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September 16, 2017 - No. 28
Supplement
150th Anniversary
of the Publication
of the First Volume of Das Kapital
on September 14, 1867
PDF
 
Das Kapital with its author Karl Marx pictured in 1869.
• The
Three Sources and Three
Component Parts of Marxism
- V.I. Lenin -
• Marx's Theory of Surplus-Value Retains
Its Full Validity Today
- Hardial Bains -
150th Anniversary of the Publication
of the
First Volume of Das Kapital
on September 14, 1867
The Three Sources and Three Component
Parts of Marxism
- V.I. Lenin -
Throughout the civilised world the teachings of Marx
evoke
the utmost hostility and hatred of all bourgeois science (both
official and liberal), which regards Marxism as a kind of
"pernicious sect." And no other attitude is to be expected, for
there can be no "impartial" social science in a society based on
class struggle. In one way or another, all official and liberal
science defends wage-slavery, whereas Marxism has declared
relentless war on that slavery. To expect science to be impartial
in a wage-slave society is as foolishly naïve as to expect
impartiality from manufacturers on the question of whether
workers' wages ought not to be increased by decreasing the
profits of capital.
But this is not all. The history of philosophy and the
history of social science show with perfect clarity that there is
nothing resembling "sectarianism" in Marxism, in the sense of its
being a hidebound, petrified doctrine, a doctrine which arose
away from the high road of the development of world civilisation.
On the contrary, the genius of Marx consists precisely in his
having furnished answers to questions already raised by the
foremost minds of mankind. His doctrine emerged as the direct and
immediate continuation of the teachings of the greatest
representatives of philosophy, political economy and
socialism.
The Marxist doctrine is omnipotent because it is true.
It is
comprehensive and harmonious, and provides men with an integral
world outlook irreconcilable with any form of superstition,
reaction, or defence of bourgeois oppression. It is the
legitimate successor to the best that man produced in the
nineteenth century, as represented by German philosophy, English
political economy and French socialism.
It is these three sources of Marxism, which are also
its
component parts that we shall outline in brief.
I
The philosophy of Marxism is materialism. Throughout
the
modern history of Europe, and especially at the end of the
eighteenth century in France, where a resolute struggle was
conducted against every kind of medieval rubbish, against serfdom
in institutions and ideas, materialism has proved to be the only
philosophy that is consistent, true to all the teachings of
natural science and hostile to superstition, cant and so forth.
The enemies of democracy have, therefore, always exerted all
their efforts to "refute," undermine and defame materialism, and
have advocated various forms of philosophical idealism, which
always, in one way or another, amounts to the defence or support
of religion.
Marx and Engels defended philosophical materialism in
the
most determined manner and repeatedly explained how profoundly
erroneous is every deviation from this basis. Their views are
most clearly and fully expounded in the works of Engels, Ludwig
Feuerbach and the End of Classical German
Philosophy and Anti-Dühring, which, like the Communist
Manifesto, are handbooks for every class-conscious worker.
But Marx did not stop at eighteenth-century
materialism: he
developed philosophy to a higher level; he enriched it with the
achievements of German classical philosophy, especially of
Hegel's system, which in its turn had led to the materialism of
Feuerbach. The main achievement was dialectics, i.e., the
doctrine of development in its fullest, deepest and most
comprehensive form, the doctrine of the relativity of the human
knowledge that provides us with a reflection of eternally
developing matter. The latest discoveries of natural science --
radium, electrons, the transmutation of elements -- have been a
remarkable confirmation of Marx's dialectical materialism despite
the teachings of the bourgeois philosophers with their "new"
reversions to old and decadent idealism.
Marx deepened and developed philosophical materialism
to the
full, and extended the cognition of nature to include the
cognition of human society. His historical materialism was a
great achievement in scientific thinking. The chaos and
arbitrariness that had previously reigned in views on history and
politics were replaced by a strikingly integral and harmonious
scientific theory, which shows how, in consequence of the growth
of productive forces, out of one system of social life another
and higher system develops -- how capitalism, for instance, grows
out of feudalism.
Just as man's knowledge reflects nature (i.e.,
developing
matter), which exists independently of him, so man's social
knowledge (i.e., his various views and doctrines --
philosophical, religious, political and so forth) reflects the
economic system of society. Political institutions are a
superstructure on the economic foundation. We see, for example,
that the various political forms of the modern European states
serve to strengthen the domination of the bourgeoisie over the
proletariat.
Marx's philosophy is a consummate philosophical
materialism
that has provided mankind, and especially the working class, with
powerful instruments of knowledge.
