Marx's teaching is a system of views and doctrines. Marx was the continuer and brilliant culminator of the three main ideological currents of the nineteenth century, belonging to the three most advanced countries of mankind: classical German philosophy, classical English political economy, and French socialism in connection with French revolutionary doctrines generally. The remarkable consistency and wholeness of his views, recognized even by Marx's opponents, which together give modern materialism and modern scientific socialism as both the theory and program of the labor movement of all civilized countries in the world, compels us to preface the exposition of the main content of Marxism—namely, Marx's economic doctrine—with a brief outline of his worldview in general.

## Philosophical Materialism

Beginning with 1844–1845, when Marx's views took shape, he was a materialist, and in particular an adherent of L. Feuerbach, subsequently perceiving only the weak aspects of the latter's materialism, consisting in its insufficient consistency and comprehensiveness. Marx saw the world-historical, "epoch-making" significance of Feuerbach precisely in his decisive break with Hegelian idealism and in his proclamation of materialism, which still "in the eighteenth century, particularly in France, was a struggle not only against existing political institutions, and at the same time against religion and theology, but also... against all metaphysics" (in the sense of "drunken speculation" as distinct from "sober philosophy") ("The Holy Family" in "Literary Heritage"){52}. "For Hegel," wrote Marx, "the process of thought, which he even transforms under the name of the Idea into an independent subject, is the demiurge (creator, originator) of reality... With me, by contrast, the ideal is nothing other than the material, transplanted into the human head and transformed within it" ("Capital," I, postscript to the 2nd edition{53}). In complete accordance with this materialist philosophy of Marx, and expounding it, Fr. Engels wrote in "Anti-Dühring" (see): — Marx became acquainted with this work in manuscript — "...The unity of the world consists not in its being, but in its materiality, which is demonstrated... through the long and difficult development of philosophy and natural science... Motion is the form of existence of matter. Nowhere and never has there been or can there be matter without motion, motion without matter... If we put the question... what is thought and cognition, where do they come from, then we shall see that they are products of the human brain and that man himself is a product of nature, evolved in a given natural environment and together with it. It goes without saying, for this reason, that the products of the human brain, which are ultimately also products of nature, do not contradict the rest of nature's connection, but correspond to it". "Hegel was an idealist, i.e., for him the thoughts of our head were not reflections (Abbilder, images, sometimes Engels speaks of "imprints"), more or less abstract, of actual things and processes, but, on the contrary, things and their development were for Hegel reflections of some idea that existed somewhere before the world arose"{54}. In his work "Ludwig Feuerbach," in which Fr. Engels expounds his and Marx's views on Feuerbach's philosophy and which Engels sent to press after rereading his and Marx's old manuscript of 1844–1845 on the subject of Hegel, Feuerbach, and the materialist understanding of history, Engels writes: "The great fundamental question of all, and especially modern, philosophy is the question of the relation of thought to being, of spirit to nature... what precedes what: spirit nature or nature spirit... Philosophers have divided into two great camps according to how they answered this question. Those who asserted that spirit existed before nature, and who, consequently, in one way or another acknowledged the creation of the world... formed the idealist camp. Those, on the other hand, who made nature the fundamental principle, adhered to various schools of materialism". Every other use of the concepts of (philosophical) idealism and materialism leads only to confusion. Marx decisively rejected not only idealism, always connected in one way or another with religion, but also the viewpoint of Hume and Kant widespread especially in our time, agnosticism, criticism, positivism in various forms, considering such philosophy a "reactionary" concession to idealism and at best "shamefaced smuggling of materialism in through the back door, expelled before the public's eyes"{55}. See on this question, in addition to the named works of Engels and Marx, the latter's letter to Engels of December 12, 1866, where Marx, noting the "more materialistic," than usual, appearance of the well-known natural scientist T. Huxley and his acknowledgment that, inasmuch as "we actually observe and think, we can never step off the ground of materialism," reproaches him for a "loophole" toward agnosticism, Humism{56}. Particularly noteworthy is Marx's view of the relation of freedom to necessity: "blind necessity, until it is conscious. Freedom is the consciousness of necessity" (Engels in "Anti-Dühring") = the recognition of objective lawfulness of nature and the dialectical transformation of necessity into freedom (along with the transformation of the unknown but knowable, "thing-in-itself" into "thing-for-us," "essence of things" into "phenomena"). The fundamental deficiency of the "old," including the Feuerbachian (and especially the "vulgar," Büchner-Vogt-Moleschott) materialism, Marx and Engels considered to be (1) that this materialism was "predominantly mechanical," not taking into account the latest development of chemistry and biology (and in our day one should also add: the electrical theory of matter); (2) that old materialism was unhistorical, undialectical (metaphysical in the sense of anti-dialectical), did not consistently and comprehensively carry through the viewpoint of development; (3) that they understood the "essence of man" abstractly, and not as the "aggregate" (concretely determined historically) of "all social relations" and therefore only "explained" the world, whereas the matter is one of "changing" it, i.e., did not understand the significance of "revolutionary practical activity."

## Dialectics

Hegelian dialectics, as the most comprehensive, rich in content, and profound doctrine of development, Marx and Engels considered the greatest achievement of classical German philosophy. Every other formulation of the principle of development, evolution, they considered one-sided, poor in content, distorting and maiming the actual course of development (often with leaps, catastrophes, revolutions) in nature and in society. "Marx and I were perhaps the only people who set ourselves the task of rescuing" (from the destruction of idealism and Hegelianism among other things) "conscious dialectics and translating it into a materialist understanding of nature". "Nature is confirmation of dialectics, and it is precisely modern natural science that shows this confirmation to be extraordinarily rich" (written before the discovery of radium, electrons, the transformation of elements, etc.!), "accumulating daily masses of material and proving that in nature things ultimately work out dialectically, not metaphysically"{57}.

