Royal Road to Science — Marx Engels Collected Works Volume 6, Marx and Engels 1845–1848

Cover of the first German 23-page edition of the Manifesto of the Communist Party

Welcome back. The organization of this entry will be as follows:

I. This Introduction, including the MECW Preface

II. Marx’s Poverty of Philosophy

III. Marx and Engels’ Manifesto of the Communist Party and previous related documents

IV. Marx’s economics’ speech notebook entitled “Wages”

V. Miscellaneous notes on other works of Volume 6 — like speeches, newspaper entries, and letters: of which there are 62 in the main volume and 32 more from the “Appendices” and “Preparatory Materials” sections for a total of 97 unique works by Marx and/or Engels in 805 pages.

We’ll start with this quote from the “Preface”: “Volume 6 of the Collected Works of Marx and Engels covers the period between the autumn of 1845 and March 1848, when the bourgeois-democratic revolutions in Europe were maturing, and the contents reflect the manifold theoretical studies and practical activities of Marx and Engels undertaken on the eve of the revolutions of 1848–49. In these activities Marx and Engels were mainly concerned with completing their working out of the general theoretical foundations of Marxism as the ideology of the working class, with taking the first steps towards the creation of a proletarian party based on the principles of scientific communism and proletarian internationalism, and with drawing up the programme and tactical platform of the international working-class movement. It was in this period that Marx and Engels founded the first international proletarian organisation — the Communist League, and produced Marxism’s first programmatic statement — the Manifesto of the Communist Party.”

Of his Poverty of Philosophy Marx said “This book contains in embryo what after a labour of twenty years became the theory that was developed in Capital.” In that “embryo” we will see more than just criticism of Proudhon that continues from the polemics in The German Ideology and The Holy Family, but an increasingly clear contrast where Marx draws a line in favor of a more materialist dialectic, and a more materialist understanding of history: “Social relations are closely bound up with productive forces. In acquiring new productive forces men change their mode of production; and in changing their mode of production, in changing the way of earning their living, they change all their social relations. The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist…the greatest productive power is the revolutionary class itself.”

Marx’s earlier studies of the political economists now also become more critical and clear as well, with more distinct breaks from the likes of Smith and Ricardo as well as a growing number of idealist socialists. Together, the preface notes, this creates a theory of “the unity of economic and political struggle and the decisive role of the political struggle for the emancipation of the proletariat”; a “class for itself.”

Many of the newspaper entries and letters at this time will show how Marx and Engels began to put these revolutionary politics into attempts of international action, culminating yet again with Marx being expelled from his home (this time, being kicked out of the young country of Belgium.)

II. The Poverty of Philosophy

First, from the end notes, some background on what this book was:

“Marx decided that he must criticise Proudhon’s economic and philosophical views and at the same time clear up a number of questions relating to the theory and tactics of the revolutionary proletarian movement from the scientific materialist standpoint at the end of 1846, as a result of his reading Proudhon’s Système des contradictions économiques ou Philosophie de la misère, which had appeared a short time earlier.

…

“By the beginning of April 1847 Marx’s work was completed in the main and had gone to press (see this volume, p. 72). On June 15, 1847 he wrote a short foreword…

“The book was published in Brussels and Paris early in July 1847. Marx’s followers saw it as a theoretical substantiation of the platform of the proletarian party which was taking shape at the time.”

The structure of the book is straightforward. You have prefaces and introductions followed by:

• “Chapter One: A Scientific Discovery” divided into three parts on use value, exchange value, synthetic value, and proportionality of value
• “Chapter Two: The Metaphysics of Political Economy” with five parts dealing with seven observations by Proudhon; division of labour and machinery; competition and monopoly; property/ground rent; and strikes and “combinations” (unions) of workers.

In tone, this is significantly easier to follow than The Holy Family and also easier than The German Ideology. This could be easily explained by the fact it is was a final published product without sections that had been reduced by the gnawing of rodents. Which is of course literally true but there is also a more mature Marx here, using (slightly) less ad hominem attacks, less “baroque” language, and a more clear argument. Also, and this may be a reader’s bias, there is a bit greater proportion of English political economy to German philosophy as well. And Marx even dropped the use of insulting mock-names for his adversary here, respectfully referring to “M. Proudhon” (while tearing apart his arguments.) Finally, it is dare I say a “superior” work because Proudhon had more interesting things to say than either the Bauers or Stirner (Feuerbach is a more complicated case for authorship reasons covered in my last entry) even if at times his arguments remain somewhat esoteric and Marx doesn’t always clearly differentiate when he is summarizing Proudhon and when he is speaking for himself

First is Marx’s 1847 foreword, somewhat inaccurately portraying himself as a German economist but with the zinger loaded up front: “M. Proudhon has the misfortune of being peculiarly misunderstood in Europe. In France, he has the right to be a bad economist, because he is reputed to be a good German philosopher. In Germany, he has the right to be a bad philosopher, because he is reputed to be one of the ablest French economists. Being both German and economist at the same time, we desire to protest against this double error.

“The reader will understand that in this thankless task we have often had to abandon our criticism of M. Proudhon in order to criticize German philosophy, and at the same time to give some observations on political economy.”

Then after two Engels prefaces from later editions, the core of the work begins — and it’s a particularly strong section, “The Antithesis of Use Value and Exchange Value”. Marx quotes Proudhon’s definitions of both: “The capacity for all products, whether natural or industrial, to contribute to man’s subsistence is specifically termed use value; their capacity to be given in exchange for one another, exchange value.” Proudhon also says the capacity to be exchanged for exchange value is the result of scarcity and the division of labor. His relation between the two is described by Marx as “transubstantiation” (not a compliment in this context.)

Marx makes an argument against Proudhon’s Robinson Crusoe-like theory that presupposes the division of labour and thus exchage then exchange value: “I and all the others, always according to M. Proudhon’s supposition, have got no farther than the solitary and hardly social position of the Robinsons. The collaborators and the various functions, the division of labour and the exchange it implies, are already at hand.”

