Political economy is a curious science. Difficulties and conflicting opinions arise at the very first step on its terrain, with the most basic question of all: What is the specific object of this science? The simple worker, who has only a rather vague idea of what political economy teaches, will ascribe his lack of understanding to his own inadequate general education. Yet, in some respects, he shares his misfortune here with many learned doctors and professors, who write thick volumes about political economy and deliver lectures to young people studying at the universities. Incredible as it sounds, the fact is that most specialists in political economy themselves have a very confused notion as to what the real object of their specialism is.
Since it is the custom for these learned gentlemen to work with definitions, that is, to reduce the nature of the most complex things to a few well-ordered sentences, we shall seek by way of example to find out from one official representative of political economy what this science is basically about. Let us listen first of all to what the doyen of the German professorial world, the author of countless frightfully thick textbooks on political economy, the founder of the so-called “historical school,”2 Wilhelm Roscher, has to say on the subject. In his first major work, Grundlagen der Nationalökonomie. Ein Hand- und Lesebuch für Geschäftsmänner und Studierende [Fundamentals of Political Economy. A Handbook and Textbook for Businessmen and Students], which appeared in 1854 and has since gone through twenty-three editions, we read in Chapter 2, paragraph 16:
We understand by political economy the theory of national economic life, the theory of the laws of development of the national economy, of the economic life of the nation (philosophy of national economic history according to [Hans Karl Emil] von Mangoldt).3 This links up in one direction, like all sciences of national life, with consideration of the individual person; it expands in the other sense to the study of humanity as a whole.4
Does this help “businessmen and students” understand what “national economic theory” is? It is precisely—the theory of national economy.5 What are horn-rimmed spectacles? Spectacles with a horn-rim. What is a pack-ass? An ass on which burdens are packed. An extremely simple procedure, in fact, for explaining to little children the use of compound words. The only trouble is that anyone who does not already know the meaning of the words in question will be none the wiser, no matter which way round the words are placed.
Let us turn to another German scholar, who currently teaches political economy at the University of Berlin, a luminary of official science famous “far across the land, down to the blue sea,” in other words Professor [Gustav von] Schmoller. In the great collective work of German professors edited by Professors [Johannes] Conrad and [Wilhelm] Lexis, Handwörterbuch der Staatswissenschaften [Concise Dictionary of the Political Sciences],6 Schmoller gives the following answer to the question what this science might be, in an essay on economic theory:
I would say that it is the science that seeks to describe, define, and explain in causal terms national economic phenomena as a coherent whole, which naturally presupposes that national economy has already been correctly defined. At the center of this science stand those phenomena of division and organization of labor, of commerce and the distribution of income, of social economic institutions, supported by particular forms of private and public law, that are typically found among present-day civilized peoples, and that, controlled by the same or similar mental forces, produce similar or identical arrangements or forces, presenting in their total description a statics of the present economic civilized world, a kind of average constellation. Starting from this point, the science has gone on to investigate the differences between particular national economies, the various forms of organization here and there, and thus to inquire as to the combination and series in which these different forms emerge, and has in this way come to the notion of a causal development of forms and a historical succession of economic conditions; it has thus added to the static treatment a dynamic one. And as, from its first appearance, it already came by way of ethical-historical value judgments to the positing of ideals, it has continued to maintain this practical function to a certain degree. Alongside theory, it has posited practical lessons for life.I
Phew! Let’s pause for breath. What was all that? Social economic arrangements—private and public law—mental forces—similar and the same—the same and similar—statistics—statics—dynamics—average constellation—causal development—ethical-historical value judgments … For ordinary mortals, this has the same numbing effect as a millwheel turning in the brain. In his insistent drive for knowledge, and his blind confidence in the spring of professorial wisdom, he makes the painful effort of going through the whole nonsense twice and three times, trying to extract some conceivable meaning. Unfortunately this is all needless trouble. What we’re offered is precisely nothing but echoing phrases, hollow words screwed together. An unmistakable sign of this is that anyone who thinks clearly, and has a genuine mastery of his subject matter, also expresses himself clearly and understandably. Someone who expresses himself in obscure and high-flown terms, if he is not a pure philosophical idea-constructor or a fantasist of religious mysticism, only shows that he is himself unclear about the matter, or has reason to avoid clarity. We shall go on to show that the obscure and confusing language of bourgeois scholars as to the nature of political economy is not accidental, but actually expresses two things: both the unclearness of these gentlemen themselves, and their tendentious, stubborn rejection of a real explanation of the question.
That the clear definition of the nature of political economy is indeed a contentious question is suggested by a certain external circumstance. This is the fact that the most contradictory views are expressed as to the age of this science. For example, the late Adolphe Blanqui—a well-known historian and professor of political economy at the University of Paris, and brother of the famous socialist leader and Commune fighter Auguste Blanqui7 —started the first chapter of his History of Political Economy,8 published in 1837, with the following epigraph: “Political economy is older than people think. The Greeks and the Romans already had their own.” Other writers on the history of political economy, however, for instance the former Dozent at the University of Berlin, Eugen Dühring, consider it important to stress that political economy is much younger than people generally believe: according to them, this science only properly arose in the second half of the eighteenth century.II
To cite socialist judgments on this question, Lassalle in the preface to his classic polemical text of 1864 against Schulze-Delitzsch, Kapital und Arbeit [Capital and Labor], made the following assertion: “Political economy is a science that is only at its beginnings and still to be constructed.”9 Karl Marx, for his part, gave the first volume of his economic masterwork Capital that appeared three years later, representing the fulfillment of the expectation expressed by Lassalle, the subtitle “Critique of Political Economy.” In this way, Marx placed his own work outside the previous political economy, considering this as something confined and superseded, and setting out to criticize it. It is clear that a science that one lot of people maintain is almost as old as the written history of humanity, a second lot that it is scarcely a century and a half old, a third lot that it is still in diapers, and others again that it has already run its course and the time has come for its critical burial—it is clear that such a science presents a rather peculiar and tangled problem.
We would receive equally poor advice if we were to ask one of the official representatives of this science to explain the remarkable fact that political economy, as currently prevailing opinion holds, only arose so late, scarcely a hundred and fifty years ago. Professor Dühring, for example, in a great flood of words, argues that the ancient Greeks and Romans had scarcely any scientific notion of political-economic matters, only “unsound,” “superficial,” “most commonplace” ideas taken from everyday experience, while the whole of the Middle Ages was extremely “unscientific.”III Which learned explanation does not take us a single step forward, not to mention the fact that it is also quite misleading, particularly in its generalization about the Middle Ages.
A different original explanation is offered by Professor Schmoller. In the same essay that we cited above from the Handwörterbuch der Staatswissenschaften, he tells us:
For several centuries, individual private and social economic facts were observed and described, individual truths of national economy recognized, and economic questions discussed in systems of ethics and law. These relevant individual parts could only be united when questions of national economy acquired previously unsuspected importance for the ruling and administration of states, from the seventeenth through to the nineteenth century, when numerous writers concerned themselves with them and instruction of students in them became necessary, while at the same time the rise of scientific thinking in general led to the accumulated propositions and truths of national economy being combined, by way of certain fundamental ideas—such as money and exchange, state economic policy, labor and the division of labor—into connected systems, as was attempted by major writers of the eighteenth century. Since this time, national economic theory or political economy has existed as an independent science.IV
If we briefly summarize this long speech, we obtain the lesson: individual political-economic observations, which existed as separate facts for a long while, came together in a particular science when this was required for the “ruling and administration of states”—i.e. governments—and it became necessary for this purpose to teach political economy in universities. What a wonderful and classic explanation from a German professor! First a chair is founded, when this is “required” by the praiseworthy government, to be occupied by an assiduous professor; then of course the corresponding science has also to be created, otherwise what could the professor teach? Doesn’t this remind us of the master of court ceremonies who maintained that there would always have to be monarchies, otherwise what would be the function of a master of ceremonies? For the basic contention here is indeed that political economy came into being because the governments of modern states needed this science. The command of the powers that be is the genuine birth certificate of political economy. It is completely in character with the way of thinking of a present-day professor who, as scientific valet of the Reich government of the day, agitates “scientifically” as need arises for certain naval, customs or tax proposals, or as a battlefield hyena preaches chauvinist national hatred and intellectual cannibalism during a war—it is completely in character to imagine that the financial needs of princes, the interests of “royal treasuries,” a word of command from governments, is all that is needed to conjure a new science out of the ground. For the rest of humanity, however, those not paid out of the exchequer, such a notion has its difficulties. Above all, this explanation only raises a new puzzle. For we then have to ask: what happened so that around the seventeenth century, as Professor Schmoller maintains, the governments of modern states suddenly felt a need to dupe their dear subjects according to scientific principles, whereas for countless centuries they had managed quite successfully in the old-fashioned way, without such principles? Should we not turn all this upside down and see the new-fangled needs of “royal treasuries” as simply a modest consequence of that great historical transformation out of which the new science of political economy arose around the middle of the nineteenth century?
In brief, after failing to learn from this learned guild what political economy actually deals with, we do not even know when and why it arose.
One thing, at any rate, is established: in all the definitions of bourgeois specialists we have cited above, it is always a question of “national economy.” And “political economy” is only a foreign word for the theory of national economy. The concept of national economy stands at the center of discussion for all official representatives of this science. What then actually is this national economy? Professor Bücher, whose work Die Entstehung der Volkswirtschaft [The Rise of the National Economy] enjoys a high reputation both in Germany and abroad, offers the following information:
The national economy is formed by the totality of arrangements, dispositions and procedures that the satisfaction of the needs of an entire nation demands. This national economy, again, breaks down into numerous particular economies, which are connected with one another by trade, and dependent on one another in a variety of ways as a result of the fact that each undertakes particular tasks for all the others and has the others undertake such tasks for it.V
Let us try to translate this learned “definition” into the language of ordinary mortals.
If the first thing we hear is the “totality of dispositions and procedures” that are designed to satisfy the needs of an entire nation, we are forced to consider everything possible: factories and workshops, agriculture and stock-raising, railways and warehouses, but also church preaching and police surveillance, ballet performances, civil servants and observatories, parliamentary elections, national guards and military associations, chess clubs, dog shows and duels—for all these and an endless chain of other “dispositions and procedures” serve today to “satisfy the needs of an entire nation.” The national economy would then be everything that takes place under the sun, and political economy a universal science “of all things and more,” as the Latin tag goes.
The generous definition of the Leipzig professor evidently has to be restricted somewhat. Very likely he only wants to refer to “arrangements and procedures” that serve to satisfy the material needs of a nation, or more precisely, the satisfaction of such needs by material things. And even then the “totality” would be far too widely conceived, and easily float off again into the mist. Yet we shall try to find our way here as best we can.
People all need, in order to live, food and drink, a protecting roof, clothing in cold regions, as well as all kind of articles of daily use in the home. These things may be simpler or more refined, be supplied sparingly or abundantly, but they are indispensable for the existence of any human society and must consequently be constantly produced by people—we are not in the land of Cockaigne.10 In every kind of culture, as well, there are all kinds of objects that serve to improve life and satisfy intellectual and social needs, such as weapons for defense against enemies: among the so-called savages, dance masks, bows and arrows and idols; for us, luxury goods, churches, machine-guns and submarines. The production of all these articles requires, in turn, various natural materials, as well as the various tools with which they are produced. These materials, too, such as stones, wood, metal, plants etc., are obtained from the earth by human labor, and the tools that are used in this connection are likewise the product of human labor.
If this rough-hewn notion is temporarily satisfactory, we could conceive the national economy as follows: each nation constantly creates by its own labor a mass of things that are necessary for life—food, clothing, buildings, household articles, jewelry, weapons, religious objects, etc.—using the materials and tools that are indispensable for their production. The way in which a nation performs all this labor, how it distributes the goods produced among its individual members, how it consumes them and produces them afresh in an endless cycle—all this together forms the economy of the people in question, a “national economy.” This would then be more or less the meaning of the first sentence in Professor Bücher’s definition. But we have to go into rather more detail.
“This national economy, again, breaks down into numerous particular economies, which are connected with one another by trade, and dependent on one another in a variety of ways as a result of the fact that each undertakes particular tasks for all and has others undertake such tasks for it.” Here we come up against a new question: What are these “particular economies” that the “national economy,” which we have taken pains to conceive properly, breaks down into? The first thing that suggests itself would be individual households, family economies. Indeed, each nation in the so-called civilized countries does consist of a number of families, and each family as a rule also conducts its “economy.” This private economy consists in the family obtaining certain monetary incomes, whether from the employment of its adult members or from other sources, with which it in turn meets its needs for food, clothing, housing, etc.; and in this connection, if we think of a family economy, it is usually the housewife, the kitchen, the wash-tub and the nursery that form the center of this notion. Are these then the “individual economies” into which the “national economy” breaks down? We get into a certain confusion here. The national economy, as we have just understood it, involves first and foremost the production of all those goods that are used as food, clothing, housing, furniture, tools and materials for life and labor. At the center of the national economy stands production. In family economies, on the other hand, we see only the consumption of the objects that the family obtains ready-made out of its income. We know that most families in modern states today buy almost all their foodstuffs, clothing, furniture, etc. ready-made from shops or markets. In the domestic economy meals are prepared only with bought foodstuffs, and clothes generally made from bought material. Only in very backward rural districts are there still peasant families who provide for most of their needs by their own household work. Of course there are on the other hand, even in modern states, many families who do produce various industrial products at home, such as domestic weavers and garment workers; there are even, as we know, whole villages where toys and similar things are produced on a mass scale domestically. But here the product manufactured by these families belongs exclusively to the entrepreneur who ordered it and paid for it; not the slightest part of it goes into their own consumption, into the economy of the home-working family. For their own household economy, these domestic workers buy everything ready-made out of their meager wages, in the same way as other families. Bücher’s statement that the national economy breaks down into many individual economies would thus lead to something like the following result: the production of the means of existence of a whole nation “breaks down” simply into the consumption of means of subsistence by individual families—a statement that looks much like utter nonsense.
An additional doubt also arises. According to Professor Bücher, these “individual economies” are “connected with one another by exchange” and completely dependent on one another because “each undertakes particular tasks for all others.” What kind of exchange and dependence does this mean? Is it for example exchange between friends and neighbors, of the kind that takes place between various private families? But what does such exchange actually have to do with the national economy, with the economy as a whole? Any capable housewife, indeed, will maintain that it is better for the household and for domestic peace that as little exchange as possible takes place between neighbors in different houses. And as to precisely what this “dependence” involves, it is impossible to see what “tasks” the household economy of pensioner Meyer is supposed to undertake for the household economy of headmaster Schulze and “all others.” We have clearly taken a completely wrong turn here, and have to tackle the question from a different direction.
It evidently cannot be individual family households into which Professor Bücher’s “national economy” breaks down. Shouldn’t it rather be such things as factories, workshops, and agricultural holdings? One fact seems to confirm that this leads us onto the correct path. All these businesses are where various things really are produced and manufactured that serve the maintenance of the whole nation, while on the other hand there is real exchange and mutual dependence among them. A factory making trouser buttons, for example, is completely reliant on the tailoring workshops where it finds outlets for its goods, while the tailors in turn can’t produce proper trousers without buttons. On the other hand, the tailoring workshops need materials, and this makes them reliant on the weavers of cotton and wool, who in turn depend on sheep-rearing and the cotton trade, etc., etc. Here we really can see a ramified connection of production. It is of course rather pompous to speak of “tasks” that each of these businesses “undertakes for all others,” when what we have is the most ordinary sale of trouser buttons to tailors, of wool to spinning plants, and the like. But we have to accept such flowery language as unavoidable professorial jargon, as they love to wrap the profitable little deals of the business world in a bit of poetry and “ethical value judgments,” as Professor Schmoller so nicely puts it. It is just that still more serious doubts arise at this point. The individual factories, agricultural holdings, coalmines and iron works are said to be so many “individual economies” into which the national economy “breaks down.” But this concept of an “economy,” at least as we have now conceived the national economy, must evidently include within a certain orbit both the manufacture of means of subsistence and their use, both production and consumption. In these factories, workshops, mines and plants, however, only production takes place, and indeed only for others. What are consumed here are only the materials and tools that are needed for labor. The finished product, for its part, in no way enters into consumption within the same business. Not a single trouser button is consumed by the manufacturer and his family, let alone by the factory workers, nor are iron tubes consumed by the iron-works proprietor’s family. Besides, if we try to define the “economy” more closely, we must always understand by it something whole, to a certain extent entire unto itself, more or less the production and consumption of the most important means of subsistence required for human existence. Today’s individual industrial and agricultural businesses, however, as every child knows, only produce a single product, or at most a few products, which would be far from sufficient for human maintenance, most of these moreover being not at all consumable, just one part of a food product, or a raw material or tool needed for this. Present-day production facilities are precisely just fragments of an economy, having no meaning and purpose of their own in economic terms, so that they immediately strike even the untutored eye as not forming any “economy” by themselves, but only a shapeless little splinter of an economy. So if we say that the national economy, i.e. the totality of arrangements and procedures that serve to satisfy the needs of a people, breaks down again into individual economies, which are factories, workshops, mines, etc., we could equally well say that the totality of biological arrangements that serve to perform the functions of the human organism is the human being itself, which breaks down again into several individual organisms that are the nose, ears, legs, arms, etc. The present-day factory, in fact, is no more an “individual economy” than the nose is an individual organism.
This route too thus leads to an absurdity—proof that the artful definitions of bourgeois scholars, constructed simply on the basis of external characteristics and word-splitting, have an evident reason in this case to circumvent the true heart of the matter.
Let us now attempt to subject the concept of national economy to a closer examination.
We are told about the needs of a nation, about the satisfaction of these needs in an interconnected economy, and in this way about the economy of a nation. Political economy would then be the science that explains to us the nature of this national economy, i.e. the laws according to which a nation creates and increases its wealth by labor, distributes this among individuals, consumes it and creates it afresh. The object of the investigation should thus be the economic life of a whole nation, in contrast with a private or individual economy, whatever the latter might mean. It appears to confirm this notion that the epoch-making book published in 1776 by Adam Smith, who is seen as the father of political economy, bore the title The Wealth of Nations.11
The first thing we must ask, however, is whether there really is such a thing as the economy of a nation. Do nations each conduct a separate household, a closed economic life? Since the expression “national economy” is especially popular in Germany, let us turn our attention to this country.
The hands of German workers, male and female, produce each year tremendous quantities of all kinds of useful products. But is all this produced just for the use of the population living in the German Empire? We know that an enormous proportion of German products, growing every year, is dispatched to other countries and parts of the world, for the use of other nations. German iron products go to various neighboring European countries, and further afield to South America and Australia; leather and leather goods go from Germany to all European states; glass products, sugar and gloves find their way to England; animal hides to France, England and Austria-Hungary; the dye-stuff alizarin12 to England, the United States and India; phosphates for artificial fertilizer to the Netherlands and Austria-Hungary; coke to France; coal to Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands and Switzerland; electrical cable to England, Sweden and Belgium; toys to the United States; German beer, indigo, aniline and other coal-tar dyes, German pharmaceuticals, cellulose, gold articles, stockings, cotton and woolen materials and clothes, and German locomotive rails are dispatched to almost all trading countries across the world.