"The great fundamental thought," writes Engels, "that the world consists not of finished, completed objects, but represents itself a totality of processes, in which objects, seeming immutable, as well as the mental images of them made in the head, concepts, are in continuous change, now arising, now passing away,—this great fundamental thought has, since Hegel's time, entered general consciousness to such a degree that hardly anyone will dispute it in its general form. But one thing is to acknowledge it in words, another to apply it in each individual case and in each given field of investigation". "For dialectical philosophy nothing is finally established, unconditional, sacred. On everything and in everything it sees the stamp of inevitable decline, and nothing can withstand it except the continuous process of arising and passing away, infinite ascent from lower to higher. It itself is merely a simple reflection of this process in the thinking brain". Thus dialectics, according to Marx, is the "science of the general laws of motion both of the external world and of human thought"{58}.

Marx perceived and developed this revolutionary side of Hegel's philosophy. Dialectical materialism "requires no philosophy standing above the other sciences." From former philosophy there remains "the doctrine of thought and its laws—formal logic and dialectics"{59}. And dialectics, in Marx's understanding and in accordance also with Hegel, includes what is now called the theory of cognition, epistemology, which must examine its subject equally historically, studying and generalizing the origin and development of cognition, the transition from ignorance to knowledge.

In our time the idea of development, evolution, has entered almost entirely into public consciousness, but by other paths, not through Hegelian philosophy. However, this idea in the formulation given it by Marx and Engels, relying on Hegel, is far more comprehensive, far richer in content, than the current idea of evolution. Development, as it were repeating the steps already passed, but repeating them otherwise, on a higher basis ("negation of negation"), development, so to speak, in a spiral, not in a straight line; — development that is leap-like, catastrophic, revolutionary; — "interruptions of continuity"; the transformation of quantity into quality; — internal impulses to development given by contradiction, the collision of different forces and tendencies acting on a given body or within a given phenomenon or within a given society; — the mutual dependence and the closest, indissoluble connection of all aspects of each phenomenon (with history revealing ever new and new aspects), a connection giving a unified, lawful world process of motion, — such are some features of dialectics as a richer (than customary) doctrine of development. (Cf. Marx's letter to Engels of January 8, 1868 with mockery of the "wooden trichotomies" of Stein, which it would be absurd to confuse with materialist dialectics{60}.)

## The Materialist Understanding of History

The recognition of the inconsistency, incompleteness, one-sidedness of old materialism led Marx to the conviction that it was necessary "to reconcile the science of society with the materialist foundation and reconstruct it in accordance with this foundation"{61}. If materialism in general explains consciousness from being, and not the reverse, then in application to the social life of mankind, materialism required explaining social consciousness from social being. "Technology," says Marx ("Capital," I), "discloses man's active relation to nature, the immediate process of the production of his life, and likewise his social conditions of life and the spiritual conceptions that flow from them"{62}. Marx gave the complete formulation of the basic propositions of materialism, extended to human society and its history, in the preface to the work "A Critique of Political Economy" in the following words:

"In the social production of their life, men enter into definite, necessary relations independent of their will—production relations, which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces.

The totality of these production relations constitutes the economic structure of society, the real basis on which rises a juridical and political superstructure and to which there correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and spiritual process of life generally. It is not men's consciousness that determines their being, but, conversely, their social being that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing production relations, or—what is only the juridical expression of this—with the property relations within which they had been working hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then comes an epoch of social revolution. With the change of the economic foundation the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed. In considering such transformations it is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the juridical, political, religious, artistic or philosophical—in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out.

Just as one cannot judge an individual by what he thinks about himself, so one cannot judge such a period of transformation by its consciousness. On the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the existing conflict between the social productive forces and the production relations..."

"Broadly speaking, the Asiatic, the antique, the feudal, and the modern bourgeois, modes of production can be designated as progressive epochs in the economic formation of society"{63}. (Cf. Marx's brief formulation in his letter to Engels of July 7, 1866: "Our theory of the determination of the organization of labour by the means of production"{64}.)

The discovery of the materialist understanding of history, or rather the consistent continuation and extension of materialism to the sphere of social phenomena, eliminated two main deficiencies of previous historical theories. First, they considered at best only the ideological motives of people's historical activity, not investigating what gives rise to these motives, not grasping the objective lawfulness in the development of the system of social relations, not perceiving the roots of these relations in the degree of development of material production; second, previous theories did not encompass the actions of the masses of the population, whereas historical materialism for the first time made it possible with the precision of natural history to investigate the social conditions of the life of the masses and the changes in these conditions. Pre-Marxist "sociology" and historiography at best gave an accumulation of raw facts, haphazardly gathered, and a depiction of individual aspects of the historical process. Marxism pointed the way to a comprehensive, all-sided study of the process of the arising, development, and decline of socio-economic formations, examining the totality of all contradictory tendencies, reducing them to precisely defined conditions of life and production of the various classes of society, eliminating subjectivism and arbitrariness in the choice of individual "predominant" ideas or in their interpretation, uncovering the roots without exception of all ideas and all various tendencies in the state of the material productive forces. Men themselves create their own history, but what determines the motives of men and precisely of masses of men, what gives rise to collisions of contradictory ideas and strivings, what is the totality of all these collisions of all the mass of human societies, what are the objective conditions of production of material life that create the basis of all of men's historical activity, what is the law of development of these conditions,—to all this Marx directed attention and pointed the way to a scientific study of history as a unified, lawful, in all its enormous diversity and contradictoriness, process.

