Formation of the Economic Thought of Karl Marx 1843 to Capital
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Ernest Mandel The Formation of the Economic Thought of Karl Marx 1843 to Capital Translated by Brian Pearce 1971 [1967] Contents 1. From the Critique of Private Property to the Critique of Capitalism 9 2. From Condemning Capitalism to Providing a Socioeconomic Vindication of Communism 27 3. From Rejection to Acceptance of the Labor Theory of Value 40 4. A First General Analysis of the Capitalist Mode of Production 52 5. The Problem of Periodic Crises 67 6. Perfecting the Theory of Value, the Theory of Surplus Value, and the Theory of Money 79 7. The Grundrisse, or the Dialectics of Labor Time and Free Time 100 8. The Asiatic Mode of Production and the Historical Pre-Conditions for the Rise of Capital 116 9. The Final Shaping of the Theory of Wages 140 10. From the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts to the Grundrisse: From an Anthropological to a Historical Conception of Alienation 154 11. Progressive Disalienation Through the Building of Socialist Society, or Inevitable Alienation in Industrial Society? 187 Bibliography 211 7 I From the Critique of Private Property to the Critique of Capitalism Marx and Engels did not travel the same route to arrive at the ideas they came to share. “They had in common the same philo sophical starting point, namely, Hegel’s dialectics, [Bruno] Bauer’s ‘self-consciousness,’ and Feuerbach’s humanism; they then made the acquaintance of British and French socialism, but whereas this became for Marx the means whereby he ordered his thoughts regarding the struggles and aspirations of his epoch, for Engels the same role was played by British industry.” 1 This difference resulted, no doubt, from differences in charac ter and temperament—the more speculative nature of Marx’s genius, the greater impetuousness of Engels’. Chance and material circumstances also played a part, however. While Marx emigrated from Germany to France, Engels was sent to England to learn the conduct of business affairs, and there came into contact with the reality of large-scale capitalist industry. It was the shock of this encounter with the contradictions of bourgeois society that was to decide the course of his thinking for the rest of his life.1 2 1. Franz Mehring, in Aus dem literarischen Nachlass von Karl Marx und Friedrich Engels, 1841-1850, Vol. I, p. 359. 2. “While in Manchester, it was tangibly brought home to me that the economic facts, which have so far played no role or only a contemptible one in the writing of history, are, at least in the modern world, a decisive historical force; that they form the basis for the origin of the present-day class antagonism; that these class antagonisms, in the countries where they have become fully developed, thanks to large-scale industry, hence espe cially in England, are in their turn the basis of the formation of political parties and of party struggles, and thus of all political history.” (Frederick 9 10 The Formation of the Economic Thought of Karl Marx If Marx developed almost unaided the entire economic “panel” of Marxist theory, it is to Engels that the credit is due for having been the first to urge Marx to take up the study of political econ omy and for having grasped, in a “brilliant sketch,” the central importance of this science for communism.3 This “sketch,” writ ten at the end of 1843, was the first economic work by either of the two friends; Ryazanov correctly ascribes it a “very great im portance in the history of the development [of the beginnings] of Marxism.” 4 It must be emphasized that it was also Engels who, though two years Marx’s junior, was the first to declare himself openly a communist and to regard as necessary and inevitable a radical revolution which would abolish private property. As early as the end of 1842, when he was only just twenty-two, Engels ended an article on the Prussian monarchy by predicting a bourgeois revolution, and began an article on Britain by an nouncing the approach of a social revolution.5 At that same time, in an article published in the Rheinische Xeitung (“Der Kom- munismus und die Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung”), Marx was still rejecting communism, while stressing the need to study it thoroughly in order to be able to criticize it adequately.6 Nev ertheless, the two founders of scientific socialism were already attacking the problem from the same angle: by criticizing the neo-Hegelian conception of the state, by discovering the exist ence of social classes, and by analyzing the inhuman effects of private property and competition. We are able in both cases to follow the trajectory of their thinking from point to point: from criticism of religion to criti cism of philosophy; from criticism of philosophy to criticism of Engels, On the History of the Communist League, in Karl Marx and Fred erick Engels, Selected Works, Vol. Ill, pp. 173-190. The piece was written as an introduction to the 1885 German edition of Marx’s pamphlet Reve lations About the Cologne Communist Trial.) 