convince us that Marx is right on this point. For his own part Marx himself, though he understood Hegel as well as any Hegelian is ever acknowledged by any other to understand him, played with Hegel's terms, and did not really try to convert the dialectic into an economic as well as metaphysical method.'

His own economic position is given in outline in the Poverty of Philosophy. The Economists (he says) have a peculiar way of proceeding; they recognize only two kinds of institutions, those of art and those of nature. To the economists the institutions of feudalism are artificial, those of modern bourgeoisie natural, as, to the theologians, their own religion is from God and every other is man's invention.3 The present arrangements by which wealth is created and productive forces utilized are natural laws' independent of time, 'eternal laws' which must always rule society. History (in their view) once existed but exists no more. It existed once because there were once feudal institutions with arrangements for production quite different from the present. Feudalism Marx allows) had also a proletariate of its own, the serfs. It had its 'good' and 'bad' elements, the latter being in the end victorious, for they are the elements that create movement by evoking conflict. To eliminate the bad would be to kill the germ from which present civil society has grown. Once successful, the bourgeois society crushed not only all the old economic forms of feudal life, but the civic and political relations corresponding. Rightly to judge of production under feudalism, we must consider it as founded on a struggle of classes, which went on till the one class was victorious. The mode of production and the industrial system which developed through this struggle are far from being eternal laws. The changes occurring in the productive powers of men brought about changes in the industrial system; preserve the new powers of production the traditional forms of the old must be destroyed; once these were destroyed, the class once revolutionary became con

servative; thereupon a new antagonism of classes began to develope. There is a new proletariate, in conflict with the bourgeoisie; and the conflict flows necessarily from the new economic conditions. "From day to day it becomes more clear that the system of production under the bourgeoisie has a double-sided character; under the same system, in which wealth is produced, poverty is produced also; and under that in which powers of production develope there are developed also 'powers of repression.' The result is that the wealth of the middle class is only produced by the continual destruction of the wealth of its individual members and the consequent increase of the proletariate."

As the antagonism comes more clearly to light, different schools of economists begin to show themselves. We have first the Fatalists, classical and romantic. The former (as Adam Smith and Ricardo) live at a time. when the struggle with feudal survivals is not yet over; their mission is simply to show how as a matter of fact wealth is acquired in the bourgeois society, to formulate the new laws and categories, and to show their relation to the old. Poverty is to them simply the pain that accompanies a new birth whether in nature or in industry. The latter belong to our own time, when the contrast of the wealthy and the proletariate is complete. They use a tone of superiority and disdain towards the working classes. 'They copy the doctrines of their predecessors; and the indifference, which with their predecessors had something of naïveté, has with them something of coquetry."

After the fatalists we have the Humanitarians, who take to heart the bad side of present arrangements, and try to alleviate the sufferings and lessen the antagonism. They advise the workers to be temperate, to work hard, and to have small families, and they advise the employers to put enthusiasm and humanity into their business. Their doctrines are full of distinctions between theory and practice, principles and conclusions, ideas and applications of them, good sides and bad sides of everything. Fully developed, the humanitarian becomes the Philanthropic school, which denies the necessity of antagonism and would make all men capitalists. The theories of these Philanthropists depend on abstraction from the

unpleasant parts of the reality. They think to preserve bourgeois categories without the contrasts inseparable therefrom. They fancy themselves in opposition to the bourgeoisie and are really more at one with it than the other schools are.

Lastly, the Socialists and Communists are the theorists of the proletariate as the Economists are of the middle classes. Since the whole character of bourgeois production is not yet fully developed, the proletariate is not yet a compact class with a political programme; the material conditions for the emancipation of the proletariate are not yet fully formed; and the form to be taken by the new society is not yet discernible. Hence the Socialists and Communists are as yet Utopians who seek to meet the needs of the oppressed classes by improvising systems and running after schemes of social regeneration. "But, in proportion as history goes forward and with it the struggle of the proletariate becomes sharper and sharper, they need no longer look for science in their own minds; they have only to note well the movement passing before their own eyes and make themselves the organs of it." Till then they will see nothing but distress in the distress around them, without seeing in it the revolutionary side, the subversive movement which is to overturn the old society. "When science is produced by the historical movement and associates itself therewith in full consciousness of cause and effect, from that moment it ceases to be doctrinaire and becomes revolutionary." 1