Or alternatively: “M. Proudhon might just as well have inverted the order of things, without in any way affecting the accuracy of his conclusions. To explain exchange value, we must have exchange. To explain exchange, we must have the division of labour. To explain the division of labour, we must have needs which render necessary the division of labour. To explain these needs, we must ‘presuppose’ them.”

Marx thankfully does not just leave himself on the attack as he did in some earlier works, but outlines his alternative: “Exchange has a history of its own. It has passed through different phases. There was a time, as in the Middle Ages, when only the superfluous, the excess of production over consumption, was exchanged.

“There was again a time, when not only the superfluous, but all products, all industrial existence, had passed into commerce, when the whole of production depended on exchange. How are we to explain this second phase of exchange — marketable value at its second power?”

Again, Marx says Proudhon answers that question and others with presuppositions. Then he summarizes Proudhon four points on value as such:

“1. Use value and exchange value form a ‘surprising contrast,’ they are in opposition to each other.

2. Use value and exchange value are in inverse ratio, in contradiction, to each other.

3. Economists have neither observed nor recognized either the opposition or the contradiction.

4. M. Proudhon’s criticism begins at the end.”

Marx lands more effective blows: “What caps M. Proudhon’s difficulty? That he has simply forgotten about demand [!]…After having equated exchange value and scarcity, use value and abundance, M. Proudhon is quite astonished not to find use value in scarcity and exchange value, nor exchange value in abundance and use value; and seeing that these extremes are impossible in practice, he can do nothing but believe in mystery. Incalculable worth exists for him, because buyers do not exist, and he will never find any buyers, so long as he leaves out demand.”

Marx further criticizes the lack of focus on demand by Proudhon by listing historical examples of artificial alterations to avoid (cheap) abundance: “On the contrary, he should have concluded that abundance, the production of very useful things, should be restricted if their price, their exchange value is to be raised.

“The old vine-growers of France in petitioning for a law to forbid the planting of new vines; the Dutch in burning Asiatic spices, in uprooting clove trees in the Moluccas, were simply trying to reduce abundance in order to raise exchange value. During the whole of the Middle Ages this same principle was acted upon, in limiting by laws the number of journeymen a single master could employ and the number of implements he could use.”

Marx continues on the supply/demand value issue, “After having represented abundance as use value and scarcity as exchange value — nothing indeed is easier than to prove that abundance and scarcity are in inverse ratio — M. Proudhon identifies use value with supply and exchange value with demand. To make the antithesis even more clear-cut, he substitutes a new term, putting “estimation value” instead of exchange value. The battle has now shifted its ground, and we have on one side utility (use value, supply), on the other side, estimation (exchange value, demand).”

How does Marx allege Proudhon reconcile all of this? “Free will” (an interesting and again very individualistic way to describe a struggle between supply and demand, as if two “Robinsons” merged their islands.) But Marx wonders “what could be more varied than the objects which form the staple food of different peoples!”

So Proudhon imagines “Knights of free will”: “It is not enough for M. Proudhon to have eliminated the elements just mentioned from the relation of supply and demand. He carries abstraction to the furthest limits when he fuses all producers into one single producer, all consumers into one single consumer, and sets up a struggle between these two chimerical personages. But in the real world, things happen otherwise.”

Though I put it out of order here, Marx starts to articulate a theory of value again more advanced than we saw in 1844, edging closer at least to what we will read leading up to Capital: “The consumer is no freer than the producer. His judgment depends on his means and his needs. Both of these are determined by his social position, which itself depends on the whole social organisation. True, the worker who buys potatoes and the kept woman who buys lace both follow their respective judgments. But the difference in their judgements is explained by the difference in the positions which they occupy in the world, and which themselves are the product of social organisation.”

The second section of the first chapter starts with labor value, and synthetic or constituted value: “Here, in a nutshell, is the history of the discovery of synthetic value: Adam Smith — vague intuition; J. B. Say — antinomy; M. Proudhon — constituting and ‘constituted’ truth. And let there be no mistake about it: all the other economists, from Say to Proudhon, have merely been trudging along in the rut of antimony.”

If it wasn’t bad enough to be accused of forgetting about demand, Marx now Proudhon forgot about labor as well. That is, except for Proudhon’s alternative “labor time”, which has a flaw obvious enough a child could probably grasp the slow down as way to increase their wages: in measuring a value by labor via time, Proudhon grants the same productivity to a carpenter who would make eight very nice chairs in a day to one who would make one very uncomfortable, ugly chair.

Marx has his own example: “Let us suppose for a moment that a jeweler’s day is equivalent to three days of a weaver; the fact remains that any change in the value of jewels relative to that of woven materials, unless it be the transitory result of the fluctuations of supply and demand, must have as its cause a reduction or an increase in the labor time expended in the production of one or the other. If three working days of different workers be related to one another in the ratio of 1:2:3, then every change in the relative value of their products will be a change in this same proportion of 1:2:3. Thus values can be measured by labor time, in spite of the inequality of value of different working days; but to apply such a measure we must have a comparative scale of the different working days: it is competition that sets up this scale.”

“Is your hour’s labor worth mine? That is a question which is decided by competition.

“Competition, according to an American economist, determines how many days of simple labor are contained in one day’s compound labor. Does not this reduction of days of compound labor to days of simple labor suppose that simple labor is itself taken as a measure of value? If the mere quantity of labor functions as a measure of value regardless of quality, it presupposes that simple labor has become the pivot of industry. It presupposes that labor has been equalized by the subordination of man to the machine or by the extreme division of labor; that men are effaced by their labor; that the pendulum of the clock has become as accurate a measure of the relative activity of two workers as it is of the speed of two locomotives. Therefore, we should not say that one man’s hour is worth another man’s hour, but rather that one man during an hour is worth just as much as another man during an hour. Time is everything, man is nothing; he is, at the most, time’s carcase. Quality no longer matters.”

