Written November to early December 1886.

From: *Die Neue Zeit*, No. 2, 1887.

The world outlook of the Middle Ages was essentially theological. The unity of the European world, which in reality did not exist internally, was established externally, against the common Saracen foe, by Christianity. The unity of the Western European world, which formed a group of peoples developing in constant interaction, was brought together in Catholicism. This theological unification was not merely ideal. It really existed, not only in the Pope, its monarchical centre, but above all in the feudally and hierarchically organised Church, which in every country, as the owner of about a third of the land, held a mighty position of power within the feudal organisation. The Church, with its feudal landed property, was the real bond between the various countries; the feudal organisation of the Church gave the secular-feudal state order its religious consecration. The clergy, moreover, was the only educated class. It was therefore self-evident that the dogma of the Church was the starting point and basis of all thought. Jurisprudence, natural science, philosophy, everything was dealt with according to whether its content agreed with the doctrines of the Church or not.

But within the womb of feudality the power of the bourgeoisie developed. A new class rose up against the great landowners. The town burghers were above all and exclusively commodity producers and commodity traders, while the feudal mode of production rested essentially on the self-consumption of the products generated within a limited circle – partly by the producers, partly by the feudal tribute collectors. The Catholic world outlook, cut to the measure of feudalism, could no longer satisfy this new class and its conditions of production and exchange. Nevertheless it too remained for a long time still caught in the bonds of the all-powerful theology. All the Reformations and the struggles attaching to them, waged under a religious banner, from the 13th to the 17th century, are, on their theoretical side, nothing but repeated attempts of the bourgeoisie, the urban plebeians and the peasants who had become rebellious in alliance with both, to adapt the old theological world outlook to the changed economic conditions and the life situation of the new class. But it did not work. The religious flag fluttered for the last time in England in the 17th century, and scarcely fifty years later the new world outlook appeared in France undisguised, the outlook that was to become the classic one of the bourgeoisie,
the juridical world outlook.

It was a secularisation of the theological world outlook. Human right took the place of dogma, of divine right; the state took the place of the church. The economic and social conditions, which had previously been imagined, because sanctioned by the church, as created by the church and dogma, were now conceived as based on right and created by the state. Because the exchange of commodities on a social scale and in its full development, particularly through advance and credit, gives rise to complicated reciprocal contractual relations and thus demands generally valid rules that can only be supplied by the community – state-determined legal norms –, people imagined that these legal norms did not spring from economic facts but from formal enactment by the state. And because competition, the fundamental mode of intercourse of free commodity producers, is the great leveller, equality before the law became the principal battle-cry of the bourgeoisie. The fact that the struggle of this newly rising class against the feudal lords and the absolute monarchy that then protected them, like every class struggle, had to be a political struggle, a struggle for the possession of the state, waged for *legal demands*, helped to consolidate the juridical world outlook.

But the bourgeoisie produced its negative double, the proletariat, and with it a new class struggle, which broke out before the bourgeoisie had completely conquered political power. Just as in its time the bourgeoisie, in its struggle against the nobility, had for a while still dragged along the theological world outlook by force of tradition, so the proletariat initially took over from its adversary the juridical way of thinking, and sought in it weapons against the bourgeoisie. The first proletarian party formations, like their theoretical representatives, remained entirely on the juridical “legal ground”, except that they constructed a different legal ground from that of the bourgeoisie. On the one hand, the demand for equality was extended to the effect that legal equality should be supplemented by social equality; on the other, from Adam Smith’s propositions that labour is the source of all wealth, but that the product of labour must be shared by the worker with the landowner and the capitalist, the conclusion was drawn that this sharing was unjust and must be either abolished or at least modified in favour of the workers. The feeling, however, that by leaving the question on the purely juridical “legal ground” it was in no way possible to eliminate the evils created by the bourgeois-capitalist mode of production, and especially by the modern large-scale industrial mode of production, already led the most outstanding minds among the early socialists – Saint-Simon, Fourier and Owen – to abandon the juridical-political sphere entirely and to declare all political struggle fruitless.

Both conceptions were equally inadequate to express appropriately and comprehensively the emancipation aspirations of the working class created by the economic situation. The demand for equality, no less than that for the full product of labour, ran into insoluble contradictions as soon as they were to be formulated in juridical detail, and left the core of the matter, the transformation of the mode of production, more or less untouched. The rejection of political struggle by the great utopians was at the same time a rejection of the class struggle, hence of the only possible mode of activity of the class in whose interest they appeared. Both conceptions abstracted from the historical background to which they owed their existence; both appealed to sentiment: the one to the sense of right, the other to the sense of humanity. Both clothed their demands in the form of pious wishes, of which it was impossible to say why they should be realised just now and not a thousand years earlier or later.

