Karl Marx (1883-1883) was an economist and
philosopher who had a profound impact on the way which the
modern world understands human social relationships. The product
of a middle class German-Jewish family, Marx benefited from an
excellent education, but was barred from an academic career by
the radical nature of his political views. As a young man,
Marx moved around Europe, eventually meeting a forging a close
intellectual partnership with Friedrich Engels, the scion of a
wealthy family of German industrialists. With Engels'
assistance, Marx in 1848 wrote The Communist Manifesto, a short book which
set out for the first time his dialectical materialist view of
history and his socialist critique of industrial capitalism.
Marx eventually moved to London and spent the remainder of
his life working on successive volumes of Capital, a far lengthier and
more detailed presentation of his views. Socialism and
dissatisfaction with the changes wrought by industrial
capitalism certainly had existed before Marx wrote, but after he
began publishing, he exerted a decisive influence on all
subsequent socialist thinkers and political leaders. Many
of the most significant political upheavals of the twentieth
century were inspired by Marx's ideas, for good or for ill.
Excerpts from The
Communist Manifesto (Written with Friedrich
Engels, 1848)
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of
class struggles.
Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf,
guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed,
stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an
uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time
ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at
large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.
In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a
complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold
gradation of social rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians,
knights, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords,
vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in almost
all of these classes, again, subordinate gradations.
The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of
feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has
but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new
forms of struggle in place of the old ones.
Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this
distinct feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as
a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile
camps, into two great classes directly facing each other —
Bourgeoisie [the capitalist class] and Proletariat [the working
class].
From the serfs of the Middle Ages sprang the chartered burghers of
the earliest towns. From these burgesses the first elements of the
bourgeoisie were developed.
The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up
fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The East-Indian and
Chinese markets, the colonisation of America, trade with the
colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in commodities
generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry, an
impulse never before known, and thereby, to the revolutionary
element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development.
The feudal system of industry, in which industrial production was
monopolised by closed guilds, now no longer sufficed for the
growing wants of the new markets. The manufacturing system took
its place. The guild-masters were pushed on one side by the
manufacturing middle class; division of labour between the
different corporate guilds vanished in the face of division of
labour in each single workshop.
Meantime the markets kept ever growing, the demand ever rising.
Even manufacturer no longer sufficed. Thereupon, steam and
machinery revolutionised industrial production. The place of
manufacture was taken by the giant, Modern Industry; the place of
the industrial middle class by industrial millionaires, the
leaders of the whole industrial armies, the modern bourgeois.
Modern industry has established the world market, for which the
discovery of America paved the way. This market has given an
immense development to commerce, to navigation, to communication
by land. This development has, in its turn, reacted on the
extension of industry; and in proportion as industry, commerce,
navigation, railways extended, in the same proportion the
bourgeoisie developed, increased its capital, and pushed into the
background every class handed down from the Middle Ages.
We see, therefore, how the modern bourgeoisie is itself the
product of a long course of development, of a series of
revolutions in the modes of production and of exchange.
Each step in the development of the bourgeoisie was accompanied by
a corresponding political advance of that class. An oppressed
class under the sway of the feudal nobility, an armed and
self-governing association in the medieval commune(4): here
independent urban republic (as in Italy and Germany); there
taxable “third estate” of the monarchy (as in France); afterwards,
in the period of manufacturing proper, serving either the
semi-feudal or the absolute monarchy as a counterpoise against the
nobility, and, in fact, cornerstone of the great monarchies in
general, the bourgeoisie has at last, since the establishment of
Modern Industry and of the world market, conquered for itself, in
the modern representative State, exclusive political sway. The
executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the
common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.
The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary
part.
The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an
end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has
pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to
his “natural superiors”, and has left remaining no other nexus
between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash
payment”. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious
fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism,
in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved
personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless
indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single,
unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. In one word, for
exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has
substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.
The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto
honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the
physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science,
into its paid wage labourers.
The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental
veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money
relation.
The bourgeoisie has disclosed how it came to pass that the brutal
display of vigour in the Middle Ages, which reactionaries so much
admire, found its fitting complement in the most slothful
indolence. It has been the first to show what man’s activity can
bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian
pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted
expeditions that put in the shade all former Exoduses of nations
and crusades.
The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising
the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of
production, and with them the whole relations of society.
Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form,
was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all
earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of
production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions,
everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois
epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations,
with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions,
are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they
can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is
profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses
his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.
The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases
the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must
nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions
everywhere.
The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market
given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in
every country. To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has drawn
from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it
stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed
or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new
industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question
for all civilised nations, by industries that no longer work up
indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest
zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home,
but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants,
satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants,
requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and
climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and
self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction,
universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also
in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of
individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness
and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from
the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world
literature.