And another example: “If a quarter of corn cost two days’ labor instead of one, it would have twice its original value; but it would not set in operation double the quantity of labor, because it would contain no more nutritive matter than before.”

And yet another way to say it: “[Proudhon presupposes] that the pendulum of the clock has become as accurate a measure of the relative activity of two workers as it is of the speed of two locomotives.”

And what is labor then? “Labor is not a ‘vague thing’; it is always some definite labor, it is never labor in general that is bought and sold. It is not only labor that is qualitatively defined by the object; but also the object which is determined by the specific quality of labor.” Marx observes that different laborers have different physical constitutions and diligence even within the same job.

Proudhon therefore presents a utopian presentation of Ricardo, derived of actual economic relations, proposing a perfect equality of value and wages/equal value of labor — “to put the cost of manufacture of hats and the cost of maintenance of men on the same plane is to turn men into hats.”

Marx introduces then a concept of a minimum wage needed for reproduction: “ Labor, being itself a commodity, is measured as such by the labor time needed to produce the labor-commodity. And what is needed to produce this labor-commodity? Just enough labor time to produce the objects indispensable to the constant maintenance of labor, that is, to keep the worker alive and in a condition to propagate his race.” [Not to be confused with an average unit labour-cost style definitions of “socially necessary labor time” based on having both a use and exchange value. That comes later.]

Since labor time measured value via the wage system was already in place, what Proudhon is proposing is “the formula of the present enslavement of the worker, instead of being, as M. Proudhon would have it, the ‘revolutionary theory’ of the emancipation of the proletariat.”

In reality though, Fuit Troja. (Troy is no more): the proportion of actually existing supply and demand is “prosperity, depression, crisis, stagnation, renewed prosperity, and so on.”

And for the actual products, “The use of products is determined by the social conditions in which the consumers find themselves placed, and these conditions themselves are based on class antagonism.

“Cotton, potatoes and spirits are objects of the most common use. Potatoes have engendered scrofula; cotton has to a great extent driven out flax and wool, although wool and flax are, in many cases, of greater utility, if only from the point of view of hygiene; finally, spirits have got the upper hand of beer and wine, although spirits used as an alimentary substance are everywhere recognized to be poison. For a whole century, governments struggled in vain against the European opium; economics prevailed, and dictated its orders to consumption.”

Marx does engage in at least a small menu item for “the cookshops of the future”: “In a future society, in which class antagonism will have ceased, in which there will no longer be any classes, use will no longer be determined by the minimum time of production; but the time of production devoted to different articles will be determined by the degree of their social utility.” (Of course this does not note if this would be done through any particular planning and/or democratic process, so it’s not a full menu to be sure.)

Again, Marx contrasts Proudhon with his own view, more elaborately articulated than any point previously (apologies for the long quote but it seems key):

“Things happen in quite a different way from what M. Proudhon imagines. The very moment civilization begins, production begins to be founded on the antagonism of orders, estates, classes, and finally on the antagonism of accumulated labor and actual labor. No antagonism, no progress. This is the law that civilization has followed up to our days. Till now the productive forces have been developed by virtue of this system of class antagonisms. To say now that, because all the needs of all the workers were satisfied, men could devote themselves to the creation of products of a higher order — to more complicated industries — would be to leave class antagonism out of account and turn all historical development upside down. It is like saying that because, under the Roman emperors, muraena were fattened in artificial fishponds, therefore there was enough to feed abundantly the whole Roman population. Actually, on the contrary, the Roman people had not enough to buy bread with, while the Roman aristocrats had slaves enough to throw as fodder to the muraena.

“The price of food has almost continuously risen, while the price of manufactured and luxury goods has almost continuously fallen. Take the agricultural industry itself; the most indispensable objects, like corn, meat, etc., rise in price, while cotton, sugar, coffee, etc., fall in a surprising proportion. And even among comestibles proper, the luxury articles, like artichokes, asparagus, etc., are today relatively cheaper than foodstuffs of prime necessity. In our age, the superfluous is easier to produce than the necessary. Finally, at different historical epochs, the reciprocal price relations are not only different, but opposed to one another. In the whole of the Middle Ages, agricultural products were relatively cheaper than manufactured products; in modern times they are in inverse ratio. Does this mean that the utility of agricultural products has diminished since the Middle Ages?

“The use of products is determined by the social conditions in which the consumers find themselves placed, and these conditions themselves are based on class antagonism.

“Cotton, potatoes and spirits are objects of the most common use. Potatoes have engendered scrofula; cotton has to a great extent driven out flax and wool, although wool and flax are, in many cases, of greater utility, if only from the point of view of hygiene; finally, spirits have got the upper hand of beer and wine, although spirits used as an alimentary substance are everywhere recognized to be poison. For a whole century, governments struggled in vain against the European opium; economics prevailed, and dictated its orders to consumption.

“Why are cotton, potatoes and spirits the pivots of bourgeois society? Because the least amount of labor is needed to produce them, and, consequently, they have the lowest price. Why does the minimum price determine the maximum consumption? Is it by any chance because of the absolute utility of these objects, their intrinsic utility, their utility insomuch as they correspond, in the most useful manner, in the needs of the worker as a man, and not to the man as a worker? No, it is because in a society founded on poverty the poorest products have the fatal prerogative of being used by the greatest number.

“To say now that because the least costly things are in greater use, they must be of greater utility, is saying that the wide use of spirits, because of their low cost of production, is the most conclusive proof of their utility; it is telling the proletarian that potatoes are more wholesome for him than meat; it is accepting the present state of affairs; it is, in short, making an apology, with M. Proudhon, for a society without understanding it.

“In a future society, in which class antagonism will have ceased, in which there will no longer be any classes, use will no longer be determined by the minimum time of production; but the time of production devoted to different articles will be determined by the degree of their social utility.”

