(c) The Marxist Doctrine of Class War and of the Evolution of Capital

The doctrine of the class wars rests on the foundation of the materialist conception of history. “ It was found,” writes Engels in Anti-Dühring, “that all history hitherto was the history of class wars, that the classes fighting each other are, each time, the outcome of the conditions of production and commerce in one word, of the economic conditions of their epoch.” (3rd edition, page 12). In modern society it is the class war between the capitalist owners of the means of production and the producers without capital, the wage workers, which imprints its mark on history in this respect. For the former class Marx took from France the term BOURGEOISIE, and for the latter the term PROLETARIAT. This class struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat is accordingly the antagonism, transferred to men, which is in the conditions of production to-day, that is, in the private character of the method of appropriation and the social character of the method of production. The means of production are the property of individual capitalists who appropriate to themselves the results of the production, but the production itself has become a social process; that means, a production of commodities for use made by many workers on a basis of systematic division and organisation of labour. And this antagonism conceals in itself, or has, a second conflict, as a supplement the systematic division and organisation of work within the establishments for production (workshop, factory, combination of factories, etc.) is opposed by the unsystematic disposal of the produce on the market.

The starting point of the class struggle between capitalists and workers is the antagonism of interests which follows from the nature of the utilisation of the labour of the latter by the former for profit. The examination of this process of utilisation leads to the doctrine of value and of the production and appropriation of surplus value.

It is significant for capitalist production and the order of society founded thereon, that men in their economic relations stand opposed to one another throughout as buyers and sellers. It recognises in social life no general legal relations of dependence but only actual ones following from purely economic relations (differences of economic means, relation of hirer and hired, etc.). The worker sells to the capitalist his power to work for a definite time, under definite conditions, and for a definite price – wages. The capitalist sells the products (manufactured with the help of the worker – that is, by the whole of the workers employed by him) in the goods market at a price which, as a rule and as a condition of the continuance of his undertaking, yields a surplus above the amount which the manufacture costs. What is, then, this surplus?

According to Marx it is the surplus value of the labour accomplished by the worker. The goods are exchanged on the market at a value which is fixed by the labour embodied in them, measured according to time. What the capitalist has put in in past-we would even say dead-labour in the form of raw material, auxiliary material, wear and tear of machinery, rent, and other costs of production, appears again unchanged in the value of the product. It is otherwise with the living work expended on it. This costs the capitalist wages; it brings him an amount beyond these, the equivalent of the value of labour. The labour value is the value of the quantity of labour worked into the product; the worker’s wages is the selling price of the labour power used up in production. Prices, or the value of labour power, are determined by the cost of maintenance of the worker as it corresponds with his historically developed habits of life. The difference between the equivalent (Erlös) of the labour-value and the labour-wage is the surplus value which it is the natural endeavour of the capitalist to raise as high as possible and in any case not to allow to sink.

But competition on the market of commodities presses constantly on the price of commodities, and an increase of sales is again only obtained by a cheapening of production. The capitalist can attain this cheapening in three kinds of ways: lowering of wages, lengthening of the hours of work, an increase in the productivity of labour. As at a given time there are always definite limits to the first two, his energy is always being turned to the last one. Better organisation of work, inter-unification of work and perfecting of machinery are, in the more developed capitalist societies, the predominating means of cheapening production. In all these cases the consequence is that the organic composition o f capital, as Marx calls it, is changing. The relation of the portion of capital laid out in raw materials, tools for work, etc., increases; the portion of capital laid out in labour wages decreases; the same amount of commodities is produced by fewer workers, an increased amount by the old or even by a less number of workers. The ratio of the surplus value to the portion of capital laid out in wages Marx calls the rate of surplus value or of exploitation, the ratio of the surplus value to the whole capital invested in producing he calls the rate of profit. From the foregoing it is self-evident that the rate of surplus can rise at the same time as the rate of profit falls.

According to the nature of the branch of production we find a very different organic combination of capital. There are undertakings where a disproportionately large portion of the capital is spent on instruments of work, raw material, etc., and only a relatively small amount on wages; and others where the wages form the most important part of the expenditure of capital. The first represent higher, the second lower, organic combinations of capital. If an equal proportionate rate ruled throughout between the surplus value attained and the labour wage, in these latter branches of production the profit rates would in many cases exceed those in the first by multiples: But that is not the case. In a developed capitalist society goods are sold not at their labour values but at their prices of production, which consist of the cost of production (workers’ wages plus dead work used up) and of an additional expense which corresponds with the average profit of the whole social production, or the profit rate of that branch of production in which the organic combination of capital shows an average ratio of wages-capital to capital employed for the other purposes. The prices of commodities in the different branches of production, therefore, show by no means the same relation to their value. In some cases they are constantly far below the value, and in others constantly above it, and only in those branches of production with an average composition of capital do they approach the value. The law of value disappears altogether from the consciousness of the producers; it works only behind their backs, whilst the level of the average profit rate is regulated by it at longer intervals only.

