i :
Signed: Frederick Engels and Karl Marx
The Germans are gradually beginning to spoil the communist movement too. Here also being as always the last and most inactive, they believe they can conceal their somnolence by contempt for their predecessors and empty philosophical boasting. Communism has hardly come into existence in Germany before it is being seized on by a whole host of speculative minds who imagine they have performed miracles by translating into the language of Hegelian logic propositions that long ago became commonplaces in France and England and now offering this new wisdom to the world as something unprecedented, as "true German theory", in order to be able to throw mud to their heart's content at the "bad practice" and "ridiculous" social systems of the narrow-minded French and English. This always ready German theory, which has had the boundless good fortune to get a whiff of Hegel's philosophy of history and to become embodied in the scheme of the eternal categories by some dried-up Berlin professor, and which then perhaps leafed through Feuerbach, a few German communist writings and Herr Stein's book on French socialism,(1) this German theory of the very worst sort has already, without the slightest difficulty, reconstrued French socialism and communism according to Herr Stein, has allotted it a subordinate position, has "overcome" it, and "elevated" it to the "higher stage of development" of the always ready "German theory".[205] It has never occurred to it, of course, to acquaint itself to any extent with the things to be elevated themselves, to take a look at Fourier, Saint-Simon, Owen and the French Communists — Herr Stein's meagre extracts are quite sufficient to bring about this brilliant victory of German theory over the wretched efforts of foreigners.
In contrast to this comical arrogance of German theory, which is incapable of dying, it is absolutely necessary to show the Germans what a lot they owe to foreigners since they became concerned with social questions. Among all the pompous phrases now loudly proclaimed in German literature as the basic principles of true, pure, German, theoretical communism and socialism, there has so far not been a single idea which has grown on German soil. What the French or the English said as long as ten, twenty and even forty years ago — and said very well, very clearly, in very fine language — the Germans have now at last during the past year become acquainted with in bits and have Hegelianised, or at best belatedly rediscovered it and published it in a much worse, more abstract form as a completely new discovery. I make no exception here of my own writings. What is peculiar to the Germans is only the bad, abstract, unintelligible and clumsy form in which they have expressed these ideas. And as befits genuine theoreticians, from what the French have produced — they still know almost nothing at all of the English — they have so far found worthy of their attention, apart from the most general principles, only what is worst and most theoretical: the schematic plans of future society, the social systems. The best aspect, the criticism of existing society, the real basis, the main task of any investigation of social questions, they have calmly pushed aside. Not to mention the fact that these wise theoreticians are accustomed also to speak contemptuously of, or to ignore altogether, the only German who has really achieved something, namely: Weitling.
I want to put before these wise gentlemen a short chapter from Fourier, which they could take as an example. It is true that Fourier did not start out from the Hegelian theory and for this reason unfortunately could not attain knowledge of absolute truth, not even of absolute socialism. It is true that owing to this shortcoming Fourier unfortunately allowed himself to be led astray and to substitute the method of series for the absolute method and thereby arrived at such speculative constructions as the conversion of the sea into lemonade, the couronnes boréale and australe* the anti-lion, and the conjunction of the planets.[206] But, if it has to be, I shall prefer to believe with the cheerful Fourier in all these stories rather than in the realm of the absolute spirit, where there is no lemonade at all, in the identity of Being and Nothing and the conjunction of the eternal categories. French nonsense is at least cheerful, whereas German nonsense is gloomy and profound. And then, Fourier has criticised existing social relations so sharply, with such wit and humour that one readily forgives him for his cosmological fantasies, which are also based on a brilliant world outlook.
The fragment which I am reproducing here was found among Fourier's works after his death and was printed in the first number of the periodical Phalange,* published by the Fourierists from the beginning of 1845. I am omitting what relates to Fourier's positive system and what otherwise is of no interest, and in general am making such free use of the text as is absolutely necessary with the foreign Socialists in order to make the things they wrote with definite aims in view readable to a public which is alien to these aims. This fragment is by no means the most brilliant of Fourier's writings, nor is it the best of what he wrote about trade — and yet no German Socialist or Communist, with the exception of Weitling, has so far written anything remotely comparable to this rough sketch.
To save the German public the trouble of reading the Phalange itself, I should mention that this periodical is a purely monetary speculation on the part of the Fourierists, and Fourier's manuscripts published in it are of very unequal value. Messieurs the Fourierists who publish this review are germanised, pompous theoreticians who have replaced the humour with which their teacher unmasked the world of the bourgeoisie by a holy, thoroughgoing theoretical, learned seriousness, for which they are deservedly ridiculed in France and prized in Germany. The description of the imaginary triumphs of Fourierism which they present in the first issue of the Phalange could send a professor of the absolute method into raptures.