The last thing for this section that I will quote is an important editorial endnote: “In their works of the 1840s and 1850s, prior to Marx having worked out the theory of surplus value, Marx and Engels used the terms ‘value of labour’, ‘price of labour’, ‘sale of labour’ which, as Engels noted in 1891 in the introduction to Marx’s pamphlet Wage Labour and Capital, ‘from the point of view of the later works were inadequate and even wrong. After he had proved that the worker sells to the capitalist not his labour but his labour power Marx used more precise terms. In later works Marx and Engels used the terms ‘value of labour power’, ‘price of labour power’, ‘sale of labour power’”. Additionally, Marx seemed to add “la force du travail” in 1876 for the French edition, backing up the argument of Engels and the MECW editors.

The third section of the first chapter is separated into two topics on money and surplus labor respectively.

After introducing Proudhon’s take on Marx again accuses Proudhon of another massive presupposition: that of money itself! That Marx does not make assumptions such as the money form itself contrasts himself in historically notable ways to the Smiths and Ricardos as well as his main target here, Proudhon:

“But, after all that, how can M. Proudhon go on talking about the constitution of a value, since a value is never constituted by itself? It is constituted, not by the time needed to produce it by itself, but in relation to the quota of each and every other product which can be created in the same time. Thus the constitution of the value of gold and silver presupposes an already completed constitution of a number of other products.”

Silver and gold have value despite a value constituted by labor time because they are a universal agent of the exchange.

What about alternatives? “‘Cursed gold!’ cries a Communist flippantly [through the mouth of M. Proudhon]. You might as well say: ‘Cursed wheat, cursed vines, cursed sheep! — for just like gold and silver, every commercial value must attain its strictly exact determination.”

“The idea of making sheep and vines attain the status of money is not new. In France, it belongs to the age of Louis XIV. At that period, money having begun to establish its omnipotence, the depreciation of all other commodities was being complained of, and the time when ‘every commercial value’ might attain its strictly exact determination, the status of money, was being eagerly invoked.”

Marx quips, “One sees that the first illusions of the bourgeoisie are also their last.”

Then Marx moves on to surplus labour. He does this in attacking Proudhon’s “Prometheus” another Robinson-like construction of the individual except now as the lone genius of Greek lore,

“In 1770 the population of the United Kingdom of Great Britain was 15 million, and the productive population was 3 million. The scientific power of production equalled a population of about 12 million individuals more. Therefore there were, altogether, 15 million of productive forces. Thus the productive power was to the population as 1 is to 1; and the scientific power was to the manual power as 4 is to 1.

In 1840 the population did not exceed 30 million: the productive population was 6 million. But the scientific power amounted to 650 million; that is, it was to the whole population as 21 is to 1, and to manual power as 108 is to 1.

In English society the working day thus acquired in 70 years a surplus of 2,700 per cent productivity; that is, in 1840 it produced 27 times as much as in 1770. According to M. Proudhon, the following question should be raised: why was not the English worker of 1840 27 times as rich as the one of 1770? In raising such a question one would naturally be supposing that the English could have produced this wealth without the historical conditions in which it was produced, such as: private accumulation of capital, modern division of labour, automatic workshops, anarchical competition, the wage system — in short, everything that is based upon class antagonism. Now, these were precisely the necessary conditions of existence for the development of productive forces and of surplus labour. Therefore, to obtain this development of productive forces and this surplus labour, there had to be classes which profited and classes which decayed.

What then, ultimately, is this Prometheus resuscitated by M. Proudhon? It is society, social relations based on class antagonism. These relations are not relations between individual and individual, but between worker and capitalist, between farmer and landlord, etc. Wipe out these relations and you annihilate all society, and your Prometheus is nothing but a ghost without arms or legs; that is, without automatic workshops, without division of labour — in a word, without everything that you gave him to start with in order to make him obtain this surplus labour.

If then, in theory, it sufficed to interpret, as M. Proudhon does, the formula of surplus labour in the equalitarian sense, without taking into account the actual conditions of production, it should suffice, in practice, to share out equally among the workers all the wealth at present acquired, without changing in any way the present conditions of production. Such a distribution would certainly not assure a high degree of comfort to the individual participants.”

Marx also finds even in an area of economic optimism a more sordid story for both reasons of crisis and of colonialism: “If economists, in support of their optimism, cite the example of the English workers employed in the cotton industry, they see the condition of the latter only in the rare moments of trade prosperity. These moments of prosperity are to the periods of crisis and stagnation in the ‘true proportion’ of 3 to 10. But perhaps also, in speaking of improvement, the economists were thinking of the millions of workers who had to perish in the East Indies so as to procure for the million and a half workers employed in England in the same industry three years’ prosperity out of ten.”

The second and final chapter of The Poverty of Philosophy begins. with Marx’s clever introduction:

“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.

“Now metaphysics — indeed all philosophy — can be summed up, according to Hegel, in method. We must, therefore, try to elucidate the method of M. Proudhon, which is at least as foggy as the Economic Table.”

In the first of seven groups of comments on Proudhon’s seven observations, Marx does a more formulaic summary of Hegel, which makes me wonder was for a more “generalized” audience: “to speak Greek — we have thesis, antithesis and synthesis. For those who do not know the Hegelian language, we shall give the ritual formula: affirmation, negation and negation of the negation. That is what language means.” The reason Marx spends some time summarizing Hegel here is also then to accuse Proudhon of reducing Hegel to his “meanest proportions.”

Marx on the second observation: “Economic categories are only the theoretical expressions, the abstractions of the social relations of production, M. Proudhon, holding this upside down like a true philosopher, sees in actual relations nothing but the incarnation of the principles…

M. Proudhon the economist understands very well that men make cloth, linen, or silk materials in definite relations of production. But what he has not understood is that these definite social relations are just as much produced by men as linen, flax, etc. Social relations are closely bound up with productive forces. In acquiring new productive forces men change their mode of production; and in changing their mode of production, in changing the way of earning their living, they change all their social relations. The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist.”