## Class Struggle

That the strivings of some members of a given society run counter to the strivings of others, that social life is full of contradictions, that history shows us struggle between peoples and societies, and also within them, and besides this still the alternation of periods of revolution and reaction, peace and war, stagnation and rapid progress or decline,—these facts are well known. Marxism provided a guiding thread that made it possible to discover lawfulness in this seeming labyrinth and chaos, namely: the theory of class struggle. Only the study of the totality of the strivings of all members of a given society or group of societies can lead to a scientific determination of the result of these strivings. And the source of contradictory strivings is the difference in the position and conditions of life of those classes into which each society breaks down. "The history of all hitherto existing societies," writes Marx in the "Communist Manifesto" (except the history of the primitive commune—Engels adds subsequently), "has been the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in short, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large or in the common ruin of the contending classes... The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones. Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinctive feature: it has simplified class antagonisms: society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other—bourgeoisie and proletariat." Since the time of the great French revolution, European history with special vividness disclosed in a number of countries this actual substratum of events, the struggle of classes. And already the epoch of the Restoration in France brought forth a series of historians (Thierry, Guizot, Mignet, Thiers) who, generalizing what was happening, could not but recognize class struggle as the key to understanding all French history. And the modern epoch, the epoch of the complete victory of the bourgeoisie, representative institutions, broad (if not universal) suffrage, cheap, mass-circulation, daily press, etc., the epoch of powerful and increasingly broad associations of workers and associations of entrepreneurs, etc., has shown even more vividly (though sometimes in a very one-sided, "peaceful," "constitutional" form) class struggle as the motive force of events. The following passage from Marx's "Communist Manifesto" will show us what demands the objective analysis of the position of each class in modern society, in connection with the analysis of the conditions of development of each class, Marx placed on social science: "Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class. All the other classes decay and finally disappear in the face of modern industry; the proletariat is its special and essential product. The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class. They are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative. Nay more, they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history. If by chance they are revolutionary they are so only in view of their impending transfer into the proletariat; they thus defend not their present, but their future interests, they desert their own standpoint to place themselves at that of the proletariat." In a series of historical works (see the Literature) Marx gave brilliant and profound examples of materialist historiography, analyses of the position of each individual class and sometimes of various groups or strata within a class, showing directly why and how "every class struggle is a political struggle"{65}. The passage we have cited illustrates the complex network of social relations and transitional stages from one class to another, from past to future that Marx analyzes in order to account for the entire resultant of historical development.

The most profound, all-sided, and detailed confirmation and application of Marx's theory is his economic doctrine.

## Marx's Economic Doctrine

"The ultimate aim of this work," says Marx in the preface to "Capital," "is to discover the economic law of motion of modern society"{66}, i.e., of capitalist, bourgeois society. The investigation of the production relations of a given, historically determined, society in their arising, development, and decline—such is the content of Marx's economic doctrine. In capitalist society commodity production is dominant, and Marx's analysis therefore begins with an analysis of the commodity.

### Value

A commodity is, first, a thing that satisfies some human need; second, a thing that is exchanged for another thing. The usefulness of a thing makes it a use-value. Exchange-value (or simply value) appears first of all as a relation, a proportion in the exchange of a definite quantity of use-values of one kind for a definite quantity of use-values of another kind. Daily experience shows us that millions and billions of such exchanges constantly equate all and every sort of different and incomparable use-values to one another. What is common to these different things, constantly equated to one another in a definite system of social relations? The common element is that they are products of labor. In exchanging products, people equate the most different kinds of labor. Commodity production is a system of social relations in which individual producers create diverse products (social division of labor), and all these products are equated to one another in exchange. Consequently, what is common to all commodities is not the concrete labor of a particular branch of production, not labor of one kind, but abstract human labor, human labor in general. The whole labor-power of a given society, represented in the sum of the values of all commodities, is one and the same human labor-power: billions of acts of exchange prove this. And, consequently, each individual commodity represents only a certain share of socially necessary labor time. The magnitude of value is determined by the quantity of socially necessary labor or the labor time socially necessary for the production of a given commodity, a given use-value. "In equating their different products one to another in exchange, men equate their different kinds of labor one to another. They do not know this, but they do it"{67}. Value is a relation between two persons—as one old economist said; he should only have added: a relation covered with a material envelope. Only from the standpoint of a system of social production relations of one definite historical form of society, and moreover relations manifesting themselves in mass, billionsfold repeated, exchange phenomena, can one understand what value is. "As values, commodities are only definite quantities of congealed labor time"{68}. Having analyzed in detail the dual character of the labor embodied in commodities, Marx proceeds to analyze the form of value and money. Marx's chief task here is to study the origin of the monetary form of value, to study the historical process of the unfolding of exchange, beginning from individual, chance acts of it ("simple, individual or accidental form of value": a definite quantity of one commodity is exchanged for a definite quantity of another commodity) up to the universal form of value, when a series of different commodities is exchanged for one and the same definite commodity, and to the monetary form of value, when this definite commodity, the universal equivalent, is gold. Being the highest product of the development of exchange and commodity production, money obscures, covers over the social character of private labors, the social connection between individual producers united by the market. Marx subjects the various functions of money to extraordinarily detailed analysis, and here (as generally in the first chapters of "Capital") it is especially important to note that the abstract and sometimes seemingly purely deductive form of exposition actually reproduces gigantic factual material on the history of the development of exchange and commodity production. "Money presupposes a certain height of commodity circulation. The different forms of money—simple commodity equivalent or means of circulation or means of payment, treasure and world money—indicate, according to the different extent of the application of this or that function and according to the relative predominance of one of them, very different stages of the social process of production" ("Capital," I){69}.

