuous, and therefore form a production period i.e., the entire time of production required to finish a certain product obliges the capitalist, just as fixed capital does, to make his advances for a longer or shorter term, but this does not make his capital fixed capital. Seeds for instance are not fixed capital, but only raw material which is held for about a year in the process of production. All capital is held in the process of production so long as it functions as productive capital, and so are therefore all elements of productive capital, whatever their material forms, their functions and the modes of circulation of their values. Whether this period of fixation lasts a long or a short time a matter depending on the kind of process of production involved or the useful effect aimed at this does not effect the distinction between fixed and circulating capital. A part of the instruments of labour, which includes the general instruments of labour, is either localised as soon as it enters the process of production as an instrument of labour, i.e., is prepared for its productive function, such as for instance machinery, or is produced from the outset in its immovable, localised form, such as improvements of the soil, factory buildings, blast furnaces, canals, railways, etc. The constant attachment of the instrument of labour to the process of production in which it is to function is here also due to its physical mode of existence. On the other hand an instrument of labour may physically change continually from place to place, may move about, and nevertheless be constantly in the process of production; for instance a locomotive, a ship, beasts of burden, etc. Neither does immobility in the one case bestow upon it the character of fixed capital, nor does mobility in the other case deprive it of this character. But the fact that some instruments of labour are localised, attached to the soil by their roots, assigns to this portion of fixed capital a peculiar role in the economy of nations. They cannot be sent abroad, cannot circulate as commodities in the world-market. Title to this fixed capital may change, it may be bought and sold, and to this extent may circulate ideally. These titles of ownership may even circulate in foreign markets, for instance in the form of stocks. But a change of the persons owning this class of fixed capital does not alter the relation of the immovable, materially fixed part of the national wealth to its immovable part. The peculiar circulation of fixed capital results in a peculiar turnover. That part of the value which it loses in its bodily form by wear and tear circulates as a part of the value of the product. The product converts itself by means of its circulation from commodities into money; hence the same applies to the value-part of the instrument of labour circulated by the product, and this value drips down in the form of money from the process of circulation in proportion as this instrument of labour ceases to be a depository of value in the process of production. Its value thus acquires a double existence. One part of it remains attached to its use-form or bodily form belonging in the process of production. The other part detaches itself from that form in the shape of money. In the performance of its function that part of the value of an instrument of labour which exists in its bodily form constantly decreases, while that which is transformed into money constantly increases until the instrument is at last exhausted and its entire value, detached from its corpse, is converted into money. Here the peculiarity of the turnover of this element of productive capital becomes apparent. The transformation of its value into money keeps pace with the pupation into money of the commodity which is the carrier of its value. But its reconversion from the money-form into a use-form proceeds separately from the reconversion of the commodities into other elements of their production and is determined rather by its own period of reproduction, that is, by the time during which the instrument of labour wears out and must be replaced by another of the same kind. If a machine worth 10,000 lasts for, say, a period of ten years, then the period of turnover of the value originally advanced for it amounts to ten years. It need not be renewed and continues to function in its bodily form until this period has expired. In the meantime its value circulates piecemeal as a part of the value of the commodities whose continuous production it serves and it is thus gradually transformed into money until finally at the end of ten years it entirely assumes the form of money and is reconverted from money into a machine, in other words, has completed its turn-over. Until this time of reproduction arrives, its value is gradually accumulated, in the form of a money reserve fund to start with. The remaining elements of productive capital consist partly of those elements of constant capital which exist as auxiliary and raw materials, partly of variable capital invested in labour-power. The analysis of the labour-process and of the process of producing surplus-value (Buch I, Kap. V) [English edition: Ch. VII. Ed.] showed that these different components behave quite differently as creators of products and as creators of values. The value of that part of constant capital which consists of auxiliary and raw materials the same as of that part which consists of instruments of labour re-appears in the value of the product as only transferred value, while labour-power adds an equivalent of its value to the product by means of the labour-process, in other words, actually reproduces its value. Furthermore, one part of the auxiliary substances fuel, lighting gas, etc. is consumed in the process of labour without entering bodily into the product, while the other part of them enters bodily into the product and forms its material substance. But all these differences are immaterial so far as the circulation and therefore the mode of turnover is concerned. Since auxiliary and raw materials are entirely consumed in the creation of the product, they transfer their value entirely to the product. Hence this value is circulated in its entirety by the product, transforms itself into money and from money back into the elements of production of the commodity. Its turnover is not interrupted, as is that of fixed capital, but passes uninterruptedly through the entire circuit of its forms, so that these elements of productive capital are continually renewed in kind. As for the variable component of productive capital, which is invested in labour-power, be it noted that labour-power is purchased for a definite period of time. As soon as the capitalist has bought it and embodied it in the process of production, it forms a component part of his capital, its variable component. Labour-power acts daily during the period of time in which it adds to the product not only its own value for the whole day but also a surplus-value in excess of it. We shall not consider this surplus-value for the present. After labour-power has been bought and it has performed its function, say for a week, its purchase must be constantly renewed within the customary intervals of time. The equivalent of its value, which the labour-power adds to the product during its functioning and which is transformed into money in consequence of the circulation of the product, must continually be reconverted from money into labour-power or continually pass through the complete circuit of its forms, that is, must be turned over, if the circuit of continuous production is not to be interrupted. Hence that part of the value of the productive capital which has been advanced for labour-power is entirely transferred to the product (we constantly leave the question of surplus-value out of consideration here), passes with it through the two metamorphoses belonging in the sphere of circulation and always remains incorporated in the process of production by virtue of this continuous renewal. Hence, however different otherwise may be the relation between labour-power, so far as the creation of value is concerned, and the component parts of constant capital which do not constitute fixed capital, this kind of turnover of its value labour-power shares with them, in contradistinction to fixed capital. These components of the productive capital the parts of its value invested in labour-power and in means of production which do not constitute fixed capital by reason of their common turnover characteristics confront the fixed capital as circulating or fluent capital. We have already shown [Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Ch. VI, pp. 167-76. Ed.] that the money which the capitalist pays to the labourer for the use of his labour-power is nothing more or less than the form of the general equivalent for the means of subsistence required by the labourer. To this extent, the variable capital consists in substance of means of subsistence. But in this case, where we are discussing turnover, it is a question of form. The capitalist does not buy the labourer s means of subsistence but his labour-power. And that which forms the variable part of his capital is not the labourer s means of subsistence but his labour-power in action. What the capitalist consumes productively in the labour-process is the labour-power itself and not the labourer s means of subsistence. It is the labourer himself who converts the money received for his labour-power into means of subsistence, in order to reconvert them into labour-power, to keep alive, just as the capitalist for instance converts a part of the surplus-value of the commodities he sells for money into means of subsistence for himself without thereby warranting the statement that the purchaser of his commodities pays him in means of subsistence. Even if the labourer is paid a part of his wages in means of subsistence, in kind, this nowadays amounts to a second transaction. He sells his labour-power at a certain price, with the understanding that he shall receive a part of this price in means of subsistence. This changes merely the form of the payment, but not the fact that what he actually sells is his labour-power. It is a second transaction, which does not take place between the labourer and the capitalist, but between the labourer as a buyer of commodities and the capitalist as a seller of commodities, while in the first transaction the labourer is a seller of a commodity (his labour-power) and the capitalist its buyer. It is exactly the same as if a capitalist, on selling his commodity, say, a machine, to an iron works, has it replaced by some other commodity, say, iron. It is therefore not the labourer s means of subsistence which acquire the definite character of circulating capital as opposed to fixed capital. Nor is it his labour-power. It is rather that part of the value of productive capital which is invested in labour-power and which, by virtue of the form of its turnover, receives this character in common with some, and in contrast with other, component parts of the constant capital. The value of the circulating capital in labour-power and means of production is advanced only for the time during which the product is in process of production, in accordance with the scale of production determined by the volume of the fixed capital. This value enters entirely into the product, is therefore fully returned by its sale from the sphere of circulation, and can be advanced anew. The labour-power and means of production, in which the circulating component of capital exists, are withdrawn from circulation to the extent required for the creation and sale of the finished product, but they must be continually replaced and renewed by purchasing them back, by reconverting them from the money-form into the elements of production. They are withdrawn from the market in smaller quantities at a time than the elements of fixed capital, but they must be withdrawn again from it so much the more frequently and the advance of capital invested in them must be renewed at shorter intervals. This constant renewal is effected by the continuous conversion of the product which circulates their entire value. And finally, they pass through the entire circuit of metamorphoses, not only so far as their value is concerned but also their material form. They are perpetually reconverted from commodities into the elements of production of the same commodities. Together with its own value, labour-power always adds to the product surplus-value, the embodiment of unpaid labour. This is continuously circulated by the finished product and converted into money just as are other elements of its value. But here, where we are primarily concerned with the turnover of capital-value, and not with that of the surplus-value occurring at the same time, we dismiss the latter for the present. From the foregoing one may conclude the following: 1. The definiteness of form of fixed and circulating capital arises merely from the different turnovers of the capital-value, functioning in the process of production, or of the productive capital. This difference in turnover arises in its turn from the different manner in which the various components of productive capital transfer their value to the product; it is not due to the different parts played by these components in the generation of product value, nor to their characteristic behaviour in the process of self-expansion. Finally the difference in the delivery of value to the product and therefore the different manner in which this value is circulated by the product and is renewed in its original bodily form through the metamorphoses of the product arises from the difference of the material shapes in which the productive capital exists, one portion of it being entirely consumed during the creation of an individual product and the other being used up only gradually. Hence it is only the productive capital which can be divided into fixed and circulating capital. But this antithesis does not apply to the other two modes of existence of industrial capital, that is to say, commodity-capital and money-capital, nor does it exist as an antithesis of these two modes to productive capital. It exists only for productive capital and within its sphere. No matter how much money-capital and commodity-capital may function as capital and no matter how fluently they may circulate, they cannot become circulating capital as distinct from fixed capital until they are transformed into circulating components of productive capital. But because these two forms of capital dwell in the sphere of circulation, Political Economy as we shall see has been misled since the time of Adam Smith into lumping them together with the circulating part of productive capital and assigning them to the category of circulating capital. They are indeed circulation capital in contrast to productive capital, but they are not circulating capital in contrast to fixed capital. 2. The turnover of the fixed component part of capital, and therefore also the time of turnover necessary for it, comprises several turnovers of the circulating constituents of capital. In the time during which the fixed capital turns over once, the circulating capital turns over several times. One of the component parts of the value of the productive capital acquires the definiteness of form of fixed capital only in case the means of production in which it exists is not wholly worn out in the time required for the fabrication of the product and its expulsion from the process of production as a commodity. One part of its value must remain tied up in the form of the still preserved old use-form, while the other part is circulated by the finished product, and this circulation on the contrary simultaneously circulates the entire value of the fluent component parts of the capital. 3. The value-part of the productive capital, the part invested in fixed capital, is advanced in one lump sum for the entire period of employment of that part of the means of production of which the fixed capital consists. Hence this value is thrown into the circulation by the capitalist all at one time. But it is withdrawn again from the circulation only piecemeal and gradually by realising the parts of value which the fixed capital adds piecemeal to the commodities. On the other hand the means of production themselves, in which a component part of the productive capital becomes fixed, are withdrawn from the circulation all at one time to be embodied in the process of production for the entire period in which they function. But they do not require for this period any replacement by new samples of the same kind, do not require reproduction. They continue for a longer or shorter period to contribute to the creation of the commodities thrown into circulation without withdrawing from circulation the elements of their own renewal. Hence they do not require from the capitalist a renewal of his advance during this period. Finally the capital-value invested in fixed capital does not pass bodily through the circuit of its forms, during the functioning period of the means of production in which this capital-value exists, but only as concerns its value, and even this it does only parts and gradually. In other words, a portion of its value is continually circulated and converted into money as a part of the value of the commodities, without being reconverted from money into its original bodily form. This reconversion of money into the bodily form of the means of production does not take place until the end of its functioning period, when the means of production has been completely consumed. 4. The elements of circulating capital are as permanently fixed in the process of production if it is to be uninterrupted as the elements of fixed capital. But the elements of circulating capital thus fixed are continually renewed in kind (the means of production by new products of the same kind, labour-power by constantly renewed purchases) while in the case of the elements of fixed capital neither they themselves are renewed nor need their purchases be renewed so long as they continue to exist. There are always raw and auxiliary materials in the process of production, but always new products of the same kind, after the old elements have been consumed in the creation of the finished product. Labour-power likewise always exists in the process of production, but only by means of ever new purchases, frequently involving changes of persons. But the same identical buildings, machines, etc., continue to function, during repeated turnovers of the circulating capital, in the same repeated processes of production. Originally in the construction of modern railways it was the prevailing opinion, nursed by the most prominent practical engineers, that a railway would last a century and that the wear and tear of the rails was so imperceptible that it could be ignored for all financial and other practical purposes; 100 to 150 years was supposed to be the life of good rails. But it was soon found that the life of a rail, which naturally depends on the speed of the locomotives, the weight and number of trains, the diameter of the rails, and on a multitude of other attendant circumstances, did not exceed an average of 20 years. In some railway terminals, great traffic centres, the rails even wear out every year. About 1867 began the introduction of steel rails, which cost about twice as much as iron rails but which last more than twice as long. The life-time of wooden sleepers was from 12 to 15 years. It was also ascertained with regard to the rolling stock that freight cars wear out faster than passenger cars. The life of a locomotive was estimated in 1867 to be about 10 to 12 years. The wear and tear is first of all a result of use. As a rule the wear of the rails is proportionate to the number of trains. (R.C., No. 17645.) With increased speed the wear and tear of a railway increased in a higher ratio than the square of the speed; that is to say, if you doubled the speed of the engine, you more than quadrupled the cost of wear and tear of the road. (R.C., No. 17046.) Wear and tear is furthermore caused by the action of natural forces. For instance sleepers suffer not only from actual wear but also from rot. Finally, here as everywhere else in modern industry, the moral depreciation plays a role. After the lapse of ten years, one can generally buy the same number of cars and locomotives for 30,000 that would previously have cost 40,000. Depreciation in the rolling stock must be set at 25 per cent of the market price even when there is no depreciation whatever in its use-values. (Lardner, Railway Economy.) (Because now there are better forms for such bridges.) The instruments of labour are largely modified all the time by the progress of industry. Hence they are not replaced in their original, but in their modified form. On the one hand the mass of the fixed capital invested in a certain bodily form and endowed in that form with a certain average life constitutes one reason for the only gradual pace of the introduction of new machinery, etc., and therefore an obstacle to the rapid general introduction of improved instruments of labour. On the other hand competition compels the replacement of the old instruments of labour by new ones before the expiration of their natural life, especially when decisive changes occur. Such premature renewals of factory equipment on a rather large social scale are mainly enforced by catastrophes or crises. By wear and tear (moral depreciation excepted) is meant that part of value which the fixed capital, on being used, gradually transmits to the product, in proportion to its average loss of use-value. This wear and tear takes place partly in such a way that the fixed capital has a certain average durability. It is advanced for this entire period in one sum. After the termination of this period it must be totally replaced. So far as living instruments of labour are concerned, for instance horses, their reproduction is timed by nature itself. Their average lifetime as instruments of labour is determined by laws of nature. As soon as this term has expired they must be replaced by new ones. A horse cannot be replaced piecemeal; it must be replaced by another horse. Other elements of fixed capital permit of a periodical or partial renewal. In this instance partial or periodical replacement must be distinguished from gradual extension of the business. The fixed capital consists in part of homogeneous constituents which do not however last the same length of time but are renewed piecemeal at various intervals. This is true for instance of the rails and railway stations, which must be replaced more often than those of the remainder of the trackage. It also applies to the sleepers, which on the Belgian railways had to be renewed in the forties at the rate of 8 per cent annually, according to Lardner, so that all the sleepers were renewed in the course of 12 years. Hence we have here the following situation: a certain sum is advanced for a certain kind of fixed capital for say ten years. This expenditure is made at one time. But a definite part of this fixed capital, the value of which has entered into the value of the product and been converted with it into money, is replaced in kind every year, while the remainder continues to exist in its original body form. It is this advance in one sum and the only partial reproduction in bodily form which distinguish this capital, as fixed, from circulating capital. Other pieces of the fixed capital consist of heterogeneous components, which wear out in unequal periods of time and must so be replaced. This applies particularly to machines. What we have just said concerning the different durabilities of different constituent parts of a fixed capital applies in this case to the durability of different component parts of any machine figuring as a piece of this fixed capital. With regard to the gradual extension of the business in the course of the partial renewal, we make the following remarks: Although, as we have seen, the fixed capital continues to perform its functions in the process of production in kind, a part of its value, proportionate to the average wear and tear, has circulated with the product, has been converted into money, and forms an element in the money reserve fund intended for the replacement of the capital pending its reproduction in kind. This part of the value of the fixed capital transformed into money may serve to extend the business or to make improvements in the machinery which will increase the efficiency of the latter. Thus reproduction takes place in larger or smaller periods of time, and this is, from the standpoint of society, reproduction on an enlarged scale extensive if the means of production is extended; intensive if the means of production is made more effective. This reproduction on an extended scale does not result from accumulation transformation of surplus-value into capital but from the reconversion of the value which has branched off, detached itself in the form of money from the body of the fixed capital into new additional or at least more effective fixed capital of the same kind. Of course it depends partly on the specific nature of the business, to what extent and in what proportions it is capable of such gradual addition, hence also in what amount a reserve fund must be collected to be reinvested in this way, and what period of time this requires. To what extent furthermore improvements in the details of existing machinery can be made, depends of course on the nature of these improvements and the construction of the machine itself. How well this point is considered at the very outset in the construction of railways is shown by Adams: This depends largely on the available space. In the case of some buildings additional storeys may be built; in the case of others lateral extension, hence more land, is required. Within capitalist production there is on the one side much waste of material, on the other much impracticable lateral extension of this sort (partly to the injury of the labour-power) in the gradual expansion of the business, because nothing is undertaken according to a social plan, but everything depends on the infinitely different conditions, means, etc., with which the individual capitalist operates. This results in a great waste of the productive forces. This piecemeal reinvestment of the money reserve fund (i.e., of that part of the fixed capital which has been reconverted into money) is easiest in agriculture. A field of production of a given area is here capable of the greatest possible gradual absorption of capital. The same applies to where there is natural reproduction as in cattle breeding. Fixed capital entails special maintenance costs. A part of this maintenance is provided by the labour-process itself; fixed capital spoils, if it is not employed in the labour-process (Buch I, Kap. VI, S. 196 and Kap. XIII, S. 423, [English edition: Ch. VIII and XV. Ed.] on wear and tear of machinery when not in use). The English law therefore explicitly treats it as waste, if rented lands are not cultivated according to the custom of the land. (W. A. Holdsworth, Barrister at Law, The Law of Landlord and Tenant, London, 1857, p. 96.) This maintenance resulting from use in the labour-process is a free gift inherent in the nature of living labour. Moreover the preservative power of labour is of a two-fold character. On the one hand it preserves the value of the materials of labour by transferring it to the product, on the other hand it preserves the value of the instruments of labour without transferring this value to the product, by preserving their use-value through their activity in the process of production. The fixed capital however requires also a positive expenditure of labour for its maintenance in good repair. The machinery must be cleaned from time to time. It is a question here of additional labour without which the machinery becomes useless, of merely warding off the noxious influences of the elements, which are inseparable from the process of production; hence it is a question of keeping the machinery literally in working order. It goes without saying that the normal durability of fixed capital is calculated on the supposition that all the conditions which it can perform its functions normally during that time are fulfilled, just as we assume, in placing a man s life at 30 years on the average, that he will wash himself. It is here not a question of replacing the labour contained in the machine, but of constant additional labour made necessary by its use. It is not a question of labour performed by the machine, but of labour spent on it, of labour which it is not an agent of production but raw material. The capital expended for this labour must be classed as circulating capital, although it does not enter into the labour-process proper to which the product owes its existence. This labour must be continually expended in production, hence its value must be continually replaced by that of the product. The capital invested in it belongs in that part of circulating capital which has to cover the unproductive costs and is to be distributed over the produced values according to an annual average calculation. We have seen [Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I, p. 426, Note 1. Ed.] that in industry proper this labour of cleaning is performed by the workingmen gratis, during the rest periods, and for that very reason often also during the process of production itself, and most accidents can be traced to this source. This labour does not figure in the price of the product. As far as that goes the consumer receives it gratis. On the other hand the capitalist thus does not pay the maintenance costs of the machine. The labourer pays in persona, and this is one of the mysteries of the self-preservation of capital, which in point of fact constitute a legal claim by the labourer on the machinery, on the strength of which he is a co-owner of the machine even from the standpoint of bourgeois law. However, in various branches of production, in which the machinery must be removed from the process of production for the purpose of cleaning and where therefore the cleaning cannot be performed in between, as for instance in the case of locomotives, this maintenance work counts as current expenses and is therefore an element of circulating capital. For instance a goods engine should not run more than 3 days without being kept one day in the shed. If you attempt to wash out the boiler before it has cooled down that is very injurious. (R.C., No. 17823.) The actual repairs or patchwork require expenditures of capital and labour which are not contained in the originally advanced capital and cannot therefore be replaced and covered, at least not always, by the gradual replacement of the value of the fixed capital. For instance if the value of the fixed capital is 10,000 and its total life of 10 years, then these 10,000, having been entirely converted into money after the lapse of ten years, will replace only the value of the capital originally invested, but they do not replace the capital, or labour, added in the meantime for repairs. This is an additional component part of the value, which is not advanced all at one time but whenever a need for it arises, and the various times for advancing it are in the very nature of things accidental. All fixed capital demands such subsequent, dosed out, additional outlay of capital for instruments of labour and labour-power. The damage which separate parts of the machinery, etc., may incur is naturally accidental and so are therefore the repairs involved. Nevertheless two kinds of repairs are to be distinguished in the general mass, which are of a more or less fixed character and fall within various periods of the life of fixed capital. These are the ailments of childhood and the far more numerous ailments of the post-middle durability period. A machine for instance may be commissioned in ever so perfect a condition, still actual use will reveal shortcomings which must be remedied by subsequent labour. On the other hand the more a machine passes beyond the mid-durability point, the more therefore the normal wear and tear has accumulated and the more the material of which it consists has been worn out and become decrepit, the more numerous and considerable will be the repairs required to keep it going for the remainder of its average durability. It is the same with an old man, who incurs more medical expenses to keep from dying prematurely than a young and strong man. So in spite of its accidental character repair work is unevenly distributed over the various periods of life of fixed capital. From the foregoing and from the generally accidental character of repair work on machines its follows: In one respect the actual expenditure of labour-power and instruments of labour on repairs is accidental, like the circumstances which necessitate these repairs; the amount of the repairs needed is unevenly distributed over the different periods of fixed capital s life. In other respects it is taken for granted in estimating the average life of fixed capital that it is constantly kept in good working order, partly by cleaning (including the cleaning of the premises), partly by repairs as often as required. The transfer of value through wear and tear of fixed capital is calculated on its average life, but this average life itself is based on the assumption that the additional capital required for maintenance purposes is continually advanced. But then it is also evident that the value added by this extra expenditure of capital and labour cannot enter into the price of the commodities concerned at the same time as it is incurred. For example, a manufacturer of yarn cannot sell his yarn dearer this week than last, merely because one of his wheels broke or a belt tore this week. The general costs of spinning have not been changed in any way by this accident in some individual factory. Here, as in all determinations of value, the average decides. Experience shows the average occurrence of such accidents and the average volume of the maintenance and repair work necessary during the average life of the fixed capital invested in a given branch of business. This average expense is distributed over the average life and added to the price of the product in corresponding aliquot parts; hence it is replaced by means of its sale. The additional capital which is thus replaced belongs to the circulating capital, although the manner of its expenditure is irregular. As it is of paramount importance to remedy every damage to machinery immediately, every comparatively large factory employs in addition to the regular factory force special personnel engineers, carpenters, mechanics, locksmiths, etc. Their wages are a part of the variable capital and the value of their labour is distributed over the product. On the other hand the expenses for means of production are calculated on the basis of the above-mentioned average, according to which they form continually a part of the value of the product, although they are actually advanced in irregular periods and therefore enter into the product or the fixed capital in irregular periods. This capital, expended in repairs properly so called, is in many respects a capital sui generis, which can be classed neither as circulating nor as fixed capital, but belongs with greater justification to the former, since it figures among the running expenses. The manner of book-keeping does not of course change in any way the actual state of affairs booked. But it is important to note that customarily many lines of business figure the costs of repairs together with the actual wear and tear of the fixed capital in the following manner: Let the advanced fixed capital be 10,000 and its durability 15 years. The annual wear and tear is then 666 . But the depreciation is calculated on a durability of only ten years; in other words, 1,000 are added annually to the price of the produced commodities for wear and tear of the fixed capital, instead of 666 . Thus 333 are reserved for repairs, etc. (The figures 10 and 15 are chosen only by way of illustration.) This amount is spent on an average for repairs, so that the fixed capital may last 15 years. Such a calculation naturally does not prevent the fixed capital and the additional capital spent on repairs from belonging to different categories. On the strength of this mode of calculation it was assumed for instance that the lowest cost estimate for the maintenance and replacement of steamships was 15 per cent annually the time of reproduction being therefore 6 years. In the sixties, the English government indemnified the Peninsular and Oriental Co. at the annual rate of 16 percent, corresponding to a reproduction time of 6 years. On railways the average life of a locomotive is 10 years, but the depreciation, counting in repairs is taken as 12 per cent, which brings down its durability to 8 years. In the case of passenger and goods cars, the estimate is 9 per cent, or a durability of 11 1/9 years. Legislation has everywhere drawn a distinction, in leases of houses and other objects which represent fixed capital to their owners and are leased as such, between normal depreciation, which is the result of time, the action of the elements, and normal wear on the one hand and on the other those occasional repairs which are required from time to time for maintenance during the normal life of the house and during its normal use. As a rule, the former are borne by the owner, the latter by the tenant. Repairs are further divided into ordinary and substantial ones. The last-named are partly a renewal of the fixed capital in its bodily form, and they fall likewise on the shoulders of the owner, unless the lease explicitly states the contrary. Take for instance the English law: Entirely different from the replacement of wear and tear and from the work of maintenance and repair is insurance, which relates to destruction caused by extraordinary phenomena of nature, fire, flood, etc. This must be made good out of the surplus-value and is a deduction from it. Or, considered from the point of view of society as a whole, there must be continuous over-production, that is, production on a larger scale than is necessary for the simple replacement and reproduction of the existing wealth, quite apart from the increase in population, so as to be in possession of the means of production required to compensate for the extraordinary destruction caused by accidents and natural forces. In point of fact only the smallest part of the capital needed for replacement consists of the money reserve fund. The most substantial part consists in the extension of the scale of production itself, which partly is actual expansion and partly belongs to the normal volume of production in those branches of industry which produce the fixed capital. For instance a machine factory must arrange things so that the factories of its customers can annually be extended and that a number of them will always stand in need of total or partial reproduction. On determining the wear and tear as well as the costs of repairs, according to the social average, great disparity necessarily appears, even in the case of capital investments of equal size, operating otherwise under equal conditions and in the same branch of industry. In practice a machine, etc., lasts with one capitalist longer than the average period, while with another it does not last so long. With the one the costs of repairs are above, with the other below average, etc. But the addition to the price of the commodities resulting from wear and tear and from costs of repairs is the same and is determined by the average. The one therefore gets more out of this additional price than he really added, the other less. This circumstance as well as all others which result in different gains for different capitalists in the same line of business with the same degree of exploitation of labour-power tends to enhance the difficulty of understanding the true nature of surplus-value. The line between repairs proper and replacement, between costs of maintenance and costs of renewal, is rather flexible. Hence the eternal dispute, for instance in railroading, whether certain expenses are for repairs or for replacement, whether they must be defrayed from current expenditures or from the original stock. A transfer of expenses for repairs to capital account instead of revenue account is the familiar method by which railway boards of directors artificially inflate their dividends. However, experience has already furnished the most important clues for this. According to Lardner, the subsequent labour required during the early life of a railway for example The separation of the replacement and maintenance of fixed capital become practically impossible and purposeless in agriculture, at least when not operated by steam. According to Kirchhof (Handbuch der landwirthschaftlichen Betriebslehre, Dresden, 1852, p. 137), In the case of the rolling stock of a railway, repairs and replacement cannot be separated at all. The same with coaches: This process, which Lardner here describes relative to a railway, does not fit the case of an individual factory, but may well serve as an illustration of continuous, partial reproduction of fixed capital intermingled with repairs within an entire branch of industry or even within the aggregate production considered on a social scale. Here is proof of the lengths to which adroit boards of directors may go in manipulating the terms repairs and replacement for the purpose of extracting dividends. According to the above-quoted paper read by R. P. Williams, various English railway companies wrote off the following sums from the revenue account, as averages over a number of years, for repairs and maintenance of the permanent way and buildings (per English mile of track annually). In certain cases the wear and tear, and therefore its replacement, is practically infinitesimal so that nothing but costs of repairs have to be charged. Lardner s statements below relative to works of art in railroading apply in general to all such durable structures as docks, canals, iron and stone bridges, etc. This applies to all similar structures of secular duration, in which cases therefore the capital advanced need not be gradually replaced commensurate with their wear and tear, but only the annual average costs of maintenance and repair need be transferred to the prices of the product. Although, as we have seen, a greater part of the money returning for the replacement of the wear and tear of the fixed capital is annually, or even in shorter intervals, reconverted into its bodily form, nevertheless every single capitalist requires a sinking fund for that part of his fixed capital which falls due for reproduction only after a lapse of years but must then be entirely replaced. A considerable component part of the fixed capital precludes gradual reproduction because of its peculiar properties. Besides, in cases where the reproduction takes place piecemeal in such a way that at short intervals new stock is added to the depreciated old stock, a previous accumulation of money of a greater or smaller amount, depending on the specific character of the branch of industry, is necessary before the replacement can be effected. Not just any sum of money will suffice for this purpose; a definite amount is needed. If we study this question on the assumption of simple circulation of money, without regard to the credit system, of which we shall treat later, [The capitalist credit system is treated in parts IV and V of the third volume of Capital. Ed.] then the mechanism of this movement is as follows: It was shown (Buch I, Kap. III, 3a) [English edition: Volume I, Ch. III, 3a, Ed.] that the proportion in which the aggregate mass of money is distributed over a hoard and means of circulation varies steadily, if one part of the money available in society constantly lies fallow as a hoard, while another performs the functions of a medium of circulation or of an immediate reserve fund of the directly circulating money. Now in our case money that must be accumulated as a hoard in the hands of a relatively big capitalist in rather large amounts is thrown all at once into circulation on the purchase of the fixed capital. It then divides again in society into medium of circulation and hoard. By means of the sinking fund, in which the value of the fixed capital flows back to its starting-point in proportion to its wear and tear, a part of the circulating money again forms a hoard, for a longer or shorter period, in the hands of the same capitalist whose hoard had, upon the purchase of the fixed capital, been transformed into a medium of circulation and passed away from him. It is a continually changing distribution of the hoard which exists in society and alternately functions as a medium of circulation and then is separated again, as a hoard, from the mass of the circulating money. With the development of the credit system, which necessarily runs parallel with the development of modern industry and capitalist production, this money no longer serves as a hoard but as capital; however not in the hands of its owner but of other capitalists at whose disposal it has been placed.

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The circulating capital entering into the process of production transfers its entire value to the product and must therefore be continually replaced in kind by the sale of the product, if the process of production is to proceed without interruption. The fixed capital entering into the process of production transfers only a part of its value (the wear and tear) to the product and despite this wear and tear continues functioning in the process of production. Therefore it need not be replaced in kind until the lapse of intervals of various duration, at any rate not as frequently as the circulating capital. This necessity of replacement, the reproduction term, is not only quantitatively different for the various constituent parts of fixed capital, but, as we have seen, a part of the perennial fixed capital, that which lasts longer, may be replaced annually or at shorter intervals and added in kind to the old fixed capital. In the case of fixed capital of different properties the replacement can take place only all at once at the end of its period of durability. It is therefore necessary to reduce the specific turnovers of the various parts of fixed capital to a homogeneous form of turnover, so that they will remain different only quantitatively, namely, according to duration of turnover. The qualitative identity does not come about if we take as our starting-point P ... P, the form of the continuous process of production. For definite elements of P must be constantly replaced in kind while others need not. However the form M ... M' undoubtedly yields this identity of turnover. Take for instance a machine worth 10,000, which lasts ten years of which one-tenth, or 1,000, is annually reconverted into money. These 1,000 have been converted in the course of one year from money-capital into productive capital and commodity-capital, and then reconverted from this into money-capital. They have returned to their original form, the money-form, just like the circulating capital, if we study the latter in this form, and it is immaterial whether this money-capital of 1,000 is once more converted at the end of the year into the bodily form of a machine or not. In calculating the aggregate turnover of the advanced productive capital we therefore fix all its elements in the money-form, so that the return to that form concludes the turnover. We assume that value is always advanced in money, even in the continuous process of production, where this money-form of value is only that of money of account. Thus we can compute the average. Suppose the fixed capital is 80,000 and its period of reproduction 10 years, so that 8,000 of it annually return to their money-form, or it completes one-tenth of its turnover. Suppose further the circulating capital is 20,000, and its turnover is completed five times per year. The total capital would then be 100,000. The turned-over fixed capital is 8,000, the turned-over circulating capital five times 20,000, or 100,000. Then the capital turned over during one year is 108,000, or 8,000 more than the advanced capital. 1 + 2/25 of the capital have been turned over. In the illustration under No. 3, then, the sums assumedly returned into the hands of the capitalist at the end of one year are (a) a sum of value amounting to 20,000 which he invests again in the circulating constituents of the capital, and (b) a sum of 8,000 which has been set free by wear and tear from the value of the advanced fixed capital; simultaneously this same fixed capital remains in the process of production, but with the reduced value of 72,000 instead of 80,000. The process of production therefore would have to be continued for nine years more, before the advanced fixed capital outlived its term and ceased to function as a creator of products and values, so that it would have to be replaced. The advanced capital-value, then, has to pass through a cycle of turnovers, in the present case a cycle of ten annual ones, and this cycle is determined by the life, hence the reproduction or turnover time of the applied fixed capital. As the magnitude of the value and the durability of the applied fixed capital develop with the development of the capitalist mode of production, the lifetime of industry and of industrial capital lengthens in each particular field of investment to a period of many years, say of ten years on an average. Whereas the development of fixed capital extends the length of this life on the one hand it is shortened on the other by the continuous revolution in the means of production, which likewise incessantly gains momentum with the development of the capitalist mode of production. This involves a change in the means of production and the necessity of their constant replacement, on account of moral depreciation, long before they expire physically. One may assume that in the essential branches of modern industry this life-cycle now averages ten years. However we are not concerned here with the exact figure. This much is evident: the cycle of interconnected turnovers embracing a number of years, in which capital is held fast by its fixed constituent part, furnishes a material basis for the periodic crises. During this cycle business undergoes successive periods of depression, medium activity, precipitancy, crisis. True, periods in which capital is invested differ greatly and far from coincide in time. But a crisis always forms the starting-point of large new investments. Therefore, from the point of view of society as a whole, more or less, a new material basis for the next turnover cycle.[22a] The same Scrope says in the same passage: Scrope confuses here the difference in the flow of certain parts of the circulating capital, brought about for the individual capitalist by terms of payment and conditions of credit, with the difference in the turnovers due to the nature of capital. He says that wages must be paid weekly out of the weekly receipts from paid sales or bills. It must be noted here in the first place that certain differences occur relative to wages themselves, depending on the length of the term of payment, that is, the length of time for which the labourer must give credit to the capitalist, whether wages are payable every week, month, three months, six months, etc. In this case, the law expounded before, holds good, to the effect that the quantity of the means of payment required for all periodical payments (hence of the money-capital to be advanced at one time) is in inverse [This is evidently a slip of the pen, the proportion being direct and not inverse. Ed.] proportion to the length of their periods. (Buch I, Kap. III, 3b, Seite 124.) [English edition: Ch. III, 3b, p. 141. Ed.] In the second place, it is not only the new value added in the process of production by the week s labour which enters completely into the weekly product, but also the value of the raw and auxiliary materials consumed by the weekly product. This value circulates with the product containing it. It assumes the form of money through the sale of the product and must be reconverted into the same elements of production. This applies as much to the labour-power as to the raw and auxiliary materials. But we have already seen (Chapter VI, II, 1) that continuity of production requires a supply of means of production different for different branches of industry, and different within one and the same branch of business for different component parts of this element of the circulating capital, for instance, for coal and cotton. Hence, although these materials must be continually replaced in kind, they need not always be bought anew. The frequency of purchases depends on the size of the available stock, on the time it takes to exhaust it. In the case of labour-power there is no such storing of a supply. The reconversion into money of the part of capital laid out in labour-power goes hand in hand with that of the capital invested in raw and auxiliary materials. But the reconversion of the money, on the one hand into labour-power, on the other into raw materials, proceeds separately on account of the special terms of purchase and payment of these two constituents, one of them being bought as a productive supply for long periods, the other, labour-power, for shorter periods, for instance a week. On the other hand the capitalist must keep a stock of finished commodities besides a stock of materials for production. Let us leave sales difficulties aside. A certain quantity of goods must be produced, say, on order. While the last portion of this lot is being produced, the finished products are waiting in the warehouse until the order can be completely filled. Other differences in the turnover of circulating capital arise whenever some of its separate elements must stay in some preliminary stage of the process of production (drying of wood, etc.) longer than others. The credit system, to which Scrope here refers, as well as commercial capital, modifies the turnover for the individual capitalist. On a social scale it modifies the turnover only in so far as it does not accelerate merely production but also consumption.

