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[7] Compare M. Beer, "History of British Socialism," Vol, I., pp. 245-270.
An appreciation of Marx can only be arrived at by adopting the Marxian method. We must judge him in the same way as any other towering figure in the realm of thought or of action. Marx was a child of his time, and his system is a logical conception of certain economic and social phenomena of his age, owing something to the pioneer work and thinking of some of his predecessors.
Two important events dominated his thinking: the French Revolution and the English Industrial Revolution. Even apart from the statement of Arnold Ruge that in 1843-44 Marx had collected a vast amount of material for a history of the French National Convention, we know from the work he did between 1844 and 1852 how profound was the influence of the French Revolution on his intellectual life. Still deeper, however, were the traces left upon his mind by the studies he made on the economic transformation of England during the period 1700-1825. Both events are obvious, catastrophic expressions of class movements and class conflicts, in which the middle class, as the representative of a higher economic order, gains the victory over autocratic forms of feudal authority and oligarchic systems of organisation through State regulation, in which, however, at the same time, a new class—the working class—raises its head and begins to make a stand against the victor.
Marx was led to interpret these events in this way and to make them the basis of his conception of [126]history chiefly through the influence of Hegel, Ricardo, and the English anti-capitalist school following upon Ricardo. To the end of his life he clung to the opinion that dialectic, as Hegel had formulated it, was indeed mystical but, when materialistically conceived, contains the laws of the movement of society. "The mystification which dialectic suffers in Hegel's hands in no wise hinders him from presenting in a comprehensive and intelligible manner its general processes."—(Preface to second German edition of "Capital," 1873.)
The splitting up of the concept into contradictories, and the attainment of a higher positive through the negation of these contradictories, that was what, to Marx's mind, constituted the essence and the deepest meaning of the French Revolution and of the English Industrial Revolution. Society, the positive, split up into feudal and bourgeois, into two sharply divided contradictories, the bourgeoisie appearing as the negation, to be supplanted by the proletariat and so to make room for a Communist society, the higher synthesis.
What he got from Hegel in a mystical form found an economic expression in Ricardo and the anti-capitalist school. Ricardo's writings, which belong to the second decade of the nineteenth century and which formulate, in the guise of a system of economics, the antagonisms and the conflicts between industry and landed nobility, presented themselves as a practical demonstration of the validity of dialectic. The fundamental idea of Ricardo's system may be expressed as follows:
Capital is the motive force of society and the creator of civilisation, but the fruits of its activity are enjoyed [127]not by capital but by the landed nobility. That is the thesis; now for the proof. The value of all commodities which can be made in any quantity desired consists in the quantity of labour which is expended for the purpose of producing them. The value is expressed in the costs of production, the most important components of which are wages and profit. Wages and profit stand in opposition to one another: if wages rise, profit falls, and conversely. Wages consist in a definite quantity of the necessaries of life, sufficient to keep the worker effective. Wages must obviously rise whenever the cost of living rises. The facts show that this is actually the case. The following reasons make this clear. In consequence of the civilising effects of capital, there is an increase in the opportunities for work and in population, resulting in an increased demand for the necessaries of life. Agriculture must be extended, but agricultural land is limited and of varying quality. The extension of agriculture brings into use the inferior kinds of land, which demand a greater amount of labour for their cultivation. And as the amount of labour determines the value of the commodity, the cost of living increases, and there is a rapid rise in ground rents. The workers demand higher wages, whereby the profits of the employers are diminished. But there is still another circumstance to be taken into consideration. Whereas the prices of agricultural products rise, those of industrial products fall, since, in consequence of the invention of machinery and of the superior division of labour, smaller quantities of labour are required to produce manufactured goods. The result of the entire working of capital for the civilised community is accordingly the reduction of [128]profits, the depreciation of capital, and the increase of wages. This latter, however, is of no advantage to the workers, for food prices rise higher and higher; on the contrary, the whole advantage falls to the landed nobility, who do nothing for the furtherance of civilisation, but who, through ground rents and protective tariffs, receive everything.
We have, then, in Ricardo a system of economic contradictions between profit, wages, and rent, or between bourgeoisie, proletariat, and nobility, in which the antagonism between bourgeoisie and proletariat is still undeveloped.
The year of the publication of Ricardo's "Principles" (1817) is the year which witnessed the rise of English Socialism. In that year, Robert Owen, in a public meeting in the City of London, declared himself a Socialist. Three years later appeared the first criticisms of Ricardo's political economy. In these it was argued that, according to Ricardo, labour is the source of value, yet he considers capital as the creative factor of society and the working class as a mere appendage of capital. It must be the reverse; for the workers create values together with the surplus products which are appropriated by capital. In 1817, Robert Owen openly declares himself a Socialist; four years later appears the anonymous letter to Lord John Russell; Percy Ravenstone publishes his "Criticism of Capitalism," John Gray his Lecture, and Hodgskin his pamphlet on the unproductive nature of capital, in which he establishes the existence of a raging class struggle.
The deep impression which these writings made on Marx is clearly seen in the second and third volumes of his "Theories on Surplus Value." And he links [129]on to them. He completed what Ricardo hinted at and what the anti-capitalist school deduced from Ricardo. How Marx continued and elaborated these deductions we haw already seen in Chapter 3, "Outlines of Marx's Economics," and Chapter 7, "Surplus Value as the Motive Force of Society," where capital is shown to be the mass of surplus value of which the workers have been deprived.
The deductions made by the English anti-capitalist school from Ricardo signified, politically, the first awakenings of the English workers to class-consciousness, to the struggle against capital. Just as Ricardo's theory of value and rent was the battle-cry of capital against the aristocracy—a battle-cry which created the free trade movement and shattered the economic power of the landed nobility, so the theory of value and surplus value was to become the battle-cry of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie, the declaration of independence, so to speak, of the working class. The English proletariat lacked a philosopher who could work out the idea to its logical conclusion, until Marx applied himself to the problem and solved it, so far indeed as philosophical problems can be solved, by a science which places itself at the disposal of a class movement.
