II. The Theory of Productive Forces and the Theory of Exchange Values
1) ( Herr List's theory of "productive forces" is limited to the following main propositions:
a) The causes of wealth are something quite different from wealth itself; the force capable of creating* wealth is infinitely more important than wealth itself [p. 201];> ; (, b) List is far from rejecting the theory of cosmopolitan economy; he is merely of the opinion that political economy also should be scientifically developed [p. 187];
c) What then is the cause of labour?..., what impels these minds and these arms and hands to undertake production and what gives efficacy to these efforts? What else can it be but the spirit which animates the individuals, the social system which makes their activity fruitful, the natural forces the use of which is at their disposal? Lp- 205J.)
( 6) Smith "went astray by explaining spiritual forces from material conditions" [p. 207].)
< 7) "That science which teaches how productive forces are aroused and cultivated and how they are suppressed or destroyed" (ibid.).)
8) An example [of the distinction] between two fathers of families, Christian religion, monogamy, etc. [pp. 208-209]. (9) "One can establish the concepts of value and capital, profit, wages, land rent, resolve them into their component parts, and speculate about what could influence their rise and fall, etc., without in so doing taking into account the political conditions of the nations" [p. 211].)
Transition.
10) Workshops and factories are the mothers and children of scientific (civic) freedom [p. 212].[106]
11) The theory of productive and non-productive classes. The former produce exchange values, the latter produce productive forces [p. 215].
12) Foreign trade must not be judged solely from the standpoint of the theory of values [p. 216].
13) The nation must sacrifice material forces in order to acquire spiritual or social forces. Protective tariffs for raising manufacturing power [pp. 216-217].
14) "If therefore a sacrifice of values is made owing to protective tariffs, that sacrifice is compensated by the acquisition of productive forces, and this not only ensures the nation an infinitely greater sum of material goods for the future, but also industrial independence in the event of war" [p. 217].
15) "In all these respects, however, the chief thing depends on the state of the society in which the individual takes shape, on whether crafts and sciences flourish" (p. 206).
2) Herr List is so much a prey to the economic prejudices of the old political economy — more so, as we shall see, than other economists of the "School"—that for him "material goods" and "exchange values" completely coincide. But exchange value is entirely independent of the specific nature of the "material goods". It is independent of both the quality and the quantity of material goods. Exchange value falls when the quantity of material goods rises, although both before and afterwards these bear the same relation to human needs. Exchange value is not connected with quality. The most useful things, such as knowledge, have no exchange value. Herr List therefore ought to have understood that the conversion of material goods into exchange values is a result of the existing social system, of the society of developed private property. The abolition of exchange value is the abolition of private property and of private acquisition. Herr List, on the other hand, is so naive as to admit that by means of the theory of exchange values
"one can establish the concepts of value and capital, profit, wages, land rent, resolve them into their component parts, and speculate about what could influence their rise and fall, etc., without in so doing taking into account the political conditions of the nations" (p. 211).
Hence, without taking into account the "theory of productive forces" and the "political conditions of the nations", all this can be "established". What is established thereby? Reality. What is established, for example, by wages? The life of the worker. Furthermore, it is established thereby that the worker is the slave of capital, that he is a "commodity''', an exchange value, the higher or lower level of which, the rise or fall of which, depends on competition, on supply and demand; it is established thereby that his activity is not a free manifestation of his human life, that it is, rather, a huckstering sale of his forces, an alienation (sale) to capital of his one-sidedly developed abilities, in a word, that it is "labour". One is supposed to forget this. "Labour" is the living basis of private property, it is private property as the creative source of itself. Private property is nothing but objectified labour. If it is desired to strike a mortal blow at private property, one must attack it not only as a material state of affairs, but also as activity, as labour. It is one of the greatest misapprehensions to speak of free, human, social labour, of labour without private property. "Labour" by its very nature is unfree, unhuman, unsocial activity, determined by private property and creating private property. Hence the abolition of private property will become a reality only when it is conceived as the abolition of "labour" (an abolition which, of course, has become possible only as a result of labour itself, that is to say, has become possible as a result of the material activity of society and which should on no account be conceived as the replacement of one category by another).[107] An "organisation of labour", therefore, is a contradiction. The best organisation that labour can be given is the present organisation, free competition, the dissolution of all its previous apparently "social" organisation.
