On August 16, 1867, Marx
finished correcting the last proofs of the first volume of
Capital and sent a brief and moving note to Engels: This has
been possible thanks to you alone. Without your self-sacrifice
for me I could never possibly have done the enormous work for
the three volumes. I embrace you, full of thanks.” In fact,
the first volume of Capital was not brought out by the
publisher, Meissner of Hamburg, until a month later, on
September 14, 1867.
This book, which has had an
incalculable influence on modern history, has provoked a
permanent controversy over its real nature since the end of the
nineteenth century. Louis Althusser and his school have recently
rekindled this controversy in France. [Louis Althusser is a
prominent professional philosopher belonging to the French
Communist Party. He is the author of Pour Marx and Lire le
Capital.]
Precisely what is Capital? Is
it a work of economics? Is it a work of revolutionary politics?
Is it a philosophical text? Is it the beginning of modern
sociology? Some people have even declared that it is above all
the work of a moralist.
The subtitle of the work is:
“A Critique of Political Economy.” “Political economy”
is for Marx a demi-science, a science which was transformed into
an ideology. It was arrested in its development and deviated
from the scientific path because it remained captive to the
prejudices and concepts of the dominant class of its epoch, the
bourgeoisie. It was because their own logic would have obliged
them to condemn the capitalist mode of production, expose its
contradictions, demonstrate its transitory character and presage
its end that the bourgeois economists were incapable of
completing the work of Adam Smith and Ricardo and that the
classical school of political economy began to decay.
In carrying through the
“critique of political economy” Marx therefore had to
combine three steps at one time. He had to analyze the
functioning of capitalist economy by disclosing its
contradictions and showing to what extent the official economic
science is incapable of rendering an account of these and
explaining them. He had to analyze the theories of the bourgeois
economists, set forth the contradictions, inadequacies and
errors of their theories and trace these back to their roots in
the ideological, that is to say, their apologetic role, in
relation to bourgeois society. And he had to analyze the class
struggle between the capitalists and the workers, which enabled
the economic and ideological evolution to be incarnated in
living men who made their own history, in the last instance
through the class struggle.
The partisans of Louis
Althusser are certainly right when they say that the object of
Capital is essentially a “socio-economic structure,” the
specific analysis of the capitalist mode of production. Capital
does not pretend to provide an explanation of all human
societies, past and to come. It is more modestly content to
explain only the society which has been dominant for the past
four centuries: bourgeois society.
But the partisans of Althusser
are not simply right when the narrowly circumscribe the object
of Capital in this manner. They are also wrong, for this
definition does not allow us to render an account of the full
complexity of Marx’s major work.
To be able to explain the
operation of the capitalist mode of production, Marx was obliged
to trace back the origin of the “economic categories”
(commodity, value, money, capital); however, their origin in
located in precapitalist society. He is therefore also obliged
to undertake the work of an historian as well as to provide
basic materials for the understanding of precapitalist
societies.
And Marx could not validly
analyze the contradictions of the capitalist mode of production
without providing a powerful instrument of struggle to the
working class, without thereby actively intervening in this
class struggle and without trying to orient it toward a precise
objective: the overthrow of capitalist society. The Marx of 1867
had not forgotten the imperishable aphorism of the Marx of 1845:
“Hitherto, the philosophers have only interpreted the world
differently; the point is, to change it.
Capital is therefore a work
that is both theoretical and practical, philosophical and
economic, historical and sociological. It could not be otherwise
because of the method Marx used to write it.
Marx himself tersely defined
this method when he wrote Maurice Lachâtre on March 18, 1872,
that he had applied to the study of economic problems a method
which had never before been applied to them. He was obviously
referring to the dialectical method. This combines the fullest
use of empirical data with a critical analysis of them, by
disclosing their internal contradictions, contradictions which
are most clearly evident when the origins of these same
phenomena are studied.
Thanks to the application of
this method Marx was able to surmount the weaknesses and
inadequacies of the classical school of political economy. He
perfected the labor theory of value (which explains the origin
of the value of commodities, a social phenomenon, by the
quantity of labor socially necessary for their production), by
distinguishing “labor” from “labor power,” and by
explaining that what capitalism buys is not the “labor” of
the worker but his “labor power,” his capacity for
working.
With this refinement, he was
able to elaborate the category of “abstract labor,” that is
to say, of labor, without distinction as to trade, averaging out
the totality of labor time at the disposition of society. And by
detailing it in this way he was able to formulate his theory of
surplus value, which is defined as the difference between the
price (the value) of labor power, and the value produced by this
same labor power.