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The difference between these two kinds of advances does not arise until advanced money has been transformed into the elements of productive capital. It is a difference that exists solely within productive capital. It therefore never occurs to Quesnay to classify money either among the original or the annual advances. As advances for production, i.e., as productive capital, both of them stand opposed to money as well as the commodities existing in the market. Furthermore the difference between these two elements of productive capital is correctly reduced in Quesnay to the different manner in which they enter into the value of the finished product, hence to the different manner in which their values are circulated together with those of the products, and hence to the different manner of their replacement or their reproduction, the value of the one being wholly replaced annually, that of the other partly and at longer intervals. The only progress made by Adam Smith is the generalisation of the categories. With him it no longer applies to one special form of capital, the farmer s capital, but to every form of productive capital. Hence it follows as a matter of course that the distinction derived from agriculture between an annual turnover and one of two or more years duration is superseded by the general distinction into different periods of turnover, one turnover of the fixed capital always comprising more than one turnover of the circulating capital, regardless of the periods of turnover of the circulating capital, whether they be annual, more than annual, or less than annual. Thus in Adam Smith the avances annuelles transform themselves into circulating capital, and the avances primitives into fixed capital. But his progress is confined to this generalisation of the categories. His implementation is far inferior to that of Quesnay. The crudely empirical manner in which Smith broaches the investigation engenders at the very outset a lack of clarity: Adam Smith immediately continues: He continues: Or does he mean to say that capital employed in order to produce goods and to sell these at a profit must be sold after its transformation into goods and by means of the sale must in the first place pass from the possession of the seller into that of the buyer, and in the second place change from its bodily form, goods, into its money-form, so that it is of no use to its owner so long as it either remains in his possession or continues in the same shape? In that case, the whole thing amounts to this: The capital-value that formerly functioned in the form of productive capital, in a form peculiar to the process of production, now functions as commodity-capital and money-capital, in forms peculiar to the process of circulation, where it is no longer either fixed or circulating capital. And this applies equally to those elements of value which are added by raw and auxiliary material, i.e., by circulating capital, and to those which are added by the wear and tear of instruments of labour hence by fixed capital. We do not get any nearer to the difference between fixed and circulating capital in this way. Further: That by circulating capital Adam Smith means here nothing but capital of circulation, i.e., capital-value in the forms pertaining to the process of circulation (commodity capital and money-capital) is shown by his singularly ill-chosen illustration. He selects for this purpose a kind of capital which does not belong at all in the process of production, but whose abode is exclusively the sphere of circulation, which consists solely of capital of circulation merchant s capital. How absurd it is to start out with an illustration in which capital does not figure altogether as productive capital is stated right afterwards by him himself: But how a profit is to come into existence by changes of form of money and commodities, by a mere transmutation of value from one of these forms into another, is more than anyone can tell. And an explanation becomes absolutely impossible because he starts out here with merchants capital, which moves only in the sphere of circulation. We shall return to this later. Let us first hear what he has to say about fixed capital. [Vol. II, pp. 254-55.] But Adam Smith suddenly changes the entire basis of his classification, and contradicts the text with which he had opened the entire investigation a few lines previously. This refers particularly to the statement: There are two different ways in which a capital may be employed so as to yield a revenue or a profit to its employer, [Vol. II, p. 254] namely, as circulating or as fixed capital. According to that these are therefore different methods of employing different capitals independent of one another, such as capitals that can be employed either in industry or in agriculture. And then we read [Vol. II, p. 255]: In the illustrations Smith gives he designates the instruments of trade as fixed capital, and the portion of capital laid out in wages and raw materials, including auxiliary materials, as circulating capital ( repaid with a profit by the price of the work ). And so he starts out, in the first place, from the various constituents of the labour-process, from labour-power (labour) and raw materials on the one hand, and instruments of labour on the other. But these are constituents of capital, because a sum of value which is to function as capital is invested in them. To this extent they are material elements, modes of existence of productive capital, that is to say, of capital functioning in the process of production. But why is one of these parts called fixed? Because Let us take on the other hand a different industry, one which utilises raw materials that form the substance of its product, and auxiliary materials that enter into the product bodily and not only as so much value, as is the case with fuel coal. The product, for instance the yarn, changes hands together with the raw material, the cotton, composing it, and passes from the process of production into that of consumption. But so long as the cotton functions as an element of productive capital, its master does not sell it, but processes it, has it made into yarn. He does not part with it. Or, to use Smith s crudely erroneous and trivial terms, he does not make any profit by parting with it, by its changing masters, or by circulating it. He does not permit his materials to circulate any more than his machines. They are fixed in the process of production, the same as the spinning machines and the factory buildings. Indeed, a part of the productive capital must be just as continually fixed in the form of coal, cotton, etc., as in the form of instruments of labour. The difference is only that for instance the cotton, coal, etc., required for one week s yarn production, are always entirely consumed in the manufacture of the weekly product, so that new cotton, coal, etc., must be supplied in their place; in other words, these elements of productive capital, although remaining identical in kind, always consist of new specimens of the same kind, while the same individual spinning machine or the same individual factory building continues its participation in a whole series of weekly productions without being replaced by a new specimen of its kind. As elements of the productive capital all its constituent parts are continually fixed in the process of production, for it cannot proceed without them. And all the elements of productive capital, whether fixed or circulating, equally confront, as productive capital, the capital of circulation, i.e., commodity-capital and money-capital. It is the same with labour-power. A part of the productive capital must be continually fixed in it, and it is the same identical labour-powers, just as it is the same machines, that are everywhere employed for a certain length of time by the same capitalist. The difference between labour-power and machines in this case is not that the machines are bought once and for all (which is not so when they are paid for in instalments), while the labourer is not. The difference is rather that the labour expended by the labourer enters wholly into the value of the product, while the value of the machines enters only piecemeal. Smith confuses different definitions when he says of circulating capital as opposed to fixed: Quesnay, on the other hand, had derived these differences from the process of reproduction and its necessities. In order that this process may be continuous, the value of the annual advances must annually be replaced in full out of the value of the annual product, while the value of the investment capital need be replaced only piecemeal, so that it requires complete replacement and therefore complete reproduction only in a period of, say, ten years (by a new material of the same kind). Consequently Adam Smith falls far below Quesnay. So there is therefore absolutely nothing left to Adam Smith for a definition of fixed capital except that it is instruments of labour which do not change their shape in the process of production and continue to serve in production until they are worn out, as opposed to the products in the formation of which they assist. He forgets that all elements of productive capital continually confront in their bodily form (as instruments of labour, materials, and labour-power) the product and the product circulating as a commodity, and that the difference between the part consisting of materials and labour-power and that consisting of instruments of labour is only this: with regard to labour-power, that it is always purchased afresh (not bought for the time it lasts, as are the instruments of labour); with regard to the materials, that it is not the same identical materials that function in the labour-process throughout, but always new materials of the same kind. At the same time the false impression is created that the value of the fixed capital does not participate in the circulation, although of course Adam Smith previously explained the wear and tear of fixed capital as a part of the price of the product. In opposing circulating capital to fixed, no emphasis is placed on the fact that this opposition exists solely because it is that constituent part of productive capital which must be wholly replaced out of the value of the product and must therefore fully share in its metamorphoses, while this is not so in the case of the fixed capital. Instead the circulating capital is jumbled together with those forms which capital assumes on passing from the sphere of production to that of circulation, as commodity-capital and money-capital. But both forms, commodity-capital as well as money-capital, are carriers of the value of both the fixed and the circulating component parts of productive capital. Both of them are capital of circulation, as distinguished from productive capital, but not circulating (fluent) capital as distinguished from fixed capital. Finally, owing to the wholly erroneous explanation that profit is made by fixed capital staying in the process of production, and by circulating capital leaving it and being circulated, and also on account of the identity of form assumed in the turnover by the variable capital and the circulating constituent of the constant capital, their essential difference in the process of self-expansion and of the formation of surplus-value is hidden, so that the entire secret of capitalist production is obscured still more. The common designation "circulating capital" abolishes this essential difference. Political Economy subsequently went still farther by holding fast not to the antithesis between variable and constant capital but to the antithesis between fixed and circulating capital as the essential and sole delimitation. After Adam Smith has designated fixed and circulating capital as two particular ways of investing capital, each of which yields a profit by itself, he says: Adam Smith then gives the following illustration: Whether the seed is directly deducted from the product as a part of it or the entire product is sold and a part of its value converted in the purchase of another man s seed in either case it is mere replacement that takes place and no profit is made by this replacement. In the one case the seed enters into circulation as a commodity together with the remainder of the product; in the other it figures only in book-keeping as a component part of the value of the advanced capital. But in both cases it remains a circulating constituent of the productive capital. The seed is entirely consumed to get the product ready, and it must be entirely replaced out of the product to make reproduction possible. Hence raw material and auxiliary substances lose the characteristic form with which they are clothed on entering the labour-process. It is otherwise with the instruments of labour. Tools, machines, workshops, and vessels, are of use in the labour-process, only so long as they retain their original shape, and are ready each morning to renew the process, with their shape unchanged. And just as during their lifetime, that is to say, during the continued labour-process in which they serve, they retain their shape independent of the product, so too, they do after their death. The corpses of machines, tools, workshops, etc., are always separate and distinct from the product they helped to turn out. (Buch I, Kap. VI, S. 192.) [English edition: Volume I, Ch. VIII, p. 203. Ed.] These different ways in which means of production are consumed to form the product, some of them preserving their independent shape vis- -vis the product, others changing or losing it entirely this difference pertaining to the labour-process as such and therefore just as well to the labour-processes aimed at satisfying merely one s own needs, e.g., the needs of the patriarchal family, without any exchange, without production of commodities are falsified by Adam Smith. He does so 1) by introducing here the totally irrelevant definition of profit, claiming that some of the means of production yield a profit to their owner by preserving their form, while the others do so by losing it; 2) by jumbling together the alterations of a part of the elements of production in the labour-process with the change of form (purchase and sale) that is characteristic of the exchange of products, of commodity circulation, and which at the same time includes a change in the ownership of the circulating commodities. The turnover presupposes reproduction effected by circulation, hence by the sale of the product, by its conversion into money and its reconversion from money into its elements of production. But since a part of the capitalist producer s own product serves him directly as means of production, he appears as a seller of it to himself, and that is how the matter figures in his books. In that case this part of the reproduction is not brought about by circulation but proceeds directly. However the part of the product thus serving again as means of production replaces circulating, not fixed capital, since 1) its value passes wholly into the product, and 2) it itself has been wholly replaced in kind by a new specimen out of the new product. Adam Smith tells us now what circulating and fixed capital consist of. He enumerates the things, the material elements, which form fixed, and those which form circulating capital, as if this definiteness were inherent in these things materially, by nature, and did not rather spring from their definite function within the capitalist process of production. And yet in the same chapter (Book II, Chapter I) he makes the remark that although a certain thing, e.g., a dwelling, which is reserved as "stock" for "immediate consumption," Things form constituent parts of the circulating or fixed capital, depending on what function they perform in the labour-process. A head of cattle for instance, as labouring cattle (instrument of labour), represents the material mode of existence of fixed capital, while as cattle for fattening (raw material) it is a constituent part of the farmer s circulating capital. On the other hand the same thing may now function as a constituent part of productive capital and now belong to the fund for direct consumption. A house for instance when performing the function of a workshop, is a fixed component part of productive capital; when serving as a dwelling it is in no wise a form of capital. The same instruments of labour may in many cases serve either as means of production or as means of consumption. It was one of the errors following from Adam Smith s idea that the property of being fixed or circulating capital was conceived as inherent in the things themselves. The mere analysis of the labour-process (Buch I, Kap. V) [ English edition: Volume I, Ch. VII. Ed.] shows that the definitions of instruments of labour, materials of labour, and product change according to the various roles played by one and the same thing in the process. The definitions of fixed and non-fixed capital are based in their turn on the definite roles played by these elements in the labour-process, and therefore also in the value formation process. In the second place, on enumerating the things fixed and circulating capitals consist of, it becomes fully apparent that Smith lumps together the distinction valid and making sense only with regard to productive capital (capital in its productive form) between the fixed and circulating components of the same, with the distinction between productive capital and those forms which pertain to capital in its process of circulation, viz., commodity-capital and money-capital. He says in the same passage (pp. 187 and 188): The fact that Smith at the same time speaks of the merchant shows his confusion. Once the producer sells his product to the merchant, it no longer constitutes any form of his capital. From the point of view of society, it is indeed still commodity-capital, although in other hands than those of its producer; but for the very reason that it is a commodity-capital it is neither fixed nor circulating capital. In every kind of production not meant for the satisfaction of the producer s direct needs, the product must circulate as a commodity, i.e., it must be sold, not in order to make a profit on it, but that the producer may be able to live at all. Under capitalist production, there is to be added the circumstance that when a commodity is sold the surplus-value embodied in it is also realised. The product emerges as a commodity from the process of production and is therefore neither a fixed nor a circulating element of this process. Incidentally, Smith here argues against himself. The finished products, whatever their material form or their use-value, their useful effect, are all commodity-capital here, hence capital in a form characteristic of the process of circulation. Being in this form, they are not constituent parts of any productive capital their owner may have. This does not in the least prevent them from becoming, right after their sale, in the hands of their purchaser, constituent parts of productive capital, either fixed or circulating. Here it is evident that things which for a certain time appear in the market as commodity-capital, as opposed to productive capital, may or may not function as circulating or fixed constituents of productive capital after they have been removed from the market. The product of the cotton spinner, yarn, is the commodity-form of his capital, is commodity-capital as far as he is concerned. It cannot function again as a constituent part of his productive capital, neither as material of labour nor as an instrument of labour. But in the hands of the weaver who buys it it is incorporated in the productive capital of the latter as one of its circulating constituent parts. For the spinner, however, the yarn is the depository of the value of part of his fixed as well as circulating capital (apart from the surplus-value). In the same way a machine, the product of a machine-manufacturer, is the commodity-form of his capital, is commodity-capital to him. And so long as it stays in this form it is neither circulating nor fixed capital. But if sold to a manufacturer for use it becomes a fixed component part of a productive capital. Even if by virtue of its use-form the product can partly re-enter as means of production into the process from which it originated, e.g., coal into coal production, precisely that part of the output of coal which is intended for sale represents neither circulating nor fixed capital but commodity-capital. On the other hand a product, due to its use-form, may be wholly incapable of forming any element of productive capital, either as material of labour or as an instrument of labour. For instance any means of subsistence. Nevertheless it is commodity-capital for its producer, is the carrier of the value of his fixed as well as circulating capital; and of the one or the other according to whether the capital employed in its production has to be replaced in whole or in part, has transferred its value to the product in whole or in part. With Smith, in No. 3, the raw material (material not worked up, semi-finished products, auxiliary substances) does not figure on the one hand as a component part embodied in the productive capital, but actually only as a special kind of use-values of which the social product can at all consist, as a special kind of commodities existing alongside the other material constituent parts, means of subsistence, etc., enumerated under Nos. 2 and 4. On the other hand these materials are indeed cited as incorporated in the productive capital and therefore as elements of it in the hands of the producer. The confusion is evidenced by the fact that they are partly conceived as functioning in the hands of the producer ( in the hands of the growers, the manufacturers, etc. ), and partly in the hands of merchants ( mercers, drapers, timber-merchants ), where they are merely commodity-capital, not component parts of productive capital. Indeed, Adam Smith wholly forgets here, in enumerating the elements of circulating capital, the distinction applying only to the productive capital between fixed and circulating capital. He rather places commodity-capital and money-capital, i.e., the two forms of capital typical of the process of circulation, in opposition to the productive capital, but that quite unconsciously. Finally, it is a striking fact that Adam Smith forgets to mention labour-power when counting off the constituent parts of circulating capital. There are two reasons for this. We have just seen that, apart from money-capital, circulating capital is only another name for commodity-capital. But to the extent that labour-power circulates in the market, it is not capital, no form of commodity-capital. It is not capital at all; the labourer is not a capitalist, although he brings a commodity to market, namely his own skin. Not until labour-power has been sold, been incorporated in the process of production, hence not until it has ceased to circulate as a commodity, does it become a constituent of productive capital variable capital as the source of surplus-value, a circulating component part of productive capital with reference to the turnover of the capital-value invested in it. Since Smith here confuses the circulating capital with commodity-capital, he cannot bring labour-power under the head of circulating capital. Hence the variable capital here appears in the form of the commodities the labourer buys with his wages, viz., means of subsistence. In this form the capital-value invested in wages is supposed to belong to circulating capital. That which is incorporated in the process of production is labour-power, the labourer himself, not the means of subsistence wherewith the labourer maintains himself. True, we have seen (Buch I, Kap. XXI) [English edition: Volume I, Ch. XXIII. Ed.] that from the point of view of society the reproduction of the labourer himself by means of his individual consumption is likewise part of the process of reproduction of social capital. But this does not apply to the individual, isolated process of production which we are studying here. The acquired and useful abilities (p. 187) which Smith mentions under the head of fixed capital are on the contrary component parts of circulating capital, since they are abilities of the wage-labourer and he has sold his labour together with its abilities. It is a great mistake on the part of Adam Smith to divide the entire social wealth into 1) a fund for immediate consumption, 2) fixed capital, and 3) circulating capital. According to the above, wealth would have to be divided into 1) a consumption-fund which does not form any part of functioning social capital although parts of it can continually function as capital; and 2) capital. Accordingly one part of the wealth functions as capital, the other as non-capital, or consumption-fund. And here appears the absolute necessity that all capital be either fixed or circulating somewhat like the natural necessity that a mammal be male or female. But we have seen that the antithesis between fixed and circulating capital applies solely to the elements of productive capital, that consequently there is besides these a considerable amount of capital commodity-capital and money-capital exists in a form in which it can be neither fixed nor circulating. Inasmuch as under capitalist production the entire mass of social products circulates in the market as commodity-capital, with the exception of that part of the products which is directly used up again by the individual capitalist producers in its bodily form as means of production without being sold or bought, it is evident that not only the fixed and circulating elements of productive capital, but likewise all the elements of the consumption-fund are derived from the commodity-capital. This is tantamount to saying that on the basis of capitalist production both means of production and articles of consumption first appear as commodity-capital, even though they are intended for later use as means of production or articles of consumption, just as labour-power itself is found in the market as a commodity, although not as commodity-capital. This accounts for the following new confusion in Adam Smith. He says: Considered socially it is true that the part of the commodity-capital which consists of products that can serve only as instruments of labour must unless they have been produced to no purpose, cannot be sold sooner or later function as instruments of labour, i.e., with capitalist production as their basis, they must, whenever they cease to be commodities, form real, as before they formed prospective, elements of the fixed part of the social productive capital. But there is a distinction here, arising from the bodily form of the product. A spinning machine for instance has no use-values, unless it is used for spinning, unless therefore it functions as an element of production and consequently, from the point of view of the capitalist, as a fixed component part of a productive capital. But a spinning machine is movable. It may be exported from the country in which it was produced and sold abroad directly or indirectly for raw materials, etc., or for champagne. In that case it has functioned only as a commodity-capital in the country in which it was produced, but never as fixed capital, not even after its sale. Products however which are localised by being anchored in the soil, and can therefore be used only locally, such as factory buildings, railways, bridges, tunnels, docks, etc., soil improvements, etc., cannot be exported bodily, neck and crop. They are not movable. They are either useless, or as soon as they have been sold must function as fixed capital in the country that produced them. To their capitalist producer, who builds factories or improves land for speculative sale, these things are forms of his commodity-capital, or, according to Adam Smith, forms of circulating capital. But viewed socially these things if they are not to be useless must ultimately function as fixed capital in that very country, in some local process of production. From this it does not follow in the least that immovables are in themselves fixed capital. They may belong, as dwelling houses, etc., to the consumption-fund, and in that case they are not part whatever of the social capital, although they constitute an element of the social wealth of which capital is only a part. The producer of these things, to speak in the language of Adam Smith, makes a profit by their sale. And so they are circulating capital! Their practical utiliser, their ultimate purchaser, can use them only by applying them in the process of production, and so they are fixed capital! Titles to property, for instance railway shares, may change hands every day, and their owner may make a profit by their sale even in foreign countries, so that titles to property are exportable, although the railway itself is not. Nevertheless these things must either lie fallow in the very country in which they are localised, or function as a fixed component of some productive capital. In the same way manufacturer A may make a profit by selling his factory to manufacturer B, but this does not prevent the factory from functioning as fixed capital the same as before. Therefore, while the locally fixed instruments of labour, which cannot be detached from the soil, will nevertheless, in all probability, have to function as commodity-capital for their producer and not constitute any elements of his fixed capital (which is made up as far as he is concerned of the instruments of labour he needs for the construction of buildings, railways, etc.), one should not by any means draw the contrary conclusion that fixed capital necessarily consists of immovables. A ship and a locomotive are effective only through their motion; yet they function, not for him who produced them, but for him who applies them as fixed capital. On the other hand things which are most decidedly fixed in the process of production, live and die in it and never leave it any more after once entering it, are circulating component parts of the productive capital. Such are for instance the coal consumed to drive the machine in the process of production, the gas used to light the factory, etc. They are circulating capital not because they bodily leave the process of production together with the product and circulate as commodities, but because their value enters wholly into that of the commodity which they help to produce and which therefore must be entirely replaced out of the proceeds of the sale of the commodity. In the passage last quoted from Adam Smith, notice must also be taken of the following phrase: Adam Smith classifies the means of subsistence of labourers as circulating capital in contradistinction to fixed capital: Generally speaking the advanced capital is converted into productive capital, i.e., it assumes the form of elements of production which are themselves the products of past labour. (Among them labour-power.) Capital can function in the process of production only in this form. Now, if instead of labour-power itself, into which the variable part of capital has been converted, we take the labourer s means of subsistence, it is evident that these means as such do not differ, so far as the formation of value is concerned, from the other elements of productive capital, from the raw materials and the food of the labouring cattle, on which ground Smith in one of the passages quoted above places them, after the manner of the physiocrats, on the same level. The means of subsistence cannot themselves expand their own value or add any surplus-value to it. Their value, like that of the other elements of the productive capital, can re-appear only in the value of the product. They cannot add any more to its value than they have themselves. Like raw materials, semi-finished goods, etc., they differ from fixed capital composed of instruments of labour only in that they are entirely consumed in the product (at least as far as concerns the capitalist who pays for them) in the formation of which they participate and that therefore their value must be replaced as a whole, while in the case of the fixed capital this takes place only gradually, piecemeal. The part of productive capital advanced in labour-power (or in the labourer s means of subsistence) differs here only materially and not in respect of the process of labour and production of surplus-value from the other material elements of productive capital. It differs only in so far as it falls into the category of circulating capital together with one part of the objective creators of the product ("materials" Adam Smith calls them generally), as opposed to the other part of these objective product creators, which belong in the category of fixed capital. The fact that the capital laid out in wages belongs in the circulating part of productive capital and, unlike the fixed component of productive capital, shares the quality of fluency with a part of the objective product creators, the raw materials, etc., has nothing whatever to do with the role played in the process of self-expansion by this variable part, as distinct from the constant part of capital. This refers only to how this part of the advanced capital-value is to be replaced, renewed, hence reproduced out of the value of the product of means of the circulation. The purchase and repurchase of labour-power belong in the process of circulation. But it is only within the process of production that the value laid out in labour-power is converted (not for the labourer but for the capitalist) from a definite, constant magnitude into a variable one, and only thus the advanced value is converted altogether into capital-value, into capital, into self-expanding value. But by classing, like Smith, the value expended for the means of subsistence of the labourers, instead of value laid out in labour-power, as the circulating component of productive capital, the understanding of the distinction between variable and constant capital, and thus the understanding of the capitalist process of production in general, is rendered impossible. The determination that this part of capital is variable capital in contrast to the constant capital, spent for material creators of the product, is buried beneath the determination that the part of the capital invested in labour-power belongs, as far as the turnover is concerned, in the circulating part of productive capital. And the burial is brought to completion by enumerating the labourer s means of subsistence instead of his labour-power as an element of productive capital. It is immaterial whether the value of the labour-power is advance in money or directly in means of subsistence. However under capitalist production the latter can be but an exception. By thus establishing the definition of circulating capital as being the determinant of the capital value laid out for labour-power this physiocratic definition without the premise of the physiocrats Adam Smith fortunately killed among his followers the understanding that that part of capital which is spent on labour-power is variable capital. The more profound and correct ideas developed by him elsewhere did not prevail, but this blunder of his did. Indeed, other writers after him went even further. They were not content to make it the decisive definition of the part of capital invested in labour-power to be circulating as opposed to fixed capital; they made it the essential definition of circulating capital to be invested in labour-power to be circulating as opposed to fixed capital; they made it the essential definition of circulating capital to be invested in means of subsistence for labourers. Naturally associated with this is the doctrine that the labour-fund, [Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I, pp. 609-11. Ed.] consisting of the necessary means of subsistence, is of a definite magnitude, which on the one hand physically limits the share of the labourers in the social product, but on the other has to be fully expended in the purchase of labour-power.

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But the original lack of clarity is apparent at the outset in the following immaterial juxtaposition: First: The differences in the degree of durability of fixed capital and the difference arising from capital being composed of constant and variable capital are conceived as being of equal significance. But the last-named difference determines the difference in the production of surplus-value; the first named on the other hand, so far as the process of self-expansion is concerned, refers only to the manner in which a particular value is transferred from a means of production to the product; so far as the process of circulation is concerned, this difference refers only to the period of the renewal of the expended capital, or, from another point of view, to the time for which it has been advanced. If instead of seeing through the internal machinery of the capitalist process of production one considers merely the accomplished phenomena, then these distinctions actually coincide. In the distribution of the social surplus-value among the various capitals invested in different branches of industry, the differences in the different periods of time for which capital is advanced (for instance the various degrees of durability of fixed capital) and the different organic compositions of capital (and therefore also the different circulations of constant and variable capital) contribute equally toward an equalisation of the general rate of profit and the conversion of values into prices of production. Secondly: From the point of view of the process of circulation, we have on one side the instruments of labour fixed capital, on the other the material of labour and wages circulating capital. But from the point of view of the process of labour and self-expansion, we have on the one side means of production (instruments of labour and material of labour) constant capital; on the other, labour-power variable capital. It is wholly immaterial for the organic composition of capital (Buch I, Kap. XXIII, 2, p. 647) [English edition, Volume I, Ch. XXV, 2, pp. 622-23. Ed.] whether a specified quantity of value of constant capital consists of many instruments of labour and little material of labour or of much material of labour and few instruments of labour, while everything depends on the ratio of the capital laid out in means of production to that laid out in labour-power. Vice versa: from the point of view of the process of circulation, of the distinction between fixed and circulating capital, it is just as immaterial in what proportions a particular quantity of value circulating capital divides into material of labour and wages. From one of these points of view the material of labour is classed in the same category with the instruments of labour, as opposed to the capital-value laid out in labour-power; from the other view-point the part of capital laid out in labour-power ranges with that laid out in material of labour, as opposed to that laid out in instruments of labour. For this reason the part of the capital-value laid out in material of labour (raw and auxiliary materials) does not appear on either side in Ricardo. It disappears entirely; for it will not do to class it with fixed capital, because its mode of circulation coincides entirely with that of the part of capital laid out in labour-power. And on the other hand it should not be placed alongside circulating capital, because in that event the identification of the antithesis of fixed and circulating capital with that of constant and variable capital, which had been handed down by Adam Smith and is tacitly retained, would abolish itself. Ricardo has too much logical instinct not to feel this, and for this reason that part of capital vanishes entirely from his sight. It is to be noted at this point that the capitalist, to use the jargon of Political Economy, advances the capital laid out in wages for various periods of time, according to whether he pays these wages weekly, monthly, or quarterly. But as a matter of fact the reverse takes place. It is the labourer who advances his labour to the capitalist for a week, a month, or three months, according to whether he is paid by the week, by the month, or every three months. If the capitalist bought labour-power instead of paying for it, in other words, if he paid the labourer his wages in advance for a day, a week, a month, or a quarter, he would be justified in claiming that he advanced wages for those periods. But since he pays after the labour has lasted for days, weeks, or months, instead of buying it and paying for the time which it is to last, the whole thing amounts to a capitalist quid pro quo, and the advance which the labour gives to the capitalist in labour is turned into an advance of money given to the labourer by the capitalist. It does not alter the case in the least that the capitalist gets back the product itself or its value (together with the surplus-value embodied in it) from circulation, or realises it, only after a relatively long or short period of time, according to the different periods required for its manufacture or for its circulation. The seller of a commodity does not care a rap what its buyer is going to do with it. The capitalist does not get a machine cheaper because he must advance its entire value at one shot, while this value returns to him only gradually and piecemeal from circulation; nor does he pay more for cotton because its value enters entirely into the value of the product into which it is made and is therefore replaced fully and at one time by the sale of the product. Let us return to Ricardo. It is therefore understandable why bourgeois Political Economy instinctively clung to Adam Smith s confusion of the categories constant and variable capital with the categories fixed and circulating, and repeated it parrotlike, without criticism, from generation to generation for a century. The part of capital laid out for wages is no longer in the least distinguished by bourgeois Political Economy from the part of capital laid out for raw materials, and differs only formally from constant capital on the point of whether it is circulated piecemeal or in one lump by the product. Thereby the basis for an understanding of the real movement of capitalist production, and hence of capitalist exploitation, is buried at one stroke. It is but a question of the reappearance of advanced values. In Ricardo the uncritical adoption of the Smithian confusion is more disturbing not only than in the later apologists, in whom the confusion of ideas is rather something not disturbing, but than in Adam Smith himself, because Ricardo, in contrast to the latter, is more consistent and incisive in his analysis of value and surplus-value, and indeed upholds the esoteric Adam Smith against the exoteric Adam Smith. Among the physiocrats there is no such confusion. The distinction between avances annuelles and avances primitives refers only to the different periods of reproduction of the different component of capital, especially of agricultural capital, while their views on the production of surplus-value form a part of their theory that is independent of these distinctions, a part they hold up as the strong point of the theory. The formation of surplus-value is not explained as originating from capital as such, but is attributed to one particular sphere of the production of capital, agriculture. Secondly. The essential point in the definition of variable capital and therefore for the conversion of any sum of values into capital is that the capitalist exchanges a definite, given (and in this sense constant) magnitude of value for value-creating power, a magnitude of value for the production, self-expansion, of value. Whether the capitalist pays the labourer in money or in means of subsistence does not affect this basic definition. It only alters the mode of existence of the value advanced by the capitalist which in one case exists in the form of money for which the labourer buys himself his means of subsistence in the market, in the other case in the form of means of subsistence which he consumes directly. Developed capitalist production rests indeed on the assumption that the labourer is paid in money, just as in general it presupposes the process of production brought about by the process of circulation, hence presupposes the monetary system. But the creation of surplus-value and consequently the capitalisation of the advanced sum of values has its source neither in the money-form of wages nor in the form of wages paid in kind, nor in the capital laid out in the purchase of labour-power. It arises out of the exchange of value for value-creating power, out of the conversion of a constant into a variable magnitude. The greater or smaller fixity of the instruments of labour depends on their degree of durability, hence on a physical property. Other circumstances being equal, they will wear out sooner or later, will therefore function a longer or a shorter time as fixed capital, according to their durability. But it is by no means solely on account of this physical property of durability that they function as fixed capital. The raw material in metal factories is just as durable as the machines used in manufacturing, and more durable than many component parts of these machines, such as leather and wood. Nevertheless the metal serving as raw materials forms a part of the circulating capital, while the instrument of labour, although probably built of the same metal, is a part of the fixed capital when in use. Consequently it is not because of the material, physical nature, nor the relatively great or small speed with which it wears out that a metal is put now in the category of fixed, now in that of circulating capital. This distinction is rather due to the role played by it in the process of production, being a subject of labour in one case and an instrument of labour in the other. The function of an instrument of labour in the process of production requires that on the average it should serve for a longer or shorter period in ever renewed labour-processes. Its very function therefore prescribes that the stuff of which it is composed should be more or less durable. But it is not the durability of the material of which it is fabricated that by itself makes it fixed capital. The same stuff, when raw material, becomes circulating capital, and among economists who confuse the distinction between commodity-capital and productive capital with the distinction between circulating and fixed capital, the same stuff, the same machine, is circulating capital as product and fixed capital as instrument of labour. Although it is not the durability of the material of which it is fabricated that makes an instrument of labour fixed capital, nevertheless its role as such an instrument requires that it should be composed of relatively durable material. The durability of its material is therefore a condition of its function as an instrument of labour, and consequently the material basis of the mode of circulation which renders it fixed capital. Other things being equal, the higher or lower degree of wear and tear of the stuff it is made of impresses upon it in a higher or lower degree the stamp of fixedness, is therefore very closely interwoven with the quality of being fixed capital. If the part of capital laid out in labour-power is considered exclusively from the point of view of circulating capital, hence in contrast with fixed capital, and if consequently the distinctions between constant and variable capital are lumped with those between fixed and circulating capital, then it is natural supposing that material reality of the instrument of labour forms an essential basis of its character of fixed capital to derive its character of circulating capital, in contrast with the fixed capital, from the material reality of the capital invested in labour-power, and then again to determine the circulating capital with the aid of the material reality of the variable capital. The real substance of the capital laid out in wages is labour itself, active, value-creating labour-power, living labour, which the capitalist exchanges for dead, materialised labour and embodies in his capital, by which means, and by which alone, the value in his hands turns into self-expanding value. But this power of self-expansion is not sold by the capitalist. It is always only a constituent part of his productive capital, the same as his instruments of labour; it is never a part of his commodity-capital, as for instance the finished product which he sells. In the process of production the instruments of labour, as components of the productive capital, are not opposed to labour-power as fixed capital any more than materials of labour and auxiliary substances are identified with it as circulating capital. Labour-power confronts both of them as a personal factor, while those are objective factors speaking from the point of view of the labour-process. Both of them stand opposed to labour-power, as constant capital to variable capital speaking from the point of view of the process of self-expansion of value. Or, if mention is to be made here of a material difference, so far as it affects the process of circulation, it is only this: It follows from the nature of value, which is nothing but materialised labour, and from the nature of active labour-power, which is nothing but labour in process of materialisation, that labour-power continually creates value and surplus-value during the time it functions; that what on the part of labour-power appears as motion, as a creation of value, appears on the part of its product in a state of rest, as created value. If the labour-power has performed its function, capital no longer consists of labour-power on the one side and means of production on the other. The capital-value that was invested in labour-power is now value which ( + surplus-value) was added to the product. In order to repeat the process, the product must be sold and new labour-power constantly bought with the proceeds and incorporated in the productive capital. This then gives to the part of capital invested in labour-power, and to that invested in material of labour, etc., the character of circulating capital as opposed to the capital remaining fixed in the instruments of labour. But if, on the contrary, the secondary definition of the circulating capital, which it shares with a part of the constant capital (raw and auxiliary materials), is made the essential definition of the part of capital laid out in labour-power, to wit, that the value laid out in it is transferred in full to the product in whose creation it is consumed, and not gradually and piecemeal as in the case of the fixed capital, and that consequently it must be replaced in full by the sale of the product then the part of the capital laid out in wages must likewise consist, materially, not of active labour-power but of the material elements which the labourer buys with his wages, i.e., it must consist of that part of the social commodity-capital which passes into the consumption of the labourer, viz., of means of subsistence. In that case the fixed capital consists of the more slowly perishable instruments of labour which therefore have to be replaced more slowly, and the capital laid out in labour-power consists of the means of subsistence, which must be replaced more rapidly. However, the border-line between greater or lesser perishableness is very vague and indistinct. The difference, as stated by Ricardo, is this: Once the part of capital invested in labour differs from that invested in instruments of labour only by its period of reproduction and hence its term of circulation, and once one part consists of means of subsistence and the other of instruments of labour so that those differ from these only in being more rapidly perishable, there being various degrees of durability within the first group itself, all differentia specifica between capital invested in labour-power and capital invested in means of production is naturally obliterated. This wholly contradicts Ricardo s doctrine of value, likewise his theory of profit, which is in fact a theory of surplus-value. In general he considers the distinction between fixed and circulating capital only to the extent that different proportions of both of them in equally large capitals invested in different branches of production influence the law of value, particularly the extent to which an increase or decrease of wages in consequence of these conditions affects prices. But even within this restricted investigation he commits the gravest errors on account of his confusing fixed and circulating with constant and variable capital. Indeed, he starts his analysis on an entirely wrong basis. In the first place, in so far as the part of the capital-value laid out in labour-power has to be classified under the head of circulating capital, the definitions of circulating capital itself are wrongly developed, particularly the circumstances which place the part of capital laid out in labour under this head. In the second place there is a confusion of the definition according to which the part of capital invested in labour is variable capital with the definition according to which it is circulating capital, as opposed to fixed capital. It is evident at the outset that the definition of capital invested in labour-power as circulating or fluent capital is a secondary one, obliterating its differentia specifica in the process of production. For in this definition, on the one hand, the capitals invested in labour are of the same importance as those invested in raw material, etc. A classification which identifies a part of the constant capital with the variable capital does not deal with the differentia specifica of variable capital in opposition to constant capital. On the other hand the parts of capital laid out in labour are indeed opposed to those invested in instruments of labour, but not in the least with reference to the fact that these parts enter into the production of value in quite different ways, but with reference to the fact that both transfer their value to the product, but in different periods of time. In all of these cases the point at issue is how a given value, laid out in the process of production of commodities, whether it be wages, the price of raw materials, or that of instruments of labour, is transferred to the product, hence is circulated by the product, and returned to its starting-point by the sale of the product, or is replaced. The only difference lies here in the how, in the particular manner of the transfer, and therefore also of the circulation of this value. Whether the price of labour-power previously stipulated by contract in each individual case is paid in money or means of subsistence does not alter in any way its character of being a fixed price. However it is evident in the case of wages paid in money that the money itself does not pass into the process of production in the way that the value as well as the material of the means of production do. But if on the other hand the means of subsistence which the labourer buys with his wages are directly classed in the same category, alongside raw materials, etc., as the material form of circulating capital and are opposed to the instruments of labour, then the matter assumes a different aspect. If the value of these things, of the means of production, is transferred to the product in the labour-process, the value of those other things, the means of subsistence, reappears in the labour-power that consumes them and is likewise transferred to the product by the functioning of this power. In both these cases it is equally a question of the mere reappearance, in the product, of the values advanced during production. (The physiocrats took this seriously and therefore denied that industrial labour created surplus-value.) Thus the previously quoted [Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I, p. 207, Note 3. Ed.] passage from Wayland. Furthermore this brings to completion the fetishism peculiar to bourgeois Political Economy, the fetishism which metamorphoses the social, economic character impressed on things in the process of social production into a natural character stemming from the material nature of those things. For instance, instruments of labour are fixed capital, is a scholastic definition, which leads to contradictions and confusion. Just as was demonstrated in the case of the labour-process (Buch I, Kap. V), [English edition: Ch. VII. Ed.] that it depends wholly on the role which the material components play in a particular labour-process, on their function whether they function as instruments of labour, material of labour, or products so instruments of labour are fixed capital only if the process of production is really a capitalist process of production and the means of production are therefore really capital and possess economic definiteness, the social character of capital. And in the second place, they are fixed capital only if they transfer their value to the product in a particular way. If not, they remain instruments of labour without being fixed capital. In the same way if auxiliary materials like manure give up value in the same peculiar manner as the greater part of the instruments of labour, they become fixed capital although they are not instruments of labour. It is not a question here of definitions, which things must be made to fit. We are dealing here with definite functions which must be expressed in definite categories. If to be capital laid out in wages is considered one of the qualities of means of subsistence as such under all circumstances, then it will also be a quality of this circulating capital to support labour. (Ricardo, p. 25.) If the means of subsistence were not capital they would not support labour-power; whereas it is precisely their quality of capital that endows them with the faculty of supporting capital by foreign labour. If means of subsistence as such are circulating capital after the latter had been converted into wages it follows further that the magnitude of wages depends on the ratio of the number of labourers to the given amount of circulating capital a favourite economic proposition while as a matter of fact the quantity of means of subsistence withdrawn from the market by the labourer, and the quantity of means of subsistence available for the consumption of the capitalist, depend on the ratio of the surplus-value to the price of labour. Ricardo, like Barton, [29a] everywhere confounds the relation of variable to constant capital with that of circulating to fixed capital. We shall see later to what extent this vitiates his investigation of the rate of profit. [Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. III, Ch. I-III. Ed.] Ricardo furthermore identifies the differences which arise in the turnover from other causes than the distinction between fixed and circulating capital with this distinction: The confusion created by Adam Smith has brought about the following results:

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These differences in the duration of the productive act can be observed not alone between different spheres of production, but also within one and the same sphere of production, depending on the amount of product to be turned out. An ordinary dwelling house is built in less time than a large factory and therefore requires fewer continuous labour-processes. While the building of a locomotive takes three months, that of an armoured man-of-war requires one year or more. It takes nearly a year to produce grain and several years to raise big cattle, while timber-growing needs from twelve to one hundred years. A few months will suffice for a country road, while a railway is a job of years. An ordinary carpet is made in about a week, but a Gobelin takes years, etc. Hence the time consumed in the performance of the productive act varies infinitely. The difference in the duration of the productive act must evidently give rise to a difference in the velocity of the turnover, if invested capitals are equal, in other words, must make a difference in the time for which a certain capital is advanced. Assume that a spinning-mill and a locomotive works employ the same amount of capital, that the ratio of their constant to their variable capital is the same, likewise the proportion between the fixed and circulating parts of the capitals, and that lastly their working-day is of equal length and its division into necessary and surplus-labour the same. In order to eliminate, furthermore, all the circumstances arising out of the process of circulation and having no bearing on the present case, let us suppose that both the yarn and the locomotive are made to order and will be paid on delivery of the finished product. At the end of the week, on delivery of the finished yarn, the spinning-mill owner recovers his outlay for circulating capital (leaving the surplus-value out of consideration), likewise the fixed capital s wear and tear incorporated in the value of the yarn. He can therefore repeat the same circuit anew with the same capital. It has completed its turnover. The locomotive manufacturer on the other hand must lay out ever new capital for wages and raw material every week for three months in succession, and it is only after three months, after the delivery of the locomotive, that the circulating capital, meanwhile gradually laid out in one and the same productive act for the manufacture of one and the same commodity, once more exists in a form in which it can renew its circuit. The wear and tear of his machinery during these three months is likewise replaced only now. The expenditure of the one is made for one week, that of the other is the weekly expenditure multiplied by twelve. All other circumstances being assumed as equal, the one must have twelve times as much circulating capital at his disposal as the other. It is however immaterial here that the capitals advanced weekly are equal. Whatever the amount of the advanced capital, it is advanced for only one week in the one case and for twelve weeks in the other, and the above periods must respectively elapse before it can be used for a new operation, before the same operation can be repeated with it, or a different one inaugurated. The difference in the velocity of the turnover, or in the length of time for which the individual capital must be advanced before the same capital-value can be employed in a new labour- or self-expansion process, arises here from the following circumstances: Granted the manufacture of a locomotive or of any other machine requires 100 working-days. So far as the labourers employed in the manufacture of yarn or the building of locomotives are concerned, 100 working-days constitute in either case a discontinuous (discrete) magnitude, consisting, according to our assumption, of 100 consecutive separate ten-hour labour-processes. But so far as the product the machine is concerned, these 100 working-days form a continuous magnitude, a working-day of 1,000 working-hours, one single connected act of production. I call such a working-day which is composed of a more or less numerous succession of connected working days a working period. When we speak of a working-day we mean the length of working time during which the labourer must daily spend his labour-power, must work day by day. But when we speak of a working period we mean the number of connected working-days required in a certain branch of industry for the manufacture of a finished product. In this case the product of every working-day is but a partial one, which is further worked upon from day to day and only at the end of the longer or shorter working period receives its finished form, is a finished use-value. Interruptions, disturbances of the process of social production, in consequence for instance of crises, have therefore very different effects on labour-products of a discrete nature and on those that require for their production a prolonged connected period. In the one case all that happens is that today s production of a certain quantity of yarn, coal, etc., is not followed by tomorrow s new production of yarn, coal, etc. Not so in the case of ships, buildings, railways, etc. Here it is not only the day s work but an entire connected act of production that is interrupted. If the job is not continued, the means of production and labour already consumed in its production are wasted. Even if it is resumed, a deterioration has inevitably set in in the meantime. For the entire length of the working period, the part of the value daily transferred to the product by the fixed capital accumulates in layers, as it were, until the product is finished. And here the difference between fixed and circulating capital is revealed at the same time in its practical significance. Fixed capital is advanced in the process of production for a comparatively long period; it need not be renewed until after the expiration of perhaps a period of several years. Whether a steam-engine transfers its value daily piecemeal to some yarn, the product of a discrete labour-process, or for three months to a locomotive, the product of a continuous act of production, is immaterial as far as laying out the capital required for the purchase of the steam-engine is concerned. In the one case its value flows back in small doses, for instance weekly, in the other case in larger quantities, for instance quarterly. But in either case the renewal of the steam-engine may take place only after twenty years. So long as every individual period within which the value of the steam-engine is returned piecemeal by the sale of the product is shorter than the lifetime of the engine itself, the latter continues to function in the process of production for several working periods. It is different with the circulating components of the advanced capital. The labour-power bought for a definite week is expended in the course of the same week and is materialised in the product. It must be paid for at the end of the week. And this investment of capital in labour-power is repeated every week during the three months; yet the expenditure of this part of the capital during the week does not enable the capitalist to settle for the purchase of the labour the following week. Every week additional capital must be expended to pay for labour-power, and, leaving aside the question of credit, the capitalist must be able to lay out wages for three months, even if he pays them only in weekly doses. It is the same with the other portion of circulating capital, the raw and auxiliary materials. One layer of labour after another is piled up on the product. It is not alone the value of the expended labour-power that is continually being transferred to the product during the labour-process, but also surplus-value. This product, however, is unfinished, it has not yet the form of a finished commodity, hence it cannot yet circulate. This applies likewise to the capital-value transferred in layers from the raw and auxiliary materials to the product. Depending on the length of the working period exacted by the specific nature of the product or by the useful effect to be achieved in its manufacture, a continuous additional investment of circulating capital (wages and raw and auxiliary materials) is required, no part of which is in a form capable of circulation and hence of promoting a renewal of the same operation. Every part is on the contrary held fast successively in the sphere of production as a component of the nascent product, tied up in the form of productive capital. Now, the time of turnover is equal to the sum of the time of production and the time of circulation of the capital. Hence a prolongation of the time of production reduces the velocity of the turnover quite as much as a prolongation of the time of circulation. In the present case however the following two points must be noted: Firstly: The prolonged stay in the sphere of production. The capital advanced for instance for labour, raw material, etc., during the first week, as well as the portions of value transferred to the product by the fixed capital, are held fast in the sphere of production for the entire term of three months, and, being incorporated in an only nascent, still unfinished product, cannot pass into circulation as commodities. Secondly: Since the working period required for the performance of the productive act lasts three months, and forms in fact only one connected labour-process, a new dose of circulating capital must be continually added week after week to the preceding amount. The total of the successively advanced additional capital grows therefore with the length of the working period. We have assumed that capitals of equal size are invested in spinning and machine-building, that these capitals contain equal proportions of constant and variable, fixed and circulating capital, that the working-days are of equal length, in brief, that all conditions are equal except the duration of the working period. In the first week, the outlay for both is the same, but the product of the spinner can be sold and the proceeds of the sale used to buy new labour-power, new raw materials, etc.; in short, production can be resumed on the same scale. The machine-manufacturer on the other hand cannot reconvert the circulating capital expended in the first week into money and resume operations with it until three months later, when his product is finished. There is therefore first a difference in the return of the identical quantities of capital invested. But in the second place identical amounts of productive capital are employed during the three months in both spinning and machine-building. However the magnitude of the outlay of capital in the case of the yarn manufacturer is quite different from that of the machine-builder; for in the one case the same capital is rapidly renewed and the same operation can therefore be repeated, while in the other case the renewal of the capital is relatively slow, so that ever new quantities of capital must be added to the old up to the time of its renewal. Consequently there is a difference not only in the length of time of renewal of definite portions of capital, or in the length of time for which the capital is advanced, but also in the quantity of the capital to be advanced according to the duration of the labour-process (although the capitals employed daily or weekly are equal). This circumstance is worthy of note for the reason that the term of the advance may be prolonged, as we shall see in the cases treated in the next chapter, without thereby necessitating a corresponding increase in the amount of the capital to be advanced. The capital must be advanced for a longer time, and a larger amount of capital is tied up in the form of productive capital. At the less developed stages of capitalist production, undertakings requiring a long working period, and hence a large investment of capital for a long time, such as the building of roads, canals, etc., especially when they can be carried out only on a large scale, are either not carried out on a capitalist basis at all, but rather at communal or state expense (in earlier times generally by forced labour, so far as the labour-power was concerned). Or objects whose production requires a lengthy working period are fabricated only for the smallest part by recourse to the private means of the capitalist himself. For instance, in the building of a house, the private person for whom it is built makes a number of partial advance payments to the building contractor. He therefore actually pays for the house piecemeal, in proportion as the productive process progresses. But in the advanced capitalist era, when on the one hand huge capitals are concentrated in the hands of single individuals, while on the other the associated capitalist (joint-stock companies) appears side by side with the individual capitalist and a credit system has simultaneously been developed, a capitalist building contractor builds only in exceptional cases on the order of private individuals. His business nowadays is to build whole rows of houses and entire sections of cities for the market, just as it is the business of individual capitalists to build railways as contractors. To what extent capitalist production has revolutionised the building of houses in London is shown by the testimony of a builder before the banking committee of 1857. When he was young, he said, houses were generally built to order and the payments made in instalments to the contractor as certain stages of the building were being completed. Very little was built on speculation. Contractors used to assent to such operations mainly to keep their men in constant employment and thus hold them together. In the last forty years all that has changed. Very little is now built to order. Anyone wanting a new house picks one from among those built on speculation or still in process of construction. The builder no longer works for his customers but for the market. Like every other industrial capitalist he is compelled to have finished articles in the market. While formerly a builder had perhaps three or four houses building at a time for speculation, he must now buy a large plot of ground (which in continental language means rent it for ninety-nine years, as a rule), build from 100 to 200 houses on it, and thus embark on an enterprise which exceeds his resources twenty to fifty times. The funds are procured through mortgaging and the money is placed at the disposal of the contractor as the buildings proceed. Then, if a crisis comes along and interrupts the payment of the advance instalments, the entire enterprise generally collapses. At best, the houses remain unfinished until better times arrive; at the worst they are sold at auction for half their cost. Without speculative building, and on a large scale at that, no contractor can get along today. The profit from just building is extremely small. His main profit comes from raising the ground-rent, from careful selection and skilled utilisation of the building terrain. It is by this method of speculation anticipating the demand for houses that almost the whole Belgravia and Tyburnia, and the countless thousands of villas round London have been built. (Abbreviated from the Report of the Select Committee on Bank Acts, Part I, 1857, Evidence, Questions 5413-18; 5435-36.) The execution of enterprises requiring working periods of considerable length and operations on a large scale does not fall fully within the province of capitalist production until the concentration of capital becomes very pronounced, and the development of the credit system offers to the capitalist, on the other hand, the convenient expedient of advancing and thus risking other people s capital instead of his own. It goes without saying that whether the capital advanced in production belongs to him who uses it or does not has no effect on the velocity or time of turnover. Conditions such as cooperation, division of labour, application of machinery, which augment the product of the individual working-day, shorten at the same time the working period of connected acts of production. Thus machinery shortens the building time of houses, bridges, etc.; mowers and threshers reduce the working period required to transform ripe grain into the finished product. Greater speed due to improved shipbuilding cuts the turnover time of capital invested in shipping. But improvements that shorten the working period and thereby the time during which circulating capital must be advanced generally go hand in hand with an increased outlay of fixed capital. On the other hand the working period in certain branches of production may be diminished by the mere extension of cooperation. The completion of a railway is expedited by setting afoot huge armies of labourer and thus tackling the job in many spots at once. The time of turnover is lessened in that case by an increase of the advanced capital. More means of production and more labour-power must be united under the command of the capitalist. Whereas the shortening of the working period is thus mostly connected with an increase of the capital advanced for this abbreviated time the shorter the term of advance the greater the capital advanced it must here be recalled that regardless of the existing amount of social capital, the essential point is the degree in which the means of production and subsistence, or the disposal of them, are scattered or concentrated in the hands of individual capitalists, in other words, the degree of concentration of capitals already attained. Inasmuch as credit promotes, accelerates and enhances the concentration of capital in one hand, it contributes to the shortening of the working period and thus of the turnover time. In branches of production in which the working period, whether continuous or discontinuous, is prescribed by definite natural conditions, no shortening by the above-mentioned means can take place. Says W. Walter Good, in his Political, Agricultural, and Commercial Fallacies (London, 1866, p. 325): The part of the value transferred in layers by the fixed capital to the product accumulates, and the return of this part is delayed, in proportion to the length of the working period and thus also of the period of time required for the completion of the commodity capable of circulation. But this delay does not cause a renewed outlay of fixed capital. The machine continues to function in the process of production, whether the replacement of its wear and tear in the form of money returns slowly or rapidly. It is different with the circulating capital. Not only must capital be tied up for a rather long time, in proportion to the length of the working period, but new capital must be continually advanced in the shape of wages, and raw and auxiliary materials. A delayed return has therefore a different effect on each. No matter whether the return is rapid or slow, the fixed capital continues to function. But the circulating capital becomes unable to perform its functions, if the return is delayed, if it is tied up in the form of unsold, or unfinished and as yet unsaleable products, and if no additional capital is at hand for its renewal in kind.

Economic Manuscripts: Capital: Volume Two

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It is here not a question of interruptions of the labour-process necessitated by natural limitations of the labour-power itself, although we have seen to what extent the mere circumstance that fixed capital factory buildings, machinery, etc. lies idle during pauses in the labour-process, [See: Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I, pp. 256-63. Ed.] became one of the motives for an unnatural prolongation of the labour-process and for day-and-night work. We are dealing here rather with interruptions independent of the length of the labour-process, brought about by the very nature of the product and its fabrication, during which the subject of labour is for a longer or shorter time subjected to natural processes, must undergo physical, chemical and physiological changes, during which the labour-process is entirely or partially suspended. For instance grape after being pressed must ferment awhile and then rest for some time in order to reach a certain degree of perfection. In many branches of industry the product must pass through a drying process, for instance in pottery, or be exposed to certain conditions in order to change its chemical properties, as for instance in bleaching. Winter grain needs about nine months to mature. Between the time of sowing and harvesting the labour-process is almost entirely suspended. In timber-raising, after the sowing and the incidental preliminary work are completed, the seed requires about 100 years to be transformed into a finished product and during all that time it stands in comparatively very little need of the action of labour. In all these cases additional labour is drawn on only occasionally during a large portion of the time of production. The condition described in the previous chapter, where additional capital and labour must be supplied to the capital already tied up in the process of production, obtains here only with longer or shorter intervals. In all these cases therefore the production time of the advanced capital consists of two periods: one period during which the capital is engaged in the labour-process and a second period during which its form of existence that of an unfinished product is abandoned to the sway of natural processes, without being at that time in the labour-process. Nor does it matter in the least here and there. The working period and the production period do not coincide in these cases. The production period is longer than the working period. But the product is not finished, not ready, hence not fit to be converted from the form of productive into that of commodity-capital until the production period is completed. Consequently the length of the turnover period increases in proportion to the length of the production time that does not consist of working time. In so far as the production time in excess of the working time is not fixed by natural laws given once and for all, such as govern the maturing of grain, the growth of an oak, etc., the period of turnover can often be more or less shortened by an artificial reduction of the production time. Such instances are the introduction of chemical bleaching instead of bleaching on the green and more efficient drying apparatus. Or, in tanning, where the penetration of the tannic acid into the skins, by the old method, took from six to eighteen months, while the new method, by means of an air-pump, does it in only one and a half to two months. (J. G. Courcelle-Seneuil, Trait th orique et pratique des entreprises industrielles, etc., Paris, 1857, 2-me d.) The most magnificent illustration of an artificial abbreviation of the time of production taken up exclusively with natural processes is furnished by the history of iron manufacture, more especially the conversion of pig iron into steel during the last 100 years, from the puddling process discovered about 1780 to the modern Bessemer process and the latest methods introduced since. The time of production has been brought down tremendously, but the investment of fixed capital has increased in proportion. A peculiar illustration of the divergence of the production time from the working time is furnished by the American manufacture of shoe-lasts. In this case a considerable portion of the unproductive costs arises from having to hold the timber at least eighteen months before it is dry enough to work, so as to prevent subsequent warping. During this time the wood does not pass through any other labour-process. The period of turnover of the invested capital is therefore not determined solely by the time required for the manufacture of the lasts but also by the time during which it lies unproductive in the shape of drying wood. It stays 18 months in the process of production before it can enter into the labour-process proper. This example shows at the same time that the times of turnover of different parts of the aggregate circulating capital may differ in consequence of conditions which do not arise within the sphere of circulation but owe their origin to the production process. The difference between production time and working time becomes especially apparent in agriculture. In our moderate climates the land bears grain once a year. Shortening or lengthening the period of production (for winter grain it averages nine months) itself depends on the alternation of good and bad seasons, and for this reason cannot be accurately determined and controlled beforehand as in industry proper. Only such by-products as milk, cheese, etc., can steadily be produced and sold in comparatively short periods. On the other hand, working time data are as follows: In most branches of industry proper, of mining, transportation, etc., operations proceed evenly, the working time being the same year in year out and the outlay of capital passing daily into the circulation process being uniformly distributed, apart from such abnormal interruptions as fluctuations of prices, business dislocations, etc. Likewise the return of the circulating capital or its renewal is evenly distributed throughout the year, market conditions otherwise remaining the same. Yet there is in the course of the various periods of the year the greatest inequality in the outlay of circulating capital in such capital investments in which the working time constitutes only a part of the production time, while the return takes place only in bulk at a time fixed by natural conditions. If the scale of business is the same, i.e., if the amount of advanced circulating capital is the same, it must be advanced in larger quantities at a time and for longer periods than in enterprises with continuous working periods. There is also a considerably greater difference here between the life of the fixed capital and the time in which it really functions productively. Due to the difference between working time and production time, the time of employment of the applied fixed capital is of course likewise continually interrupted for a longer or shorter time, for instance in agriculture in the case of working cattle, implements and machines. In so far as this fixed capital consists of draught animals, it requires continually the same, or nearly the same, expenditure for feed, etc., as it does during the time they work. In the case of dead stock non-use also brings on a certain amount of depreciation. Hence the product is in general increasing in price, since the transfer of value to it is not calculated according to the time during which the fixed capital functions but according to the time during which it depreciates in value. In branches of production such as these, the idling of the fixed capital, whether combined with current expenses or not, forms as much a condition of its normal employment as for instance the loss of a certain quantity of cotton in spinning; and in the same way the labour-power expended unproductively but unavoidably in any labour-process under normal technical conditions counts just as well as that expended productively. Every improvement which reduces the unproductive expenditure of instruments of labour, raw material, and labour-power also reduces the value of the product. In agriculture we have a combination of both the longer working period and the great difference between working time and production time. Hodgskin rightly remarks: The following passage in the above quotation from Kirchhof in particularly worthy of note: The same applies to stock raising. A part of the herd (supply of cattle) remains in the process of production, while another part is sold annually as a product. In this case only a part of the capital is turned over every year, just as in the case of fixed capital: machinery, working cattle, etc. although this capital is a capital fixed in the process of production for a long time, and thus prolongs the turnover of the total capital, it is not a fixed capital in the strict definition of the term. What is here called a supply a certain amount of standing timber or livestock exists relatively in the process of production (simultaneously as instruments of labour and material of labour); in accordance with the natural conditions of its reproduction under proper management, a considerable part of this supply must always be available in this form. A similar influence on the turnover is exerted by another kind of supply, which is productive capital only potentially, but which owing to the nature of this economy, must be accumulated in more or less considerable quantities and hence advanced for purposes of production for a long term, although it enters into the actual process of production only gradually. In this class belongs for instance manure before it is hauled to the field, furthermore grain, hay, etc., and such supplies of means of subsistence as are employed in the production of cattle. We shall see later (Volume III), what senseless theories MacCulloch, James Mill, etc., arrived at as a result of the attempt to identify the production time diverging from working time with the latter, an attempt which in turn is due to a misapplication of the theory of value. The turnover cycle which we considered above is determined by the durability of the fixed capital advanced for the process of production. Since this cycle extends over a number of years it comprises a series of either annual turnovers of fixed capital or of turnovers repeated during the year. In agriculture such a cycle of turnovers arises out of the system of crop rotation.

Economic Manuscripts: Capital: Volume Two

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One of the sections of the time of circulation relatively the most decisive consists of the time of selling, the period during which capital exists in the state of commodity-capital. The time of circulation, and hence the period of turnover in general, are long or short depending on the relative length of this selling time. An additional outlay of capital may become necessary as a result of expenses of storage, etc. It is clear at the very start that the time required for the sale of finished goods may differ considerably for the individual capitalists in one and the same branch of industry. Hence it may differ not only for the aggregate capitals invested in the various branches of industry, but also for the various independent capitals, which are in fact merely parts of the aggregate capital invested in the same sphere of production but which have made themselves independent. Other circumstances remaining equal, the period of selling will vary for the same individual capital with the general fluctuations of the market or with its fluctuations in that particular line of business. We shall not dwell on this point any longer. We merely state this simple fact: All circumstances which in general give rise to differences in the periods of turnover of the capitals invested in different branches of industry bring in their train differences also in the turnover of the various individual capitals operating in the same business, provided these circumstances operate individually (for instance, if one capitalist has an opportunity to sell more rapidly than his competitor, if one employs more methods shortening the working periods than the other, etc.) One cause which acts permanently in differentiating the times of selling, and thus the periods of turnover in general, is the distance of the market in which a commodity is sold from its place of production. During the entire trip to the market, capital finds itself fettered in the state of commodity-capital. If goods are made to order, up to the time of delivery; if they are not made to order, there must be added to the time of the trip to the market the time during which the goods are in the market waiting to be sold. The improvement of the means of communication and transportation cuts down absolutely the wandering period of the commodities but does not eliminate the relative difference in the time of circulation of different commodity-capitals arising from their peregrinations, nor that of different portions of the same commodity-capital which migrate to different markets. For instance the improved sailing vessels and steamships, which shorten travelling, do so equally for near and distant ports. The relative difference remains, although often diminished. But the relative difference may be shifted about by the development of the means of transportation and communication in a way that does not correspond to the geographical distances. For instance a railway which leads from a place of production to an inland centre of population may relatively or absolutely lengthen the distance to a nearer inland point not connected by rail, as compared to the one which geographically is more remote. In the same way the same circumstances may alter the relative distance of places of production from the larger markets, which explains the deterioration of old and the rise of new centres of production because of changes in communication and transportation facilities. (To this must be added the circumstances that long hauls are relatively cheaper than short ones.) Moreover with the development of transport facilities not only is the velocity of movement in space accelerated and thereby the geographic distance shortened in terms of time. Not only is there a development of the mass of communication facilities so that for instance many vessels sail simultaneously for the same port, or several trains travel simultaneously on different railways between the same two points, but freight vessels may clear on consecutive days of the same week from Liverpool for New York, or goods trains may start at different hours of the same day from Manchester to London. True, the absolute velocity hence this part of the time of circulation is not altered by this latter circumstance, a certain definite capacity of the means of transportation being given. But successive shipments of commodities can start their passage at shorter intervals of time and thus reach the market one after another without accumulating in large quantities as potential commodity-capital before actual shipment. Hence the return of capital likewise is distributed over shorter successive periods of time, so that a part is continually transformed into money-capital, while the other circulates as commodity-capital. By spreading the return over several successive periods the total time of circulation and hence also the turnover are abridged. The first to increase is the frequency with which the means of transportation function, for instance the number of railway trains, as existing places of production produce more, become greater centres of production. The development tends in the direction of the already existing market, that is to say, towards the great centres of production and population, towards ports of exports, etc. On the other hand these particularly great traffic facilities and the resultant acceleration of the capital turnover (since it is conditional on the time of circulation) give rise to quicker concentration of both the centres of production and the markets. Along with this concentration of masses of men and capital thus accelerated at certain points, there is the concentration of these masses of capital in the hands of a few. Simultaneously one may note again a shifting and relocation of places of production and of markets as a result of the changes in their relative positions caused by the transformations in transport facilities. A place of production which once had a special advantage by being located on some highway or canal may now find itself relegated to a single side-track, which runs trains only at a relatively long intervals, while another place, which formerly was remote from the main arteries of traffic, may now be situated at the junction of several railways. This second locality is on the upgrade, the former on the downgrade. Changes in the means of transportation thus engender local differences in the time of circulation of commodities, in the opportunity to buy, sell, etc., or an already existing local differentiation is distributed differently. The importance of this circumstance for the turnover of capital is evidenced by the wrangling of the commercial and industrial representatives of the various localities with the railway managements. (See for instance the above-quoted Bluebook of the Railway Committee. [See p. 154 of this book. Ed.] ) All branches of production which by the nature of their product are dependent mainly on local consumption, such as breweries, are therefore developed to the greatest extent in the principal centres of population. The more rapid turnover of capital compensates here in part for the circumstance that a number of conditions of production, building lots, etc., are more expensive. Whereas on the one hand the improvement of the means of transportation and communication brought about by the progress of capitalist production reduces the time of circulation of particular quantities of commodities, the same progress and the opportunities created by the development of transport and communication facilities make it imperative, conversely, to work for ever more remote markets, in a word for the world-market. The mass of commodities in transit for distant places grows enormously, and with it therefore grows, both absolutely and relatively, that part of social capital which remains continually for long periods in the stage of commodity-capital, within the time of circulation. There is a simultaneous growth of that portion of social wealth which, instead of serving as direct means of production, is invested in means of transportation and communication and in the fixed and circulating capital required for their operation. The mere relative length of the transit of the commodities from their place of production to their market produces a difference not only in the first part of the circulation time, the selling time, but also in its second part, the reconversion of the money into the elements of the productive capital, the buying time. Suppose a commodity is shipped to India. This requires, say, four months. Let us assume that the selling time is equal to zero, i.e., the commodities are made to order and are paid for on delivery to the agent of the producer. The return of the money (no matter in what form) requires another four months. Thus it takes altogether eight months before a capital can again function as productive capital, renew the same operation. The differences in the turnover thus occasioned form one of the material bases of the various terms of credit, just as overseas commerce in general, for instance in Venice and Genoa, is one of the sources of the credit system, properly speaking. It is a matter of course that with the longer time of commodity circulation the risk of a change of prices in the market increases, since the period in which price changes can take place is lengthened. Differences in the time of circulation, partly individual between the various separate capitals of the same branch of business, partly between different branches of business according to the different usances, when payment is not made in spot cash, arise from the different terms of payment in buying and selling. We shall not dwell any longer here on this point which is of importance to the credit system. Differences in the turnover time arise also from the size of contracts for the delivery of goods, and their size grows with the extent and scale of capitalist production. A contract of delivery, being a transaction between buyer and seller, is an operation pertaining to the market, the sphere of circulation. The differences in the time of turnover arising here stem therefore from the sphere of circulation, but react immediately on the sphere of production, and do so apart from all terms of payment and conditions of credit, hence also in the case of cash payment. For instance coal, cotton, yarn, etc., are discrete products. Every day supplies its quantum of finished product. But if the master-spinner or the mine-owner accepts contracts for the delivery of such large quantities of products as require, say, a period of four or six weeks of consecutive working-days, then this is quite the same, so far as the time of advancement of capital is concerned, as if a continuous working period of four or six weeks had been introduced in this labour-process. It is of course assumed here that the entire quantity ordered is to be delivered in one bulk, or at least is paid for only after total delivery. Individually considered, every day has thus furnished its definite quantum of finished product. But this finished quantum is only a part of the quantity contracted for. While in this case the portion finished so far is no longer in the process of production, still it lies in the warehouse as potential capital only. Now let us take up the second stage of the time of circulation, the buying time, or that period in which capital is reconverted from the money-form into the elements of productive capital. During this period it must persist for a shorter or longer time in its condition of money-capital, hence a certain portion of the total capital advanced must all the time be in the condition of money-capital, although this portion consists of constantly changing elements. For instance, of the total capital advanced in a certain business, n times 100 must be available in the form of money-capital, so that, while all the constituent parts of these n times 100 are continually converted into productive capital, this sum is nevertheless just as continually replenished by the influx from the circulation, from the realised commodity-capital. A definite part of the advanced capital-value is therefore continually in the condition of money-capital, i.e., a form not pertaining to its sphere of production but its sphere of circulation. We have already seen that the prolongation of the time for which capital is fettered in the form of commodity-capital on account of the distance of the market results in direct delay of the return of the money and consequently also the transformation of the capital from money-capital into productive capital. We have furthermore seen (Chapter VI) with reference to the purchase of commodities, that the time of buying, the greater or smaller distance from the main sources of the raw material, makes it necessary to purchase raw material for a longer period and have it available in the form of a productive supply, of latent or potential productive capital; that in consequence it increases the amount of capital to be advanced at one time, and the time for which it must be advanced, if the scale of production remains otherwise the same. A similar effect is produced in various branches of business by the more or less prolonged periods in which rather large quantities of raw material are thrown on the market. In London for example great auction sales of wool take place every three months, and the wool market is controlled by them. The cotton market on the other hand is on the whole restocked continuously, if not uniformly, from harvest to harvest. Such periods determine the principal dates when these raw materials are bought. Their effect is particularly great on speculative purchases necessitating advances for longer or shorter periods for these elements of production, just as the nature of the produced commodities acts on the speculative, intentional withholding of a product for a longer or shorter term in the form of potential commodity-capital. Apart from all speculation, the volume of the purchases of those commodities which must always be available as a productive supply depends on the times of the renewal of this supply, hence on circumstances which in their turn are dependent on market conditions and which therefore are different for different raw materials. In these cases money must be advanced from time to time in rather large quantities and in lump sums. It returns more or less rapidly, but always in instalments, according to the turnover of capital. One portion of it, namely the part reconverted into wages, is just as continually expended again at short intervals. But another portion, namely that which is to be reconverted into raw material, etc., must be accumulated for rather long periods, as a reserve fund for either buying or paying. Therefore it exists in the form of money-capital, although the volume in which it exists as such, changes. We shall see in the next chapter that other circumstances arising either from the process of production or that of circulation make it necessary for a certain portion of the advanced capital to be available in the form of money. In general it must be noted that the economists are very prone to forget not only that a part of the capital required in a business passes successively through the three stages of money-capital, productive capital, and commodity-capital, but also that different portions of it continuously and simultaneously possess these forms, although the relative magnitudes of these portions vary all the time. It is especially the part always available as money-capital that is forgotten by the economists, although precisely this circumstance is highly essential for an understanding of bourgeois economy and consequently makes its importance felt as such also in practice.