II
Having recognised that the economic system is the
foundation
on which the political superstructure is erected, Marx devoted
his greatest attention to the study of this economic system.
Marx's principal work, Capital, is devoted to a study of the
economic system of modern, i.e., capitalist, society.
Classical political economy, before Marx, evolved in
England,
the most developed of the capitalist countries. Adam Smith and
David Ricardo, by their investigations of the economic system,
laid the foundations of the labour theory of value. Marx
continued their work; he provided a proof of the theory and
developed it consistently. He showed that the value of every
commodity is determined by the quantity of socially necessary
labour time spent on its production.
Where the bourgeois economists saw a relation between
things
(the exchange of one commodity for another) Marx revealed a
relation between people. The exchange of commodities expresses
the connection between individual producers through the market.
Money signifies that the connection is becoming closer and
closer, inseparably uniting the entire economic life of the
individual producers into one whole. Capital signifies a further
development of this connection: man's labour-power becomes a
commodity. The wage-worker sells his labour-power to the owner of
land, factories and instruments of labour. The worker spends one
part of the day covering the cost of maintaining himself and his
family (wages), while the other part of the day he works without
remuneration, creating for the capitalist surplus-value, the
source of profit, the source of the wealth of the capitalist
class.
The doctrine of surplus-value is the corner-stone of
Marx's
economic theory.
Capital, created by the labour of the worker, crushes
the
worker, ruining small proprietors and creating an army of
unemployed. In industry, the victory of large-scale production is
immediately apparent, but the same phenomenon is also to be
observed in agriculture, where the superiority of large-scale
capitalist agriculture is enhanced, the use of machinery
increases and the peasant economy, trapped by money-capital,
declines and falls into ruin under the burden of its backward
technique. The decline of small-scale production assumes
different forms in agriculture, but the decline itself is an
indisputable fact.
By destroying small-scale production, capital leads to
an
increase in productivity of labour and to the creation of a
monopoly position for the associations of big capitalists.
Production itself becomes more and more social -- hundreds of
thousands and millions of workers become bound together in a
regular economic organism -- but the product of this collective
labour is appropriated by a handful of capitalists. Anarchy of
production, crises, the furious chase after markets and the
insecurity of existence of the mass of the population are
intensified.
By increasing the dependence of the workers on capital,
the
capitalist system creates the great power of united labour.
Marx traced the development of capitalism from
embryonic
commodity economy, from simple exchange, to its highest forms, to
large-scale production.
And the experience of all capitalist countries, old and
new,
year by year demonstrates clearly the truth of this Marxian
doctrine to increasing numbers of workers.
Capitalism has triumphed all over the world, but this
triumph
is only the prelude to the triumph of labour over capital.
III
When feudalism was overthrown and "free" capitalist
society
appeared in the world, it at once became apparent that this
freedom meant a new system of oppression and exploitation of the
working people. Various socialist doctrines immediately emerged
as a reflection of and protest against this oppression. Early
socialism, however, was utopian socialism. It criticised
capitalist society, it condemned and damned it, it dreamed of its
destruction, it had visions of a better order and endeavoured to
convince the rich of the immorality of exploitation.
But utopian socialism could not indicate the real
solution.
It could not explain the real nature of wage-slavery under
capitalism, it could not reveal the laws of capitalist
development, or show what social force is capable of becoming the
creator of a new society.
Meanwhile, the stormy revolutions which everywhere in
Europe,
and especially in France, accompanied the fall of feudalism, of
serfdom, more and more clearly revealed the struggle of classes
as the basis and the driving force of all development.
Not a single victory of political freedom over the
feudal
class was won except against desperate resistance. Not a single
capitalist country evolved on a more or less free and democratic
basis except by a life-and-death struggle between the various
classes of capitalist society.
The genius of Marx lies in his having been the first to
deduce from this the lesson world history teaches and to apply
that lesson consistently. The deduction he made is the doctrine
of the class struggle.
People always have been the foolish victims of
deception and
self-deception in politics, and they always will be until they
have learnt to seek out the interests of some class or other
behind all moral, religious, political and social phrases,
declarations and promises. Champions of reforms and improvements
will always be fooled by the defenders of the old order until
they realise that every old institution, however barbarous and
rotten it may appear to be, is kept going by the forces of
certain ruling classes. And there is only one way of smashing the
resistance of those classes, and that is to find, in the very
society which surrounds us, the forces which can -- and, owing to
their social position, must -- constitute the power capable of
sweeping away the old and creating the new, and to enlighten and
organise those forces for the struggle.