3. Marx expresses this opinion of the Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy in his Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. (Selected Works, Vol. I, p. 504.) 4. Marx and Engels, Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe (MEGA), I, 2, pp. lxxii and lxxiii. 5. Ibid., I, 2, pp. 346 and 351. 6. Ibid., I, 1, 1, p. 263. From Private Property to Capitalism 11 the state; from criticism of the state to criticism of society—that is, from criticism of politics to criticism of political economy, which led to criticism of private property. With Marx, however, the purely theoretical aspect was to re main predominant throughout this period, and the evolution of his thought was to result in the Introduction to the Critique of the Hegelian Philosophy of Right (end of 1843 and beginning of 1844). With Engels it was the practical aspect, the criticism of British bourgeois society, that took the ascendancy, both in the Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy and in Die Lage Englands (The Condition of England), which appeared in the journal Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbûcher ^t the same time as Marx’s well-known critique. It is generally accepted that Marx took little interest in politi cal economy during his university studies. The list that has come down to us of the books he studied while at Berlin university does not include a single one devoted to this subject.7 In a letter of September 28, 1892, to Franz Mehring, Engels, discussing Marx’s years at the universities of Bonn and Berlin, writes: “He knew nothing whatever about political economy. ...” 8 Nevertheless, Pierre Naville is right in seeking to mitigate the excessively hard-and-fast character of this view. In fact, Hegel himself had been profoundly affected in his youth by economic studies, in particular by the work of Adam Smith;9 Marx saw 7. D. I. Rosenberg, Die Entwicklung der ôkonomischen Lehre von Marx und Engels in den Vierziger Jahr en des 19. Jahrhunderts, p. 35. 8. Marx and Engels, Ausgevoahlte Briefe, p. 541. 9. It was Plekhanov who first emphasized the importance of Hegel as a precursor of historical materialism, by his according to economic develop ment a central place in the explanation of what is specific in each nation or civilization. The relevant articles by Plekhanov appeared in 1891 in Die Neue 2,eit and were reprinted in La Revue Internationale, No. 22, April- June 1950. In his masterly work, Der funge Hegel, Georg Lukacs studied in detail the economic ideas of the young Hegel. In particular, he showed the cen tral position occupied by labor in Hegelian anthropology. Hegel wrote in 1803-1804: “The greater the extent to which labor is carried on with the help of machinery, the less is its value, and the longer it has to be carried on in this way.” This sentence constitutes a brilliant anticipation of what Marx and Engels were to write forty years later. (Georg Lukacs, Der junge 12 The Formation of the Economic Thought of Karl Marx the Hegelian system as a veritable philosophy of labor. “When he read the Phenomenology of Mind, the Philosophy of Right, and even the Science of Logic, Marx thus not only discovered Hegel but already, through him, was aware of that part of clas sical political economy which was assimilated and translated into philosophical terms in Hegel’s work; so that Marx would not have gone about his systematic criticism of civil society and the state according to Hegel if he had not already found in the lat ter’s writings certain elements which were still live, such as the theory of needs, the theory of appropriation, or the analysis of the division of labor.” 10 11 Marx had already moved from philosophy to politics, the first step in his intellectual development, when he became editor of the Rheinische Zeitung in 1842. His fundamental position con tinued to be one of struggle for a “human” state; he still took his stand on “human rights” in general, on the struggle against feudal survivals. Like Hegel, he considered that the state should be “the realization of freedom.” 11 But even at this stage he had discov ered a contradiction between this ideal notion of the state and the fact that the Stànde (estates) represented in the provincial diet of the Rhineland strove to “drag the state down to the level of the idea of private interest.” In other words, as soon as he tackled a current political problem—namely, the new law on theft of wood—he came up against the problem of social classes.