The working class, which by the transformation of the feudal mode of production into the capitalist mode was stripped of all ownership of the means of production and is continually reproduced by the mechanism of the capitalist mode of production in this hereditary condition of propertylessness, cannot exhaustively express its life situation in the juridical illusion of the bourgeoisie. It can only fully recognise this life situation itself if it looks at things in their reality, without juridically tinted spectacles. Marx helped it to do this with his materialist conception of history, with the demonstration that all juridical, political, philosophical, religious etc. ideas of men are in the last instance derived from their economic conditions of life, from their way of producing and exchanging the products. Thus was given the world outlook corresponding to the life and struggle situation of the proletariat; the propertylessness of the workers could only be matched by the illusionlessness of their heads. And this proletarian world outlook is now making its journey round the world.

Understandably, the struggle between the two world outlooks continues; not only between proletariat and bourgeoisie, but also between free-thinking workers and those still dominated by old tradition. On the whole, the old conception is defended here by ordinary politicians with the usual arguments. But there are also so-called scientific jurists who make a special profession of jurisprudence.¹

Until now these gentlemen had thought themselves too superior to get involved with the theoretical side of the labour movement. We must therefore be very grateful when at long last a real professor of law, Dr Anton Menger, condescends to “throw a dogmatic light” upon the history of socialism from the “philosophy of right standpoint”.²

In fact, up to now the socialists have been on the wrong track. They have neglected just what mattered.

“It is only when the socialist ideas have been stripped of the endless *economic* and philanthropic disquisitions … and transformed into sober legal concepts” (p. III), only when the whole “economic trimming” (p. 37) is removed, that “the juristic treatment of socialism … the most important task of the philosophy of right of our time” [p. III] can be taken in hand.

Now, the “socialist ideas” have to do precisely with economic relations, above all with the relation between wage-labour and capital, and here, it would seem, economic disquisitions are after all something more than mere “trimmings” to be stripped off. Moreover, economics is a so-called science, and into the bargain a little more scientific than the philosophy of right, because it deals with facts, not with mere ideas, as the latter does. But this is a matter of total indifference to the professional jurist. To him, economic investigations stand on the same level as philanthropic declamations. Fiat justitia, pereat mundus. |The law must be obeyed, even if the world perishes because of it.|

Moreover, the “economic trimmings” in Marx – and these lie heaviest on our jurist’s stomach – are not merely economic investigations. They are essentially historical. They trace the course of social development from the feudal mode of production of the Middle Ages to the developed capitalist mode of production of today, the decline of earlier classes and class antagonisms and the formation of new classes with new antagonisms of interests, which find expression, among other things, also in new legal demands. Even our jurist seems to have a faint inkling of this when he discovers on p. 37 that today’s

“philosophy of right … is in essence nothing but a reflection of the historically handed-down legal condition”, which could be called “the *bourgeois philosophy of right*”, and that “socialism has placed alongside it a *philosophy of right of the propertyless classes of the people*”.

But if this is so, what is the cause? Where do the “bourgeois” and the “propertyless classes of the people” come from, each possessing a special philosophy of right corresponding to its class position? From right or from economic development? And does Marx tell us anything else than that the legal views of the individual great classes of society are determined by their respective class positions? How does Menger get among the Marxists?

But that is only a slip, an involuntary recognition of the power of the new theory, which has escaped the strict jurist and which we therefore merely register. On the contrary, where our man of law stands on his own legal ground, he is a despiser of economic history. The declining Roman empire is his favourite example.

"Never were the means of production so centralised," he tells us, "as at the time when half the African province was the property of six persons ... never were the sufferings of the working classes greater than in the period when almost every productive worker was a slave. Neither was there any lack of fierce critics of the existing social conditions—especially among the Church Fathers—who can stand comparison with the best socialist writings of the present day; nevertheless the fall of the Western Roman Empire was followed not by socialism, but by—the mediaeval legal order" (p. 108). And why did this happen? Because "the nation did not have before it a clear picture of the future state of society, free from all extravagance".

Herr Menger thinks that at the time of the declining Roman Empire the economic preconditions for modern socialism were present, and only its juridical formulation was lacking. This is why feudalism came in place of socialism, and the materialist conception of history is reduced to absurdity!

What the jurists of the declining Roman Empire had so nicely systematised was not feudal law but Roman law, the law of a society of commodity producers. Since, according to Herr Menger’s premise, the juridical conception is the driving force of history, he here confronts the Roman jurists with the monstrous demand that, instead of the legal system of the existing Roman society, they should have delivered its exact opposite: namely, “a clear picture, free from all extravagance,” of a fantastic social condition. That, then, is Menger’s philosophy of law applied to Roman law! But Menger’s assertion that never were the economic conditions more favourable to socialism than at the time of the Roman Empire is downright shocking. The socialists whom Menger wants to refute see the guarantee for the success of socialism in the development of production itself: on the one hand, through the development of machine-driven large-scale industry in manufacture and agriculture, production becomes more and more social and the productivity of labour enormous; this drives towards the abolition of class distinctions and the transformation of commodity production in private enterprises into direct production for, and by, society. On the other hand, the modern mode of production creates the class which acquires, in ever-increasing measure, the power and the interest to actually carry out this development: a free, working proletariat.

