Marx to Dr Kugelmann

Marx to Dr Kugelmann

Concerning the Paris Commune

Abstract

April 12-17, 1871;

... If you look at the last chapter of my Eighteenth Brumaire you will find that I say that the next attempt of the French revolution will be no longer, as before, to transfer the bureaucratic-military machine from one hand to another, but to smash it, and this is essential for every real people's revolution on the Continent. And this is what our heroic Party comrades in Paris are attempting. What elasticity, what historical initiative, what a capacity for sacrifice in these Parisians! After six months of hunger and ruin, caused rather by internal treachery than by the external enemy, they rise, beneath Prussian bayonets, as if there had never been a war between France and Germany and the enemy were not at the gates of Paris. History has no like example of a like greatness. If they are defeated only their "good nature" will be to blame. They should have marched at once on Versailles, after first Vinoy and then the reactionary section of the Paris National Guard had themselves retreated. The right moment was missed because of conscientious scruples. They did not want to start the civil war, as if that mischievous abortion Thiers had not already started the civil war with his attempt to disarm Paris. Second mistake:

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After the defeat of the Paris Commune

News Stories

June 8-12, 1871

After the defeat of the Paris Commune

I

“The column of prisoners halted in the Avenue Uhrich, and was drawn up, four or five deep, on the footway facing to the road. General Marquis de Gallifet and his staff dismounted and commenced an inspection from the left of the line. Walking down slowly and eyeing the ranks, the general stopped here and there, tapping a man on the shoulder or beckoning him out of the rear ranks. In most cases, without further parley, the individual thus selected was marched out into the centre of the road, where a small supplementary column was thus soon formed.... A mounted officer pointed out to General Gallifet a man and woman for some particular offence. The women, rushing out of the ranks, threw herself on her knees, and, with outstretched arms, protested her innocence in passionate terms. The general waited for a pause, and then with most impassible face and unmoved demeanor, said: 'Madame, I have visited every theatre in Paris, your acting will have no effect on me.' (ce n'est pas la peine de jouer la comedie).... It was not a good thing on that day to be noticeably taller, dirtier, cleaner, older, uglier than one's neighbors. One individual in particular struck me as probably owing his speedy release from the ills of this world to his having a broken nose.... Over a hundred being thus chosen, a firing party told off, and the column resumed its march, leaving them behind. A few minutes afterwards a dropping fire in our rear commenced, and continued for over a quarter of an hour. It was the execution of the summarily-convicted wretches.” (Paris Correspondent, Daily News, June 8.)

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On the 20th Anniversary of the Paris Commune

1891 Introduction by Frederick Engels

On the 20th Anniversary of the Paris Commune

[PostScript]

I did not anticipate that I would be asked to prepare a new edition of the Address of the General Council of the International on The Civil War in France, and to write an introduction to it. Therefore I can only touch briefly here on the most important points.

I am prefacing the longer work mentioned above by the two shorter addresses of the General Council on the Franco-Prussian War.[Chapter 1 and Chapter 2] In the first place, because the second of these, which itself cannot be fully understood without the first, is referred to in The Civil War. But also because these two Addresses, likewise drafted by Marx, are, no less than The Civil War, outstanding examples of the author's remarkable gift, first proved in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, for grasping clearly the character, the import, and the necessary consequences of great historical events, at a time when these events are still in process before our eyes, or have only just taken place. And, finally, because we in Germany are still having to endure the consequences which Marx prophesied would follow from these events.

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The Fall of Paris

The Third Address

May, 1871

[The Fall of Paris]

The first attempt of the slaveholders' conspiracy to put down Paris by getting the Prussians to occupy it was frustrated by Bismarck's refusal.

The second attempt, that of March 18, ended in the rout of the army and the flight to Versailles of the government, which ordered the whole administration to break up and follow in its track.

By the semblance of peace negotiations with Paris, Thiers found the time to prepare for war against it. But where to find an army? The remnants of the line regiments were weak in number and unsafe in character. His urgent appeal to the provinces to succour Versailles, by their National Guards and volunteers, met with a flat refusal. Brittany alone furnished a handful of Chouans fighting under a white flag, every one of them wearing on his breast the heart of Jesus in white cloth, and shouting "Vive le Roi!" (Long live the King!)

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The Paris Commune

The Third Address

May, 1871

[The Paris Commune]

On the dawn of March 18, Paris arose to the thunder-burst of "Vive la Commune!" What is the Commune, that sphinx so tantalizing to the bourgeois mind?

"The proletarians of Paris," said the Central Committee in its manifesto of March 18, "amidst the failures and treasons of the ruling classes, have understood that the hour has struck for them to save the situation by taking into their own hands the direction of public affairs.... They have understood that it is their imperious duty, and their absolute right, to render themselves masters of their own destinies, by seizing upon the governmental power."

But the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.

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Paris Workers' Revolution & Thiers' Reactionary Massacres

The Third Address

May, 1871

[Paris Workers' Revolution & Thiers' Reactionary Massacres]

Armed Paris was the only serious obstacle in the way of the counter-revolutionary conspiracy. Paris was, therefore, to be disarmed.

On this point, the Bordeaux Assembly [National Assembly] was sincerity itself. If the roaring rant of its Rurals had not been audible enough, the surrender of Paris by Thiers to the tender mercies of the triumvirate of Vinoy the Decembriseur, Valentin the Bonapartist gendarme, and Aurelles de Paladine the Jesuit general, would have cut off even the last subterfuge of doubt.