The coercive laws of competition and the growing wealth of capital in society tend to lower constantly the profit rate, whilst this is delayed by forces working in opposite directions but is not permanently stopped. Overproduction of capital goes hand in hand with forces creating a superabundance of workers. Greater centralisation is always spreading in manufactures, commerce, and agriculture, and an expropriation of the smaller capitalists by the greater grows. Periodic crises brought about by the anarchy in production in conjunction with the under-consumption of the masses are always reappearing in a more violent and more destructive character; and they hasten the process of centralisation and expropriation by the ruin of innumerable small capitalists. On the one side is generalised the collective – cooperative – form of the process of work on an always growing scale, in an ascending degree; on the other side increases “with the constantly diminishing number of capitalist magnates who usurp and monopolise all the advantages of this process of transformation, the mass of misery, oppression, servitude, deterioration, exploitation, but also with it the revolt of the working class constantly increasing and taught, united and organised by the mechanism of the capitalist process of production itself.” Thus the development reaches a point where the monopoly of capital becomes a fetter to the method of production that has thriven on it, when the centralisation of the means of production and the socialisation of labour become incompatible with their capitalist garment. This is then rent. The expropriators and usurpers are expropriated by the mass of the nation. Capitalist private property is done away with.

This is the historical tendency of the manner of production and appropriation, according to Marx. The class which is called upon to carry out the expropriation of the capitalist class and the transformation of capitalist into public property, is the class of the wage earners, the proletariat. For this purpose must the class be organised as a political party. This party at a given moment seizes the power of the State and “changes the means of production first of all into State property. But therewith the proletariat negatives itself as a proletariat, therewith it puts an end to all differences of class and antagonisms of class, and consequently also puts an end to the State as a State.” The struggle for individual existence with its conflicts and excesses is over, the State has nothing more to oppress “and dies off.”

So far, in the most concise compression possible, I have endeavoured to set forth the most important propositions of that part of the Marxist theory which we have to consider as essential to his socialism. Just as little as – or, rather, still less than – the materialist theory of history has this part of the theory sprung from the beginning in a perfected form from the head of its authors. Even more than in the former case can a development of the theory be shown which, whilst firmly maintaining the chief points of view, consists of limiting the propositions at first represented as absolute. In the preface to Capital (1867), in the preface to the new edition of the Communist Manifesto (1872), in the preface and a note to the new edition of the Poverty of Philosophy (1884), and in the preface to the Class Struggles in the French Revolution (1895), some of the changes are shown which in the course of time have been brought to pass with regard to various corresponding matters in the views of Marx and Engels. But not all the changes to be cited here and elsewhere with reference to single portions or hypotheses of the theory have found full consideration in its final elaboration. Marx and Engels confined themselves sometimes merely to hinting at, sometimes only to stating in regard to single points, the changes recognised by them in facts, and in the better analyses of these facts, which influenced the form and application of their theory. And even, in the last respect contradictions are not wanting in their writings. They have left to their successors the duty of bringing unity again into their theory and of co-ordinating theory and practice.

But this duty can only be accomplished if one gives an account unreservedly of the gaps and contradictions in the theory. In other words, the further development and elaboration of the Marxist doctrine must begin with criticism of it. To-day, the position is that one can prove everything out of Marx and Engels. This is very comfortable for the apologists and the literary pettifogger. But he who has kept only a moderate sense for theory, for whom the scientific character of socialism is not “only a show-piece which on festive occasions is taken out of a plate cupboard but otherwise is not taken into consideration,” he, as soon as he is conscious of these contradictions, feels also the need of removing them. The duty of the disciples consists in doing this and not in everlastingly repeating the words of their masters.

In this sense has been undertaken the following criticism of some elements of the Marxist doctrine. The wish to keep within moderate bounds a volume intended in the first instance for the use of working men, and the necessity of finishing it within a few weeks explain why an exhaustive treatment of the subject has not even been attempted. At the same time, let it be understood once for all that no pretensions are raised as to originality in the criticism. Most, if not all, of what follows has in substance been worked out – or at least indicated – by others already. The justification for this essay is not that it discloses something not known before but that it acknowledges what has been disclosed already.

But this is also a necessary work. The mistakes of a theory can only be considered as overcome when they are recognised as such by the advocates of that theory. Such recognition does not necessarily signify the destruction of the theory. It may rather appear after subtraction of what is acknowledged to be mistaken – if I may be allowed to use an image of Lassalle – that it is Marx finally who carries the point against Marx.