Economic Manuscripts: Capital: Volume Two

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1885-c2/ch14.htm

Take the commodity-capital which is the product of a working period of, say, nine weeks. Let us, for the time being, leave aside that portion of the value of the product which is added to it by the average wear and tear of the fixed capital, and also the surplus-value added to the product during the process of production. The value of this product is then equal to that of the circulating capital, advanced for its production, i.e., of the wages and the raw and auxiliary materials consumed in its production. Let this value be 900, so that the weekly outlay is 100. The period of production, which here coincides with the working period, is therefore nine weeks. It is immaterial whether it is assumed that this is the working period of a continuous product, or whether it is a continuous working period for a discrete product, so long as the quantity of discrete product brought to market at one time costs nine weeks labour. Let the time of circulation be three weeks. Then the entire period of turnover is twelve weeks. At the end of nine weeks the advanced productive capital is converted into commodity-capital, but now it stays for three weeks in the period of circulation. The new period of production therefore cannot start before the beginning of the thirteenth week, and production would be at a standstill for three weeks, or for a quarter of the entire period of turnover. It again does not make any difference whether it is assumed that it takes so long on an average to sell the product, or that this length of time is bound up with the remoteness of the market or the terms of payment for the goods sold. Production would be standing still for three weeks every three months, making it four times three, or twelve weeks in a year, which means three months, or one-quarter, of the annual period of turnover. Hence, if production is to be continuous and carried along the same scale week after week, there is only this alternative: Either the scale of production must be reduced, so that the 900 suffice to keep the work going both during the working period and the time of circulation of the first turnover, is then commenced with the tenth week, before the first period of turnover is completed, for the period of turnover is twelve weeks, and the working period nine weeks. A sum of 900 distributed over twelve weeks makes 75 per week. It is evident in the first place that such a reduced scale of business presupposes changed dimensions of the fixed capital and therefore, on the whole, a curtailment of the business. In the second place, it is questionable whether such a reduction can take place at all, for in each business there exists, commensurate with the development of its production, a normal minimum of invested capital essential to maintain its capacity to complete. This normal minimum grows steadily with the advance of capitalist production, and hence it is not fixed. There are numerous intermediate grades between the normal minimum existing at any particular time and the ever increasing normal maximum, a medium which permits of many different scales of capital investment. Within the limits of this medium reductions may take place, their lowest limit being the prevailing normal minimum. When there is a hitch in production, when the markets are overstocked, and when raw materials rise in price, etc., the normal outlay of circulating capital is restricted once the pattern of the fixed capital has been set by cutting down working time to, say, one half. On the other hand, in times of prosperity, the pattern of the fixed capital given, there is an abnormal expansion of the circulating capital, partly through the extension of working time and partly through its intensification. In businesses which have, from the outset, to reckon with such fluctuations, the situation is relieved partly by recourse to the above measures and partly by employing simultaneously a greater number of labourers, in combination with the application of reserve fixed capital, such as reserve locomotives on railways, etc. However, such abnormal fluctuations are not considered here, where we assume normal conditions. In order to make production continuous, therefore, the expenditure of the same circulating capital is here distributed over a longer period, over twelve weeks instead of nine. In every section of time there consequently functions a reduced productive capital. The circulating portion of the productive capital is reduced from 100 to 75, or one-quarter. The total amount by which the productive capital functioning for a working period of nine weeks is reduced equals 9 times 25, or 225, or one-quarter of 900. But the ratio of the time of circulation to that of turnover is likewise three-twelfths, or one-quarter. It follows therefore: circulation of the productive capital transformed into commodity-capital, if it is rather to be carried on simultaneously and continuously week after week, and if no special circulating capital is available for this purpose, it can be done only by curtailing productive operations, by reducing the circulating component of the functioning productive capital. The portion of circulating capital thus set free for production during the time of circulation is to the total advanced circulating capital as the time of circulation is to the period of turnover. This applies, as has already been stated, only to branches of production in which the labour-process is carried on in the same scale week after week, where therefore no varying amounts of capital are to be invested in different working periods, as for instance in agriculture. If on the other hand we assume that the nature of the business excludes a reduction of the scale of production, and thus of the circulating capital to be advanced each week, then continuity of production can be secured only by additional circulating capital, in the above-named case of 300. During the twelve-week turnover period, 1,200 are successively invested, and 300 is one-quarter of this sum as three weeks is of twelve. At the end of the working time of nine weeks the capital-value of 900 has been converted from the form of productive into that of commodity-capital. Its working period is concluded, but it cannot be re-opened with the same capital. During the three weeks in which it stays in the sphere of circulation, functioning as commodity-capital, it is in the same state, so far as the process of production is concerned, as if it did not exist at all. We rule out in the present case all credit relations and take for granted that the capitalist operates only with his own money. But during the time the capital advanced for the first working period, having completed its process of production, stays three weeks in the process of circulation, there functions an additional capital investment of 300, so that the continuity of production is not broken. Now, the following must be noted in this connection: Firstly: The working period of the capital of 900 first advanced is completed at the close of nine weeks and it does not return until after three weeks are up, that is to say, at the beginning of the thirteenth week. But a new working period is immediately begun with the additional capital of 300. By this means continuity of production is maintained. Secondly: The functions of the original capital of 900 and of the capital of 300 newly added at the close of the first nine-week working period, inaugurating the second working period after the conclusion of the first without any interruption, are, or at least could be, clearly distinguished in the first period of turnover, while they cross each other each other in the course of the second period of turnover. Let us make this matter plainer. First period of turnover of 12 weeks. First working period of 9 weeks; the turnover of the capital advanced for this is completed at the beginning of the 13th week. During the last 3 weeks the additional capital of 300 functions, opening the second working period of 9 weeks. Second period of turnover. At the beginning of the 13th week, 900 have returned and are able to begin a new turnover. But the second working period has already been opened in the 10th week by the additional 300. At the start of the 13th week, thanks to this, one-third of the working period is already over and 300 has been converted from productive capital into product. Since only 6 weeks more are required for the completion of the second working period, only two-thirds of the returned capital of 900, or only 600, can enter into the productive process of the second working period. 300 of the original 900 are set free to play the same role which the additional capital of 300 played in the first working period. At the close of the 6th week of the second period of turnover the second working period is up. The capital of 900 advanced in it returns after 3 weeks, or at the end of the 9th week of the second, 12-week period of turnover. During the 3 weeks of its period of circulation, the freed capital of 300 comes into action. This begins the third working period of a capital of 900 in the 7th week of the second period of turnover, or the 19th week of the year. Third period of turnover. At the close of the 9th week of the second period of turnover there is a new reflux of 900. But the third working period has already commenced in the 7th week of the previous period of turnover and 6 weeks have already elapsed. The third working period, then, lasts only another 3 weeks. Hence only 300 of the returned 900 enter into the productive process. The fourth working period fills out the remaining 9 weeks of this period of turnover and thus the 37th week of the year begins simultaneously the fourth period of turnover and the fifth working period. In order to simplify the calculation in this case let us assume a working period of 5 weeks and a period of circulation of 5 weeks, making a turnover period of 10 weeks. Figure the year as composed of fifty weeks and the capital outlay per week as 100. A working period then requires a circulating capital of 500 and the time of circulation an additional capital of 500. The working periods and times of turnover then are as follows: Now let us take a third illustration: Working period 6 weeks time of circulation 3 weeks, weekly advance during labour-process 100. 1st working period: 1st-6th week. At the end of the 6th week a commodity-capital of 600, returned at the end of the 9th week. 2nd working period: 7th-12th week. During the 7th-9th week 300 of additional capital is advanced. At the end of the 9th week, return of 600. Of this, 300 are advanced during the 10th-12th week. At the end of the 12th week therefore 300 are free and 600 are in the form of commodity-capital, returnable at the end of the 15th week. 3rd working period: 13th-18th week. During the 13th-15th week, advance of above 300, then reflux of 600, of which 300 are advanced for the 16th-18th week. At the end of the 18th week, 300 are free in money-form, 600 on hand as commodity-capital which returns at the end of the 21st week. (See the more detailed presentation of this case under II, below.) A comparison of these three illustrations shows, first, that a successive release of capital I of 500 and of additional capital II of likewise 500 takes place only in the second illustration, so that these two portions of capital move separately and apart from each other. But this is so only because we have made the very exceptional assumption that the working period and the time of circulation form two equal halves of the turnover period. In all other cases, whatever the difference between the two constituents of the period of turnover, the movements of the two capitals cross each other, as in illustrations I and III, beginning with the second period of turnover. The additional capital II, with a portion of capital I, then forms the capital functioning in the second turnover period, while the remainder of capital I is set free to perform the original function of capital II. The capital operating during the circulation time of the commodity-capital is not identical, in this case, with the capital II originally advanced for this purpose, but it is of the same value and forms the same aliquot part of the total capital advanced. Secondly: The capital which functioned during the working period lies idle during the time of circulation. In the second illustration the capital functions during the 5 weeks of the working period and lies idle during the 5 weeks of the circulation period. Therefore the entire time during which capital I lies idle here amounts to one half of the year. It is the additional capital II that appears during this time having, in the case before us, also in its turn lain idle half a year. But the additional capital required to ensure the continuity of production during the time of circulation is not determined by the aggregated amount, or sum total, of the times of circulation during the year, but only by the ratio of the time of circulation to the period of turnover. (We assume, of course, that all the turnovers take place under the same conditions.) For this reason 500 of additional capital, and not 2,500, are required in the second illustration. This is simply due to the fact that the additional capital enters just as well into the turnover as the capital originally advanced, and that it therefore makes up its magnitude just as the other by the number of its turnovers. Thirdly: The circumstances here considered are not affected by whether the time of production is longer than the working time or not. True, the aggregate of the periods of turnover is prolonged thereby, but this extension does not necessitate any additional capital for the labour-process. The additional capital serves merely the purpose of filling the gaps in the labour-process that arise on account of the time of circulation. Hence it is there simply to protect production against interruptions, originating in the time of circulation. Interruptions arising from the specific conditions of production are to be eliminated in another way, which need not be discussed at this point. There are however establishments in which work is carried on only intermittently, to order, so that there may be intervals between the working periods. In such cases, the need for additional capital is pro tanto eliminated. On the other hand in most cases of seasonal work there is a certain limit for the time of reflux. The same work cannot be renewed next year with the same capital, if the circulation time of this capital has not, in the meantime, run out. On the other hand the time of circulation may also be shorter than the interval between two periods of production. In that event the capital lies fallow, unless it is meanwhile employed otherwise. Fourthly: The capital advanced for a certain working period for instance the 600 in the third illustration is invested partly in raw and auxiliary materials, in a productive supply for the working period, in constant circulating capital, and partly in variable circulating capital, in the payment of labour itself. The portion laid out in constant circulating capital, may not exist for the same length of time in the form of a productive supply; the raw material for instance may not be on hand for the entire working period, coal may be procured only every two weeks. However, as credit is still out of the question here, this portion of capital, in so far as it is not available in the form of a productive supply, must be kept on hand in the form of money so that it can be converted into a productive supply as and when needed. This does not alter the magnitude of the constant circulating capital-value advanced for 6 weeks. On the other hand regardless of the money-supply for unforeseen expenses, the reserve fund proper for the elimination of disturbances wages are paid in shorter intervals, mostly weekly. Therefore unless the capitalist compels the labourer to advance his labour for a longer time, the capital required for wages must be on hand in the form of money. During the reflux of the capital a portion must therefore be retained in money-form for the payment of the labour, while the remaining portion may be converted into productive supply. The additional capital is divided exactly like the original. But it is distinguished from capital I by the fact that (apart from credit relations) in order to be available for its own working period it must advanced during the entire duration of the first working period of capital I, into which it does not enter. During this time it can already be converted, at least in part, into constant circulating capital, having been advanced for the entire period of turnover. To what extent it assumes this form or persists in the form of additional money-capital until this conversion becomes necessary, will depend partly on the special conditions of production of definite lines of business, partly on local conditions, partly on the price fluctuations of raw material, etc. If social capital is viewed in its entirety, a more or less considerable part of this additional capital will always be for a rather long time in the state of money-capital. But as for that portion of capital II which is to be advanced for wages, it is always converted only gradually into labour-power, as small working periods expire and are paid for. This portion of capital II, then, is available in the form of money-capital during the entire working period, until by its conversion into labour-power it take part in the function of productive capital. Consequently, the accession of the additional capital required for the transformation of the circulation time of capital I into time of production, increases not only the magnitude of the advanced capital and the length of time for which the aggregate capital must necessarily be advanced, but also, and specifically so, that portion of the advanced capital which exists as money-supply, which hence exists in the state of money-capital and has the form of potential money-capital. The same thing also takes place as far as it concerns both the advance in the form of a productive supply and in that of a money-supply when the separation of capital into two parts made necessary by the time of circulation, namely into capital for the first working period and replacement capital for the time of circulation, is not caused by the increase of the capital laid out but by a decrease of the scale of production. The amount of capital tied up in the money-form grows here still more in relation to the scale of production. What is achieved in general by this separation of capital into an originally productive and an additional capital is a continuous succession of the working periods, the constant function of an equal portion of the advanced capital as productive capital. Let us look at the second illustration. The capital continuously employed in the process of production amounts to 500. As the working period is 5 weeks it operates ten times during 50 weeks (taken as a year). Hence its product, apart from surplus-value, is 10 times 500, or 5,000. From the standpoint of a capital working directly and uninterruptedly in the process of production a capital-value of 500 the time of circulation seems to be brought to nought. The period of turnover coincides with the working period, and the time of circulation is assumed to be equal to zero. But if the capital of 500 were regularly interrupted in its productive activity by a 5-week circulation time, so that it would again become capable of production only after the close of the entire 10-week turnover period, we should have 5 turnovers of ten weeks each in the 50 weeks of the year. These would comprise five 5-week periods of production, or a sum of 25 productive weeks with a total product worth 5 times 500 or 2,500, and five 5-week periods of circulation, or a total circulation time of likewise 25 weeks. If we say in this case that the capital of 500 has been turned over 5 times in the year, it will be clear and obvious that during half of each period of turnover this capital of 500 did not function at all as a production capital and that, all in all, it performed its functions only during one half of the year, but did not function at all during the other half. In our illustration the replacement capital of 500 appears on the scene during those five periods of circulation and the turnover is thus expanded from 2,500 to 5,000. But now the advanced capital is 1,000 instead of 500. 5,000 divided by 1,000 is 5. Hence, there are five turnovers instead of ten. And that is just the way people figure. But when it is said that the capital of 1,000 has been turned over five times during the year, the recollection of the time of circulation disappears from the hollow skulls of the capitalists and a confused idea is formed that this capital has served continuously in the production process during the five successive turnovers. But if we say that the capital of 1,000 has been turned over five times this includes both the time of circulation and the time of production. Indeed, if 1,000 had really been continuously active in the process of production, the product would, according to our assumptions, have to be 10,000 instead of 5,000. But in order to have 1,000 continuously in the process of production, 2,000 would have to be advanced. The economists, who as a general rule have nothing clear to say in reference to the mechanism of the turnover, always overlook this main point, to wit, that only a part of the industrial capital can actually be engaged in the process of production if production is to proceed uninterruptedly. While one part is in the period of production, another must always be in the period of circulation. Or in other words, one part can perform the function of productive capital only on condition that another part is withdrawn from production proper in the form of commodity- or money-capital. In overlooking this, the significance and role of money-capital is entirely ignored. We have now to ascertain what differences in the turnover arise if the two sections of the period of turnover, the working period and the circulation period, are equal, or if the working period is greater or smaller than the circulation period, and, furthermore, what effect this has on the tie-up of capital in the form of money-capital. We assume the capital advanced weekly to be in all cases 100, and the period of turnover 9 weeks, so that the capital to be advanced in each period of turnover is 900. The two capitals (capital I advanced for the first working period, and supplemental capital II, which functions during the circulation period of capital I) relieve one another in their movements without crossing. With the exception of the first period, either of the two capitals is therefore advanced only for its own period of turnover. Let the period of turnover be 9 weeks, as indicated in the following illustrations, so that the working period and the circulation period are each 4 weeks. Then we have the following annual diagram. Let us consider capital I and capital II as two capitals wholly independent of one another. They are entirely independent in their movements; these movements complement one another merely because their working and circulating periods directly relieve one another. They may be regarded as two totally independent capitals belonging to different capitalists. Capital I has completed five full turnovers and two-thirds of its sixth turnover period. At the end of the year it has the form of commodity-capital, which is three weeks short of its normal realisation. During this time it cannot enter into the process of production. It functions as commodity-capital, it circulates. It has completed only two-thirds of its last period of turnover. This is expressed as follows: It has been turned over only two-thirds of a time, only two-thirds of its total value have performed a complete turnover. We say that 450 complete their turnover in 9 weeks, hence 300 do in 6 weeks. But in this mode of expression the organic relations between the two specifically different components of the turnover time are ignored. The exact meaning of the expression that the advanced capital of 450 has made 5 turnovers is merely that it has accomplished five turnovers fully and only two-thirds of the sixth. On the other hand the expression that the turned-over capital equals 5 times the advanced capital hence, in the above case, 5 times 450, making 2,550 is correct, meaning that unless this capital of 450 were complemented by another capital of 450, one portion of it would have to be in the process of production while another in the process of circulation. If the time of turnover is to be expressed in terms of the capital turned over, it can always be expressed only in terms of existing value (in fact, of finished product). The circumstance that the advanced capital is not in a condition in which it may re-open the process of production finds expression in the fact that only a part of it is in a state capable of production or that, in order to be in a state of uninterrupted production, the capital would have to be divided into a portion which would be continually in the period of production and into another which would be continually in the period of circulation, depending upon the relation of these periods to each other. It is the same law which determines the quantity of the constantly functioning productive capital by the ratio of the time of circulation to the time of turnover. By the end of the 51st week, which we regard here as the end of the year, 150 of capital II have been advanced to the production of an unfinished lot of goods. Another part of it exists in the form of circulating constant capital raw materials, etc. i.e., in a form in which it can function as productive capital in the production process. But a third part of it exists in the form of money, at least the amount of the wages for the remainder of the working period (3 weeks), which is not paid, however, until the end of each week. Now, although at the beginning of a new year, hence of a new turnover cycle, this portion of the capital is not in the form of productive capital but in that of money-capital, in which it cannot take part in the process of production, at the opening of the new turnover circulating variable capital, i.e., living labour-power, is nevertheless active in the process of production. This is due to the fact that labour-power is not paid until the end of the week, although bought at the beginning of the working period, say, per week, and so consumed. Money serves here as a means of payment. For this reason it is still as money in the hands of the capitalist, on the one hand, while, on the other hand, labour-power, the commodity into which money is being transformed, is already active in the process of production, so that the same capital-value appears here doubly. If we look merely at the working periods, On the other hand, if we consider the periods of turnover, there has been turned over: It is to be noted that if capitals I and II were independent of each other they would nevertheless form merely different independent portions of the social capital advanced in the same sphere of production. Hence if the social capital within this sphere of production were composed solely of I and II, the same calculation would apply to the turnover of the social capital in this sphere as applies here to the constituent parts I and II of the same private capital. Going further, every portion of the entire social capital invested in any particular sphere of production may be so calculated. But in the last analysis, the number of turnovers made by the entire social capital is equal to the sum of the capitals turned over in the various spheres of production divided by the sum of the capitals advanced in those spheres. It must further be noted that just as capitals I and II in the same private business have here strictly speaking different turnover years (the cycle of turnover of capital II beginning 4 weeks later than that of capital I, so that the year of I ends 4 weeks earlier than that of II), so the various private capitals in the same sphere of production begin their operations at totally different periods and therefore conclude their turnover years at different times of the year. The same calculation of averages that we employed above for I and II suffices also here to bring down the turnover years of the various independent portions of the social capital to one uniform turnover year. But this does not alter the fact that, as before, 1) the number of working periods of the total capital advanced is equal to the sum of the value of the annual product of both advanced portions of capital divided by the total capital advanced, and 2) the number of turnovers made by the total capital is equal to the sum of the two amounts turned over divided by the sum of the two advanced capitals. Here too we must consider both portions of capital as if they performed turnover movements entirely independent of each other. Thus, we assume once more, that 100 are to be advanced weekly to the labour-process. Let the working period last 6 weeks, requiring therefore every time an advance of 600 (capital I). Let the time of circulation be 3 weeks, so that the period of turnover is 9 weeks, as before. Let capital II of 300 step in during the three-week circulation period of capital I. Considering both capitals as independent of each other, we find the schedule of the annual turnover to be as follows: In reality, capital II has no working and circulating periods separate and distinct from those of capital I. The working period is 6 weeks, the circulation period 3 weeks. Since capital II amounts to only 300, it can suffice only for a part of the working period. This is indeed the case. At the end of the 6th week a product valued at 600 passes into circulation and returns in money-form at the close of the 9th week. Then, at the opening of the 7th week, capital II begins its activity, and covers the requirements of the next working period, the 7th to 9th week. But according to our assumption the working period is only half up at the end of the 9th week. Hence capital I of 600 having just returned, at the beginning of the 10th week, once more enters into operation and with its 300 supplies the advances needed for the 10th to 12th week. This disposes of the second working period. A product value of 600 is in circulation and will return at the close of the 15th week. At the same time, 300, the amount of the original capital II, are set free and are able to function in the first half of the following working period, that is to say, in the 13th to 15th week. After the lapse of these weeks the 600 return; 300 of them suffice for the remainder of the working period, and 300 remain for the following working period. The thing therefore works as follows: In the present example we assumed a case in which the working time was and the circulation time of the period of turnover, i.e., the working time was a simple multiple of the circulation time. The question now is whether capital is likewise set free, in the way shown above, when this assumption is not made. Let us assume a working time of 5 weeks, a circulation time of 4 weeks, and a capital advance of 100 per week. Let us further assume a working period of 7 weeks, with a capital I of 700; a circulation period of 2 weeks, with a capital II of 200. In that case the first period of turnover lasts from the 1st to the 9th week; its first working period from the 1st to the 7th week, with an advance of 700, its first circulation period from the 8th to the 9th week. End of the 9th week, 700 flow back in money-form. The second period of turnover, from the 8th to the 16th week, contains the second working period of the 8th to the 14th week. The requirements of the 8th and 9th weeks of this period are covered by capital II. End of the 9th week, the above 700 return. Up to the close of this working period (10th-14th week), 500 of this sum are used up; 200 remain free for the next working period. The second circulation period lasts from the 15th to the 16th week. End of the 16th week 700 return once more. From now on, the same thing is repeated in every working period. The need for capital during the first two weeks is covered by the 200 set free at the close of the preceding working period; at the close of the second week 700 return; but only 5 weeks remain of the working period, so that it can consume only 500; therefore 200 always remain free for the next working period. We find, then, that in the given case, where the working period has been assumed to be greater than the circulation period, a money-capital will at all events have been set free at the close of each working period, which is of the same magnitude as capital II advanced for the circulation period. In our three illustrations capital II was 300 in the first, 400 in the second, and 200 in third. Accordingly, the capital set free at the close of each working period was 300, 400 and 200 respectively. The total turnover is as follows: In all cases investigated it was assumed that both the working period and the circulation period remain the same throughout the year in any of the businesses here examined. This assumption was necessary if we wished to ascertain the influence of the time of circulation on the turnover and advancement of capital. That in reality this assumption is not so unconditionally valid, and that it frequently is not valid at all does not alter the case in the least. In this entire section we have discussed only the turnovers of the circulating capital, not those of the fixed, for the simple reason that the question at issue has nothing to do with fixed capital. The instruments of labour, etc., employed in the process of production form only fixed capital, inasmuch as their time of employment exceeds the period of turnover of the circulating capital; inasmuch as the period of time during which these instruments of labour continue to serve in perpetually repeated labour-processes is greater than the period of turnover of the circulating capital, and hence equal to the n periods of turnover of the circulating capital. Regardless of whether the total time represented by these n periods of turnover of the circulating capital is longer or shorter, that portion of the productive capital which was advanced for this time in fixed capital is not advanced anew during its course. It continues its functions in its old use-form. The difference is merely this: In proportion to the varying length of a single working period of each period of turnover of the circulating capital, the fixed capital gives up a greater or smaller part of its original value to the product of that working period, and proportionally to the duration of the circulation time of each period of turnover this value-part of the fixed capital given up to the product returns quicker or slower in money-form. The nature of the subject we are discussing in this section the turnover of the circulating portion of productive capital derives from the very nature of this portion. The circulating capital employed in a working period cannot be applied in a new working period until it has completed its turnover, until it has been transformed into commodity-capital, from that into money-capital, and from that back into productive capital. Hence, in order that the first working period may be immediately followed by a second, capital must be advanced anew and converted into the circulating elements of productive capital, and its quantity must be sufficient to fill the void occasioned by the circulation period of the circulating capital advanced or the first working period. This is the source of the influence exerted by the length of the working period of the circulating capital over the scale of the labour-process and the division of the advanced capital or the addition of new portions of capital. This was precisely what we had to examine in this section. A very considerable portion of the social circulating capital, which is turned over several times a year, will therefore periodically exist in the form of released capital during the annual turnover cycle. It is furthermore evident that, all other circumstances being equal, the magnitude of the released capital grows with the volume of the labour-process or with the scale of production, hence with the development of capitalist production in general. In the case cited under B, (2), because the total advanced capital increases; in B (1), because with the development of capitalist production the length of the period of circulation grows, hence also the period of turnover in those cases where the working period is less than the period of circulation, and there is no regular ratio between the two periods. In the first case for instance we had to invest 100 per week. This required 600 for a working period of 6 weeks, 300 for a circulation period of 3 weeks, totalling 900. In that case 300 are released continually. On the other hand if 300 are invested weekly, we have 1,800 for the working period and 900 for the circulation period. Hence 900 for the circulation period. Hence 900 instead of 300 are periodically set free. Abstractly speaking, it is all the same whether 600 work during 6 times 8, or 48, weeks (product 4,800) or whether the total capital of 900 is expended during 6 weeks in the labour-process and then lies idle during the 3-week period of circulation. In the latter case, it would be working, in the course of the 48 weeks, 5 times 6, or 32 weeks (product 5 times 900, or 4,800), and lie idle for 16 weeks. But, apart from the greater spoilage of the fixed capital during the idle 16 weeks and apart from the appreciation of labour, which must be paid during the entire year, even if employed only during a part of it, such a regular interruption of the process of production is altogether irreconcilable with the operations of modern big industry. This continuity is itself a productive power of labour. Now, if we take a closer look at the released, or rather suspended, capital, we find that a considerable part of it must always be in the form of money-capital. Let us adhere to our illustration: Working period 6 weeks, period of circulation 3 weeks, investment per week 100. In the middle of the second working period, end of the 9th week, 600 return, and only 300 of them must be invested for the remainder of the working period. At the end of the second working period, 300 are therefore released. In what state are these 300? We shall assume that is invested for wages and are for raw and auxiliary materials. Then 200 of the returned 600 exist in the form of money for wages and 400 in the form of productive supply, in the form of elements of the constant circulating productive capital. But since only one half of this productive supply is required for the second half of the second working period, the other half exists for 3 weeks in the form of a surplus productive supply, i.e., of a supply exceeding the requirements of one working period. But the capitalist knows that he needs only one half, or 200, of this portion ( 400) of the returned capital for the current working period. It will therefore depend on market conditions whether he will immediately reconvert these 200, in whole or in part, into a surplus productive supply, or keep them entirely or partially in the form of money-capital in anticipation of a more favourable market. On the other hand it goes without saying that the portion to be laid out for wages ( 200) is retained in the form of money. The capitalist cannot store labour-power in warehouses after he has bought it, as he may do with the raw material. He must incorporate it in the process of production and pay for it at the end of the week. At any rate these 100 of the released capital of 300 will therefore have the form of money-capital set free, i.e., not required for the working period. The capital released in the form of money-capital must therefore be at least equal to the variable portion of capital invested in wages. At a maximum, it may comprise the entire released capital. In reality it fluctuates constantly between this minimum and maximum. The money-capital thus released by the mere mechanism of the turnover movement (together with that freed by the successive reflux of fixed capital and that required in every labour-process for variable capital) must play an important role as soon as the credit system develops and must at the same time form one of the latter s foundations. Let us assume that the time of circulation in our illustration is shortened from 3 to 2 weeks. This is not to be a normal change, but due, say, to prosperous times, shorter terms of payment, etc. The capital of 600, which is laid out during the working period, returns one week earlier than needed. It is therefore released for this week. Furthermore, in the middle of the working period, as before, 300 are released (a portion of those 600), but for 4 weeks instead of 3. There are then, on the money-market 600 for one week and 300 for 4 instead of 3 weeks. As this concerns not one capitalist alone but many and occurs in various periods in different businesses, more available money-capital makes its appearance in the market. If this condition lasts for some time, production will be expanded wherever feasible. Capitalists operating on borrowed money will exercise less demand on the money-market, which eases it as much as increased supply; or finally the sums which have become superfluous for the mechanism are thrown definitely on the money-market. In consequence of the contraction of the time of circulation from 3 weeks to 2, and consequently of the period of turnover from 9 weeks to 8, one-ninth of the total capital advanced becomes superfluous. The 6-week working period can now be kept going as continuously with 800 as formerly with 900. One portion of the value of the commodity-capital, equal to 100, once it has been reconverted into money, persists therefore in the state of money-capital without performing any more functions as a part of the capital advanced for the process of production. While the scale of production and other conditions, such as prices, etc., remain the same, the sum of value of the advanced capital is reduced from 900 to 800. The remainder of the originally advanced value amounting to 100 is eliminated in the form of money-capital. As such it enters the money-market and forms an additional portion of the capitals functioning here. This shows the way in which a plethora of money-capital may arise and not only in the sense that the supply of money-capital is greater than the demand; this is always only a relative plethora, which occurs for instance in the melancholy period opening a new cycle after the end of a crisis. But also in the sense that a definite portion of the capital-value advanced becomes superfluous for the operation of the entire process of social reproduction which includes the process of circulation and is therefore eliminated in the form of money-capital a plethora brought about by the mere contraction of the period of turnover, while the scale of production and prices remain the same. The amount of money in circulation, whether great or small, did not influence it in the least. Let us assume on the contrary that the period of circulation is prolonged from, say, 3 weeks to 5. In that case at the very next turnover the reflux of the advanced capital takes place 2 weeks too late. The last part of the process of production of this working period cannot be carried on further by the mechanism of the turnover of the advanced capital itself. Should this condition last any length of time, a contraction of the process of production, a reduction of its volume, might take place, just as an extension occurred in the previous case. But in order to continue the process on the same scale, the advanced capital would have to be increased by 2/9, or 200, for the entire term of the prolongation of the circulation period. This additional capital can be obtained only from the money-market. If the lengthening of the period of circulation applies to one or several big branches of business, it may exert pressure on the money-market, unless this effect is paralysed by some counter-effect. In this case it is likewise evident and obvious that this pressure, like that plethora before, had nothing whatever to do with a movement either of prices of the commodities or the mass of existing circulating medium. [The preparation of this chapter for publication presented no small number of difficulties. Firmly grounded as Marx was in algebra, he did not get the knack of handling figures, particularly commercial arithmetic, although there exists a thick batch of copybooks containing numerous examples of all kinds of commercial computations which he had solved himself. But knowledge of the various methods of calculation and exercise in daily practical commercial arithmetic are by no means the same, and consequently Marx got so tangled up in his computations of turnovers that besides places left uncompleted a number of things were incorrect and contradictory. In the tables reproduced above I have preserved only the simplest and arithmetically correct data. My reason for doing so was mainly the following: The uncertain results of these painstaking calculations led Marx to attach unwarranted importance to a circumstance, which in my opinion, has actually little significance. I refer to what he calls the release of money-capital. The actual state of affairs, based on the above assumptions, is this: No matter what may be the ratio between the working period and circulation time, hence between capital I and capital II, there is returned to the capitalist, in the form of money, after the end of the first turnover and thereafter at regular intervals equal to the duration of one working period, the capital required for one working period, i.e., a sum equal to capital I. If the working period is 5 weeks, the circulation time 4 weeks, and capital I 500, then a sum of money equal to 500 returns each time at the end of the 9th, 14th, 19th, 24th, 29th week, etc. If the working period is 6 weeks, the circulation time 3 weeks, and capital I 600, then 600 return at the end of the 9th, 15th, 21st, 27th, 33rd week, etc. Finally, if the working period is 4 weeks, the circulation time 5 weeks, and capital I 400, then 400 are returned at the end of the 9th, 13th, 17th, 21st, 25th week, etc. Whether any, and if so how much, of this returned money is superfluous and thus released for the current working period is immaterial. It is assumed that production continues uninterruptedly on the current scale, and in order that this may come about money must be available and must therefore return, whether released or not. If production is interrupted, release stops likewise. In other words: There is indeed a release of money, a formation therefore of latent, merely potential, capital in the form of money. But it takes place under all circumstances and not only under the special conditions set forth in the text; and it comes about on a larger scale than that assumed in the text. So far as circulating capital I is concerned, the industrial capitalist is in the same situation at the end of each turnover as when he established his business: he has all of it in one bulk, while he can convert it back into productive capital only gradually. The essential point in the text is the proof that on the one hand a considerable portion of the industrial capital must always be available in the form of money and that on the other hand a still more considerable portion must temporarily assume the form of money. The proof is, if anything, rendered stronger by these additional remarks of mine. F. E.] In the second place however one half of the originally advanced capital-value of 900, or 450, which (a) passed successively through the forms of money-capital, productive capital, and commodity-capital, and (b) existed simultaneously and constantly side by side partly in the form of money-capital, partly in that of productive capital, and partly in that of commodity-capital, would be eliminated from the circuit of Business X, and thus come into the money-market as additional money-capital, affecting it as an additional constituent. These released 450 act as money-capital, not because they have become superfluous money for the operation of Business X but because they are a constituent part of the original capital-value, and hence are intended to function further as capital and not to be expended as mere means of circulation. The best method of letting them operate as capital is that of throwing them as money-capital on the money-market. On the other hand the scale of production (apart from fixed capital) might be doubled. In that case a productive process of double the previous volume would be carried on with the same advanced capital of 900. If on the other hand the prices of the circulation elements of productive capital were to increase by one half, 1500 instead of 100 or 1,350 instead of 900 would be required per week. It would take an additional capital of 450 to carry on the business on the same scale, and this would exert a pro tanto pressure on the money-market, big or small depending on its condition. If all the capital available on this market were then already engaged, there would be increased competition for available capital. If a portion of it were unemployed, it would pro tanto be called into action. But, in the third place, given a certain scale of production, the turnover velocity and the prices of the elements of the circulating productive capital remaining the same, the price of the products of Business X may rise or fall. If the price of the commodities supplied by Business X falls, the price of its commodity-capital of 600, which it constantly threw into circulation, drops to, say, 500. Hence one-sixth of the value of the advanced capital does not return from the process of circulation. (The surplus-value contained in the commodity-capital is not considered here.) It is lost in that process. But since the value, or price, of the elements of production remains the same, this reflux of 500 suffices only to replace 5/6 of the capital of 600 constantly engaged in the process of production. It would therefore require an additional money-capital of 100 to continue production on the same scale. Vice versa, if the price of the product of Business X were to rise, then the price of the 600 commodity-capital would be increased, say, to 700. One-seventh of this price, or 100, does not originate in the process of production, is not advanced in this process, but derives from the process of circulation. But only 600 are needed to replace the elements of production. Hence, the release of 100. It does not fall within the scope of the investigation hitherto made to ascertain why, in the first case, the period of turnover is shortened or lengthened, and why in the second case the prices of raw materials and labour, and in the third, the prices of the products supplied, rise or fall. But the following does belong in it: Business X supplies, just as before, the same six weeks product of the same value of 600, and as work continues year in year out without interruption, it supplies in 51 weeks the same quantity of products, valued at 5,100. There is, then, no change so far as the quantity and price of the product thrown into circulation by this business are concerned, nor in the times when it throws its product on the market. But 100 are eliminated because due to the contraction of the circulation period the requirements of the process are satisfied with only 800 instead of the former 900. The 100 eliminated capital exist in the form of money-capital. But they do not by any means represent that portion of the advanced capital which would have to function constantly in the form of money-capital. Let us assume that 4/5, or 480, of the advanced circulating capital I of 600 are constantly invested in productive materials and 1/5, or 120, in wages. Then the weekly investment in materials of production would be 80 and in wages 20. Capital II, amounting to 300, should then also be divided into 4/5, or 240, for materials of production and 1/5, or 60, for wages. The capital invested in wages must always be advanced in the form of money. As soon as the commodity-product, worth 600, has been reconverted into the money-form, or sold, 480 of it can be transformed into materials of production (productive supply), but 120 retain their money-form in order to serve for the payment of wages for six weeks. These 120 are the minimum of the returning capital of 600 which must always be renewed and replaced in the form of money-capital and therefore must always be kept on hand as that portion of the advanced capital which functions in the form of money. Now, if 100 of the 300 periodically released for three weeks, and likewise divisible into 240 for productive supply and 60 for wages, is entirely eliminated, completely thrust out of the turnover mechanism, in the form of money-capital by shortening the circulation time, where does the money for this money-capital of 100 come from? Only one-fifth of this amount consists of money-capital periodically set free within the turnovers. But four-fifths, or 80, are already replaced by an additional productive supply of the same value. In what manner is this additional productive supply converted into money, and where does the money for this conversion come from? If the abridged period of circulation has become a fact, then only 400 of the above 600, instead of 480, are reconverted into productive supply. The remainder, 80, is retained in its money-form and constitutes, together with the above 20 for wages, the 100 of eliminated capital. Although these 100 come from the sphere of circulation through the sale of the 600 worth of commodity-capital and are now withdrawn from it by not being reinvested in wages and elements of production, it must not be forgotten that, being in the money-form, they are once more in that form in which they were originally thrown into circulation. In the beginning 900 were invested in productive supply and wages. Now only 800 are necessary to carry out the same productive process. The 100 thus released in money now form a new, employment-seeking money-capital, a new constituent part of the money-market. True, they have already previously been periodically in the form of released money-capital and of additional productive capital, but these latent states were themselves the requisites for the execution of the process of production, because they were the requisites for its continuity. Now they are no longer needed for that purpose and for this reason form new money-capital and a constituent part of the money-market, although they by no means form either an additional element of the available social money-supply (for they existed at the beginning of the business and were thrown by it into the circulation), or a newly accumulated hoard. These 100 are now in actual fact withdrawn from circulation inasmuch as they are a part of the advanced money-capital that is no longer employed in the same business. But this withdrawal is possible only because the conversion of the commodity-capital into money, and of this money into productive capital, C' M C, is accelerated by one week, so that the circulation of the money operating in this process is likewise hastened. They have been withdrawn from it because they are no longer needed for the turnover of capital X. It has been assumed here that the advanced capital belongs to him who employs it. Had he borrowed it nothing would be changed. With the shortening of the time of circulation he would have to borrow only 800 instead of 900. The 100, if returned to the lender, would as before form 100 of new money-capital, only in the hands of Y instead of X. Should capitalist X receive 480 worth of materials of production on credit, so that he has to advance only 210 in money for wages out of his own pocket, he would now have to procure 80 worth of materials less on credit and this sum would constitute superfluous commodity-capital for the capitalist granting the credit, while capitalist X would have eliminated 20 in money. The additional supply for production is now reduced by one-third. It consisted of 240 constituting four-fifths of 300, the additional capital II, but now it is only 160, i.e., additional supply for 2 instead of 3 weeks. It is now renewed every 2 weeks instead of every 3, but only for 2 instead of 3 weeks. The purchases, for instance in the cotton market, are thus more frequent and smaller. The same amount of cotton is withdrawn from the market, for the quantity of the product remains the same. But the withdrawals are distributed differently in time, extending over a longer period. Supposing that it is a question of 3 months or 2. If the annual consumption of cotton amounts to 1,200 bales, the sales in the first case will be: But in the second case: Hitherto we presupposed that the contraction of the time of circulation in Business X was due to the fact that X sold his articles quicker, received his money for them sooner, or, in the event of credit, was given shorter terms of payment. The contraction was therefore attributed to a quicker sale of the commodities, to a quicker transformation of commodity-capital into money-capital, C' M, the first phase of the process of circulation. But it might also derive from the second phase, M C, and hence from a simultaneous change, be it in the working period or in the time of circulation of capitals Y, Z, etc., which supply capitalist X with the productive elements of his circulating capital. For instance if cotton, coal, etc., with the old methods of transport, are three weeks in transit from their place of production or storage to the place of production of capitalist X, then X s productive supply must last at least for three weeks, until the arrival of new supplies. So long as cotton and coal are in transit, they cannot serve as means of production. They are then rather a subject of labour for the transport industry and the capital employed in it; they are also commodity-capital in the process of circulation for the producer of coal or the dealer in cotton. Suppose improvements in transport reduce the transit to two weeks. Then the productive supply can be changed from a three-weekly into a fortnightly supply. This releases the additional advanced capital 80 set aside for this purpose and likewise the 20 for wages, because the turned-over capital of 600 returns one week sooner. On the other hand if for instance the working period of the capital which supplies the raw materials is cut down (examples of which were given in the preceding chapters), so that the possibility arises of renewing the supply of raw materials in less time, then the productive supply may be reduced and the interval between periods of renewal shortened. If, vice versa, the time of circulation, and thus the period of turnover, are prolonged, then it is necessary to advance additional capital. This must come out of the pocket of the capitalist himself if he has any additional capital. But it will then be invested in some form or other as a part of the money-market. To make it available, it must be pried loose from its old form. For instance stocks must be sold, deposits withdrawn, so that in this case too the money-market is indirectly affected. Or he must borrow it. As for that part of the additional capital which is needed for wages, it must under normal conditions always be advanced in the form of money-capital, and for that purpose the capitalist X exerts his share of direct pressure on the money-market. But this is indispensable for the part which must be invested in materials of production only if he must pay for them in cash. If he can get them on credit, this does not have any direct influence on the money-market, because the additional capital is then advanced directly as a productive supply and not in the first instance as money-capital. But if the lender throws the bill of exchange received from X directly on the market, discounts it, etc., this would influence the money-market indirectly, through someone else. If, however, he uses this note to cover a debt not yet due for instance, this additional advanced capital does not affect the money-market either directly or indirectly. If the materials of production drop to half, they require for the 6-week period only 240 instead of 480, and for the additional capital No. II only 120 instead of 240. Capital I is thus reduced from 600 to 240 plus 120, or 360, and capital II from 300 to 120 plus 60, or 180. The total capital of 900 is therefore reduced to 360 plus 180, or 540. A sum of 360 is therefore released. This eliminated and now unemployed capital, or money-capital, seeking employment in the money-market, is nothing but a portion of the capital of 900 originally advanced as money-capital, which, due to the fall in the prices of the materials of production, into which it is periodically reconverted, has become superfluous if the business is not to be expanded but carried on in the same scale. If this fall in prices were not due to accidental circumstances (a particularly rich harvest, over-supply, etc.) but to an increase of productive power in the branch of production which furnishes the raw materials, then this money-capital would be an absolute addition to the money-market, and to the capital available in the form of money-capital in general, because it would no longer constitute an integral part of the capital already invested. If, on the contrary, the price of the product rises, a portion of the capital which was not advanced is taken out of circulation. This is not an organic part of the capital advanced in the process of production and unless production is expanded therefore constitutes money-capital eliminated. As we have assumed that the prices of the elements of the product were given before it was brought to market as commodity-capital, a real change of value might have caused the rise of prices since it acted retroactively, causing a subsequent rise in the price of, say, raw materials. In that event capitalist X would realise a gain on his product circulating as commodity-capital and on his available productive supply. This gain would give him an additional capital, which would now be needed for the continuation of his business with the new and higher prices of the elements of production. Or the rise of prices is but temporary. What capitalist X then needs by way of additional capital becomes released capital for the other side, insofar as X s product forms an element of production for other branches of business. What the one has lost the other has gained.

