Karl Marx's
ECONOMIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL MANUSCRIPTS
First Manuscript



WAGES OF LABOR



Wages are determined by the fierce struggle between capitalist and worker. The 
capitalist inevitably wins. The capitalist can live longer without the worker 
than the worker can live without him. Combination among capitalists is habitual 
and effective, while combination among the workers is forbidden and has painful 
consequences for them. In addition to that, the landowner and the capitalist can 
increase their revenues with the profits of industry, while the worker can 
supplement his income from industry with neither ground rent nor interest on 
capital. This is the reason for the intensity of competition among the workers. 
It is, therefore, only for the worker that the separation of capital, landed 
property, and labor, is a necessary, essential, and pernicious separation. 
Capital and landed property need not remain constant in this abstraction, as 
must the labor of the workers. 
 So, for the worker, the separation of capital, ground rent, and labor, is 
fatal. 
 For wages, the lowest and the only necessary rate is that required for the 
subsistence of the worker during work and enough extra to support a family and 
prevent the race of workers from dying out. According to [economist Adam] Smith, 
the normal wage is the lowest which is compatible with common humanity -- i.e., 
with a bestial existence. [See Smith, The Wealth of Nations, 2 vols., Everyman 
edition, Vol. I, p. 61.] 
 The demand for men necessarily regulates the production of men, as of every 
other commodity. If the supply greatly exceeds the demand, then one section of 
the workers sinks into beggary or starvation. The existence of the worker is, 
therefore, reduced to the same condition as the existence of every other 
commodity. The worker has become a commodity, and he is lucky if he can find a 
buyer. And the demand on which the worker's life depends is regulated by the 
whims of the wealthy and the capitalists. If supply exceeds demand, one of the 
elements which go to make up the price -- profit, ground rent, wages -- will be 
paid below its price. A part of these elements is, therefore, withdrawn from 
this application, with the result that the market price gravitates towards the 
natural price as the central point. But 1. it is very difficult for the worker 
to direct his labor elsewhere where there is a marked division of labor; and 2. 
because of his subordinate relationship to the capitalist, he is the first to 
suffer. 
 So the worker is sure to lose and to lose most from the gravitation of the 
market price towards the natural price. And it is precisely the ability of the 
capitalist to direct his capital elsewhere which either drives the worker, who 
is restricted to one particular branch of employment, into starvation or forces 
him to submit to all the capitalist's demands. 
 The sudden chance fluctuations in market price hit ground rent less than that 
part of the price which constitutes profit and wages, but they hit profit less 
than wages. For every wage which rises, there is generally one which remains 
stationary and another which falls. 
 The worker does not necessarily gain when the capitalist gains, but he 
necessarily loses with him. For example, the worker does not gain if the 
capitalist keeps the market price above the natural price by means of a 
manufacturing or trade secret, a monopoly or a favorably placed property. 
 Moreover, the prices of labor are much more constant than the prices of 
provisions. They are often in inverse proportion. In a dear year, wages drop 
because of a drop in demand and rise because of an increase in the price of 
provisions. They, therefore, balance. In any case, some workers are left without 
bread. In cheap years, wages rise on account of the rise in demand, and fall on 
account of the fall in the price of provisions. So they balance. [Smith, I, pp. 
76-7.] 
 Another disadvantage for the worker: 
 The price of the labor of different kinds of workers varies much more than the 
profits of the various branches in which capital is put to use. In the case of 
labor, all the natural, spiritual, and social variations in individual activity 
are manifested and variously rewarded, were as dead capital behaves in a uniform 
way and is indifferent to real individual activity. 
 In general, we should note that where worker and capitalist both suffer, the 
worker suffers in his very existence while the capitalist suffers in the profit 
on his dead mammon. 
 The worker has not only to struggle for his physical means of subsistence; he 
must also struggle for work -- i.e., for the possibility and the means of 
realizing his activity. Let us consider the three main conditions which can 
occur in society and their effect on the worker. 
 (1) If the wealth of society is decreasing, the worker suffers most, although 
the working class cannot gain as much as the property owners when society is 
prospering, none suffers more cruelly from its decline than the working class. 
[Smith, I, p. 230.] 
 (2) Let us now consider a society in which wealth is increasing. This condition 
is the only one favorable to the worker. Here, competition takes place among the 
capitalists. The demand for workers outstrips supply. But: 
 In the first place, the rise of wages leads to overwork among the workers. The 
more they want to earn the more they must sacrifice their time and freedom and 
work like slaves in the service of avarice. In doing so, they shorten their 
lives. But this is all to the good of the working class as a whole, since it 
creates a renewed demand. This class must always sacrifice a part of itself if 
it is to avoid total destruction. 
 Furthermore, when is a society in a condition of increasing prosperity? When 
the capitals and revenues of a country are growing. But this is only possible 
 (a) as a result of the accumulation of a large quantity of labor, for capital 
is accumulated labor; that is to say, when more and more of the workers' 
products are being taken from him, when his own labor increasingly confronts him 
as alien property and the means of his existence and of his activity are 
increasingly concentrated in the hands of the capitalist. 
 (b) The accumulation of capital increases the division of labor, and the 
division of labor increases the number of workers; conversely, the growth in the 
number of workers increases the division of labor, just as the growth in the 
division of labor increases the accumulation of capital. As a consequence of 
this division of labor, on the one hand, and the accumulation of capitals, on 
the other, the worker becomes more and more uniformly dependent on labor, and on 
a particular, very one-sided and machine-like type of labor. Just as he is 
depressed, therefore, both intellectually and physically to the level of a 
machine, and from being a man becomes an abstract activity and a stomach, so he 
also becomes more and more dependent on every fluctuation in the market price, 
in the investment of capital and in the whims of the wealthy. Equally, the 
increase in that class of men who do nothing but work increases the competition 
among the workers and therefore lowers their price. In the factory system, 
conditions such as these reach their climax. 
 (c) In a society which is becoming increasingly prosperous, only the very 
richest can continue to live from the interest on money. All the rest must run a 
business with their capital, or put it on the market. As a result, the 
competition among the capitalists increases, there is a growing concentration of 
capital, the big capitalists ruin the small ones, and a section of the former 
capitalists sinks into the class of the workers -- which, because of this 
increase in numbers, suffers a further depression of wages and becomes even more 
dependent on the handful of big capitalists. Because the number of capitalists 
has fallen, competition for workers has increased, the competition among them 
has become all the more considerable, unnatural and violent. Hence, a section of 
the working class is reduced to beggary or starvation with the same necessity as 
a section of the middle capitalists ends up in the working class. 
 So, even in the state of society most favorable to him, the inevitable 
consequence for the worker and early death, reduction to a machine, enslavement 
to capital which piles up in threatening opposition to him, fresh competition 
and starvation or beggary for a section of the workers. 
 An increase in wages arouses in the worker the same desire to get rich as in 
the capitalist, but he can only satisfy this desire by sacrificing his mind and 
body. An increase in wages presupposes, and brings about, the accumulation of 
capital, and thus opposes the product of labor to the worker as something 
increasingly alien to him. Similarly, the division of labor makes him more and 
more one-sided and dependent, introducing competition from machines as well as 
from men. Since the worker has been reduced to a machine, the machine can 
confront him as a competitor. Finally, just as the accumulation of capital 
increases the quantity of industry and, therefore, the number of workers, so it 
enables the same quantity of industry to produce a greater quantity of products. 
This leads to overproduction and ends up either by putting a large number of 
workers out of work or by reducing their wages to a pittance. 
 Such are the consequences of a condition of society which is most favorable to 
the worker -- i.e., a condition of growing wealth. 
 But, in the long run, the time will come when this state of growth reaches a 
peak. What is the situation of the worker then? 
  
