[Gutenberg 48446] • Karl Marx

EXCERPT:

It has been said that the professional and professorial exponents of economic science confine themselves to variants of a single theme. Usually belonging to the master class by birth and education, and at any rate attached to that class by the ties of economic interest, they are ever guided by the conscious or subconscious aim of providing a theoretical justification for the capitalist system, and their lives are devoted to inculcating the art of extracting honey from the hive without alarming the bees. Achille Loria is an exception to this generalisation. Professor of political economy at Turin, and one of the most learned economists of the day, he is anything but an apologist for the bourgeois economy. With the exception of the first volume of Marx’s Capital, no more telling indictment of capitalism has ever been penned than Loria’s Analysis of Capitalist Property (1889). This gigantic work has not been translated, but a number of Loria’s books are available to English readers: The Economic Foundations of Society, 1902; Contemporary Social Problems, 1911; The Economic Synthesis, 1914. A biographical and critical study of Malthus, in the Italian, was rendered into English in 1917 and published in the United States as the opening chapter of a symposium on Population and Birth Control edited by the writers of this foreword. The Economic Foundations of Society has run through five editions in Swan Sonnenschein’s (now Allen for new ideas must be conveyed in a new speech or by the use of old words refashioned. We cannot understand Loria, we cannot appreciate Loria’s criticism of Marx, we cannot grasp the nature of Loria’s own affiliation to Marx, unless we realise precisely what the Italian economist means by the speciously familiar terms “income,” “subsistence,” “unproductive labourers,” “recipients of income,” and the like. The familiarity of the words makes them all the more misleading to those who do not hold the Lorian clue to guide them through the economic labyrinth. Does this sound alarming? Yet Loria’s doctrines, like those of Marx, like those of Darwin, like those of—but we must not say “like those of Kant"—are simplicity itself to anyone who is able to survive the first shock of the encounter, to surmount the first agony of a new idea.