Economic Manuscripts: Capital: Volume Two

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1885-c2/ch15.htm

Let the period of turnover be 5 weeks: the working period 4 weeks, the period of circulation 1 week. Then capital I is 2,000, consisting of 1,600 of constant capital and 400 of variable capital; capital II is 500, 400 of which are constant and 100 variable. In every working week a capital of 500 is invested. In a year of 50 weeks an annual product of 50 times 500, or 2,500, is manufactured. Capital I of 2,000, constantly employed in the working period, is therefore turned over 12 times. 12 times 2,000 makes 25,000. Of these 25,000 four-fifths, or 20,000, are constant capital laid out in means of production, and one-fifth, or 5,000 is variable capital laid out in wages. The total capital of 25,000 is thus turned over 25,000/2,500, or 10 times. The variable circulating capital expended in production can serve afresh in the process of circulation only to the extent that the product in which its value is reproduced has been sold, converted from a commodity-capital into a money-capital, in order to be once more laid out in payment of labour-power. But the same is true of the constant circulating capital (materials of production) invested in production, the value of which reappears in the product as a portion of its value. What these two portions the variable and the constant part of the circulating capital have in common and what distinguishes them from the fixed capital is not that the value transferred from them to the product is circulated by the commodity-capital, i.e., through the circulation of the product as a commodity. One portion of the value of the product, and thus of the product circulating as a commodity, of the commodity-capital, always consists of the wear and tear of the fixed capital, that is to say, of that portion of the value of the fixed capital which is transferred to the product during the process of production. The difference is really this: The fixed capital continues to function in the process of production in its old use-form for a longer or shorter cycle of turnover periods of the circulating capital (equal to constant circulating plus variable circulating capital), while every single turnover is conditioned on the replacement of the entire circulating capital passing from the sphere of production in the form of commodity-capital into the sphere of circulation. The constant circulating and variable circulating capital have the first phase of circulation, C' M, in common. In the second phase they separate. The money into which the commodity is reconverted is in part transformed into a productive supply (constant circulating capital). Depending on the different terms of purchase of its constituent parts, one portion of the money may sooner, another later, be converted from money into materials of production, but finally it is wholly consumed that way. Another portion of the money realised by the sale of the commodity is held in the form of a money-supply, in order to be gradually expended in the payment of the labour-power incorporated in the process of production. This part constitutes the variable circulating capital. Nevertheless the entire replacement of either portion always originates from the turnover of capital, from its conversion into a product, from a product into a commodity, from a commodity into money. This is the reason why, in the preceding chapter, the turnover of the circulating capital, constant and variable, was treated jointly and separately without paying any regard to the fixed capital. In the question which we shall now take up, we must go a step farther and proceed with the variable portion of the circulating capital as though it along constituted the circulating capital. In other words, we leave out of consideration the constant circulating capital which is turned over together with it. A sum of 2,500 has been advanced and the value of the annual product is 25,000. But the variable portion of the circulating capital is 500; therefore the variable capital contained in 25,000 amounts to 25,000 divided by 5, or 5,000. If we divide these 5,000 by 500, we find the number of turnovers is 10, just as it is in the case of the total capital of 2,500. Here, where it is only a question of the production of surplus-value, it is absolutely correct to make this average calculation, according to which the value of the annual product is divided by the value of the advanced capital and not by the value of that portion of this capital which is employed constantly in one working period (thus, in the present case not by 400 but by 500, not by capital I but by capital I plus capital II). We shall see later that, from another point of view, the calculation is not quite exact, just as this average calculation generally is not quite exact. That is to say, it serves well enough for the practical purposes of the capitalist, but it does not express exactly or properly all the real circumstances of the turnover. We have hitherto ignored one part of the value of the commodity-capital, namely the surplus-value contained in it, which was produced during the process of production and incorporated in the product. To this we have now to direct our attention. Suppose the variable capital of 100 invested weekly produces a surplus-value of 100%, or 100, then the variable capital of 500 invested over a 5-week turnover period produces 500 of surplus-value, i.e., one half of the working day consists of surplus-labour. If 500 of variable capital produce a surplus-value of 500, then 5,000 produce ten times 500, or 5,000 in surplus-value. But the advanced variable capital amounts to 500. The ratio of the total surplus-value produced during one year to the sum of value of the advanced variable capital is what we call the annual rate of surplus-value. In the case at hand it is 5,000 to 500 or 1,000%. If we analyse this rate more closely, we find that it is equal to the rate of surplus-value produced by the advanced variable capital during one period of turnover, multiplied by the number of turnovers of the variable capital (which coincides with the number of turnovers of the entire circulating capital). The variable capital advanced in the case before us for one period of turnover is 500. The surplus-value produced during this period is likewise 500. The rate of surplus-value for one period of turnover is therefore 500s/500v or 100%. This 100%, multiplied by 10, the number of turnovers in one year, makes 5,000s/500v, or 1,000%. That refers to the annual rate of surplus-value. As for the amount of surplus-value obtained during a specified period of turnover, it is equal to the value of the variable capital advanced during this period, of 500 in the present case, multiplied by the rate of surplus-value, in the present case therefore 500 times 100/100, or 500 times 1, or 500. If the advanced variable capital were 1,500, then with the same rate of the surplus-value the amount of surplus-value would be 1,500 times 100/100, or 1,500. We shall apply the term capital A to the variable capital of 500, which is turned over ten times per year, producing an annual surplus-value of 5,000 for which, therefore, the yearly rate of surplus-value is 1,000%. Now let us assume that another variable capital, B, of 5,000, is advanced for one whole year (i.e., here for 50 weeks), so that it is turned over only once a year. We assume furthermore that at the end of the year the product is paid for on the same day that it is finished, so that the money-capital, into which it is converted, returns on the same day. The circulation period is then zero, the period of turnover equals the working period, namely, one year. As in the preceding case there is to be found in the labour-process each week a variable capital of 100, or of 5,000 in 50 weeks. Let the rate of surplus-value be the same, or 100%, i.e., let one half of the working-day of the same length consist of surplus-labour. If we consider 5 weeks, the invested variable capital is 500, the rate of surplus-value 100% and therefore the amount of surplus-value produced in 5 weeks 500. The quantity of labour-power here exploited, and the intensity of its exploitation, are assumed to be exactly the same as those of capital A. Each week the invested variable capital of 100 produces a surplus-value of 100, hence in 50 weeks the invested capital of 50 100 = 5,000 produces a surplus-value of 5,000. The amount of surplus-value produced annually is the same as in the previous case, 5,000, but the yearly rate of surplus-value is entirely different. It is equal to the surplus-value produced in one year divided by the advanced variable capital: 5,000s/5,000v, or 100%, while in the case of capital A it was 1,000%. In the case of both capitals A and B, we have invested a variable capital of 100 a week. The degree of self-expansion, or the rate of surplus-value, is likewise the same, 100%, and so is the magnitude of the variable capital, 100. The same quantity of labour-power is exploited, the volume and degree of exploitation are equal in both cases, the working-days are the same and equally divided into necessary labour and surplus-labour. The amount of variable capital employed in the course of the year is 5,000 in either case; it sets the same amount of labour in motion, and extracts the same amount of surplus-value, 5,000, from the labour-power set in motion by these two equal capitals. Nevertheless there is a difference of 900% in the annual rate of surplus-value of the two capitals A and B. This phenomenon creates the impression, at all events, that the rate of surplus-value depends not only on the quantity and intensity of exploitation of the labour-power set in motion by the variable capital, but besides on inexplicable influences arising from the process of circulation. And it has indeed been so interpreted, and has if not in this its pure form, then at least in its more complicated and disguised form, that of the annual rate of profit completely routed the Ricardian school since the beginning of the twenties. The strangeness of this phenomenon disappears at once when we place capitals A and B in exactly the same conditions, not only seemingly but actually. These equal conditions exist only when the variable capital B in its entire volume is expended for the payment of labour-power in the same period of time as capital A. In that case the 5,000 of capital B are invested for 5 weeks, 1,000 per week makes an investment of 50,000 per year. The surplus-value is then likewise 50,000, according to our premises. The turned-over capital of 50,000 divided by the advanced capital of 5,000 makes the number of turnovers 10. The rate of surplus-value, 5,000s/5,000v, or 100%, multiplied by the number of turnovers, 10, makes the annual rate of surplus-value 50,000s/5,000v, or 10/1, or 1,000%. Now the annual rate of surplus-value are alike for A and B, namely 1,000%, but the amounts of the surplus-value are 50,000 in the case of B, and 5,000 in the case of A. The amounts of the surplus-value produced are now in the same proportion to one another as the advanced capital-values B and A, to wit: 5,000:500 = 10:1. But capital B has set in motion ten times as much labour-power as capital A within the same time. Only the capital actually employed in the labour-power produces surplus-value and to it apply all laws relating to surplus-value, including therefore the law according to which the quantity of surplus-value, its rate being given, is determined by the relative magnitude of the variable capital. [See Karl Marx, Capital, Ch. XI. Ed.] The labour-process itself is measured by time. If the length of the working-day is given (as here, where we assume all conditions relating to A and B to be equal, in order to elucidate the difference in the annual rate of surplus-value), the working week consists of a definite number of working-days. Or we may consider any working period, for instance this working period of 5 weeks, as one single working-day of, say, 300 hours, if the working-day has 10 hours and the week 6 days. We must further multiply this number by the number of labourers who are employed conjointly every day simultaneously in the same labour-process. If that number is taken as 10, there will be 60 times 10 or 600 hours in one week, and a working period of 5 weeks would have 600 times 5, or 3,000 hours. The rate of surplus-value and the length of the working-day being the same, variable capitals of equal magnitude are therefore employed, if equal quantities of labour-power (a labour-power of the same price multiplied by the number of labourers) are set in motion in the same time. Let us now return to our original examples. In both cases, A and B, equal variable capitals of 100 per week are invested every week throughout the year. The invested variable capitals actually functioning in the labour-process are therefore equal, but the advanced variable capitals are very unequal. In the case of A, 500 are advanced for every 5 weeks, of which 100 are employed every week. In the case of B, 5,000 must be advanced for the first 5-week period, of which only 100 per week, or 500 in 5 weeks, or one-tenth of the advanced capital, is employed. In the second 5-week period 4,500 must be advanced, but only 500 of this is employed, etc. The variable capital advanced for a definite period of time is converted into employed, hence actually functioning and operative variable capital only to the extent that it really steps into the sections of that period of time taken up by the labour-process, to the extent that it really functions in the labour-process. In the intermediate time, in which a portion of it is advanced in order to be employed later, this portion is practically non-existent for the labour-process and has therefore no influence on the formation of either value or surplus-value. Take for instance capital A, of 500. It is advanced for 5 weeks, but every week only 100 enter successively into the labour-process. In the first week one-fifth of this capital is employed; four-fifths are advanced without being employed, although they must be in stock, and therefore advanced, for the labour-processes of the following 4 weeks. The circumstances which differentiate the relation between the advanced and the employed variable capital affect the production of surplus-value the rate of surplus-value being given only to the extent, and only by reason of the fact that they differentiate the quantity of variable capital which can be really employed in a stated period of time, for instance in one week, 5 weeks, etc. The advanced variable capital functions as variable capital only to the extent and only during the time that it is actually employed, and not during the time in which it remains in stock, is advanced, without being employed. But all the circumstances which differentiate the relation between the advanced and the employed variable capital come down to the difference of the periods of turnover (determined by the difference of either the working period, or the circulation period, or both). The law of production of surplus-value states that equal quantities of functioning variable capital produce equal quantities of surplus-value if the rate of surplus-value is the same. If then, equal quantities of variable capital are employed by the capitals A and B in equal periods of time with equal rates of surplus-value, they must generate equal quantities of surplus-value in equal periods of time, no matter how different the ratio of this variable capital employed during a definite period of time to the variable capital advanced during the same time, and no matter therefore how different the ratio of the quantities of surplus-value produced, not to the employed but to the advanced variable capital in general. The difference of this ratio, far from contradicting the laws of the production of surplus-value that have been demonstrated, rather corroborates them and is one of their inevitable consequences. Let us consider the first 5-week productive period of capital B. At the end of the fifth week 500 have been employed and consumed. The value of the product is 1,000, hence 500s/500v = 100%. Just the same as with capital A. The fact that, in the case of capital A, the surplus-value is realised together with the advanced capital, while in the case of B it is not, does not concern us here, where it is only a question of the production of surplus-value and of its ratio to the variable capital advanced during its production. But if on the contrary we calculate the ratio of surplus-value in B, not to that portion of the advanced capital of 5,000 which has been employed and hence consumed during its production, but to this total advanced capital itself, we find that it is 500s/5,000v of 1/10, or 10%. Hence it is 10% for capital B and 100% for capital A, i.e., ten-fold. If it were said that this difference in the rate of surplus-value for equal capitals, which have set in motion equal quantities of labour equally divided at that into paid and unpaid labour, is contrary to the laws of the production of surplus-value, the answer would be simple and prompted by a mere glance at the actual relations: In the case of A, the actual rate of surplus-value is expressed, i.e., the relation of a surplus-value produced in 5 weeks by a variable capital of 500, to the variable capital of 500. In the case of B on the other hand the calculation is of a kind which has nothing to do either with the production of surplus-value or with the determination of its corresponding rate of surplus-value. For the 500 of surplus-value produced by a variable capital of 500 of variable capital advanced during their production, but with reference to a capital of 5,000, nine-tenths of which, or 4,500, have nothing whatever to do with the production of this surplus-value of 500, but are on the contrary intended to function gradually in the course of the following 45 weeks, so that they do not exist at all so far as the production of the first 5 weeks is concerned, which alone is at issue in this instance. Hence in this case the difference in the rates of surplus-value of A and B presents no problem at all. Let us now compare the annual rates of surplus-value for capitals B and A. For capital B it is 500s/500v = 100%; for capital A it is 5,000s/500v = 1,000%. But the ratio of the rates of surplus-value is the same as before. There we had (Rate of Surplus-Value of Capital B) / (Rate of Surplus-Value of Capital A)= 10% / 100% Now we have (Annual Rate of Surplus-Value of Capital B) / (Annual Rate of Surplus-Value of Capital A)= 100% / 1,000% But now the problem has changed. The annual rate of capital B, 5,000s/5,000v = 100%, offers not the slightest deviation not even the semblance of a deviation from the laws of production known to us and of the rate of surplus-value corresponding to this production. During the year 5,000v have been advanced and productively consumed, and they have produced 5,000s. The rate of surplus-value therefore equals the above fraction, 5,000s/5,000v = 100%. The annual rate agrees with the actual rate of surplus-value. In this case it is therefore not capital B but capital A which presents the anomaly that has to be explained. We have here the rate of surplus-value 5,000s/500v = 1,000%. But while in the first case 500s, the product of 5 weeks, was calculated for an advanced capital of 5,000, nine-tenths of which were not employed by its production, we have now 5,000s calculated for 500v, i.e., for only one-tenth of the variable capital actually employed in the production of 5,000s; for the 5,000s are the product of a variable capital of 5,000 productively consumed during 50 weeks, not that of a capital of 500 consumed in one single period of 5 weeks. In the first case the surplus-value produced in 5 weeks had been calculated for a capital advanced for 50 weeks, a capital ten times as large as the one consumed during the 5 weeks. Now the surplus-value produced in 50 weeks is calculated for a capital advanced for 5 weeks, a capital ten times smaller than the one consumed in 50 weeks. Capital A, of 500, is never advanced for more than 5 weeks. At the end of this time it returns and can renew the same process in the course of the year ten times, as it makes ten turnovers. Two conclusions follow from this: Firstly: The capital advanced in the case of A is only five times larger than that portion of capital which is constantly employed in the productive process of one week. On the other hand capital B which is turned over only once in 50 weeks and must therefore be advanced for 50 weeks, is fifty times larger than that one of its portions which can constantly be employed for one week. The turnover therefore modifies the relation between the capital advanced during the year for the process of production and the capital constantly employable for a definite period of production, say, a week. Here we have, then, the first case, in which the surplus-value of 5 weeks is not calculated for the capital employed during these 5 weeks, but for a capital ten times larger, employed for 50 weeks. Secondly: The 5-week period of turnover of capital A comprises only one-tenth of the year, so that one year contains ten such turnover periods, in which capital A of 500 is successively re-invested. The employed capital is here equal to the capital advanced for 5 weeks, multiplied by the number of periods of turnover per year. The capital employed during the year is 500 times 10, or 5,000. The capital advanced during the year is 5,000/10, or 500. Indeed, although the 500 are always re-employed, the sum advanced every 5 weeks never exceeds these same 500. On the other hand in case of capital B only 500 are employed during 5 weeks and advanced for these 5 weeks. But as the period of turnover in this case is 50 weeks, the capital employed in one year is equal to the capital advanced for 50 weeks and not to that advanced for every 5 weeks. The annually produced quantity of surplus-value, given the rate of surplus-value, is however commensurate with the capital employed during the year, not with the capital advanced during the year. Hence it is not larger for this capital of 5,000, which is turned over once a year, than it is for the capital of 500, which is turned over ten times a year. And it is so big only because the capital turned over once a year is itself ten times larger than the capital turned over ten times a year. The variable capital turned over during one year hence the portion of the annual product, or of the annual expenditure equal to that portion is the variable capital actually employed, productively consumed, during that year. It follows therefore that if the variable capital A turned over annually and the variable capital B turned over annually are equal and the employed under equal conditions of self-expansion, so that the rate of surplus-value is the same for both of them, then the quantity of surplus-value produced annually must likewise be the same for both of them. Hence the rate of surplus-value calculated for a year must also be the same, since the amounts of capital employed are the same, so far as the rate is expressed by (quantity of surplus-value produced annually) / (variable capital turned over annually). Or, expressed generally: Whatever the relative magnitude of the turned-over variable capitals, the rate of the surplus-value produced by them in the course of the year is determined by the rate of surplus-value at which the respective capitals have worked in average periods (say, the average of a week or day). This is the only consequence of the laws of production of surplus-value and of the determination of the rate of surplus-value. Let us see further what is expressed by the ratio (Capital turned over annually) / (capital advanced) In the case of capital A we have: ( 5,000 of capital turned over annually) / ( 500 of capital advanced) ( 5,000 of capital turned over annually) / ( 5,000 of capital advanced) The respective quantities of labour (the sum of the paid and unpaid labour), which are set in motion by the two variable capitals turned over annually, are equal in this case, because the turned-over capitals themselves are equal and their rates of self-expansion are likewise equal. The ratio of variable capital turned over annually to the variable capital advanced indicates 1) the ratio of the capital to be advanced to the variable capital employed during a definite working period. If the number of turnovers is 10, as in the case of A, and the year assumed to have 50 weeks, then the period of turnover is 5 weeks. For these 5 weeks variable capital must be advanced and the capital advanced for 5 weeks must be 5 times as large as the variable capital employed during one week. That is to say, only one-fifth of the advanced capital (in this case 500) can be employed in the course of one week. On the other hand, in the case of capital B, where the number of turnovers is 1/1, the time of turnover is 1 year, or 50 weeks. The ratio of the advanced capital to the capital employed weekly is therefore 50 : 1. If matters were the same for B as they are for A, then B would have to invest 1,000 per week instead of 100. 2) It follows that B has employed ten times as much capital ( 5,000) as A to set in motion the same quantity of variable capital and hence the rate of surplus-value being given of labour (paid and unpaid), and thus to produce also the same quantity of surplus-value during the year. The real rate of surplus-value expresses nothing but the ratio of the variable capital employed during a definite period to the surplus-value produced in the same time; or the quantity of unpaid labour set in motion by the variable capital employed during this time. It has absolutely nothing to do with that portion of the variable capital which is advanced during the time in which it is not employed. Hence it has likewise nothing to do with the ratio between that portion of capital which is advanced during a definite period of time and that portion which is employed during the same period of time a ratio that is modified and differentiated for different capitals by the turnover period. It follows rather from what has been set forth above that the annual rate of surplus-value coincides only in one single case with the real rate of surplus-value which expresses the degree of exploitation of labour; namely in the case when the advanced capital is turned over only once a year and the capital advanced is thus equal to the capital turned over in the course of the year, when therefore the ratio of the quantity of the surplus-value produced during the year to the capital employed during the year in this production coincides and is identical with the ratio of the quantity of surplus-value produced during the year to the capital advanced during the year. A) The annual rate of surplus-value is equal to the (quantity of surplus-value produced during the year) / (variable capital advanced) B) The annual rate of surplus-value is equal to the (real rate of surplus-value variable capital advanced n) / (variable capital advanced) Only when n is equal to 1, that is, when the variable capital advanced is turned over only once a year, and hence equal to the capital employed or turned over during a year, the annual rate of surplus-value is equal to its real rate. Let us call the annual rate of surplus-value S', the real rate of surplus-value s', the advanced variable capital v, the number of turnovers n. Then S' = s'vn/v = s'n. In other words, S' is equal to s'n, and it is equal to s' only when n = 1, and hence S' = s' times 1, or s'. It follows furthermore that the annual rate of surplus-value is always equal to s'n, i.e., to the real rate of surplus-value produced in one period of turnover by the variable capital consumed during that period, multiplied by the number of turnovers of this variable capital during one year, or (what amounts to the same) multiplied by its inverted time of turnover calculated for one year. (If the variable capital is turnover over ten times per year, then its time of turnover is 1/10 of a year; its inverted time of turnover therefore 10/1 or 10.) It follows furthermore that S' = s' when n is equal to 1. S' is greater than s' when n is greater than 1; i.e., when the advanced capital is turned over more than once a year or the turned-over capital is greater than the capital advanced. Finally, S' is smaller than s' when n is smaller than 1, that is, when the capital turned over during the year is only a part of the advanced capital, so that the period of turnover is longer than one year. Let us dwell a moment on this last case. We retain all the premises of our former illustration, except that the period of turnover is lengthened to 55 weeks. The labour-process requires a variable capital of 100 per week, hence 5,500 for the period of turnover, and produces every week 100s; s' is therefore 100%, as before. The number of turnovers, n, is here 50/55 or 10/11, because the time of turnover is 1 plus 1/10 of the year (of 50 weeks), or 11/10 years. S' = 100% 5,500 10/11 / 5,500 = 100 10/11 = 1000/11 = 90 10/11%. It is therefore smaller than 100%. Indeed, if the annual rate of surplus-value were 100%, then during the year 5,500v would produce 5,500s, whereas 10/11 years are required for that. The 5,500v produce only 5,000s during one year, therefore the annual rate of surplus-value is 5,000s/5,500v, or 10/11 or 90 10/11%. The annual rate of surplus-value, or the comparison between the surplus-value produced during one year and the variable capital advanced in general (as distinguished from the variable capital turned over during the year), is therefore not merely subjective comparison; the actual movement of the capital itself gives rise to this contraposition. So far as the owner of capital A is concerned, his advanced variable capital of 500 has returned to him at the end of the year, and 5,000 of surplus-value in addition. It is not the quantity of capital employed by him during the year, but the quantity returning to him periodically that expresses the magnitude of his advanced capital. It is immaterial for the present issue whether at the end of the year the capital exists partly as a productive supply, or partly as money- or commodity-capital, and in what proportions it may have been divided into these different parts. So far as the owner of capital B is concerned, 5,000, his advanced capital, has returned to him besides 5,000 in surplus-value. For the owner of capital C (the last considered, worth 5,500) surplus-value to the amount of 5,000 has been produced during the year ( 5,000 invested and rate of surplus-value 100%), but his advanced capital has not yet returned to him, nor has his produced surplus-value. S' = s'n indicates that the rate of surplus-value valid for the variable capital employed during one period of turnover, to wit, (quantity of s produced in one turnover period) / (variable capital employed in one turnover period) We have already seen (Buch I, Kap. IV [English edition: Part II. Ed.]) (The Transformation of Money into Capital), and furthermore (Buch I, Kap. XXI [English edition: Ch. XXIII. Ed.]) (Simple Reproduction), that the capital-value is in general advanced, not expended, as this value, having passed through the various phases of its circuit, returns to its point of departure, and at that enriched by surplus-value. This characterises it as advanced. The time that elapses from the moment of its departure to the moment of its return is the time for which it was advanced. The entire circular movement described by capital-value, measured by the time from its advance to its return, constitutes its turnover, and the duration of this turnover is a period of turnover. When this period has expired and the circuit is completed, the same capital-value can renew the same circuit, can therefore expand anew, can create surplus-value. If the variable capital is turned over ten times in one year, as in the case of capital A, then the same advance of capital begets in the course of one year ten times the quantity of surplus-value that corresponds to one period of turnover. One must get a clear conception of the nature of this advance from the standpoint of capitalist society. Capital A, which is annually turned over ten times, is advanced ten times during one year. It is advanced anew for every new period of turnover. But at the same time, during the year A never advances more than this same capital-value of 500 and in actual fact never disposes of more than these 500 for the productive process examined by us. As soon as these 500 have completed one circuit A makes them start anew the same circuit; by its very nature capital preserves its character of capital only because it always functions as capital in successive production processes. It is, moreover, never advanced for more than five weeks. Should the turnover last longer, it proves inadequate. Should the turnover be curtailed, a part becomes superfluous. Not ten capitals of 500 are advanced, but one capital of 500 is advanced ten times at successive intervals. The annual rate of surplus-value is therefore not calculated for ten advances of a capital of 500 or for 5,000, but for one advance of a capital of 500. It is the same as if one shilling circulates ten times and yet never represents more than one single shilling in circulation, although it performs the function of 10 shillings. But in the pocket which holds it after each change of hands it retains the same identical value of one shilling as before. In the same way capital A indicates at each successive return, and likewise on its return at the end of the year, that its owner has operated always with the same capital-value of 500. Hence only 500 return to him each time. His advanced capital is therefore never more than 500. Hence the advanced capital of 500 forms the denominator of the fraction which expresses the annual rate of surplus-value. We had for it the above formula S' = s'vn/v = s'n. Since the real rate of surplus-value, s', equals s/v, the quantity of surplus-value divided by the variable capital which produced it, we may substitute s/v for the value of s' in s'n, and get the other formula S' = sn/v. But by its ten-fold turnover and thus the ten-fold renewal of its advance, the capital of 500 performs the function of a ten times larger capital, of a capital of 5,000, just as 500 shillings which circulate ten times per year perform the same function as 5,000 shillings which circulate only once. In the case of capital A we have 10 five-week turnover periods. In the first period of turnover 500 of variable capital are advanced; i.e., 100 are weekly converted into labour-power, so that 500 are spent on labour-power at the end of the first turnover period. These 500, originally a part of the total capital advanced, have ceased to be capital. They are paid out in wages. The labourers in their turn pay them out in the purchase of means of subsistence, consuming means of subsistence worth 500. A quantity of commodities of that value is therefore annihilated; (what the labourer may save up in money, etc., is not capital either). As far as concerns the labourer, this quantity of commodities has been consumed unproductively, except inasmuch as it preserves the efficacy of his labour-power, an instrument indispensable to the capitalist. In the second place however these 500 have been transformed, for the capitalist, into labour-power of the same value (or price). Labour-power is consumed by him productively in the labour-process. At the end of 5 weeks a product valued at 1,000 has been created. Half of this, 500, is the reproduced value of the variable capital expended in payment of labour-power. The other half, 500, is newly produced surplus-value. But the 5-weekly labour-power, through exchange for which a portion of the capital was converted into variable capital, is likewise expended, consumed, although productively. The labour which was active yesterday is not the same that is active today. Its value plus that of surplus-value created by it exists now as the value of a thing distinct from labour-power, to wit, of a product. But by converting the product into money, that portion of its value which is equal to the value of variable capital advanced can once more be exchanged for labour-power and thus again function as variable capital. The fact that the same workmen, i.e., the same bearers of labour-power, are given employment not only by the reproduced capital-value but also by that which has been reconverted into the form is immaterial. It is possible for the capitalist to hire different workmen for the second period of turnover. In actual fact therefore a capital of 5,000, and not of 500, is expended successively in wages during the ten periods of turnover of 5 weeks each, and these wages will again be spent by the labourers to buy means of subsistence. The capital of 5,000 so advanced is consumed. It ceases to exist. On the other hand labour-power worth 5,000, not 500, is incorporated successively in the productive process and reproduces not only its own value of 5,000, but produces over and above that a surplus-value of 5,000. The variable capital of 500 advanced during the second period of turnover is not the identical capital of 500 that had been advanced during the first period of turnover. That has been consumed, spent in wages. But it is replaced by new variable capital of 500, which was produced in the first period of turnover in the form of commodities, and reconverted into money. This new money-capital of 500 is therefore the money-form of the quantity of commodities newly produced in the first period of turnover. The fact that an identical sum of money, 500, is again in the hands of the capitalist, i.e., apart from the surplus-value, precisely as much money-capital as he had originally advanced, conceals the circumstance that he is operating with newly produced capital. (As for the other constituents of value of the commodity-capital, which replace the constant parts of capital, their value is not newly produced, but only the form is changed in which this value exists.) Let us take the third period of turnover. Here it is evident that the capital of 500, advanced for a third time, is not an old but a newly produced capital, for it is the money-form of the quantity of commodities produced in the second, not the first, period of turnover, i.e., of that portion of this quantity of commodities whose value is equal to that of the advanced variable capital. The quantity of commodities produced in the first period of turnover is sold. A part of its value equal to the variable portion of the value of the advanced capital was transformed into the new labour-power of the second period of turnover; it produced a new quantity of commodities, which were sold in their turn and a portion of whose value constitutes the capital of 500 advanced in the third turnover period. And so forth during the ten periods of turnover. In the course of these, newly produced quantities of commodities (whose value, inasmuch as it replaces variable capital, is also newly produced, and does not merely re-appear as in the case of the constant circulating part of the capital) are thrown upon the market every 5 weeks, in order to incorporate ever new labour-power in the process of production. Therefore what is accomplished by the ten-fold turnover of the advanced variable capital of 500 is not that this capital of 500 can be productively consumed ten times, or that a variable capital lasting for 5 weeks can be employed for 50 weeks. Rather, ten times 500 of variable capital is employed in the 50 weeks, and the capital of 500 always lasts only for 5 weeks and must be replaced at the end of the 5 weeks by a newly produced capital of 500. This applies equally to capitals A and B. But at this point the difference begins. At the end of the first period of 5 weeks a variable capital of 500 has been advanced and expended by B as well as A. Both A and B have converted its value into labour-power and replaced it by that portion of the value of the product newly created by this labour-power which is equal to the value of the advanced variable capital of 500. For both B and A the labour-power has not only replaced the value of the expended variable capital of 500 by a new value of the same amount, but also added a surplus-value which, according to our assumption, is of the same magnitude. But in the case of B the value-product, which replaces the advanced variable capital and adds to it a surplus-value, is not in the form in which it can function anew as productive, or variable, capital. It is in such a form in the case of A. And up to the end of the year B does not possess the variable capital expended in the first 5 and every subsequent 5 weeks (although it has been replaced by newly produced value plus surplus-value) in the form in which it can again function as productive, or variable, capital. True, its value is replaced by new value, hence renewed, but the form of its value (in this case the absolute form of value, its money-form) is not renewed. For the second period of 5 weeks (and thus for every succeeding 5 weeks of the year) another 500 must again be available, the same as for the first period. Hence, regardless of credit conditions, 5,000 must be available at the beginning of the year as a latent advanced money-capital, although they are really expended, turned into labour-power, only gradually, in the course of the year. But because in the case of A the circuit, the turnover of the advanced capital, is consummated, the replacement value after the lapse of the first 5 weeks is already in the form in which it can set new labour-power in motion for a term of 5 weeks in its original form, the money-form. In cases of both A and B new labour-power is consumed in the second 5-week period and a new capital of 500 is spent in payment of this labour-power. The means of subsistence of the labourers, paid with the first 500, are gone; at all events their value has vanished from the hands of the capitalist. With the second 500 new labour-power is bought, new means of subsistence withdrawn from the market. In short, it is a new capital of 500 that is being expended, not the old. But in the case of A this new capital of 500 is the money-form of the newly produced substitute for the value of the formerly expended 500, while in the case of B, this substitute is in a form in which it cannot function as variable capital. It is there, but not in the form of variable capital. For the continuation of the process of production for the next 5 weeks an additional capital of 500 must therefore be available and advanced in the here indispensable form of money. Thus, during 50 weeks, both A and B expend an equal amount of variable capital, pay for and consume an equal quantity of labour-power. Only, B must pay for it with an advanced capital equal to its total value of 5,000, while A pays for it successively with the ever renewed money-form of the value-substitute, produced every 5 weeks, for the capital of 500 advanced for every 5 weeks, i.e., never more than that advanced for the first 5 weeks, viz., 500. These 500 last for the entire year. It is therefore clear that, the degree of exploitation of labour and the real rate of surplus-value being the same, the annual rates (of surplus-value) of A and B must be inversely proportional to the magnitudes of the variable money-capitals which have to be advanced in order to set in motion the same amount of labour-power during the year. A: 5,000s/500v = 1,000%; B: 5,000s/5,000v = 100%. But 500v : 5,000v = 1 : 10 = 100% : 1,000%. The conversion, sooner or later, of the value-substitute into money, and thus into the form in which variable capital is advanced, is obviously an immaterial circumstance, so far as the production of surplus-value itself is concerned. This production depends on the magnitude of variable capital employed and the degree of exploitation of labour. But that circumstance modifies the magnitude of the money-capital which must be advanced in order to set a definite quantum of labour-power in motion during the year, and therefore it determines the annual rate of surplus-value. The shorter the period of turnover of capital the shorter therefore the intervals at which it is reproduced throughout the year the quicker is the variable portion of the capital, originally advanced by the capitalist in the form of money, transformed into the money-form of the value (including, besides, surplus-value) created by the labourer to replace this variable capital; the shorter is the time for which the capitalist must advance money out of his own funds, and the smaller is the capital advanced by him in general in proportion to the given scale of production; and the greater comparatively is the quantity of surplus-value which he extracts during the year with a given rate of surplus-value, because he can buy the labourer so much more frequently with the money-form of the value created by that labourer and can so much more frequently set his labour into motion again. If the scale of production is given, the absolute magnitude of the advanced variable money-capital (and of the circulating capital in general) decreased proportionately to the decrease of the turnover period, while the annual rate of surplus-value increases. If the magnitude of the advanced capital is given, the scale of production grows; hence, if the rate of surplus-value is given, the absolute quantity of surplus-value created in one period of turnover likewise grows, simultaneously with the rise in the annual rate of surplus-value effected by the shortening of the periods of reproduction. It generally follows from the foregoing investigation that the different lengths of the turnover periods make it necessary for money-capital to be advanced in very different amounts in order to set in motion the same quantity of productive circulating capital and the same quantity of labour with the same degree of exploitation of labour. On the other hand pressure on society s available productive capital. Since elements of productive capital are for ever being withdrawn from the market and only an equivalent in money is thrown on the market in their place, the effective demand rises without itself furnishing any element of supply. Hence a rise in the prices of productive materials as well as means of subsistence. To this must be added that stock-jobbing is a regular practice and capital is transferred on a large scale. A band of speculators, contractors, engineers, lawyers, etc., enrich themselves. They create a strong demand for articles of consumption on the market, wages rising at the same time. So far as foodstuffs are involved, agriculture too is stimulated. But as these foodstuffs cannot be suddenly increased in the course of the year, their import grows, just as that of exotic foods in general (coffee, sugar, wine, etc.) and of articles of luxury. Hence excessive imports and speculation in this line of the import business. Meanwhile, in those branches of industry in which production can be rapidly expanded (manufacture proper, mining, etc.), climbing prices give rise to sudden expansion soon followed by collapse. The same effect is produced in the labour-market, attracting great numbers of the latent relative surplus-population, and even of the employed labourers, to the new lines of business. In general such large-scale undertakings as railways withdraw a definite quantity of labour-power from the labour-market, which can come only from such lines of business as agriculture, etc., where only strong lads are needed. This still continues even after the new enterprises have become established lines of business and the migratory working-class needed for them has already been formed, as for instance in the case of temporary rise above the average in the scale of railway construction. A portion of the reserve army of labourers, which keep wages down, is absorbed. A general rise in wages ensues, even in the hitherto well employed sections of the labour-market. This lasts until the inevitable crash again releases the reserve army of labour and wages are once more depressed to their minimum, and lower. Inasmuch as the length, great or small, of the period of turnover depends on the working period proper, that is, the period necessary to get the product ready for the market, it is based on the existing material conditions of production specific for the various investments of capital. In agriculture they assume more of the character of natural conditions of production, in manufacture and the greater part of the mining industry they vary with the social development of the process of production itself. Inasmuch as the length of the working period depends on the size of the supply (the quantitative volume in which the product is generally thrown upon the market as commodities), it is conventional in character. But the convention itself has its material basis in the scale of production, and is therefore accidental only when examined singly. Finally, inasmuch as the length of the turnover period hinges on that of the period of circulation, it is partly dependent on the incessant change of market conditions, the greater or lesser ease of selling, and the resultant necessity of disposing of part of the product in nearer or remoter markets. Apart from the volume of the demand in general, the movement of prices is here of cardinal importance since sales are intentionally restricted when prices are falling, while production proceeds; vice versa, production and sales keep pace when prices are rising or sales can be made in advance. But we must consider the actual distance of the place of production from the market as the real material basis. For instance English cotton goods or yarn are sold to India. Suppose the exporter himself pays the English cotton manufacturer (the exporter does so willingly only if the money-market is strong. But when the manufacturer himself replaces his money-capital by some credit transaction, things are not so good). The exporter sells his cotton goods later in the Indian market, from where his advanced capital is remitted to him. Up to this remittance the case runs the very same course as when the length of the working period necessitated the advance of new money-capital to maintain the production process on a given scale. The money-capital with which the manufacturer pays his labourers and renews the other elements of his circulating capital is not the money-form of the yarn produced by him. This cannot be the case until the value of this yarn has returned to England in the form of money or products. It is additional money-capital as before. The only difference is that instead of the manufacturer, it is advanced by the merchant, who in turn may well have obtained it by means of credit operations. Similarly, before this money is thrown on the market, or simultaneously with this, no additional product has been put on the English market that could be bought with this money and would enter the sphere of productive or individual consumption. If this situation continues for a rather long period of time and on a rather large scale, it must have the same effect as the previously mentioned prolongation of the working period. Now it may be that in India the yarn is again sold on credit. With this credit products are bought in India and sent as return shipment to England or drafts remitted for this amount. If this condition is protracted, the Indian money-market comes under pressure and the reaction on England may here produce a crisis. This crisis, in its turn, even if connected with bullion export to India, calls forth a new crisis in that country on account of the bankruptcy of English firms and their Indian branches, which had received credit from Indian banks. Thus a crisis occurs simultaneously in the market in which the balance of trade is favourable, as well as in the one in which it is unfavourable. This phenomenon may be still more complicated. Assume for instance that England has sent silver bullion to India but India s English creditors are not urgently collecting their debts in that country, and India will soon after have to ship its silver bullion back to England. It is possible that the export trade to India and the import trade from India may approximately balance each other, although the volume of the import trade (except under special circumstances, such as a scarcity of cotton, etc.) is determined and stimulated by the export trade. The balance of trade between England and India may seem equilibrated or may disclose slight oscillations in either direction. But as soon as the crisis breaks out in England it turns out that unsold cotton goods are stored in India (hence have not been transformed from commodity-capital into money-capital an over-production to this extent), and that on the other hand there are stored up in England unsold supplies of Indian goods, and moreover, a great portion of the sold and consumed supplies is not yet paid. Hence what appears as a crisis on the money-market is in reality an expression of abnormal conditions in the very process of production and reproduction.