Marx's philosophical materialism alone has shown the
proletariat the way out of the spiritual slavery in which all
oppressed classes have hitherto languished. Marx's economic
theory alone has explained the true position of the proletariat
in the general system of capitalism.
Independent organisations of the proletariat are
multiplying
all over the world, from America to Japan and from Sweden to
South Africa. The proletariat is becoming enlightened and
educated by waging its class struggle; it is ridding itself of
the prejudices of bourgeois society; it is rallying its ranks
ever more closely and is learning to gauge the measure of its
successes; it is steeling its forces and is growing
irresistibly.
Marx's Theory of Surplus-Value
Retains Its Full Validity
Today
- Hardial Bains -
Marx discovered the economic law of motion of
capitalist
society, the law of surplus-value. He demonstrated that the
motive of production under capitalism is profit, which represents
the unpaid labour of the working class, the new value created by
the workers in the capitalistic labour process, in excess of
their wages. Marx was the first to discover the origin of
capitalist profit in the exploitation of the working class. He
showed that the development of production under capitalism takes
place amidst crises and upheavals, and that this is due to the
anarchy of production which stems from the fundamental
contradiction of the capitalist mode of production, the
contradiction between the social character of production and the
private capitalist appropriation of the fruits of production. At
a certain stage, the growth of the productive forces comes into
conflict with the growth of profits, with the private capitalist
appropriation, and crisis breaks out, characterized by a
seemingly illogical phenomenon: there is an oversupply of goods,
but the workers cannot afford to buy them and must live in want.
All the features of capitalist society as it has developed were
predicted by Marx on the basis of its economic law of motion.
Starting from this law, Marx was able to formulate the absolute
general law of capitalist accumulation, which holds that as
capitalism develops, and as greater and greater wealth is
concentrated in the hands of the bourgeoisie, the lot of the
working class necessarily deteriorates: the rich become richer,
the poor become poorer.
"The greater the social wealth, the functioning
capital,
the extent and energy of its growth, and, therefore, also the
absolute mass of the proletariat and the productiveness of its
labour, the greater is the industrial reserve army. The same
causes which develop the expansive power of capital, develop also
the labour-power at its disposal. The relative mass of the
industrial reserve army increases, therefore, with the potential
energy of wealth. But the greater this reserve army in proportion
to the active labour-army, the greater is the mass of a
consolidated surplus-population, whose misery is in inverse ratio
to its torment of labour. The more extensive, finally, the
lazarus-layers of the working class, and the industrial reserve
army, the greater is official pauperism. This is the
absolute general law of capitalist accumulation."[1]
Marx concluded that the capitalist system would be hit
with
recurring crises of increasing severity, and that this situation
could be ended only by the violent revolution of the proletariat
together with its allies against the capitalist mode of
production.[2] In
this way,
Marx reasoned, capitalist private property and the capitalist
relations of production would be overthrown and replaced by the
social ownership of the means of production, so that the
contradiction between the social character of production and the
existing property relations could be abolished.
With the law of surplus-value, Marx discovered the
origin and
growth of capitalist profit and laid bare the "economic law of
motion of modern society." This problem had puzzled all
earlier political economists, who, however closely they had
approached the labour theory of value, had been unable to explain
the origin of profit in a scientific way. Engels explained:
"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."[3]
After the first industrial crisis of 1825, and with the
complete ascendency to political power of the bourgeoisie in
France and England after 1830, the bourgeoisie, confronted by the
development of the proletarian class struggle, was forced to
abandon all scientific political economy. Marx explained in the
Afterword to the Second German Edition of Capital:
"In France and in England the bourgeoisie had
conquered
political power. Thenceforth, the class-struggle, practically as
well as theoretically, took on more and more outspoken and
threatening forms. It sounded the knell of scientific bourgeois
economy. It was thenceforth no longer a question, whether this
theorem or that was true, but whether it was useful to capital or
harmful, expedient or inexpedient, politically dangerous or not.
In place of disinterested inquirers, there were hired
prize-fighters; in place of genuine scientific research, the bad
conscience and evil intent of apologetic."[4]
From the 1840s onward, Marx developed his economic
doctrine
on the basis of the economic law of motion of modern society.
Thenceforth, the scientific position in political economy was
synonymous with Marxism. Scientific rigour became synonymous with
proletarian partisanship, because Marxism showed that crises and
the other ills of capitalism could be ended once and for all only
by putting an end to the capitalist system, and that the
condition of the working class under capitalism, the condition of
wage-slavery, the chains which bound the worker hand and foot to
capital, could be smashed only by the revolutionary overthrow of
all existing conditions, of the bourgeois order.