The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of
production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication,
draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation. The
cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it
batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the
barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to
capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to
adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to
introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to
become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after
its own image.
The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the
towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the
urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued
a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural
life. Just as it has made the country dependent on the towns, so
it has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on
the civilised ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois,
the East on the West.
The bourgeoisie keeps more and more doing away with the scattered
state of the population, of the means of production, and of
property. It has agglomerated population, centralised the means of
production, and has concentrated property in a few hands. The
necessary consequence of this was political centralisation.
Independent, or but loosely connected provinces, with separate
interests, laws, governments, and systems of taxation, became
lumped together into one nation, with one government, one code of
laws, one national class-interest, one frontier, and one
customs-tariff.
The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has
created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have
all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature’s forces
to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and
agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs,
clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of
rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground — what
earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive
forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?
We see then: the means of production and of exchange, on whose
foundation the bourgeoisie built itself up, were generated in
feudal society. At a certain stage in the development of these
means of production and of exchange, the conditions under which
feudal society produced and exchanged, the feudal organisation of
agriculture and manufacturing industry, in one word, the feudal
relations of property became no longer compatible with the already
developed productive forces; they became so many fetters. They had
to be burst asunder; they were burst asunder.
Into their place stepped free competition, accompanied by a social
and political constitution adapted in it, and the economic and
political sway of the bourgeois class.
A similar movement is going on before our own eyes. Modern
bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange
and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic
means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is
no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he
has called up by his spells. For many a decade past the history of
industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt of modern
productive forces against modern conditions of production, against
the property relations that are the conditions for the existence
of the bourgeois and of its rule. It is enough to mention the
commercial crises that by their periodical return put the
existence of the entire bourgeois society on its trial, each time
more threateningly. In these crises, a great part not only of the
existing products, but also of the previously created productive
forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises, there breaks
out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an
absurdity — the epidemic of over-production. Society suddenly
finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it
appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut
off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and
commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much
civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry,
too much commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of
society no longer tend to further the development of the
conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have
become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are
fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring
disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the
existence of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois
society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. And
how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by
enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other,
by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough
exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way
for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing
the means whereby crises are prevented.
The weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the
ground are now turned against the bourgeoisie itself.
But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring
death to itself; it has also called into existence the men who are
to wield those weapons — the modern working class — the
proletarians.
***
Finally, in times when the class struggle nears the decisive hour,
the progress of dissolution going on within the ruling class, in
fact within the whole range of old society, assumes such a
violent, glaring character, that a small section of the ruling
class cuts itself adrift, and joins the revolutionary class, the
class that holds the future in its hands. Just as, therefore, at
an earlier period, a section of the nobility went over to the
bourgeoisie, so now a portion of the bourgeoisie goes over to the
proletariat, and in particular, a portion of the bourgeois
ideologists, who have raised themselves to the level of
comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole.
Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie
today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class. The
other classes decay and finally disappear in the face of Modern
Industry; the proletariat is its special and essential product.
The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper,
the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie,
to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle
class. They are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative. Nay
more, they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of
history. If by chance, they are revolutionary, they are only so in
view of their impending transfer into the proletariat; they thus
defend not their present, but their future interests, they desert
their own standpoint to place themselves at that of the
proletariat.
***
In depicting the most general phases of the development of the
proletariat, we traced the more or less veiled civil war, raging
within existing society, up to the point where that war breaks out
into open revolution, and where the violent overthrow of the
bourgeoisie lays the foundation for the sway of the proletariat.
Hitherto, every form of society has been based, as we have already
seen, on the antagonism of oppressing and oppressed classes. But
in order to oppress a class, certain conditions must be assured to
it under which it can, at least, continue its slavish existence.
The serf, in the period of serfdom, raised himself to membership
in the commune, just as the petty bourgeois, under the yoke of the
feudal absolutism, managed to develop into a bourgeois. The modern
labourer, on the contrary, instead of rising with the process of
industry, sinks deeper and deeper below the conditions of
existence of his own class. He becomes a pauper, and pauperism
develops more rapidly than population and wealth. And here it
becomes evident, that the bourgeoisie is unfit any longer to be
the ruling class in society, and to impose its conditions of
existence upon society as an over-riding law. It is unfit to rule
because it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slave
within his slavery, because it cannot help letting him sink into
such a state, that it has to feed him, instead of being fed by
him. Society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie, in other
words, its existence is no longer compatible with society.