But while insultingly exhibiting the true purpose of the disarmament of Paris, the conspirators asked her to lay down her arms on a pretext which was the most glaring, the most barefaced of lies. The artillery of the Paris National Guard, said Thiers, belonged to the state, and to the state it must be returned. The fact was this: From the very day of the capitulation, by which Bismarck's prisoners had signed the surrender of France, but reserved to themselves a numerous bodyguard for the express purpose of cowing Paris, Paris stood on the watch. The National Guard reorganized themselves and intrusted their supreme control to a Central Committee elected by their whole body, save some fragments of the old Bonapartist formations. On the eve of the entrance of the Prussians into Paris, the Central Committee took measures for the removal to Montmartre, Belleville, and La Villette, of the cannon and mitrailleuses treacherously abandoned by the capitulards in and about the very quarters the Prussians were to occupy. That artillery had been furnished by the subscriptions of the National Guard. As their private property, it was officially recognized in the capitulation of January 28, and on that very title exempted from the general surrender, into the hands of the conqueror, or arms belonging to the government. And Thiers was so utterly destitute of even the flimsiest pretext for initiating the war against Paris, that he had to resort to the flagrant lie of the artillery of the National Guard being state property!

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France Capitulates & the Government of Thiers

The Third Address

May, 1871

[France Capitulates & the Government of Thiers]

In September 4, 1870, when the working men of Paris proclaimed the republic, which was almost instantaneously acclaimed throughout France, without a single voice of dissent, a cabal of place-hunting barristers, with Thiers for their statesman, and Trochu for their general, took hold of the Hotel de Ville. At that time they were imbued with so fanatical a faith in the mission of Paris to represent France in all epochs of historical crisis that, to legitimate their usurped titles as governors of France, they thought it quite sufficient to produce their lapsed mandates as representatives of Paris.

In our second address on the late war, five days after the rise of these men, we told you who they were. Yet, in the turmoil of surprise, with the real leaders of the working class still shut up in Bonapartist prisons and the Prussians already marching on Paris, Paris bore with their assumption of power, on the express condition that it was to be wielded for the single purpose of national defence. Paris, however, was not to be defended without arming its working class, organizing them into an effective force, and training their ranks by the war itself. But Paris armed was the revolution armed. A victory of Paris over the Prussian aggressor would have been a victory of the French workmen over the French capitalist and his state parasites. In this conflict between national duty and class interest, the Government of National Defence did not hesitate one moment to turn into a Government of National Defection.

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Prussian Occupation of France

The Second Address

September 9, 1870

[Prussian Occupation of France]

In our first manifesto of the 23rd of July, we said:

"The death-knell of the Second Empire has already sounded at Paris. It will end, as it began, by a parody. But let us not forget that it is the governments and the ruling classes of Europe who enabled Louis Bonaparte to play during 18 years the ferocious farce of the Restored Empire."

Thus, even before war operations had actually set in, we treated the Bonapartist bubble as a thing of the past.

If we were not mistaken as to the vitality of the Second Empire, we were not wrong in our apprehension lest the German war should "lose its strictly defensive character and degenerate into a war against the French people". The war of defense ended, in point of fact, with the surrender of Louis Bonaparte, the Sedan capitulation, and the proclamation of the republic at Paris. But long before these events, the very moment that the utter rottenness of the imperialist arms became evident, the Prussian military camarilla had resolved upon conquest. There lay an ugly obstacle in their way — [Prussian] King William's own proclamations at the commencement of the war.

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The Begining of the Franco-Prussian War

The Civil War in France

The First Address

July 23, 1870

[The Begining of the Franco-Prussian War]

In the Inaugural Address of the International Working Men's Association, of November 1864, we said:

"If the emancipation of the working classes requires their fraternal concurrence, how are they to fulfill that great mission with a foreign policy in pursuit of criminal designs, playing upon national prejudices, and squandering in piratical wars the people's blood and treasure?"

We defined the foreign policy aimed at by the International in these words:

"Vindicate the simple laws of morals and justice, which ought to govern the relations of private individuals, as the laws paramount of the intercourse of nations."

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The Civil War in France

Frederick Engels: The Civil War in France

July 1870 - May 1871;

Introduction

Written by Karl Marx as an address to the General Council of the International, with the aim of distributing to workers of all countries a clear understanding of the character and world-wide significance of the heroic struggle of the Communards and their historical experience to learn from. The book was widely circulated by 1872 it was translated into several languages and published throughout Europe and the United States.

The first address was delivered on July 23rd, 1870, five days after the beginning of the Franco-Prussian war. The second address, delivered on September 9, 1870, gave a historical overview of the events a week after the army of Bonaparte was defeated. The third address, delivered on May 30, 1871, two days after the defeat of the Paris Commune – detailed the significance and the underlining causes of the first workers government ever created.

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Grundrisse: Notebook VII – Capital and revenue (profit)

Capital and revenue (profit). Production and distribution. Sismondi. – Production costs from capital’s viewpoint. Profit, ditto. – Inequality of profits. Equalization and communal rate of profit. – Transformation of surplus value into profit. – Laws