I begin my reproductions with a passage which has already been reprinted in the Theorie des quatre mouvements. This is the case with considerable sections of the present fragment of which, however, I shall give only what is most essential.
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"We now touch on civilisation's most sensitive spot; it is an unpleasant task to raise one's voice against the folly of the day, against chimeras that are downright epidemical.
"To speak against the absurdities of trade today means to expose oneself to anathemas just as much as if one had spoken against the tyranny of the popes and the barons in the twelfth century. If it were a matter of choosing between two dangerous roles, I think it would be less dangerous to offend a sovereign with bitter truths than to offend the mercantile spirit which now rules as a despot over civilisation and even over sovereigns.
"And yet a superficial analysis will prove that our commercial systems debase and disorganise civilisation, and that in trade as in all other things we are going astray more and more under the guidance of the inexact sciences.
"The controversy on trade is hardly half a century old and has already produced thousands of volumes; and yet its originators have not seen that the trade mechanism is organised in such a way that it is a slap in the face for all common sense. It has subordinated the whole of society to one class of parasitical and unproductive people, the merchants. All the essential classes of society — the proprietor,* the farmer, the manufacturer, and even the government — find themselves dominated by an inessential, accessory class, the merchant, who should be their subordinate, their employed agent, removable and accountable, and who, nevertheless, directs and obstructs at will all the mainsprings of circulation.
"In respect of errors other than those of trade, public opinion and the learned bodies are, indeed, more tractable; it is pretty well agreed that the philosophical systems are dangerous illusions, that experience belies our boasting of perfection, that our theories of freedom do not square with civilisation, that our virtues are social comedies and our legislations labyrinths; there are even jokes about a fashionable controversy, ideology. But tongue-wagging about commerce, with its theories of imports and exports, counterbalance, balance, and guarantee, has become the Ark of the Covenant before which everything bows down. This, then, is the illusion which we have to dispel.
"First of all we must show that our trade systems, which are now gaped at with stupid veneration, are the antipodes of truth, of justice, and therefore also of unity.
"It is difficult to make clear to a century that precisely that operation which it considers to be the masterpiece of all wisdom is nothing but the seal of ignorance stamped on its entire policy. Let us but look at the already known results: maritime monopoly, fiscal monopoly, growing national debts, bankruptcies in unbroken succession resulting from paper money, increasing villainy in all business relations. Already now we can stigmatise the mechanism of free trade, i.e., of free lying? that veritable industrial anarchy, that monstrous power in society.
"How is it that the most lying class in the social body is most protected by the 'apostles of truth(2)? How does it happen that today learned men who preach contempt of vile wealth praise only the class which pursues wealth per fas et nefas, the class of stock exchange gamblers and corner-men? Formerly the philosophers were unanimous in censuring certain corporations which defended with flexibility of conscience the proposition that there is a difference between taking and stealing. How then have the same philosophers now become the apologists of a class which affirms, with still greater immorality, that haggling is not lying, that to dupe the buyer is not the same as robbing him, that stockjobbing and cornering are by no means plundering the productive class, in brief, that one must work only for money, not for fame; — for that is the refrain which the merchants sing in chorus: We don't pursue business pour la gloirel* Is it then to be wondered at that the modern sciences went astray when they espoused the cause of those who openly profess such principles?"
Trade takes various forms according to the various social stages; for as it is the pivot of all social life, it exists as soon as there is any social condition in general. A people becomes social, forms a society, from the moment when it begins to carry out exchange. For this reason trade exists already among the savages, where it takes the form of direct barter. Under patriarchy it becomes indirect commerce; in barbarism the basis of the commercial method is formed by the monopolies, the fixing of maximums and prices and forcible government requisitions, and in civilisation by individual competition or lying and bewildering struggle.[3]
"There is no need for us to dwell on direct barter among the savages who have no knowledge of money. One man is lucky at the hunt and exchanges a piece of game for arrows made by another, who has not been hunting and needs eatables. This method is not even trade, it is barter."
The second method, indirect commerce, is "primitive trade. It is carried on through a go-between, who becomes the owner of something which he did not produce and does not intend to consume. This method, although it is bad and leaves room for arbitrariness, is nevertheless highly advantageous in the following three cases:
"1) in young countries, where only agriculture exists without industry; this is the state in which all colonies find themselves at the beginning;
"2) in harsh lands, as in Siberia and the African deserts; a merchant who defies heat and cold to carry objects of necessity to distant parts is a very useful man;
"3) in oppressed and constricted lands, where the Bedouin plunder caravans, exact ransom from merchants and often murder them — every kind of protection is due to him who braves these dangers in order to bring supplies to a distant land. When such a merchant becomes rich he certainly deserves it.