Conversely, however, the German people are reliant at every turn in their labor, as well as in daily consumption, on products of other countries and nations. We eat bread from Russian wheat and meat from Hungarian, Danish and Russian cattle; the rice that we consume comes from the East Indies and North America, tobacco from the Dutch East Indies and Brazil; we receive cocoa beans from West Africa, pepper from India; lard from the United States; tea from China; vegetables from Italy, Spain and the United States; coffee from Brazil, Central America and the Dutch East Indies; meat extract from Uruguay; eggs from Russia, Hungary and Bulgaria; cigars from the island of Cuba; pocket watches from Switzerland; sparkling wine from France; cattle hides from Argentina; feathers for beds from China; silk from Italy and France: flax and hemp from Russia; cotton from the United States, India and Egypt; fine wool from England; jute from India; malt from Austria-Hungary; linseed from Argentina; certain kinds of coal from England; lignite from Austria; nitre13 from Chile; quebracho for tanning from Argentina; construction timber from Russia; cork from Portugal; copper from the United States; tin from the Dutch East Indies; zinc from Australia; aluminum from Austria-Hungary and Canada; asbestos from Canada; asphalt and marble from Italy; cobblestones from Sweden; lead from Belgium, the United States and Australia; graphite from Ceylon, phosphoric lime from America and Algeria; iodine from Chile …
From the simplest foodstuff eaten every day to the most sought-after luxury goods and the materials and tools needed for them, the greater part come directly or indirectly from foreign countries, entirely or in one or other component, and are the product of other people’s labor. To make our life and work possible in Germany, we have almost all other countries, peoples and parts of the world work for us, and we work in turn for all these countries.
In order to get an idea of the enormous scope of this exchange, let us cast a glance at the official statistics for imports and exports. According to the Statistisches Jahrbuch für das Deutsche Reich [Statistical Yearbook of the German Empire], 1914 edition,14 Germany’s total trade (net of goods arriving in Germany for re-export) was as follows.
Germany imported in 1913:
| Raw materials | to the value of | 5,262 million marks |
| Semi-finished products | 1,246 million marks | |
| Finished products | 1,776 million marks | |
| Foodstuffs and consumer goods | 3,063 million marks | |
| Live animals | 289 million marks |
In total, 11,63815 million marks, or close to 12 thousand million.
In the same year, Germany exported:
| Raw materials | 1,720 million marks |
| Semi-finished products | 1,159 million marks |
| Finished products | 6,642 million marks |
| Foodstuffs and consumer goods | 1,362 million marks |
| Live animals | 7 million marks |
In total, 10,891 million marks or nearly 11 billion marks. Germany’s annual foreign trade thus amounts to more than 22 billion marks.
The situation is the same, to a greater or lesser extent, in other modern states, precisely those with which political economy has been exclusively concerned. All these countries produce for one another, partly even for the most far-flung parts of the world, while likewise consuming all along the line products from all other parts of the world.
In the light of such a tremendously developed reciprocal exchange, how are we to draw the borders between the “economy” of one nation and that of another? Should we speak of so many “national economies” as if these could be treated as separate territories in economic terms?
Of course, the increasing international exchange of goods is no new discovery, unknown to bourgeois scholars. Official statistical surveys and their annually published reports have long since made the facts reported the common property of all educated people; businessmen and industrial workers, moreover, know them from their daily life. The fact of rapidly increasing world trade is so universally known and recognized today that it can no longer be challenged or doubted. But how is this question conceived by the academic specialists in political economy? As a purely external chance connection, as the export of a so-called “surplus” in the products of one country over and above its own needs and the import of what is “lacking” in its own economy—a connection that in no way prevents them from continuing to speak as before of the “national economy” and “national-economic theory.”
Professor Bücher, for example, proclaims, after he has lectured us at length about the present-day “national economy” as the highest and final stage of development in the series of historical economic forms:
It would be a mistake to conclude from the successful easing of international trade in the liberal age that the era of national economy is on the decline and making way for an era of world economy … We certainly see today in Europe a series of states that renounce national autonomy in their provision of goods to the extent that they are forced to obtain considerable quantities of their food and consumer goods from abroad, while their industrial production capacity has grown far beyond the national need and supplies regular surpluses that have to seek their utilization in foreign lands. But the existence alongside one another of such industrial and raw-material producing countries that are mutually reliant, this “international division of labor,” should not be taken as a sign that humanity is on the brink of reaching a new stage of development, and be opposed to earlier stages under the name of a world economy. For, on the one hand, no economic stage has guaranteed complete ability to satisfy its own needs in the long term; each leaves certain gaps, which have had to be filled in one way or another. On the other hand, at least up to this time, no signs of this so-called world economy have yet appeared that depart from those of the national economy in their essential characteristics, and it is very doubtful whether such will appear in the foreseeable future.VI
Still bolder is Professor Bücher’s younger colleague [Werner] Sombart, who declares point-blank that we are not moving into a world economy, but on the contrary increasingly departing from this:
The civilized peoples, I would rather maintain, are today (as far as their overall economy goes) not fundamentally more, but rather less linked with one another by trading relations. The individual national economy today is not more but actually less involved in the world market than a hundred or fifty years ago. At least … it would be wrong to assume that international trade relations are acquiring a relatively growing importance for the modern national economy. The opposite is the case.
Professor Sombart is convinced that “individual national economies are becoming ever more complete microcosms [i.e. small closed worlds—R.L.] and that the internal market increasingly overshadows the world market in importance for all lines of trade.”VII
This blatant foolishness, which recklessly flies in the face of all daily perceptions of economic life, most happily underlines the stubborn reluctance of the gentlemen of the scholarly guild to recognize the world economy as a new phase of development of human society—a reluctance that it is well worthwhile to note, and whose hidden roots we shall go on to examine.
So, because at “earlier economic stages,” for example at the time of King Nebuchadnezzar, “certain gaps” in people’s economic life were filled by exchange, present-day world trade has nothing to teach us, and we still have a “national economy.” That is Professor Bücher’s opinion.
How indicative this is about the crude historical conception of a scholar whose fame is based precisely on supposedly acute and deep insights into economic history! With the help of a fatuous schema, he brings the international trade of the most varied stages of economy and civilization, separated by millennia, under a single category. Of course there never has been any social form without exchange, and there is not today. The oldest prehistoric discoveries, the most primitive caves used as dwellings by “antediluvian” human beings, the most primitive graves from early times, all give evidence of a certain exchange of products already between distant regions. Exchange is as old as human culture itself, it has ever been a constant accompaniment of this and its most powerful promoter. In this general knowledge, quite vague in its generality, our scholar now drowns all particularities of different eras, levels of civilization and economic forms. Just as all cats are grey in the dark, so in the obscurity of this professorial theory all forms of exchange, no matter how diverse, are one and the same. The primitive exchange of an Amerindian tribe in Brazil, who every now and then happen to exchange their uniquely woven dance masks for the artfully made bows and arrows of another tribe; the gleaming warehouses of Babylon, where the splendors of Oriental court life were accumulated; the ancient market of Corinth, where at the new moon Oriental cloth, Greek pottery, paper from Tyre, Syrian and Anatolian slaves were offered for sale to rich slave-owners; the medieval maritime trade of Venice, supplying luxury goods to European feudal courts and patrician houses—and the present-day capitalist world trade, which has brought East and West, North and South, all the oceans and corners of the world into its net, and year in, year out moves tremendous quantities of goods hither and thither—from the beggar’s daily bread and firewood through to the artworks most sought after by rich connoisseurs, from the simplest fruit of the soil through to the most complicated tool, from human labor-power, the source of all wealth, through to the deadly instruments of war—all this is one and the same for our professor of political economy: simply the “filling” of “certain gaps” in the independent economic organism! …
Fifty years ago, Schulze von Delitsch taught the German workers that each person nowadays first of all produced for himself, but “those products he does not need himself … he exchanges for the products of others.”VIII Lassalle’s response to him remains unforgettable:
Herr Patrimonialrichter16 Schulze! Have you no idea at all about the real pattern of social labor today? Didn’t you come from Bitterfeld and Delitzsch? In what century of the Middle Ages are you still living with these ideas? … Have you no inkling that social labor today is precisely characterized by the fact that each person produces precisely what he cannot use himself? Have you no inkling that this has to be so, ever since the rise of modern industry, that the form and essence of present-day labor lies in this, and that without the sharpest emphasis on this point it is impossible to understand a single page of our present-day economic conditions, not a single one of our present-day economic phenomena?
According to you, then, Herr Leonor Reichenheim in Wüste-Giersdorf produces first of all the cotton yarn that he needs for himself. The surplus, which his daughters cannot work up into more stockings and nightshirts for him, he exchanges.
Herr Borsig first of all produces machines for his family’s needs. He then sells the surplus machines.
The workshops making mourning clothes provide first of all for deaths in their own families. But if there are too few of these, and some mourning clothes are left over, they exchange them.
Herr Wolff, proprietor of the local telegraph office, first has messages come in for his own instruction and pleasure. And when he’s had his fill, if there are any left over, he exchanges them with the stock-exchange sharks and newspaper editorial offices against their surplus newspaper reports and shares! …
In conclusion, it is precisely the distinctive character of labor in earlier periods of society, to be sharply emphasized, that at this time people produced first of all for their own needs and parted with the surplus, i.e. they principally pursued a natural economy.
And it is again the distinctive character, the specific determination of labor in modern society, that each produces only what he in no way does need, i.e. that everyone produces exchange-values, whereas previously they produced use-values.
And do you not understand, Herr Schulze, that this is the necessary “form and manner of performing labor,” ever more prevailing, in a society in which the division of labor has developed to such a degree as it has in modern society?IX
What Lassalle tried here to explain to Schulze about capitalist private enterprise applies more each day now to the economic pattern of highly developed capitalist countries such as England, Germany, Belgium or the United States, in whose footsteps the others are following one after the other. And the attempt by the progressive patrician from Bitterfeld to mislead the workers was only more naïve, but no cruder, than the tendentious arguments of a Bücher or Sombart against the concept of a world economy today.
Punctilious civil servant that he is, the German professor loves proper order. For the sake of order, he also likes to arrange the world nicely into the pigeon-holes of a scientific schema. And in the same way as he places his books on the shelves, so he has also divided the different countries onto two shelves: on the one hand, countries that produce industrial goods and have “a surplus” of these; on the other, countries that pursue agriculture and stock-raising and whose products meet a shortage in other lands. This is how international trade arises, and what it is based on.
Germany is the one of the most industrialized countries in the world. According to this schema, its most vigorous trade should be with a large agricultural country such as Russia. How is it then that Germany’s most important trading partners are the two other most industrialized countries: the United States and Britain? Germany’s trade with the United States in 1913 amounted to 2,400 million marks, and with Britain to 2,300 million; Russia only came in third place. And especially as regards exports, the leading industrial state in the world is precisely the greatest customer for German industry: with 1,400 million marks’ worth of annual imports from Germany, England stands in first position, leaving all other countries far behind. The British Empire, including its colonies, takes a good fifth of German exports. What does the professorial schema say about this remarkable phenomenon?
Here industrial countries, there agricultural ones—that is the rigid skeleton of world economic relations with which Professor Bücher and most of his colleagues operate. Back in the 1860s, however, Germany was an agricultural country; it had a surplus of agricultural products and had to obtain the most necessary industrial goods from England. Since then, it has also been transformed into an industrial country, and the most powerful rival to England. The United States is doing the same as Germany did in the 1870s and 80s, in a yet briefer interval; it is already well along this path. America is still one of the largest grain-producing countries in the world, along with Russia, Canada, Australia and Romania, and according to its last census (which dates from 1900) as many as 36 percent of its total population is still employed in agriculture. At the same time, however, the country’s industry is striding forward at an unmatched speed, so that it presents a dangerous contender to England and Germany. We could set up a prize competition for our great faculties of political economy to define whether the United States, in Professor Bücher’s schema, should be classified as an agricultural state or an industrial one. Russia is slowly following on the same path, and as soon as it casts off the fetters of an obsolete form of state it will catch up, thanks to its tremendous population and inexhaustible natural wealth, and appear in our own lifetimes alongside Germany, England and the United States as a powerful industrial country, if it does not indeed overshadow them. The world is precisely not a rigid skeleton, unlike the wisdom of a professor; it is living, moving and changing. The polar opposition between industry and agriculture, from which international exchange is supposed to emerge, is thus itself something fleeting; it will steadily shift ever more from the center of the modern civilized world to its periphery. What is happening meanwhile with trade within this ambit of civilization? According to Bücher’s theory it should steadily dwindle. But instead—a miracle!—trade is growing ever greater between the industrial countries themselves.
Nothing is more instructive than the picture that the development of our modern economic region offers in the last quarter of a century. Despite the fact that there have been real orgies of tariff raising in all the industrial countries and major states of Europe, as also in America, i.e. mutual artificial barriers to “national economies,” world trade has not stopped developing in this period—it has pursued a furious course. And that increasing industrialization and world trade go hand in hand, even a blind person can see from the example of the three leading countries: England, Germany and the United States.
Coal and iron form the core of modern industry. Coal production from 1885 to 1910 rose as follows:
| in England | from 162 to 269 million tons |
| in Germany | from 74 to 222 million tons |
| in the United States | from 101 to 455 million tons |
Pig iron production rose in the same period
| in England | from 7.5 to 10.2 million tons |
| in Germany | from 3.7 to 14.8 million tons |
| in the United States | from 4.1 to 27.7 million tons |
At the same time, annual foreign trade (imports and exports) rose from 1882 to 1912
| in England | from 13,000 to 27,400 million marks |
| in Germany | from 6,200 to 21,300 million marks |
| in the United States | from 5,500 to 16,200 million marks |
If however we take the total foreign trade (imports and exports) of all the more important countries on earth in recent years, this rose from 105,000 million marks in 1904 to 165,000 million in 1912. That means a growth of 57 percent in eight years! There is not even a close parallel to this breath-taking pace of economic development in the whole of previous world history—“the dead ride swiftly.”X The capitalist “national economy” seems in a hurry to exhaust the limits of its capacity, to shorten the remission period in which it can justify its existence. And what does the schema of “certain gaps” and the clumsy dance between industrial and agricultural countries have to say about this?
Yet there is no longer such a puzzle in modern economic life.
Let us take a closer look at the tables for German imports and exports, instead of resting content with total sums of goods exchanged or their major economic categories; let us examine as an experiment the most important kinds of German trade.
Two facts immediately strike the most superficial observer. The first is that in several cases one and the same type of commodity figures in both columns, even if in different quantities. Germany sends enormous quantities of machinery abroad, but it also imports machinery from abroad to the considerable annual sum of 80 million marks. Likewise, coal is exported from Germany while at the same time foreign coal is imported into Germany. The same holds for cotton goods, woolen yarn and finished goods, also for hides and skins, and many other goods that are not included in this table. From the standpoint of a crude opposition between industry and agriculture, which our professor of political economics uses like Aladdin’s lamp to illuminate all the secrets of modern world trade, this remarkable duplication is quite incomprehensible; it even appears completely absurd. What is happening here? Has Germany a “surplus over and above its own needs,” or on the contrary “certain gaps”? Both in coal and in cotton goods? And in cattle hides? And a hundred more! Or is a “national economy” supposed always to show some kind of “surplus” and “certain gaps”? Aladdin’s lamp is flickering insecurely. Clearly the observed facts can only be explained if we assume that there exist more complicated and far-reaching economic connections between Germany and other countries, a ramified and detailed division of labor that allows for certain kinds of the same products to be produced in Germany for other countries, other kinds abroad for Germany, creating a continuous to and fro in which individual countries appear only as organic parts of a greater whole.
Besides, anyone must be struck at first glance in the table above by the fact that imports and exports do not appear here as two separate phenomena in need of explanation, on the one hand by “gaps” in a country’s own economy, on the other by its “surpluses,” but that they are instead linked causally together. Germany’s tremendous cotton import is quite evidently not the result of its population’s own needs, but is rather designed from the start to make possible the great export of cotton goods and clothing from Germany. Likewise, the connection between the import of wool and the export of woolen goods, and between the tremendous import of iron from abroad and the tremendous export of iron goods of every shape and form, and so on. Thus Germany imports in order to be able to export. It does not artificially create “certain gaps” so as to subsequently transform these gaps into as many “surpluses.” The German “microcosm” thus appears from the start, in all its dimensions, as a fragment of a greater whole, as a single workshop in the world.
| In 1913 | |||
| Germany imported | million marks | Germany exported | million marks |
| Cotton, raw | 607 | Machines of all kinds | 680 |
| Wheat | 117 | Iron products | 652 |
| Wool, raw | 413 | Coal | 516 |
| Barley | 390 | Cotton goods | 446 |
| Chopper ore | 335 | Woolen goods | 271 |
| Cattle hides | 322 | Paper and paper products | 263 |
| Iron ore | 227 | Skins for fur | 225 |
| Coal | 204 | Iron ingots | 205 |
| Eggs | 194 | Silk goods | 202 |
| Skins for fur | 188 | Coke | 147 |
| Chilean nitre | 172 | Aniline and other dyestuffs | 142 |
| Raw silk | 158 | Clothing | 132 |
| Rubber | 147 | Copper goods | 130 |
| Pine planks | 135 | Leather uppers | 114 |
| Cotton yarn | 116 | Leather goods | 114 |
| Woolen yarn | 108 | Toys | 103 |
| Pine, raw | 97 | Sheet iron | 102 |
| Calf skins | 95 | Woolen yarn | 91 |
| Jute | 94 | Iron tubing | 84 |
| Machines of all kinds | 80 | Cattle skins | 81 |
| Lamb, sheep and goat skins | 73 | Iron wire | 76 |
| Cotton goods | 72 | Rails, etc. | 73 |
| Lignite | 69 | Pig iron | 65 |
| Wool, combed | 61 | Cotton yarn | 61 |
| Woolen goods | 43 | Rubber goods | 57 |
But let us examine this “microcosm” rather more closely, in its “ever more perfect” self-satisfaction. Let us imagine that by some kind of social and political catastrophe the German “national economy” were actually cut off from the rest of the world and left to its own devices. What picture would this then present?
Let us start with the daily bread. German agriculture has twice as high a yield as that of the United States; in terms of quality it holds first place among the world’s agricultural countries, and it is only outdone by the still more intensive cultivation of Belgium, Ireland and the Netherlands. Fifty years ago, Germany with an agriculture that was then far more backward was one of the granaries of Europe; it fed other countries with the surplus of its own bread. Today, despite the higher yield, German agriculture is not nearly sufficient to feed its own people and its own cattle: a sixth of the foodstuffs needed have to be obtained from abroad. In other words, if the German “national economy” were to be cut off from the world, a sixth of the population, some 11 million Germans, would be deprived of their sustenance.
The German people spend 220 million marks each year on coffee, 67 million on cocoa, 8 million on tea, 61 million on rice; they spend at least another 10 million marks on various spices, and 134 million on imported tobacco. All these products, which even the poorest people today cannot dispense with, which are part of everyday habit and subsistence, are not produced in Germany at all (or, as in the case of tobacco, only in small quantities), since the German climate is unsuited to them. If Germany were to be permanently closed off from the world economy, the subsistence of the German people, which corresponds to its present level of civilization, would collapse.
Let us turn from food to clothing. Both the underwear and the outer clothing of the broad mass of people are today made entirely from cotton, the underwear of the richer bourgeoisie from linen and their outer garments from fine wool and silk. Neither cotton nor silk are produced in Germany at all, and no more is the highly important textile jute or the finest wool, Britain having a world monopoly on these; Germany also has a great shortfall in hemp and flax. If Germany were permanently cut off from the world, both raw materials from abroad and outlets for exports would disappear, and all classes of the German people would be deprived of their most essential clothing; the Germany textile industry, which together with the clothing industry today provides a livelihood for 1,400,000 adult and juvenile workers of both sexes, would be ruined.
We can go on. The backbone of today’s large-scale industry is what is known as heavy industry, i.e. machine production and metallurgy; and the backbone of these is metal ore. In 1913, Germany consumed some 17 million tons of pig iron. Its own production of pig iron also amounts to 17 million tons. At first glance, it might look as if the German “national economy” could cover its own needs in terms of iron. But the production of pig iron requires iron ore, and we find that Germany’s own demand for iron ore alone amounts to some 27 million tons, a value of more than 110 million marks, while 12 million tons of higher-quality iron ore costing more than 200 million marks, ore without which the German metal industry could not continue, is obtained from Sweden, France and Spain.