### Surplus-Value

At a certain stage of the development of commodity production, money is transformed into capital. The formula of commodity circulation was: T (commodity) – M (money) – T (commodity), i.e., the sale of one commodity to purchase another. The general formula of capital is, by contrast, M – T – M, i.e., purchase in order to sell (with profit). Marx calls surplus-value this increase of the original value of money put into circulation. The fact of this "growth" of money in capitalist circulation is well known. It is precisely this "growth" that transforms money into capital, as a special, historically determined, social relation of production. Surplus-value cannot arise from commodity circulation, since it knows only the exchange of equivalents, cannot arise from a markup in price, since the mutual losses and gains of buyers and sellers would be balanced out, but we are dealing precisely with a mass, average, social phenomenon, not an individual one. In order to obtain surplus-value, "the owner of money must find on the market such a commodity whose use-value possesses the original property of being a source of value"{70}, such a commodity whose process of consumption would at the same time be a process of creating value. And such a commodity exists. It is human labor-power. Its consumption is labor, and labor creates value. The owner of money purchases labor-power at its value, determined, like the value of any other commodity, by the socially necessary labor time necessary for its production (i.e., the value of the maintenance of the worker and his family). Having purchased labor-power, the owner of money has the right to consume it, i.e., to make it work a whole day, say, 12 hours. Meanwhile the worker in the course of 6 hours (the "necessary" labor time) creates a product that covers his maintenance, and in the course of the next 6 hours (the "surplus" labor time) creates an unpaid by the capitalist "surplus" product or surplus-value. Consequently, in capital, from the standpoint of the production process, one must necessarily distinguish two parts: constant capital, expended on means of production (machines, tools of labor, raw materials, etc.)—its value (all at once or by parts) passes unchanged to the finished product—and variable capital, expended on labor-power. The value of this capital does not remain unchanged, but increases in the process of labor, creating surplus-value. Therefore, to express the degree of exploitation of labor-power by capital one must compare surplus-value not with the whole capital, but only with variable capital. The rate of surplus-value, as Marx calls this ratio, will, for example, in our case be 6/6, i.e., 100 %.

The historical prerequisite for the arising of capital is, first, the accumulation of a definite sum of money in the hands of individuals at a comparatively high level of the development of commodity production in general, and, second, the existence of a "free" laborer in the double sense: free from any restrictions or limitations on the sale of labor-power and free from land and from the means of production generally, an unpropertied laborer, a "proletarian" laborer, to whom there is nothing to live on except the sale of his labor-power.

The increase of surplus-value is possible by two basic methods: through the prolongation of the working day ("absolute surplus-value") and through the reduction of the necessary working day ("relative surplus-value"). Analyzing the first method, Marx unfolds a grandiose picture of the struggle of the working class for the reduction of the working day and the intervention of state power for its prolongation (14th–17th centuries) and for its reduction (factory legislation of the 19th century). After "Capital" appeared, the history of the labor movement of all civilized countries in the world supplied thousands and thousands of new facts illustrating this picture.

In analyzing the production of relative surplus-value, Marx investigates three basic historical stages of the increase of labor productivity by capitalism: 1) simple cooperation; 2) division of labor and manufacture; 3) machines and large-scale industry. How deeply Marx has here uncovered the basic, typical features of capitalist development is evident, among other things, from the fact that investigations of Russian so-called "handicraft" industry provide the richest material for illustration of the first two of the three named stages. And the revolutionizing effect of large-scale machine industry, described by Marx in 1867, revealed itself in the course of the half-century that has passed since then, in a whole series of "new" countries (Russia, Japan, etc.).

Further. Highly important and new in Marx is the analysis of the accumulation of capital, i.e., the transformation of part of surplus-value into capital, its use not for personal needs or caprices of the capitalist, but for new production. Marx showed the error of all previous classical political economy (beginning with Adam Smith), which supposed that all surplus-value transformed into capital went to variable capital. In fact, however, it breaks down into means of production plus variable capital. Enormous significance in the process of capitalist development and its transformation into socialism belongs to the more rapid growth of the share of constant capital (in the total sum of capital) compared to the share of variable capital.

The accumulation of capital, accelerating the displacement of workers by machines, creating wealth on one pole and misery on the other, also generates the so-called "reserve army of labor," the "relative surplus population" of workers, or "capitalist overpopulation," assuming extraordinarily diverse forms and giving capital the possibility to expand production extraordinarily rapidly. This possibility, in connection with credit and the accumulation of capital in the means of production, gives, among other things, the key to understanding the crises of overproduction, which periodically came in capitalist countries first on average every 10 years, then at longer and less determined intervals. From the accumulation of capital on the basis of capitalism one must distinguish the so-called primary accumulation: the violent separation of the laborer from the means of production, the driving of peasants from the land, the theft of common lands, the system of colonies and state debts, protective tariffs, etc. "Primary accumulation" creates on one pole a "free" proletariat, on the other an owner of money, a capitalist.

"The historical tendency of capitalist accumulation" Marx characterizes in the following celebrated words: "The expropriation of the immediate producers is carried out with merciless vandalism, and under the pressure of the basest, the vilest, the pettiest, and the most odious passions. Private property, earned by the labor of its owner" (peasant and craftsman), "founded, so to say, on a fusion of the isolated, independent laboring individual with his conditions of labor, is supplanted by capitalist private property, which rests on exploitation of alien, but formally free labor-power... Now the expropriators are expropriated. The individual capitalist is expropriated by the capitalists as a class. Not only is the surplus-value appropriated by the individual capitalist expropriated, but the whole surplus-value appropriated and again converted into capital. Many capitalists are expropriated by a few. Hand in hand with this centralization, or this expropriation of many capitalists by few, develop, on an ever-extending scale, the cooperative form of the laboring process, the conscious technical application of science, the methodical cultivation of the soil, the transformation of the instruments of labor into instruments of labor that can only be used in common, the economizing of all means of production by their use as the means of production of combined, socialized labor, the entanglement of all peoples in the net of the world market, and with this, the international character of the capitalist regime. Along with the constantly diminishing number of the magnates of capital, who usurp and monopolize all advantages of this process of transformation, grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation; but with this too grows the revolt of the working-class, a class always increasing in numbers, and disciplined, united, organized by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself. The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with, and under it. Centralization of the means of production and socialization of labor at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integuments. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated" ("Capital," I){71}.