Economic Manuscripts: Capital: Volume Two

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1885-c2/ch16.htm

But there are furthermore necessarily differences in the capitalisation of surplus-value, in accumulation, and also in the quantity of surplus-value produced during the year, while the rate of surplus-value remains the same. To begin with, we note that capital A (in the illustration of the preceding chapter) has a current periodical revenue, so that with the exception of the period of turnover inaugurating the business, it pays for its own consumption within the year out of its production of surplus-value, and need not cover it by advances out of its own funds. But the latter has to be done in the case of B. While it produces as much surplus-value in the same intervals of time as A, the surplus-value is not realised and therefore cannot be consumed either productively or individually. So far as individual consumption is concerned, the surplus-value is anticipated. Funds for that purpose must be advanced. One portion of the productive capital, which it is difficult to classify namely the additional capital required for the repair and maintenance of the fixed capital, is now likewise seen in a new light. In the case of A this portion of capital is not advanced in full or for the greater part at the beginning of production. It need not be available or even in existence. It comes out of the business itself by a direct transformation of surplus-value into capital, i.e., by its direct employment as capital. A part of the surplus-value which is not only periodically generated but also realised during the year can defray the expenditures that must be incurred for repairs, etc. A portion of the capital needed to carry on the business on its original scale is thus produced in the course of business by the business itself by means of capitalising part of the surplus-value. This is impossible for capital B. The portion of capital in question must in his case form a part of the capital originally advanced. In both cases this portion will figure in the books of the capitalists as an advanced capital, which it really is, since according to our assumption it forms a part of the productive capital required for maintaining the business on a certain scale. But it makes all the difference in the world out of which funds it is advanced. In the case of B it is really a part of the capital to be originally advanced or held available. In the case of A on the other hand it is a part of the surplus-value used as capital. This last case shows that not only the accumulated capital but also a portion of the originally advanced capital may simply be capitalised surplus-value. As soon as the development of credit interferes, the relation between originally advanced capital and capitalised surplus-value becomes still more complicated. For instance from not having sufficient capital of his own at the very outset for this purpose, A borrows from banker C a portion of the productive capital with which he starts in business or continues it during the year. Banker C lends him a sum of money which consists only of surplus-value deposited with the banker by capitalists D, E, F, etc. As far as A is concerned there is as yet no question of accumulated capital. But with regard to D, E, F, etc., A is, in fact, nothing but an agent capitalising surplus-value appropriated by them. We have seen (Buch I, Kap. XXII) [English edition: Ch. XXIV. Ed.] that accumulation, the conversion of surplus-value into capital, is essentially a process of reproduction on a progressively increasing scale, whether this expansion is expressed extensively in the form of an addition of new factories to the old, or intensively by the enlargement of the existing scale of operation. The expansion of the scale of production may proceed in small portions, a part of the surplus-value being used for improvements which either simply increase the productive power of the labour employed or permit at the same time of its more intensive exploitation. Or, where the working-day is not legally limited, an additional expenditure of circulating capital (in materials of production and wages) suffices to enhance the production scale without an expansion of the fixed capital, whose daily time of employment is thus merely lengthened, while its period of turnover is correspondingly shortened. Or the capitalised surplus-value may, under favourable market conditions, permit of speculation in raw materials, operations for which the capital originally advanced would not have been sufficient, etc. However it is clear that in cases where the greater number of periods of turnover brings with it a more frequent realisation of surplus-value during the year, there will be periods in which there can be neither a prolongation of the working-day nor an introduction of improvements in details; on the other hand a proportional expansion of the whole business, partly by expanding its entire plant, the buildings for example, partly by enlarging the cultivated areas in agriculture, is possible only within certain more or less narrow limits and, besides, requires such a volume of additional capital as can be supplied only by several years accumulation of surplus-value. Along with the real accumulation or conversion of surplus-value into productive capital (and a corresponding reproduction on an extended scale), there is, then, an accumulation of money, a raking together of a portion of the surplus-value in the form of latent money-capital, which is not intended to function as additional active capital until later, when it swells to a certain volume. That is how the matter looks from the standpoint of the individual capitalist. But simultaneously with the development of capitalist production the credit system also develops. The money-capital which the capitalist cannot as yet employ in his own business is employed by others, who pay him interest for its use. It serves him as money-capital in its specific meaning, as a kind of capital distinguished from productive capital. But it serves as capital in another s hands. It is plain that with the more frequent realisation of surplus-value and the rising scale on which it is produced, there is an increase in the proportion of new money-capital or money as capital thrown upon the money-market and then absorbed at least the greater part of it by extended production. The simplest form in which the additional latent money-capital may be represented is that of a hoard. It may be that this hoard is additional gold or silver secured directly or indirectly in exchange with countries producing precious metals. And only in this manner does the hoarded money in a country grow absolutely. On the other hand it may be and is so in the majority of cases that this hoard is nothing but money which has been withdrawn from circulation at home and has assumed the form of a hoard in the hands of individual capitalists. It is furthermore possibly that this latent money-capital consists only of tokens of value we still ignore credit-money at this point or of mere claims of capitalists (titles) against third persons conferred by legal documents. In all such cases, whatever may be the form of existence of this additional money-capital, it represents, so far as it is capital in spe, nothing but additional and reserved legal titles of capitalists to future annual additional social production. There is either reproduction on a simple scale. Or there is capitalisation of surplus-value, accumulation. The circumstance that the value of the product consists in part of surplus-value and in part of that portion of value which is formed by the variable capital reproduced in the product plus the constant capital consumed by it, does not alter anything whatever either in the quantity or in the value of the total product, which constantly steps into circulation as commodity-capital and is just as constantly withdrawn from it, in order to be productively or individually consumed, i.e., to serve as means of production or consumption. If constant capital is left aside, only the distribution of the annual product between the labourers and the capitalists is affected thereby. Even if simple reproduction is assumed, a portion of the surplus-value must therefore always exist in the form of money and not of products, because otherwise it could not be converted for purposes of consumption from money into products. This conversion of the surplus-value from its original commodity-form into money must be further analysed at this place. In order to simplify the matter, we shall presuppose the most elementary form of the problem, namely the exclusive circulation of metal coin, of money which is a real equivalent. According to the laws of the simple circulation of commodities (developed in Buch I, Kap. III), [English edition: Volume I, Ch. III. Ed.] the mass of the metal coin existing in a country must not only be sufficient to circulate the commodities, but must also suffice to meet the currency fluctuations, which arise partly from fluctuations in the velocity of the circulation, partly from a change in the prices of commodities, partly from the various and varying proportions in which the money functions as a medium of payment or as a medium of circulation proper. The proportion in which the existing quantity of money is split into a hoard and money in circulation varies continually, but the total quantity of money is always equal to the sum of the money hoarded and the money circulating. This quantity of money (quantity of precious metal) is a gradually accumulated hoard of society. Since a portion of this hoard is consumed by wear and tear, it must be replaced annually, the same as any other product. This takes place in reality by a direct or indirect exchange of a part of the annual product of a particular country for the product of countries producing gold and silver. However, this international character of the transaction conceals its simple course. In order to reduce the problem to its simplest and most lucid expression, it must be assumed that the production of gold and silver takes place in that particular country itself, that therefore the production of gold and silver constitutes a part of the total social production within every country. Apart from the gold and silver produced for articles of luxury, the minimum of their annual production must be equal to the wear of metal coin annually occasioned by the circulation of money. Furthermore, if the sum of the values of the annually produced and circulating quantity of commodities increases, the annual production of gold and silver must likewise increase, inasmuch as the increased sum of values of the circulating commodities and the quantity of money required for their circulation (and the corresponding formation of a hoard) are not made good by a greater velocity of money currency and a more comprehensive function of money as a medium of payment, i.e., by a greater mutual balancing of purchases and sales without the intervention of actual money. A portion of the social labour-power and a portion of the social means of production must therefore be expended annually in the production of gold and silver. The capitalists who are engaged in the production of gold and silver and who, according to our assumption of simple reproduction, carry on their production only within the bounds of the annual average wear and tear and the annual average consumption of gold and silver entailed thereby throw their surplus-value which they consume annually, according to our assumption, without capitalising any of it directly into circulation in the money-form, which is its natural form; unlike the other branches of production, where it is the converted form of the product. Furthermore, as far as wages are concerned the money-form in which the variable capital is advanced they are also not replaced by the sale of the product, by its conversion into money, but by a product itself whose natural form is from the outset that of money. Finally the same applies also to that portion of the product of precious metals which is equal to the value of the periodically consumed constant capital, both the constant circulating and constant fixed capital consumed during the year. Let us consider the circuit, or turnover, of the capital invested in the production of precious metals first in the form of M C ... P ... M'. Since C in M C consists not only of labour-power and means of production but also of fixed capital, only a part of whose value is consumed in P, it is evident that M', the product, is a sum of money equal to the variable capital laid out in wages plus the circulating constant capital laid out in means of production plus a portion of the value equivalent to the worn-out fixed capital plus the surplus-value. If the sum were smaller, the general value of gold remaining the same, then the mine would be unproductive or, if this got to be generally the case, the value of gold compared with the value of commodities that remains unchanged would subsequently rise; i.e., the prices of commodities would fall, so that henceforth the amount of money laid out in M C would be smaller. If we consider at first only the circulating portion of capital advanced in M, the starting-point of M C ... P ... M', we find that a certain sum of money is advanced, thrown into circulation for the payment of labour-power and the purchase of materials of production. But this sum is not withdrawn from circulation by the circuit of this capital, in order to be thrown into it anew. The product is money even in its bodily form; there is no need therefore of transforming it into money by means of exchange, by a process of circulation. It passes from the process of production into the sphere of circulation, not in the form of commodity-capital which has to be reconverted in money-capital, but as money-capital which is to be reconverted into productive capital, i.e., which is to buy fresh labour-power and materials of production. The money-form of the circulating capital consumed in labour-power and means of production is replaced, not by the sale of the product, but by the bodily form of the product itself; hence, not by once more withdrawing its value from circulation in money-form, but by additional newly produced money. Let us suppose that this circulating capital is 500, the period of turnover 5 weeks, the working period 4 weeks, the period of circulation only 1 week. From the outset, money for 5 weeks must be partly advanced for a productive supply, and partly be ready to be paid out gradually in wages. At the beginning of the 6th week, 400 will have returned and 100 will have been released. This is constantly repeated. Here, as in previous cases, 100 will always be found in released form during a certain time of the turnover. But they consist of additional, newly produced, money, the same as the other 400. We have in this case 10 turnovers per year and the annual product is 5,000 in gold. (The period of circulation is not constituted, in this case, by the time required for the conversion of commodities into money, but by that required for the conversion of money into the elements of production.) In the case of every other capital of 500 turned over under the same conditions, the ever renewed money-form is the converted form of the commodity-capital produced and thrown into circulation every 4 weeks and which by its sale that is to say, by a periodical withdrawal of the quantity of money it represented when it originally entered into the process assumes this money-form anew over and over again. Here, on the contrary, in every turnover period a new additional 500 in money is thrown from the process of production itself into circulation, in order to withdraw from it continually materials of production and labour-power. This money thrown into circulation is not withdrawn from it again by the circuit which this capital describes, but is rather increased by quantities of gold constantly produced anew. Let us look at the variable portion of this circulating capital, and assume that it is, as before, 100. Then these 100 would be sufficient in the ordinary production of these commodities, with 10 turnovers, to pay continually for the labour-power. Here, in the production of gold, the same amount is sufficient. But the 100 of the reflux, with which the labour-power is paid every 5 weeks, are not a converted form of its product but a portion of this ever renewed product itself. The producer of gold pays his labourers directly with a portion of the gold they themselves produced. The 1,000 thus expended annually in labour-power and thrown by the labourers into circulation do not return therefore via this circulation to their starting-point. Furthermore, so far as the fixed capital is concerned, it requires the investment of a comparatively large money-capital on the original establishment of the business, and this capital is thus thrown into circulation. Like all fixed capital it returns only piecemeal in the course of years. But it returns as a direct portion of the product, of the gold, not by the sale of the product and its consequent conversion into money. In other words, it gradually assumes its money-form not by a withdrawal of money from the circulation but by an accumulation of a corresponding portion of the product. The money-capital so restored is not a quantity of money gradually withdrawn from the circulation to compensate for the sum originally thrown into it for the fixed capital. It is an additional sum of money. Finally, as concerns the surplus-value, it is likewise equal to a certain portion of the new gold product, which is thrown into the circulation in every new period of turnover in order to be unproductively expended, according to our assumption, on means of subsistence and articles of luxury. But according to our assumption, the entire annual production of gold which continually withdraws labour-power and materials of production, but no money, from the market, while continuously adding fresh quantities of money to it merely replaces the money worn out during the year, hence only keeps intact the quantity of social money which exists constantly, although in varying portions, in the two forms of hoarded money and money in circulation. According to the law of the circulation of commodities, the quantity of money must be equal to the amount of money required for circulation plus a certain amount held in the form of a hoard, which increases or decreases as the circulation contracts or expands, and serves especially for the formation of the requisite reserve funds of means of payment. What must be paid in money in so far as there is no balancing of accounts is the value of the commodities. The fact that a portion of this value consists of surplus-value, that is to say, did not cost the seller of the commodities anything, does not alter the matter in any way. Let us suppose that the producers are all independent owners of their means of production, so that circulation takes place between the immediate producers themselves. Apart from the constant portion of their capital, their annual value-product might then be divided into two parts, analogous with capitalist conditions: Part a, replacing only the necessary means of subsistence, and part b, consumed partly in articles of luxury, partly for an expansion of production. Part a then represents the variable capital, part b the surplus-value. But this division would remain without influence on the magnitude of the sum of money required for the circulation of their total product. Other circumstances remaining equal, the value of the circulating mass of commodities would be the same, and thus also the amount of money required for that value. They would also have to have the same money-reserves if the turnover periods are equally divided, i.e., the same portion of their capital would always have to be held in the form of money, because their production, according to our assumption, would be commodity production, the same as before. Hence the fact that a portion of the value of the commodities consists of surplus-value would change absolutely nothing in the quantity of the money required for the running of the business. An opponent of Tooke, who clings to the formula M C M', asks him how the capitalist manages always to withdraw more money from circulation than he throws into it. Mind you! The question at issue here is not the formation of surplus-value. This, the only secret, is a matter of course from the capitalist standpoint. The sum of values employed would not be capital if it did not enrich itself by means of surplus-value. But as it is capital by assumption, surplus-value is taken for granted. The question, then, is not where the surplus-value comes from but whence the money comes into which it is turned. But in bourgeois economics, the existence of surplus-value is self-understood. It is therefore not only assumed but also connected with the further assumption that a part of the mass of commodities thrown into circulation is a surplus-product, hence representing a value which the capitalist did not throw into circulation as part of his capital; that, consequently, with his product the capitalist throws into circulation a surplus over and above his capital, and that he withdraws this surplus from it. The commodity-capital, which the capitalist throws into circulation, has a greater value (it is not explained and remains obscure where this comes from, but the above Political Economy considers it a fact) than the productive capital which he withdrew from circulation in the form of labour-power plus means of production. On the basis of this assumption it is evident why not only capitalist A, but also B, C, D, etc., are always able to withdraw more value from circulation by the exchange of their commodities than the value of the capital originally and repeatedly advanced by them. A, B, C, D, and the rest continuously throw a greater commodity-value into circulation in the form of commodity-capital this operation is as many-sided as the various independently functioning capitals than they withdraw from it in the form of productive capital. Hence they have constantly to divide among themselves a sum of values (i.e., everyone, on his part, has to withdraw from circulation a productive capital) equal to the sum of values of the productive capitals they respectively advanced; and just as constantly they have to divide among themselves a sum of values which they all, from all sides, throw into circulation in the form of commodities representing the respective excesses of the commodity-values above the values of their elements of production. But the commodity-capital must be turned into money before its reconversion into productive capital and before the surplus-value contained in it is spent. Where does the money for this purpose come from? This question seems difficult at the first glance and neither Tooke nor any one else has answered it so far. Let the circulating capital of 500 advanced in the form of money-capital, whatever its period of turnover, now stand for the total circulating capital of society, that is, of the capitalist class. Let the surplus-value be 100. How can the entire capitalist class manage to draw continually 600 out of circulation, when it continually throws only 500 into it? After the money-capital of 500 has been converted into productive capital, the latter transforms itself within the process of production into commodities worth 600 and there are in circulation not only commodities valued at 500, equal to the money-capital originally advanced, but also a newly produced surplus-value of 100. This additional surplus-value of 100 is thrown into circulation in the form of commodities. No doubt about that. But such an operation does not by any means furnish the additional money for the circulation of this additional commodity-value. It will not do to obviate this difficulty by plausible subterfuges. For instance: So far as the constant circulating capital is concerned, it is obvious that not all invest it simultaneously. While capitalist A sells his commodities, so that his advanced capital assumes the form of money, there is on the other hand the available money-capital of the buyer B which assumes the form of his means of production precisely what A is producing. By the same act through which A restores the money-form to his produced commodity-capital, B returns his capital to its productive form, transforms it from money-form into means of production and labour-power; the same amount of money functions in the two-sided process as in every simple purchase C M. On the other hand when A reconverts his money into means of production, he buys from C, and this man pays B with it, etc., and thus the transaction would be explained. But: None of the laws established with reference to the quantity of the circulating money in the circulation of commodities (Buch I, Kap. III), [English edition: Volume I, Ch. III. Ed.] are changed in any way by the capitalist character of the process of production. Hence, when one says that the circulating capital of society to be advanced in the form of money amounts to 500, one has already taken into account that this is on the one hand the sum simultaneously advanced, and that on the other hand it sets in motion more productive capital than 500 because it serves alternately as the money-form of various productive capitals. This manner of explanation, then, assumes the money, whose existence it is called upon to explain, as already existing. It might be further said: Capitalist A produces articles which capitalist B consumes individually, unproductively. B s money therefore turns A s commodity-capital into money and thus the same sum of money serves to realise B s surplus-value and A s circulating constant capital. But in that case the question that still awaits solution is assumed still more directly to have been solved, namely: where does B get the money that makes up his revenue? How did he himself realise this portion of the surplus-value of his product? It might also be said that the part of the circulating variable capital which A steadily advances to his labourers returns to him steadily from the circulation, and only a varying part of it always stays with him for the payment of wages. But a certain time elapses between the expenditure and the reflux, and meanwhile the money paid out for wages might, among other uses, serve for the realisation of surplus-value. But we know in the first place that the longer this time the greater must be the supply of money which capitalist A must keep constantly in petto. In the second place the labourer spends the money, buys commodities for it and thus converts into money pro tanto the surplus-value contained in them. Consequently the same money that is advanced in the form of variable capital serves pro tanto also the purpose of turning surplus-value into money. Without penetrating any further into the question at this point, let this suffice: the consumption of the entire capitalist class and its retainers keeps step with that of the working-class; hence simultaneously with the money thrown into circulation by the labourers the capitalists too must throw money into it, in order to spend their surplus-value as revenue. Hence money must be withdrawn from circulation for it. This explanation would serve merely to reduce, but not eliminate, the quantity of money required. Finally, it might be said: A large amount of money is constantly thrown into circulation when fixed capital is first invested, and it is recovered from the circulation only gradually, piecemeal, after a lapse of years, by him who threw it into circulation. Cannot this sum suffice to convert the surplus-value into money? The answer to this must be that perhaps the sum of 500 (which includes hoard formation for needed reserve funds) implies its employment as fixed capital, if not by him who threw it into circulation, then by somebody else. Besides, it is already assumed in regard to the amount expended for the procurement of products serving as fixed capital that the surplus-value contained in them is also paid, and the question is precisely where this money comes from. The general reply has already been given: If a mass of commodities worth x times 1,000 has to circulate, it changes absolutely nothing in the quantity of the money required for this circulation whether the value of this mass of commodities has been produced capitalistically or not. The problem itself therefore does not exist. All other conditions being given, such as velocity of the currency of money, etc., a definite sum of money is required in order to circulate commodities worth x times 1,000 quite independently of how much or how little of this value falls to the share of the direct producers of these commodities. So far as any problem exists here, it coincides with the general problem: Where does the money required for the circulation of the commodities of a country come from? However, from the point of view of capitalist production, the semblance of a special problem does indeed exist. In the present case it is the capitalist who appears as the point of departure, who throws money into circulation. The money which the labourer expends for the payment of his means of subsistence existed previously as the money-form of the variable capital and was therefore thrown originally into circulation by the capitalist as a means of buying or paying for the labour-power. The capitalist furthermore throws into circulation the money which constitutes originally the money-form of his constant, fixed and circulating, capital; he expends it as a means of purchase or payment for instruments of labour and materials of production. But beyond this the capitalist no longer appears as the starting-point of the quantity of money in circulation. Now, there are only two points of departure: the capitalist and the labourer. All third categories of persons must either receive money for their services from these two classes or, to the extent that they receive it without any services in return, they are joint owners of the surplus-value in the form of rent, interest, etc. That the surplus-value does not all stay in the pocket of the industrial capitalist but must be shared by him with other persons, has nothing to do with the present question. The question is how he turns his surplus-value into money, not how the proceeds are later divided. For our purposes the capitalist may as well still be regarded as the sole owner of the surplus-value. As for the labourer, it has already been said that he is but the secondary, while the capitalist is the primary, starting-point of the money thrown by the labourer into circulation. The money first advanced as variable capital is going through its second circulation when the labourer spends it to pay for means of subsistence. The capitalist class remains consequently the sole point of departure of the circulation of money. If they need 400 for the payment of means of production and 100 for the payment of labour-power, they throw 500 into circulation. But the surplus-value incorporated in the product, with a rate of surplus-value incorporated in the product, with a rate of surplus-value of 100%, is equal in value to 100. How can they continually draw 600 out of circulation, when they continually throw only 500 into it? Nothing comes from nothing. The capitalist class as a whole cannot draw out of circulation what was not previously thrown into it. We disregard here the fact that the sum of 400 may suffice, when turned over ten times, to circulate means of production valued at 4,000 and labour-power valued at 1,000, and that the other 100 may likewise suffice for the circulation of 1,000 worth of surplus-value. The ratio of the sum of money to the value of commodities circulated by it is immaterial here. The problem remains the same. Unless the same pieces of money circulate several times, a capital of 5,000 must be thrown into circulation, and 1,000 is required to convert the surplus-value into money. The question is where this money comes from, whether it is 1,000 or 100. In any event it is in excess of the money-capital thrown into the circulation. Indeed, paradoxical as it may appear at first sight, it is the capitalist class itself that throws the money into circulation which serves for the realisation of the surplus-value incorporated in the commodities. But, nota bene, it does not throw it into circulation as advanced money, hence not as capital. It spends it as a means of purchase for its individual consumption. The money is not therefore advanced by the capitalist class, although it is the point of departure of its circulation. Let us take some individual capitalist who is starting in business, a farmer for instance. During the first year, he advances a money-capital of, say, 5,000, paying 4,000 for means of production, and 1,000 for labour-power. Let the rate of surplus-value be 100%, the amount of surplus-value appropriated by him 1,000. The above 5,000 comprise all the money he advances as money-capital. But the man must also live, and he does not take in any money until the end of the year. Take it that his consumption amounts to 1,000. These he must have in his possession. He may say that he has to advance himself these 1,000 during the first year. But this advance, which here has only a subjective meaning, denotes nothing else but that he must pay for his individual consumption during the first year out of his own pocket instead of defraying it out of the gratuitous production of his labourers. He does not advance this money as capital. He spends it, pays it out for an equivalent in means of subsistence which he consumes. This value has been spent by him in money, thrown into circulation and withdrawn from it in the form of commodity-values. These commodity-values he has consumed. He has thus ceased to bear any relation to their value. The money with which he paid for this value exists now as an element of the circulating money. But he has withdrawn the value of this money from circulation in the form of products; and this value is now destroyed together with the products in which it existed. It s all gone. But at the end of the year he throws commodities worth 6,000 into circulation and sells them. By this means he recovers: 1) his advanced money-capital of 5,000; 2) the realised surplus-value of 1,000. He has advanced as capital, has thrown into circulation, 5,000, and he withdraws from it 6,000 5,000 of which cover his capital, and 1,000 his surplus-value. The last 1,000 are turned into money with the money which he himself has thrown into circulation, which he did not advance, but spent as a consumer, not as a capitalist. They now return to him as the money-form of the surplus-value produced by him. And henceforth this operation is repeated every year. But beginning with the second year, the 1,000 which he spends are constantly the converted form, the money-form, of the surplus-value produced by him. He spends them annually and they return to him annually. If his capital were turned over more frequently a year, it would not alter this state of affairs, but would affect the length of time, and hence the amount which he would have to throw into circulation for his individual consumption over and above his advanced money-capital. This money is not thrown into circulation by the capitalist as capital. But it is a decided trait of the capitalist to be able to live on means in his possession until surplus-value begins to return. In the present case we assumed that the sum of money which the capitalist throws into circulation to pay for his individual consumption until the first returns of his capital is exactly equal to the surplus-value which he produced and hence must turn into money. This is obviously an arbitrary assumption so far as the individual capitalist is concerned. But it must be correct when applied to the entire capitalist class as simple reproduction is assumed. It only expresses the same thing as the assumption; namely, that the entire surplus-value, and it alone hence no fraction of the original capital stock is consumed unproductively. It had been previously assumed that the total production of precious metals (taken to be equal to 500) sufficed only for the replacement of the wear and tear of the money. The capitalists producing gold possess their entire product in gold that portion which replaces constant capital as well as that which replaces variable capital, and also that consisting of surplus-value. A portion of the social surplus-value therefore consists of gold, and not of a product which is turned into gold only in the process of circulation. It consists from the outset of gold and is thrown into circulation in order to draw products out of it. The same applies here to wages to variable capital, and to the replacement of the advanced constant capital. Hence, whereas one part of the capitalist class throws into circulation commodities greater in value (greater by the amount of the surplus-value) than the money-capital advanced by them, another part of the capitalists throws into circulation money of greater value (greater by the amount of surplus-value) than that of the commodities which they constantly withdraw from circulation for the production of gold. Whereas one part of the capitalists constantly pumps more money out of the circulation than it pours into it, the part that produces gold constantly pumps more money into it than it takes out in means of production. Although a part of this product of 500 in gold is surplus-value of the gold-producers, the entire sum is, nonetheless, intended only to replace the money necessary for the circulation of commodities. It is immaterial for this purpose how much of this gold turns into money the surplus-value incorporated in the commodities, and how much of it their other value constituents. Transferring the production of gold from one country to another produces no change whatever in the matter. One part of the social labour-power and the social means of production of country A is converted into a product, for instance linen, valued at 500, which is exported to country B in order to buy gold there. The productive capital thus employed in the country A throws no more commodities as distinct from money upon the market of country A than it would it if were employed directly in the production of gold. This product of A represents 500 in gold and enters into the circulation of this country only as money. That portion of the social surplus-value which is contained in this product exists for country A directly in the form of money, and never in any other form. Although for the gold-producing capitalists only a part of the product represents surplus-value, and another part of the replacement capital, still the question of how much of this gold, outside the circulating constant capital, replaces variable capital and how much of it represents surplus-value depends exclusively on the respective ratios of wages and surplus-value to the value of the circulating commodities. The part which forms surplus-value is distributed among the diverse members of the capitalist class. Although that part is continually spent by them for individual consumption and recovered by the sale of new products it is precisely this purchase and sale that circulates among them the money required for the conversion of the surplus-value into money there is nevertheless a portion of the social surplus-value, in the form of money, even if in varying proportions, in the pockets of the capitalists, just as a portion of the wages stays at least during part of the week in the pockets of the labourers in the form of money. And this part is not limited by that part of the money product which originally forms the surplus-value of the gold-producing capitalists, but, as we have said, is limited by the proportion in which the above product of 500 is generally distributed between capitalists and labourers, and in which the commodity-supply to be circulated consists of surplus-value and the other constituents of value. However, that portion of surplus-value which does not exist in other commodities but alongside of them in the form of money, consists of a portion of the annually produced gold only to the extent that a portion of the annual production of gold circulates for the realisation of the surplus-value. The other portion of money, which is continually in the hands of the capitalist class in varying portions, as the money-form of their surplus-value, is not an element of the annually produced gold, but of the mass of money previously accumulated in the country. According to our assumption the annual production of gold, 500, just covers the annual wear of money. If we keep in mind only these 500 and ignore that portion of the annually produced mass of commodities which is circulated by means of previously accumulated money, the surplus-value produced in commodity-form will find in the circulation process money for its conversion into money for the simple reason that on the other side surplus-value is annually produced in the form of gold. The same applies to the other parts of the gold product of 500 which replace the advanced money-capital. Now, two things are to be noted here. In the first place, it follows that the surplus-value spent by the capitalists as money, as well as the variable and other productive capital advanced by them in money, is actually the product of labourers, namely of the labourers engaged in the production of gold. They produce anew not only that portion of the gold product which is advanced to them as wages but also that portion of the gold product in which the surplus-value of the capitalist gold-producers is directly represented. Finally, as for that portion of the gold product which replaces only the constant capital-value advanced for its production, it re-appears in the form of money (or product in general) only through the annual work of the labourers. When the business started, it was originally expended by the capitalist in the form of money, which was not newly produced but formed a part of the circulating mass of social money. But to the extent that it is replaced by a new product, by additional gold, it is the annual product of the labourer. The advance on the part of the capitalist appears here, too, merely as a form which owes its existence to the fact that the labourer is neither the owner of his own means of production nor able to command, during production, the means of subsistence produced by other labourers. In the second place however, as far as concerns that mass of money which exists independently of his annual replacement of 500, partly in the form of a hoard and partly in the form of circulating money, things must be, or rather must have been originally with it just as they are annually with regard to these 500. We shall return to this point at the close of this sub-section. [See: pp. 347-48 of this book. Ed.] But before then we wish to make a few additional remarks. If we furthermore assume other circumstances as remaining equal including the length, intensity, and productivity of the working-day but a different division of the value of the product between wages and surplus-value, so that either the former rises and the latter falls, or vice versa, the mass of the circulating money is not affected thereby. This change can take place without any expansion or contraction of the money currency. Let us consider particularly the case in which there is a general rise in wages, so that, under the assumptions made, there will be a general fall in the rate of surplus-value, but besides this, also according to our assumption, there will be no change in the value of the circulating mass of commodities. In this case there naturally is an increase in the money-capital which must be advanced as variable capital, hence in the amount of money which performs this function. But the surplus-value, and therefore also the amount of money required for its realisation, decreases by exactly the same amount by which the amount of money required for the function of variable capital increases. The amount of money required for the realisation of the commodity-value is not affected thereby, any more than this commodity-value itself. The cost price of the commodity rises for the individual capitalist but its social price of production remains unchanged. What is changed is the proportion in which, apart from the constant part of the value, the price of production of commodities is divided into wages and profit. But, it is argued, a greater outlay of variable money-capital (the value of the money is, of course, considered constant) implies a larger amount of money in the hands of the labourers. This causes a greater demand for commodities on the part of the labourers. This, in turn, leads to a rise in the price of commodities. Or it is said: If wages rise, the capitalists raise the prices of their commodities. In either case, the general rise in wages causes a rise in commodity prices. Hence a greater amount of money is needed for the circulation of the commodities, no matter how the rise in prices is explained. Reply to the first formulation: in consequence of a rise in wages, the demand of the labourers for the necessities of life will rise particularly. Their demand for articles of luxury will increase to a lesser degree, or a demand will develop for things which formerly did not come within the scope of their consumption. The sudden and large-scale increase in the demand for the indispensable means of subsistence will doubtless raise their prices immediately. The consequence: a greater part of the social capital will be employed in the production of necessities of life and a smaller in the production of luxuries, since these fall in price on account of the decrease in surplus-value and the consequent decrease in the demand of the capitalists for these articles. On the other hand as the labourers themselves buy articles of luxury, the rise in their wages does not promote an increase in the prices of the necessities of life but simply displaces buyers of luxuries. More luxuries than before are consumed by labourers, and relatively fewer by capitalists. Voil tout. After some oscillations the value of the mass of circulating commodities is the same as before. As for the momentary fluctuations, they will not have any other effect than to throw unemployed money-capital into domestic circulation, capital which hitherto sought employment in speculative deals on the stock-exchange or in foreign countries. Reply to the second formulation: If it were in the power of the capitalist producers to raise the prices of their commodities at will, they could and would do so without a rise in wages. Wages would never rise if commodity prices fell. The capitalist class would never resist the trades unions, if it could always and under all circumstances do what it is now doing by way of exception, under definite, special, so to say local, circumstances, to wit, avail itself of every rise in wages in order to raise prices of commodities much higher yet and thus pocket greater profits. The assertion that the capitalists can raise the prices of luxuries, because the demand for them decreases (in consequence of the reduced demand of the capitalists whose means of purchasing such articles has decreased) would be a very unique application of the law of supply and demand. Since it is not a mere displacement of luxury buyers, a displacement of capitalists by labourers and so far as this displacement does occur, the demand of the labourers does not stimulate a rise in the prices of necessities, for the labourers cannot spend that portion of their increased wages for necessities which they spend for luxuries the prices of luxuries fall in consequence of reduced demand. Capital is therefore withdrawn from the production of luxury articles, until their supply is reduced to dimensions corresponding to their altered role in the process of social production. With their production thus reduced, they rise in price their value otherwise unchanged to their normal level. So long as this contraction, or this process of levelling, lasts and the prices of necessities rise, as much capital is supplied to the production of the latter as is withdrawn from other branches of production, until the demand is satisfied. Then the equilibrium is restored and the end of the whole process is that the social capital, and therefore also the money-capital, is divided in a different proportion between the production of the necessities of life and that of luxury articles. The entire objection is a bugbear set up by the capitalists and their economic sycophants. The facts which serve as the pretext for this bugbear are of three kinds: Apart from this, the circuit of money that is, the return of money to its point of departure being a phase of the turnover of capital, is a phenomenon entirely differently from, and even the opposite of, the currency of money, which expresses its steady departure from the starting-point by changing hands again and again. (Buch I, S. 94.) [English edition: pp. 114-15. Ed.] Nevertheless, an accelerated turnover implies eo ipso an accelerated currency. First concerning the variable capital: If a certain money-capital of, say, 500 is turned over the form of variable capital ten times a year, it is evident that this aliquot part of the quantity of money in circulation circulates ten times its value, or 5,000. It circulates ten times a year between the capitalist and the labourer. The labourer is paid, and pays, ten times a year with the same aliquot part of the circulating quantity of money. If the same variable capital were turned over only once a year, the scale of production remaining the same, there would be only one capital turnover of 5,000. Furthermore: Let the constant portion of the circulating capital be equal to 1,000. If the capital is turned over ten times, the capitalist sells his commodity, and therefore also the constant circulating portion of its value, ten times a year. The same aliquot part of the circulating quantity of money (equal to 1,000) passes ten times per annum from the hands of its owners into those of the capitalist. This money changes hands ten times. Secondly, the capitalist buys means of production ten times a year. This again makes ten circulations of money from one hand into another. With a sum of money amounting to 1,000, the industrial capitalist sells 10,000 worth of commodities, and again buys 10,000 worth of commodities. By means of 20 circulations of 1,000 in money a commodity-supply of 20,000 is circulated. Finally, with an acceleration of the turnover, the portion of money with realises the surplus-value also circulates faster. But, conversely, an acceleration of money-circulation does not necessarily imply a more rapid turnover of capital, and therefore of money; that is, it does not necessarily imply a contraction and more rapid renewal of the reproduction process. A more rapid circulation of money takes place whenever a larger number of transactions are performed with the same amount of money. This may also take place under the same periods of capital reproduction as a result of changes in the technical facilities for the circulation of money. Furthermore, there may be an increase in the number of transactions in which money circulates without representing actual exchanges of commodities (marginal transactions on the stock-exchange, etc.). On the other hand some circulations of money may be entirely eliminated, as for instance where the agriculturist is himself a landowner, there is no circulation of money between the farmer and the landlord; where the industrial capitalist is himself the owner of the capital, there is no circulation of money between him and the creditors. The capitalist mode of production its basis being wage-labour, the payment of the labourer in money, and in general the transformation of payments in kind into money payments can assume greater dimensions and achieve greater perfection only where there is available in the country a quantity of money sufficient for circulation and the formation of a hoard (reserve fund, etc.) promoted by it. This is the historical premise, although it is not to be taken to mean that first a sufficient hoard is formed and then capitalist production begins. It develops simultaneously with the development of the conditions necessary for it, and one of these conditions is a sufficient supply of precious metals. Hence the increased supply of precious metals since the sixteenth century is an essential element in the history of the development of capitalist production. But so far as the necessary further supply of money material on the basis of capitalist production is concerned, we see surplus-value incorporated in products thrown into circulation without the money required for their conversion into money, on the one hand, and on the other surplus-value in the form of gold without previous transformation of products into money. The additional commodities to be converted into money find the necessary amount of money at hand, because on the other side additional gold (and silver) intended for conversion into commodities is thrown into circulation, not by means of exchange, but by production itself. In the first place, as far as the additional money-capital required for the functioning of the increasing productive capital is concerned, that is supplied by the portion of the realised surplus-value thrown into circulation by the capitalists as money-capital, not as the money-form of the revenue. The money is already in the hands of the capitalists. Only its employment is different. Now however in consequence of the additional productive capital, its product, an additional mass of commodities is thrown into circulation. Together with this additional quantity of commodities, a part of the additional money needed for its realisation is thrown into circulation, inasmuch as the value of this mass of commodities is equal to that of the productive capital consumed in their production. This additional amount of money has been advanced precisely as additional money-capital, and therefore returns to the capitalist through the turnover of his capital. Here the same question as above re-appears. Where does the additional money come from with which to realise the additional surplus-value now contained in the form of commodities? The general reply is again the same. The sum total of the prices of the circulating commodities has been increased, not because the prices of a given quantity of commodities have risen, but because the mass of commodities now circulating is greater than that of the previously circulating commodities, without it being offset by a fall in prices. The additional money required for the circulation of this greater quantity of commodities of greater value must be secured either by greater economy in the use of the circulating quantity of money whether by balancing the payments, etc., by measures which accelerate the circulation of the same coins or by the transformation of money from the form of a hoard into that of a circulating medium. The latter does not only imply that idle money-capital begins to function as a means of purchase or payment, or that money-capital already functioning as a reserve fund while performing this function for its owner, actively circulates for society (as is the case with bank deposits which are continually lent), thus performing a double function. It also implies that the stagnating reserve funds of coins are economised. In order that money should flow continuously as coin, coin must constantly coagulate as money. The continual currency of coin depends on its continual stagnation, in greater or smaller quantities, in reserve funds of coin which spring up throughout the sphere of circulation and also necessitate it; the formation, distribution, dissolution, and re-formation of these reserve funds are constantly alternating, their existence constantly disappears, their disappearance constantly exists. Adam Smith expressed this never-ceasing transformation of coin into money and of money into coin by saying that every owner of commodities must always keep in supply, aside from the particular commodity which he sells, a certain quantity of the universal commodity with which he buys. We saw that in the circulation C M C the second member M C splits up constantly into a series of purchases which do not take place at once but at successive intervals of time, so that one part of M is current as coin while the other rests as money. As a matter of fact money is in that case only suspended coin and the separate parts of the current mass of coins continuously appear now in the one form, and now in the other, alternating constantly. This first transformation of the medium of circulation into money represents, therefore, but a technical aspect of money-circulation itself. (Karl Marx, Zur Kritik der Politischen Oekonomie, 1859, pp. 105, 106.) ( Coin as distinguished from money is here employed to indicate money in its function of a mere medium of circulation in contrast with its other functions.) When all these measures do not suffice, additional gold must be produced, or, what amounts to the same, a part of the additional product exchanged, directly or indirectly, for gold the product of countries in which precious metals are mined. The entire amount of labour-power and social means of production expended in the annual production of gold and silver intended as instruments of circulation constitutes a bulky item of the faux frais of the capitalist mode of production, of the production of commodities in general. It is an equivalent abstraction from social utilisation of as many additional means of production and consumption as possible, i.e., of real wealth. To the extent that the costs of this expensive machinery of circulation are decreased, the given scale of production or the given degree of its extension remaining constant, the productive power of social labour is eo ipso increased. Hence, so far as the expediencies developing with the credit system have this effect, they increase capitalist wealth directly, either by performing a large portion of the social production and labour-power without any intervention of real money, or by raising the functional capacity of the quantity of money really functioning. This disposes also of the absurd question whether capitalist production in its present volume would be possible without the credit system (even if regarded only from this point of view), that is, with the circulation of metallic coin alone. Evidently this is not the case. It would rather have encountered barriers in the volume of production of precious metals. On the other hand one must not entertain any fantastic illusions on the productive power of the credit system, so far as it supplies or sets in motion money-capital. A further analysis of this question is out of place here. Inasmuch as the money so accumulating is additional money, the matter needs no explanation. It can only be a portion of the surplus-gold brought from gold-producing countries. In this connection it must be noted that the home product, in exchange for which this gold is imported, is no longer in the country in question. It has been exported to foreign countries in exchange for gold. But if we assume that the same amount of money is still in the country as before, then the accumulated and accumulating money has accrued from the circulation. Only its function is changed. It has been converted from money in currency into latent money-capital gradually taking shape. The money which is accumulated in this case is the money-form of sold commodities, and moreover of that part of their value which constitutes surplus-value for their owner. (The credit system is here assumed to be non-existent.) The capitalist who accumulates this money has sold pro tanto without buying. If we look upon this process merely as an individual phenomenon, there is nothing to explain. A part of the capitalists keeps a portion of the money realised by the sale of its product without withdrawing products from the market in return. Another part of them on the other hand transforms its money wholly into products, with the exception of the constantly recurring money-capital required for running the business. One portion of the products thrown upon the market as vehicles of surplus-value consists of means of production, or of the real elements of variable capital, the necessary means of subsistence. It can therefore serve immediately for the expansion of production. For it has not been premised in the least that one part of the capitalists accumulates money-capital, while the other consumes its surplus-value entirely, but only that one part does its accumulating in the shape of money, forms latent money-capital, while the other part accumulates genuinely, that is to say, enlarges the scale of production, genuinely expands its productive capital. The available quantity of money remains sufficient for the requirements of circulation, even if, alternately, one part of the capitalists accumulates money, while the other enlarges the scale of production, and vice versa. Moreover, the accumulation of money on one side may proceed even without cash money by the mere accumulation of outstanding claims. But the difficulty arises when we assume not an individual, but a general accumulation of money-capital on the part of the capitalist class. Apart from this class, according to our assumption the general and exclusive domination of capitalist production there is no other class at all except the working-class. All that the working-class buys is equal to the sum total of its wages, equal to the sum total of the variable capital advanced by the entire capitalist class. This money flows back to the capitalist class by the sale of its product to the working-class. Its variable capital thus resumes its money-form. Let the sum total of the variable capital be x times 100, i.e., the sum total of the variable capital employed, not advanced, during the year. The question now under consideration is not affected by how much or how little money, depending on the velocity of the turnover, is needed to advance this variable capital-value during the year. The capitalist class buys with these x times 100 of capital a certain amount of labour-power, or pays wages to a certain number of labourers first transaction. The labourers buy with this same sum a certain quantity of commodities from the capitalists, whereby the sum of x times 100 flows back into the hands of the capitalists second transaction. And this is constantly repeated. This amount of x times 100, therefore, can never enable the working-class to buy the part of the product which represents the constant capital, not to mention the part which represents the surplus-value of the capitalist class. With these x times 100 the labourers can never buy more than a part of the value of the social product equal to that part of the value which represents the value of the advanced variable capital. Apart from the case in which this universal accumulation of money expresses nothing but the distribution of the precious metal additionally introduced, in whatever proportion, among the various individual capitalists, how is the entire capitalist class then supposed to accumulate money? They would all have to sell a portion of their product without buying anything in return. There is nothing mysterious about the fact that they all have a certain fund of money which they throw into circulation as a medium of circulation for their consumption, and a certain portion of which returns to each one of them from the circulation. But in that case this money-fund exists precisely as a fund for circulation, as a result of the conversion of the surplus-value into money, and does not by any means exist as latent money-capital. If we view the matter as it takes place in reality, we find that the latent money-capital, which is accumulated for future use, consists: 1) Of deposits in banks; and it is a comparatively trifling sum which is really at the disposal of the bank. Money-capital is accumulated here only nominally. What is actually accumulated is outstanding claims which can be converted into money (if ever) only because a certain balance arises between the money withdrawn and the money deposited. It is only a relatively small sum that the bank holds in its hands in money. 2) Of government securities. These are not capital at all, but merely outstanding claims on the annual product of the nation. 3) Of stocks. Those which are not fakes are titles of ownership of some corporative real capital and drafts on the surplus-value accruing annually from it. There is no accumulation of money in any of these cases. What appears on the one side as an accumulation of money-capital appears on the other as a continual actual expenditure of money. It is immaterial whether the money is spent by him who owns it, or by others, his debtors. On the basis of capitalist production the formation of a hoard as such is never an end in itself but the result either of a stagnation of the circulation larger amounts of money than is generally the case assuming the form of a hoard or of accumulations necessitated by the turnover; or, finally, the hoard is merely the creation of money-capital existing temporarily in latent form and intended to function as productive capital. If therefore on the one hand a portion of the surplus-value realised in money is withdrawn from circulation and accumulated as a hoard, another part of the surplus-value is at the same time continually converted into productive capital. With the exception of the distribution of additional precious metals among the members of the capitalist class, accumulations in the form of money never takes place simultaneously at all points. What is true of the portion of the annual product which represents surplus-value in the form of commodities, is also true of the other portion of it. A certain sum of money is required for its circulation. This sum of money belongs to the capitalist class quite as much as the annually produced quantity of commodities which represents surplus-value. It is originally thrown into circulation by the capitalist class itself. It is constantly redistributed among its members by means of the circulation itself. Just as in the case of circulation of coin in general, a portion of this sum stagnates at ever varying points, while another portion continually circulates. Whether a part of this accumulation is intentional, for the purpose of forming money-capital, or not, does not alter things. No notice has been taken here of those adventures of circulation in which one capitalist grasps a portion of the surplus-value, or even of the capital, of another, thereby bringing about one-sided accumulation and centralisation of money-capital as well as of productive capital. For instance a part of the snatched surplus-value accumulated by A as money-capital may be a part of the surplus-value of B which does not return to him.