Back to our topic. The product of capital, then, is profit. By relating to itself as profit, it relates to itself as the source of the production of value, and the rate of profit expresses the proportion to which it has increased its own value. But the capitalist is not merely capital. He has to live, and since he does not live by working he must live from profit, i.e. from the alien labour he appropriates. Thus capital is posited as the source of wealth. Since capital has incorporated productivity into itself as its inherent quality, capital relates to profit as revenue. It can consume a part of it (seemingly all of it, but this will prove to be false) without ceasing to be capital. After consumption of this fruit it can bear new fruit. It can represent consumption wealth without ceasing to represent the general form of wealth, something which money in simple circulation could not possibly do. The latter had to abstain in order to remain the general form of wealth; or, if it exchanged for real wealth, for consumer gratifications, it ceased to be the general form of wealth. Thus profit appears as a form of distribution, like wages. But since capital can grow only through the retransformation of profit into capital – into surplus capital – profit is at the same time a form of production for capital; just exactly as wages are a mere relation of production from the standpoint of capital, a relation of distribution from the worker’s standpoint. This shows that the relations of distribution are themselves produced by the relations of production, and represent the latter themselves from another point of view. It shows further that the relation of production to consumption is posited by production itself. Note the fatuousness of all bourgeois economists, including e.g. J. St. Mill, who considers the bourgeois relations of production as eternal, but their forms of distribution as historical, and thereby shows that he understands neither the one nor the other. As to simple exchange, Sismondi correctly remarks: ‘An exchange always presupposes two values; each may have a different share; but the quality of capital and revenue does not follow from the object exchanged; it attaches to the person who is its owner.’ (Sismondi, VI.) [29] Hence the simple exchange relation provides no basis for the explanation of revenue. The quality of a value obtained in exchange, whether it represents capital or revenue, is determined by relations lying outside simple exchange. Absurd, therefore, to want to reduce these more complex forms to the earlier, simpler exchange relations, as do the harmonic freetraders. From the standpoint of simple exchange, and considering accumulation as the mere accumulation of money (exchange value), capital’s profit and revenue are impossible. ‘If the rich spend the accumulated wealth for luxury products – and they can obtain commodities only through exchange – then their funds would soon be exhausted … But, in the social order, wealth has achieved the quality of reproducing itself through alien labour. Wealth, like labour, and through labour, yields an annual fruit which may be destroyed each year without the rich man thereby becoming poorer. This fruit is the revenue springing from capital.’ (Sismondi, IV.) [30] While profit thus appears in one respect as the result of capital, it appears in the other as the presupposition of capital formation. Thus is posited anew the circular movement in which the result appears as presupposition. ‘Thus a part of the revenue became transformed into capital, into a permanent, self-multiplying value, which did not perish; this value tore itself free from the commodity which created it; like a metaphysical, insubstantial quality it always remained in possession of the same cultivateur’ (capitalist), ‘assuming various forms for him.’ (Sismondi, VI) [31]

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Grundrisse: Notebook VII – Capital as Fructiferous. Transformation of Surplus Value into Profit

We now come to the

THIRD SECTION. CAPITAL AS FRUCTIFEROUS. INTEREST. PROFIT. (PRODUCTION COSTS ETC.)

Rate of profit. – Fall of the rate of profit. – Rate of profit. – Sum of profit. – Atkinson. A. Smith. Ramsay. Ricardo. – Surplus value as profit always expresses a lesser proportion. – Wakefield. Carey. Bastiat

Capital is now posited as the unity of production and circulation; and the surplus value it creates in a given period of time, e.g. in one year, is = ST/(p + c) = ST/R or = S(T/p - T/p × c/(c + p)). Capital is now realized not only as value which reproduces itself and is hence perennial, but also as value which posits value. Through the absorption of living labour time and through the movement of its own circulation (in which the movement of exchange is posited as its own, as the inherent process of objectified labour), it relates to itself as positing new value, as producer of value. It relates as the foundation to surplus value as that which it founded. Its movement consists of relating to itself, while it produces itself, at the same time as the foundation of what it has founded, as value presupposed to itself as surplus value, or to the surplus value as posited by it. In a definite period of time which is posited as the unit measure of its turnovers because it is the natural measure of its reproduction in agriculture, capital produces a definite surplus value, which is determined not only by the surplus value it posits in one production process, but rather by the number of repetitions of the production process, or of its reproductions in a specified period of time. Because of the inclusion of circulation, of its movement outside the immediate production process, within the reproduction process, surplus value appears no longer to be posited by its simple, direct relation to living labour; this relation appears, rather, as merely a moment of its total movement. Proceeding from itself as the active subject, the subject of the process – and, in the turnover, the direct production process indeed appears determined by its movement as capital, independent of its relation to labour – capital relates to itself as self-increasing value; i.e. it relates to surplus value as something posited and founded by it; it relates as well-spring of production, to itself as product; it relates as producing value to itself as produced value. It therefore no longer measures the newly produced value by its real measure, the relation of surplus labour to necessary labour, but rather by itself as its presupposition. A capital of a certain value produces in a certain period of time a certain surplus value. Surplus value thus measured by the value of the presupposed capital, capital thus posited as self-realizing value – is profit; regarded not sub specie aeternitatis, but sub specie – capitalis, the surplus value is profit; and capital as capital, the producing and reproducing value, distinguishes itself within itself from itself as profit, the newly produced value. The product of capital is profit. The magnitude, surplus value, is therefore measured by the value-magnitude of the capital, and the rate of profit is therefore determined by the proportion between its value and the value of capital. A very large part of what belongs here has been developed above.  But the anticipated material is to be put here. In so far as the newly posited value, which is of the same nature as the capital, is itself in turn taken up into the production process, itself in turn maintains itself as capital, to that extent the capital itself has grown, and now acts as a capital of greater value. After it has distinguished the profit, as newly reproduced value, from itself as presupposed, self-realizing value, and has posited profit as the measure of its realization, it suspends the separation again, and posits it in its identity to itself as capital which, grown by the amount of the profit, now begins the same process anew in larger dimensions. By describing its circle it expands itself as the subject of the circle and thus describes a self-expanding circle, a spiral.