Highly important and new is, further, the analysis given by Marx in Volume II of "Capital" of the reproduction of social capital taken as a whole. And here Marx takes not an individual, but a mass phenomenon, not a small fraction of society's economy, but the whole of this economy in its totality. Correcting the error indicated above, Marx divides all social production into two large departments: I) production of means of production and II) production of objects of consumption and examines in detail, on the numerical examples he took, the circulation of the whole social capital as a whole, both in the case of reproduction on the same scale and in the case of accumulation. In Volume III of "Capital" the question of the formation of the average rate of profit on the basis of the law of value is resolved. A great step forward in economic science, in the person of Marx, is that the analysis is conducted from the standpoint of mass economic phenomena, the totality of social economy as a whole, and not from the standpoint of individual cases or the external surface of competition, to which vulgar political economy and the modern "theory of marginal utility" often restrict themselves. First Marx analyzes the origin of surplus-value and only then proceeds to its distribution into profit, interest, and ground-rent. Profit is the ratio of surplus-value to all the capital invested in an enterprise. Capital of "high organic composition" (i.e., with a predominance of constant capital over variable capital in amounts above the average social level) gives a rate of profit below average. Capital of "low organic composition"—above average. Competition between capitals, the free transition of them from one branch to another, will in both cases reduce the rate of profit to average. The sum of the values of all commodities of a given society coincides with the sum of the prices of commodities, but in individual enterprises and branches of production, under the influence of competition, commodities are sold not at their values, but at prices of production (or production prices), which equal the capital expended plus average profit.

Thus the well-known and undisputed fact of the deviation of prices from values and the equality of profit is fully explained by Marx on the basis of the law of value, since the sum of the values of all commodities coincides with the sum of prices. But the reduction of (social) value to (individual) prices occurs not simply, not directly, but in a very complex way: it is perfectly natural that in a society of scattered commodity-producers, connected only by the market, lawfulness cannot manifest itself otherwise than as average, social, mass lawfulness with the mutual cancellation of individual deviations in one direction or another.

The increase of labor productivity means the more rapid growth of constant capital compared to variable capital. And since surplus-value is a function solely of variable capital, it is understandable that the rate of profit (the ratio of surplus-value to all capital, and not solely to its variable part) has a tendency to fall. Marx analyzes this tendency in detail and the series of circumstances that conceal it or work against it. Without dwelling on the transmission of the extraordinarily interesting sections of Volume III devoted to usurious, commercial, and monetary capital, we shall proceed to the most important: to the theory of ground-rent. The price of production of agricultural products, in consequence of the limited amount of land, which is all held by individual owners in capitalist countries, is determined by the costs of production not on average but on the worst soil, not under average but under the worst conditions of delivering the product to market. The difference between this price and the price of production on better soils (or under better conditions) gives differential or rent. Analyzing it in detail, showing the origin of it in the difference in fertility of individual plots of land, in the difference in the size of capital invested in land, Marx completely uncovered (see also "Theories of Surplus-Value," where Rodbertus's criticism deserves special attention) Ricardo's error, that differential rent is obtained only in the successive transition from better lands to worse ones. On the contrary, there are also reverse transitions, there is the transformation of one category of lands into another (owing to progress in agricultural technique, the growth of cities, etc.), and it is a profound error, laying at the door of nature the deficiencies, limitations, and contradictions of capitalism, the so-called "law of decreasing fertility of soil". Then, the equality of profit in all branches of industry and the national economy in general presupposes complete freedom of competition, freedom for capital to flow from one branch to another. Meanwhile private property in land creates a monopoly, a hindrance to this free flow. Because of this monopoly, agricultural products, characterized by a lower organic composition of capital and consequently individually a higher rate of profit, do not enter the completely free process of equalization of the rate of profit; the owner of land, as a monopolist, gets the opportunity to hold the price above the average, and this monopoly price gives birth to absolute rent. Differential rent cannot be eliminated under the existence of capitalism, absolute rent can be—for example, through the nationalization of land, through its transfer into the ownership of the state. Such a transition would mean the undermining of the monopoly of private owners, would mean a more consistent, more complete carrying-through of freedom of competition in agriculture. And therefore radical bourgeoisie, Marx notes, appeared in history more than once with this progressive bourgeois demand for the nationalization of land, which, however, frightens the majority of the bourgeoisie, because it too closely "touches" another monopoly, especially important in our day and "sensitive": the monopoly of the means of production in general. (Marx himself explained his theory of average profit on capital and absolute ground-rent remarkably popularly, briefly, and clearly in his letter to Engels of August 2, 1862. See "Correspondence," vol. III, pp. 77–81. Cf. also the letter of August 9, 1862, ibid., pp. 