Thus, if wages can be "established" according to the theory of values, if it is thereby "established" that man himself is an exchange value, that the overwhelming majority of people in the nations constitutes a commodity, which can be determined without taking "the political conditions of the nations" into account, what does all this prove but that this overwhelming majority of people in the nations does not have to take "political conditions" into account, that these are for it a sheer illusion, that a theory which in reality sinks to this sordid materialism of making the majority of people in the nations into a "commodity", into an "exchange value", and of subjecting this majority to the wholly material conditions of exchange value, is an infamous hypocrisy and idealistic eye-wash (embellishment), when in relation to other nations it looks down contemptuously on the bad "materialism" of "exchange values", and is itself ostensibly only concerned with "productive forces"? Furthermore, if the conditions of capital, land rent, etc., can be "established" without taking the "political conditions" of the nations into account, what does this prove but that the industrial capitalist and the recipient of land rent are guided in their actions in real life by profit, exchange values, and not by considerations about "political conditions" and "productive forces", and that their talk about civilisation and productive forces is only an embellishment of narrow-minded egoistic tendencies?
The bourgeois says: Of course, the theory of exchange values should not be undermined within the country, the majority of the nation should remain a mere "exchange value", a "commodity", one which must find its own buyer, one which is not sold, but which sells itself. In relation to you proletarians, and even in our mutual relations, we regard ourselves as exchange values, here the law of universal huckstering holds good. But in relation to other nations we must interrupt the operation of this law. As a nation we cannot huckster ourselves to other nations. Since the majority of people in the nations has become subject to the laws of huckstering "without taking into account" the "political conditions of the nations", that proposition has no other meaning than the following: We German bourgeois do not want to be exploited by the English bourgeois in the way that you German proletarians are exploited by us and that we exploit one another. We do not want to subject ourselves to the same laws of exchange value as those to which we subject you. We do not want any longer to'recognise outside the country the economic laws which we recognise inside the country.
[8] What then does the German philistine want? He wants to be a bourgeois, an exploiter, inside the country, but he wants also not to be exploited outside the country. He puffs himself up into being the "nation" in relation to foreign countries and says: I do not submit to the laws of competition; that is contrary to my national dignity; as the nation I am a being superior to huckstering.
The nationality of the worker is neither French, nor English, nor German, it is labour, free slavery, self-huckstering. His government is neither French, nor English, nor German, it is capital. His native air is neither French, nor German, nor English, it is factory air. The land belonging to him is neither French, nor English, nor German, it lies a few feet below the ground. Within the country, money is the fatherland of the industrialist. Thus, the German philistine wants the laws of competition, of exchange value, of huckstering, to lose their power at the frontier barriers of his country! He is willing to recognise the power of bourgeois society only in so far as it is in accord with his interests, the interests of his class! He does not want to fall victim to a power to which he wants to sacrifice others, and to which he sacrifices himself inside his own country! Outside the country he wants to show himself and be treated as a different being from what he is within the country and how he himself behaves within the country! He wants to leave the cause in existence and to abolish one of its effects! We shall prove to him that selling oneself out inside the country has as its necessary consequence selling out outside, that competition, which gives him his power inside the country, cannot prevent him from becoming powerless outside the country; that the state, which he subordinates to bourgeois society inside the country, cannot protect him from the action of bourgeois society outside the country.
However much the individual bourgeois fights against the others, as a class the bourgeois have a common interest, and this community of interest, which is directed against the proletariat inside the country, is directed against the bourgeois of other nations outside the country. This the bourgeois calls his nationality.
2)(1) It is possible, of course, to regard industry from a completely different point of view than that of sordid huckstering interest, from which it is nowadays regarded not only by the individual merchant and the individual manufacturer, but also by the manufacturing nations and the trading nations. Industry can be regarded as a great workshop in which man first takes possession of his own forces and the forces of nature, objectifies himself and creates for himself the conditions for a human existence. When industry is regarded in this way, one abstracts from the circumstances in which it operates today, and in which it exists as industry; one's standpoint is not from within the industrial epoch, but above it; industry is regarded not by what it is for man today, but by what present-day man is for human history, what he is historically; it is not its present-day existence (not industry as such) that is recognised, but rather the power which industry has without knowing or willing it and which destroys it and creates the basis for a human existence. (To hold that every nation goes through this development internally would be as absurd as the idea that every nation is bound to go through the political development of France or the philosophical development of Germany. What the nations have done as nations, they have done for human society; their whole value consists only in the fact that each single nation has accomplished for the benefit of other nations one of the main historical aspects (one of the main determinations) in the framework of which mankind has accomplished its development, and therefore after industry in England, politics in France *and philosophy in Germany have been developed, they have been developed for the world, and their world-historic significance, as also that of these nations, has thereby come to an end.)
This assessment of industry is then at the same time the recognition that the hour has come for it to be done away with, or for the abolition of the material and social conditions in which mankind has had to develop its abilities as a slave. For as soon as industry is no longer regarded as a huckstering interest, but as the development of man, man, instead of huckstering interest, is made the principle and what in industry could develop only in contradiction with industry itself is given the basis which is in harmony with that which is to be developed.