Economic Manuscripts: Capital: Volume Two

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1885-c2/ch17.htm

The process of reproduction of capital comprises this direct process of production as well as the two phases of the circulation process proper, i.e., the entire circuit which, as a periodic process a process which constantly repeats itself in definite periods constitutes the turnover of capital. Whether we study the circuit in the form of M ... M' or that of P ... P, the direct process of production P itself always forms but one link in this circuit. In the one form it appears as a promoter of the process of circulation; in the other the process of circulation appears as its promoter. Its continuous renewal, the continuous re-appearance of capital as productive capital, is in either case determined by its transformations in the process of circulation. On the other hand the continuously renewed process of production is the condition of the transformations which the capital undergoes ever anew in the sphere of circulation, of its alternate appearance as money-capital and commodity-capital. Every individual capital forms, however, but an individualised fraction, a fraction endowed with individual life, as it were, of the aggregate social capital, just as every individual capitalist is but an individual element of the capitalist class. The movement of the social capital consists of the totality of the movements of its individualised fractional parts, the turnovers of the individual capitals. Just as the metamorphosis of the individual commodity is a link in the series of metamorphoses of the commodity-world the circulation of commodities so the metamorphosis of the individual capital, its turnover, is a link in the circuit described by social capital. This total process comprises both the productive consumption (the direct process of production) together with the conversions of form (materially considered, exchanges) which bring it about, and the individual consumption together with the conversions of form or exchanges by which it is brought about. It includes on the one hand the conversion of variable capital into labour-power, and therefore the incorporation of labour-power in the process of capitalist production. Here the labourer acts as the seller of his commodity, labour-power, and the capitalist as its buyer. But on the other hand the sale of the commodities embraces also their purchase by the working-class appears as buyer and the capitalists as sellers of commodities to the labourers. The circulation of the commodity-capital includes the circulation of surplus-value, hence also the purchases and sales by which the capitalist effect their individual consumption, the consumption of surplus-value. The circuit of the individual capitals in their aggregate as social capital, hence considered in its totality, comprises not only the circulation of capital but also the general circulation of commodities. The latter can originally consist of only two components: 1) The circuit of capital proper and 2) the circuit of the commodities which enter into individual consumption, consequently of the commodities for which the labourer expends his wages and the capitalist his surplus-value (or a part of it). At any rate, the circuit of capital comprises also the circulation of the surplus-value, since the latter is a part of the commodity capital, and likewise the conversion of the variable capital into labour-power, the payment of wages. But the expenditure of this surplus-value and wages for commodities does not form a link in the circulation of capital, although at least the expenditure of wages is essential for this circulation. In Volume I the process of capitalist production was analysed as an individual act as well as a process of reproduction: the production of surplus-value and the production of capital itself. The changes of form and substance experienced by capital in the sphere of circulation were assumed without dwelling upon them. It was presupposed that on the one hand the capitalist sells the product at its value and on the other that he finds within the sphere of circulation the objective means of production for restarting or continuing the process. The only act within the sphere of circulation on which we have dwelt was the purchase and sale of labour-power as the fundamental condition of capitalist production. In the first part of this Book II, the various forms were considered which capital assumes its circular movement, and the various forms of this movement itself. The circulation time must now be added to the working times discussed in Volume I. In the second Part, the circuit was studied as being periodic, i.e., as a turnover. It was shown on the one hand in what manner the various constituents of capital (fixed and circulating) accomplish the circuit of forms in different periods of time and in different ways; on the other hand the circumstances were examined by which the different lengths of the working period and circulation period are conditioned. The influence was shown which the period of the circuit and the different proportions of its component parts exert upon the dimensions of the production process itself and upon the annual rate of surplus-value. Indeed, while it was the successive forms continually assumed and discarded by capital in its circuit that were studied in Part I, it was shown in Part II how a capital of a given magnitude is simultaneously, though in varying proportions, divided, within this flow and succession of forms, into different forms: productive capital, money-capital, and commodity-capital, so that they not only alternate with one another, but different portions of the total capital-value are constantly side by side and function in these different states. Especially money-capital came forward with distinctive features not shown in Volume I. Certain laws were found according to which diverse large components of a given capital must be continually advanced and renewed depending on the conditions of the turnover in the form of money-capital in order to keep a productive capital of a given size constantly functioning. But in both the first and the second Parts it was always only a question of some individual capital, of the movement of some individualised part of social capital. However the circuits of the individual capitals intertwine, presuppose and necessitate one another, and form, precisely in this interlacing, the movement of the total social capital. Just as in the simple circulation of commodities the total metamorphosis of a commodity appeared as a link in the series of metamorphoses of the world of commodities, so now the metamorphosis of the individual capital appears as a link in the series of metamorphoses of the social capital. But while simple commodity circulation by no means necessarily comprises the circulation of capital since it may take place on the basis of non-capitalist production the circuit of the aggregate social capital, as was noted, comprises also the commodity circulation lying outside the circuit of individual capital, i.e., the circulation of commodities which do not represent capital. We have now to study the process of circulation (which in its entirety is a form of the process of reproduction) of the individual capitals as components of the aggregate social capital, that is to say, the process of circulation of this aggregate social capital. In the study of the turnover of the individual capital money-capital revealed two aspects. In the first place it constitutes the form in which every individual capital appears upon the scene and opens its process as capital. It therefore appears as the primus motor, lending impetus to the entire process. In the second place, that portion of the advanced capital-value which must be continually advanced and renewed in the form of money differs in its ratio to the productive capital which it sets in motion, i.e., in its ratio to the continuous scale of production, depending on the particular length of the period of turnover and the particular ratio between its two component parts the working period and the period of circulation. But whatever this ratio may be, the portion of the capital-value in process which can continually function as productive capital is limited in any event by that portion of the advanced capital-value which must always exist beside the productive capital in the form of money. It is here merely a question of the normal turnover, an abstract average. Additional money-capital required to compensate for interruptions of the circulation is excepted. As to the first point: commodity production presupposes commodity circulation, and commodity circulation presupposes the expression of commodities in money, the circulation of money; the splitting of a commodity into commodity and money is law of the expression of the product as a commodity. Similarly the capitalist production of commodities whether considered socially or individually presupposes capital in the form of money, or money-capital, both as the primus motor of every incipient business, and as its continual motor. The circulating capital especially implies that the money-capital acts with constant repetition at short intervals as a motor. The entire advanced capital-value, that is to say, all the elements of capital, consisting of commodities, labour-power, instruments of labour, and materials of production, must be bought over and over again with money. What is true here of the individual capital is also true of the social capital, which functions only in the form of many individual capitals. But as we showed in Volume I, it does not at all follow from this that capital s field of operation, the scale of production, depends even on a capitalist basis for its absolute limits on the amount of functioning money-capital. Incorporated in capital are elements of production whose expansion within certain limits is independent of the magnitude of the advanced money-capital. Though payment of labour-power be the same, it can be exploited more or less extensively or intensively. If the money-capital is increased with this greater exploitation (that is, if wages are raised), it is not increased proportionately, hence not at all pro tanto. The productively exploited nature-given materials the soil, the seas, ores, forests, etc. which do not constitute elements of capital-value, are more intensively or extensively exploited with a greater exertion of the same amount of labour-power, without an increased advance of money-capital. The real elements of productive capital are thus multiplied without requiring an additional money-capital. But so far as such an addition becomes necessary for additional auxiliary materials, the money-capital in which the capital-value is advanced is not increased proportionately to the augmented effectiveness of the productive capital, hence is pro tanto not at all increased. The same instruments of labour, and thus the same fixed capital, can be used more effectively by an extension of the time they are daily used and by a greater intensity of employment, without an additional outlay of money for fixed capital. There is, in that case, only a more rapid turnover of the fixed capital, but then the elements of its reproduction are supplied more rapidly. Apart from the natural substances, it is possible to incorporate in the productive process natural forces, which do not cost anything, to act as agents with more or less heightened effect. The degree of their effectiveness depends on methods and scientific developments which cost the capitalist nothing. The same is true of the social combination of labour-power in the process of production and of the accumulated skill of the individual labourers. Carey calculates that the landowner never receives enough, because he is not paid for all the capital or labour put into the soil since time immemorial in order to give it its present productivity. (Of course, no mention is made of the productivity of which the soil is robbed.) According to that each individual labourer would have to paid according to the work which it cost the entire human race to evolve a modern mechanic out of a savage. On the contrary one should think that if all the unpaid labour put into the soil and converted into money by the landowner and capitalist is totalled up, all the capital ever invested in this soil has been paid back over and over again with usurious interest, so that society has long ago redeemed landed property over and over again. True enough, the increase in the productive power of labour, so far as it does not imply an additional investment of capital-value, augments in the first instance only the quantity of the product, not its value, except insofar as it makes it possible to reproduce more constant capital with the same labour and thus to preserve its value. But it forms at the same time new material for capital, hence the basis of increased accumulation of capital. So far as the organisation of social labour itself, and thus the increase in the social productive power of labour, requires large-scale production and therefore the advance of large quantities of money-capital by individual capitalists, we have shown in Book I [From Manuscript II. F. E.] that this is accomplished in part by the centralisation of capitals in a few hands, without necessitating an absolute increase in the magnitude of the functioning capital-values, and consequently also in the magnitude of the money-capital in which they are advanced. The magnitude of the individual capitals can increase by centralisation in the hands of a few without a growth of their social sum total. It is only a changed distribution of the individual capitals. Finally, we have shown in the preceding Part that a shortening of the period of turnover permits of setting in motion either the same productive capital with less money-capital or more productive capital with the same money-capital. [English edition: Vol. I, pp. 624-28, 761-64. Ed.] But evidently all this has nothing to do with the question of money-capital itself. It shows only that the advanced capital a given sum of values consisting in its free form, in its value-form, of a certain sum of money includes, after its conversion into productive capital, productive powers whose limits are not set by the limits of its value, but which on the contrary may operate within certain bounds with differing degrees of extensiveness or intensiveness. If the prices of the elements of production the means of production and labour-power are given, the magnitude of the money-capital required for the purchase of a definite quantity of these elements of production existing as commodities is determined. Or the magnitude of value of the capital to be advanced is determined. But the extent to which this capital acts as a creator of values and products is elastic and variable. As to the second point: it is self-evident that part of the social labour and means of production which must be annually expended for the production or purchase of money in order to replace worn-off coin is pro tanto a diminution of the volume of social production. But as for the money-value which functions partly as a medium of circulation, partly as a hoard, it is simply there, acquired, present alongside the labour-power, the produced means of production, and the natural sources of wealth. It cannot be regarded as a limit set to these things. By its transformation into elements of production, by its exchange with other nations, the scale of production might be extended. This presupposes, however, that money plays its role of world-money the same as ever. To set the productive capital in motion requires more or less money-capital, depending on the length of the period of turnover. We have also seen that the division of the period of turnover into working time and circulation time requires an increase of the capital latent or suspended in the form of money. Inasmuch as the period of turnover is determined by the length of the working period, it is determined, other conditions remaining equal, by the material nature of the process of production, hence not by the specific social character of this process of production. However, on the basis of capitalist production, more extensive operations of comparatively long duration necessitate large advances of money-capital for a rather long time. Production in such spheres depends therefore on the magnitude of the money-capital which the individual capitalist has at his disposal. This barrier is broken down by the credit system and the associations connected with it, e.g., the stock companies. Disturbances in the money-market therefore put such establishments out of business, while these same establishments, in their turn, produce disturbances in the money-market. On the basis of socialised production the scale must be ascertained on which those operations which withdraw labour-power and means of production for a long time without supplying any product as a useful effect in the interim can be carried on without injuring branches of production which not only withdraw labour-power and means of production continually, or several times a year, but also supply means of subsistence and of production. Under socialised as well as capitalist production, the labourers in branches of business with shorter working periods will as before withdraw products only for a short time without giving any products in return; while branches of business with long working periods continually withdraw products for a longer time before they return anything. This circumstance, then, arises from the material character of the particular labour-process, not from its social form. In the case of socialised production the money-capital is eliminated. Society distributes labour-power and means of production to the different branches of production. The producers may, for all it matters, receive paper vouchers entitling them to withdraw from the social supplies of consumer goods a quantity corresponding to their labour-time. These vouchers are not money. They do not circulate. We see that inasmuch as the need for money-capital originates in the length of the working period, it is conditioned by two things: First, that money in general is the form in which every individual capital (apart from credit) must make its appearance in order to transform itself into productive capital; this follows from the nature of capitalist production and commodity-production in general. Second, the magnitude of the required money advance is due to the circumstance that labour-power and means of production are continually withdrawn from society for a comparatively long time without any return to it, during that period, of products convertible into money. The first condition, that the capital to be advanced must be advanced in the form of money, is not eliminated by the form of this money itself, whether it is metal-money, credit-money, token-money, etc. The second condition is in no way affected by what money-medium or in what form of production labour, means of subsistence, and means of production are withdrawn without the return of some equivalent to the circulation.

Economic Manuscripts: Capital: Volume Two

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1885-c2/ch18.htm

The label of a system differs from that of other articles, among other things, by the fact that it cheats not only the buyer but often also the seller. Quesnay himself and his immediate disciples believed in their feudal shop-sign. So do our grammarians even this day and hour. But as a matter of fact the system of the physiocrats is the first systematic conception of capitalist production. The representative of industrial capital the class of tenants directs the entire economic movement. Agriculture is carried on capitalistically, that is to say, it is the enterprise of a capitalist farmer on a large scale; the direct cultivator of the soil is the wage-labourer. Production creates not only articles of use but also their value; its compelling motive is the procurement of surplus-value, whose birth-place is the sphere of production, not of circulation. Among the three classes which figure as the vehicles of the social process of reproduction brought about by the circulation, the immediate exploiter of productive labour, the producer of surplus-value, [Marx analyses Quesnay s Tableau conomique in greater detail in his Theories of Surplus-Value (see English edition: Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus-Value [Volume IV of Capital], Part I, Moscow, 1963, pp. 299-333 and 367-69). Ed.] the capitalist farmer, is distinguished from those who merely appropriate the surplus-value. The capitalist character of the physiocratic system excited opposition even during its florescence: on the one side it was challenged by Linguet and Mably, on the other by the champions of the small freeholders. He says furthermore: Adam Smith says furthermore: Adam Smith then tells us that one should exclude from the net revenue, i.e., from the revenue in its specific meaning, the entire fixed capital, and also the entire portion of the circulating capital which is required for the maintenance and repair of the fixed capital, and for its renewal, in fact all capital not in a bodily form intended for the consumption-fund. With regard to the second kind of labourers who directly produce articles of consumption Adam Smith s definitions are not quite exact. For he says that in these kinds of labour, both the price of labour and the product go to the stock reserved for immediate consumption, After Adam Smith has thus entirely excluded the fixed capital from the net revenue of a country, he continues: And so we learn hear that: Now if Adam Smith had welded together the snatches of thought which forced themselves upon him at first in the study of the reproduction of that which he calls fixed, and now of that which he calls circulating capital, he would have arrived at the following result: The first constituent part, according to Adam Smith the reproduced portion of the fixed capital of all the individual capitalists employed in this first section, is totally excluded from making any part of the neat revenue, either of the individual capitalist or of society. It always functions as capital, never as revenue. To that extent the fixed capital of every individual capitalist is in no way different from the fixed capital of society. But the other portions of value of the annual product of society consisting of means of production portions of value which therefore exist in aliquot parts of this aggregate quantity of means of production form indeed simultaneously revenues for all agents engaged in this production, wages for the labourers, profits and ground-rents for the capitalists. But they form capital, not revenue, for society, although the annual product of society consists only of the sums of the products of the individual capitalists who belong to that society. By nature they are generally fit to function only as means of production, and even those which, if need be, might be able to function as articles of consumption are intended for service as raw or auxiliary materials of new production. But they serve as such hence as capital not in the hands of their producers, but in those of their users, namely: If Adam Smith had continued his analysis to this point, but little would have been lacking for the solution of the whole problem. He almost hit the nail on the head, for he had already observed that certain value-parts of one kind (means of production) of the commodity-capitals constituting the total annual product of society indeed form revenue for the individual labourers and capitalists engaged in their production, but do not form a constituent part of the revenue of society; while a value-part of the other kind (articles of consumption), although representing capital-value for its individual owners, the capitalists engaged in this sphere of investment, is only a part of the social revenue. But this much is evident from the foregoing: First: Although the social capital is only equal to the sum of the individual capitals and for this reason the annual commodity-product (or commodity-capital) of society is equal to the sum of commodity-products of these individual capitals; and although therefore the analysis of the value of the commodities into its component parts, valid for every individual commodity-capital, must also be valid for the commodity-capital of all society and actually proves valid in the end the form of appearance which these component parts assume in the aggregate social process of reproduction is different. Second: Even on the basis of simple reproduction there takes place not merely a production of wages (variable capital) and surplus-value, but direct production of new constant capital-value, although the working-day consists of only two parts, one in which the labourer replaces the variable capital, in fact producing an equivalent for the purchase of his labour-power, and another in which he produces surplus-value (profit, rent, etc.). The daily labour which is expended in the reproduction of means of production and whose value is composed of wages and surplus-value realises itself in new means of production which replace the constant part of capital laid out in the production of articles of consumption. The main difficulties, the greater part of which has been solved in the preceding text, are not encountered in studying accumulation but simple reproduction. For this reason, Adam Smith (Book II) and Quesnay (Tableau conomique) before him make simple reproduction their starting-point, whenever it is a question of the movement of the annual product of society and its reproduction through circulation. In manufacture: After Adam Smith has thus shown that the value of a product in manufacture is equal to v + s (s standing for the profit of the capitalist), he tells us that in agriculture the labourers besides The dogma that the price of all commodities (hence also of the annual commodity-product) resolves itself into wages plus profit plus ground-rent, assumes even in the intermittent esoteric constituents of Smith s work the form that the value of every commodity, hence also that of society s annual commodity-product, is equal to v + s, or equal to the capital-value laid out in labour-power and continually reproduced by the labourers, plus the surplus-value added by the labourers through their work. This final result of Adam Smith reveals to us at the same time see further down the source of his one-sided analysis of the component parts into which the value of a commodity resolves sources of revenue for different classes engaged in production has nothing to do with the determination of the magnitude of each of these component parts and of the sum of their values. All kinds of quid pro quo s are jumbled together when Adam Smith says: We have already seen above that Adam Smith himself later on overthrows his own theory, without however being conscious of his contradictions. But their source is to be found precisely in his scientific premises. The capital converted into labour produces a greater value than its own. How? Says Adam Smith: by the labourers imparting during the process of production to the things on which they work a value which forms not only an equivalent for their own purchase price, but also a surplus-value (profit and rent) apportioned not to them but to their employers. That is all they accomplish, and all they can accomplish. And what is true of the industrial labour of one day is true of the labour set in motion by the entire capitalist class during one year. Hence the aggregate mass of the annual value produced by society can resolve itself only into v + s, into an equivalent by which the labourers replace the capital-value expended for the purchase of their own labour-power, and into an additional value which they must deliver over and above this to their employers. But these two elements of commodity-value form at the same time sources of revenue for the various classes engaged in reproduction: the first is the source of wages, the revenue of the labourers; the second that of surplus-value, a portion of which is retained by the industrial capitalist in the form of profit, while another is given up by him as rent, the revenue of the landlord. Where, then, should another portion of value come from, when the annual value-product contains no other elements than v + s? We are proceeding here from simple reproduction. Since the entire quantity of annual labour resolves itself into labour needed for the reproduction of the capital-value laid out in labour-power, and into labour needed for the creation of surplus-value, where should the labour for the production of a capital-value not laid out in labour-power come from? The case is as follows: Now Adam Smith s first mistake consists in equating the value of the annual product to the newly produced annual value. The latter is only the product of labour of the past year, the former includes besides all elements of value consumed in the making of the annual product, but which were produced in the preceding and partly even earlier years: means of production whose value merely re-appears which, as far as their value is concerned, have been neither produced nor reproduced by the labour expended in the past year. By this confusion Adam Smith spirits away the constant portion of the value of the annual product. This confusion rests on another error in his fundamental conception: He does not distinguish the two-fold nature of labour itself: of labour which creates value by expending labour-power, and of labour as concrete, useful work, which creates articles of use (use-values). The total quantity of the commodities fabricated annually, in other words, the total annual product is the product of the useful labour active during the past year; it is only due to the fact that socially employed labour was spent in a ramified system of useful kinds of labour that all these commodities exist; it is due to this fact alone that the value of the means of production consumed in the production of commodities and reappearing in a new bodily form is preserved in their total value. The total annual product, then, is the result of the useful labour expended during the year; but only a part of the value of the annual product has been created during the year; this portion is the annual value-product, in which the quantity of labour set in motion during the year is represented. Hence, if Adam Smith says in the passage just cited: While we cannot reproach Adam Smith for going in this analysis no farther than all his successors (although a step in the right direction could already be discerned among the physiocrats), he subsequently gets lost in a chaos and this mainly because his esoteric conception of the value of commodities in general is constantly contravened by exoteric conceptions, which on the whole prevail with him, and yet his scientific instinct permits the esoteric standpoint to re-appear from time to time. Now while that portion of the capital advanced by the capitalist, which has been converted by the purchase of labour-power into variable capital, functions in the process of production itself as operative labour-power and by the expenditure of this power is produced anew as a new value, in the form of commodities, i.e., is reproduced hence a reproduction, or new production, of advanced capital-value the labourer spends the value, or price, of his sold labour-power on means of subsistence, on means for the reproduction of his labour-power. An amount of money equal to the variable capital forms his income, hence his revenue, which lasts only so long as he can sell his labour-power to the capitalist. The commodity of the wage-labourer his labour power serves as a commodity only to the extent that it is incorporated in the capital of the capitalist, acts as capital; on the other hand the capital expended by the capitalist as money-capital in the purchase of labour-power functions as a revenue in the hands of the seller of labour-power, the wage labourer. Various processes of circulation and production intermingle here, which Adam Smith does not distinguish. In all purchases and sales of commodities so far as only these transactions are under discussion it is quite immaterial what becomes of the proceeds the seller receives for his commodities, and what becomes of the bought articles of use in the hands of the buyer. Hence, so far as the mere process of circulation is concerned, it is quite immaterial that the labour-power bought by the capitalist reproduces capital-value for him, and that on the other hand the money received by the labourer as the purchase-price of his labour-power constitutes his revenue. The magnitude of value of the labourer s article of commerce, his labour-power, is not affected either by its forming revenue for him or by the fact that the use of this article of commerce by the buyer reproduces capital-value for this buyer. Since the value of labour-power i.e., the adequate selling price of this commodity is determined by the quantity of labour required for its reproduction, and this quantity of labour itself is here determined by that needed for the production of the necessary means of subsistence of the labourer, hence for the maintenance of his existence, the wages become the revenue on which the labourer has to live. It is entirely wrong, when Adam Smith says (p. 223): The money which the labourer receives is spent by him in order to preserve his labour-power, or viewing the capitalist class and the working-class in their totality in order to preserve for the capitalist the instrument by means of which alone he can remain a capitalist. Thus the continuous purchase and sale of labour-power perpetuates on the one hand labour-power as an element of capital, by virtue of which the latter appears as the creator of commodities, articles of use having value, by virtue of which, furthermore, that portion of capital which buys labour-power is continually restored by labour-power s own product, and consequently the labourer himself constantly creates the fund of capital out of which he is paid. On the other hand the constant sale of labour-power becomes the source, ever renewing itself, of the maintenance of the labourer and hence his labour-power appears as that faculty through which he secures the revenue by which he lives. Revenue in this case signifies nothing else than a appropriation of values effected by ever repeated sales of a commodity (labour-power), these values serving only for the continual reproduction of the commodity to be sold. And to this extent Smith is right when he says that the portion of the value of the product created by the labourer himself for which the capitalist pays him an equivalent in the form of wages, becomes the source of revenue for the labourer. But this does not alter the nature or magnitude of this portion of the value of the commodity any more than the value of the means of production is changed by the fact that they function as capital-values, or the nature and magnitude of a straight line are changed by the fact that it serves as the base of some triangle or as the diameter of some ellipse. The value of labour-power remains quite as independently definite as that of those means of production. This portion of the value of a commodity neither consists of revenue as an independent factor constituting this value-part nor does it resolve itself into revenue. While this new value constantly reproduced by the labourer constitutes a source of revenue for him, his revenue conversely is not a constituent of the new value produced by him. The magnitude of the share paid to him of the new value created by him determines the value-magnitude of his revenue, not vice versa. The fact that this part of the newly created value forms a revenue for him, indicates merely what becomes of it, shows the character of its application, and has no more to do with its formation than with that of any other value. If my receipts are ten shillings a week that changes nothing in the nature of the value of the ten shillings, nor in the magnitude of their value. As in the case of every other commodity so in that of labour-power its value is determined by the amount of this labour is necessary for its reproduction; that the amount of this labour is determined by the value of the labourer s necessary means of subsistence, hence is equal to the labour required for the reproduction of the very conditions of his life that is peculiar for this commodity (labour-power), but no more peculiar than the fact that the value of labouring cattle is determined by the value of the means of subsistence necessary for its maintenance, i.e., by the amount of human labour necessary to produce these means of subsistence. But it is this category of revenue which is to blame for all the harmful confusion in Adam Smith. The various kinds of revenue form with him the component parts of the annually produced, newly created commodity-value, while, vice versa, the two parts into which this commodity-value resolves itself for the capitalist the equivalent of his variable capital advanced in the form of money when purchasing labour, and the other portion of the value, the surplus- value, which likewise belongs to him but did not cost him anything form sources of revenue. The equivalent of the variable capital is advanced again for labour-power and to that extent forms a revenue for the labourer in the shape of wages; since the other portion, the surplus-value, does not serve to replace any advance of capital for the capitalist, it may be spent by him in articles of consumption (both necessities and luxuries) or consumed as revenue instead of forming capital-value of any description. Commodity-value itself is the preliminary condition of this revenue and its component parts differ, from the point of view of the capitalist, only to the extent that they constitute either an equivalent for an excess over the variable capital-value advanced by him. Both of them consist of nothing but labour-power expended during the production of commodities, rendered fluent in labour. They consist of outlay, not income or revenue of outlay of labour. In accordance with the quid pro quo, by which the revenue becomes the source of commodity-value instead of the commodity-value being the source of revenue, the value of commodities new has the appearance of being composed of the various kinds of revenue; these revenues are determined independently of one another, and the total value of commodities is determined by the addition of the values of these revenues. But now the question is how to determine the value of each of these revenues which are supposed to form commodity-value. In the case of wages it can be done, for wages represent the value of their commodity, labour-power, and this value is determinable (the same as that of all other commodities) by the labour required for the reproduction of this commodity. But surplus-value, or, as Adam Smith has it, its two forms, profit and rent, how are they determined? Here Adam Smith has but empty phrases to offer. At one time he represents wages and surplus-value (or wages and profit) as component parts of the value, or price, of commodities; at another, and almost in the same breath, as parts into which the price of commodities resolves itself ; but this means on the contrary that the commodity-value is the thing given first and that different parts of this given value fall in the form of different revenues to the share of different persons engaged in the productive process. This is by no means identical with the notion that value is composed of these three component parts. If I determine the lengths of three different straight lines independently, and then form out of these three lines as component parts a fourth straight line equal to their sum, it is by no means the same procedure as when I have some given straight line before me and for some purpose divide it, resolve it, so to say, into three different parts. In the first case, the length of the line changes throughout with the lengths of the three lines whose sum it is; in the second case, the lengths of the three parts of the line are from the outset limited by the fact that they are parts of a line of given length. As a matter of fact, if we adhere to that part of Smith s exposition which is correct, namely, that the value newly created by the annual labour and contained in the annual social commodity-product (the same as in every individual commodity, or every daily, weekly, etc., product) is equal to the value of the variable capital advanced (i.e., to the value-part intended to purchase new labour-power) plus the surplus-value which the capitalist can realise in means of his individual consumption simple reproduction being assumed and other circumstances remaining the same; if we furthermore keep in mind that Adam Smith lumps together labour, so far as it creates value and is an expenditure of labour-power, and labour, so far as it creates use value, i.e., is expended in a useful, appropriate manner then the entire conception amounts to this: The value of every commodity is the product of labour; hence this is also true of the value of the product of the annual labour or of the value of society s annual commodity-product. But since all labour resolves itself 1) into necessary labour-time, in which the labourer reproduces merely an equivalent for the capital advanced in the purchase of his labour-power, and 2) into surplus-labour, by which he supplies the capitalist with a value for which the latter does not give any equivalent, hence surplus-value, it follows that all commodity value can resolve itself only into these two component parts, so that ultimately it forms a revenue for the working-class in the form of wages, and for the capitalist class in the form of surplus-value. As for the constant capital-value, i.e., the value of the means of production consumed in the creation of the annual product, it cannot be explained how this value gets into that of the new product (except for the phrase that the capitalist charges the buyer with it in the sale of his goods), but ultimately, since the means of production are themselves products of labour, this portion of value can, in turn, consist only of an equivalent of the variable capital and of surplus-value, of a product of necessary labour and of surplus-labour. The fact that the values of these means of production function in the hands of their employers as capital-values does not prevent them from having originally, in the hands of others if we go to the bottom of the matter even though at some previous time resolved themselves into the same two portions of value, hence into two different sources of revenue. One point herein is correct: that the matter presents itself differently in the movement of social capital, i.e., of the totality of individual capitals, from the way it presents itself for each individual capital considered separately, hence from the standpoint of each individual capitalist. For the latter the value of commodities resolves itself into 1) a constant element (a fourth one, as Adam Smith says), and 2) the sum of wages and surplus-value, or wages, profit and rent. But from the point of view of society the fourth element of Adam Smith, the constant capital-value, disappears. The appropriation of surplus-value a value in excess of the equivalent of the value advanced by the capitalist although inaugurated by the purchase and sale of labour-power, is an act performed within the process of production itself, and forms an essential element of it. The introductory act, which constitutes an act of circulation the purchase and sale of labour-power itself rests on a distribution of the elements of production which preceded and presupposed the distribution of the social products, namely on the separation of labour-power as a commodity of the labourer from the means of production as the property of non-labourers. However this appropriation of surplus-value, or this separation of the production of value into a reproduction of advanced value and a production of new value (surplus-value) which does not replace any equivalent, does not alter in any way the substance of value itself or the nature of the production of value. The substance of value is and remains nothing but expended labour-power labour independent of the specific, useful character of this expenditure. A serf for instance expends his labour-power for six days, labours for six days, and the fact of this expenditure as such is not altered by the circumstance that he may be working three days for himself, on his own field, and three days for his lord, on the field of the latter. Both his voluntary labour for himself and his forced labour for his lord are equally labour; so far as this labour is considered with reference to the values, or to the useful articles created by it, there is no difference in his six days of labour. The difference refers merely to the different conditions by which the expenditure of his labour-power during both halves of his labour-time of six days is called forth. The same applies to the necessary and surplus-labour of the wage-labourer. The process of production expires in the commodity. The fact that labour-power was expended in its fabrication now appears as a material property of the commodity, as the property of possessing value. The magnitude of this value is measured by the amount of labour expended; the value of a commodity resolves itself into nothing else besides and is not composed of anything else. If I have drawn a straight line of definite length, I have, to start with, produced a straight line (true, only symbolically, as I know beforehand) by resort to the art of drawing, which is practised in accordance with certain rules (laws) independent of myself. If I divide this line into three sections (which may correspond to a certain problem), every one of these sections remains a straight line, and the entire line, whose sections they are, does not resolve itself by this division into anything different from a straight line, for instance into some kind of curve. Neither can I divide a line of a given length in such a way that the sum of its parts is greater than the undivided line itself; hence the length of the undivided line is not determined by any arbitrarily fixed lengths of its parts. Vice versa, the relative lengths of these parts are limited from the outset by the size of the line whose parts they are. In this a commodity produced by a capitalist does not differ in any way from that produced by an independent labourer or by communities of working-people or by slaves. But in the present case the entire product of labour, as well as its entire value, belongs to the capitalist. Like every other producer he has to convert his commodity by sale into money before he can manipulate it further; he must convert it into the form of the universal equivalent. Let us examine the commodity-product before it is converted into money. It belongs wholly to the capitalist. On the other hand as a useful product of labour, a use-value, it is entirely the product of a past labour-process. Not so its value. One portion of this value is but the value of the means of production expended in the production of this commodity and re-appearing in a new form. This value has not been produced during the process of production of this commodity, for the means of production possessed this value before the process of production, independently of it; they entered into this process as the vehicles of this value; it is only its form of appearance that has been renewed and altered. This portion of the value of the commodity constitutes for the capitalist an equivalent of the portion of the constant capital-value advanced and consumed in the production of the commodity. It existed previously in the form of means of production; it exists now as a component part of the value of the newly produced commodity. As soon as this commodity has been turned into money, the value now existing in the form of money must be reconverted into means of production, into its original form determined by the process of production and its function in it. Nothing is altered in the character of the value of a commodity by the function of this value as capital. A second portion of the value of a commodity is the value of the labour-power which the wage-worker sells to the capitalist. It is determined, the same as that of the means of production, independently of the process of production into which labour-power is to enter, and it is fixed in an act of circulation, the purchase and sale of labour-power, before the latter enters the process of production. By means of his function the expenditure of labour-power the wage-labourer produces a commodity-value equal to the value which the capitalist has to pay him for the use of his labour-power. He gives this value to the capitalist in the form of a commodity and is paid for it by him in money. That this portion of the commodity-value is for the capitalist but an equivalent for the variable capital which he has to advance in wages does not alter in any way the fact that it is a commodity-value newly created during the process of production and consisting of nothing but what surplus-value consists of, namely, past expenditure of labour-power. Nor is this truth affected by the fact that the value of the labour-power paid by the capitalist to the labourer in the form of wages and assumes the form of a revenue for the labourer, and that not only labour-power is continually reproduced thereby but also the class of wage-labourers as such, and thus the basis of the entire capitalist production. However, the sum of these two portions of value does not comprise the whole of commodity-value. There remains an excess over both of them the surplus-value. This, like the portion of value which replaces the variable capital advanced in wages, is a value newly created by the labourer during the process of production congealed labour. But it does not cost the owner of the entire product, the capitalist, anything. This circumstance actually permits the capitalist to consume the surplus-value entirely as revenue, unless he has to surrender parts of it to other participants such as ground-rent to the landlord, in which case such portions constitute a revenue of such third persons. This same circumstance was the compelling motive that induced our capitalist to engage at all in the manufacture of commodities. But neither his original benevolent intention of snatching surplus-value, nor its subsequent expenditure as revenue by him or others affects the surplus-value as such. They do not impair the fact that it is congealed unpaid labour, nor the magnitude of this surplus-value, which is determined by entirely different conditions. However, if Adam Smith wanted to occupy himself, as he did, with the role of the various parts of this value in the total process of reproduction, even while he was investigating the value of commodities, it would be evident that while some particular parts function as revenue, others function just as continually as capital and consequently, according to his logic, should have been designated as constituent parts of the commodity-value, or parts into which this value resolves itself. Adam Smith identifies the production of commodities in general with capitalist commodity production; the means of production are to him from the outset capital, labour is from the outset wage-labour, and therefore Ramsay makes the following remark against Ricardo: Say, indeed, settles the matter easy enough. That which is an advance of capital for one, is or was a revenue and net product for another. The difference between the gross and the net product is purely subjective, and Storch, who likewise accepts Adam Smith s doctrine in principle, finds however that Say s practical application of it does not hold water. Barton, Ramsay, and Cherbuliez attempt to go beyond the formulation of Adam Smith. They founder because they pose the problem one-sidedly from the outset by failing to make clear the distinction between constant and variable capital-value and between fixed and circulating capital. John Stuart Mill likewise reproduces, with his usual pomposity, the doctrine handed down by Adam Smith to his followers. As a result, the Smithian confusion of thought persists to this hour and his dogma is one of the orthodox articles of faith of Political Economy.