86–87){72}. — On the history of ground-rent it is also important to point out Marx's analysis showing the transformation of labor-rent (when the peasant through his labor on the landowner's land creates surplus product) into rent in kind or natural rent (the peasant on his own land produces surplus product, giving it to the landowner in consequence of "extra-economic coercion"), then into monetary rent (the same natural rent transformed into money, "obrok" of old Russia, in consequence of the development of commodity production) and finally into capitalist rent, when in place of the peasant appears the entrepreneur in agriculture, conducting cultivation with the aid of hired labor. In connection with this analysis of the "genesis of capitalist ground-rent" should be noted a series of profound (and especially important for backward countries like Russia) thoughts of Marx on the evolution of capitalism in agriculture. "The transformation of natural into money-rent is not only accompanied, but even preceded inevitably by the formation of a class of property-less day-laborers, who hire themselves out for money. In the period of the rise of this class, when it appears still only sporadically, among the more wealthy peasants obligated to pay obrok, there naturally develops the practice of exploiting rural wage-laborers at their own expense—quite like the practice in feudal times when wealthy peasant-serfs in their turn kept serfs of their own. In these peasants there gradually develops the possibility of accumulating some property and of becoming future capitalists themselves. Among the old independent landowners there arises, consequently, a nursery of capitalist tenant-farmers, the development of which is conditioned by the general development of capitalist production outside agriculture" ("Capital," III{2}, 332){73}... "The expropriation and ejection of the rural population, not only 'frees' for industrial capital the workers, their means of subsistence, their instruments of labor, but also creates the home market" ("Capital," I{2}, 778){74}. The impoverishment and ruin of the rural population plays, in turn, a role in creating the reserve army of labor for capital. In every capitalist country "a portion of the agricultural population is always in process of transition to become an urban or factory (i.e., non-agricultural) population. This source of relative excess population flows perpetually... The agricultural laborer is depressed to the minimum of wages, and always stands with one foot in the swamp of pauperism" ("Capital," I{2}, 668){75}. The private property of the peasant in the land he cultivates is the basis of small production and the condition for its flourishing, the attainment by it of its classical form. But this small production is compatible only with the narrow, primitive limits of production and society. Under capitalism "the exploitation of peasants differs from the exploitation of the industrial proletariat only in form. The exploiter is the same—capital. Individual capitalists exploit individual peasants through mortgages and usury; the class of capitalists exploits the class of peasants through the state taxes" ("The Class Struggle in France"){76}. "The peasant parcel represents only the pretext which allows the capitalist to draw from the soil a profit, interest, and rent, leaving the peasant proprietor to pick out his wages as best he can" ("The Eighteenth Brumaire"){77}. Commonly the peasant even gives away to capitalist society, i.e., to the class of capitalists, part of his wages, sinking "to the level of the Irish tenant-farmer—under the semblance of being a private proprietor" ("The Class Struggle in France"){78}. What is one of the reasons "why in countries with predominant small peasant landownership the price of grain stands lower than in countries with capitalist production"? ("Capital," III{2}, 340). Because "the peasant gives away to society (i.e., to the class of capitalists) free part of his surplus product. "Consequently such low price (of grain and other agricultural products) is a consequence of the poverty of the producers, and not in any way a result of the productivity of their labor" ("Capital," III{2}, 340). Small landed property, the normal form of small production, degrades, is destroyed, perishes under capitalism. "Small landed property, in its very nature, excludes: the development of the social productive forces of labor, social forms of labor, the social concentration of capital, cattle-raising on a large scale, the progressive application of science. Usury and a system of taxation necessarily lead everywhere to its impoverishment. The investment of capital in the purchase of land withdraws this capital from use in the cultivation of the land. Infinite fragmentation of the means of production and the separation of the producers themselves" (Cooperatives, i.e., associations of small peasants, playing an extraordinarily progressive bourgeois role, only weaken this tendency, but do not eliminate it; one should also not forget that these cooperatives bring much to prosperous peasants and very little, almost nothing, to the mass of the poor, and then the associations themselves become exploiters of hired labor). "Gigantic waste of human force. The progressive deterioration of the conditions of production and increase in cost of the means of production is a law of small property" {79}. Capitalism, both in agriculture as in industry, transforms the process of production only at the cost of "a martyrology of the producers." "The dispersion of the rural workers over large areas breaks their power of resistance, while the concentration of urban workers increases this power. In modern, capitalist, agriculture, as in modern industry, the increase of the productive power of labor and greater mobility of it are bought at the cost of the ruin and exhaustion of labor-power itself. Moreover every advance of capitalist agriculture is a step forward not only in the art of robbing the laborer but also in the art of robbing the soil... Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology and the combination of the various processes into a socially integrated system of production only by exhausting at the same time the original sources whence all wealth springs—the earth and the laborer" ("Capital," I, end of chapter 13){80}.