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Grundrisse: Notebook V – Circulation and creation of value

Circulation and creation of value. (Equalization between different capitals in the conditions of circulation.) Capital not a source of value-creation. – Circulation costs. – Continuity of production presupposes suspension of circulation time

It follows from the relation of circulation time to the production process that the sum of values produced, or the total realization of capital in a given epoch, is determined not simply by the new value which it creates in the production process, or by the surplus time realized in the production process, but rather by this surplus time (surplus value) multiplied by the number which expresses how often the production process of capital can be repeated within a given period of time. The number which expresses this frequency of repetition may be regarded as the coefficient of the production process or of the surplus value created through it. However, this coefficient is not positively but negatively determined by the velocity of circulation. I.e. if the velocity of circulation were absolute, i.e. if no interruption in production resulting from circulation occurred at all, then this coefficient would be at its maximum. If the real conditions of e.g. wheat production in a given country permit only one harvest, then no velocity of circulation can make two harvests out of it. But if an obstruction in the circulation occurred, if the farmer could not sell his wheat soon enough e.g. to hire workers again, then production would be delayed. The maximum of the coefficient of the production process or the realization process in a given period of time is determined by the absolute time taken up by the production phase itself. With circulation completed, capital is able to begin its production process anew. Thus if circulation caused no delay at all, if its velocity were absolute and its duration = 0, i.e. if it were accomplished in no time, then this would only be the same as if capital had been able to begin its production process anew directly it was finished; i.e. circulation would not have existed as a limiting barrier for production, and the repetition of the production process in a given period of time would be absolutely dependent on, identical with, the duration of the production process. Thus if the development of industry allowed x lb. of twist to be produced in 4 months with a capital of 100, then with that capital the production process could be repeated only 3 times per year, and only 3x lb. of twist could be produced. No velocity of circulation could increase the reproduction of capital, or rather the repetition of its realization process, beyond that point. That could occur only in consequence of an increase in the forces of production. Circulation time in itself is not a productive force of capital, but a barrier to its productive force arising from its nature as exchange value. The passage through the various phases of circulation here appears as a barrier to production, a barrier posited by the specific nature of capital itself. All that can happen through the acceleration and abbreviation of circulation time – of the circulation process – is the reduction of the barrier posited by the nature of capital. The natural barriers to the repetition of the production process e.g. in agriculture coincide with the duration of one cycle of the production phase. The barrier posited by capital is the lag not between seeding and harvest, but between harvest and the transformation of the harvest into money, and retransformation of the money into say e.g. purchase of labour. The circulation-artists who imagine that they can do something with the velocity of circulation other than lessen the obstacles to reproduction posited by capital itself are on the wrong track. (Even madder, of course, are those circulation-artists who imagine that credit institutes and inventions which abolish the lag of circulation time will not only do away with the delays and interruptions in production caused by the transformation of the finished product into capital, but will also make the capital, with which productive capital exchanges, itself superfluous; i.e. they want to produce on the basis of exchange value but to remove at the same time, by some witchcraft, the necessary conditions of production on this basis.) The most that credit can do in this respect – as regards mere circulation – is maintain the continuity of the production process, if all other conditions of this continuity are present, i.e. if the capital to be exchanged with actually exists etc.

It is posited in the circulation process that the transformation of the capital into money is posited as a condition for the realization of capital through production, for the exploitation of labour by capital; or, the exchange of capital for capital * is posited as barrier to the exchange of capital for labour and vice versa.

* For from the present standpoint we still only have labour or capital at all points of circulation.

Capital exists as capital only in so far as it passes through the phases of circulation, the various moments of its transformation, in order to be able to begin the production process anew, and these phases are themselves phases of its realization – but at the same time, as we saw, of its devaluation. As long as capital remains frozen in the form of the finished product, it cannot be active as capital, it is negated capital. Its realization process is delayed in the same degree, and its value-in-process [prozessierender Wert] negated. This thus appears as a loss for capital, as a relative loss of its value, for its value consists precisely in its realization process. This loss of capital means in other words nothing else but that time passes it by unseized, time during which it could have been appropriating alien labour, surplus labour time through exchange with living labour, if the deadlock had not occurred. Now let us imagine many capitals in particular branches of business, all of which are necessary (which would become evident if, in the eventuality of a massive flight of capital from a given branch, supply falling below demand, the market price would therefore rise above the natural price in that branch), and let a single branch of business require e.g. that capital A remain longer in the form of devaluation, i.e. that the time in which it passes through the various phases of circulation is longer than in all other branches of business, in which case this capital A would regard the smaller new value which it could produce as a positive loss, just as if it had so many more outlays to make in order to produce the same value. It would thus charge relatively more exchange value for its products than the other capitals, in order to share the same rate of gain. But this could take place in fact only if the loss were distributed among the other capitals. If A demands more exchange value for the product than there is labour objectified in it, then it can obtain this more only if the others obtain less than the real value of their products. That is, the less favourable conditions under which A has produced would be borne in proportional shares by all the capitalists who exchange with it, and in this way an equal average level would come out. But the sum of the surplus value created by all these capitals together would be lessened exactly by the amount of capital A’s lesser realization in relation to the other capitals; only, instead of this reduction falling exclusively on capital A, it is borne as a general loss, as a loss shared proportionally by all the capitals. Nothing can therefore be more ridiculous than the notion (see e.g. Ramsay) that, apart from the exploitation of labour, capital forms an original source, separately from labour, of value-creation, because the distribution of surplus labour among the capitals takes place not in proportion to the surplus labour time achieved by the individual capital, but in proportion to the total surplus labour which the totality of capitals achieved, and hence a higher value-creation can be attributed to the individual capital than is directly explicable from its particular exploitation of labour power. But this more on one side has to be compensated by a less on the other. This is what average means, if it means anything at all. The question how the relation of capital to alien capital, i.e. the competition of capitals, distributes the surplus value among them obviously has nothing to do with the absolute amount of this surplus value. Nothing more absurd, then, than to conclude that, because one capital obtains a compensation for its exceptional circulation time, i.e. puts its relatively lesser realization to account as positively greater realization, now all capitals combined, capital can make something out of nothing, make a plus out of a minus, make a plus-surplus value out of a minus-surplus value or out of minus-surplus labour time, and that it possesses, therefore, a mystical wellspring of value independent of the appropriation of alien labour. The manner in which the capitals among other things compute their proportional share of the surplus value – not only according to the surplus labour time which they set in motion, but also in accordance with the time which their capital has worked as such, i.e. lain fallow, found itself in the phase of devaluation – does of course not alter in the least the total sum of the surplus value which they have to distribute among themselves. This sum itself cannot grow by being smaller than it would have been if capital A, instead of lying fallow, had created surplus value; i.e. by having created less surplus value in the same time as the other capitalists. And this lying-fallow is made good for capital A only in so far as it arises necessarily out of the conditions of the particular branch of production, and hence appears in respect to capital as such as a burden on realization, as a necessary barrier to its realization generally. The division of labour leaves this barrier as a barrier only as regards the production process of this particular capital. If the production process is regarded as conducted by capital as such, this lying-fallow is a general barrier to capital’s realization. If one imagines all production carried out by labour alone, then all the larger advances which it requires during its realization appear as what they are – deductions from surplus value.