The third observation is“ the production relations of every society form a whole.”

The fourth includes a very interesting footnote by Engels 20 years after the end of the US Civil war to comment on Marx’s comments 20 years before it.

First Marx in 1845: “Slavery is an economic category like any other. Thus it also has its two sides. Let us leave alone the bad side and talk about the good side of slavery. Needless to say, we are dealing only with direct slavery, with Negro slavery in Surinam, in Brazil, in the Southern States of North America.

“Direct slavery is just as much the pivot of bourgeois industry as machinery, credits, etc. Without slavery you have no cotton; without cotton you have no modern industry. It is slavery that gave the colonies their value; it is the colonies that created world trade, and it is world trade that is the precondition of large-scale industry. Thus slavery is an economic category of the greatest importance.

“Without slavery North America, the most progressive of countries, would be transformed into a patriarchal country. Wipe North America off the map of the world, and you will have anarchy — the complete decay of modern commerce and civilization. Cause slavery to disappear and you will have wiped America off the map of nations.”

And then we have a footnote with Engels’ 1885 comment on this statement in retrospect: “This was perfectly correct for the year 1847. At that time the world trade of the United States was limited mainly to import of immigrants and industrial products, and export of cotton and tobacco, i.e., of the products of southern slave labour. The Northern States produced mainly corn and meat for the slave states. It was only when the North produced corn and meat for export and also became an industrial country, and when the American cotton monopoly had to face powerful competition, in India, Egypt, Brazil, etc., that the abolition of slavery became possible. And even then this led to the ruin of the South, which did not succeed in replacing the open Negro slavery by the disguised slavery of Indian and Chinese [ethnic slur]...”

The fifth observation has a rich metaphor: “But the moment you present men as the actors and authors of their own history, you arrive — by detour — at the real starting point, because you have abandoned those eternal principles of which you spoke at the outset. M. Proudhon has not even gone far enough along the crossroad which an ideologist takes to reach the main road of history.”

The sixth continues to take this crossroad. Marx says this road of Proudhon is “history according to the sequence of ideas.” Among these, a mystical tendency, a providential aim of equality. Marx contrasts this with the reality of a Scotland with larger estates with more sheep, “Now say that the providential aim of the institution of landed property in Scotland was to have men driven out by sheep, and you will have made providential history.”

The seventh and final observation has a historical materialist argument as well: “Economists have a singular method of procedure. There are only two kinds of institutions for them, artificial and natural. The institutions of feudalism are artificial institutions, those of the bourgeoisie are natural institutions. In this, they resemble the theologians, who likewise establish two kinds of religion. Every religion which is not theirs is an invention of men, while their own is an emanation from God. When the economists say that present-day relations — the relations of bourgeois production — are natural, they imply that these are the relations in which wealth is created and productive forces developed in conformity with the laws of nature

…

“After the triumph of the bourgeoisie, there was no longer any question of the good or the bad side of feudalism. The bourgeoisie took possession of the productive forces it had developed under feudalism. All the old economic forms, the corresponding civil relations, the political state which was the official expression of the old civil society, were smashed.”

Marx then contrasts fatalist, romantic, humanitarian, and philanthropic economists to the socialists and communists, aka “the theoreticians of the proletarian class”.

Though Marx continues five other sections after the seven observations, this entry is already getting too long. Much of the rest is repetitive and some of his new work here on landed property and rent remains tentative and unsure. I’ll stop with his concluded shots fired from the seven observations followed by the conclusions of the entire book:

“Let us return to M. Proudhon.

Every economic relation has a good and a bad side; it is the one point on which M. Proudhon does not give himself the lie. He sees the good side expounded by the economists; the bad side he sees denounced by the Socialists. He borrows from the economists the necessity of eternal relations; he borrows from the Socialists the illusion of seeing in poverty nothing but poverty. He is in agreement with both in wanting to fall back upon the authority of science. Science for him reduces itself to the slender proportions of a scientific formula; he is the man in search of formulas. Thus it is that M. Proudhon flatters himself on having given a criticism of both political economy and communism: he is beneath them both. Beneath the economists, since, as a philosopher who has at his elbow a magic formula, he thought he could dispense with going into purely economic details; beneath the socialists, because he has neither courage enough nor insight enough to rise, be it even speculatively, above the bourgeois horizon.

He wants to be the synthesis — he is a composite error.

“He wants to soar as the man of science above the bourgeois and proletarians; he is merely the petty bourgeois, continually tossed back and forth between capital and labour, political economy and communism.”

and

“An oppressed class is the vital condition for every society founded on the antagonism of classes. The emancipation of the oppressed class thus implies necessarily the creation of a new society. For the oppressed class to be able to emancipate itself, it is necessary that the productive powers already acquired and the existing social relations should no longer be capable of existing side by side. Of all the instruments of production, the greatest productive power is the revolutionary class itself. The organization of revolutionary elements as a class supposes the existence of all the productive forces which could be engendered in the bosom of the old society.

“Does this mean that after the fall of the old society there will be a new class domination culminating in a new political power? No.

“The condition for the emancipation of the working class is the abolition of every class, just as the condition for the liberation of the third estate, of the bourgeois order, was the abolition of all estates and all orders.

“The working class, in the course of its development, will substitute for the old civil society an association which will exclude classes and their antagonism, and there will be no more political power properly so-called, since political power is precisely the official expression of antagonism in civil society.

“Meanwhile the antagonism between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie is a struggle of class against class, a struggle which carried to its highest expression is a total revolution. Indeed, is it at all surprising that a society founded on the opposition of classes should culminate in brutal contradiction, the shock of body against body, as its final denouement?

“Do not say that social movement excludes political movement. There is never a political movement which is not at the same time social.