With the growth of capitalism into monopoly capitalism
and
imperialism, all the contradictions of capitalism are aggravated
to the extreme; the necessity for revolution to resolve these
problems, far from becoming an increasingly remote prospect,
becomes the issue of the day, the problem taken up for solution.
Today, just as when Marx made his thoroughgoing analysis of
commodity production under capitalism, the worker has nothing to
sell but his labour power; he is a wage slave forced to sell
himself in the market-place in order to gain his living. The
development of large-scale production, the relentless
concentration of production and capital in fewer hands, the
growth of finance capital, the export of capital around the
world, the division of the world amongst the imperialist powers --
none of this has negated the basic economic laws of capitalism
discovered by Marx. The present objective conditions only
reconfirm the validity of Marx's economic doctrine.
It is the compelling truth of Marx's economic doctrine
and
the power of his teachings that force the apologists of the
bourgeoisie, all its hired prize-fighters, onto the field against
Marxism, to "invalidate" and "disprove" it. Today, as in the
past, these apologists come forward with arguments to justify the
exploitation of the workers and the profit system. In Marx's day,
they claimed that the capitalist was entitled to a "return" for
his "abstinence," for his "risk-taking," for his "wages of
superintendence." But all these arguments fell before the
scientific proof that no matter what justification was given for
profits, interest, rent and other returns to the owners of
bourgeois property, this return could be paid only out of what
was produced by the living labour of the working class and other
toilers in the course of material production. The bourgeoisie
denied the labour theory of value altogether. It made "value"
synonymous with "price" and maintained that prices were
determined by the forces of "supply and demand," and especially
by the satisfaction of the subjective desires of the consumers,
so that there was and could be no objective measure of the value
of labour.
With this psychological explanation of value, the
bourgeois
economists hoped both to eliminate the labour theory of value and
to justify the unequal division of the fruits of labour between
the exploiters and exploited, between the rich and poor. One of
the originators of the psychological theory of value based on
the utilitarian philosophy, W.S. Jevons, also put forward the
theory that the periodic crises of capitalism can be explained by
sunspot activity! And this new version of the value theory
appeared simultaneously in England, Austria and France in 1871,
at a time of sharp class battles, at the time of the revolt of
the Paris proletariat and establishment of the Paris Commune.
With the development of capitalism to the stage of
monopoly
capitalism, revisionist theoreticians sought to discredit the
Marxist economic doctrine on the basis of "new data" of economic
development. They insisted that the rate of concentration and
destruction of small-scale production was proceeding only very
slowly in industry, and in agriculture not at all; that crises
had become rarer and of less force; that cartels and trusts would
enable crises to be done away with altogether; that the theory of
"collapse" was unsound because class antagonisms were becoming
less acute. They argued that the development of capitalism into
monopoly capitalism was easing and even eliminating the
contradictions of capitalism.
Lenin came out in struggle against these revisionists
who
sought to alter the conclusions of Marx, to eliminate the
recognition of the economic laws of motion of capitalism and to
eliminate the class struggle. Lenin showed that in its
development, capitalism had proceeded on the basis of the
economic laws discovered by Marx. It had developed into monopoly
capitalism with the concentration of capital and production on a
large scale, and this had intensified the class antagonisms. He
pointed out:
"Realities very soon made it clear to the
revisionists
that crises were not a thing of the past; prosperity was followed
by a crisis. The forms, the sequence, the picture of a particular
crisis changed, but crises remained an inevitable component of
the capitalist system. While uniting production, the cartels and
trusts at the same time, and in a way that was obvious to all,
aggravated the anarchy of production, the insecurity of existence
of the proletariat and the oppression of capital, thereby
intensifying class antagonisms to an unprecedented degree."[5]
In his monumental work, Imperialism, the Highest
Stage of
Capitalism, Lenin described how capitalism had developed into
the stage of monopoly capitalism, capitalist imperialism. He
showed how the features of monopoly capitalism, its moribund and
parasitic character, had developed on the basis of the economic
laws discovered by Marx: the growth of concentration of capital
and production and the emergence of monopolies; the development
of finance capital through the merging of industrial capital and
bank capital under the domination of the banks; the export of
capital; and the division of the world among the capitalist
monopolies and the imperialist powers. He described imperialism
as the stage of capitalism when the revolution is the order of
the day, the problem taken up for solution. In particular, Lenin
analyzed the operation of the basic economic law of capitalism
under modern conditions of monopoly capitalism and concluded that
the capitalists seek maximum profits by exacting tribute from
every cell of the society. Thus, he concluded:
"Finance capital, concentrated in a few hands and
exercising a virtual monopoly, exacts enormous and
ever-increasing profits from the floating of companies, issue of
stock, state loans, etc., strengthens the domination of the
financial oligarchy and levies tribute upon the whole of the
society for the benefit of the monopolists."[6]
Stalin formulated this law precisely in his work, Economic
Problems
of
Socialism
in
the
USSR, showing that the basic
economic law of capitalism remains the law of surplus-value,
which explains the origin and growth of capitalist profit, and
that although the operation of this law is modified under
imperialism, its principles are unchanged. Stalin concluded that
the main features and requirements of the basic economic law of
modern capitalism might be formulated as:
"the securing of the maximum capitalist profit
through
the exploitation, ruin and impoverishment of the majority of the
population of the given country, through the enslavement and
systematic robbery of the peoples of other countries, especially
backward countries, and, lastly, through wars and militarization
of the national economy, which are utilized for the obtaining of
the highest profits."[7]
Thus Stalin refuted the views of modern revisionists
such as
Browder and Tito who claimed that monopoly capitalism in the U.S.