"In these three cases the merchants are neither Stock Exchange gamblers nor corner-men; they do not hawk, one speculator to another, the objects intended for consumption. On their arrival they offer them openly to the consumer in a bazaar or public market; they are the accelerators of industrial movement. They want to earn — nothing is more reasonable in the civilised world: he who has sown deserves to harvest. But it is very rare that the merchants content themselves with this function of theirs; singly or in alliance they scheme to obstruct the circulation of commodities in order to make prices immediately soar.
"Trade becomes pernicious from the moment the go-betweens, due to their excessive number, become parasites [on the social body] and are ready to conceal goods, to let them rise in price under the pretext of an artificially produced scarcity, in brief, to rob simultaneously the producer and the consumer through speculation tricks instead of serving both as simple, open go-betweens. We still see this openness at our small markets in villages and towns. The man who buys a hundred calves or sheep is a useful intermediary for twenty peasants, who would otherwise lose whole working days to bring them to market in town. When, on arriving at the market, he publicly offers his animals for sale, he thereby renders a service also to the consumers; but when by means of heaven knows what tricks he agrees with other 'friends of trade'(3) to hide three-quarters of the sheep, to tell the butchers that sheep are scarce, that he can only supply a few friends, to sell them half as dear again under this pretext, to alarm the buyers, and then to bring the hidden sheep out one after the other, to sell them at inflated prices in the atmosphere of alarm previously created and thus to extort a high ransom from the consumers — then this is no longer simple commerce, open offering of commodities free from any intrigue, it is compound commerce, whose endlessly changing tricks give birth to the thirty-six typical vices of our trade system and are tantamount to a legal monopoly. When one lays hands on the total product by ruse in order to make it dearer, that is robbing more by means of intrigues than the monopoly does by armed force.
"I shall not dwell any longer on the method of the barbarians. It comprises fixing of maximums, forcible requisitions and monopolies, which are still quite customary also in the civilised state. As I have already said elsewhere, the various methods of individual periods overlap; one must not wonder, therefore, that civilisation borrows individual features from both higher and lower stages. Our civilised trade mechanism is thus an amalgamation of the characters of all periods, with those of the civilised stage, however, predominating — and these are much more despicable still than those of barbarism, because our trade is nothing but organised and legitimised robbery under the mask of legality. As a result, the racketeers and intermediaries can unite to cause artificial dearth of any foodstuffs and thus plunder both producers and consumers to heap up in a hurry scandalous fortunes of fifty millions, whose owners nevertheless complain that there is no protection of trade, that the merchants cannot subsist, that nothing is done, and that the state is being ruined if the merchant is reduced to the inability to make more than fifty millions!
"Meanwhile we are taught by a new(4) science that these people should be granted complete freedom. Let the merchants do their job, we are told; without this freedom the corner-man, who even so has earned only fifty million, would perhaps not even have made a single million, and his respectable family would have to manage on fifty thousand francs revenue —
"DU, talem avertite casum! "... Contempt of commerce, a contempt inborn in all peoples, was prevalent in all nations considered to be honourable except for a few coastal clans of hucksters who derived benefit from commercial extortions and villainies. Athens, Tyre and Carthage, which profited by commerce, could not mock at it; everybody refrains from mocking at the ways in which he has enriched himself, and the financier least of all will mock at the art of adding ciphers to bills, or allowing the enemy to take away the ledgers and putting the cash in safety while reporting it also as having been taken by the enemy.
"In reality with ancient as well as with modern peoples commerce has always been an object of mockery on the part of all honourable classes. How can one have any esteem for an out-and-out rascally profession or a class of people who lie with every word they say and by means of this magic art earn millions while the honest landowner who cultivates his piece of land with great effort and exertion, using the best of his experience, barely achieves an insignificant increase in its yield?
"Meanwhile, for a century a new science called Economics has been exalting hucksters, stockjobbers, corner-men, usurers, bankrupts, monopolisers and commercial parasites to the peak of honours: the governments, daily deeper and deeper in debt, always intent on finding means of borrowing money, have found themselves forced to conceal their contempt and to spare this class of mercantile blood-suckers which keeps the money-coffers locked to civilisation and pumps out all the treasures of agricultural and industrial diligence under the pretext of serving it. It is not denied that trade ensures transportation, victualling, and distribution, but it does so like a servant who performs service actually worth a thousand francs annually and on the other hand robs his master of ten thousand francs, or ten times as much as he produces.