The other metals present more or less the same picture. Against an annual consumption of 220,000 tons of zinc, Germany produces 270,000 tons itself, out of which 100,000 tons is exported, while more than 50,000 tons of metal is obtained from abroad to cover its needs. The zinc ore needed is again only partly obtained in Germany, some half a million tons to the value of 50 million marks. 300,000 tons of higher-quality ores costing 40 million marks have to be imported. With lead, Germany imports 94,000 tons of finished metal and 123,000 tons of ore. And with copper, finally, German production with an annual consumption of 241,000 tons depends on imports17 from abroad for as much as 206,000 tons. Tin, for its part, is completely obtained from abroad. If Germany were cut off from the world for an extended period, the basis for the existence of German metal production, which employs 662,000 workers, along with the machine industry that provides a living for 1,130,000 workers of both sexes, would disappear consequent on the supply of the most valuable metals, along with the enormous outlet abroad for German iron products and machinery. And a whole series of other branches of production that depend on these raw materials and tools, such as those supplying them with raw and ancillary materials, would collapse along with the metal and machine industries, for example coal mining, as well as those that produce means of subsistence for the immense armies of workers in these branches of industry.
We should also mention the chemical industry with its 168,000 workers, which produces for the entire world. Likewise the wood industry, which employs 450,000 workers today, but which would have to close down most of its operations without foreign timber and construction wood. Also the leather industry, which in the absence of foreign hides as well as the large market it has abroad, would make its 117,000 workers redundant. We should mention the precious metals gold and silver, which provide the money material and are accordingly the indispensable foundation of all present-day economic life, but which are scarcely produced at all in Germany. Let us bear all this in mind, and then ask, what is this German “national economy”? Assuming, in other words, that Germany were to be really and permanently cut off from the rest of the world and had to conduct its economy quite alone, what would become of present-day economic life and along with it Germany’s whole contemporary civilization? One branch of production after another would collapse, each in turn pulling the other down with it, a tremendous mass of proletarians would find themselves without employment, the whole population would be deprived of the most essential means of subsistence, consumer goods and clothing, trade would be deprived of its foundation, the precious money metal, and the entire “national economy” would become a heap of rubble, a shattered wreck! …
This is what these “certain gaps” in German economic life actually amount to, and likewise the “ever more perfect microcosm” that self-evidently floats in the blue ether of professorial theory.
But stop! What about the world war of 1914, the great experimental test of the “national economy”? Has this not vindicated Bücher and Sombart most convincingly? Has it not shown an envious world how excellently the German “microcosm” remains capable of existence, healthy and powerful even in hermetic isolation from world trade, thanks to sturdy state organization and the performance of German technology? Hasn’t the food supply of the people been entirely met without foreign agriculture, and haven’t the wheels of industry kept moving despite foreign export outlets?
Let us examine the facts.
Food supply, first of all. This was not remotely met by German agriculture alone. Several million adult men in the army were supplied for almost the whole duration of the war by foreign countries: Belgium, northern France, and parts of Poland and Lithuania. To feed the German people, therefore, the surface of its own “national economy” was expanded by the whole area of the occupied regions of Belgium and northern France, and in the second year of the war by the western part of Russia, which had to meet a large part of the shortfall in German provisioning out of its own agricultural production. An additional counterpart to this was the lamentable deficit in the nutrition of the domestic population of those foreign territories, which in turn—Belgium is an example—were supported by charity from the products of American agriculture. A second additional factor was the rise in price of all provisions in Germany by between 100 and 200 percent, and the terrible malnutrition of the broadest strata of the domestic population.
Then there is industrial machinery. How could all this be kept going without the supply of foreign raw materials and other means of production, the tremendous scale of which we already know? How could such a miracle happen? The solution to the riddle is extremely simple and no miracle is involved. German industry could remain active simply and solely because it was indeed continuously supplied with the indispensable raw materials from abroad, which it obtained in three ways: firstly from the large stocks that Germany already possessed of cotton, wool, copper, etc., in various forms, and which only needed to be taken out of their hiding places and made available; secondly, from the stocks that it laid hands on in other countries: Belgium, northern France, parts of Poland and Lithuania, by means of military occupation; and thirdly, by the continuing supply from abroad, which by the intermediary of neutral countries (and Luxembourg) did not stop right through the whole of the war. If we add to this the fact that an indispensable precondition of this entire “war economy” and its smooth progress was also an enormous reserve of foreign precious metal deposited in German banks, it turns out that the hermetic isolation of German industry and trade from the rest of the world is just as much a legend as is the adequate supply of the German population by domestic agriculture, and that the supposed self-sufficiency of the German “microcosm” during the World War was based on a couple of fairy-tales.
Finally, we come to the outlet for German industry, which we showed was provided to such a high degree by all other parts of the world. For the duration of the war this was replaced by the state’s own military needs. In other words, the most important branches of industry: metallurgy, textiles, leather and chemicals, underwent remodeling and were transformed exclusively into industries supplying the armed forces. Since the costs of the war were borne by German tax-payers, this transformation of industry into war industry meant that the German “national economy,” instead of sending a large part of its products for exchange abroad, surrendered them to continuing destruction in the war, burdening the future products of the economy for decades to come with the loss arising, by way of the public credit system.18
If we take all this into account, it is clear that the miraculous success of this “microcosm” during the war represented in every respect an experiment in which the only question was how long it could be extended without the artificial construction collapsing like a house of cards.
One further glance at a remarkable phenomenon: If we consider Germany’s foreign trade in its total amounts, it is striking that its imports are significantly greater than its exports: the former amounted in 1913 to 11,600 million marks, the latter to 10,900 million. And this relationship was in no way an exception for the year in question, but can be noted for an extended number of years. The same holds for Great Britain, which in 1913 showed imports to a total of 13,000 million marks and exports to 10,000 million. How is such a phenomenon possible? Perhaps Professor Bücher can explain it for us with his theory of the “surplus” over a country’s own needs and of “certain gaps.”
If the economic relations between the different “national economies” amount to no more than the fact that, as the professor teaches us, these “national economies,” just as at the time of Nebuchadnezzar, cast off certain “surpluses,” i.e. if simple commodity exchange is the only bridge over the void dividing one of these “microcosms” from another, it is clear that a country can import exactly as much in goods from abroad as it exports of its own. But in simple commodity exchange money is only an intermediary, and the foreign products are paid at the end of the day in one’s own commodities. How then can a “national economy” manage the artifice of permanently importing more from abroad than it exports from its own “surplus”? Perhaps the professor will jest with us that the solution is the simplest thing in the world, the importing country only needs to settle the excess of its imports over its exports in cash. “Only,” indeed! The luxury, year in year out, of filling the bottomless pit of its foreign trade with a considerable sum of money that will never be seen again is something that at most a country with rich gold and silver mines of its own could afford, which is not the case with either Germany or France, Belgium or the Netherlands. Besides, there is a further amazing surprise: not only does Germany steadily import more goods that it imports, it also imports more money! In 1913, German imports of gold and silver came to 441.3 million marks, its exports to 102.8 million, a relationship that has been approximately the same for years. What does Professor Bücher with his “surpluses” and “gaps” have to say about this puzzle? The magic lamp is flickering gloomily. Indeed, we begin to suspect that behind the puzzling character of world trade there must in fact be quite other kinds of economic relations between individual “national economies” than simple commodity exchange; to regularly obtain from other countries more than you give them is evidently only possible for a country that has some kind of economic claim over others that is completely different from exchange between equals. And such claims and relations of dependence between countries exist in fact at every turn, although these professorial theories know nothing of them. One such dependence relationship, in the simplest form, is that between a so-called mother country and its colony. Great Britain draws from its largest colony, India, an annual tribute of more than 1,000 million marks. And we accordingly see that India’s exports of goods are some 1,200 million marks greater than its imports. This “surplus” is nothing more than the economic expression of the colonial exploitation of India by British capitalism—whether these goods are directly bound for Great Britain, or whether India has to sell to other states each year goods to a value of 1,200 million marks specifically for the purpose of paying this tribute to its British exploiters.XI But there are also other relationships of economic dependence that are not based on political rule. Russia annually exports around 1,000 million marks’ worth more of goods than it imports. Is it the great “surplus” of agricultural products over the needs of its own “national economy” that drains this immense flow of goods each year out of the Russian Empire? But the Russian peasant, whose corn is taken out of the country in this way, is well known to suffer from scurvy due to undernourishment, and often has to eat bread mixed with tree bark! The massive export of his grain, through the mechanism of a financial and taxation system designed for this purpose, is a matter of life or death for the Russian state, in order to meet its obligations to foreign creditors. Since its notorious defeat in the Crimean war,19 and its modernization by the reforms of Alexander II,20 the Russian state apparatus has been financed to a high degree by capital borrowed from Western Europe, principally from France. In order to pay interest on the French loans, Russia has to sell each year large quantities of wheat, timber, flax, hemp, cattle and poultry to Britain, Germany and the Netherlands. The immense surplus of Russian exports thus represents the tribute of a debtor to his creditors, a relationship matched on the French side by a large surplus of imports, which represents nothing other than the interest on its loan capital. But in Russia itself, the chain of economic connections runs further. The borrowed French capital has served principally in the last few decades for two purposes: railway building with state guarantees, and armaments. To this end, Russia has developed since the 1870s a strong heavy industry—under the protection of a system of high customs tariffs. The borrowed capital from the old capitalist country France has fueled a young capitalism in Russia, but this in turn requires for its support and expansion a considerable import of machinery and other means of production from Britain and Germany as the most technologically advanced industrial countries. A tie of economic connections is thus woven between Russia, France, Germany and Britain, in which commodity exchange is only a small part.
Yet this does not exhaust the manifold nature of these connections. A country like Turkey or China presents a new puzzle for our professor. It has, contrary to Russia but similarly to Germany or France, a large surplus of imports, amounting in many years to almost double the quantity of exports. How can Turkey or China afford the luxury of such a copious filling of the “gaps” in their “national economies,” given that these economies are not nearly in a position to export corresponding “surpluses”? Do the Western powers offer the crescent and the realm of the pigtail each year a present of several hundred million marks, in the form of all kinds of useful goods, out of Christian charity? Every child know that both Turkey and China are actually up to their necks in the jaws of European usurers, and have to pay the British, German and French banks an enormous tribute in interest. Following the Russian example, both Turkey and China should on the contrary show a surplus of exports of their own agricultural products in order to be able to pay this interest to their West European well wishers. But in both these two countries the so-called “national economy” is fundamentally different from the Russian. Certainly, the foreign loans are likewise used principally for railway building, port construction and armaments. But Turkey has virtually no industry of its own, and cannot conjure this out of the ground of its medieval peasant subsistence agriculture with its primitive cultivation and tithes. The same is true in a slightly different way for China. And so not only the whole of the population’s need for industrial goods, but also everything necessary for transport construction and the equipment of army and navy, has to be imported ready-made from Western Europe and constructed on site by European entrepreneurs, technicians and engineers. The loans are indeed frequently tied in advance to supplies of this kind. China, for example, obtains a loan from German and Austrian banking capital only on condition that it immediately orders a certain quantity of armaments from the Skoda works21 and Krupp;22 other loans are tied in advance to concessions for the construction of railways. In this way, most European capital migrates to Turkey and China already in the form of goods (armaments) or industrial capital in kind, in the form of machinery, iron, etc. These latter goods are not sent for exchange, but for the production of profit. Interest on this capital, along with further profit, is squeezed from the Turkish or Chinese peasants by the European capitalists with the help of a corresponding taxation system under European financial control. The bare figures of a preponderance of imports for Turkey or China, and corresponding European exports, thus conceal the particular relationship that obtains between the rich big-capitalist West and the poor and backward East that it bleeds dry with the help of the most modern and developed communications facilities and military installations—and with it the galloping ruin of the old peasant “national economy.”
A still different case is presented by the United States. Here we again see, as in Russia, an export figure well above that of imports—the former came to 10,200 million marks in 1913, the latter to 7,400 million—but the reasons for this are fundamentally different from the Russian case. Right from the beginning of the nineteenth century, the London stock exchange has absorbed vast quantities of American loans and shares; speculation in American company formation and stocks, until the 1860s, regularly announced like a fever patient’s thermometer an impending major crisis for British industry and trade. Since then, the outflow of English capital to the United States has not ceased. This capital partly took the form of loan capital to cities and private companies, but mostly that of industrial capital, whether American railway and industrial stocks were sold on the London stock exchange, or English industrial cartels founded branches in the US in order to circumvent the high tariff barrier, or else to take over companies there by purchasing their shares, in order to get rid of their competition on the world market. The United States possesses today a highly developed heavy industry that is advancing every more swiftly, and that, while it continues to attract money capital from Europe, itself exports industrial capital on an increasing scale—machinery, coal—to Canada, Mexico and other Central and South American countries. In this way the United States combines an enormous export of raw materials—cotton, copper, wheat, timber and petroleum—to the old capitalist countries with a growing industrial export to the young countries embarking on industrialization. The United States’ great surplus of exports thus reflects the particular transitional stage from a capital-receiving agricultural country to a capital-exporting industrial one, the role of an intermediate link between the old capitalist Europe and the new and backward American continent.
An overview of this great migration of capital from the old industrial countries to the young ones, and the corresponding reverse migration of the incomes drawn from this capital and paid as annual tribute by the young countries to the old, shows three powerful streams. England, according to estimates from 1906, had already invested 54,000 million marks by this time in its colonies and elsewhere, from which it drew an annual income of 2,800 million marks. France’s foreign capital at this time amounted to 32,000 million marks, with an annual income of at least 1,300 million. Germany, finally, had invested 26,000 million, which yielded 1,240 million annually. These great main streams, however, ultimately break down into smaller tributaries. Just as the United States is spreading capitalism further on the American continent, so even Russia—itself still fueled completely by French capital, and English and German industry—is already transferring loan capital and industrial products to its Asian hinterland, to China, Persia and Central Asia; it is involved in railway construction in China, etc.
We thus discover behind the dry hieroglyphs of international trade a whole network of economic entanglements, which have nothing to do with simple commodity exchange, which is all that the professorial wisdom can notice.
We discover that the distinction Herr Bücher makes between countries of industrial production and countries of raw-material production, the flimsy scaffolding on which he hangs the whole of international exchange, is itself only a crude product of professorial schematism. Perfume, cotton goods and machines are all manufactured goods. But the export of perfume from France only shows that France is the country of luxury production for the thin stratum of the rich bourgeoisie across the world; the export of cotton goods from Japan shows that Japan, competing with Western Europe, is undermining the traditional peasant and handicraft production throughout East Asia, driving it out by commodity trade; while the export of machinery from England, Germany and the United States shows that these three countries are themselves propagating heavy industry to all regions of the world.
We thus discover that one “commodity” is exported and imported today that was unknown in the time of King Nebuchadnezzar as well as in the whole of the antique and medieval periods: capital. And this commodity does not serve to fill “certain gaps” in other countries’ “national economies,” but quite the reverse—opening up gaps, rifts and splits in the edifice of traditional “national economies,” and acting like gunpowder to transform these “national economies” sooner or later into heaps of rubble. In this way, the “commodity” capital spreads still more remarkable “commodities” on an ever more massive scale from various old countries to the whole world: modern means of transport and the destruction of whole indigenous populations, money economy and an indebted peasantry, riches and poverty, proletariat and exploitation, insecurity of existence and crises, anarchy and revolutions. The European “national economies” extend their polyp-like tentacles to all countries and people of the earth, strangling them in a great net of capitalist exploitation.
Cannot Professor Bücher believe in a world economy, despite all this? No. For the scholar explains, after he has carefully surveyed all regions of the world and discovered nothing: I cannot help myself, I see nothing in the way of “special phenomena” that “deviate in essential characteristics” from a national economy, “and it is much to be doubted whether such things will appear in the foreseeable future.”XII
Let us now leave trade and trade statistics completely aside, and turn directly to life, to the history of modern economic relations. Just a single small passage from the great colorful picture.
In 1768, [Richard] Arkwright built the first mechanically driven cotton spinning plant in Nottingham, and in 1785 [Edmund] Cartwright invented the mechanical loom. The immediate result in England was the destruction of handloom weaving and the rapid spread of mechanical manufacture. At the start of the nineteenth century there were, according to one estimate, around a million handloom weavers; they were now fated to die out, and by 1860 no more than a few thousand remained in the whole kingdom, out of more than half a million factory workers in the cotton sector. In 1863, Prime Minister [William] Gladstone spoke in Parliament of the “intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power”23 that the English bourgeoisie had obtained, without the working class winning any share of this.
The English cotton industry draws its raw material from North America. The growth of factories in Lancashire conjured up immense cotton plantations in the southern United States. Blacks were imported from Africa for the deadly work on these plantations, as well as those of sugar, rice and tobacco. The African slave trade expanded tremendously, whole tribes were hunted down in the “dark continent,” sold off by their chiefs, transported across immense stretches over land and sea, to be auctioned in America. A literal black “Völkerwanderung”24 took place. At the end of the eighteenth century, in 1790, there were by one estimate only 697,000 blacks; by 1861 there were over four million.
The colossal extension of the slave trade and slave labor in the South of the United States triggered a crusade by the Northern states against this un-Christian atrocity. The massive import of English capital in the years 1825–60 made possible a vigorous railway construction in the Northern states, the beginnings of their own industry and with it a bourgeoisie enthusiastic for more modern forms of exploitation, for capitalist wage-slavery. The fabulous business of the Southern planters, who could drive their slaves to death within seven years, was all the more intolerable to the pious Puritans of the North because their own climate prevented them from establishing a similar paradise in their own states. At the instigation of the Northern states, slavery in every form was abolished for the whole of the Union in 1861.25 The Southern planters, whose deepest feelings were injured, answered this blow with open revolt. The Southern states declared their secession from the Union, and the great Civil War broke out.
The immediate effect of the war was the devastation and economic ruin of the Southern states. Production and trade collapsed, the supply of cotton was interrupted. This deprived English industry of its raw material, and in 1863 a tremendous crisis broke out in England, the so-called “cotton famine.” In Lancashire, 250,000 workers lost their jobs completely, 166,000 were only employed part-time, and just 120,000 workers were still fully employed. The population of this district was racked by poverty, and 50,000 workers asked Parliament in a petition to vote funds to enable their families to emigrate. The Australian states, which lacked the labor-power required to begin their capitalist development—after the indigenous population had been almost completely exterminated by the European settlers—declared that they were prepared to accept unemployed proletarians from England. But the English manufacturers protested vigorously against the emigration of their “living machinery,” which they would need again themselves as soon as the anticipated revival of industry took place. The workers were refused the funds for emigration, and had to bear the full weight of the crisis and its terrors.
Denied American supply, English industry sought to obtain its raw material elsewhere, and turned its attention to the East Indies. Cotton plantations were feverishly started here, and rice cultivation, which had provided the daily food of the population for millennia and formed the basis of their existence, had to give way in large areas to the profitable projects of speculators. In the wake of this suppression of rice cultivation, the next few years saw an extraordinary price rise and a famine that carried off over a million people in Orissa alone, a district north of Bengal.