## Socialism

From the foregoing it is evident that the inevitability of the transformation of capitalist society into socialist society Marx deduces entirely and exclusively from the economic law of motion of modern society. The socialization of labor, advancing in thousands of forms more and more rapidly and manifesting itself in the half century that has passed since Marx's death, particularly vividly in the growth of large-scale production, cartels, syndicates and trusts of capitalists, as well as in the gigantic growth of the size and power of financial capital,—here is the chief material basis of the inevitable coming of socialism. The intellectual and moral motive force, the physical executor of this transformation is the proletariat educated by capitalism itself. Its struggle with the bourgeoisie, manifesting itself in various and ever richer forms, inevitably becomes a political struggle directed at the conquest of political power by the proletariat ("the dictatorship of the proletariat"). The socialization of production cannot but lead to the transition of the means of production into the ownership of society, to "the expropriation of the expropriators." The enormous increase of labor productivity, the reduction of the working day, the replacement of the remnants, ruins of small, primitive, fragmented production by collective improved labor—here are the direct consequences of such a transition. Capitalism finally severs the connection of agriculture with industry, but at the same time by its highest development it prepares new elements of this connection, the union of industry with agriculture on the basis of the conscious application of science and the combination of collective labor, a new distribution of mankind (with the elimination both of rural backwardness, isolation from the world, wildness, and of the unnatural concentration of gigantic masses in large cities). A new form of the family, new conditions in the position of women and in the education of the growing generation are being prepared by the highest forms of modern capitalism: women's and children's labor, the dissolution of the patriarchal family by capitalism inevitably assume in modern society the most terrible, calamitous and repulsive forms. But nevertheless "modern industry, by assigning as it does an important part of the work of production, outside the domestic sphere, to women, to young persons, and to children of both sexes, creates a new economic foundation for a higher form of the family and of the relations between the sexes. Needless to say that it is just as absurd to regard the Christian-Germanic form of the family as absolute, as to regard the antique Roman, the antique Greek, or the Eastern forms, which, moreover, taken together, form a series of historical development. Moreover, if the collective working-group is composed of individuals of both sexes and all ages, this circumstance, although in its crude, capitalistic form, where the laborer exists for the process of production, and not the process of production for the laborer, is a pestilential source of corruption and slavery,—under suitable conditions it is, on the contrary, a source of humanistic development" ("Capital," I, end of chapter 13). The factory system shows us "the germs of the education of the future, an education that will unite for all children over a given age productive labor with instruction and gymnastics, not only as one of the methods of increasing social production, but as the only method of producing fully developed human beings" (ibid.){81}. On the same historical ground, not in the sense merely of explaining the past, but also in the sense of fearless foresight of the future and bold practical activity directed to its achievement, does Marx place socialism and the questions of nationality and of the state. Nations are an inevitable product and an inevitable form of the bourgeois epoch of social development. And the working-class could not mature, grow strong, develop, without "arranging itself within a nation," without being "national" ("though certainly not in the sense in which the bourgeoisie understands this"). But the development of capitalism increasingly breaks down the national partitions, destroys national isolation, substitutes class antagonisms for national ones. In developed capitalist countries it is therefore fully true that "the working men have no country" and that "the union of the efforts" of the workers of at least civilized countries "is one of the first conditions for the liberation of the proletariat" ("Communist Manifesto"){82}. The state, this organized violence, arose inevitably at a certain stage of the development of society, when society split into irreconcilable classes, when it could not exist without a "power" standing supposedly above society and to a certain extent separated from it. Arising within class contradictions, the state becomes "the state of the strongest, economically dominant class, which, with its help, becomes also the politically dominant class and thereby acquires new means for the suppression and exploitation of the oppressed class. Thus the ancient state was first and foremost the state of the slave-owners for the suppression of slaves, the feudal state was an organ of the nobility for the suppression of the peasant serfs, and the modern representative state is an instrument of exploitation of wage-labor by capital" (Engels in "The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State," where he expounds his and Marx's views){83}. Even the freest and most progressive form of bourgeois state, the democratic republic, in no way eliminates this fact, but merely changes its form (connection of government with the stock exchange, the corruption—direct and indirect—of officials and the press, etc.). Socialism, leading to the elimination of classes, thereby also leads to the elimination of the state. "The first act in which the state really constitutes itself the representative of the whole of society—the taking possession of the means of production in the name of society—is at the same time its last independent act as a state. State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies down by itself. The government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production. The state is not 'abolished'. It dies out"{84}. "A society organized on the basis of free and equal associations of producers will place the state machinery where it then will belong: into the museum of antiquities, by the side of the spinning wheel and the bronze axe" (Engels in "The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State"){85}.

Finally, on the question of the relation of Marx's socialism to the small peasantry, which will remain in the epoch of the expropriation of the expropriators, it is necessary to point out Engels's statement, expressing Marx's thoughts: "As soon as we are in possession of state power we shall not think of expropriating small peasants (with or without compensation), just as we shall have to expropriate big landed proprietors. Our task with respect to small peasants will first of all consist in converting their individual production and individual property into a cooperative one, but not by force, by way of example and by proffering social assistance for this purpose. And then we certainly shall have enough means to enable us to demonstrate to the peasants all the advantages of collective production, advantages which must now already be explained to them" (Engels: "On the Agrarian Question in the West," Alekseeva edition, p. 17, Russian transl. with errors. Original in "Neue Zeit"){86}.

## The Tactics of the Class Struggle of the Proletariat

Having already in 1844–1845 clarified one of the fundamental deficiencies of old materialism, consisting in the fact that it could not understand the conditions and could not evaluate the significance of revolutionary practical activity, Marx throughout his whole life, along with theoretical work, devoted unceasing attention to questions of the tactics of the class struggle of the proletariat. Enormous material is provided in this regard by all of Marx's works and especially by the four-volume correspondence with Engels published in 1913. This material has as yet far from been gathered, brought together, studied, and worked out. Therefore we must restrict ourselves here only to the most general and brief remarks, emphasizing that without this side of materialism Marx justly considered it half-hearted, one-sided, dead. Marx defined the fundamental task of the tactics of the proletariat in strict accordance with all the premises of his materialist-dialectical worldview. Only the objective accounting of the totality of the mutual relations of all without exception the classes of a given society, and consequently also the accounting of the objective stage of development of this society and the accounting of the mutual relations between it and other societies can serve as the support for the correct tactics of the advanced class. In this all classes and all countries are examined not in a static but in a dynamic way, i.e., not in a motionless state but in motion (the laws of which flow from the economic conditions of the existence of each class). Motion in turn is examined not only from the standpoint of the past but also from the standpoint of the future, and moreover not in the vulgar understanding of "evolutionists," seeing only slow changes, but dialectically: "Twenty years equal one day in great historical developments," Marx wrote to Engels, "although subsequently there may come days in which twenty years are concentrated" (vol. III, p. 127 of "Correspondence"){87}. At each stage of development, at each moment, the tactics of the proletariat must account for this objectively inevitable dialectic of human history; on the one hand, using for the development of consciousness, strength, and fighting capacity of the advanced class of the epoch of political stagnation or tortoise-like, so-called "peaceful," development, and on the other hand, conducting all this work of utilization in the direction of the "ultimate aim" of the movement of this class and creating in it the capacity for the practical solution of great tasks in great days that "concentrate in themselves twenty years." Two reasoning of Marx are especially important on this question, one from "The Poverty of Philosophy" concerning the economic struggle and economic organizations of the proletariat, the other from the "Communist Manifesto" concerning its political tasks. The first states: "Large-scale industry congregates in one place a mass of people who are strangers to one another. Competition splits their interests. But the maintenance of wages, this common interest with respect to their master, unites them in a common idea of resistance, of coalition... Coalitions, at first isolated, constitute themselves into groups, and the maintenance of the association becomes more necessary to them than that of wages... In this struggle—a veritable civil war—all the elements necessary for coming battles unite and develop. Once it has reached this point, the coalition takes on a political character"{88}. Here before us is a program and tactics of economic struggle and trade union movement for several decades, for the whole long epoch of preparation of the forces of the proletariat "for coming battles." This must be compared with the numerous indications of Marx and Engels on the example of the English labor movement, how industrial "prosperity" provokes attempts to "buy off the workers" (I, 136, "Correspondence with Engels"){89}, to divert them from struggle, how this prosperity generally "demoralizes the workers" (II, 218); how "the English proletariat becomes bourgeois"—"the most bourgeois of all nations" (English) "seems to want ultimately to bring about a state of affairs where alongside the bourgeoisie there will be a bourgeois aristocracy and a bourgeois proletariat" (II, 290){90}; how "revolutionary energy" disappears from it (III, 124); how one will have to wait a more or less long time for "the deliverance of the English workers from their apparent bourgeois corruption" (III, 127); how the English labor movement lacks "the fire of the Chartists" (1866; III, 305){91}; how English labor leaders are created on the model of a compromise "between radical bourgeoisie and worker" (on Holyoake, IV, 209); how, owing to England's monopoly and while this monopoly does not burst, "there is nothing to be done with the British workers" (IV, 433){92}. The tactics of economic struggle in connection with the general course (and outcome) of the labor movement is examined here from a remarkably broad, all-sided, dialectical, truly revolutionary standpoint.