Now compare this with the conditions of Imperial Rome, where there was no question of large-scale machine production either in industry or in agriculture. We certainly find a concentration of landed property, but one has to be a jurist to regard that as synonymous with the development of socially conducted labour in large-scale enterprises. If we present Herr Menger with three examples of landed property: an Irish landlord who owns 50,000 acres, which are worked by 5,000 tenants in small holdings of an average of 10 acres; a Scottish landlord who has turned 50,000 acres into hunting grounds; and an American giant farm of 10,000 acres where wheat is grown in a large-scale industrial manner—he will declare that in the first two cases the concentration of the means of production has advanced five times as far as in the last.

The development of Roman agriculture in the imperial period led on the one hand to the extension of pasture farming over immense areas and the depopulation of the country, on the other to the breaking up of estates into small parcels that were leased out to coloni, hence to dwarf holdings of bond small peasants, the precursors of the later serfs, and thus to a mode of production in which the mode of production of the Middle Ages was already contained in embryo. And among other things, for this very reason, most esteemed Herr Menger, the Roman world was followed by “the mediaeval legal order”. To be sure, there were periods in certain provinces when large-scale agricultural enterprises existed, but they were not machine production with free workers: they were plantation economy with slaves, barbarians of the most diverse nationalities who often could not understand one another. Contrasted with these were the free proletarians, but not working proletarians, but lumpenproletarians. Today society rests more and more upon the labour of the proletarians, they become ever more indispensable for its existence; the Roman lumpenproletarians were parasites, not only useless but even harmful to society, and therefore without decisive power.

But to Herr Menger the mode of production and the people seem never to have been so ripe for socialism as in the imperial period! We see the advantage of keeping as far away as possible from economic “trimmings.”

We shall let him have the Church Fathers gratis, since he conceals in what respect their “critiques of the existing social conditions” “can stand comparison with the best socialist writings of the present day”. We owe the Church Fathers many interesting communications on the sinking Roman society, but as a rule they did not embark on a critique of it; they contented themselves with roundly condemning it, and in expressions of such vehemence that by comparison the most violent language of modern socialists and even the clamour of the anarchists appears tame. Is this the “superiority” Herr Menger has in mind?

With the same contempt for historical facts that we have just noted, Menger says on p. 2 that the privileged classes receive their income without rendering any personal service in return to society. That the ruling classes, on the ascending branch of their development, have very definite social functions to perform and for that very reason become ruling classes, is thus entirely unknown to him. While socialists recognise the temporary historical justification of these classes, Menger here declares their appropriation of the surplus product to be theft. He can then only wonder when he finds on pp. 122, 123 that these classes are daily losing more and more of the power to protect their right to this income. That this power consists in the exercise of social functions and vanishes with the disappearance of these functions in the further course of development, is a pure riddle to this great thinker.

Enough. The professor now proceeds to treat socialism in terms of the philosophy of law, that is, to reduce it to a few short juridical formulas, to socialist “basic rights,” a new edition of the rights of man for the nineteenth century. Such basic rights, to be sure, have only “slight practical effect,” but are “not without use in the scientific field” as “slogans” (pp. 5, 6).

Thus we have already sunk so low that we are dealing only with slogans. First the historical context and content of the mighty movement is eliminated, to make room for a mere “philosophy of law,” and then this philosophy of law is reduced to slogans which, admittedly, are not worth a farthing in practice! It was indeed worth the trouble.

The professor now discovers that the whole of socialism can be reduced juridically to three such slogans, three basic rights. These are:
1. the right to the full proceeds of labour,
2. the right to existence,
3. the right to work.
The right to work is only a provisional demand, “the first clumsy formula in which the revolutionary demands of the proletariat are summarised” (Marx) and thus does not belong here. On the other hand, the demand for equality is forgotten, the demand that dominated the whole of French revolutionary socialism, from Babeuf to Cabet and Proudhon, but which Herr Menger will hardly be able to formulate juridically, in spite of—or perhaps precisely because—it is the most juridical of all those mentioned. As the quintessence there remain only the meagre propositions 1 and 2, which, moreover, contradict one another, as Menger finally discovers on p. 27, but which does not in the least prevent every socialist system from having to move within them (p. 6). It is, however, palpable that squeezing the most diverse socialist doctrines of the most diverse countries and stages of development into these two “slogans” must falsify the whole presentation. The peculiarity of each individual doctrine, which precisely constitutes its historical significance, is here not only cast aside as incidental, but, because it deviates from the slogan and contradicts it, is directly rejected as simply false.