All these discoveries, which
simultaneously overturned economic science and socialist theory,
had already been made by 1859, in Marx’s little book
Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy, which is
especially celebrated for its “Preface” formulating in
classical terms the Marxist theory of historical materialism.
But it is in Capital that they are found deployed in all their
richness.
Capital above all seeks to set
forth the “natural laws of capitalist production.” These are
all derived from the fundamentals of the structure: the theory
of labor value and the theory of surplus value.
Capitalist production is
production for the market under the conditions of private
ownership of the means of production, that is, under the
conditions of competition. To win out in this competition, or at
least not to go under, the industrial capitalist has to reduce
his costs of production. He achieves this by developing
technology, the machine system. In so doing, he replaces living
labor by a machine and pitilessly subjects the former to the
latter. At the same time he kills two birds with one stone: He
lowers his costs of production, facilitating the conquest of
markets; he reduces employment, generating the unemployment
which presses down on the wage workers and thus increases his
share of the “net value” produced by his workers. This
“net value” is essentially divided between wages and
profits; if the share of the first is reduced, the share of the
second is automatically augmented.
To be able to develop
technology and the machine system, the capitalist needs a
constantly growing quantity of capital since machines become
more and more numerous and costly with the development of
technology. There is only one fundamental means of increasing
capital: augmenting profit. For it is through the investment of
these profits (through the “accumulation of capital”) that
capitals grow.
To augment his profit’s the
capitalist can resort to two means: either by reducing wages (or
by prolonging the working day without increasing the daily wage)
or by augmenting the productivity of labor without increasing
wages (or by raising these less than the productivity of labor
rises). The first method was above all applied up to the end of
the 19th century in Europe (it continues to be applied in the
underdeveloped countries); it culminates in an absolute
impoverishment of the working class. The second method has above
all been applied in Europe since the end of the 19th century; it
culminates in a relative impoverishment of the working class
(that is to say, the per capita income of the wage worker
increases less quickly than the per capita income of the
population). The statistics confirm this.
The accumulation of capital,
the instrument for beating out competition, culminates in the
concentration of capital. The big fish eat up the little ones.
Since the costs of the original installation incessantly
increase, only a smaller and smaller number of the big
capitalist trusts can spread into the most technically advanced
branches of industry. The other day an American economist
predicted that by the end of the century three hundred giant
corporations would dominate the whole of capitalist world
economy.
But this colossal upsurge of
productive forces is accomplished in an anarchic and unorganized
manner. It is oriented toward the realization of private profit
and not toward the satisfaction of human needs. Hence the
tendency to overproduction inherent in the capitalist mode of
production which is nowadays expressed under the aspect of
excess productive capacity. Hence the tendency toward periodic
economic crises which are shamefacedly called
“recessions.
Capital, as we have remarked,
has not only overturned economic science. It likewise overturned
the workers movement. It transformed socialism from a utopia
into a science. It forged a weapon for the workers, with which
they cannot only detect the weak points in the armor of their
adversaries, but also prepare for the advent of a new society,
socialist society.
At the moment when the young
Marx and Engels drafted the “Communist Manifesto ” at
Brussels in 1847, there were scarcely several hundred
revolutionary socialists organized in three or four countries.
The liberating cry: “Workers of all lands, unite!” did not
then correspond to any experienced reality. The scientific
diagnosis: “The history of all epochs has been the history of
class struggles” could then be grasped by the principal actors
in the contemporary drama -- the workers in large-scale industry
-- only in a few countries.
Twenty years later, when
Capital appeared, there was already a workers international on
the scene and a trade union consciousness had grown up among the
workers of half a score of countries. But this was still no more
than a very small vanguard. In number, compared with the whole
of humanity, it was an insignificant marginal group, although it
could already throw a “great fear ” into capital during the
proclamation of the Paris Commune.
No more than twenty years
later, scientific socialism had become a movement embracing
millions of workers throughout the world. And a half century
after the publication of Capital, the first abundant dividends
were collected: The working class conquered power for the first
time in a big country, in Russia, in October 1917.
Today, there is not a single
country, not even an island, small as it may be, on this planet
where a private industrialist does not confront a working class
organized into unions or political parties. Today hundreds of
millions of workers, intellectuals, poor peasants and students
are ranged under Marx’s banner. There is not much chance
capitalism will survive the twentieth century and that it will
be able to contemplate the 150th anniversary of Capital with the
same mixture of respect, irritation and complacency with which
it is still able, in some industrialized countries, to mark the
centenary in its fashion.
Marx rightly predicted: “The
bourgeoisie will remember my carbuncles for a long time.” Such
is the power of thought, when it is scientific, that is to say,
when it can comprehend the meaning of evolution and when it
takes hold of the consciousness of the masses.
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