“It is only in an order of things in which there are no more classes and class antagonisms that social evolutions will cease to be political revolutions. Till then, on the eve of every general reshuffling of society, the last word of social science will always be: ‘Le combat ou la mort; la lutte sanguinaire ou le neant. C’est ainsi que la quéstion est invinciblement posée.’ [From the novel Jean Siska by George Sand: ‘Combat or Death: bloody struggle or extinction. It is thus that the question is inexorably put.’]

Whether or not Marx believed at various points that class struggle precedes class, a topic taken up by more contemporary writers, I’ll deal with in a briefer entry than this!

III. Manifesto of the Communist Party

Beginning of Engels’ manuscript, “Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith”

What is there to be said about the Manifesto that hasn’t already been said?

You know the famous lines: “A spectre is haunting Europe”, “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles” and so on. You may know the list of 10 demands that were explained to be both particular examples but also somewhat universal at the same time. We have already in covered in great depth what Marx and Engels objected to in the other socialists they take aim at in the Manifesto as well (something that needs to be historicized to the extent that it is less urgent today unless we see a return of the feudal socialists.) Others have placed its interesting comments on the abolition of the bourgeois family into a longer historical arc better than I ever could.

So what I thought might be interesting thing is to ask how the Manifesto may have been different if it had kept to the original catechism proposal (today, it comes off like a “FAQ” format!) of the earlier documents with the same popular aims known as “Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith” and “Principles of Communism”. (The “Demands of the Communist Party in Germany” could be grouped together in this same lineage as well, though I find it quite different in both its smaller scope and in its political viewpoints.)

The contrast of those first two documents with each other is just as interesting as contrasting them with the Manifesto. For example, in the earlier version, the first question was “Are you a communist?” (one word answer: “yes”.) The second version dispenses with that softball. Then the first question and answers of substance shows how much Engels (and possibly others) changed it in roughly four months:

“What is the aim of the Communists?”

• “To organise society in such a way that every member of it can develop and use all his capabilities and powers in complete freedom and without thereby infringing the basic conditions of this society.” [first version]
• “Communism is the doctrine of the conditions of the liberation of the proletariat.” [second]

On what later became a very hot topic of “socialism in one country”, the Principles is instructive on. “Will it be possible for this revolution to take place in one country alone?”:

• “No. By creating the world market, big industry has already brought all the peoples of the Earth, and especially the civilized peoples, into such close relation with one another that none is independent of what happens to the others.”

Though in later writings, Marx and Engels toned down the necessity of their use of a “simultaneous” revolution concept, they maintained that it is “a universal revolution and will, accordingly, have a universal range.”

Both of these catechism/”FAQ” documents, and ultimately the Manifesto, have more in common in spirit than they have ideological difference: all are notably radical in how they talk about the ultimate abolition of nations, current familial relations, and classes. In fact, it is striking how radical the documents manage to be in speaking of changing “all existing social relations” — something that some of the “post left”/“class first”/whatever these online cultural conservative “socialists” are calling themselves today would do better to remember.

Really, asking if the Manifesto would have been “better” as a list of questions and answers (paired with a dramatic preamble and conclusion) — or in the familiar format we know it today — is probably a silly question that I am entertaining. But there is something very clear about answering a list of questions! And the idea of a catechism was to create something easy for workers to understand of their program so far. Normal paragraph prose better served the “historical materialist” questions of how proletarians differed from slaves, serfs, and early artisan/manufacturing workers — but the Q&A format was very digestible for something like asking if a peaceful abolition of private property will be possible (the answer was that it would be “desirable” so communists would support it — but they would also use deeds not words to back up proletarians if they were “forced” into revolution.)

What I would never suggest should have been anything but what we know is the ending of the Manifesto, each sentence an absolute classic: “The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Workers of the world, unite!”

IV. Marx’s economics notebook for a speech, entitled “Wages”

First page of Marx’s manuscript

Marx did a series of lectures in December 1847 on the topic of political economy. The audience was the German Workers Society in Brussels. He intended to turn these lectures into a pamphlet, but that never came to be. MECW V9 has the closest thing to this, “Wage-Labour and Capital”, which ran in a newspaper in April 1849 and was published by Engels as late as 1891. Anyway, this project started with the notes of the lecture that have survived and were published in MECW V6.

The heart of the notes is Marx summarizing political economists/thinkers of his time: Atkinson, Carlyle, M’Culloch, Wade, Babbage, Ure, Rossi, and Bray. Marx then moves to ask “how does the growth of productive forces affect wages?” and to speak about “competition between workers and employers”, “fluctuations of wages”, “minimum wage”, “suggestions of remedies”, and “workers associations” (essentially, unions) before concluding with a “positive aspect of wage labor”.

Many of the notes Marx made are clearly just speaking prompts for himself (e.g. “ Something to be said on population theory”.) But a lot is more detailed and interesting on the different theorists’ views of wages:

• Carlyle’s identification that the majority of labor not “skilled labor” (still technically true under the way people are categorized as “unskilled” or “semi skilled” workers based on the amount of education their job requires; though obviously it should be no judgement on how difficult it is to do such a job well. As anyone who has worked in, say, fast food, can attest.)
• Wade’s “general law of market prices” for labor says 50 unemployed workers most be counted against the wages of the 950 employed workers.
• Babbage’s “truck system” (known to some of us as “truck wages” or “the company store.”)
• Ure’s “enteral principle of modern industry: to replace adults by children, skilled workers by unskilled, men by women.”
• Rossi’s “Wages are not a factor indispensable to production. In a different organisation of labour they may disappear”
• Cherbuliez’s “When one speaks of the fall or rise of wages one must never lose sight of the whole world market or of the position of the workers in the various countries.”
• And finally, Bray’s “triple machine in the hands of despotism and capital” of savings banks, taken up again by Marx later as a failed proposed solution to problems facing workers. The triple machine is 1. this money just flows back to the national bank, which will lend it back to capitalists, 2. the “golden chain” then by which government holds part of the working class, creating 3. a new weapon in the hands of the capitalists [why #2 and #2 isn’t just one point is beyond me.]