In the present work, only No. 1, the right to the full proceeds of labour, is treated.

The right of the worker to the full proceeds of labour, i.e. of each individual worker to *his* specific proceeds of labour, is, in this definiteness, exclusively Proudhon’s doctrine. Quite different from this is the demand that the means of production and products should belong to the working community as a whole. This demand is communist and, as Menger discovers on p. 48, goes beyond demand No. 1, which causes him no small embarrassment. Consequently, he must sometimes classify the communists under No. 2, and sometimes twist and turn basic right No. 1 until he can bring them under it. This happens on p. 7. Here it is presupposed that, after the abolition of commodity production, the latter nevertheless persists. It seems quite natural to Herr Menger that in a socialist society, too, exchange-values, i.e. commodities for sale, are produced, and that the *prices of labour* continue to exist, that is, that labour-power is still sold as a commodity. The only question he is concerned with is whether the historically inherited prices of labour are maintained in socialist society with a surcharge, or whether “a completely new determination of labour prices” is to take place. The latter, in his opinion, would shake society even more than the introduction of the socialist social order itself! This conceptual confusion is understandable, since our scholar speaks on p. 94 of a *socialist theory of value*, and hence imagines, after well-known models, that Marx’s theory of value is supposed to serve as the standard of distribution for the future society. Indeed, on p. 56 we are told that the full proceeds of labour are nothing definite at all, since they can be calculated according to at least *three* different standards, and finally on pp. 161, 162 we learn that it is the “natural principle of distribution” and can only exist in a society with common property but separate use, that is, a society that to-day is not presented as the final goal by any single socialist! A splendid basic right! And a splendid philosopher of law of the working class!

Thus Menger has made it easy for himself to present the history of socialism “critically.” Three words I name to you, heavy with content, and even if they do not pass from mouth to mouth, they are still quite sufficient for the matriculation examination to which the socialists are subjected here. Come forward, Saint-Simon, come Proudhon, come Marx, and whatever you are all called: Do you swear by No. 1, or No. 2, or No. 3? Into my Procrustean bed with you, and whatever juts out over it I hack away as political-economic and philanthropic trimmings!

It is merely a question here of discovering with whom these three fundamental rights foisted by Menger upon socialism are first to be found; whoever first sets up one of these formulas is the great man. That this cannot be done without ludicrous blunders, despite the learnedly attitudinising apparatus, goes without saying. Thus he believes that among the Saint-Simonists *les oisifs* denote the propertied, and *les travailleurs* the labouring classes (p. 67), and this with reference to the title of the Saint-Simonist work: “*Les oisifs et les travailleurs. – Fermages, loyers, intérêts, salaires*” (the idlers and the workers. – Rent, hire, interest, wages), where the absence of
profit
should already have taught him better. On the same page Menger himself quotes a decisive passage from the *Globe*, the organ of Saint-Simonism, in which, alongside the scholars and artists, the *industriels*, i.e. the
manufacturers
, are praised as benefactors of humanity in contrast to the *oisifs*, and where only the abolition of the tribute to the *oisifs* is demanded, i.e. to the
rentiers
, those who draw rent, hire, interest.
Profit
is again excluded from this list. The manufacturer occupies a prominent position in the Saint-Simonist system as a powerful and well-paid agent of society, and Herr Menger would do well to study this position more closely before he further processes it in terms of legal philosophy.

On page 73 we are told that Proudhon, in the “*Contradictions économiques*”, “admittedly rather obscurely”, promised a new solution to the social problem while retaining commodity production and competition. What to Herr Professor still seemed rather obscure in 1886, Marx had already seen through in 1847, demonstrated it to be something old, and been able to predict the bankruptcy that Proudhon experienced in 1849.

But enough. All that we have dealt with so far is a mere side issue for Herr Menger and for his public as well. Had he merely written a History of Law No. 1, his pamphlet would have passed without trace. This history is only a pretext for the pamphlet; its purpose is to drag Marx down. And only because it deals with Marx is it read. For a long time now it has no longer been so easy to criticise him, ever since the understanding of his system has penetrated wider circles and the critic can no longer speculate on the public’s ignorance. Only one expedient remains: to belittle Marx, his achievements are foisted onto other socialists, with whom nobody concerns themselves, who have vanished from the scene and no longer have any political or scientific significance. In this way it is hoped to dispose of the founder of the proletarian world outlook and of that outlook itself. Herr Menger has undertaken this. One is not a professor for nothing. One wants to achieve something as well.

The matter is very simple.