A second experiment took place in Egypt. To take advantage of the opportunity provided by the American Civil War, the Egyptian khedive, Ismail Pasha, began cotton plantations as rapidly as possible. A real revolution took place in the country’s property relations and rural economy. Large area of peasant land were stolen, being declared royal property and transformed into very large-scale plantations. Thousands of workers were driven to forced labor on the plantations at the end of the whip, to build dams and canals for the khedive, or to pull ploughs. But borrowing the money needed to obtain the most modern steam-ploughs and hulling machines led to the khedive sinking ever deeper in debt to English and French bankers. This large-scale speculation ended with bankruptcy after only a year, when the end of the American Civil War brought the price of cotton down by three-quarters in the space of a few days. The result of this cotton period for Egypt was the rapid ruin of its peasant agriculture, the rapid collapse of its finances, and finally the swift occupation of the country by the English army.26
Meanwhile the cotton industry made new conquests. The Crimean War of 1855 [interrupted] the supply of hemp and flax from Russia, leading to a major crisis of linen production in Western Europe. The collapse of the old system in Russia, with the Crimean War, was followed right away by a political transformation, the abolition of serfdom, liberal reforms, free trade and the rapid building of railways. A new and stronger market for industrial products was thus opened up within this great empire, and the English cotton industry was the first to penetrate the Russian market. At the same time, in the 1860s, a series of bloody wars opened up China to English trade.27 England dominated the world market, and the cotton industry made up half its exports. The period of the 1860s and 70s was the time of most brilliant business deals for the English capitalists, as well as the time when they were most inclined to guarantee their “hands” and secure “industrial peace” by small concessions to the workers. It was in this period that the English trade unions, with the cotton spinners and weavers in the lead, achieved their most striking successes, as well as the time when the revolutionary traditions of the Chartist movement28 and the Owenite ideas29 finally died out among the English proletariat, ossifying into conservative trade unionism.
But the page soon turned. Everywhere on the continent that England exported its cotton products there gradually developed a local cotton industry. Already in 1844, the hunger revolts of the handloom weavers in Silesia and Bohemia30 had been the first heralds of the March revolution [of 1848].31 In the English colonies, too, an indigenous industry arose. The cotton factories of Bombay soon competed with the English, and in the 1880s helped to break England’s monopoly on the world market.
In Russia, finally, the rise of cotton manufacture in the 1870s inaugurated the age of large-scale industry and protective tariffs. In order to circumvent the high tariff barrier, whole factories along with their staff were taken from Saxony and the Vogtland32 to Russian Poland,33 where the new manufacturing centers of Lodz and Zgierz34 grew into big cities at a Californian pace. In the early 1880s, unrest in the Moscow-Vladimir cotton district forced the first labor protection laws in the tsarist empire. In 1896, 60,000 workers from the St Petersburg cotton plants carried out the first mass strike in Russia.35 And nine years later, in June 1905, 100,000 workers in Lodz, the third center of the cotton industry, with German workers among their leaders, erected the first barricades of the great Russian revolution …
Here we have, in a few lines, 140 years in the history of a modern branch of industry, a history that winds its way through all five continents, hurls millions of human lives hither and thither, erupting in one place as economic crisis, in another as famine, flaming up here as war, there as revolution, leaving in its wake on all sides mountains of gold and abysses of poverty—a wide and blood-stained stream of sweat from human labor.
These are convulsions of life, actions at a distance, that reach right into the innards of nations, while the dry figures of international trade statistics give only a pale reflection of them. In the century and a half since modern industry was first established in England, the capitalist world economy has taken shape at the price of the pains and convulsions of the whole of humanity. It has seized one branch of production after another, taken hold of one country after another. With steam and electricity, fire and sword, it has obtained entry into the most remote corners of the earth, has torn down all Chinese walls, and through an era of world crises, periodic common catastrophes, it has initiated the economic interconnection of present-day humanity.36 The Italian proletarian, expelled from his misery at home by Italian capital, who migrates to Argentina or Canada, finds there a ready-made new yoke of capital imported from the United States or England. And the German proletarian who remains at home and tries to make an honest living, is dependent for his weal and woe at every turn on the course of production and trade throughout the world. Whether he finds work or not, whether his wage is sufficient to feed his wife and children, whether he is condemned to spend several days of the week in enforced idleness, or to work day and night in infernal overtime—all this constantly varies depending on the cotton harvest in the United States, the wheat harvest in Russia, the discoveries of new gold or diamond mines in Africa, the outbreak of revolution in Brazil,37 tariff battles, diplomatic turmoil and war across five continents. Nothing is so striking today, nothing has such decisive importance for the whole shape of today’s social and political life, as the yawning contradiction between an economic foundation that grows tighter and firmer every day, binding all nations and countries into a great whole, and the political superstructure of states, which seeks to split nations artificially, by way of border posts, tariff barriers and militarism, into so many foreign and hostile divisions.
But none of this exists for Bücher, Sombart and their colleagues! For them, all that exists is the “ever more complete microcosm”! They see far and wide no “special phenomena” that would “depart in essential characteristics” from a national economy. Is this not puzzling? Would a similar blindness on the part of the official representatives of science be conceivable for phenomena that leap to the eye of any observer in their plenitude and their dazzling, lightning-like intensity, in any area of science other than that of political economy? Certainly in natural science, a professional scholar who tried to express the view publicly that the earth did not revolve round the sun, but the sun and all other stars revolved round the earth as their center, who maintained that he “did not know any phenomena” that would contradict this view “in essential characteristics”—such a scholar could be sure of being met by the Homeric laughter of the entire educated world, and would end up having his mental health examined at the instigation of troubled relatives. Of course, 400 years ago not only did the spread of such views go unpunished, but anyone who undertook to refute them publicly would himself run the risk of ending on the scaffold. In those days, preservation of the mistaken view that the earth was the center of the universe and the heavenly bodies was a pressing interest of the Catholic church, and any attack on the imagined majesty of the earth in the universe was at the same time an assault on the spiritual rule of the church and its tithes on the earth. In those days, accordingly, natural science was the ticklish nerve center of the prevailing social system, and mystification in this realm was an indispensable instrument of subjugation. Today, under the rule of capital, the ticklish point of the social system is no longer faith in the mission of the earth in the blue heaven, but rather faith in the mission of the bourgeois state on earth. And because thick fog is already rising and gathering over the powerful waves of the world economy, because storms are in preparation here that will brush away the “microcosm” of the bourgeois state like a henhouse in an earthquake, the scientific “Swiss guards” of the rule of capital stand before the gate of their stronghold, the “national state,” ready to defend it to the last gasp. The first word of present-day political economy, its basic concept, is a scientific mystification in the interest of the bourgeoisie.
Political economy is frequently defined for us in the simple formula that it is “the science of people’s economic relations.” Those who offer this kind of formulation believe they have navigated the reefs of the “national economy” and the world economy by universalizing the problem into something indefinite and speaking of “people’s” economic relations in general. Tossing the problem up into thin air, however, does not make it any more clear, but may well just confuse it even more, as the question then arises as to why and wherefore this special science of “people’s” economic relations—i.e. of all people at all times and in all circumstances—should be necessary.
Let us take any example we like of people’s economic relations, as simple and transparent as possible. Let us place ourselves in the time when the present world economy did not yet exist, when commodity trade flourished only in the towns while in the countryside a natural economy still prevailed, i.e. production for one’s own need, with the large landed proprietors as well as on the small peasant holdings. Let us take, for example, the relations described by Dugald Stewart in the Scottish highlands in the 1850s:
In some parts of the Highlands of Scotland … every peasant, according to the Statistical Account, made his own shoes of leather tanned by himself. Many a shepherd and cottar too, with his wife and children, appeared at Church in clothes which had been touched by no hands but their own, since they were shorn from the sheep and sown in the flax-field. In the preparation of these, it is added, scarcely a single article had been purchased, except the awl, needle, thimble, and a very few parts of the ironwork employed in the weaving. The dyes, too, were chiefly extracted by the women from trees, shrubs, and herbs.38
Alternatively, we can take an example from Russia, where only a relatively short time ago, in the late 1860s, the peasant economy could be commonly described as follows:
The land that he [the farmer of the Viasma district in the province of Smolensk—R.L.] cultivates provides him with food and clothing, almost everything that is necessary for his existence: bread, potatoes, milk, meat, linen, cloth, sheep pelts and wool for warm clothing … All that he buys with money are boots and a few personal items such as belt, cap and gloves, as well as some necessary household equipment: iron and wooden dishes, poker, kettle and the like.XIII
Today there are still peasant economies of this kind in Bosnia and Herzegovina, in Serbia and Dalmatia. If we were to put to one of these self-sufficient peasants in the Scottish Highlands or Russia, Bosnia or Serbia the usual professorial questions of political economy about “economic purpose,” “creation and distribution of wealth” and the like, he would stare at us in amazement. As to the reason why he and his family work, or to put it in scholarly terms, the “motivating force” that drives their “economic activity.” he would exclaim: Well, we have to live, and food doesn’t just drop from the sky. If we didn’t work, we’d die of starvation. So we work to get by, to eat our fill, to put clothes on our back and have a roof over our head. As to what we produce, “what orientation” we give our labor, that’s another foolish question! We produce what we need, what any peasant family needs to live. We grow wheat and rye, oats and barley, we plant potatoes, we keep a few cows and sheep, chickens and ducks. In winter we do the spinning, which is women’s work, while men are busy with axes, saws and hammers making whatever the house needs. You can call this a “rural economy” or a “business,” whatever you like, but at all events we have to do a bit of everything, as all kinds of things are needed in the home and the fields. How do we “divide” these tasks? Another strange question! The men naturally do what needs male strength, the women take care of the house, the cows and the henhouse, the children help with this and that. Or are you saying that I should send my wife to chop wood while I milk the cows myself? (The good man is unaware—we can add here—that there are many primitive peoples, for example the Brazilian Amerindians, where it is precisely the woman who gathers wood in the forest, digs up roots and goes to pick fruit, while among the herding peoples of Africa and Asia men not only look after the cattle but also milk them. In Dalmatia today, you can still see a woman carrying a heavy load on her back with a strong man complacently riding his donkey alongside, puffing away at his pipe. This “division of labor” seems just as natural to them as it appears obvious to our own peasants that the man should chop wood and his wife milk the cows.) And besides, this question about my “wealth”! That again, every child in the village understands. A wealthy peasant is one who has a full barn, a well-stocked stable, a respectable flock of sheep and a large henhouse; a peasant is poor if he runs short of flour already by Easter, and water drips through his roof when it rains. What does an “increase in wealth” depend on? No question about it. If I had a larger plot of land, I would naturally be richer, and if in summer, Heaven forbid, we had a heavy hailstorm, everyone in the village would be impoverished in the space of twenty-four hours.
Here we have let the peasant patiently answer the learned questions of political economy, but we are certain that, before the professor who arrived with his notebook and fountain pen to make a scientific study of such a peasant household in the Scottish Highlands or Bosnia had asked even half of his questions, he would already have been shown out of the door. In fact, all relationships in this kind of peasant economy are so simple and self-evident that their dissection with the scalpel of political economy seems an idle game.
The objection can of course be made that we perhaps chose an unfortunate example, by focusing on a tiny self-sufficient peasant household whose extreme simplicity is determined by its scanty resources and dimensions. So let us take another example. Leaving the small peasant household to continue its modest existence in a remote corner of the world, we turn our attention to the highest summit of a powerful empire, the household of Charlemagne. This sovereign, who made the Germanic Empire the most powerful in Europe at the start of the ninth century, undertaking no fewer than fifty-three crusades for the expansion and strengthening of his realm,39 and uniting under his scepter not just present-day Germany but also France, Italy, Switzerland, the northern part of Spain, Holland and Belgium, was also very concerned with economic conditions on his lands and estates. He drafted personally a special legislative decree on the economic principles of his estates, consisting of seventy paragraphs, the celebrated “Capitulare de villis,”40 i.e. law about landed estates, a priceless gem of historical survival which has happily come down to us through the dust and mildew of the archives. This claims very special attention for two reasons. Firstly, most of Charlemagne’s estates subsequently developed into powerful imperial cities: Aachen, Cologne, Munich, Basel and Strasbourg, for example, along with several other towns, were at this time agricultural estates of the emperor. Secondly, Charlemagne’s economic institutions became a model for all major spiritual and temporal landed estates of the early Middle Ages; these adopted the survivals of ancient Rome and the refined way of life of its noble villas, transplanting them into the coarser milieu of the young Germanic warrior nobility, and his prescriptions for the cultivation of vineyards and gardens, fruit and vegetables, fowl, etc. were an act in the history of civilization.
Let us take a closer look at this decree. The great emperor demanded here, above all else, to be served honestly and have his properties looked after so that his subjects living on them were protected against poverty; they should not be overburdened with labor; if they worked at night, they were to be compensated for this. But the subjects for their part were to take diligent care of the vineyards and put the pressed wine into bottles to avoid damage. If they evaded their duties they were chastised “on the back or elsewhere.” The emperor also lay down that bees and geese were to be kept on his domains; the birds were to be kept well and increased. The stocks of cows and brood mares were also to be expanded, and the greatest care taken of sheep.
We desire, the emperor continued, that our woods are managed properly, that they are not uprooted and that sparrowhawks and falcons are kept there. Fat geese and chickens should be always available for us; eggs that are not consumed in the household should be sold on the market. Each of our estates should keep a store of good featherbeds, mattresses, covers, tableware of copper, lead, iron and wood, chains, kettle-hooks, axes and drills, so that nothing needs to be borrowed from other people. The emperor further prescribed that an exact account be kept of the harvests from his estates, and he lists: vegetables, butter, cheese, honey, oil, vinegar, turnips “and other trifles,” as it says in the text of the famous decree. He continues that on each of his estates there should be various artisans, a sufficient number fluent in every craft, and he again lists the precise kinds in detail. He also made Christmas Day the date on which he required accounts of his wealth, and the smallest peasant did not count each head of stock and each egg on his holding more carefully than the great Charlemagne. Paragraph 62 of the decree states: “It is important that we know what and how much we have of all these things.” And he again lists: oxen, mills, wood, ships, wine stocks, vegetables, wool, linen, flax, fruit, bees, fish, hides, wax and honey, old and new wine, and whatever else was supplied to him. He adds, as generous consolation for the dear subjects who were to supply all this: “We hope that all this does not appear too hard to you, for you can demand the same for your part, since everyone is lord of his property.” Further, we find exact prescriptions as to the way in which wines should be packed and transported, these apparently being a particular concern in the great emperor’s governance: “Wine should be carried in barrels with firm iron hoops and never in skins. As for flour, this is to be carried in doubled crates and covered with leather, so that it can be brought across rivers without damage being done. I also want exact account to be made of the horns of my goats, male and female, as well of the skins of the wolves that are shot each year. In the month of May, merciless war against the young wolf cubs should not be neglected.” Finally, in the last paragraph, Charlemagne lists all the flowers, trees and plants that he wants to have tended in his garden: roses, lilies, rosemary, gherkins, onions, radishes, caraway, etc. The famous decree more or less comes to an end with a list of varieties of apple.
This is a picture of the imperial economy in the ninth century, and although we have here one of the most powerful and richest princes of the Middle Ages, anyone must admit that his economy, along with the principles on which it was managed, are surprisingly reminiscent of the dwarf-size peasant holding that we considered above. Here too, the imperial landlord, if we were to put to him the familiar basic questions of political economy about the nature of wealth, the purpose of production, the division of labor, etc., etc., would refer with a royal wave of the hand to the mountains of grain, wool and flax, the barrels of wine, oil and vinegar, the stables full of cows, oxen and sheep. And we would be equally at a loss to know what “laws” of political-economic science were to be investigated and deciphered in this economy, since all the connections, cause and effect, labor and its result, are as clear as day.
The reader might draw our attention here, once again, to the fact that we have taken a misleading example. It is clear after all from Charlemagne’s decree that this was not dealing with the public economic relationships of the Germanic Empire, but rather with the private economy on the emperor’s estates. But it would certainly be a historical error for anyone to try to oppose these two concepts in the context of the Middle Ages. The capitulary does indeed refer to the economy on the estates and properties of Charlemagne, but he managed this economy as ruler, not as a private person. Or more accurately: the emperor was a lord on his domains, but likewise any noble lord in the Middle Ages, i.e. in the time after Charlemagne, was more or less such an emperor on a small scale, i.e. he was by virtue of his free noble domain a legislator, tax collector and judge for the population on his estates. The very form of Charlemagne’s economic dispositions, as we have mentioned them, shows that these were indeed acts of government: they make up one of his sixty-five laws or capitularies which, drafted by the emperor, were made known at the annual imperial assemblies of his magnates. And the regulations about radishes and iron-clad wine barrels derive from the same fullness of power and are drafted in the same style as, for example, the admonitions to the bishops in his “Capitula episcoporum,”41 in which Charles gives the bishops a box on the ears and warns them energetically not to curse, not to get drunk, not to visit places of ill-fame, not to keep women or charge too high a price for the holy sacraments. We may go where we please in the Middle Ages, but nowhere in the countryside do we find an economic enterprise for which Charlemagne’s does not offer a model and a type, whether it is the estates of noble lords or the simple peasant holding, whether we have an individual peasant family operating for itself or a communally operating mark42 community.
What is most striking in both examples is that here the needs of human life directly govern and determine labor, and the result thus corresponds so exactly to intention and need that the relationships maintain, whether on a greater or smaller scale, this surprising simplicity and transparency. Both the small peasant on his holding and the great monarch in his court know quite exactly what they want to achieve by their production. And no magic is required to know this: both want to satisfy the natural human needs for eating and drinking, clothing and the conveniences of life. The only difference is that the peasant sleeps on a straw sack and the great lord on a soft featherbed, one drinks beer and mead, or just plain water, while the other has fine wine on his table. But the basis of the economy and its task of directly satisfying human needs remains the same. The result corresponds in the same self-evident way to the labor that proceeds from this natural task. Here too, again, there are differences in the labor process: the peasant works along with his family members, and the fruits of his labor correspond to the extent of his holding and his share in the common land; more precisely—since we are speaking here of medieval serf labor—he what is left over after providing dues and labor services for the lords and the church. The emperor or any other noble lord does not work himself, but has his subjects and subordinates work for him. But whether a peasant and his family work for themselves, or all together under the management of a village headman, or under the lord’s bailiff, the result of this labor is still nothing other than a particular sum of means of subsistence in the wider sense, i.e. precisely what is required, and more or less in the amount required. No matter which way you look at an economy of this kind, there is no puzzle to be found in it that could only be solved by profound investigation and a special science. The slowest-witted peasant in the Middle Ages knew precisely what his “wealth”—or rather, his poverty—depended on, leaving aside the natural phenomena that visited both lord’s and peasant’s lands from time to time. He knew quite precisely that his distress as a peasant had a very simple and direct cause: first of all the boundless extraction of labor services and dues on the part of the lords, and secondly the theft by these same lords of common lands—woods, meadows and waters. And what the peasant knew he cried aloud to the world in the peasant wars, and showed by setting fire to the houses of his bloodsuckers. What remains for scientific investigation here is only the historical origin and development of those relationships, the question as to how it could happen that throughout Europe the formerly free peasant landholdings were transformed into noble estates extracting dues and tolls, the formerly free peasantry into a mass of subjects liable to serf labor and later also to monetary dues.