But the wretched individual who [in his ideas] remains within the present system, who desires only to raise it to a level which it has not yet reached in his own country, and who looks with greedy envy on another nation that has reached this level — has this wretched individual the right to see in industry anything else but huckstering interest? Has he the right to say that he is concerned only for the development of man's abilities and man's mastery of the forces of nature? For this is just as vile as if a slave-driver were to boast that he flourished his whip over his slaves in order that the slaves should have the pleasure of exercising their muscular power. The German philistine is the slave-driver who flourishes the whip of protective tariffs in order to instil in his nation the spirit of "industrial education" [108] and teach it to exercise its muscular powers.
The Saint-Simon school has given us an instructive example of what it leads to if the productive force that industry creates unconsciously and against its will is put to the credit of present-day industry and the two are confused: industry and the forces which industry brings into being unconsciously and without its will, but which will only become human forces, man's power, when industry is abolished. This is as much an absurdity as if the bourgeois wanted to take the credit for his industry creating the proletariat, and in the shape of the proletariat the power of a new world order. The forces of nature and the social forces which industry brings into being (conjures up), stand in the same relation to it as the proletariat. Today they are still the slaves of the bourgeois, and in them he sees nothing but the instruments (the bearers) of his dirty (selfish) lust for profit; tomorrow they will break their chains and reveal themselves as the bearers of human development which will blow him sky-high together with his industry, which assumes the dirty outer shell — which he regards as its essence — only until the human kernel has gained sufficient strength to burst this shell and appear in its own shape. Tomorrow they will burst the chains by which the bourgeois separates them from man and so distorts (transforms) them from a real social bond into fetters of society.
The Saint-Simon school glorified in dithyrambs the productive power of industry. The forces which industry calls into being it lumped together with industry itself, that is to say, with the present-day conditions of existence that industry gives to these forces. We are of course far from putting the Saint-Simonists on the same level as someone like List or the German philistine. The first step towards breaking the spell cast on industry was to abstract from the conditions, the money fetters, in which the forces of industry operate today and to examine these forces in themselves. This was the first call to the people to emancipate their industry from huckstering and to understand present-day industry as a transitional epoch. The Saint-Simonists, moreover, did not stop at this interpretation. They went further — to attack exchange value, private property, the organisation of present-day society. They put forward association in place of competition. But they were punished for their original error. Not only did the above-mentioned confusion lead them further into the illusion of seeing the dirty bourgeois as a priest, but it also caused them [9], after the first external struggles, to fall back into the old illusion (confusion) — but now hypocritically, because precisely in the course of the struggle the contradiction of the two forces which they had confused became manifest. Their glorification of industry (of the productive forces of industry) became a glorification of the bourgeoisie, and Monsieur Michel Chevalier, Monsieur Duveyrier, Monsieur Dunoyer have pilloried themselves and the bourgeoisie in the eyes of the whole of Europe — after which the rotten eggs that history throws in their faces became transformed by the magic of the bourgeoisie into golden eggs — since the first of those named above has retained the old phrases but has endowed them with the content of the present-day bourgeois regime, the second is himself engaged in huckstering on a wholesale scale and presides over the selling-out of French newspapers, while the third has become the most rabid apologist for the present state of affairs and surpasses in inhumanity (in shamelessness) all previous English and French economists. — The German bourgeois and Herr List begin where the Saint-Simon school left off — with hypocrisy, deception and phrase-mongering.
England's industrial tyranny over the world is the domination of industry over the world. England dominates us because industry dominates us. We can free ourselves from England abroad only if we free ourselves from industry at home. We shall be able to put an end to England's domination in the sphere of competition only if we overcome competition within our borders. England has power over us because we have made industry into a power over us.
3) That the industrial social order is the best world for the bourgeois, the order most suitable for developing his "abilities" as a bourgeois and the ability to exploit both people and nature-—who will dispute this tautology? Who will dispute that all that is nowadays called "virtue", individual or social virtue, is a source of profit for the bourgeois? Who will dispute that political power is a means for his enrichment, that even science and intellectual pleasures are his slaves? Who will dispute it? That for him everything is excellently [adapted(2)]? That for him everything has become a means of wealth, a "productive force of wealth"?
4) Modern political economy starts out from the social system of competition. Free labour, that is to say, indirect slavery which offers itself for sale, is its principle. Its primary propositions are division of labour and the machine. And this can be given its highest development only in the factories, as modern political economy itself admits. Thus political economy today, starts out from the factories as its creative principle. It presupposes present-day social conditions. Hence it does not need to expatiate on "manufacturing force".[109]
If the "School" made no "scientific elaboration"[110] of the theory of productive forces alongside and separately from the theory of exchange values, it acted in this way because such a separation is an arbitrary abstraction, because it is impossible and cannot go beyond general phrases.
5) "The causes of wealth are something quite different from wealth itself. The force capable of creating wealth is infinitely more important than wealth itself" [List, op. cit., p. 201].