Marx summarizes the growth of the productive forces affecting wages by combining the thoughts of some of the economists above:

“Competition among workers not only in that one sells himself more cheaply than another, but also in that one does the work of two.

In general, the growth of the productive forces has the following consequences:

a) The position of the worker relative to that of the capitalist worsens, and the value of the things enjoyed is relative. The enjoyments themselves are indeed nothing but social enjoyments, relations, connections.

h) The worker becomes an increasingly one-sided productive force which produces as much as possible in as little time as possible. Skilled labour increasingly transformed into simple labour.

c) Wages become more and more dependent on the world market and the position of the worker increasingly subject to chance.

d) In productive capital the share of machinery and raw materials grows much faster than that of approvisionnement. The increase of productive capital is therefore not accompanied by a similar increase of the demand for labour.”

Further, “Every development of new productive forces is at the same time a weapon against the workers. All improvements in the means of communication, for example, facilitate the competition of workers in different localities and turn local competition into national, etc.”

Next, Marx grants some of the criticisms of “union of workers” by the bourgeois economists: specifically that they raise costs in a way that can undermine their own job security, and even more so in the face of international trade.

Marx grants this criticism also to say “so what?”: “All these objections of the bourgeois economists are, as we have said, correct, but only correct from their point of view. If in the associations it really were a matter only of what it appears to be, namely the fixing of wages, if the relationship between labour and capital were eternal, these combinations would be wrecked on the necessity of things. But they are the means of uniting the working class, of preparing for the overthrow of the entire old society with its class contradictions.”

The MECW endnotes also go out of their way to note how Marx would in the future grant less of the criticisms of unions as he did here. Though I think this is roughly accurate from my memory, it also seems part of the “worldview Marxism” of the Soviet publishing project to contain such endnotes as they often do when Marx or Engels, for example, say something that seems sympathetic to imperialism (which they did several times, though also then reverse on in some senses later.) One gets the sense the editors feel like it’s very important to correct embarrassing right-deviations by Marx and Engels in real published time instead of waiting for us to read the evolution themselves in later editions.

Of final note, Marx also had another two page section of this notebook called “Demand” separately. (Unfortunately it is not included in the HIAW archives so I can’t link to it.) Why it wasn’t published directly in the MECW right next to “Wages” seems odd as well. Regardless, there isn’t much new theoretical ground covered in these extant two pages but Marx does contrast his view of demand as being separate from those economists who deal with demand from an individual standpoint — specifically that over time that “demand gradually loses its local…character and becomes cosmopolitan.” For example, in the Crusades, demand greatly increased for products of “the Orient”, helping to form by the 14th and 15th centuries a (pre-American) “world market.” Dominant trading towns (like in Holland and Portugal) eventual turn into dominant trading nations; and then Holland becomes the first industrial country, building the chief granary of Western Europe to import food to allow them to continue as such.

V. All other works of MECW V6

In total, there are 60 entries with Engels’ name on it in this volume, and 40 with Marx’s. I will try to highlight a few more interesting things from them, generally in chronological order:

“The Festival of Nations in London”, one of several speeches at or about gatherings of communists from multiple countries and one of several that summarized the state of Europe in the years after the French Revolution of 1789 to their present:

• “The fraternisation of nations under the banner of modern democracy, as it began from the French Revolution and developed into French communism and English Chartism, shows that the masses and their representatives know better than the German theoreticians how things stand…
• “Democracy nowadays is communism”
• “Englishmen, Frenchmen, Germans, Italians, Spaniards, Poles and Swiss came together at this meeting. Hungary and Turkey, too, were represented by one-man contingents.”
• “a German Communist [Joseph Moll] had sung the Marseillaise”…”After the toast to Young Europe had been taken with ‘three roof and rafter-ringing shouts’ and ‘one cheer more’, further toasts were proposed to Thomas Paine, to the fallen Democrats of all countries, and to those of England, Scotland and Ireland, to the deported Chartists Frost, Williams, Jones and Ellis, to O’Connor, Duncombe and the other propagandists of the Charter and finally three cheers for The Northern Star. Democratic songs in all languages were sung (I can only find no mention of German songs), and the Festival was brought to an end in the most fraternal atmosphere.”

(In other entries we hear of others singing the Marseillaise as well)

In Marx’s brief “Statement”, we see the master of shade at it again:

• “According to the Rheinischer-Beobachter of January 18, issue №18, the Trier’sche Zeitung contains an announcement by the Editorial Board according to which, among a number of writers, Marx also is named as a contributor to this newspaper. In order to prevent any confusion I state that I have never written a single line for this paper, whose bourgeois philanthropic, by no means communist tendencies are entirely alien to me.”

In the surviving (the other was lost) “Circular against Kriege”, we get our first mention of the National Reform Association of the United States (slogan: “vote yourself a farm”), one of several already existing parties or organizations that Marx and Engels endorse (along with the Chartists in England and their own smaller groupings like the German Workers’ Society.) The very short version of this circular is summarized by the first resolution passed: “The line taken by the editor of the Volks-Tribun, Hermann Kriege, is not communist.”