was "young capitalism," that the socialist economy was compatible
with the capital market and commodity circulation and with the
operation of the law of value as the regulator of production and
distribution. [...]
Today the bourgeoisie is still as intent as ever to
"refute"
Marx's theory of surplus-value, to mystify the origin and source
of the growth of profit and to paint the system of wage slavery
in a rosy hue. In 1983 the imperialists even awarded the Nobel
Prize in economics to a "learned" professor, G. Debreu, whose
life's work has been the futile search for a credible alternative
to Marx's theory of surplus-value. The president of Gulf Canada
claims that the big bourgeoisie, the monopolies and
multinationals are the creators of wealth, while the workers
merely consume the wealth! The constant refrain of the
bourgeoisie is that corporate profits are the source of economic
growth and of the well-being of the people, that the growth of
profits is needed for economic expansion, and so on. It is
claiming that the current crisis is due, in large part at least,
to a decline in profits. According to this line of "reasoning,"
what is required to cure the crisis is a rise in profits. This
line is taken to the extreme by the bourgeois ideologues with
their notorious refrain that profits are the key to "job
creation" and that the workers' interests are best served by
sacrificing their wages, working conditions (even their jobs and
job security!), in order that their employers' profits might
increase and jobs might subsequently be saved or "created."
With these wild claims, the bourgeoisie is playing a
cruel
joke on the workers and the broad masses of the people. But the
Marxist theory of surplus-value and the facts of life prove that
what the bourgeoisie is saying about the so-called benefits to
the workers from profits is utterly false. The profits of the
monopolies and multinationals rose substantially in 1983, but
this "recovery" did not create jobs for the unemployed workers.
On the contrary, unemployment remains at historically high levels
of about 11 per cent. But still the bourgeoisie and its publicists
persist in dishing out this lying propaganda. The bourgeoisie has
no concern for the well-being of the people, no interest in
"creating jobs." Its preoccupation is to secure maximum profits
through the exploitation of the workers and the levying of
tribute on the whole of society.
The law of surplus-value continues to operate today.
The
basic economic law of modern capitalism remains the law of
surplus-value as it is modified in its operation under the
contemporary conditions of imperialism. The law of surplus-value
requires no "amendments" or "changes," as revisionists and
opportunists claim. On the contrary, current economic
development, characterized by the outbreak of periodic crises and
the constant deepening of the general crisis, cannot be
understood without proceeding from this basic economic law of
modern capitalism. [...]
Notes
1. Karl Marx, Capital, Vol.
1
(Moscow:
Progress
Publishers,
1971),
p.
603.
2. "One of the fundamental principles
of Marxism is that "the working class cannot simply lay hold
of the ready-made state machinery and wield it for its own
purposes." Karl Marx, "The Civil War in France," in Marx and
Engels, Selected Works, Vol. 2 (Moscow: Progress
Publishers, 1969), p. 217.
3. Frederick Engels, "Speech at the Graveside
of Karl
Marx," Marx and Engels, Selected Works, Vol. 3 (Moscow:
Progress Publishers, 1970), p. 162.
4. Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, op. cit.,
pp.
24-25.
5. V.I. Lenin, "Marxism and
Revisionism," Collected Works, Vol. 15 (Moscow: Progress
Publishers, 1973), p. 35.
6. V.I. Lenin, "Imperialism, the
Highest Stage of Capitalism," Collected Works, Vol. 22
(Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1964), p. 232.
7. J.V. Stalin, "Economic Problems of
Socialism in the U.S.S.R.," Selected Works, p. 572.
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