The situation looks completely different as soon as we turn to any phenomenon of present-day economic life. Let us take for example one of the most remarkable and outstanding phenomena: the trade crisis. We have all experienced already several major crises of trade and industry, and are familiar from our own observation with the process classically described by Frederick Engels in the following terms:
Commerce is at a standstill, the markets are glutted, products accumulate, as multitudinous as they are unsalable, hard cash disappears, credit vanishes, factories are closed, the mass of the workers are in want of the means of subsistence; bankruptcy follows upon bankruptcy, execution upon execution. The stagnation lasts for years; productive force and products are wasted and destroyed wholesale, until the accumulated mass of commodities finally filter off, more or less depreciated in value, until production and exchange gradually begin to move again. Little by little the pace quickens. It becomes a trot. The industrial trot breaks into a canter, the canter in return grows into the headlong gallop of a perfect steeplechase of industry, commercial credit, and speculation, which finally, after breakneck leaps, ends where it began—in the ditch of a crisis.43
We all know that a commercial crisis of this kind is the terror of every modern country, and the way in which such a crisis is heralded is already very instructive. After a spell of some years of prosperity and good business, a vague rumor begins in the press here and there, with reports of some disturbing news about bankruptcies on the stock exchanges; then the spots in the press become larger, the stock exchange ever more turbulent, the central bank raises the discount rate, making the supply of credit more difficult and limited, until news about bankruptcies and unsalable stocks falls like a cloudburst. The crisis is then in full swing, and the struggle now is about who bears responsibility. The business people blame the brusque refusal of credit by the banks, the banks blame the speculative craze of the stockbrokers, they in turn blame the industrialists, the industrialists blame the lack of money in the country, and so on. And when business finally begins to get under way again, it is once more the stock exchange and the newspapers that note the first signs of improvement, until hope, calm and security again appear for a while. What is remarkable about all this, however, is the fact that the crisis is seen and treated by all those involved, by the whole society, as something that stands outside the realm of human will and human calculation, like a blow of fate inflicted on us by an invisible power, a test from heaven of the same order as a severe storm, an earthquake or a flood. Even the language in which the newspapers like to report a crisis is fond of such expressions as “gloomy clouds are gathering over the formerly bright skies of the business world,” or, if a sharp increase in the discount rate is announced, they inevitably use the headline “Storm Signal,” just as we later read about the thunder passing and the horizon brightening. This way of writing expresses rather more than mere fatuousness on the part of the ink coolies of the business world, it is precisely typical of the strange effect of the crisis, its apparently law-like character. Modern society notes its approach with terror, it bends its neck and trembles at the hail-like blows, it awaits the end of the test and then raises its head again, at first timid and unbelieving, then finally relieved.
This is precisely the way that, in the Middle Ages, people awaited the outbreak of a great famine or plague, the way that country folk today suffer a heavy thunderstorm and hail: the same helplessness and impotence in the face of a severe trial. And yet famine and plague, even if ultimately social phenomena, are initially and immediately the results of natural phenomena: a harvest failure, the spread of disease-inducing germs and the like. Thunder is a basic event of physical nature, and no one, at least at the present stage of science and technology, is able to bring about a thunderstorm or to avert one. But what is this modern crisis? It consists, as we know, in too many commodities being produced without finding an outlet, with the result that trade and industry come to a halt. The production and sale of commodities, trade and industry—all these are purely human relations. It is people themselves who produce commodities, and people themselves who buy them; trade is conducted between one person and another, and in the circumstance that make up the modern crisis we do not find a single element that lies outside of human action. It is therefore nothing other than human society itself that periodically provokes the crisis. And yet we also know that the crisis is a real trial for modern society, that it is expected with dread and suffered with desperation, that it is not wanted or wished for by anyone. Apart from a few stock-exchange sharks who try to enrich themselves quickly during a crisis at the expense of others, but frequently fail in the process, the crisis is for everyone at the very least a danger or a disturbance. No one wants the crisis, and yet it comes. People create it with their own hands, yet they do not intend it for anything in the world. The medieval peasant on his little plot produced partly what his lord required, partly what he himself needed: grain and meat, provisions for himself and his family. The great medieval lord had others produce for him what he wanted and needed: grain and meat, fine wines and fine clothes, means of subsistence and luxury goods for himself and his household. Present-day society however produces what it neither wants nor can use: crises. It periodically produces means of subsistence that it cannot consume; it suffers periodic hunger alongside tremendous stocks of unsold products. Need and satisfaction, the purpose and the result of labor, no longer match; between them stands something unclear and puzzling.
Let us take another example, all too well known to workers of all countries: unemployment. Unemployment is no longer, like crises, a cataclysm that visits society from time to time. It has become today, to a greater or lesser degree, a constant and everyday accompaniment to economic life. The most well-organized and well-paid categories of workers, who keep lists of their unemployed, show an uninterrupted series of figures for each year, even each month and week; these figures fluctuate substantially, but they never completely peter out. How powerless present-day society is in the face of unemployment, this dreadful scourge of the working class, is shown each time that the scale of this evil becomes so great that it forces legislative bodies to concern themselves with it. The regular course of such discussions, after a lengthy to-ing and fro-ing, culminates in the decision to conduct an inquiry, an investigation, into the present number of unemployed. The main thing here is to measure the present state of the evil, as the level of water is measured with a depth gauge in times of flood, and in the best case weak palliative measures are taken in the form of support for the unemployed—generally at the cost of those in work—with a view to dampening the effects of the evil, without the slightest attempt being made to do away with the evil itself.
In the early years of the nineteenth century, Reverend [Thomas] Malthus, the great prophet of the English bourgeoisie, proclaimed with the heart-chilling brutality that was characteristic of him:
A man born into a world already occupied, whose family has no means of supporting him or of whose labor society has no need, has not any right to demand any portion whatever of food. He is really one too many on the land. No cover is laid for him at the great banquet of Nature. Nature tells him to go away, and does not delay herself to put the order into execution.44
Official society today, with its characteristic “social-reforming” hypocrisy, scorns such crass expressions. In practice, however, it finally tells the unemployed proletarian, “whose labor it does not need,” to “go away” in one way or another, quickly or slowly, to leave this world—the increasing figures of disease, infant mortality and crimes against property during every great crisis speak for themselves.
The comparison we have made between unemployment and flood even shows the striking fact that we are less impotent in the face of elemental events of a physical kind than we are towards our own, purely social, purely human affairs! The periodic spring floods that do such damage in the east of Germany are ultimately only the result of the current neglected state of water management. The present level of technology already affords sufficient means for protecting agriculture from the power of water, even for making good use of this power; it is just that these methods can only be applied at the highest level of a large-scale, interconnected, rational water management, which would have to refigure the whole area affected, appropriately disposing arable zones and meadows, building dams and sluices, and regulating rivers. A great reform of this kind can certainly not be undertaken, partly because neither private capitalists nor the state are willing to provide the resources for such an project, partly because on the large scale that would be needed, the barriers of a whole range of private landowning rights would be infringed. But society today does have the resources for tackling the water danger and harnessing the raging element, even if it is not in a position to use them at this time. On the other hand, this society has not discovered a method for combating unemployment. And yet this not an element, a natural phenomenon of physics, but a purely human product of economic relations. And once again here we come up against an economic puzzle, a phenomenon that no one intended, no one consciously strove for, but which all the same appears with the regularity of a natural phenomenon, over people’s heads as it were.
But we need in no way take the case of these striking phenomena of present-day life, crises or unemployment, calamities and cases of an extraordinary nature, which in popular imagination form an exception to the usual course of things. Let us take one of the most familiar examples from everyday life, repeated a thousand times in all countries: the fluctuating prices of commodities. Every child knows that the prices of goods are in no case fixed and unchangeable, but on the contrary, go up and down almost daily—sometimes, indeed, every hour. If we pick up a newspaper, and turn to the report on the commodities market, we can read the price movements of the previous day: wheat rather weak in the morning, somewhat livelier in the afternoon, rising towards the close of business, or else falling. The same goes for copper and iron, sugar and vegetable oil. And likewise with shares in different industrial firms, government and private bonds, on the stock market. Price fluctuations are a constant, daily, quite “normal” phenomenon of contemporary economic life. These price movements, moreover, cause a daily and hourly change in the wealth of those who possess all these products and papers. If the cotton price rises, then the wealth of all dealers and manufacturers who have stocks of cotton in their warehouses also rises temporarily; if prices fall, their wealth dwindles similarly. If copper prices rise, then the owners of shares in the copper mines grow richer, and if these fall, they grow poorer. In this way, people can become millionaires or beggars in a few hours as a result of simple fluctuations in price, as reported in a stock-market telegram, and this is the essential basis of the whole giddiness of stock-market speculation. The medieval lord could grow richer or poorer as a result of a good or a bad harvest, or enrich himself as a robber baron making a good catch by waylaying a passing merchant, or—and this was the most well-tested and favored method—increase his wealth by pressing more out of his peasant serfs than he managed previously, by increasing the services and dues he demanded. Today, a man can suddenly become rich or poor without doing the slightest thing himself, without lifting a finger, without any kind of natural event, even without anyone having given him something or violently robbing him. Price fluctuations are likewise a secretive movement, guided behind people’s backs by an invisible power, and causing a continuous shift and fluctuation in the distribution of social wealth. The movement is noted in the same way as temperature is indicated on a thermometer, air pressure on a barometer. And yet commodity prices and their movements are obviously a purely human affair, with no magic involved. It is no one but people themselves who produce commodities with their own hands and determine their prices, simply that here again their action gives rise to something that no one intended or had in mind; here again, the need, end and result of people’s economic action come into blatant imbalance.
What is the reason for this, and what are the obscure laws that make people’s own economic life today bring about such strange events behind their backs? This can only be revealed by scientific investigation. It has become necessary to solve all these puzzles by way of strenuous investigation, deep reflection, analysis and comparison, in other words to make explicit the hidden connections that bring it about that the results of people’s economic action no longer coincide with their intentions and their will—in sum, their consciousness. The lack of consciousness within the social economy thus becomes a task for scientific research; and here we have arrived directly at the root of political economy.
In recounting his journey around the world, Darwin says of the inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego:
They often suffer from famine: I heard Mr. Low, a sealing-master intimately acquainted with the natives of this country, give a curious account of the state of a party of one hundred and fifty natives on the west coast, who were very thin and in great distress. A succession of gales prevented the women from getting shellfish on the rocks, and they could not go out in their canoes to catch seal. A small party of these men one morning set out, and the other Indians explained to him, that they were going a four days’ journey for food: on their return, Low went to meet them, and he found them excessively tired, each man carrying a great square piece of putrid whale’s-blubber with a hole in the middle, through which they put their heads, like the Gauchos do through their ponchos or cloaks. As soon as the blubber was brought into a wigwam, an old man cut off thin slices, and muttering over them, broiled them for a minute, and distributed them to the famished party, who during this time preserved a profound silence.XIV
So much for the life of one of the most backward peoples on earth. The limits within which their will and deliberate ordering of their economy can operate are here still extremely narrow. People here are still completely tied to the apron strings of external nature, and depend on its favor and disfavor. But within these narrow limits, the organization of the whole small society of some hundred and fifty individuals prevails. Concern for the future is only expressed in the wretched form of a stock of putrid whale’s blubber. But this putrid stock is divided between everyone with due ceremony, and everyone similarly participates in the work of seeking food, under planned leadership.
Let us turn to a Greek oikos, the household economy of antiquity with slaves, which by and large also formed a “microcosm,” a little world unto itself. Here extreme social inequality already prevails. Primitive need has been transformed into a comfortable surplus of the fruits of human labor. Physical labor has become the curse of some, idleness the privilege of others, with those who work even becoming the property of the non-workers. Yet here again, this relationship of domination involves the strictest planning and organization of the economy, the labor process and distribution. The determining will of the master is its foundation, the whip of the slave overseer its sanction.
On the feudal manor of the Middle Ages, the despotic organization of labor receives early on the visage of a detailed code elaborated in advance, in which the plan and division of labor, the duties of each as well as their claims, are clearly and firmly defined. On the threshold of this period of history stands that fine document that we have already cited: Charlemagne’s “Capitulare de villis,” which still revels joyously and brightly in the wealth of physical enjoyments to which the economy is completely directed. At its end we have the baneful code of services and dues which, dictated by the unrestrained financial greed of the feudal lords, led to the German peasant war45 of the sixteenth century,46 and made the French peasant still 200 years later into that miserable and semi-bestialized creature who was only shaken to struggle for his human and civil rights by the shrill alarm clock of the great Revolution. But, until the broom of revolution swept away the feudal manor, this peasant was still in the misery of the relationship of direct mastery that firmly and clearly defined the relations of the feudal economy as an unavoidable fate.
Today we have neither masters nor slaves, neither feudal barons nor serfs. Freedom and equality before the law have in formal terms done away with all despotic relationships, at least in the old bourgeois states; in the colonies, as is well known, these same states have frequently themselves introduced slavery and serfdom. Everywhere that the bourgeoisie is at home, free competition rules economic relations as their one and only law. This means the disappearance from the economy of any kind of plan or organization. Of course, if we look at an individual private firm, a modern factory or a large complex of factories and plants such as Krupp’s, alternatively a great agricultural enterprise such as those of North America, we find here the strictest organization, the most far-reaching division of labor, the most refined planning based on scientific knowledge. Here everything works beautifully, directed by a single will and consciousness. But we scarcely leave the factory or farm gate than we are met already with chaos. Whereas the countless individual components—and a private firm today, even the most gigantic, is only a fragment of the great economic network that extends across the whole earth—whereas the fragments are most strictly organized, the whole of the so-called “national economy,” i.e. the capitalist world economy, is completely unorganized. In the whole, which stretches across oceans and continents, no plan, no consciousness, no regulation prevails; only the blind reign of unknown, uncontrolled forces plays its capricious game with people’s economic fate. There is indeed, still today, an over-powerful lord that governs working humanity: capital. But its form of government is not despotism but anarchy.
And it creates this anarchy by having the social economy bring about results that are unexpected and puzzling even to the people involved; it turns the social economy into a phenomenon that is foreign to us and alienated, whose laws we have to discover in the same way as we investigate the phenomena of external nature, which govern the life of the vegetable and animal realms, changes in the earth’s crust and the movements of heavenly bodies. Scientific knowledge must subsequently discover the meaning and rule of the social economy, which no conscious plan has dictated in advance.
It is now clear why bourgeois political economists find it impossible to clearly pinpoint the nature of their science, to put their finger into the wound of their social order, to denounce it in its inherent criminality. To discover and confess that anarchy is the life element of the rule of capital means in the same breath to pronounce a death sentence, it means saying that its existence is only granted a temporary reprieve. It is clear now why the official scientific advocates of the rule of capital seek to conceal the matter with every kind of word-spinning, to direct attention away from the core to the outer shell, from the global economy to the “national economy.” At the very first step across the threshold of political-economic knowledge, with the first fundamental question as to what political economy actually is and what is its basic problem, the paths of bourgeois and proletarian knowledge already diverge. With this first question, however abstract and immaterial for present social struggles it may appear at first sight, a special tie is already drawn between political economy as a science and the modern proletariat as a revolutionary class.
Once we adopt the perspective we have now reached, many things that first appeared uncertain now become clear.
To start with, the question of how old political economy is. A science whose task is to disclose the laws of the anarchic capitalist mode of production could naturally not arise earlier than this mode of production itself, not before the historical conditions for the class rule of the modern bourgeoisie had gradually been assembled by political and economic changes over the centuries.
According to Professor Bücher, of course, the origin of the present-day social order was something extremely simple, having little to do with preceding economic development. It was in fact the result of the superior will and elevated wisdom of absolutist princes.
“The construction of the national economy,” Bücher explains—and we already know that for a bourgeois professor the concept “national economy” is only a mystifying description of capitalist production—
is essentially a result of the political centralization that began with the rise of the territorial state model towards the end of the Middle Ages, and is reaching its culmination today with the creation of the unitary national state. The concentration of economic powers goes hand in hand with the bending of political special interests to the higher purposes of the whole. In Germany, it was the larger territorial princes who sought to bring the modern state idea to expression, in struggle with the landed aristocracy and the cities.XV
But princely power also wrought the same great deeds in the rest of Europe—in Spain, Portugal, England, France, and the Netherlands.
In all these countries, if to a varying degree, the struggle with the separate powers of the Middle Ages took place: the great nobles, the cities, provinces, spiritual and temporal corporations. Initially, it was a question of abolishing the independent circles that stood as an obstacle in the way of political concentration. But at the underlying foundation of the movement that led to the development of princely absolutism, there still slumbered the world-historical idea that the new and greater tasks of human civilization required a united organization of whole peoples, a great living community of interest, and this could only arise on the basis of a common economy.XVI
We have here the finest flowering of that serviceability in matters of thought that we have already noted among German professors of political economy. According to Professor Schmoller, the science of political economy arose at the command of enlightened absolutism. According to Professor Bücher, the whole capitalist mode of production is simply the fruit of sovereign will and the heaven-storming plans of absolutist princes. It would of course be very unfair to the great Spanish and French despots, not to mention their petty German counterparts, to raise the suspicion that in their boisterous games with the arrogant feudal lords at the end of the Middle Ages, or their bloody crusades against the cities of the Netherlands, they troubled themselves with any kind of “world-historical ideas” or “tasks of human civilization.” This would mean turning historical events upside down.
Certainly, the establishment of large centralized bureaucratic states was an indispensable precondition for the capitalist mode of production, yet it was just as much itself only a consequence of the new economic requirements, so that it would be far more justifiable to turn Bücher’s proposition around and declare that the construction of political centralization was “essentially” a fruit of the maturing “national economy,” i.e. of capitalist production.
But if absolutism had an incontestable share in this process of historical preparation, it played this part with the same stupid lack of thought of a blind instrument of historical developmental tendencies, and could likewise contradict these same tendencies whenever the occasion arose. Thus the medieval despots by the grace of God considered the cities allied with them against the feudal lords simply as objects for blackmail, which they betrayed again to the feudal lords at the first opportunity. Thus they viewed the newly discovered regions of the world, with all their population and culture, immediately and exclusively as a suitable field for the most brutal, pernicious and crude plunder, to fill the “princely treasuries” with gold nuggets as quickly as possible, for a “higher cultural purpose.” In the same way, later, we had the stubborn resistance to interposing between the “grace of God” rulers and their “loyal peoples” that sheet of paper, called a bourgeois parliamentary constitution, which is just as indispensable for the unhindered development of the rule of capital as is political unity and the large centralized states themselves.
It was in fact quite other powers at work, great shifts in the economic life of the European nations as they emerged from the Middle Ages, that pioneered the move to the new form of economy.
Once the discovery of America and the circumnavigation of Africa, i.e. the discovery of the sea route to India, had led to an unforeseen upswing and a shift in trade, the dissolution of feudalism and the guild regime was a powerful tendency in the towns. The violent conquests, land acquisitions and plundering expeditions in the newly discovered lands, the great spice trade with India, the extension of the slave trade supplying black Africans to the American plantations, very soon created in Western Europe new wealth and new needs. The small workshop of the guild artisan with all its fetters proved an impediment on the necessary expansion of production and its rapid progress. The great merchants created a way out by gathering artisans together in large factories outside the city precincts, so as to have them produce more speedily and better, untroubled by the narrow-minded guild regulations.
In England, the new mode of production was introduced by a revolution in the agricultural economy. The blossoming of wool manufacture in Flanders, with its great demand for wool, gave English feudal nobles the impulse to transform large expanses of agricultural land into sheep-walks, which meant the larger part of the English peasantry being driven out of house and home. This meant the creation of a massive number of property-less workers, proletarians, at the disposal of the emerging capitalist manufacture. The Reformation worked in the same direction, with the confiscation of church properties, some of which were handed to the court nobility and speculators, others squandered, with the greater part of their peasant population likewise driven from the soil. The manufacturers and capitalist farmers thus found a massive poor and proletarianized population, outside both feudal and guild restrictions, who, after a long martyrdom of vagabond existence, and bloody persecution by law and police, found a safe haven in wage slavery for the new class of exploiters. There immediately followed also the great technological transformations in manufacturing, which made it possible increasingly to use greater numbers of unskilled wage proletarians in place of skilled artisans or alongside them.
All this pressure and striving towards new relationships came up against feudal barriers and the misery of decomposing conditions. The natural economy that was determined by feudalism and in its very nature, as well as the impoverishment of the popular masses by the limitless pressure of serfdom, naturally restricted the domestic market for manufactured goods, while at the same time the guilds continued to fetter the most important condition of production, labor-power, in the towns. The state apparatus with its endless political fragmentation, its lack of public security, its jumble of tariff and trade-policy confusion, inhibited and burdened the new trade and production at every turn.