In “The Constitutional Question in Germany” we learn Engels’ analysis of the “status quo” of Germany:

• “While in France and England the bourgeoisie has become powerful enough to overthrow the nobility and to raise itself to be the ruling class in the state, the German bourgeoisie has not yet had such power. It has indeed a certain influence upon the governments, but in’ all cases where there is a collision of interests, this influence must give way to that of the landed nobility. While in France and England the towns dominate the countryside, in Germany the countryside dominates the towns, agriculture dominates trade and industry.”
• “The cause of this is that in its stage of civilisation Germany lags behind the Western countries. In the latter it is predominantly trade and industry which provide the mass of the population with their livelihood, but with us it is agriculture. England exports no agricultural produce whatever, but is in constant need of supplies from abroad; France imports at least as much agricultural produce as it exports, and both countries base their wealth above all on their exports of industrial products. Germany, on the contrary, exports few industrial goods, but a great quantity of corn, wool, cattle, etc. When Germany’s political system was established — in 1815, the overwhelming importance of agriculture was even greater than now and it was increased still more at that time by the fact that it was precisely the almost exclusively agricultural parts of Germany that had participated most zealously in the overthrow of the French Empire…The political representative of agriculture is, in Germany as in most European countries, the nobility, the class of big landed proprietors. The political system corresponding to the exclusive dominance of the nobility is the feudal system.”
• “To summarise. The nobility is too much in decline, the petty bourgeoisie and peasants are, by their whole position in life, too weak, the workers are still far from sufficiently mature to be able to come forward as the ruling class in Germany. There remains only the bourgeoisie…The only question then is: Is the bourgeoisie compelled by necessity to conquer political rule for itself through the overthrow of the status quo, and is it strong enough, given its own power and the weakness of its opponents, to overthrow the status quo? We shall see.” [Narrator voice — we saw.]

Another topic Marx and Engels dealt extensively with was the question of “free trade”, a growing movement pushed by organized capitalists and their advocates. Though Marx has the most famous quote about this (one used cynically by free trade advocates without proper context, especially I recall around the 2000-ish “globalization” debates), Engels twice said something similar and seemingly gets less credit for their conclusion:

• Engels: “It might thus appear to be a matter of indifference to the proletarian, to the propertyless, whether the protectionists or the free traders have the last word…With the bourgeoisie, private property will at the same time be overthrown, and the victory of the working class will put an end to all class or caste rule for ever.”
• Engels: “Either you must disavow the whole of political economy as it exists at present, or you must allow that under the freedom of trade the whole severity of the laws of political economy will be applied to the working classes. Is that to say that we are against Free Trade? No, we are for Free Trade, because by Free Trade all economical laws, with their most astounding contradictions, will act upon a larger scale, upon a greater extent of territory, upon the territory of the whole earth; and because from the uniting of all these contradictions into a single group, where they stand face to face, will result the struggle which will itself eventuate in the emancipation of the proletarians.”
• Marx: “But, in general, the protective system of our day is conservative, while the free trade system is destructive. It breaks up old nationalities and pushes the antagonism of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie to the extreme point. In a word, the free trade system hastens the social revolution. It is in this revolutionary sense alone, gentlemen, that I vote in favor of free trade.”

Multiple entries by Engels focus on both Chartists in England and about Ireland as well — some combining both, like “The Commercial Crisis in England — the Chartist Movement — Ireland”, his first piece for a French newspaper that he translated some of his Northern Star works for.

• This contained a particularly powerful quote touching on the concept of how reforms are generated: “In the meantime starving Ireland is writhing in the most terrible convulsions. The workhouses are overflowing with beggars, the ruined property owners are refusing to pay the Poor Tax, and the hungry people gather in their thousands to ransack the barns and cattle-sheds of the farmers and even of the Catholic priests, who were still sacred to them a short time ago…It looks as though the Irish will not die of hunger as calmly next winter as they did last winter. Irish immigration to England is getting more alarming each day. It is estimated that an average of 50,000 Irish arrive each year; the number so far this year is already over 220,000. In September, 345 were arriving daily and in October this figure increased to 511. This means that the competition between the workers will become stronger, and it would not be at all surprising if the present crisis caused such an uproar that it compelled the government to grant reforms of a most important nature.”

Two more, “The Chartist Movement” and “Feargus O’Connor and the Irish People” dealt with internationalism via the Chartists and Ireland as well:

• “With a lucidity which cannot escape even the most obtuse mind, O’Connor shows that the Irish people must fight with all their might and in close association with the English working classes and the Chartists in order to win the six points of the People’s Charter — annual parliaments, universal suffrage, vote by ballot, abolition of the property qualification for members of Parliament, payment of M.P.s and the establishment of equal electoral districts. Only after these six points are won will the achievement of the Repeal have any advantages for Ireland. Furthermore O’Connor points out that justice for Ireland has already been demanded earlier by the English workers in a petition which received 3 1/2 million signatures, and that now the English Chartists have again protested against the Irish Coercion Bill in numerous petitions and that the oppressed classes in England and Ireland must at last fight together and conquer together or continue to languish under the same oppression and live in the same misery and dependence on the privileged and ruling capitalist class. There can be no doubt that henceforth the mass of the Irish people will unite ever more closely with the English Chartists and will act with them according to a common plan. As a result the victory of the English democrats, and hence the liberation of Ireland, will be hastened by many years. That is the significance of O’Connor’s address to the Irish people.”
• “Working men of Great Britain and Ireland! Hold in abhorrence the conspirators .Who would set nation against nation, in the name of that wicked lie, that men of different countries are ‘natural enemies’. Rally round the banner of democracy, with its motto: ‘All men are brothers!’”

There are similar appeals to international workers’ unity for the independence for Poland as well.

Several entries also deal with the creation and early works of “The Communist League”, the first “Marxist” organization one could say (and behind the Manifesto.) Since this is running very long, we’ll deal more with international communist organizations later — as they became more relevant after 1848 anyway.

The last entry has Marx yet again being expelled, this time from Belgium in the aftermath of the events of 48: “The here-named Marx, Charles, Doctor of Philosophy, aged about 28 years [he was actually 30], born at Treves (Prussia), is ordered to leave the Kingdom of Belgium within twenty-four hours, and forbidden to return in the future under the penalties contained in Article Six of the afore-cited law of September 22, 1835. Our Minister of Justice is charged with the execution of the present order. Done at Brussels on March 2, 1848 [Signed:] Leopold.”

Cartoon by Engels of Frederick William IV making the royal speech at the opening of the United Diet in Berlin, April 11