The present social order gives the landowner and capitalist a “right” to a part – the largest part – of the product generated by the worker. Fundamental Right No. 1 says that this right is a wrong and that the worker is due the whole product of labour. Therewith the entire content of socialism is disposed of, insofar as Fundamental Right No. 2 does not come into question. He, therefore, who first said that the present-day right of the holders of the land and other means of production to a part of the product of labour is a
wrong
– that man is the great man, the
founder of “scientific”
socialism! And that was
Godwin, Hall
and
Thompson
. After discarding all the endless economic trimmings, Menger finds in Marx, as a juridical residue, only this same assertion. Consequently, Marx copied the old Englishmen, especially Thompson, and carefully concealed his source. The proof is furnished.

We abandon every attempt to make the obstinate jurist understand
that Marx nowhere puts forward the demand for the “right to the whole product of labour”,
that in his theoretical writings he puts forward no legal demand of any kind whatsoever. Even our jurist dimly senses something remotely akin to this when he reproaches Marx for nowhere giving “a thorough exposition of the right to the whole product of labour” (p. 98).

In Marx’s theoretical investigations, juridical right, which always only reflects the economic conditions of a particular society, comes into consideration only in a very secondary way; by contrast, the primary consideration is the historical justification which particular conditions, modes of appropriation, and classes of society have for particular epochs, and the investigation of which interests above all everyone who sees in history a connected, even if often crossed, course of development, and not, as the 18th century did, a mere jumble of folly and brutality. Marx understands the historical inevitability, hence the justification, of the ancient slave-holders, of the medieval feudal lords, etc., as levers of human development for a limited historical period; he thereby also recognises the temporary historical justification of exploitation, of the appropriation of the product of labour by others; but he also demonstrates at the same time that this historical justification has now not only vanished, but that the continuation of exploitation in any form whatsoever, instead of furthering social development, daily impedes it more and involves it in ever more violent collisions. And Menger’s attempt to force these epoch-making historical investigations into his narrow, juridical Procrustean bed proves only his own total incapacity to grasp things that go beyond the very narrowest juridical horizon. His Fundamental Right No. 1 absolutely does not exist for Marx in this formulation.

But now comes the point!

Herr Menger has discovered in Thompson the word
surplus-value
, surplus value. No doubt about it, Thompson is therefore the discoverer of surplus-value, Marx only a wretched plagiarist:

“In these views of Thompson one will at once recognise the line of thought, indeed even the mode of expression, which later recur in so many socialists, notably also in
Marx
and
Rodbertus
” (p. 53).

Thompson is therefore undeniably the “most eminent founder of scientific socialism” (p. 49). And in what does this scientific socialism consist?

“The opinion ‘that rent of land and profit on capital are deductions that the owners of land and capital make from the whole product of labour, is by no means
peculiar to socialism
, since some representatives of bourgeois political economy, e.g. Adam Smith,
start from the same opinion
. Thompson and his successors are only
in so far original
as they regard rent of land and profit on capital as
unlawful
deductions, which stand in contradiction to the worker’s right to the whole product of labour’” (pp. 53, 54).

Scientific socialism thus consists not in discovering an economic fact – that, according to Menger, the economists before him had already done – but simply in declaring it to be
unlawful
. That is Herr Menger’s view of it. If the socialists had indeed made things so easy for themselves, they could long since have packed up, and Herr Menger’s philosophical-legal disgrace would have been spared him. But that is what happens when a world-historical movement is reduced to juridical catchwords that can be stowed away in one’s waistcoat pocket.

But what about the surplus-value stolen from Thompson? The matter is as follows:

Thompson examines in his “Inquiry into the Principles of Distribution of Wealth”, etc., Chap. 1, Sect. 15,

“what proportional part of their product of labour should the labourers” (“ought”, literally “to be owing”, hence “ought by right”) “pay to the owners of it, called capitalists, for the article called capital?” The capitalists say that “without this capital, without machinery, raw materials, etc., mere labour would be unproductive, and that it is therefore only just that the labourer should pay something for its use.” And Thompson continues: – “Undoubtedly the labourer must pay something for the use of it, if he is so unfortunate as not to possess it himself; the question is, how much of the product of his labour ought to be deducted for this use” (p. 128 of the Pare edition of 1850).

This does not at all look like the “right to the whole product of labour”. On the contrary, Thompson finds it perfectly in order that the worker should surrender a part of his product of labour for the use of the borrowed capital. For him the only question is, how much? And here there are “two
standards, that of the worker and that of the capitalist”. And what is the worker’s standard?

“The payment of a sum that replaces the wear and tear of the capital, its value when wholly consumed, and additionally such an
extra remuneration
to its owner and manager (superintendent) as would maintain him in
equal comfort
with the actually working (more actively employed) productive labourers!”