Circulation can create value only in so far as it requires fresh employment – of alien labour – in addition to that directly consumed in the production process. This is then the same as if more necessary labour were used in the direct production process. Only the actual circulation costs increase the value of the product, but decrease the surplus value.

To the extent that the circulation of capital (the product etc.) does not merely express the phases necessary to begin the production process anew, this circulation (see Storch’s example) does not form a moment of production in its totality – is hence not circulation posited by production, and, in so far as it creates expenses, these are faux frais de production.The costs of circulation generally, in so far as their merely economic moments, circulation proper, are concerned (bringing the product to market gives it a new use value), are to be regarded as deduction from surplus value, i.e. as an increase of necessary labour in relation to surplus labour.

The continuity of production presupposes that circulation time has been suspended. If it has not been suspended, then time must pass between the different metamorphoses through which capital must travel; its circulation time must appear as deduction from its production time. On the other hand, the nature of capital presupposes that it travels through the different phases of circulation not as it does in the mind, where one concept turns into the next at the speed of thought, in no time, but rather as situations which are separate in time. It must spend some time as a cocoon before it can take off as a butterfly. Thus the conditions of production arising out of the nature of capital itself contradict each other. The contradiction can be suspended and overcome only  in two ways:

Firstly, credit: A pseudo-buyer B – i.e. someone who really pays but does not really buy – mediates the transformation of capitalist A’s product into money. But B himself is paid only after capitalist C has bought A’s product. Whether the money which this credit-man, B, gives to A is used by A to buy labour or to buy raw material and instrument, before A can replace either of them from the sale of his product, does not alter the case. Given our presupposition, he must basically give him both – i.e. all the conditions of production (these represent, however, a greater value than the original ones with which A began the production process). In this case capital B replaces capital A; but they are not realized at the same time. Now B takes the place of A; i.e. his capital lies fallow, until it is exchanged with capital C. It is frozen in the product of A, who has made his product liquid in capital B.

* Except if one imagines that all capitals produce to order for each other, and that the product is therefore always immediately money, a notion which contradicts the nature of capital and hence also the practice of large-scale industry.

Ramsay. Circulation time. Concludes therefore that capital is its own source of profit. – Ramsay. Confusion about surplus value and profit and law of values. (No surplus value according to Ricardo’s law.) – Ricardo. Competition. – Quincey. Ricardo’s theory of value. Wages and profit. Quincey. – Ricardo. – Wakefield. Conditions of capitalist production [in] colonies

The economists’ absolute confusion in respect of Ricardo‘s determination of value through labour time – something which is founded on a basic defect of his own development – emerges very clearly with Mr Ramsay. He says (after having previously drawn, from the influence of the circulation time of capitals on their relative realization, i.e. their relative share of the general surplus value, the nonsensical conclusion that: ‘This shows how capital may regulate value independently of labour’ (IX, 84. R, 43)  or ‘that capital is a source of value independent of labour’ ) – he says, literally: ‘A circulating capital (approvisionnement) will always maintain more labour than that formerly bestowed upon itself. Because, could it employ no more than had been previously bestowed upon itself, what advantage could arise to the owner from the use of it as such?’ (loc. cit. 49.) ‘Given two capitals of equal value, each produced through the labour of 100 men operating for a given time, of which the one is entirely circulating, the other entirely fixed, and may perhaps consist of wine kept to improve. Now, this circulating capital, raised by the labour of 100 men, will set 150 men in motion. Therefore the product at the end of the coming year will in this case be the result of the labour of 150 men. But still it will be of no more value than the wine at the termination of the same period, although only 100 men employed upon the latter.’ (50.) ‘Or is it asserted that the quantity of labour which every circulating capital will employ is no more than equal to the [quantity] previously bestowed upon it? That would mean, that the value of the capital expended = that of the product.’ (52.) Great confusion between the labour bestowed upon capital and that which it will employ. The capital which is exchanged for labour capacity, the approvisionnement – and this he here calls circulating capital – can never employ more labour than has been bestowed upon it. (The reaction of a development of the productive forces on present capital is beside the point here.) But there has been more labour bestowed upon it than it has paid for – surplus labour, which is converted into surplus value and surplus produce, enabling the capital to renew this profitable bargain, where the mutuality is all on one side, on a more enlarged scale. It is enabled to employ more new living labour, because during the process of production a portion of fresh labour has been bestowed upon it beyond the accumulated labour of which it consisted before entering that process.