Productive force appears as an entity infinitely superior to exchange value. This force claims the position of inner essence, whereas exchange value claims that of a transient phenomenon. The force appears as infinite, exchange value as finite, the former as non-material, the latter as material — and we find all these antitheses in Herr List. Hence the supernatural world of forces takes the place of the material world of exchange values. Whereas the baseness of a nation sacrificing itself for exchange values, of people being sacrificed for things, is quite obvious, forces, on the other hand, appear to be independent spiritual essences — phantoms— and pure personifications, deities, and after all one may very well demand of the German people that it should sacrifice the bad exchange values for phantoms! An exchange value, money, always seems to be an external aim, but productive force seems to be an aim which arises from my very nature, a self-aim. Thus, what I sacrifice in the form of exchange values is something external to me; what I gain in the form of productive forces is my self-acquisition.— That is how it seems if one is satisfied with a word or, like an idealising German, does not worry about the dirty reality which lies behind this grandiloquent word.
In order to destroy the mystical radiance which transfigures "productive force", one has only to consult any book of statistics. There one reads about water-power, steam-power, manpower, horse-power. All these are "productive forces". Is it a high appreciation of man for him to figure as a "force" alongside horses, steam and water?
Under the present system, if a crooked spine, twisted limbs, a one-sided development and strengthening of certain muscles, etc., make you more capable of working (more productive), then your crooked spine, your twisted limbs, your one-sided muscular movement are a productive force. If your intellectual vacuity is more productive than your abundant intellectual activity, then your intellectual vacuity is a productive force, etc., etc. If the monotony of an occupation makes you better suited for that occupation, then monotony is a productive force.
Is the bourgeois, the factory-owner, at all concerned for the worker developing all his abilities, exercising his productive capacities, fulfilling himself as a human being, and thereby at the same time fulfilling his human nature?
We will leave it to the English Pindar of the factory system, Mr. Ure, to reply to this question:
"It is, in fact, the constant aim and tendency of every improvement in machinery to supersede human labour altogether, or to diminish its cost, by substituting the industry of women and children for that of men; or that of ordinary labourers, for trained artisans" (Philosophie des manufactures, etc., Paris, 1836, t. I, p. 34). "By the infirmity of human nature it happens, that the more skilful the workman, the more self-willed and intractable he is apt to become, and, of course, the less fit a component of a mechanical system ... therefore [the main point] of the modern manufacturer is, through the union of capital and science, to reduce the task of his work-people to the exercise of vigilance and dexterity, etc." (loc. cit., t. I, p. 30).
Force, Productive Force, Causes ["The force capable of creating wealth is infinitely more important than wealth itself."]
It is a fine recognition of man that degrades him to a "force" capable of creating wealth! The bourgeois sees in the proletarian not a human being, but a force capable of creating wealth, a force which moreover he can then compare with other productive forces — an animal, a machine — and if the comparison proves unfavourable to man, the force of which man is the bearer must give place to the force of which the bearer is an animal or a machine, although in that case man still has (enjoys) the honour of figuring as a "productive force".
If I characterise man as an "exchange value", this expression already implies that social conditions have transformed him into a "thing". If I treat him as a "productive force", I am putting in the place of the real subject a different subject, I am substituting another person for him, and he now exists only as a cause of wealth.
The whole of human society becomes merely a machine for the creation of wealth.
The cause is in no way superior to the effect. The effect is merely the openly manifested cause.
List pretends that he is everywhere interested in productive forces for their own sake, quite apart from bad exchange values.
Some light is already thrown for us on the essence of the present-day "productive forces" by the fact that in the present state of affairs productive force consists not only in, for instance, making man's labour more efficient or natural and social forces more effective, but just as much in making labour cheaper or more unproductive for the worker. Hence productive force is from the outset determined by exchange value. It is just as much an increase of....a
Endnotes
[106] List says: "Workshops and factories are the mothers and children of civic freedom, education, the arts and sciences...."
[107] Below Marx makes clear that he understands "the abolition of labour" to mean the elimination of the existing forms of exploitation of labour, the enslavement and alienation of the working man, and emphasises the need to create social conditions under which industrial labour and industry would cease to be an object and instrument of oppression but would serve as a means for man to use his capacities and to master the forces of nature (see pp. 280-82 of this volume).
[108] An allusion to the expression "industrial education", which is frequently used by List.
[109] By manufacturing force ("die Manufakturkraft") List understands the productive power of factory industry. But he often uses this expression simply in the sense of factory industry.
[110] An allusion to List's statement that his "theory of the productive forces" should be worked out scientifically ("wissenschaftlich auszubilden sei") side by side with "the theory of exchange values" developed by the "Smith-Say school" (List, op. cit., p. 187).