Economic Manuscripts: Capital: Volume Two

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1885-c2/ch19.htm

It is evidently the circulation formula For our present purpose this process of reproduction must be studied from the point of view of the replacement of the value as well as the substance of the individual component parts of C'. We cannot rest content any longer, as we did in the analysis of the value of the product of the individual capital, with the assumption that the individual capitalist can first convert the component parts of his capital into money by the sale of his commodities, and then reconvert them into productive capital by renewed purchase of the elements of production in the commodity-market. Inasmuch as those elements of production are by nature material, they represent as much a constituent of the social capital as the individual finished product, which is exchanged for them and replaced by them. Contrariwise the movement of that portion of the social commodity-product which is consumed by the labourer in expending his wages, and by the capitalist in expending his surplus-value, not only forms an integral part of the movement of the total product but intermingles with the movements of the individual capitals, and therefore this process cannot be explained by merely assuming it. The question that confronts us directly is this: How is the capital consumed in production replaced in value out of the annual product and how does the movement of this replacement intertwine with the consumption of the surplus-value by the capitalists and of the wages by the labourers? It is then first a matter of reproduction on a simple scale. It is furthermore assumed that products are exchanged at their values and also that there is no revolution in the values of the component parts of productive capital. The fact that prices diverge from values cannot, however, exert any influence on the movements of the social capital. On the whole, there is the same exchange of the same quantities of products, although the individual capitalists are involved in value-relations no longer proportional to their respective advances and to the quantities of surplus-value produced singly by every one of them. As for revolutions in value, they do not alter anything in the relations between the value-components of the total annual product, provided they are universally and evenly distributed. To the extent however that they are partially and unevenly distributed, they represent disturbances which, in the first place, can be understood as such only as far as they are regarded as divergences from unchanged value-relations, but in the second place, once there is proof of the law according to which one portion of the value of the annual product replaces constant, and another portion variable capital, a revolution either in the value of the constant or that of the variable capital would not alter anything in this law. It would change merely the relative magnitudes of the portions of value which function in the one or the other capacity, because other values would have taken the places of the original ones. So long as we looked upon the production of value and the value of the product of capital individually, the bodily form of the commodities produced was wholly immaterial for the analysis, whether it was machines, for instance, corn, or looking glasses. It was always but a matter of illustration, and any branch of production could have served that purpose equally well. What we dealt with was the immediate process of production itself, which presents itself at every point as the process of some individual capital. So far as the reproduction of capital was concerned, it was sufficient to assume that that portion of the product in commodities which represents capital-value finds an opportunity in the sphere of circulation to reconvert itself into its elements of production and thus into its form of productive capital; just as it sufficed to assume that both the labourer and the capitalist find in the market those commodities on which they spend their wages and the surplus-value. This merely formal manner of presentation is no longer adequate in the study of the total social capital and of the value of its products. The reconversion of one portion of the value of the product into capital and the passing of another portion into the individual consumption of the capitalist as well as the working-class form a movement within the value of the product itself in which the result of the aggregate capital finds expression; and this movement is not only a replacement of value, but also a replacement in material and is therefore as much bound up with the relative proportions of the value-components of the total social product as with their use-value, their material shape. Simple reproduction, reproduction on the same scale, appears as an abstraction, inasmuch as on the one hand the absence of all accumulation or reproduction on an extended scale is a strange assumption in capitalist conditions, and on the other hand conditions of production do not remain exactly the same in different years (and this is assumed). The assumption is that a social capital of a given magnitude produces the same quantity of commodity-value this year as last, and supplies the same quantum of wants, although the forms of the commodities may change in the process of reproduction. However, as far as accumulation does take place, simple reproduction is always a part of it, and can therefore be studied by itself, and is an actual factor of accumulation. The value of the annual product may decrease, although the quantity of use-values may remain the same; or the value may remain the same although the quantity of the use-values may decrease; or the quantity of value and of the reproduced use-values may decrease simultaneously. All this amounts to reproduction taking place either under more favourable conditions than before or under more difficult ones, which may result in imperfect defective reproduction. All this can refer only to the quantitative aspect of the various elements of reproduction, not to the role which they play as reproducing capital or as a reproduced revenue in the entire process. All the various branches of production pertaining to each of these two departments form one single great branch of production, that of the means of production in the one case, and that of articles of consumption in the other. The aggregate capital employed in each of these two branches of production constitutes a separate large department of the social capital. In each department the capital consists of two parts: The value of the total annual product created with the aid of this capital in each of the two departments consists of one portion which represents the constant capital c consumed in the process of production and only transferred to the product in accordance with its value, and of another portion added by the entire labour of the year. This latter portion is divided in turn into the replacement of the advanced variable capital v and the excess over and above it, which forms the surplus-value s. And just as the value of every individual commodity, that of the entire annual product of each department consists of c + v + s. Portion c of the value, representing the constant capital consumed in production, does not coincide with the value of the constant capital employed in production. True, the materials of production are entirely consumed and their values completely transferred to the product. But only a portion of the employed fixed capital is wholly consumed and its value thus transferred to the product. Another part of the fixed capital, such as machines, buildings, etc., continues to exist and function the same as before, though depreciated to the extent of the annual wear and tear. This persistent portion of the fixed capital does not exist for us, when we consider the value of the product. It is a portion of the capital-value, which exists independently and alongside of this newly produced commodity-value. This was shown previously in the analysis of the value of the product of individual capital (Vol. I, Ch. VIII.). However, for the present we must leave aside the method of analysis employed there. We saw in the study of the value of the product of individual capital that the value of which the fixed capital was shorn through wear and tear is transferred to the product created during the time of wear, irrespective of whether or not any portion of this fixed capital is replaced in kind during this time out of the value thus transferred. At this point in the study of the total social product and of its value, however, we are compelled, at least for the present, to leave out of account that portion of value which is transferred from the fixed capital to the annual product by wear and tear, unless fixed capital is replaced in kind during the year. In one of the following sections of this chapter we shall discuss this point in particular. I. Production of Means of Production: Capital. . . . . . . . . . . . . 4,000c + 1,000v = 5,000 Commodity-Product . . . 4,000c + 1,000v, + 1,000s = 6,000, II. Production of Articles of Consumption: Capital . . . . . . . . . . . 2,000c + 500v = 2,500 Commodity-Product . . 2,000c + 500v + 500s = 3,000, Recapitulation: Total annual commodity-product: I. 4,000c + 1,000v + 1,000s = 6,000 means of production II. 2,000c + 500v + 500s = 3,000 articles of consumption. If we were now to examine the transformations necessary on the basis of simple reproduction, where the entire surplus-value is unproductively consumed, and leave aside for the present the money-circulation that brings them about, we should obtain at the outset three great points of support. 1) The 500v, representing wages of the labourers, and 500s, representing surplus-value of the capitalists, in department II, must be spent for articles of consumption. But their value exists in articles of consumption worth 1,000, held by the capitalists of department II, which replace the advanced 500v and represent the 500s. Consequently the wages and surplus-value of department II are exchanged within this department for products of this same department. Thereby articles of consumption to the amount of (500v + 500s) II = 1,000, drop out of the total product. 2) The 1,000v plus 1,000s of department I must likewise be spent for articles of consumption; in other words, for products of department II. Hence they must be exchanged for the remainder of this product equal to the constant capital part, 2,000c. Department II receives in return an equal quantity of means of production, the product of I, in which the value of 1,000v + 1,000s of I is incorporated. Thereby 2,000 IIc and (1,000v +1,000s) I drop out of the calculation. 3) There still remain 4,000 Ic. These consist of means of production which can be used only in department I to replace its consumed constant capital, and are therefore disposed of by mutual exchange between the individual capitalists of I, just as the (500v + 500s) II by an exchange between the labourers and capitalists, or between the individual capitalists of II. Let this serve for the moment to facilitate the understanding of what follows. Now, this mutual exchange is accomplished by means of a circulation of money, which promotes it just as much as it renders its understanding difficult, but which is of decisive importance because the variable portion of capital must ever resume the form of money, as money-capital converting itself from the form of money into labour-power. The variable capital must be advanced in the form of money in all branches of production carried on at the entire periphery of society simultaneously alongside each other, regardless of whether they belong to category I or II. The capitalist buys the labour-power before it enters into the process of production, but pays for it only at stipulated times, after it has been expended in the production of use-values. He owns, together with the remainder of the value of the product, also that portion of it which is only an equivalent for the money expended in the payment of labour-power, that portion of the value of the product which represents variable capital. In this portion of value the labourer has already supplied the capitalist with the equivalent of his wages. But it is the reconversion of commodities into money, their sale, which restores to the capitalist his variable capital in the form of money-capital, which he may advance once more for the purchase of labour-power. In department I, then, the aggregate capitalist has paid 1,000 (I say solely to indicate that it is value in the form of money), equal to 1,000v, to the labourers for the value of product I already existing as the v-portion, i.e., of the means of production created by them. With these 1,000 the labourers buy articles of consumption of the same value from capitalists II, thereby converting one half of the constant capital II into money; capitalists II, in their turn, buy with these 1,000 means of production, valued at 1,000, from capitalists I; thereby, as far as the latter are concerned, the variable capital-value equal to 1,000v, which, being part of their product, existed in the bodily form of means of production, is thus reconverted into money and can now function anew in the hands of capitalists I as money-capital, which is transformed into labour-power, hence into the most essential element of productive capital. In this way their variable capital flows back to them in the form of money, as a result of the realisation of some of their commodity-capital. As for the money required to exchange the s-portion of commodity-capital I for the second half of constant capital II, it may be advanced in various ways. In reality this circulation embraces innumerable separate purchases and sales by the individual capitalists of both categories, the money coming in any event from these capitalists, since we have already accounted for the money put into circulation by the labourers. A capitalist of category II can buy, with the money-capital he has besides his productive capital, means of production from capitalists of category I, and, vice versa, a capitalist of category I can buy, with money-funds assigned for personal and not for capital expenditure, articles of consumption from capitalists of category II. A certain supply of money, to be used either for the advancement of capital or for the expenditure of revenue must under all circumstances be assumed to exist beside the productive capital in the hands of the capitalists, as we have shown above in parts I and II. Let us assume the proportion is wholly immaterial for our purpose that one half of the money is advanced by capitalists II in the purchase of means of production for the replacement of their constant capital, while the other half is spent by capitalists I for articles of consumption. In that case department II advances 500 for the purchase of means of production from department I, thereby replacing (inclusive of the above 1,000 coming from the labourers of department I) three-quarters of its constant capital in kind, with the 500 so obtained department I buys articles of consumption from II, thereby completing for one half of the s-portion of its commodity-capital the circulation c m c, and thus realising its product in the consumption-fund. By means of this second process the 500 return to the hands of II as money-capital existing beside its productive capital. On the other hand I expends money to the amount of 500 for the purchase of II s articles of consumption in anticipation of the sale of that half of the s-portion of its commodity-capital which is still lying in store as product. With the same 500 II buys from I means of production, thereby replacing in kind its entire constant capital (1,000 + 500 + 500 = 2,000) while I realises its entire surplus-value in articles of consumption. On the whole, the entire exchange of commodities in the amount of 4,000 would be effected with a money-circulation of 2,000 which amount is attained only because the entire annual product is described as exchanged in bulk, in a few large lots. The important point here is that II has not only reconverted its constant capital reproduced in the form of articles of consumption, into the form of means of production, but has besides recovered the 500 which it had advanced to the circulation for the purchase of means of production; and that, similarly, I again possesses not only its variable capital, which it had reproduced in the form of means of production, in money-form, as money-capital once more directly convertible into labour-power, but also the 500 expended in the purchase of articles of consumption in anticipation of the sale of the s-portion of its capital. These 500 flow back to it not because of the expenditure incurred, but because of the subsequent sale of a part of its commodity-product incorporating one half of its surplus-value. In both cases it is not only that the constant capital of II is reconverted from the form of a product into the bodily form of means of production, in which alone it can function as capital; and likewise it is not only that the variable portion of the capital of I is converted into its money-form, and the surplus-value portion of the means of production of I into its consumable form, the form in which it can be used as revenue. It is also that the 500 of money-capital, advanced by II in the purchase of means of production prior to selling the corresponding compensating portion of the value of its constant capital existing in the form of means of consumption flow back to II; and furthermore back to I flow the 500 which were expended anticipando by it for the purchase of articles of consumption. If the money advanced by II at the expense of the constant portion of its commodity-product, and by I at the expense of the surplus-value portion of its commodity-product, flows back to them, this is solely because the one class of capitalists throws 500 into circulation over and above the constant capital existing in the form of commodities in II, and the other class a like amount over and above the surplus-value existing in the form of commodities in I. In the last analysis the two departments have mutually paid one another in full by the exchange of equivalents in the shape of their respective commodities. The money thrown into circulation by them in excess of the values of their commodities, as a means of effecting the exchange of these commodities, returns to each one of them out of the circulation in proportion to the quota which each of the two had thrown into circulation. Neither has grown a farthing richer thereby. I possessed a constant capital of 2,000 in the form of articles of consumption plus 500 in money; now it possesses 2,000 in means of production plus 500 in money, the same as before; in the same way I possesses, as before, a surplus-value of 1,000 (consisting of commodities, means of production, now converted into a consumption-fund) plus 500 in money. The general conclusion is this: Of the money which the industrial capitalists throw into circulation to accomplish their own commodity circulation, whether at the expense of the constant part of the commodity-value or at the expense of the surplus-value existing in the commodities to the extent that it is laid out as revenue, as much returns into the hands of the respective capitalists as was advanced by them for the money-circulation. As for the reconversion of the variable capital of class I into the form of money, this capital, after the capitalists of I invested it in wages, exists for them first in the form of commodities in which the labourers delivered it to them. They paid this capital in the form of money to these labourers as the price of their labour-power. To this extent the capitalists have paid for that constituent part of the value of their commodity-product which is equal to the variable capital expended in the form of money. They are, for this reason, the owners of this portion of the commodity-product as well. But that part of the working-class which is employed by them does not buy the means of production created by it; these labourers buy articles of consumption produced by II. Hence the variable capital advanced by the capitalists of I in the payment of labour-power does not return to them directly. It passes by means of purchases made by the labourers into the hands of the capitalist producers of the commodities necessary for and within the reach of working folks; in other words, it passes into the hands of capitalists II. And not until these expend the money in the purchase of means of production does it return by this circuitous route into the hands of capitalists I. It follows that, on the basis of simple reproduction, the sum of the values of v + s of the commodity-capital of I (and therefore a corresponding proportional part of the total commodity-product of I) must be equal to the constant capital IIc, which is likewise taken as a proportional part of the total commodity-product of department II; or I(v + s) = IIc. Category II of the annual production of commodities consists of a great variety of branches of production, which may, however, be divided into two great sub-divisions by their products. As far as the first category is concerned it is obvious that the variable capital advanced in the production of the commodities belonging in it must flow back in money-form directly to that portion of the capitalist class II (i.e., the capitalists IIa) who have produced these necessities of life. They sell them to their own labourers to the amount of the variable capital paid to them in wages. This reflux is direct so far as this entire sub-division a of capitalist class I is concerned, no matter how numerous the transactions may be between the capitalists of the various pertinent branches of industry, by means of which the returning variable capital is distributed pro rata. These are processes of circulation, whose means of circulation are supplied directly by the money expended by the labourers. It is different, however, with sub-division IIb. The entire portion of the value produced in this sub-division, IIb(v + s), exists in the bodily form of articles of luxury, i.e., articles which the labouring class can buy no more than it can buy commodity-value I existing in the form of means of production, notwithstanding the fact that both the articles of luxury and the means of production are the products of these labourers. Hence the reflux by which the variable capital advanced in this subdivision returns to the capitalist producers in its money-form cannot be direct but must be mediated, as in the case of Iv. Let us assume for instance that v = 500 and s = 500, as they did in the case of the entire class II; but that the variable capital and the corresponding surplus-value are distributed as follows: Sub-division a, Necessities of Life: v = 400; s = 400; hence a quantity of commodities in consumer necessities of the value of 400 v + 400s = 800, or IIa (400v + 400s). Sub-division b, Articles of Luxury: of the value of 100 v + l00 s = 200, or IIb (L00v + 100s). The labourers of IIb have received 100 in money as payment for their labour-power, or say 100. With this money they buy articles of consumption from capitalists IIa to the same amount. This class of capitalists buys with the same money 100 worth of the IIb commodities, and in this way the variable capital of capitalists IIb flows back to them in the form of money. In IIa there are available once more 400v in money, in the hands of the capitalists, obtained by exchange with their own labourers. Besides, a fourth of the part of the product representing surplus-value has been transferred to the labourers of IIb, and in exchange IIb (100v) have been received in the form of articles of luxury. Now, assuming that the capitalists of IIa and IIb divide the expenditure of their revenue in the same proportion between necessities of life and luxuries three-fifths for necessities for instance and two-fifths for luxuries the capitalists of sub-class IIa will spend three-fifths of their revenue from surplus-value, amounting to 400s, or 240, for their own products, necessities of life, and two-fifths, or 160, for articles of luxury. The capitalists of sub-class IIb will divide their surplus-value of 100s in the same way: three-fifths, or 60, for necessities, and two-fifths, or 40, for articles of luxury, the latter being produced and exchanged in their own sub-class. The 160 in articles of luxury received by (IIa)s pass into the hands of the IIa capitalists in the following manner: As we have seen, 100 of the (IIa) 400s were exchanged in the form of necessities of life for an equal amount of (IIb)v, which exists as articles of luxury, and another 60, consisting of necessities of life, for (IIb) 60s, consisting of luxuries. The total calculation then stands as follows: (IIa)s is then divided into 240 for necessities and 160 for luxuries, or 240 + 160 = 400, (IIa). (IIb)s is divided into 60 for necessities and 40 for luxuries; 60 + 40 = 100, (IIb). The last 40 are consumed by this class out of its own product (two-fifths of its surplus-value); the 60 in necessities are obtained by this class through the exchange of 60 of its surplus-value for 60, (a). We have, then, for the entire capitalist class II the following (v plus s in sub-division [a] consisting of necessities, in [b] of luxuries): IIa (400v + 400s) + IIb (100v + 100s) = 1,000; by this movement there is thus realised: 500v (a + b) [realised in 400v (a) and 100s (a)] + 500s (a + b) [realised in 300s (a) + 100v (b) + 100s (b)] =1,000. For a and b, each considered by itself, we obtain the following realisation: The 2,000 I(v + s) would therefore break up into (800v + 800s) I for a, equal to 1,600 means of production of necessities of life, and (200v + 200s) I for b, equal to 400 means of production of luxuries. A considerable part of the instruments of labour as such, as well as of the raw and auxiliary materials, etc., is the same for both departments. But so far as the exchange of the various portions of value of the total product I(v + s) is concerned, such a division would be wholly immaterial. Both the above 800v of I and the 200v of I are realised because the wages are spent for articles of consumption 1,000 IIc; hence the money-capital advanced for this purpose is distributed evenly on its return among the capitalist producers of I, their advanced variable capital is replaced pro rata in money. On the other hand, so far as the realisation of the 1,000 Is is concerned, the capitalists will here likewise draw uniformly (in proportion to the magnitude of their s) 600 IIa and 400 IIb in means of consumption out of the entire second half of IIc, equal to 1,000; consequently those who replace the constant capital of IIa will draw. 480 (three-fifths) out of 600c (IIa) and 320 (two-fifths) out of 400c (IIb), a total of 800; those who replace the constant capital of IIb will draw. 120 (three-fifths) out of 600c (IIa) and 80 (two-fifths) out of 400c (IIb), which equals 200. Grand total, 1,000. What is arbitrary here is the ratio of the variable to the constant capital of both I and II and so is the identity of this ratio for I and II and their sub-divisions. As for this identity, it has been assumed here merely for the sake of simplification, and it would not alter in any way the conditions of the problem and its solution if we were to assume different proportions. However, the necessary result of all this, on the assumption of simple reproduction, is the following. Now, if we were to say after the manner of Adam Smith that I(v + s) resolve themselves into IIc, and IIc resolves itself into I(v + s), or, as he used to say more frequently and still more absurdly, I(v + s) constitute component parts of the price (or value in exchange, as he has it) of II and II constitutes the entire component part of the value of I(v + s), then one could and should likewise say that (IIb)v resolves itself into (IIa)s, or (IIa)s into (IIb)v, or (IIb)v forms a component part of the surplus-value of IIa, and, vice versa, the surplus-value thus resolves itself into wages, or into variable capital, and the variable capital forms a component part of the surplus-value. This absurdity is indeed found in Adam Smith, since with him wages are determined by the value of the necessities of life, and these commodity-values in their turn by the value of the wages (variable capital) and surplus-value contained in them. He is so absorbed in the fractional parts into which the value-product of one working-day is divided on the basis of capitalism namely into v plus s that he quite forgets that it is immaterial in simple commodity exchange whether the equivalents existing in various bodily forms consist of paid or unpaid labour, since their production costs in either case the same amount of labour; and that it is also immaterial whether the commodity of A is a means of production and that of B an article of consumption and whether one commodity has to serve as a component part of capital after its sale while another passes into the consumption-fund and, secundum Adam, is consumed as revenue. The use to which the individual buyer puts his commodity does not come within the scope of commodity-exchange, the sphere of circulation, and does not affect the value of the commodity. This is in no wise altered by the fact that in the analysis of the circulation of the total annual social product, the definite use for which it is intended, the factor of consumption of the various component parts of that product, must be taken into consideration. In the exchange established above of (IIb)v for a portion of (IIa)s of the same value, and in the further exchanges between (IIa), and (IIb), it is by no means assumed that either the individual capitalists of IIa and IIb or their respective totalities divide their surplus-value in the same proportion between necessary articles of consumption and articles of luxury. The one may spend more on this consumption, the other more on that. On the basis of simple reproduction it is merely assumed that a sum of values equal to the entire surplus-value is realised in the consumption-fund. The limits are thus given. Within each department the one may spend more in a, the other in b. But this may compensate itself mutually, so that the capitalist groups of a and b, taken as a whole, each participate in the same proportion in both. The value-relations the proportional shares of the two kinds of producers, a and b in the total value of product II consequently also a definite quantitative relation between the branches of production supplying those products are however necessarily given in each concrete case; only the proportion chosen as an illustration is a hypothetical one. It would not alter the qualitative aspects if another illustration were selected; only the quantitative determinations would be altered. But if on account of any circumstances there arises an actual change in the relative magnitude of a and b, the conditions of simple reproduction would also change accordingly. Since (IIb)v is realised in an equivalent part of (IIa)s, it follows that in proportion as the luxury part of the annual product grows, as therefore an increasing share of the labour-power is absorbed in the production of luxuries, the reconversion of the variable capital advanced in (IIb)v into money-capital functioning anew as the money-form of the variable capital, and thereby the existence and reproduction of the part of the working-class employed in IIb the supply to them of consumer necessities depends upon the prodigality of the capitalist class, upon the exchange of a considerable portion of their surplus-value for articles of luxury. Every crisis at once lessens the consumption of luxuries. It retards, delays the reconversion of (IIb)v into money-capital, permitting it only partially and thus throwing a certain number of the labourers employed in the production of luxuries out of work, while on the other hand it thus clogs the sale of consumer necessities and reduces it. And this without mentioning the unproductive labourers who are dismissed at the same time, labourers who receive for their services a portion of the capitalists luxury expense fund (these labourers are themselves pro tanto luxuries), and who take part to a very considerable extent in the consumption of the necessities of life, etc. The reverse takes place in periods of prosperity, particularly during the times of bogus prosperity, in which the relative value of money, expressed in commodities, decreases also for other reasons (without any actual revolution in values), so that the prices of commodities rise independently of their own values. It is not alone the consumption of necessities of life which increases. The working-class (now actively reinforced by its entire reserve army) also enjoys momentarily articles of luxury ordinarily beyond its reach, and those articles which at other times constitute for the greater part consumer necessities only for the capitalist class. This on its part calls forth a rise in prices. It is sheer tautology to say that crises are caused by the scarcity of effective consumption, or of effective consumers. The capitalist system does not know any other modes of consumption than effective ones, except that of sub forma pauperis or of the swindler. That commodities are unsaleable means only that no effective purchasers have been found for them, i.e., consumers (since commodities are bought in the final analysis for productive or individual consumption). But if one were to attempt to give this tautology the semblance of a profounder justification by saying that the working-class receives too small a portion of its own product and the evil would be remedied as soon as it receives a larger share of it and its wages increase in consequence, one could only remark that crises are always prepared by precisely a period in which wages rise generally and the working-class actually gets a larger share of that part of the annual product which is intended for consumption. From the point of view of these advocates of sound and simple (!) common sense, such a period should rather remove the crisis. It appears, then, that capitalist production comprises conditions independent of good or bad will, conditions which permit the working-class to enjoy that relative prosperity only momentarily, and at that always only as the harbinger of a coming crisis. [Ad notam for possible followers of the Rodbertian theory of crises. F.E.] We saw a while ago that the proportion between the production of consumer necessities and that of luxuries requires the division of II(v + s) between IIa and IIb, and thus of IIc between (IIa)c and (IIb)c. Hence this division affects the character and the quantitative relations of production to their very roots, and is an essential determining factor of its general structure. Simple reproduction is essentially directed toward consumption as an end, although the grabbing of surplus-value appears as the compelling motive of the individual capitalists; but surplus-value, whatever its relative magnitude may be, is after all supposed to serve here only for the individual consumption of the capitalist. As simple reproduction is a part, and the most important one at that, of all annual reproduction on an extended scale, this motive remains as an accompaniment of and contrast to the self-enrichment motive as such. In reality the matter is more complicated, because partners in the loot the surplus-value of the capitalist figure as consumers independent of him. This disposes of the circulation of IIc, equal to 2,000, which is exchanged for I (1,000v + 1,000s). Leaving aside for the present the 4,000 Ic there still remains the circulation of v + s within class II. Now II(v + s) is divided between the sub-classes IIa and IIb in the following manner: The 400v (a) circulates within its own sub-class; the labourers paid with it buy from their employers, the capitalists IIa, necessary means of subsistence produced by themselves. Since the capitalists of both sub-classes spend three-fifths of their surplus-value in products of IIa (necessities) and two-fifths in products of IIb (luxuries), the three-fifths of the surplus-value of a, or 240, are consumed within the sub-class IIa itself; likewise, two-fifths of the surplus-value of b (produced and existing in the form of articles of luxury), within the sub-class IIb. There remains to be exchanged between IIa and IIb: On the side of IIa: 160s; On the side of IIb: 100v + 60s. These cancel each other. With their 100, received in the form of money wages, the labourers of IIb buy necessities of life in that amount from IIa. The IIb capitalists likewise buy necessities from IIa to the amount of three-fifths of their surplus-value, or 60. The IIa capitalists thus obtain the money required for investing, as above assumed, two-fifths of their surplus-value, or 160s, in luxuries produced by IIb (100, held by the IIb capitalists as a product replacing the wages paid by them, and 60s). The scheme for this is therefore: The direct reflux of the money-capital advanced in variable capital, which takes place only in the case of the capitalist department IIa which produces necessities of life, is but an expression, modified by special conditions, of the previously mentioned general law that money advanced to the circulation by producers of commodities returns to them in the normal course of commodity circulation. From this it incidentally follows that if any money-capitalist at all stands behind the producer of commodities and advances to the industrial capitalist money-capital (in the strictest meaning of the word, i.e., capital-value in the form of money), the real point of reflux for this money is the pocket of this money-capitalist. Thus the mass of the circulating money belongs to that department of money-capital which is organised and concentrated in the form of banks, etc., although the money circulates more or less through all hands. The way in which this department advances its capital necessitates the continual final reflux to it in the form of money, although this is once again brought about by the reconversion of the industrial capital into money-capital. The circulation of commodities always requires two things: Commodities which are thrown into circulation and money which is likewise thrown into it. The process of circulation ... does not, like direct barter of products, become extinguished upon the use-values changing places and hands. The money does not vanish on dropping out of the circuit of the metamorphosis of a given commodity. It is constantly being precipitated into new places in the arena of circulation vacated by other commodities, etc. (Vol. I, Ch. III.). For instance in the circulation between IIc and I(v + s) we assumed that II had advanced 500 in money for it. In the innumerable processes of circulation, into which the circulation between large social groups of producers resolves itself, representatives of the various groups will at various times be the first to appear as buyers, and hence throw money into circulation. Quite apart from particular circumstances, this is necessitated by the difference, if nothing else, in the periods of production, and thus of the turnovers, of the various commodity-capitals. So with these 500 II buys from I means of production of the same value and I buys from II articles of consumption valued at 500. Hence the money flows back to II, but this department does not in any way grow richer by this reflux. It had first thrown 500 in money into circulation and drew commodities of the same value out of it; then it sells 500 worth of commodities and draws the same amount of money out of circulation; thus the 500 flow back to it. As a matter of fact, II has thrown into circulation 500 in money and 500 in commodities, which is equal to 1,000. It draws out of the circulation 500 in commodities and 500 in money. The circulation requires for the handling of 500 in I commodities and 500 in II commodities only 500 in money; hence whoever advanced the money in the purchase of commodities from other producers recovers it when selling his own. Consequently if I had at first bought commodities from II for 500, and later sold to II commodities of the value of 500, these 500 would have returned to I instead of to II. In class I the money invested in wages, i.e., the variable capital advanced in the form of money, does not return directly in this form but indirectly, by a detour. But in II the 500 of wages return directly from the labourers to the capitalists, and this return is always direct in the case where purchase and sale take place repeatedly between the same persons in such a way that they are acting alternately as buyers and sellers of commodities. The capitalist of II pays for the labour-power in money; he thereby incorporates labour-power in his capital and assumes the role of an industrial capitalist in relation to his labourers as wage-earners, but does so only by means of this act of circulation, which is for him merely a conversion of money-capital into productive capital. Thereupon the labourer, who in the first instance was a seller, a dealer in his own labour-power, appears in the second instance as a buyer, a possessor of money, in relation to the capitalist, who now acts as a seller of commodities. In this way the capitalist recovers the money invested by him in wages. As the sale of these commodities does not imply cheating, etc., but is an exchange of equivalents in commodities and money, it is not a process by which the capitalist enriches himself. He does not pay the labourer twice, first in money and then in commodities. His money returns to him as soon as the labourer exchanges it for his commodities. However, the money-capital converted into variable capital, i.e., the money advanced for wages, plays a prominent role in the circulation of money itself, since the labourers must live from hand to mouth and cannot give the industrial capitalists credit for any length of time. For this reason variable capital must be advanced in the form of money simultaneously at innumerable territorially different points in society at certain short intervals, such as a week, etc. in periods of time that repeat themselves rather quickly (and the shorter these periods, the smaller relatively is the total amount of money thrown at one time into circulation through this channel) whatever the various periods of turnover of the capitals in the different branches of industry. In every country with a capitalist production the money-capital so advanced constitutes a relatively decisive share of the total circulation, the more so as the same money, before its reflux to its point of departure, passes through the most diverse channels and functions as a medium of circulation for countless other businesses. Now let us consider the circulation between I(v + s) and II from a different angle. Capitalists I advance 1,000 in the payment of wages. With this money the labourers buy 1,000 worth of means of subsistence from capitalists II. These in turn buy for the same money means of production from capitalists I. Capitalists I thus get back their variable capital in the form of money, while capitalists II have reconverted one half of their constant capital from the form of commodity-capital into that of productive capital. Capitalists II advance another 500 in money to get means of production from I. The capitalists I spend this money on articles of consumption from II. These 500 thus return to capitalists II. They advance this amount again in order to reconvert the last quarter of their constant capital, converted into commodities, into its productive bodily form. This money flows back to I and once more withdraws articles of consumption of the same amount from II. Thus the 500 return to II. The capitalists II are now as before in possession of 500 in money and 2,000 in constant capital, the latter having been newly converted from the form of commodity-capital into that of productive capital. By means of 1,500 a quantity of commodities worth 5,000 has been circulated. Namely: 1) I pays 1,000 to his labourers for their labour-power of the same value; 2) With these same 1,000 the labourers buy means of subsistence from II; 3) With the same money II buys means of production from I, thereby restoring to I variable capital to the amount of 1,000 in the form of money; 4) II buys 500 worth of means of production from I; 5) With the same 500 I buys articles of consumption from II; 6) With the same 500 II buys means of production from I; 7) With the same 500 I buys means of subsistence from II. Thus 500 have returned to II, which had thrown them into circulation besides its 2,000 in commodities and for which it did not withdraw from circulation any equivalent in commodities. The exchange therefore takes the following course: In this way the l.000 have returned to I as the money-form of its variable capital. Total amount of commodity-values exchanged: 5,000. The 500 advanced by II for the purchase have returned to it. On the other hand the bodily form into which the variable capital existing in the form of money must be transformed, i.e., labour-power, has been maintained, reproduced and again made available by consumption as the sole article of trade of its owners, which they must sell in order to live. The relation of wage-labourers and capitalists has likewise been reproduced. As for the capitalists II, the process is C M, the transformation of a portion of their commodity-product into the money-form, from which it is reconverted into the constituents of productive capital, namely into a portion of the means of production required by them. In the money advance ( 500) made by capitalists II for the purchase of the other parts of the means of production, the money-form of that portion of II which exists as yet in the form of commodities (articles of consumption) is anticipated; in the act M C, in which II buys with M, and C is sold by I, the money (II) is converted into a portion of the productive capital, while C (I) passes through the act C M, changes into money, which however does not represent any component part of capital-value for I, but surplus-value converted into money and expended solely for articles of consumption. In the circuit M C ... P ... C' M', the first act, M C, is that of one capitalist, the last, C' M' (or part of it), is that of another; whether the C, by which M is converted into productive capital, represents a component of constant capital, of variable capital, or surplus-value for the seller of C (who exchanges this C for money), is wholly immaterial for the commodity circulation itself. Class I, so far as concerns the component v + s of its commodity-product, draws more money out of the circulation than it has thrown in. In the first place, the 1,000 of variable capital return to it; in the second place, it sells means of production worth 500 (see above, exchange No. 4); one half of its surplus-value is thus turned into money; then (exchange No. 6) it sells once more 500 worth of means of production, the second half of its surplus-value, and thus the entire surplus-value is withdrawn from circulation in the shape of money. Hence in succession: 1) variable capital reconverted into money, equal to 1,000; 2) one half of the surplus-value turned into money, equal to 500; 3) the other half of the surplus-value, equal to 500; altogether 1,000v + 1,000s turned into money, equal to 2,000. Although I threw only 1,000 into circulation (aside from those exchanges which promote the reproduction of I and which we shall have to analyse later), it has withdrawn double that amount from it. Of course s passes into other hands, (II), as soon as it has been converted into money, by being spent for articles of consumption. The capitalists of I withdrew only as much in money as they threw into it in value in the form of commodities; the fact that this value is surplus-value, i.e., that it does not cost the capitalists anything, does not alter the value of these commodities in any way; so far as the exchange of values in commodity circulation is concerned, that fact is of no consequence at all. The existence of surplus-value in money is of course transient, the same as all other forms which the advanced capital assumes in its metamorphoses. It lasts no longer than the interval between the conversion of commodities I into money and the subsequent conversion of the money I into commodities II. If the turnovers had been assumed to be shorter or, from the point of view of the simple circulation of commodities, the circulation of money more rapid even less money would be ample to circulate the exchanged commodity-values; the amount is always determined if the number of successive exchanges is given by the sum of the prices, or the sum of values, of the circulating commodities. It is immaterial in what proportion this sum of values consists of surplus-value on the one hand, and of capital-value on the other. If the wages of I, in our illustration, were paid four times per year, we should have 4 times 250, or 1,000. Hence 250 in money would suffice for the circulation Iv IIc, and for that between the variable capital Iv and the labour-power I. Likewise, if the circulation between I and II were to take place in four turnovers, it would require only 250, or in the aggregate a sum of money, or a money-capital, of 500 for the circulation of commodities amounting to 5,000. In that case the surplus-value would be converted into money four times successively, one-quarter each time, instead of twice successively, one half each time. If I instead of II should act as buyer in exchange No. 4 and expend 500 for articles of consumption of the same value, II would buy means of production with the same 500 in exchange No. 5; 6) I buys articles of consumption with the same 500; 7) II buys means of production with the same 500 so that the 500 finally return to I, the same as before to II. The surplus-value is here converted into money by means of the money spent by the capitalist producers themselves for their individual consumption. This money represents the anticipated revenue, the anticipated receipts from the surplus-value contained in the commodities still to be sold. The surplus-value is not converted into money by the reflux of the 500; for aside from 1,000 in the form of commodities Iv, I threw 500 in money into circulation at the close of exchange No. 4, and this was additional money, so far as we know, and not the proceeds from the sale of commodities. If this money flows back to I, I merely gets back its additional money, and does not thereby convert its surplus-value into money. The conversion of the surplus-value I into money takes place only by the sale of the commodities Is, in which it is incorporated, and lasts each time only until the money obtained by the sale of the commodities is expended anew in the purchase of articles of consumption. With additional money ( 500) I buys articles of consumption from II; this money was spent by I, which holds its equivalent in II commodities; the money returns for the first time by the purchase from I by II of commodities to the amount of 500; in other words, it returns as the equivalent of the commodities sold by I, but these commodities do not cost I anything, they constitute surplus-value for I, and thus the money thrown into circulation by this very department turns its own surplus-value into money. On buying for the second time (No. 6) I has likewise obtained its equivalent in II commodities. Take it, now, that II does not buy (No. 7) means of production from I. In that case I would have actually paid 1,000 for articles of consumption, thereby consuming its entire surplus-value as revenue; namely, 500 in its own I commodities (means of production) and 500 in money: on the other hand, it would still have 500 in its own commodities (means of production) in stock, and would have got rid of 500 in money. On the contrary II would have reconverted three-fourths of its constant capital from the form of commodity-capital into that of productive capital; but one-fourth ( 500) would be held by it in the form of money-capital, actually in the form of idle money, or of money which has suspended its function and is held in abeyance. Should this state of affairs last for any length of time, II would have to cut down its scale of reproduction by one-fourth. However the 500 in means of production, which I has on its hands, are not surplus-value existing in the form of commodities; they occupy the place of the 500 advanced in money, which I possessed aside from its 1,000 of surplus-value in commodity-form. In the form of money, they are always convertible; as commodities they are momentarily unsaleable. So much is evident: that simple reproduction in which every element of productive capital must be replaced in both II and I remains possible in this case only if the 500 golden birds, which I first sent flying, return to it. If a capitalist (we have only industrial capitalists still to deal with here, who are the representatives of all others) spends money for articles of consumption, he is through with it, it goes the way of all flesh. It can flow back to him only if he fishes it out of circulation in exchange for commodities, i.e., for his commodity-capital. As the value of his entire annual commodity-product (his commodity-capital), so that of every one of its elements, i.e., the value of every individual commodity, is divisible, as far as he is concerned, into constant capital-value, variable capital-value, and surplus-value. The conversion into money of every individual commodity (as elements constituting the commodity-product) is consequently at the same time such a conversion of a certain portion of the surplus-value contained in the entire commodity-product. In this case, then, it is literally true that the capitalist himself threw the money into circulation when he spent it on articles of consumption by which his surplus-value is converted into money, or realised. Of course it is not a question of the identical coins but of a certain amount of hard cash equal to the one (or to a portion of the one) which he had previously thrown into circulation to satisfy his personal wants. In practice this occurs in two ways. If the business has just been opened, in the current year, it will take quite a while, at least a few months, before the capitalist is able to use any portion of the receipts of his business for his personal consumption. But for all that he does not suspend his consumption for a single moment. He advances to himself (immaterial whether out of his own pocket or by means of credit from the pocket of somebody else) money in anticipation of surplus-value still to be snatched by him; but in doing so he also advances a circulating medium for the realisation of surplus-value to be realised later. If, on the contrary, the business has been running regularly for a longer period payments and receipts are distributed over different terms throughout the year. But one thing continues uninterruptedly, namely, the consumption of the capitalist, which anticipates, and whose volume is computed on a definite proportion of, the customary or estimated revenue. With every portion of commodities sold, a portion of the surplus-value to be produced annually is also realised. But if during the entire year only as much of the produced commodities is sold as is required to replace the constant and variable capital-values contained in them, or if prices were to fall to such an extent that only the advanced capital-value contained in the entire annual commodity-product should be realised on its sale, then the anticipatory character of the expenditure of money in expectation of future surplus-value would be clearly revealed. If our capitalist fails, his creditors and the court investigate whether his anticipated private expenditures were in proper proportion to the volume of his business and to the receipt of surplus-value usually or normally corresponding to it. So far as the entire capitalist class is concerned, the proposition that it must itself throw into circulation the money required for the realisation of its surplus-value (correspondingly also for the circulation of its capital, constant and variable) not only fails to appear paradoxical, but stands forth as a necessary condition of the entire mechanism. For there are here only two classes: the working-class disposing only of its labour-power, and the capitalist class, which has a monopoly of the social means of production and money. It would rather be a paradox if the working-class were to advance in the first instance from its own resources the money required for the realisation of the surplus-value contained in the commodities. But the individual capitalist makes this advance only by acting as a buyer, expending money in the purchase of articles of consumption or advancing money in the purchase of elements of his productive capital, whether of labour-power or means of production. He never parts with his money unless he gets an equivalent for it. He advances money to the circulation only in the same way as he advances commodities to it. He acts in both instances as the initial point of their circulation. The actual process is obscured by two circumstances:

Economic Manuscripts: Capital: Volume Two

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