Mr Ramsay seems to imagine that, if a capital is the product of 20 working days (necessary and surplus together), this product of 20 working days can employ 30 working days. But this is by no means the case. Say that 10 days of necessary labour and 10 surplus days were employed on the product. Then the surplus value = 10 surplus days. If the capitalist then exchanges these again for raw material, instrument and labour, then he can set new necessary labour into motion with the surplus product. The point is not that he employed more labour time than is present in the product, but that he exchanges the surplus labour time, which costs him nothing, for new necessary labour time – in other words, precisely, that he employs the entire labour time bestowed upon the product, while he has paid only part of that labour. Mr Ramsay’s conclusion, that if the quantity of labour which every circulating capital will employ was no more than equal to that previously bestowed upon it, the value of the capital expended would be equal to that of the produce, i.e. no surplus value would be left, would be correct only if the quantity of labour bestowed upon the capital were wholly paid for, i.e. if capital did not appropriate a part of the labour without equivalent. These misunderstandings on Ricardo’s part  obviously arise from the fact that he himself was not clear about the process, nor, as a bourgeois, could he be. Insight into this process is = to the statement that capital is not only, as A. Smith thinks,  command over alien labour, in the sense that every exchange value is that, since it gives its possessor buying power, but that it is the power to appropriate alien labour without exchange, without equivalent, but with the semblance of exchange. Ricardo knows no argument to refute those, like A. Smith and others, who fall into the same error regarding value as determined by labour, and value as determined by the price of labour (wages), other than to say: with the product of the same quantity of labour one can set sometimes more and sometimes less living labour into motion, i.e. he regards the product of labour in respect of the worker only as use value – only the part of the product which he needs to be able to live as worker. But how it comes about that the worker suddenly only represents use value in the exchange, or only draws use value from the exchange, is by no means clear to him, as is already proved by his arguments against A. Smith, which are never in general terms, but always about particular examples. But why is it, then, that the share of the worker in the value of the product is determined not by the value, but rather by the use value of the product, thus not by the labour time employed on it, but by its quality of maintaining living labour capacity? If he tries to explain this with, say, competition among the workers, then the answer which would have to be given is the same as that which he gives A. Smith about competition among capitalists, i.e. that competition may well even out, equalize the level of profit, but in no way creates the measure of this level.  Likewise, competition among the workers could press down a higher wages level etc., but the general standard of wages, or as Ricardo puts it the natural price of wages, could not be explained by the competition between worker and worker, but only by the original relation between capital and labour. Competition generally, this essential locomotive force of the bourgeois economy, does not establish its laws, but is rather their executor. Unlimited competition is therefore not the presupposition for the truth of the economic laws, but rather the consequence – the form of appearance in which their necessity realizes itself. For the economists to presuppose, as does Ricardo, that unlimited competition exists  is to presuppose the full reality and realization of the bourgeois relations of production in their specific and distinct character. Competition therefore does not explain these laws; rather, it lets them be seen, but does not produce them. Then Ricardo says, too: the production costs of living labour depend on the production costs of making the values required to reproduce it. While he previously regarded the product in relation to the worker only as a use value, he now regards the worker only as an exchange value in relation to the product. The historic process through which product and living labour come into this mutual relation is none of his concern. He is just as vague about the way in which this relation is perpetuated. Capital, with him, is the result of saving; this already shows that he misunderstands the process of its origins and reproduction. He therefore also imagines that production is impossible without capital, although he can very well imagine capital possible without ground rent. The distinction between profit and surplus value does not exist for him, proof that he is clear about the nature of neither one. His procedure already shows this from the very beginning. Originally, he makes workers exchange with workers – and their exchange is then determined by the equivalent, by the labour time reciprocally expended in production. Then comes the real problem of his economics, to demonstrate that this determination of value is not altered by the accumulation of capitals – i.e. by the presence [Dasein] of capital. Firstly, he has no inkling that his first spontaneous relation is itself only a relation abstracted from the mode of production resting on capital. Secondly, what he has available is a definite amount of objective labour time, which may of course increase, and he asks himself, how is it distributed? The question is rather how is it created, and there it is precisely the specific nature of the relation of capital and labour, or the specific and distinct character of capital, which explains this. As Quincey (X, 5) puts it, modern economics (the economics of Ricardo) is in fact concerned only with the dividends, while the total product is regarded as fixed, determined by the quantity of labour employed on it – its value appraised in accordance with that.  Accordingly, Ricardo has rightly been accused of not understanding surplus value, although his opponents understand it even less. Capital is represented as appropriating a certain part of the ready and available value of labour (of the product); the creation of this value, which it appropriates above and beyond the reproduced capital, is not presented as the source of the surplus value. This creation is identical with the appropriation of alien labour without exchange, and for that reason the bourgeois economists are never permitted to understand it clearly. Ramsay accuses Ricardo of forgetting that the fixed capital (which consists of capital not included in approvisionnement, with Ramsay the raw material at the same time along with the instrument) is a deduction from the sum total available for distribution among capitalist and worker. ‘Ricardo forgets that the whole product is divided not only between wages and profits, but that another part is necessary for replacing fixed capital.’ (IX, p. 88. R. 174, note.) Indeed, since Ricardo does not grasp the relation between objectified and living labour in its living movement – [a relation] not to be deduced from the dividends of a given quantity of labour, but from the positing of surplus labour – and does not, therefore, grasp the relation among the different component parts of capital, it therefore seems with him as if the entire product were divided into wages and profits, so that the reproduction of capital is itself counted as part of profit. Quincey (loc. cit. Notebook X, 5) gives this exposition of the Ricardian doctrine: ‘If the price is 10s. then wages and profit as a whole cannot exceed 10s. But do not the wages and profits as a whole, themselves, on the contrary, predetermine the price? No, that is the old superannuated doctrine.’ (p. 204). ‘The new economics has shown that all price is governed by proportional quantity of the producing labour, and by that only. Being itself once settled, then ipso facto, price settles the fund out of which both wages and profits must derive their separate dividends.’ (loc. cit. 204.) Capital here appears not as positing surplus value, i.e. surplus labour, but only as making deductions from a given quantity of labour. The fact that instrument and raw material appropriate these dividends then has to be explained by their use value in production, which then presupposes the absurdity that raw material and instrument create use value through their separation from labour. For this separation makes them into capital. Considered for themselves, they are themselves labour, accumulated labour. Besides, this clashes with sound common sense, because the capitalist knows very well that he counts wages and profit among the production costs and regulates the necessary price accordingly. This contradiction in the determination of the product by relative labour time, and the limitation of the sum of profit and wages by the sum of this labour time, and the real determination of prices in practice, comes about only because profit is not grasped as itself a derivative, secondary form of surplus value; the same is true of what the capitalist justly regards as his production costs. His profit arises simply from the fact that a part of the cost of production costs him nothing, hence does not enter into his outlays, his production costs.