The essential conditions for the existence and for the sway of the
bourgeois class is the formation and augmentation of capital; the
condition for capital is wage-labour. Wage-labour rests
exclusively on competition between the labourers. The advance of
industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces
the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by the
revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of
Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very
foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates
products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are
its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat
are equally inevitable.
***
When, in the course of development, class distinctions have
disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the hands
of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will
lose its political character. Political power, properly so called,
is merely the organised power of one class for oppressing another.
If the proletariat during its contest with the bourgeoisie is
compelled, by the force of circumstances, to organise itself as a
class, if, by means of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling
class, and, as such, sweeps away by force the old conditions of
production, then it will, along with these conditions, have swept
away the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms and of
classes generally, and will thereby have abolished its own
supremacy as a class.
In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class
antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free
development of each is the condition for the free development of
all.
Excerpt from
"The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte," (1852)
Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they
please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but
under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from
the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a
nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be
occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating
something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of
revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the
past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans,
and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history
in time-honored disguise and borrowed language. Thus Luther put on
the mask of the Apostle Paul, the Revolution of 1789-1814 draped
itself alternately in the guise of the Roman Republic and the
Roman Empire, and the Revolution of 1848 knew nothing better to do
than to parody, now 1789, now the revolutionary tradition of
1793-95. In like manner, the beginner who has learned a new
language always translates it back into his mother tongue, but he
assimilates the spirit of the new language and expresses himself
freely in it only when he moves in it without recalling the old
and when he forgets his native tongue.
Excerpts from Capital,
Chapter 7: "The Labour-Process and the Process of Producing
Surplus-Value," (1867)
While the labourer is at work, his labour constantly undergoes a
transformation: from being motion, it becomes an object without
motion; from being the labourer working, it becomes the thing
produced. At the end of one hour’s spinning, that act is
represented by a definite quantity of yarn; in other words, a
definite quantity of labour, namely that of one hour, has become
embodied in the cotton. We say labour, i.e., the expenditure of his
vital force by the spinner, and not spinning labour, because the
special work of spinning counts here, only so far as it is the
expenditure of labour-power in general, and not in so far as it is
the specific work of the spinner.
In the process we are now considering it is of extreme importance,
that no more time be consumed in the work of transforming the
cotton into yarn than is necessary under the given social
conditions. If under normal, i.e., average social
conditions of production, a pounds of
cotton ought to be made into b pounds of
yarn by one hour’s labour, then a day’s labour does not count as
12 hours’ labour unless 12 a pounds of
cotton have been made into 12 b pounds of
yarn; for in the creation of value, the time that is socially
necessary alone counts.
Not only the labour, but also the raw material and the product now
appear in quite a new light, very different from that in which we
viewed them in the labour-process pure and simple. The raw
material serves now merely as an absorbent of a definite quantity
of labour. By this absorption it is in fact changed into yarn,
because it is spun, because labour-power in the form of spinning
is added to it; but the product, the yarn, is now nothing more
than a measure of the labour absorbed by the cotton. If in one
hour 1 2/3 lbs. of cotton can be spun into 1 2/3 lbs. of yarn,
then 10 lbs. of yarn indicate the absorption of 6 hours’ labour.
Definite quantities of product, these quantities being determined
by experience, now represent nothing but definite quantities of
labour, definite masses of crystallised labour-time. They are
nothing more than the materialisation of so many hours or so
many days of social labour.
We are here no more concerned about the facts, that the labour is
the specific work of spinning, that its subject is cotton and its
product yarn, than we are about the fact that the subject itself
is already a product and therefore raw material. If the spinner,
instead of spinning, were working in a coal mine, the subject of
his labour, the coal, would be supplied by Nature; nevertheless, a
definite quantity of extracted coal, a hundredweight for example,
would represent a definite quantity of absorbed labour. We
assumed, on the occasion of its sale, that the value of a day’s
labour-power is three shillings, and that six hours’ labour is
incorporated in that sum; and consequently that this amount of
labour is requisite to produce the necessaries of life daily
required on an average by the labourer. If now our spinner by
working for one hour, can convert 1 2/3 lbs. of cotton into 1 2/3
lbs. of yarn, it follows that in six hours he will
convert 10 lbs. of cotton into 10 lbs. of yarn. Hence, during the
spinning process, the cotton absorbs six hours’ labour. The same
quantity of labour is also embodied in a piece of gold of the
value of three shillings. Consequently by the mere labour of
spinning, a value of three shillings is added to the cotton. . . .
Let us examine the matter more closely. The value of a day’s
labour-power amounts
to 3 shillings, because on our assumption half a day’s labour is
embodied in that quantity of labour-power, i.e., because the
means of subsistence that are daily required for the production
of labour-power, cost half a day’s labour. But the past labour
that is embodied in the labour-power, and the living labour that
it can call into action; the daily cost of maintaining it, and
its daily expenditure in work, are two totally different things.
