8. Capital and Surplus-Value. (Conclusion)¶
Core Argument¶
In the concluding chapter of his critique, Engels exposes the bankruptcy of Herr Dühring’s engagement with Marx’s theory of surplus-value. Dühring’s central falsehood is to claim that Marx’s surplus-value is merely a fancy term for the everyday earnings of capital, or profit. Marx’s own text refutes this utterly: surplus-value is explicitly distinguished from its particular forms—profit, interest, and rent—which are merely subforms or fragments into which it splits. Marx repeatedly states that a given rate of surplus-value can yield many different rates of profit, and that the analysis of these divisions belongs to Book III of Capital. Dühring’s assertion is therefore either ignorant or a deliberate falsification.
Dühring then poses a question of his own: how can competing entrepreneurs realise the full product of labour, including the surplus-product, above the natural outlays of production? This, Engels shows, is a misrepresentation. Marx never claims the capitalist realises the full surplus-product alone; rather, the industrial capitalist is merely the first appropriator, sharing the surplus-value with merchants, landowners, and others. Competition plays a key role in distributing this surplus-value, as Marx indicates. Dühring’s own answer—that earnings of capital are a political and social institution above competition, and that force distributes—fails entirely to explain the origin of profit. Force cannot produce value; it can only seize it. Dühring never explains where the profit comes from, reducing his economics to the mere invocation of force, which shifts the problem from economics to politics without explaining any economic fact.
Engels then reveals the deeper fraud. Dühring recognises surplus-labour, in slavery, serfdom, or wage-labour, as the source of revenues for all ruling classes—a fact taken directly from Marx’s Capital. His “net proceeds” for the master are the surplus of the labour product over wages, which must cover the labourer’s maintenance and procreation. This appropriation occurs, as Marx shows, by the capitalist extorting more labour than is needed to reproduce the labourer’s means of subsistence—that is, by prolonging the working-day beyond necessary labour-time. This is Marx’s surplus-labour, concealed behind Dühring’s “utilisation of labour-power”; his “net proceeds” appear as Marxian surplus-product and surplus-value. Dühring’s “rent of possession” is taken from Rodbertus, who included both land rent and capital earnings under “rent”. Dühring then summarises Marx’s laws on changes in the price of labour-power and surplus-value, reducing them to a tautology: of a given magnitude, one part cannot increase unless the other decreases. Engels concludes that Dühring’s commotion over Capital is a ruse to cover his gross plagiarism of Marx in the Cursus. Dühring warns readers against Marx’s “intricate maze” while stealthily appropriating Marxian surplus-value as “rent of possession”. His achievement is merely to restate Marx’s discovery: wages pay only the labour-time needed for the labourer’s existence; the remaining working-day yields a surplus—rent of possession—falling to the capitalist entrepreneur, making the prolongation of the working-day earnings of pure extortion.