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Grundrisse: Notebook V – Difference between the capitalist mode of production and all earlier ones

Influence of circulation on the determination of value. – Circulation time = time of devaluation. – Difference between the capitalist mode of production and all earlier ones (universality etc.). Propagandistic nature of capital. – Abbreviation of circulation (credit). – Storch. – What the capitalist advances is labour. (Malthus.) – Barriers to capitalist production. (Thompson)

In as much as the renewal of production depends on the sale of the finished products; transformation of the commodity into money and retransformation of money into the conditions of production – raw material, instrument, wages; in as much as the circuits which capital travels in order to go from one of these forms into the other constitute sections of circulation, and these sections are travelled in specific amounts of time (even spatial distance reduces itself to time; the important thing e.g. is not the market’s distance in space, but the speed – the amount of time – with which it can be reached), by that much the velocity of circulation, the time in which it is accomplished, is a determinant of how many products can be produced in a given period of time; how often capital can be realized in a given period of time, how often it can reproduce and multiply its value. Thus a moment enters into value-determination which indeed does not come out of the direct relation of labour to capital. The frequency with which the same capital can repeat the production process (creation of new value) in a given period of time is evidently a condition not posited directly by the production process itself. Thus, while circulation does not itself produce a moment of value-determination, for that lies exclusively in labour, its speed does determine the speed with which the production process is repeated, values are created – thus, if not values, at least to a certain extent the mass of values. Namely, the values and surplus values posited by the production process, multiplied by the number of repetitions of the production process in a given period of time. When we speak of the velocity of the circulation of capital, we postulate that delays in the transition from one phase to the next arise only from external barriers, not such as arise from the production process and circulation itself (such as crises, overproduction etc.). Thus, in addition to the labour time realized in production, the circulation time of capital enters in as a moment of value creation – of productive labour time itself. While labour time appears as value-positing activity, this circulation time of capital appears as the time of devaluation. The difference shows itself simply in this: if the

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Grundrisse: Notebook II – The Chapter on Capital

‘From the beginnings of civilization, men have fixed the exchange value of the products of their labour not by comparison with the products offered in exchange, but by comparison with a product they preferred.’ (Ganilh, 13,9.) [19]

Simple exchange. Relations between exchangers. Harmonies of equality, freedom, etc. (Bastiat, Proudhon)

The special difficulty in grasping money in its fully developed character as money – a difficulty which political economy attempts to evade by forgetting now one, now another aspect, and by appealing to one aspect when confronted with another – is that a social relation, a definite relation between individuals, here appears as a metal, a stone, as a purely physical, external thing which can be found, as such, in nature, and which is indistinguishable in form from its natural existence. Gold and silver, in and of themselves, are not money. Nature does not produce money, any more than it produces a rate of exchange or a banker. In Peru and Mexico gold and silver did not serve as money, although it does appear here as jewellery, and there is a developed system of production. To be money is not a natural attribute of gold and silver, and is therefore quite unknown to the physicist, chemist etc. as such. But money is directly gold and silver. Regarded as a measure, money still predominates in its formal quality; even more so as coin, where this appears externally on its face impression; but in its third aspect, i.e. in its perfection, where to be measure and coinage appear as functions of money alone, there all formal character has vanished, or directly coincides with its metallic existence. It is not at all apparent on its face that its character of being money is merely the result of social processes; it is money. This is all the more difficult since its immediate use value for the living individual stands in no relation whatever to this role, and because, in general, the memory of use value, distinct from exchange value, has become entirely extinguished in this incarnation of pure exchange value. Thus the fundamental contradiction contained in exchange value, and in the social mode of production corresponding to it, here emerges in all its purity. We have already criticized the attempts made to overcome this contradiction by depriving money of its metallic form, by positing it outwardly, as well, as something posited by society, as the expression of a social relation, whose ultimate form would be that of labour-money.

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Production, Consumption, Distribution, Exchange (Circulation)

Grundrisse: Introduction

Late August – Mid-September 1857

1. Production, Consumption, Distribution, Exchange (Circulation)

(1) PRODUCTION

Independent Individuals. Eighteenth-century Ideas

The object before us, to begin with, material production.