The "Communist Manifesto" on the tactics of political struggle put forward the basic proposition of Marxism: "the communists fight for the attainment of the immediate aims, for the enforcement of the momentary interests of the working-class; but in the movement of the present, they also represent and take care of the future of that movement"{93}. In the name of this Marx in 1848 supported in Poland the party of "agrarian revolution," "the very party that called forth the Kraków insurrection of 1846"{94}. In Germany of 1848–1849 Marx supported the extreme revolutionary democracy and never subsequently took back what he had said then about tactics. He regarded the German bourgeoisie as an element which "was inclined from the very beginning to commit treason against the people" (only an alliance with the peasantry could have given the bourgeoisie the full achievement of its tasks) "and to make compromises with the crowned representatives of the old society." Here is the summary analysis given by Marx of the class position of the German bourgeoisie in the epoch of the bourgeois-democratic revolution, an analysis which is, incidentally, a model of materialism examining society in motion and moreover not only from the side of motion that faces backward: "...without faith in itself, without faith in the people; whining before those above, trembling before those below;... frightened by the world tempest; nowhere with energy, everywhere with plagiarism;... without initiative;... a cursed old man, condemned to guide in his senile interests the first impulses of youth of a young and vigorous people..." ("Neue Rheinische Zeitung" 1848, see "Literary Heritage," vol. III, p. 212){95}. About twenty years later in a letter to Engels (III, 224) Marx declared the cause of the failure of the 1848 revolution to be the fact that the bourgeoisie preferred peace with slavery to even the prospect of fighting for freedom. When the epoch of revolutions of 1848–1849 was over, Marx rose up against any playing at revolution (Schapper–Willich and the struggle with them), demanding the ability to work in the epoch of a new period, preparing ostensibly "peacefully" new revolutions. In what spirit Marx demanded the conduct of this work is evident from the following his evaluation of the situation in Germany in the most reactionary period in 1856: "Everything in Germany will depend on whether it is possible to back the proletarian revolution by a second edition of the Peasant War" ("Correspondence with Engels," II, 108){96}. While the democratic (bourgeois) revolution in Germany was not completed, all Marx's attention in the tactics of the socialist proletariat was directed to the development of the democratic energy of the peasantry. He considered Lassalle as committing "objectively a betrayal of the labor movement for the benefit of Prussia" (III, 210), among other reasons precisely because Lassalle favored the landowners and Prussian nationalism. "It is base," wrote Engels in 1865, exchanging thoughts with Marx on the forthcoming joint appearance of their in print, "in an agricultural country to attack in the name of industrial workers only the bourgeoisie, forgetting the patriarchal 'stick exploitation' of rural workers by the feudal nobility" (III, 217){97}. In the period 1864–1870, when the epoch of the completion of the bourgeois-democratic revolution in Germany was drawing to a close, an epoch of struggle between the exploiting classes of Prussia and Austria over this or that way of completing this revolution from above, Marx not only condemned Lassalle, who was playing up to Bismarck, but also corrected Liebknecht when he fell into "Austriophilism" and the defense of particularism; Marx demanded revolutionary tactics equally relentlessly fighting both Bismarck and the Austriophiles, tactics that would not adapt to the "victor"—the Prussian junker, but would immediately renew the revolutionary struggle against him and on the ground created by Prussian military victories ("Correspondence with Engels," III, 134, 136, 147, 179, 204, 210, 215, 418, 437, 440–441){98}. In the famous appeal of the International of September 9, 1870 Marx warned the French proletariat against premature uprising{99}, but when it nevertheless came about (1871), Marx greeted with enthusiasm the revolutionary initiative of the masses, "storming heaven" (Marx's letter to Kugelmann){100}. The defeat of revolutionary action in this situation, as in many others, from the standpoint of Marx's dialectical materialism, was a lesser evil in the general course and outcome of proletarian struggle than the refusal to hold the position taken, surrender without a fight: such surrender would have demoralized the proletariat, crippled its fighting capacity. Fully appreciating the use of legal means of struggle in epochs of political stagnation and the domination of bourgeois legality, Marx in 1877–1878, after the exceptional law against socialists was issued{101}, sharply condemned the "revolutionary phrase" of Most, but condemned no less, if not more sharply, the opportunism that then temporarily seized the official Social-Democratic party, which did not immediately display firmness, steadfastness, revolutionariness, readiness to go over to illegal struggle in response to the exceptional law ("Marx's Letters to Engels," IV, 397, 404, 418, 422, 424){102}. Cf. also his letters to Sorge.