| Author(s) | Friedrich Engels |
|---|---|
| Written | 11 August 1884 |
ENGELS TO PAUL LAFARGUE
IN PARIS
[Worthing, about 11 August 1884]
p. 1. Beaulieu always writes Schoeffle: the gentleman's name is Schäffle.
p. 3, nascent capitalist system —? about 1780-1800? The birth of that system dates back to the 15th century, whereas nascent big industry merely led to its apogee.
pp.1 and 4. Maine does not in any way deserve to be cited in the same breath as Maurer; he discovered nothing and is merely a disciple of the disciples of Maurer; long before his day, the communal ownership of land in India had been known about and described by Campbell, etc.; that in Java by Money, that in Russia by Haxthausen.[1] His only merit is to have been the first Englishman to have accepted and vulgarised Maurer's discoveries.
p. 5, must be entirely recast. The examples you give do not apply to the point under discussion. The peasant's plot which turns into capital would be land as capital, a very complex matter not discussed by Marx until the 3rd book[2] ! Your slave-owner producing for the New Orleans market is no more a capitalist than the Romanian boyar who exploits forced peasant labour. No one can be a capitalist unless he owns the means of labour and exploits the free working man!
Rather you should say: the loom of the small peasant of pre-revolutionary times, which was used to weave clothing for his family, was not capital, nor yet is it capital when the peasant sells to the merchant the cloth he has been able to make during the long winter evenings; but if he employs a paid hand to weave those commodities for the merchant, and if he pockets the difference between the cost of production and the price of the sale of the cloth, then the loom is transformed into capital.— The object of production — to produce commodities — does not impart to the instrument the character of capital. The production of commodities is one of the preconditions for the existence of capital; but so long as the producer sells only what he himself produces, he is not a capitalist; he becomes so only from the moment he makes use of his instrument to exploit the wage labour of others. This also applies to p. 6. How can you possibly have failed to draw that distinction?
In place of your impossible slave-owner (don't be so Réachel), you might say: a feudal lord whose fields are cultivated by tenants subject to labour-rent, and who, moreover, collects tribute from them in the form of eggs, poultry, fruit, cattle, etc., is not a capitalist. He lives on the surplus labour of others, but he does not transform the product of that surplus labour into surplus value; he does not sell, but consumes, spends and dissipates it. But if the said lord, as he so frequently did in the 18th century, rids himself of some of those tenants, if he combines their plots into one big farm and rents it out to one big industrial farmer of the kind so beloved of the Physiocrats; if, in the cultivation of his farm, the said big farmer employs as wage labour those formerly subject to labour-rent, then agriculture is transformed from feudal into capitalist agriculture, and the farmer becomes a capitalist.
p. 6. The direct form taken by the circulation of commodities is, of course, its primitive form[3] ; this clearly has to exist before the 2nd form can come into being. Compared with simple barter it is not primitive; but the circulation of commodities presupposes the existence of money; barter creates only fortuitous exchanges, not the circulation of commodities.
p. 7. Capitalist production is not some form or other, whether direct or indirect, of the circulation of commodities. Production and circulation are two different things. All capitalist production presupposes the circulation of commodities, this being the element in which it moves, but it is not itself circulation, any more than digestion is the circulation of the blood. You can delete the whole of that sentence, which contributes nothing whatever to the sense.
p. 11. The passage you underline, I find incomprehensible as well as wrong on all counts. Your average capitalist does sell and can sell for more than 10 frs what is produced at a cost of 10 frs.— Where you go wrong is over 'the costs of production'. But the costs of production, in the sense used by economists,[4] include profit; they consist 1) of the amount the product has cost the capitalist and 2) of the profit; in other words: 1) of the amount which replaces the constant capital spent, 2) of the amount which replaces the wages paid, 3) of the surplus value, either as a whole or in part, created by the surplus labour of the wage earners. You should therefore take Beaulieu's sentence, his definition of value (p. 9, bottom), and compare the two expressions of value one with the other: either the cost price includes the profit, in which case the commodities are paid for 'in accordance with the social labour they contain'. In which case the price (or value) includes a surplus value created by living labour, over and above the wages paid, and appropriated by the capital. Or else the cost price does not cover the profit; in which case the value is determined, not by the social labour comprised in the object, but by the wages, whether high or low, paid for that labour — an outworn concept refuted at some length by Ricardo.
pp. 12 and 13. The whole value of the machine and of the cotton, and even that of the waste, is transmitted to the product; and therein lies the true nub of your argument. If the 115 lbs of cotton yield only 100 lbs of yarn, the price[5] of the 115 lbs of raw cotton is added to the value of those 100 lbs of yarn. Perhaps it is this, the value of the 15 lbs which have disappeared qua material but have reappeared qua value, that Mr Beaulieu calls surplus value?