Even in 1847 we see that Marx had a clear view of the work before him. In his later books, the Criticism of Political Economy (1859), and especially Das Kapital (1867), he accomplished much of it. England, in which he lived during the last half of his life, was the country where the peculiarities of modern industry had most fully shown themselves; and Das Kapital, whatever may happen to its arguments, is likely to hold its place as a storehouse of references to the facts of English industry from the end of last century to the middle of the present. Towards the Economists, Marx is in these later books

1 Misère de la Phil., p. 119.

more decidedly hostile. His own economical doctrines are Ricardian and deductive; but they are presented as true only of human nature as it appears under the system of modern industry, which is now almost ready to vanish away.

Goods

In this system (he tells us) wealth means a collection of goods for sale. Goods are, indeed, in the last resort, outward objects that satisfy wants. That is their value in use; but in the system in question it is the value in exchange that is all important. Goods have, no doubt, a quality as well as a quantity; but in our modern world it is the quantitative aspect that needs and gets special attention. Now we are at once brought face to face with the question how it is that certain quantities of things so unlike each other in quality as iron and wheat become commensurable. What is the common element? If we abstract from the value in use, we find only one property left, the fact that the things exchanged are the product of labour, "abstract human labour." 1 exchange according to the average social human labour" which they need to produce them, or, more particularly, according to the time taken to make them by workmen neither exceptionally fast nor exceptionally slow, but of ordinary ability, with appliances neither ahead of the times nor behind them, but abreast of them. Cost is in fact average minimum cost. This "average social human labour" is "abstract labour" in the sense that the results of concrete weaving and tailoring, etc., are all measured for exchangeability by the quantity of working time in the abstract taken to produce them. The possibility of their translation into this form is the condition of their exchangeability, though the latter is not created by the former, still less by Money, which is only the phenomenal form of the immanent measure of value, the working time." "

In all previous epochs the products of labour have been objects of use; but only in our own under the régime of the Capitalists is equivalence based upon value in the

1 It is as when we put articles on the scales, and, however different their qualities, judge purely their weights. I. 32.

2 Das Kapital, I. 72, cf. 48.

sense described, and goods are made for Sale and not for use, and the relation of the producers to each other is transformed into a relation of their products to each other. It is the state of things described by Hegel in the Philosophy of Right. The legal relation of persons who only realize their personality by having property, is characteristic of the Bourgeois Society.1

The reign of Capital begins with the world-wide trade introduced by the discoveries of the 16th century. Historically it appears in opposition to Property in Land, and in the form of Money; "No land without a lord," “Money has no master." The difference between money as capital and money as money is at first simply in the forms and formulas of their circulation. As money it stands midway-the exchange is goods for money, and then money for goods again. As capital, it is at the extremes; the exchange is of money for goods, and then goods for money again.*

To explain how this process can be profitable is to explain the existence of a surplus value, a value accruing to the capitalist beyond the equivalent of the "socially necessary labour" already described. We see that competition reduces goods to cost price; yet the moneyed men get more than the cost price. How is this? The solution lies in the fact that they can purchase a commodity (labour) which has the property of producing value, more value than it itself has. The value of the labour is determined, like that of other things, by the "labour socially necessary" to produce it, in other words, necessary to produce the means of living according to the average standard of the same in the given society. This is all the average labourer will fetch; and its price is represented say by three or four hours' labour a day. If he worked only for these three or four, the employer would make nothing by him; but the employer has the upper hand, and by paying him his cost price can secure not only his work for three or four hours, but for the whole day, of eight or ten hours. For five or six hours

1 Das Kapital, I., chap. ii.

2 Ib., p. 128, 129. In usury it is simply of money for money without the middle term. p. 138.