This, according to Thompson, is the
worker’s
demand, and whoever does not at once here “recognise the line of thought, indeed even the mode of expression” of “Marx”, fails Herr Menger’s legal-philosophical examination without mercy.

But the surplus-value – where is the surplus-value? Patience, dear reader, we’ll get there directly.

“The capitalist’s standard would be the
additional value
which the same quantity of labour
produces in consequence of the use of machinery
or other capital; so that
this whole surplus-value
would be enjoyed by the capitalist, by reason of his superior intelligence and skill by virtue of which he has accumulated his capital and advanced it or its use to the workers” (Thompson, p. 128).

This passage, taken literally, is purely unintelligible. Without means of production no production is possible. But the means of production are here assumed in the form of capital, i.e. in the possession of capitalists. If, therefore, the worker produces without “the use of machinery or other capital”, he attempts the impossible and produces nothing at all. But if he produces with the use of capital, then his
entire
product would be what is here called surplus-value. Let us proceed. And here Thompson makes the same capitalist say, on p. 130:

“Before the invention of machinery, before the erection of workshops and factories, what was the amount of the product which the unassisted strength of the worker brought forth? Whatever this amount was, he shall continue to enjoy it … but to the erector of the buildings or the machinery, or to him who has acquired these by voluntary exchange, to him there shall accrue the whole
surplus-value
of the manufactured commodities as a reward”, etc.

Thompson’s capitalist here only voices the everyday illusion of the manufacturer, that the labour-hour of the worker producing with the aid of machinery, etc., produces a greater
value
than the labour-hour of the simple manual labourer did before the invention of machinery. This fancy is nourished by the
extraordinary
“surplus-value” pocketed by the capitalist who breaks into a field hitherto belonging to hand-labour with a newly-invented machine monopolised by him and perhaps by a few other capitalists. The price of the hand-product here determines the market price of the entire product of this branch of industry; the machine product costs perhaps only the fourth
part of the labour, thus leaving the manufacturer a “surplus-value” of 300 per cent on his cost price.

Naturally the generalization of the new machine of this kind soon puts an end to "surplus-value"; but then the capitalist sees that to the degree that the machine product determines the market price, and this price sinks more and more to the real value of the machine product, the price of the hand product likewise sinks and is thereby pressed below its former value, so that machine labour, compared with hand labour, still produces a certain "surplus-value". This quite ordinary self-deception Thompson here puts into the mouth of his manufacturer. How little he himself shares it, however, he says expressly immediately beforehand, on p. 127:

"The raw materials, the buildings, the wages, all of them can add nothing to their own value; the
additional value
comes from labour alone."

Whereby we beg our readers' pardon if, for the sole use and benefit of Herr Menger, we here extra establish that this "additional value" of Thompson's, too, is by no means Marx's surplus-value, but the
whole
of the value added to the raw material by labour, hence the sum of the value of labour-power and surplus-value in Marx's sense.

Only now, after this indispensable "economic gloss", can we fully appreciate the audacity with which Herr Menger says on p. 53:

"According to Thompson's view ... the capitalists regard ...
that
difference between
the necessaries of life of the worker
and the actual yield of their labour, which has become more productive through machines and other capital outlays, as a surplus value (surplus value, additional value) which is to accrue to the owners of land and capital."

That is supposed to be the German "free" rendering of the passage from Thompson, p. 128, cited by us above. But Thompson's capitalist speaks solely of the difference between the product of the same quantity of labour (the same quantity of labour), according to whether it works with the use of capital or without the use of capital, the difference between the product of an equal amount of hand labour and machine labour. The "necessaries of life of the worker" can be smuggled in by Herr Menger only by means of a direct falsification of Thompson.

Let us note, then: The "surplus-value" of the Thompsonian capitalist is not the "surplus-value" or "additional value" of Thompson; still less is either of the two the "surplus-value" of Herr Menger; and least of all is any one of the three the "surplus-value" of Marx.

But that does not bother Herr Menger in the slightest. He continues on p. 53:

"Ground-rent and profit on capital are therefore nothing other than deductions which the owner of land and capital, by virtue of his legal position of power, is in a position to make from the full product of labour, to the disadvantage of the worker"—a proposition whose entire content is already contained in Adam Smith—and then exclaims triumphantly: "In these views of
Thompson's
one will immediately recognise the train of thought, indeed even the mode of expression, which later recurs in so many Socialists, notably also in Marx and Rodbertus."

In other words: Herr Menger has discovered in Thompson the word surplus value (also additional value), surplus-value, whereby he can conceal, only by means of a direct substitution, that surplus value or additional value occurs in Thompson in two totally different meanings, both of which are again totally different from the sense in which Marx uses the word surplus-value.

That is the whole content of his mighty discovery! What a pitiful result compared with the pompous announcement of the preface:

"In this work I shall
provide the proof
that
Marx
and
Rodbertus
borrowed their most important socialist theories from older English and French theorists, without naming the sources of their views."