Individuals producing in society – hence socially determined individual production – is, of course, the point of departure. The individual and isolated hunter and fisherman, with whom Smith and Ricardo begin, belongs among the unimaginative conceits of the eighteenth-century Robinsonades, which in no way express merely a reaction against over-sophistication and a return to a misunderstood natural life, as cultural historians imagine. As little as Rousseau’s contrat social, which brings naturally independent, autonomous subjects into relation and connection by contract, rests on such naturalism. This is the semblance, the merely aesthetic semblance, of the Robinsonades, great and small. It is, rather, the anticipation of ‘civil society’, in preparation since the sixteenth century and making giant strides towards maturity in the eighteenth. In this society of free competition, the individual appears detached from the natural bonds etc. which in earlier historical periods make him the accessory of a definite and limited human conglomerate. Smith and Ricardo still stand with both feet on the shoulders of the eighteenth-century prophets, in whose imaginations this eighteenth-century individual – the product on one side of the dissolution of the feudal forms of society, on the other side of the new forces of production developed since the sixteenth century – appears as an ideal, whose existence they project into the past. Not as a historic result but as history’s point of departure. As the Natural Individual appropriate to their notion of human nature, not arising historically, but posited by nature. This illusion has been common to each new epoch to this day. Steuart  avoided this simple-mindedness because as an aristocrat and in antithesis to the eighteenth century, he had in some respects a more historical footing.

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The Poverty of Philosophy

Karl Marx 

The Metaphysics of Political Economy

The Method

Here we are, right in Germany! We shall now have to talk metaphysics while talking political economy. And in this again we shall but follow M. Proudhon's “contradictions.” Just now he forced us to speak English, to become pretty well English ourselves. Now the scene is changing. M. Proudhon is transporting us to our dear fatherland and is forcing us, whether we like it or not, to become German again.

If the Englishman transforms men into hats, the German transforms hats into ideas. The Englishman is Ricardo, rich banker and distinguished economist; the German is Hegel, simple professor at the University of Berlin.

Louis XV, the last absolute monarch and representative of the decadence of French royalty, had attached to his person a physician who was himself France's first economist. This doctor, this economist, represented the imminent and certain triumph of the French bourgeoisie. Doctor Quesnay made a science out of political economy; he summarized it in his famous Tableau économique. Besides the thousand and one commentaries on this table which have appeared, we possess one by the doctor himself. It is the “Analysis of the Economic Table,” followed by “seven important observations.”

M. Proudhon is another Dr. Quesnay. He is the Quesnay of the metaphysics of political economy.

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The Civil War in France - The Paris Commune

The Third Address

May, 1871

[The Paris Commune]

On the dawn of March 18, Paris arose to the thunder-burst of “Vive la Commune!” What is the Commune, that sphinx so tantalizing to the bourgeois mind?

“The proletarians of Paris,” said the Central Committee in its manifesto of March 18, “amidst the failures and treasons of the ruling classes, have understood that the hour has struck for them to save the situation by taking into their own hands the direction of public affairs.... They have understood that it is their imperious duty, and their absolute right, to render themselves masters of their own destinies, by seizing upon the governmental power.”

But the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.

The centralized state power, with its ubiquitous organs of standing army, police, bureaucracy, clergy, and judicature – organs wrought after the plan of a systematic and hierarchic division of labor – originates from the days of absolute monarchy, serving nascent middle class society as a mighty weapon in its struggle against feudalism. Still, its development remained clogged by all manner of medieval rubbish, seignorial rights, local privileges, municipal and guild monopolies, and provincial constitutions. The gigantic broom of the French Revolution of the 18th century swept away all these relics of bygone times, thus clearing simultaneously the social soil of its last hinderances to the superstructure of the modern state edifice raised under the First Empire, itself the offspring of the coalition wars of old semi-feudal Europe against modern France.

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Marx-Engels Correspondence 1879

From 

Marx and Engels to August Bebel, Wilhelm Liebknecht, Wilhelm Bracke and others

(1) The negotiations with C. Hirsch.

Liebknecht asks Hirsch if he will take over the editorship of the Party organ which is to be newly established in Zürich. Hirsch wants information as to the finances of the paper: what funds are at its disposal and who provides them. The first, in order to know whether the paper will be bound to fade out after a few months. And then to make sure who holds the purse strings and with them the ultimate control over the line of the paper. Liebknecht’s answer to Hirsch : “Everything all right, you will hear the rest from Zürich “(Liebknecht to Hirsch, July 28) does not reach him. But from Zürich comes a letter to Hirsch from Bernstein (July 24) in which Bernstein announces that “we have been charged with the launching and supervision” (of the paper). A discussion had taken place “between Viereck and us” in which it had been felt “that your position, owing to the differences which you had with individual comrades when you were a Laterne [Lantern] man would be made rather difficult; but I do not attach much weight to this objection.” Not a word about the financing.

Hirsch replies by return on July 26, with the question as to the material position of the paper. What comrades have pledged themselves to cover the deficit? Up to what amount and for how long? The question of the editor’s salary plays no part at all here, all Hirsch wants to know is if “the means are ensured for guaranteeing the paper for at least a year.”

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Marx and Engels and: "The Permanent Revolution", and, "Socialism In One Country"

INTRODUCTION

This issue consists of materials relevant to a recent discussion on the e-list of the "International Struggle Marxist-Leninist". At that site a discussion was initiated by Comrade Gazza who pointed out, that in a passage from a work by Frederick Engels, it seems that Engels believed that socialism in a single country was impossible.

This issue contains the following:

Firstly an annotated and edited version of three e-messages between comrades Gazza and Klo McKinsey ;

Secondly a commentary from Alliance; outlining the views of Marx, Engels, Then discusses Trotsky's distortion and differences from Lenin; and finally Stalin's evaluation of these differences. 

Thirdly, an Appendix of two relevant letters from Engels .

We feel that the discussion is of importance, not the least because with honest intent, there is an echo of an earlier distortion of the concept of "Permanent Revolution", by Trotsky. We stress that we have no concern that Comrade Gazza has any intent to re-tread Trotsky's path. But his isolation of an earlier quote from Engels deserves a fuller discussion, if only to remind all Marxist-Leninists of the history of the theory of "Socialism in One Country", and its' Trotskyite counter-part , the "Theory of Permanant Revolution".

TABLE OF CONTENTS

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