The former determines the exchange-value of the labour-power,
the latter is its use-value. The fact that half a day’s labour
is necessary to keep the labourer alive during 24 hours, does
not in any way prevent him from working a whole day. Therefore,
the value of labour-power, and the value which that labour-power
creates in the labour-process, are two entirely different
magnitudes; and this difference of the two values was what the
capitalist had in view, when he was purchasing the labour-power.
The useful qualities that labour-power possesses, and by virtue
of which it makes yarn or boots, were to him nothing more than a
conditio sine qua non [an indispensable condition]; for
in order to create value, labour must be expended in a useful
manner. What really influenced him was the specific use-value
which this commodity possesses of being a source not only of value, but of more value than it
has itself. This is the
special service that the capitalist expects from labour-power,
and in this transaction he acts in accordance with the “eternal
laws” of the exchange of commodities. The seller of
labour-power, like the seller of any other commodity, realises
its exchange-value, and parts with its use-value. He cannot take
the one without giving the other. The use-value of labour-power,
or in other words, labour, belongs just as little to its seller,
as the use-value of oil after it has been sold belongs to the
dealer who has sold it. The owner of the money has paid the
value of a day’s labour-power; his, therefore, is the use of it
for a day; a day’s labour belongs to him. The circumstance, that
on the one hand the daily sustenance of labour-power costs only
half a day’s labour, while on the other hand the very same
labour-power can work during a whole day, that consequently the
value which its use during one day creates, is double what he
pays for that use, this circumstance is, without doubt, a piece
of good luck for the buyer, but by no means an injury to the
seller.
Our capitalist foresaw this state of things, and that was the
cause of his laughter. The labourer therefore finds, in the
workshop, the means of production necessary for working, not only
during six, but during twelve hours. Just as during the six hours’
process our 10 lbs. of cotton absorbed six hours’ labour, and
became 10 lbs. of yarn, so now, 20 lbs. of cotton will absorb 12
hours’ labour and be changed into 20 lbs. of yarn. Let us now
examine the product of this prolonged process. There is now
materialised in this 20 lbs. of yarn the labour of five days,
of which four days are due to the cotton and the lost steel
of the spindle, the remaining day having been absorbed by the
cotton during the spinning process. Expressed in gold, the labour
of five days is thirty shillings. This is therefore the price of
the 20 lbs. of yarn, giving, as before, eighteenpence as the price
of a pound. But the sum of the values of the commodities that
entered into the process amounts to 27 shillings. The value of the
yarn is 30 shillings. Therefore the value of the product is 1/9
greater than the value advanced for its production; 27 shillings
have been transformed into 30 shillings; a surplus-value of 3
shillings has been created. The trick has at last succeeded; money
has been converted into capital.
Every condition of the problem is satisfied, while the laws that
regulate the exchange of commodities, have been in no way
violated. Equivalent has been exchanged for equivalent. For the
capitalist as buyer paid for each commodity, for the cotton, the
spindle and the labour-power, its full value. He then did what is
done by every purchaser of commodities; he consumed their
use-value. The consumption of the labour-power, which was also the
process of producing commodities, resulted in 20 lbs. of yarn,
having a value of 30 shillings. The capitalist, formerly a buyer,
now returns to market as a seller, of commodities. He sells his
yarn at eighteenpence a pound, which is its exact value. Yet for
all that he withdraws 3 shillings more from circulation than he
originally threw into it. This metamorphosis, this conversion of
money into capital, takes place both within the sphere of
circulation and also outside it; within the circulation, because
conditioned by the purchase of the labour-power in the market;
outside the circulation, because what is done within it is only a
stepping-stone to the production of surplus-value, a process which
is entirely confined to the sphere of production. Thus “tout
est pour le mieux dans le meilleur des mondes possibles.”
[“Everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.”
– Voltaire, Candide].
. . .
If we now compare the two processes of producing value and of
creating surplus-value, we see that the latter is nothing but the
continuation of the former beyond a definite point. If on the one
hand the process be not carried beyond the point, where the value
paid by the capitalist for the labour-power is replaced by an
exact equivalent, it is simply a process of producing value; if,
on the other hand, it be continued beyond that point, it becomes a
process of creating surplus-value. . . .
The process of production, considered on the one hand as the
unity of the labour-process and the process of creating value,
is production of commodities; considered on the other hand as
the unity of the labour-process and the process of producing
surplus-value, it is the capitalist process of production, or
capitalist production of commodities.
Sources:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch01.htm
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch07.htm