How lamely the comparison that precedes this sentence now drags along:

"If someone had 'rediscovered' the doctrine of the division of labour thirty years after the appearance of Adam Smith's work on the Wealth of Nations, or if today a writer wished to present Darwin's theory of evolution as his own intellectual property, one would consider him an
ignoramus
or a
charlatan
. Only in the field of social science, which is as yet almost wholly lacking in a historical tradition, are successful attempts of this kind conceivable."

We shall disregard here that Menger still believes Adam Smith "discovered" the division of labour, whereas Petty had already fully developed this point eighty years before Smith. What Menger said in respect of Darwin, however, now turns round to some extent. The Ionian philosopher Anaximander already put forward the view, in the sixth century before our era, that man developed from a fish, and as is well known, this is also the view of today's evolutionary natural science. Now if someone were to come forward and declare that the train of thought and even the mode of expression of Darwin is already to be recognised here, and that Darwin is nothing but a plagiarist of Anaximander, but carefully concealed his source, he would be proceeding in regard to Darwin and Anaximander exactly as Herr Menger actually proceeds in regard to Marx and Thompson. The Herr Professor is right: "Only in the field of the social sciences" may one count on that ignorance which makes "successful attempts of this kind conceivable".

Since, however, he lays such emphasis on the little word "surplus-value", regardless of what concept is connected with it, let the great connoisseur of socialist and economic literature be let into the secret that not only does the word surplus produce occur already in Ricardo (in the chapter on wages), but that, alongside the mieux-value used by Sismondi, the expression plus-value for any increase in value that costs the commodity possessor nothing has been current coin in ordinary business life in France from time immemorial. In light of this, it might appear questionable whether the discovery, accomplished by Menger, of the discovery of surplus-value by Thompson, or rather by the Thompsonian capitalist, will obtain validity even in the philosophy of law.

But Herr Menger is still far from being done with Marx. Listen:

"It is characteristic that Marx and Engels have been
falsely citing
this
fundamental work
of English Socialism" (namely Thompson) "for
forty years
" (p. 50).

Not content with having hushed up this, his secret Egeria, for forty years, Marx must also falsely cite her! And not once, but for forty years. And not only Marx, but also Engels! What accumulated premeditation of infamy! Poor Lujo Brentano, who for twenty years have been vainly searching for a single false citation by Marx and on this manhunt have not only burned your own fingers, but have also brought your credulous friend Sedley-Taylor in Cambridge to grief—hang yourself, Lujo, that you did not invent that. And what does this horrendous, forty-year-long stubbornly perpetuated and, on top of that, "characteristic" falsification consist of, which, further, through the malicious and likewise forty-year-long complicity of Engels, takes on the character of a dolose conspiracy?

"... falsely citing it, by placing its first appearance in the year 1827!"

And the book had already appeared in 1824!

"Characteristic" indeed—of Herr Menger. That is, however, by no means the only one—pay attention, Lujo!—not the only false citation of Marx and Engels, who seem to carry on false citation as a trade—perhaps also on the tramp? In the "Misère de la philosophie", which appeared in 1847, Marx confused
Hodgskin
with
Hopkins
, and forty years later (these malicious people simply will not do anything in less than forty years) Engels commits the same thing in the preface to the German translation of the "Misère". With this sensitivity of his for printer's errors and slips of the pen, it is truly a loss for humanity that the Herr Professor did not become a proof-reader in a printing works. But no, we must take back this compliment. Herr Menger is also of no use as a proof-reader, for he too copies wrongly, hence cites falsely. This happens to him not only with English, but also with German titles. Thus he points, e.g., to "Engels' translation of this work", namely the "Misère". According to the title-page of the work, Engels did not make the translation. Engels cites the passage of Marx's with Hopkins
verbatim
in the relevant preface; he was therefore obliged to cite the error along with it, if he did not wish to cite Marx falsely. But these people simply cannot do right by Herr Menger.

But enough of the petty clutter in which our legal philosopher disports himself with such complacency. It is "characteristic" of the man and his whole sort that he, who has become acquainted with this whole literature only through Marx—he cites not a single English writer who has not already been cited by Marx, except perhaps Hall and world-renowned men like Godwin, Shelley's father-in-law—that he feels obliged to show that he knows two or three books more than Marx did "forty years ago", in the year 1847. He who, with the titles alone of the works cited by Marx in his pocket and with the present-day resources and conveniences of the British Museum, can make no other discovery in this line than that Thompson's "Distribution" appeared in 1824 and not in 1827, truly has no need to boast of bibliographical erudition.

What applies to many another social reformer of our time also applies to Herr Menger: Big words and paltry—if any—deeds. The proof is promised that Marx is a plagiarist, and what is proved is that a
word
, "surplus-value", was already used before Marx, albeit in a different sense!