"As a young spendthrift secretly despises the Jew to whom he goes every week to get himself fleeced, but still always greets him very politely, so also the modern governments have, with obvious contempt, concluded an armistice with trade, which is doing all the better for the fact that it knows how to have itself lumped together with the very manufacturers whom it plunders. The economists, who have found in this merchants' hotch-potch a nursery of new dogmas, a mine of systems, have overthrown morality with all its high-sounding talk of truth in order to enthrone their favourites, the stockjobbers and bankrupts. Thereupon all the scholars rivalled in self-abasement; in the beginning science admitted those 'friends of trade' as its equals — Voltaire dedicated a tragedy to an English merchant.(5)
Today these stockjobbers would have a good laugh if a scholar presumed to dedicate a tragedy to them! Stockjobbing has discarded the mask, it no longer needs the incense of the scholars; it wants secret—and soon legal—participation in government] And indeed we have seen the Aachen Congress unable to decide anything until two bankers arrived.
"Despite the fact that the economic systems have exalted the Golden Calf of trade, they have been unable to put an end to the natural contempt which the nations feel towards it. It remains despised by the nobility, the clergy, the propertied classes, the officials, the lawyers, the scholars, despised by artists, soldiers, and every class worthy of respect. In vain has trade heaped sophism on sophism to prove to them that the stockjobbing blood-sucker should be respected— a natural disdain for this class of upstarts still prevails. Everybody yields to the upswing of a dogma favoured by fortune, but everybody continues in secret to despise the mercantile hydra, which takes no notice of this and pursues the course of its conquests.
"How is it that our century has made public the crimes of so many classes, even those of the Federates, who only existed for a month in 1815, whence comes it that it has never occurred to this century, which has spared neither kings nor popes in its collections on crimes, to make public the crimes of the merchants? Yet writers are unanimous in complaining that they suffer from a lack of material. To show them how fruitful this material is, I shall make a methodical analysis of only a single one of the" (thirty-six) "crimes of civilised trade. These thirty-six reprehensible features of our trade under the domination of individual competition and of bewildering and lying struggle are the following:
Synoptical Table of the Features of Civilised Trade*
Pivotal points: Intermediate ownership and the dismemberment of agriculture. The two-sidedness of trade. Arbitrary determination of value. Freedom of fraudulence. Insolidarity, lack of mutual liability. Theft, removal of capital. Decrease in wages. Artificial obstruction of supply sources. Oppressive surpluses. Perverse interferences. Destructive policy.
Torpidness or general lack of credit (recoil, repercussion). Fictitious money. Financial confusion. Epidemical crime. Obscurantism. Parasitism. Cornering (accaparement). Stockjobbing. Usury. Unfruitful work. Industrial lotteries (speculation on risk). Indirect corporative monopoly. Fiscal monopoly, state administration enforced by falsification. The exotic, or colonial monopoly. Maritime monopoly. Feudal, caste monopoly. Baseless provocation. Loss. Falsification. Ruin of health. Bankruptcy. Smuggling. Piracy. Fixing of maximums and requisitions. Speculative slavery. Universal egoism."
Of these thirty-six features we shall consider in detail only one, bankruptcy; before that I shall say a few words about some others.
Endnotes
[205] By "German theory of the very worst sort" Engels means "true socialism", which in 1844-45 was spreading among German intellectuals and craftsmen. It was a mixture of the idealistic aspects of Feuerbachianism with French Utopian socialism in an emasculated form. As a result, socialist teaching was turned into abstract sentimental moralising divorced from real needs. The vulgarisation of the French Utopian Socialists' views by "true socialism", combined with an arrogant and deprecatory attitude towards them, was especially marked in Grün's book Die soziale Bewegung in Frankreich und Belgien published in Darmstadt in August 1845. This work of Engels reflects the intention which by then had matured in his and Marx's minds to dissociate themselves publicly from "true socialism" and to criticise its representatives. Marx and Engels gave a detailed criticism of "true socialism" in The German Ideology.
[206] Here the author has in mind Fourier's fantastic descriptions of the changes which according to his vision of the future were destined to take place in nature: a change in the unpleasant taste of sea water, which would turn into lemonade, the appearance of heat-radiating coronas over the North and South Poles, the transformation of beasts of prey into animals useful to man, and so on. The method of series is a method of classification typical of Fourier and applied by him in analysing various natural and social phenomena. By means of this method Fourier tried to develop a new social science according to which the social and psychological factor — the attraction and repulsion of passions — would be demonstrated as the main principle of social development (the passions, in turn, were divided into groups or series). In this method and its application by Fourier, unscientific and fantastic elements were combined with rational observations and spontaneous manifestations of dialectics.
[3] Here and elsewhere Engels quotes Reichardt's reviews of C. Briiggemann's book, Preussens Beruf in der deutschen Staats-Entwickelung, und die nächsten Bedingungen zu seiner Erfüllung, Berlin, 1843 and A. Benda's Katechismus für wahlberechtigte Bürger in Preussen, Berlin, 1843. Both reviews were published in the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, Heft VI, May 1844.