It was clear that the rising bourgeoisie in Western Europe, as representative of free world trade and manufacture, had in some way or another to clear all these obstacles out of the way, if it did not want to completely renounce its world-historical mission. Before it broke feudalism to pieces in the great French Revolution, it first struggled with it critically, and the new science of political economy thus arose as one of the most important ideological weapons of the bourgeoisie in its struggle against the medieval feudal state and for the modern state of the capitalist class. The new economic order that was breaking through appeared right away in the form of new and rapidly arising riches, which poured over West European society and stemmed from quite different, more profitable and apparently inexhaustible sources than the patriarchal methods of feudal peasant slavery, which in any case had already reached the end of their natural life. The most striking source of the new enrichment was at first not the emerging new mode of production, but rather its pacemaker, the powerful upswing of world trade on the emergence from the Middle Ages—in the rich Italian commercial republics on the Mediterranean and in Spain, where the first questions of political economy arose, as well as the first attempts to answer them.
What is wealth? How do states become wealthy, and how are they made poor? This was the new problem, once the old notions of feudal society had lost their traditional validity in the whirlpool of new relations. Wealth is gold, for which anything can be bought. Trade therefore creates wealth. So those states become rich that are in a position to bring much gold into the country and not let any out. World trade, therefore, along with colonial conquests in the newly discovered lands and manufactures that produce goods for export, must be promoted by the state, while the import of products from abroad, which would draw gold out of the country, is forbidden. This was the first doctrine of political economy, which appeared in Italy already at the end of the sixteenth century, and came to prevail generally in the seventeenth century in England and France. And no matter how crude this doctrine was, it did offer the first sharp break with the mental universe of feudal natural economy, the first bold criticism of it, the first idealization of trade, of commodity production, and in this form—of capital: in sum the first program of a state policy after the hearts of the young bourgeoisie struggling to advance.
The focus soon switched from the merchant to the commodity-producing capitalist, but still only cautiously, under the mask of humble servant in the anteroom of the feudal lord. Wealth is by no means gold, which is simply the mediator in commodity trade, so the French lumières47 proclaimed in the eighteenth century. What a childish confusion to see gleaming metal as the firm basis of fortune! Can I eat metal if I’m hungry, or can it protect me from the winter cold? Didn’t the Persian king Darius, with all his gold treasure, suffer from dreadful pangs of thirst on the battlefield, and would have willingly given it all away for a sip of water?48 No, wealth means the gifts of nature in foodstuffs and materials, with which all of us, king and beggar alike, satisfy our needs. The more lavishly a population satisfies its needs, the wealthier a state is, as it can draw all the more in tax. But who is it that coaxes nature to make corn into bread, to make the thread from which we spin our clothes, the wood and ore from which we build houses and machinery? Agriculture! It is agriculture, not trade, that forms the true fount of wealth. The mass of the agricultural population, accordingly, the peasant masses whose hands create the wealth of everyone, must be rescued from their boundless misery, protected from feudal exploitation, raised up to well-being! (And in this way I shall also find a market for my goods, the manufacturing capitalist quietly adds.) The great lords of the land, therefore, the feudal barons, into whose hands the whole wealth of agriculture flows, should be the only ones who pay taxes and maintain the state! (Which means, the capitalist again murmurs into his beard with a smile, that I also need pay no taxes.) Agriculture, accordingly, work in the bosom of nature, need only be freed from all the chains of feudalism, for the springs of wealth to flow in their natural abundance for people and state, and the supreme happiness of all people to stand automatically in a necessary harmony with the whole.49
If in these Enlightenment doctrines could be clearly heard already the approaching rumble of the storming of the Bastille [in 1789], the capitalist bourgeoisie soon felt strong enough to throw off the mask of obsequiousness, place itself sturdily in the foreground and demand without beating about the bush the restructuring of the whole state to suit them. Agriculture was in no way the only source of wealth, Adam Smith declared in England in the late eighteenth century. All wage labor that was harnessed to commodity production created wealth, whether on the farm or in manufacture! (Any kind of labor, said Adam Smith; but for him and his followers—who were already no more than a mouthpiece for the emerging bourgeoisie—people who labored were by nature capitalist wage-laborers!) For all wage-labor created, besides the most necessary wage for the worker’s own subsistence, also rent to maintain the lord of the land and a profit as the wealth of the owner of capital, the entrepreneur. And this wealth was all the greater, the larger the number of workers in a workshop who were harnessed to labor under the command of a single capital, and the more detailed and meticulous the division of labor among them. This then was the true natural harmony, the true wealth of nations: from any kind of work, a wage for the laborers, a wage that kept them alive and forced them to further wage-labor; a rent sufficient for the careless life of the lords; and a profit attractive enough to make it worthwhile for the entrepreneur to pursue his business. Everyone is provided for without the clumsy old methods of feudalism. Promoting the “wealth of nations,” therefore, meant promoting the wealth of the capitalist entrepreneur, who keeps the whole system in motion and with it the golden vein of wealth—the bleeding of wage-labor. Away then with all chains and obstacles of the good old days, as well as the more recent paternal methods of the state. Free competition, the free blossoming of private capital, the whole apparatus of taxation and state in the service of the capitalist entrepreneur—and everything will be for the best in this best of all worlds!
This was the economic gospel of the bourgeoisie, with all the wrappings peeled away, and with it political economy finally acquired its fundamental and true form. Of course, the practical reform proposals and advice of the bourgeoisie to the feudal state came to grief as hopelessly as all historic attempts to pour new wine into old bottles. In twenty-four hours the hammer of revolution succeeded in doing what half a century of reforming patchwork had failed to do. It was in fact the conquest of political power that provided the bourgeoisie with the conditions of their supremacy. But political economy, along with the philosophical, social and natural-rights theories of the age of Enlightenment, was above all a means for acquiring self-consciousness, a formulation of the class consciousness of the bourgeoisie and as such a precondition and impulse for the revolutionary act. Even in its palest offshoots, the work of bourgeois world-renovation in Europe was fed by the ideas of classical political economy. The bourgeoisie in England, in its stormy period of struggle for free trade, with which it inaugurated its supremacy on the world market, drew its weapons from the arsenal of Smith and Ricardo. And even the reformers of the Stein-Hardenberg-Scharnhorst era, who wanted to give Prussia’s feudal plunder a more modern touch after the blows received at the battle of Jena,50 if only to enhance its capacity for survival, developed their ideas from the doctrines of the English classics, so that the “young German”51 political economist [Alexander von der] Marwitz could write in 1810 that along with Napoleon, Adam Smith was the most powerful ruler in Europe.52
If we understand then why political economy first arose some hundred and fifty years ago, its later destiny becomes clear from the same point of view. If political economy appears as a science of the particular laws of the capitalist mode of production, its existence and function are evidently linked to the existence of this, and lose their foundation once this mode of production ceases to exist. In other words: political economy as a science has played out its role as soon as the anarchic economy of capitalism makes way for a planned economic order, consciously organized and managed by the whole of working society. The victory of the modern working class and the realization of socialism accordingly mean the end of political economy as a science. This is where a particular connection arises between political economy and the class struggle of the modern proletariat.
If it is the task and object of political economy to explain the laws of the origin, development and spread of the capitalist mode of production, it is an unavoidable consequence that it must as a further consequence also discover the laws of the decline of capitalism, which just like previous economic forms is not of eternal duration, but is simply a transitional phase of history, a rung on the endless ladder of social development. The doctrine of the emergence of capitalism thus logically turns into the doctrine of the decline of capitalism, the science of the mode of production of capital into the scientific foundation of socialism, the theoretical means of the bourgeoisie’s domination into a weapon of the revolutionary class struggle for the liberation of the proletariat.
This second part of the general problem of political economy has of course not been solved by either French or English scholars from the bourgeois class, still less their German counterparts. One man drew the final consequences of the theory of the capitalist mode of production, a man who stood from the start on the class position of the revolutionary proletariat: Karl Marx. With this, socialism and the modern workers’ movement was placed for the first time on an unshakeable foundation of scientific knowledge.
Socialism goes back for thousands of years, as the ideal of a social order based on equality and the brotherhood of man, the ideal of a communistic society. With the first apostles of Christianity, various religious sects of the Middle Ages, and in the German peasants’ war, the socialist idea always glistened as the most radical expression of rage against the existing society. But in this ideal form, which could commend itself to any social milieu at any time, socialism remained no more than a golden fantasy, as unachievable as the appearance of the rainbow against the background of clouds.
It was in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century that the socialist idea first appeared with vigor and force, freed from religious enthusiasm, but rather as an opposition to the terror and devastation that emerging capitalism wreaked on society. Yet this socialism too was basically nothing but a dream, the invention of individual bold minds. If we listen to the first forerunner of the revolutionary uprisings of the proletariat, Gracchus Babeuf, who carried out an attempted coup during the great French Revolution for the forcible introduction of social equality,53 the only fact on which he was able to base his communist strivings was the gaping inequality of the existing social order. He did not tire, in his passionate articles and pamphlets, likewise in his speech in his own defense before the tribunal that sentenced him to death, of painting this in the most dismal colors. His gospel of socialism was a monotonous repetition of charges against the inequality of the existing order, against the sufferings and pains, the misery and humiliation, of the working masses, at whose expense a handful of idle people grow rich and rule. It was enough for Babeuf that the existing social order deserved to collapse, and it could in fact have been overthrown a hundred years earlier if there had been a group of determined men to seize state power and introduce a regime of equality, as the Jacobins54 of 1795 sought to seize political power and introduce the republic.
The socialist ideas represented by the three great thinkers: [Claude Henri] Saint-Simon and [Charles] Fourier in France, [Robert] Owen in England, in the 1820s and 30s, with far greater genius and brilliance, relied on quite different methods, but essentially rested on the same foundation. Certainly, none of these three had in mind a revolutionary seizure of power for the realization of socialism; on the contrary, they were, like the whole generation that followed the great Revolution [of 1789], disappointed by all social overthrow and all politics, and avowed supporters of purely peaceful propaganda methods. Yet the basis of the socialist idea was the same for all three: in essence, this was simply the project and invention of a mind of genius, who recommended its realization to tortured humanity, in order to redeem them from the hell of the bourgeois social order.
These socialist theories thus remained, despite the force of their criticisms and the spell of their future ideals, without significant influence on the real movements and struggles of contemporary history. Babeuf and his handful of friends sank like a frail bark in the powerful counter-revolutionary wash, without at first leaving any trace but a short illuminating line on the pages of revolutionary history. Saint-Simon and Fourier only founded sects of enthusiastic and talented supporters, who after a while scattered or took new directions, after they had spread rich and fertile stimulus in terms of social ideas, criticisms and initiatives. It was Owen who had most effect on the mass of the proletariat, yet even his influence, after inspiring an elite troop of English workers in the 1830s and 40s, subsequently disappeared without trace.
A new generation of socialist leaders emerged in the 1840s: [Wilhelm] Weitling in Germany, [Pierre Joseph] Proudhon, Louis Blanc and Blanqui in France. The working class, for its part, had already embarked on struggle against the rule of capital, it had given the signal for class struggle in the elemental insurrections of the Lyons silk weavers in France,55 and in the Chartist movement in England. But there was no direct connection between these spontaneous stirrings of exploited masses and the various socialist theories. The revolutionary proletarian masses did not have a definite socialist goal in mind, nor did the socialist theorists seek to base their ideas on a political struggle of the working class. Their socialism was to be realized by cleverly thought-out arrangements, such as Proudhon’s “people’s bank” for fair exchange of goods, or Louis Blanc’s producer associations.56 The only socialist who counted on political struggle as a means to carry out the social revolution was Blanqui, who was in this way the only genuine representative of the proletariat and its revolutionary class interest in this period. But his socialism was basically a project that was achievable at any time, as the fruit of the determined will of a revolutionary minority and a sudden overthrow that this would achieve.
The year 1848 was to see both the culmination and the crisis of this earlier socialism in all its varieties. The Paris proletariat, influenced by traditions of earlier revolutionary struggle and roused by various socialist systems, passionately clung to the vague ideas of a just social order. As soon as the bourgeois monarchy of Louis-Philippe was toppled,57 the Paris workers used their position of power to demand from the terrified bourgeoisie the realization now of the “social republic” and a new “organization of labor.” For the achievement of this program, the proletariat afforded the provisional government the celebrated timeframe of three months, during which time the workers starved and waited, while the bourgeoisie and petty-bourgeoisie quietly armed and prepared the subjection of the workers. The period ended with the memorable butchery of June, in which the ideal of a “social republic” achievable at any time was drowned in the streaming blood of the Paris proletariat.58 The revolution of 1848 did not introduce the realm of social equality, but rather the political rule of the bourgeoisie and an unprecedented upswing of capitalist exploitation under the Second Empire.
At the same time, however, that socialism of the old schools seemed buried forever beneath the demolished barricades of the June insurrection, the socialist idea was placed on a completely new footing by Marx and Engels. These two sought the basis for socialism not in moral repugnance towards the existing social order nor in cooking up all kinds of possible attractive and seductive projects, designed to smuggle in social equality within the present state. They turned to the investigation of the economic relationships of present-day society. Here, in the laws of capitalist anarchy itself, Marx discovered the real starting-point for socialist efforts. If the French and English classics of political economy had discovered the laws by which the capitalist economy lived and developed, Marx took up their work half a century later precisely at the point where they had broken this off. He discovered for his part how these same laws of the present-day social order acted towards their own downfall, by increasingly threatening the existence of society with the spread of anarchy and forming a chain of devastating economic and political catastrophes. It was thus, as Marx showed, the developmental tendencies of the rule of capital itself that at a certain stage of their maturity made necessary the transition to a planned mode of production, consciously organized by the whole working society, if the whole of society and human culture were not to collapse in the convulsions of unleashed anarchy. And the rule of capital hastened this fateful hour ever more energetically by bringing together its future gravediggers, the proletarians, in ever greater masses, by spreading itself over all corners of the earth, producing an anarchic world economy and in this way creating the basis for the proletariat of all countries to combine in a revolutionary world power for the abolition of capitalist class rule. In this way socialism ceased to be a project, a beautiful fantasy or even an experiment of particular groups of workers in separate countries. As the common program of political action of the international proletariat, socialism is a historical necessity, since it is a fruit of the economic developmental tendencies of capitalism.
It is clear then why Marx placed his own economic doctrine outside official political economy, calling it a “critique of political economy.” The laws of capitalist anarchy and its future downfall that Marx brought to light are certainly a continuation of the political economy that was created by bourgeois scholars, but a continuation whose final results stand in very sharp contrast to the points of departure of this. The Marxian doctrine is a child of political economy, but a child that cost its mother her life. Political economy found its completion in Marx’s theory, but also its conclusion as a science. What is still to follow—apart from the detailed development of Marx’s doctrine—is simply the transformation of this doctrine into action, i.e. the struggle of the international proletariat for the realization of the socialist economic order. The end of political economy as a science thus amounts to a world historical act: its transformation into the practice of a world economy organized according to a plan. The final chapter of political-economic doctrine is the social revolution of the world proletariat.
The particular connection between political economy and the modern working class thereby proves to be a reciprocal relationship. If political economy, as this was extended by Marx, is on the one hand more than any other science the indispensable basis for proletarian enlightenment, on the other hand the class-conscious proletariat of today forms the only comprehending and receptive audience for the doctrine of political economy. At an earlier time, it was only with the decaying ruins of the old feudal society before their eyes that [François] Quesnay and [Pierre] Boisguilbert in France, Adam Smith and [David] Ricardo in England, full of pride and enthusiasm for the young bourgeois society and with a firm belief in the impending thousand-year rule of the bourgeoisie and its “natural” social harmony, fearlessly directed their penetrating gaze into the depths of the laws of capitalism.
Since then, the proletarian class struggle that has risen ever more powerfully, and especially the June insurrection of the Paris proletariat, has long since destroyed the faith of bourgeois society in its divine mandate. Since it has eaten from the tree of knowledge of modern class antagonisms, it shuns the classical nakedness in which it showed itself to the creators of its own political economy. It is clear today however that it was these scientific discoveries from which the spokesmen for the modern proletariat drew their most deadly weapons.
For several decades now, therefore, it is not just socialist political economy, but bourgeois political economy as well, in so far as this is genuinely scientific, that finds a deaf ear among the possessing classes. Unable to understand the teachings of their own great ancestors, and still less to accept the Marxian teaching that emerged from these and tolls the death knell of bourgeois society, today’s bourgeois scholars produce under the name of political economy an inchoate brew of garbage from all kinds of scientific ideas and self-interested confusions, no longer pursuing the goal of investigating the real tendencies of capitalism, but only striving for the opposite aim of concealing these tendencies in order to defend capitalism as the best, eternal, and only possible economic order.
Forgotten and betrayed by bourgeois society, scientific political economy now seeks its audience only among the class-conscious proletarians, finding with them not just theoretical understanding but also vigorous fulfillment. It is political economy more than anything else to which Lassalle’s well-known words apply: “If science and the workers, these two opposite poles of society, embrace one another, they will overwhelm in their arms all obstacles of civilization.”XVII
Our knowledge of the earliest and most primitive economic forms is very recent. In 1847, Marx and Engels wrote in the first classic proclamation of scientific socialism, the Communist Manifesto, that “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”59 But around the very same time that the creators of scientific socialism announced this notion, it began to be shaken by new discoveries on all sides. Almost every year brought formerly unknown insights into the ancient economic conditions of human society, leading to the conclusion that there must have been enormous stretches of time in past history in which there were not yet class struggles, since there was no division into different social classes, no distinction between rich and poor, and no private property.60
In the years 1851 to 1853, the first of Georg Ludwig von Maurer’s epoch-making works was published in Erlangen, the Einleitung zur Geschichte der Mark-, Hof-, Dorf- und Stadt-Verfassung und der öffentlichen Gewalt [Introduction to the History of the Mark, Court, Village and Town Constitution],61 casting a new light on the Germanic past and the social and economic structure of the Middle Ages. Several decades before, in some particular places—Germany, the Nordic countries and Iceland—people had already stumbled upon remarkable survivals of age-old agricultural arrangements that indicated the former existence of common ownership of land in those places, the existence of an agrarian communism. At first, however, no one knew what to make of these survivals. According to an earlier point of view, widespread since the writings of [Justus] Möser and [Nikolaus] Kindlinger, the cultivation of the soil in Europe was undertaken by individual households, each of whom was allocated a separate holding that was the household’s private property. Only in the later Middle Ages, it was believed, were the formerly scattered dwellings brought together into villages for the sake of greater security, and the formerly separated household plots bundled together as village ones. Improbable on closer consideration as this notion appears, the most unbelievable thing is what has to be assumed about its origin, i.e. that dwellings often quite far removed from one another were torn down simply to rebuild them in a different place, and further, that each person voluntarily gave up the convenient situation of his private fields around his house, which he was free to cultivate how he liked, in order to receive land that was divided into narrow strips scattered across open fields, whose cultivation was completely dependent on his fellow-villagers—unlikely as this theory was, it continued all the same to prevail until the mid nineteenth century. Maurer was the first to combine these various particular discoveries into a bold and wide-ranging theory, and he demonstrated conclusively, on the basis of immense factual material and the profoundest research in old archives, proclamations and legal institutions, that common property in land did not arise for the first time in the late Middle Ages, but was rather the typical and general age-old form of the Germanic settlements in Europe from the very beginning. Two thousand years ago and still earlier, in that first misty age of the Germanic people, who did not yet have any written history, the prevailing conditions were fundamentally different from those of today. There was then among the Germans no state with written obligatory laws, no divide between rich and poor, rulers and workers. They formed free tribes and clans, which wandered across Europe for a long time until they settled first temporarily and eventually permanently. The first cultivation of land in Germany, as Maurer showed, was undertaken not by individuals, but by whole clans and tribes, as it was in Iceland by larger societies known as frändalid and skulldalid—i.e. friendships and retinues.62 The oldest information about the ancient Germans, which we have from the Romans, authenticates this notion, as does the examination of institutions that have survived. The first peoples who populated Germany were migrating pastoralists. Like other nomads, stock raising and the possession of rich meadows for this was their main concern. In the long run, however, they could not exist without agriculture as well, as was also the case with other migrant peoples old and new. And it was precisely in this condition of nomadic economy mixed with agriculture, yet with stock-raising still apparently their main activity and cultivation something subordinate, that Julius Caesar found the Germanic populations of the Suevi or Swabians.63 Similar conditions, customs and institutions were also noted among the Franks, Allemanni, Vandals64 and other Germanic tribes. All these Germanic populations settled as coherent tribes and clans, rapidly cultivating the land and gathering together whenever more powerful tribes pressed one way or another, or their pasture was no longer sufficient. Only when the migrating tribes had become peaceful and none of the others any longer pressed them, did they remain for a longer time in these settlements and thus gradually acquired fixed territories. This settling down, however, whether at an earlier or a later date, whether on virgin land or on former Roman or Slavic possessions, took place by whole tribes and clans. In this process, each tribe, and each clan within a tribe, took over a particular area, which then belonged in common to everyone involved. The ancient Germans did not know any meum and tuum65 in connection with land. Each clan rather formed as it settled a so-called mark community, which cultivated, partitioned and worked in common the land that it held. Each individual received by lot a share of the fields, which he was only given to use for a definite time, the strictest equality being observed in this sharing of the land. All economic, legal and general affairs of these mark communities, which generally also formed a “hundred” of arms-bearing men, were handled by the assembly of mark members itself, and this also chose the mark leader and other public officials.