So it is, too, with the juridical socialism of Herr Menger. In the preface, Herr Menger declares that he sees in the

"juridical treatment of Socialism" the "most important task of the philosophy of law
of our time
". "Its correct solution will contribute essentially to the accomplishment of the indispensable modifications of our legal order by way of a peaceful reform. Only when socialist ideas have been transformed into sober legal concepts will the practical statesmen be in a position to recognise how far the prevailing legal order is to be remodelled in the interest of the suffering masses of the people."

He proposes to set about this transformation by presenting Socialism as a legal system.

And what does this juridical treatment of Socialism amount to? In the "Concluding Remarks" it says:

"There can scarcely be any doubt that the development of a legal system which is completely dominated by these fundamental legal ideas" (Fundamental Right No. 1 and 2) "
belongs to a distant future
" (p. 163).

What appears in the preface as the most important task "of our time" is, at the end, pushed off into a "distant future".

"The necessary changes" (of the prevailing legal order) "will come about by way of a long historical development, just as our present-day social order has decomposed and destroyed the feudal system over the course of centuries,
until finally only a single impulse was required to eliminate the same completely
" (p. 164),

Very prettily said, but where does legal philosophy remain when the “historical development” of society brings about the necessary changes? In the preface it is the jurists who prescribe the path to social development; now, when the jurist is about to be taken at his word, he loses his courage and stammers something about historical development doing everything by itself.

“But does our social development now strive towards the realisation of the right to the full product of labour or of the right to work?”

Herr Menger declares that he does not know. So basely he now gives up his socialist “basic rights”. But if these basic rights are incapable of tempting a dog from the hearth, if they do not determine and realise social development but are rather determined and realised by it, why then all this trouble to reduce the whole of socialism to basic rights? Why the trouble to strip socialism of its economic and historical “trimmings” if we are afterwards forced to learn that the “trimmings” constitute its true content? Why only inform us at the end that the entire investigation has no purpose at all, since the goal of the socialist movement can be recognised, not by transforming socialist ideas into sober legal concepts, but only by studying social development and its driving causes?

Herr Menger’s wisdom ultimately boils down to his declaring that he cannot say what direction social development will take, but one thing is certain: one should “not artificially intensify the infirmities of our present social order” (p. 166), and to make possible the further preservation of these “infirmities” he recommends—free trade and the avoidance of further borrowing by the state and the municipalities!

These counsels are the entire tangible result of Menger’s legal philosophy, which makes its appearance with so much noise and self-praise! It is a pity that Herr Professor does not reveal the secret of how modern states and communes are to manage without “the contracting of state and municipal debts.” If he possesses this secret, let him by all means not keep it to himself. It would open his way “to the top” into a ministerial chair even more swiftly than his “legal-philosophical” achievements could do.

Whatever reception these may find in “influential quarters”, in any case we believe we may assure that the socialists of the present and the future will make a present to Herr Menger of all his basic rights or renounce any attempt to dispute with him his “full product of labour”.

By this it is of course not said that socialists renounce putting forward definite legal demands. An active socialist party is impossible without such demands, as indeed is any political party. The claims arising from the common interests of a class can only be realised by that class conquering political power and giving its claims universal validity in the form of laws. Every struggling class must therefore formulate its claims as legal demands in a programme. But the claims of each class change in the course of social and political transformations; they vary in every country according to its peculiarities and the stage of its social development. Hence the legal demands of the individual parties, with all their agreement on the final goal, are not at all times and among every people exactly the same. They are a changeable element and are revised from time to time, as can be observed in the socialist parties of different countries. In such revisions it is the actual conditions that are taken into account; by contrast, it has never occurred to any of the existing socialist parties to make a new legal philosophy out of its programme, and it is not likely to occur to them in the future either. At least, what Herr Menger has managed to accomplish in this field can only act as a deterrent.

That is the only useful aspect of his little work.

Footnotes

(1) Compare on this point the article by Fr. Engels on ‘Ludwig Feuerbach’ in the *Neue Zeit*, Vol. IV, p. 206: “With professional politicians, with the theorists of public law and the jurists of private law, the connection with economic facts gets entirely lost. Since in each particular case the economic facts must assume the form of legal motives in order to be sanctioned in the form of law, and since, in so doing, consideration has naturally also to be given to the already existing legal system, the legal form is now supposed to be everything and the economic content nothing. Public law and private law are treated as independent spheres, each having its own independent historical development, each being capable of and requiring systematic presentation, through the consistent eradication of all internal contradictions.”

(2) Dr. Anton Menger, *The Right to the Full Product of Labour in Historical Presentation*, Stuttgart, Cotta, 1886, X, p. 171.