p. 13. If the capitalist were to lend his machinery, etc., to the workman, the product would belong to the latter — which is never the case.
pp. 13 and 14, 'engenders a gain called profit': cf. para. 1, p. 270, where Mr Beaulieu demonstrates that it is not the capitalist but rather the consumer who is the beneficiary of technical progress. He criticises Marx for forgetting competition; yet all through the chapter on manufacture and big industry, Marx demonstrates that machinery merely helps to lower the price of the products, and that it is competition which accentuates that effect[6] ; in other words, the gain consists in manufacturing a greater number of products in the same length of time, so that the amount of work involved in each is correspondingly less and the value of each proportionately lower. Mr Beaulieu forgets to tell us in what respect the wage earner benefits from seeing his productivity increase when the product of that increased productivity does not belong to him, and when his wage is not determined by the productivity of the instrument.
pp. 14 and 15. The justification of profit here proffered by Beaulieu contains what is the quintessence of vulgar economics, namely its justification of the exploitation of the working man by the capitalist. The creator of capital demands his 'due' return for that creation (that is to say, the 'wages of abstinence' — see Marx[7] ), and that return has to be paid by the exploited working man in the form of unpaid labour. This you commend on the grounds that 'profit is the legitimate offspring of living labour'! 'The managerial salary' is represented and assessed in terms of the salary paid to a salaried manager, a salary with which no capitalist would rest content. Cf. Capital, 3rd German edition, pp. 171 and 172 (the French edition is not to hand), where you will find all these statements refuted in a few words.[8] The insurance premium against risk is indeed taken out of surplus value, but it is reckoned over and above the profit; every year the capitalist sets aside a sum amounting to... as a reserve for what he calls the ducroire (from the Italian del credere, that is, to cover himself against bad faith or bad debts). Finally, rewards for greater efficiency, for inventions not yet generally exploited, occur only in exceptional cases and may then yield an extra profit; but here we are concerned with ordinary, average profit such as is common to all industrialists. Come to that, you will find this type of profit discussed in Capital, 3rd German edition, pp. 314-17.[9]
By taking these statements of Beaulieu's in earnest, by declaring that profit thereby becomes 'the legitimate offspring of living labour' (not of the working man, but of the labour of the capitalist), you endorse, on Marx's behalf and in Marx's name, those doctrines of vulgar economics which he combatted always and everywhere. You must, therefore, completely change your mode of expression so as to exclude even the semblance of such a meaning. Otherwise it will be you who falls into the trap.
Your assertion on p. 16 that 'when the products... capitalist profit is nil or all but nil', runs completely contrary to the facts. For in that case, where is the exploitation of the workers? What are you complaining about? And what do the capitalists live and grow fat on, or dissipate? Where the deuce did you light on such an idea, never expounded even by vulgar economists and which, furthermore, is not even to be found in Beaulieu? And you call it a general law! What is true is that, with machines making 100 metres of cloth with the same expenditure of labour as manual labour on its own would require for 1 metre, the capitalist can spread his profit over 100 metres instead of concentrating it on only one; the result being that, while every metre carries only 1/100 of the profit, the profit on the sum total of labour expended may stay the same, if not actually increase.
p. 16. Marx would protest against 'the political and social ideal' attributed to him by you. When one is an economist, 'a man of science', one does not have an ideal, one elaborates scientific results, and when one is, to boot, a party man, one struggles to put them into practice. But when one has an ideal, one cannot be a man of science, having, as one then does, preconceived ideas.
In short, the article will have an effect if you eliminate the chief errors I have indicated. But for the purpose of your riposte,[10] which must be of a far more serious nature, I am firmly of the opinion that you must seriously re-read Capital, from cover to cover, with Beaulieu's book beside you; and that you should mark all the passages relating to vulgar economics. I say Capital rather than Deville's book[11] which would be wholly inadequate because of grave defects in the descriptive section.
Again, you must not forget that these gentry, Beaulieu and others, are far better versed than you are in the ordinary literature of economics, and that this is a field in which you will not be able to combat them on equal terms; it is their business to know such things, not yours. So do not venture too far into that field.
I have spoken frankly and hope you will not take it amiss. It is too serious a matter and, if you were to put a foot wrong, the whole party would suffer as a result.
We are dying of heat here, but are pretty well, nonetheless. Everyone sends a thousand greetings to Laura and yourself. Unfortunately our stock of Pilsener is nearly exhausted and takes two days to be replenished from Brighton! We are right out in the wilds here.
Yours ever,
F. E.