It was only in mountain, forest or marshy districts, where lack of space or cultivable land made denser settlement impossible, as for example in the Odenwald,66 Westphalia and the Alps, that the Germans settled as individual households. Yet these too formed into communities, with meadows, woods and pastures rather than fields being the common property of the whole village, the so-called “common land” (Allmende), and all public affairs being dealt with by the mark community.
The tribe, as the ensemble of many such mark communities, generally around a hundred, most often came into play only as the highest judicial and military unit. This mark-community organization, as Maurer showed in the twelve volumes of his great work, formed the foundation as well as the smallest cell of the whole social network, from the very start of the Middle Ages through to quite recent modern times, with feudal manors, villages and towns, in different modifications, all emerging out of it, and its ruins can be seen right to the present day in certain districts of Central and Northern Europe.
When the first discoveries of age-old common property in land in Germany and the Nordic countries became known, the theory was put forward that this was a particular and specifically Germanic institution, which could only be explained in terms of the particularities of the Germanic national character. Although Maurer himself was quite free from this national view of Germanic agricultural communism, and pointed out similar examples among other peoples, it generally remained a fixed assertion in Germany that the old rural mark community was a peculiarity of Germanic public and legal relations, an emanation of the “Germanic spirit.” Yet almost at the same time as Maurer’s first publications on the ancient village communism of the Germans, new discoveries came to light in a quite different part of the European continent. Between 1847 and 1852, the Westphalian Baron von Haxthausen, who had traveled in Russia in the early 1840s at the invitation of Tsar Nicholas I, published in Berlin his Studien über die inneren Zustände, das Volksleben und insbesondere die ländlichen Einrichtungen Russlands [Studies on the Internal Conditions of Russia, the Life of its People and Especially its Rural Institutions].67 From this work the world learned to its astonishment that in the east of Europe fully analogous institutions still persisted. The age-old village communism, whose ruins in Germany had to be unveiled with difficulty from the overlays of later centuries and millennia, was suddenly found alive and kicking in the enormous empire to the east. In both the book mentioned above, and in his later work published in 1866 in Leipzig on Die ländliche Verfassung Russlands [The Rural Constitution of Russia],68 Haxthausen demonstrated that the Russian peasants knew nothing of private property in fields, meadows and woods, the village as a whole being the real owner of these, while individual peasant families obtained only temporary use of parcels of land—by drawing lots just as with the ancient Germans.69 In Russia, at the time when von Haxthausen traveled and investigated, serfdom was still in full force, and at first glance it was thus all the more striking that under the rigid surface of a harsh serfdom and a despotic state apparatus the Russian village presented a little closed-off world unto itself, with rural communism and the communal handling of all public affairs by the village assembly, the mir.70 The German discoverer of these peculiarities explained the Russian rural commune as a product of the ancient Slavic family community, as this is still found among the southern Slavs of the Balkan countries and as it fully existed in the Russian law books of the twelfth century and later. Haxthausen’s discovery was seized on with jubilation by a whole intellectual and political tendency in Russia, by Slavophilism.71 This tendency, bent on a glorification of the Slavic world and its particularities, its “unspent force” as against the “lazy West” with its Germanic culture, found in the communist institutions of the Russian peasant community its strongest point of support over the next two or three decades.72 Depending on the respective reactionary or revolutionary branch that Slavophilism divided into, the rural community was seen either as one of the three authentic basic Slavic institutions of Russiandom: Greek Orthodox belief, tsarist absolutism, and peasant-patriarchal village communism, or conversely as a suitable point of support for introducing a socialist revolution in Russia in the immediate future, and thus making much earlier than in Western Europe the leap directly into the promised land of socialism.73 The opposing poles of Slavophilism both completely agreed, however, that the Russian rural community was a specifically Slavic phenomenon, explicable in terms of the particular national character of the Slavic tribes.
In the meantime, another moment in the history of the European nations had appeared, bringing them into contact with new regions of the world and making them very perceptibly aware of particular public institutions and age-old cultural forms that belonged neither to the Germanic nor to the Slavic orbit. This time it was not a matter of scientific investigations and learned discoveries, but rather the heavy-handed interests of the European capitalist states and their experiences in practical colonial policy. In the nineteenth century, in the age of capitalism, European colonial policy struck out on new paths. It was no longer, as in the sixteenth century with the first attack on the New World, a matter of the speediest plunder of the treasures and natural wealth of the newly discovered tropical lands in terms of precious metals, spices, valuable adornments and slaves, in which the Spanish and Portuguese had achieved so much. Nor was it a matter of important opportunities for trade, with various raw materials from overseas countries being imported for the European market, and valueless trash and plunder being pressed on the indigenous peoples of these countries, in which the Dutch of the seventeenth century were the pioneers and served as a model for the English. Now, as well as these earlier methods of colonization, which are still in full bloom here and there today and have never gone out of style, we had a new method of more persistent and systematic exploitation of the population of the colonies for the enrichment of the “home country.” This was designed to serve two purposes: first, the actual seizure of land as the most important material source of wealth in each country, and second, the continuous taxation of the broad mass of the population. In this double effort, the European colonial powers necessarily came up against a remarkable rock-hard obstacle in all these exotic lands, i.e. the particular property institutions of the indigenous peoples, which opposed a most stubborn resistance to plundering by the Europeans. In order to seize land from the hands of its former proprietors, it was first necessary to establish who these proprietors were. In order not just to decree taxes, but also to be able to collect them, it had to be established who was liable for such taxes. Here the Europeans in their colonies came upon relationships quite foreign to them, which directly overturned all their notions of the sanctity of private property. The English in South Asia had the same experience of this as the French did in North Africa.
The conquest of India by the English, begun in the early seventeenth century with the gradual seizure of the entire coastline and Bengal, only ended in the nineteenth century with the subjection of the highly important Punjab in the north. After political subjection, however, came the difficult work of the systematic exploitation of India. Everywhere they went, the English experienced the greatest surprise: they found the most varied peasant communities, large and small, which had occupied the land for millennia, cultivating rice and living in quiet, orderly conditions, but—oh horror!—no private owner of the land was to be found anywhere in these tranquil villages. No matter whom you asked, no one could call the land or the parcel he worked his own, i.e. no one was allowed to sell, lease, mortgage it or pawn it for arrears of taxation. All the members of these communities, which sometimes embraced whole large clans, sometimes only a few families who had branched off from the clan, stuck doggedly together, and ties of blood were everything to them, while individual ownership was nothing. Indeed, the English to their amazement were forced to discover on the banks of the Indus and the Ganges similar models of rural communism against which even the communist customs of the ancient Germanic mark or Slavic village community seemed almost like the fall into private property.
As the English tax authorities reported from India in 1845, “We can see no permanent shares. Each possesses the share that he cultivates only as long as the agricultural work continues. If a share is left untilled, it falls back into common land and can be taken over by anyone else, on condition that he cultivates it.”XVIII
At the same time, a government report on the administration of Punjab from 1849 to 1851 stated:
It is highly interesting to observe how strong the sentiment of blood kinship is in this community, and the consciousness of stemming from a common ancestor. Public opinion so strictly insists on the maintenance of this system that we not uncommonly see how persons are allowed into it even if their ancestors had not participated in this common ownership for one or even two generations.XIX
“With this form of possession of land,” wrote the report of the English state council on the Indian clan community, “no member of the clan can prove that he owns this or that part of the common land, but only that he possesses it for temporary use. The products of the common economy are placed in a common bank, from which all needs are met.”XX Here, therefore, we have no distribution of the fields at all, even for the agricultural season; the peasants of the community possess and work their fields undividedly and in common, they bring the harvest into a common village store, which the capitalist eye of the English had to see as a “bank,” and fraternally meet their modest needs from the fruits of their common labor. In the northwestern corner of the Punjab, close to the border with Afghanistan, other very remarkable customs were encountered, which scorned any notion of private property. Here, while the fields were indeed divided and even periodically changed around, it was not—what a miracle!—individual families that exchanged their plots with one another, instead whole villages rotated their land every five years, with the whole community migrating. As the English tax commissioner James wrote from India in 1852 to his superiors: “I cannot fail to mention a most peculiar custom that has persisted in some districts until today: I mean the periodic exchange of lands between individual villages and their subsections. In some districts only fields are exchanged, in others even dwelling houses.”XXI
Once again, therefore, we have the particular characteristics of a certain family of peoples, this time an “Indian” peculiarity. The communist institutions of the Indian village community, however, indicate their traditional age-old character both by their geographical location and particularly by the strength of blood ties and kinship relations. It was precisely the earliest forms of communism preserved in the oldest inhabited parts of India, the north-west, that clearly indicated the conclusion that communal property along with strong ties of kinship was attributable to thousand-year-old customs, linked with the first settlements of the immigrant Indians in their new home, present-day India. Sir Henry Maine, professor of comparative law at Oxford and former member of the government of India, took the Indian rural community as the subject of his lectures as early as 1871,74 placing it alongside the mark communities that Maurer had demonstrated in Germany and [Erwin] von Nasse in England,75 as age-old institutions of the same character as the Germanic rural communities.
The venerable age of these communist institutions also struck the amazed English in a further way, i.e. by the stubbornness with which they resisted the tax and administration skills of the colonizers. It took a struggle of decades, with every kind of coup de main, enormity, and unscrupulous attack on the people’s old laws and prevailing notions of right, before they could bring about an incurable confusion of all property relations, general insecurity and the ruin of the great mass of peasants. The old ties were broken, the quiet seclusion of village communism torn asunder and replaced by discord, disharmony, inequality and exploitation. The result was enormous latifundia on the one hand, and an immense mass of millions of dispossessed peasant tenants on the other. Private property celebrated its entry in India, and with it typhus and scurvy due to hunger became a constant presence in the marshes of the Ganges.
But even if, in the wake of the discoveries of the English colonizers in India, this ancient rural communism, already now found among three such major branches of the great Indo-Germanic family of peoples—Germanic, Slavic and Indian—was seen as an ancient peculiarity of the Indo-Germanic group of peoples, uncertain as this ethnographic concept may be, the concurrent discoveries of the French in Africa already went far beyond this orbit. What we had here were discoveries that showed among the Arabs and Berbers of North Africa exactly the same institutions as had been found at the heart of Europe and on the Asian continent.
Among the Arabic nomadic herdsmen, land was the property of the clan. This clan property, so the French scholar [Rodolpho] Dareste wrote in 1852,76 was handed down from generation to generation, and no individual Arab could point to a piece of land and say: This is mine.
Among some branches of the Kabyles,77 who had been completely Arabized, the clan associations had already very much decayed, yet the power of the clans still remained strong: they took common responsibility for taxes; they bought livestock together for division among the different branches of a family as food; in all disputes over possession of land the clan council was the highest authority; settlement among the Kabyles always required the agreement of the clans; and the clan council likewise disposed of uncultivated lands. The prevailing rule, however, was the undivided property of a family, which did not just include in the present-day European sense an individual couple, but was rather a typically patriarchal family, like that of the ancient Israelites as described in the Bible—a large circle of kinship, consisting of father, mother, sons and their wives, children and grandchildren, uncles, aunts, nephews and cousins. In this circle, said another French researcher, [Aristide] Letourneux, in 1873,78 it was the custom for the oldest family member to dispose of the undivided property, though he was in fact chosen for this office by the family, while in all more important cases, in particular where the sale and purchase of land was involved, the whole family council had to be consulted.
This was the situation with the population of Algeria at the time that the French colonized it. France had the same experience in North Africa as the English had in India. Everywhere, the European colonial policy met with stubborn resistance on the part of age-old social associations and their communistic institutions, which protected individuals from the exploitative grip of European capital and European financial policy.
At the same time as these new discoveries, a half-forgotten memory from the first days of European colonialism and its quest for booty in the New World now appeared in a new light. The yellowed chronicles of the Spanish state archives and monasteries preserved the curious tale from centuries ago of the miraculous South American country where already in the age of the great discoveries the Spanish conquistadores had found the most remarkable institutions. The hazy reports of this South American land of marvels found their way into European literature already in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, reports of the empire of the Incas, which the Spanish had discovered in what is now Peru and where the people lived with complete common property under the paternal theocratic government of generous despots. The fantastic ideas of this legendary communist realm in Peru persisted so stubbornly that in 1875 a German writer could refer to the Inca kingdom as “almost unique in human history” in being a social monarchy on a theocratic foundation, in which “the greater part of what the Social Democrats strive for today as their conceived ideal, but at no time have achieved,” was carried out in practice.XXII In the meantime, however, more exact material on this remarkable land and its customs had appeared.
In 1840, an important original report by Alonzo de Zurita, one-time auditor to the royal council in Mexico, on administration and agrarian relations in the former Spanish colonies, was published in French translation.79 And in the mid-nineteenth century, even the Spanish government was stirred to rescue old information about the conquest and administration of Spain’s American possessions from the archives and bring it to light. This made a new and important documentary contribution to the material on social conditions of ancient precapitalist stages of culture in overseas lands.
Already on the basis of Zurita’s reports, the Russian scholar Maksim Kovalevsky concluded in the 1870s that the legendary realm of the Incas in Peru had been simply a country in which the same age-old agrarian communist relations prevailed that Maurer had already found in many places among the ancient Germans, and that were the predominant form not just in Peru but also in Mexico and throughout the new regions of the world conquered by the Spanish. Later publications made possible an exact investigation of the old Peruvian agrarian relations, and revealed a new picture of primitive rural communism—again in a new part of the world, among a different race, at a quite different cultural stage and in a quite different era, than had been the case with previous discoveries.
Here we had an age-old agrarian communist constitution, which—prevailing from time immemorial among the Peruvian tribes—was still fully alive and well at the time of the Spanish invasion. Here too, a kinship association, the clan, was the only proprietor of the land in each village, or in a few villages together, and here too, the arable land was divided into lots and distributed annually by lot to the members of the village; here too public affairs were settled by the village community, which also elected the village head. Indeed, on the distant continent of South America, among the Amerindians, living traces were found of a communism so far-reaching as seemed quite unknown in Europe: there were immense common buildings, where whole clans lived in common quarters with a common burial place. It was said of one such quarter that it was occupied by more than 4,000 men and women. The capital of the so-called Inca emperor, the town of Cuzco, consisted of several such common quarters, each of which bore the particular name of a clan.80
From the mid-nineteenth century, therefore, through to the 1870s, a wealth of material came to light that eroded and soon tore to shreds the old idea of the eternal character of private property and its existence from the beginning of the world. After agrarian communism had been discovered as a peculiarity of the Germanic people, then as something Slavic, Indian, Arab-Kabyle, or ancient Mexican, as the marvel state of the Peruvian Inca and in many more “specific” races of people in all parts of the world, the conclusion was unavoidable that this village communism was not at all a “peculiarity” of a particular race of people or part of the world, but rather the general and typical form of human society at a certain level of cultural development. The first reaction of official bourgeois science, i.e. political economy, was obstinately to resist this knowledge. The English school of Smith and Ricardo, which prevailed throughout Europe in the first half of the nineteenth century, simply denied the possibility of common property in land. Just as earlier on the crude ignorance and narrow-mindedness of the first Spanish, Portuguese, French and Dutch conquerors in newly discovered America completely failed to understand the agrarian relations of the indigenous population, and in the absence of private owners simply declared the whole land “property of the emperor,” available to the exchequer, so in the age of bourgeois “enlightenment,” the great luminaries of political-economic learning proceeded in the same way. In the seventeenth century, for example, the French missionary [Jean-Antoine] Dubois wrote about the Indians: “The Indians possess no property in land. The fields that they work are the property of the Mongol government.”81 And a medical doctor of the Montpellier faculty, François Bernier, who traveled the lands of the great Mogul in Asia and published in Amsterdam in 1699 a very well-known description of these countries, exclaimed in amazement: “These three states, Turkey, Persia, and India, have denied the concept of meum and tuum in relation to the ownership of land, a concept that is the foundation of everything fine and good in the world.”82 Exactly this same crass ignorance and lack of understanding of everything that appeared different from capitalist culture was shown by the scholar James Mill, father of the celebrated John Stuart Mill, when he wrote in his history of British India: “On the basis of all the facts we have considered, we can only reach one conclusion, that landownership in India fell to the conqueror, for if we were to assume that he was not the landowner, we would not be in a position to say who the owner was.”83
The idea that ownership of land simply belonged to the Indian peasant communities who had worked it for millennia, that there could be a country, a great social culture, in which land was not a means for exploiting the labor of others, but simply the foundation of the existence of working people themselves, was something that the brain of a great scholar of the English bourgeoisie was unable to accept. This almost touching limitation of the intellectual horizon to the four walls of the capitalist economy only shows that the official science of the bourgeois enlightenment has an infinitely narrower horizon and cultural-historical understanding than the Romans had two thousand years ago, with their generals like Caesar, and historians like Tacitus, handing down to us extremely valuable insights and descriptions on the economic and social relations of the Germanic barbarians that they saw as strange and savage.
Just as today, so previously too, bourgeois political economy as the intellectual defense forces of the prevailing form of exploitation had less understanding than any other science of different forms of culture and economy, and it was reserved for branches of science that were somewhat more removed from the direct conflict of interest and struggle between capital and labor, to recognize in the communist institutions of earlier times a generally prevailing form of economic and cultural development at a certain stage. It was jurists such as Maurer and Kovalevsky, and the English law professor and state councilor for India, Sir Henry Maine, who first came to understand agrarian communism as an international primitive form of development that appeared among all races and in all parts of the world. And it was a legally trained sociologist, the American Lewis Henry Morgan, who discovered the necessary social structure of primitive society as the basis for this economic form.84
The great role of kinship ties among the ancient communist village communities struck scholars, both in India and in Algeria, as well as among the Slavs. In the wake of Maurer’s studies, it was established in the case of the Germans that it was always in the form of clans, i.e. kinship groups, that they pursued their settlement in Europe. The history of the antique Greeks and Romans showed all along the line that the clan had always played the greatest role for them, as a social group, an economic unit, a legal institution and a closed circle of religious practice. Finally, almost all reports of travelers in so-called savage countries agreed remarkably on the fact that, the more primitive a people was, the greater the role of kinship ties in the life of that people, and the more that these governed their economic, social and religious relations and ideas.85
Scientific research was thus presented with a new and highly important problem. What actually were these kinship ties that were so important in ancient times, how had they come to be formed, what was their connection with economic communism and economic development in general? On all these questions, it was Morgan who first offered an insight in his epoch-making book Ancient Society. Morgan, who had spent a large part of his life among an Indian tribe of Iroquois in the state of New York, and had made a most thorough study of the conditions of this primitive hunting people, came by comparing his own results with facts known about other primitive peoples to a new and wide-ranging theory about the forms of development of human society over the immense expanses of time that preceded any historical information. Morgan’s pioneering ideas, which retain their full validity today despite the wealth of new material that has since appeared and corrected several details of his presentation, can be summarized as follows.
1. Morgan was the first to bring scientific order into prehistoric cultural history, both by defining its particular stages and also by revealing the underlying driving force of this development. Until then, the immense temporal extents of social life that preceded any written history, as well as the social relations of the primitive peoples still living today, with all their motley wealth of forms and stages, formed an uncharted chaos, from which only individual chapters and fragments had been brought to light by scientific research here and there. In particular, the descriptions “savagery” and “barbarism,” which were customarily used as a summary description of these conditions, had only a meaning as negative concepts, descriptions of the lack of everything that was considered characteristic of “civilization,” i.e. of well-mannered human life as seen through contemporary eyes. From this point of view, properly mannered social life, appropriate to human dignity, began only with those conditions described in written history. Everything that belonged to “savagery” and “barbarism” indifferently formed only an inferior and embarrassing stage prior to civilization, a half-animal existence which present-day civilized humanity could only regard with condescending disparagement. Just as the official representatives of the Christian church regard all primitive and pre-Christian religions as simply a long series of errors in the quest of humanity for the only true religion, so for the political economists all primitive forms of economy were merely unsuccessful attempts that preceded the discovery of the one true form of economy: that of private property and exploitation with which written history and civilization begins. Morgan dealt this conception a decisive blow by portraying the whole of primitive cultural history as an equally valid—indeed an infinitely more important—part in the uninterrupted developmental sequence of humanity, infinitely more important both on account of its infinitely longer duration in comparison with the tiny section of written history, and also on account of the decisive acquisitions of culture that were made precisely in that long dawn of human social existence. By filling the descriptions “savagery,” “barbarism” and “civilization” for the first time with a positive content, Morgan made them into precise scientific concepts and applied them as tools of scientific research. For Morgan, savagery, barbarism and civilization are three sections of cultural development, separated from each other by quite particular material characteristics, and themselves each breaking down into a lower, middle and upper stage, which again are distinguished by particular concrete achievements and advances. Pedantic know-alls today may rail that the middle stage of savagery could not simply begin, as Morgan believed, with fishing, the upper stage with the invention of the bow and arrow, and so on, since in several cases the sequence was the other way round, and in other cases was dependent on natural conditions—objections that can indeed be made against any historical classification, if this is conceived as a rigid schema of absolute validity, an iron fetter on knowledge instead of a living and flexible guideline. Morgan’s epoch-making service remains exactly the same, that he originated the investigation of prehistory with this first scientific classification of preconditions, just as it is Linnaeus’s service to have supplied the first scientific classification of plants. Yet there is one great difference. [Carl] Linnaeus, as we well know, took as the basis of his systematization of plants a very usable but purely external characteristic—the sexual organs of plants—and this first makeshift had later, as Linnaeus himself well recognized, to make way for a deeper natural classification from the standpoint of the developmental history of the plant world. Morgan, on the contrary, made his most fruitful contribution to research precisely by the choice of the basic principle on which he built his system: he made the starting point of his classification the proposition that it is the kind of social labor, production, that in each historical epoch from the first beginnings of culture plays the main role in determining human social relations, and that its decisive advances are likewise so many milestones in this development.
2. Morgan’s second great achievement bears on the family relations of primitive society. Here too, on the basis of comprehensive material that he obtained by an international survey, he laid down the first scientifically founded sequence of developmental forms of the family, from the earliest forms of quite primitive society through to today’s prevailing monogamy—i.e. legally established permanent marriage of a single couple, with the dominant position of the man. Of course, here too material has emerged to require several corrections of detail to Morgan’s developmental schema of the family. The basic lines of his system, however, as the first ladder of human family forms derived strictly from the idea of development, from the grey of prehistory through to the present, remain a lasting contribution to the treasury of social science. This area, too, Morgan enriched not simply by his systematic conception, but also by a fundamental idea of genius about the relationship between the family relations of a society and its prevailing kinship system. Morgan was the first to draw attention to the striking fact that among many primitive peoples the actual relations of sexuality and descent, i.e. the actual family, do not coincide with the kinship categories that people ascribe one another, or with the reciprocal duties that derive from these ascriptions. He was the first to find an explanation for this puzzling phenomenon purely in materialist and dialectical terms. “The family,” he says, “represents an active principle. It is never stationary, but advances from a lower to a higher form as society advances from a lower to a higher condition.… Systems of consanguinity, on the contrary, are passive; recording the progress made by the family at long intervals apart, and only changing radically when the family has radically changed.”86
We find, then, that among primitive peoples, systems of consanguinity remain valid that correspond to an earlier and already superseded form of family, just as people’s ideas and notions generally remain tied for a long while to conditions that have been superseded by the actual material development of society.
3. On the basis of the developmental history of family relations, Morgan offered the first exhaustive investigation of the ancient clan associations that are found at the beginning of historical tradition among all civilized peoples—among the Greeks and Romans, the Celts and Germans, the ancient Israelites—and that still exist among most primitive peoples that survive today. He showed that these associations resting on blood relationship and common descent are on the one hand only a high stage in the development of the family, while on the other hand they are the basis of the whole social life of peoples—in those long stretches of time when there was not yet a state in the modern sense, i.e. no organization of political compulsion on a fixed territorial basis. Each tribe, which itself consisted of a certain number of clan associations, or, as the Romans called them, gentes, had its own territory, which belonged to it as a whole, and in each tribe the clan association was the unit in which a common household was run communistically, in which there were no rich and poor, no idlers and workers, no masters and slaves, and where all public affairs were dealt with by the free vote and decision of all. As a living example of these relations that all peoples of present-day civilization went through, Morgan described in detail the gens87 organization of the American Indians, which was in full bloom at the time of the conquest of America by the Europeans:
All the members of an Iroquois gens were personally free, and they were bound to defend each other’s freedom; they were equal in privileges and in personal rights, the sachem and chiefs claiming no superiority; and they were a brotherhood bound together by the ties of kin. Liberty, equality, and fraternity, though never formulated, were cardinal principles of the gens. These facts are material, because the gens was the unit of a social and governmental system, the foundation upon which Indian society was organized. A structure composed of such units would of necessity bear the impress of their character, for as the unit so the compound. It serves to explain that sense of independence and personal dignity universally an attribute of Indian character.88
4. The gentile organization led social development to the threshold of civilization, which Morgan characterizes as that brief recent epoch of cultural history in which private property arose on the ruins of communism and with it a public organization of compulsion: the state and the exclusive dominance of man over woman in the state, in property right and in the family. In this relatively brief historical period fall the greatest and most rapid advances in production, science and art, but also the deepest fissure of society by class antagonism, the greatest misery for the mass of the people and their greatest enslavement. Here is Morgan’s own judgment on our present-day civilization, with which he concludes the results of his classical investigation:
Since the advent of civilization, the outgrowth of property has been so immense, its forms so diversified, its uses so expanding and its management so intelligent in the interests of its owners, that it has become, on the part of the people, an unmanageable power. The human mind stands bewildered in the presence of its own creation. The time will come, nevertheless, when human intelligence will rise to the mastery over property, and define the relations of the state to the property it protects, as well as the obligations and the limits of the rights of its owners. The interests of society are paramount to individual interests, and the two must be brought into just and harmonious relations. A mere property career is not the final destiny of mankind, if progress is to be the law of the future as it has been of the past. The time which has passed away since civilization began is but a fragment of the past duration of man’s existence; and but a fragment of the ages yet to come. The dissolution of society bids fair to become the termination of a career of which property is the end and aim; because such a career contains the elements of self-destruction. Democracy in government, brotherhood in society, equality in rights and privileges, and universal education, foreshadow the next higher plane of society to which experience, intelligence and knowledge are steadily tending. It will be a revival, in a higher form, of the liberty, equality and fraternity of the ancient gentes.89
Morgan’s achievement had wide-ranging significance for the knowledge of economic history. He placed the ancient communistic economy, which up till then had only been discovered in isolated individual cases and not explained, on the broad footing of a consistent and general cultural development, and particularly of the gens constitution. Primitive communism, with the democracy and social equality that went together with it, were thereby shown to be the cradle of social development. By this expansion of the horizon of the prehistoric past, he showed the whole present-day civilization, with private property, class rule, male supremacy, state compulsion and compulsory marriage, as simply a brief transition phase that, just as it arose itself from the dissolution of age-old communist society, is bound to make way in turn in the future for higher social forms. In this way, however, Morgan gave powerful new support to scientific socialism. While Marx and Engels showed by way of the economic analysis of capitalism the unavoidable historical transition of society to the communist world economy in the very near future, thus giving socialist efforts a firm scientific basis, Morgan in a certain sense supplied the work of Marx and Engels90 with a full and powerful underpinning, by demonstrating that a communist and democratic society, even if in different and more primitive forms, embraced the whole long past of human cultural history prior to present-day civilization. In this way, the noble survivals of the dim past offered a hand to the revolutionary efforts of the future, the circle of knowledge was harmoniously closed, and from this perspective the present-day world of class rule and exploitation, which presented itself as the one and only world of civilization, the highest aim of world history, appeared as a tiny transitional stage on the great forward march of human culture.91
Morgan’s “ancient society” formed as it were a subsequent introduction to the Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels. It was only natural that it should provoke a reaction in bourgeois science. Within two or three decades from the mid-nineteenth century, the concept of primitive communism made its entry into science on all sides. As long as it was a question of honorable “Germanic antiquity,” “Slavic tribal peculiarities’, or the historical excavation of the Peruvian Inca state and the like, these discoveries did not overstep the realm of scientific curiosities, without contemporary significance or any direct connection to the interests and struggles of today’s bourgeois society. So much so that staunch conservative or moderately liberal statesmen such as Ludwig von Maurer or Sir Henry Maine could claim the greatest merit for these discoveries. Soon, however, such a connection was established, in two different directions. Colonial policy, as we have seen, involved a collision of palpable material interests between the bourgeois world and primitive communist conditions. The more that the capitalist regime began to establish itself as all-powerful in Western Europe after the mid-nineteenth century, in the wake of the storms of the February revolution of 1848, the sharper this collision grew. At the same time, and precisely after the February revolution, a new enemy within the camp of bourgeois society, the revolutionary workers’ movement, played an ever-greater role. After the June days of 1848 in Paris, the “red specter” never again vanished from the public stage, and in 1871 it reappeared in the dazzling light of the struggle of the Commune, to the fury of the French and international bourgeoisie. In the light of these brutal class struggles, primitive communism as the latest discovery of scientific research showed a dangerous face. The bourgeoisie, clearly affected in their class interests, scented an obscure connection between the ancient communist survivals that put up stubborn resistance in the colonial countries to the forward march of the profit-hungry “Europeanization” of the indigenous peoples, and the new gospel of revolutionary impetuousness of the proletarian mass in the old capitalist countries. When the French National Assembly was deciding the fate of the unfortunate Arabs of Algeria in 1873, with a law on the compulsory introduction of private property,92 it was repeatedly said, in a gathering where the cowardice and bloodlust of the conquerors of the Paris Commune still trembled, that the ancient common property of the Arabs must at any cost be destroyed, “as a form that supports communist tendencies in people’s minds.”93 In Germany, meanwhile, the glories of the new German Empire, the “founders’ time”94 and the first capitalist crash of the 1870s,95 with Bismarck’s “blood and iron” regime and the anti-Socialist law,96 greatly inflamed class struggles and made even scientific research uncomfortable. The unmatched growth of German Social Democracy,97 as the theories of Marx and Engels become flesh, sharpened to an extraordinary degree the class instinct of bourgeois science in Germany, and a reaction against the theories of primitive communism now set in most forcefully. Cultural historians such as [Julius] Lippert and [Heinrich] Schurtz, political economists such as [Karl] Bücher, sociologists such as [Carl Nicolai] Starcke, [Edward] Westermarck and [Ernst] Grosse, now united in a keen combat against the doctrine of primitive communism, and particularly Morgan’s theory of the development of the family and the previously universal prevalence of a kinship constitution with equality between the sexes and general democracy. This Herr Starcke, for example, in his Primitive Familie of 1888,XXIII called Morgan’s hypotheses about kinship systems a “crazy dream … not to say a feverish delusion.”XXIV But more serious scholars, too, such as Lippert, author of the best cultural history that we have, took the field against Morgan. Basing themselves on obsolete and superficial reports of eighteenth-century missionaries who were completely untrained in economics or ethnology, and themselves quite ignorant of Morgan’s wide-ranging studies, Lippert described the economic conditions of the North American Indians, the very same people whose life with its finely developed social organization Morgan had penetrated more thoroughly than anyone else, as evidence that among hunting peoples in general there is no common regulation of production and no “provision” for the totality and for the future, rather nothing but a lack of regulation and consciousness. The foolish distortion by narrow-minded European missionaries of the communist institutions that actually existed among the Indians of North America was taken over by Lippert quite uncritically, as shown for example by the following quotation he offers from the history of the mission of the Evangelical Brothers among the Indians of North America by [Georg Heinrich] Loskiel in 1789. “Many among them” (the American Indians), says our excellently oriented missionary,
are so lethargic that they do not plant for themselves, but rather rely completely on others’ not refusing to share their stores with them. Since in this way the more diligent do not benefit from their work any more than the idlers, as time goes on ever less is planted. If a hard winter comes, so that deep snow prevents them from going hunting, it is easy for a general famine to arise, which often leads to many people dying. Hunger then leads them to eat the roots of grass and the inner bark of trees, particularly of young oaks.98
“By a natural connection, therefore,” Lippert adds to the words of his source, “the relapse into earlier carelessness leads to a relapse to an earlier way of life.” And in this Indian society, in which no one “may refuse” to share his store of provisions with others, and in which an “Evangelical Brother” constructs in a quite evidently arbitrary fashion the inevitable division between the “diligent” and the “idlers” along European lines, Lippert finds the best proof against primitive communism:
Still less at such a stage does the older generation care to equip the younger generation for life. The Indian is already far removed from primitive man. As soon as someone has a tool, he has the concept of ownership, but only limited to this. This concept the Indian already has at the lower stage; but in this primitive ownership any communist trait is lacking; the development begins with the opposite.XXV [Emphasis R.L.]
Professor Bücher opposed to the primitive communist economy his “theory of individual search for food” on the part of primitive peoples, and the “immeasurable stretches of time” in which “people existed without working.”XXVI For the cultural historian Schurtz, however, Professor Bücher with his “insight of genius” is the prophet that he follows blindly.XXVII The most typical and energetic representative of reaction, however, against the dangerous doctrines of primitive communism and the gentile constitution, and against Morgan as the “church father of German socialism,”XXVIII is Herr Ernst Grosse. At first sight, Grosse is himself a supporter of the materialist conception of history, i.e. he attributes various legal, kinship and intellectual forms of social life to the prevailing relations of production as their determining factors. “Only a few cultural historians,” he says in his Anfänge der Kunst [The Beginnings of the Arts] published in 1894,
seem to have grasped the full significance of production. It is however far more easy to underestimate this than to overestimate it. Economic activity is likewise the center of life of every cultural form; it influences all the other factors of culture in the deepest and most irresistible way, while being itself determined not so much by cultural factors as by natural ones—geographical and meteorological. It would be correct in a certain sense to call the form of production the primary cultural phenomenon, besides which all other branches of culture appear only as derivative and secondary; not of course in the sense that these other branches have arisen from the stem of production, but rather because, despite their independent origins, they have always been formed and developed under the overwhelming pressure of the prevailing economic factor.XXIX
It would seem at first sight that Grosse himself had learned his main ideas from the “church fathers of German Social Democracy,” Marx and Engels, even if he understandably takes care not to betray with a single word from which scientific corner he has taken over ready-made his superiority over “most cultural historians.” Indeed, he is even “more Catholic than the pope” in relation to the materialist conception of history. Whereas Engels—along with Marx the joint creator of the materialist conception of history—assumed for the development of family relations in primitive times through to the formation of today’s legally accredited compulsory marriage a progress of forms independent of economic relations, founded on the interest of preserving and multiplying the human species, Grosse goes a great deal further. He puts forward the theory that at all times the form of family is simply the direct product of the economic relations prevailing at the time. “Nowhere,” he says, “does the cultural significance of production appear with such clarity as in the history of the family. The strange forms of human families, which have inspired sociologists to still stranger hypotheses, appear surprisingly understandable as soon as they are considered in connection with the forms of production.”XXX
Grosse’s book published in 1896, Die Formen der Familie und die Formen der Wirthschaft [The Forms of Family and the Forms of Economy], is devoted completely to proving this idea. At the same time, however, Grosse is a determined opponent of the doctrine of primitive communism. He too seeks to demonstrate that human social development began not with common property but with private property; he too strives, like Lippert and Bücher, to show from his standpoint that the further we go back in ancient history, the more exclusively and all-powerfully the “individual” and his “individual ownership” prevails. Of course, the discoveries of primitive village communities in all parts of the world, and clan associations—or kinship groups as Grosse calls them—in connection with these, cannot be simply denied. It is just that Grosse has the clan organization99 —and this is his own particular theory—emerge as the framework of a communist economy only at a particular stage of development, i.e. with the lower agricultural stage, to dissolve again at the stage of higher agriculture and make way once more for “individual ownership.” In this way, Grosse triumphantly turns the historical perspective established by Morgan and Marx directly on its head. According to this, communism was the cradle of human cultural development, the form of economic relations that accompanied this development for measureless extents of time, only to decline and dissolve with civilization and make way for private property, this epoch of civilization facing in turn a rapid process of dissolution and a return to communism in the higher form of a socialist social order. According to Grosse, it was private property that accompanied the rise and development of culture, making way temporarily for communism only at a particular stage, that of lower agriculture. According to Marx and Engels, and likewise Morgan, the beginning and end point of cultural history is common property and social solidarity; according to Grosse and his colleagues of bourgeois science, it is the “individual” and his private property. But this is not enough. Grosse is not only an express opponent of Morgan and primitive communism, but of the whole developmental theory in the realm of social life, and pours scorn on those childish minds who seek to bring all phenomena of social life into a developmental series and conceive this as a unitary process, an advance of humanity from lower to higher forms of life. This fundamental idea, which serves as a basis for the whole of modern social science in general, and particularly for the conception of history and doctrine of scientific socialism, Herr Grosse combats as a typical bourgeois scholar, with all the power at his command. “Humanity,” he proclaims and emphasizes, “in no way moves along a single line in a single direction; rather, its paths and goals are just as varied as are the conditions of life of different peoples.”XXXI In the person of Grosse, therefore, bourgeois social science, in its reaction against the revolutionary consequences of its own discoveries, has reached the same point that bourgeois vulgar economics reached in its reaction to classical economics: the denial of the very lawfulness of social development.XXXII Let us examine this strange historical “materialism” of the latest champion to defeat Marx, Engels and Morgan.
Grosse has a good deal to say about “production,” he is always referring to the “character of production” as the determining factor that influences the whole of culture. But what does he understand by production and its character?