     (3) "In a country which had acquired that full complement of
     riches... both the wages of labor and the profits of
     stock would probably be very low... the competition for
     employment would necessarily be so great as to reduce the
     wages of labor to what was barely sufficient to keep up
     the number of laborers, and, the country being already
     fully peopled, that number could never be augmented." [Smith I, p. 84]
The surplus population would have to die. 
 So, in a declining state of society, we have the increasing misery of the 
worker; in an advancing state, complicated misery; and in the terminal state, 
static misery. 
 Smith tells us that a society of which the greater part suffers is not happy. 
[Smith I, p. 70] But, since even the most prosperous state of society leads to 
suffering for the majority, and since the economic system [Nationalokonomie], 
which is a society based on private interests, brings about such a state of 
prosperity, it follows that society's distress is the goal of the economic 
system. 
 We should further note in connection with the relationship between worker and 
capitalist that the latter is more than compensated for wage rises by a 
reduction in the amount of labor time, and that wage rises and increases in the 
interest on capital act on commodity prices like simple and compound interest 
respectively. 
 Let us now look at things from the point of view of the political economist and 
compare what he has to say about the theoretical and practical claims of the 
worker. 
 He tells us that, originally, and in theory, the whole produce of labor belongs 
to the worker. [Smith I, p. 57] But, at the same time, he tells us that what the 
worker actually receives is the smallest part of the product, the absolute 
minimum necessary; just enough for him to exist not as a human being but as a 
worker and for him to propagate not humanity but the slave class of the workers. 

 The political economist tells us that everything is bought with labor and that 
capital is nothing but accumulated labor, but then goes on to say that the 
worker, far from being in a position to buy everything, must sell himself and 
his humanity. 
 While the ground rent of the indolent landowner generally amounts to a third of 
the product of the soil, and the profit of the busy capitalist to as much as 
twice the rate of interest, the surplus which the worker earns amounts at best 
to the equivalent of death through starvation for two of his four children. 
[Smith I, p. 60]] 
 According to the political economist, labor is the only means whereby man can 
enhance the value of natural products, and labor is the active property of man. 
But, according to this same political economy, the landowner and the capitalist, 
who as such are merely privileged and idle gods, are everywhere superior to the 
worker and dictate the law to him. 
 According to the political economist, labor is the only constant price of 
things. But nothing is more subject to chance than the price of labor, nothing 
exposed to greater fluctuations. 
 While the division of labor increases to the productive power of labor and the 
wealth and refinement of society, it impoverishes the worker and reduces him to 
a machine. While labor gives rise to the accumulation of capital, and so brings 
about the growing prosperity of society, it makes the worker increasingly 
dependent on the capitalist, exposes him to greater competition and drives him 
into the frenzied world of overproduction, with its subsequent slump. 
 According to the political economist, the interest of the worker is never 
opposed to the interest of society. But, society is invariably and inevitably 
opposed to the interest of the worker. 
 According to the political economist, the interest of the worker is never 
opposed to that of society: (1) because the rise in wages is more than made up 
for by the reduction in the amount of labor time, with the other consequences 
explained above, and (2) because in relation to society the entire gross product 
is net product, and only in relation to the individual does the net product have 
any significance. 
 But it follows from the analyses made by the political economists, even though 
they themselves are unaware of the fact, that labor itself -- not only under 
present conditions, but in general, insofar as its goal is restricted to the 
increase of wealth --is harmful and destructive. 
  
*
In theory, ground rent and profit on capital are deductions made from wages. 
But, in reality, wages are a deduction which land and capital grant the worker, 
an allowance made from the product of labor to the worker, to labor. 
 The worker suffers most when society is in a state of decline. He owes the 
particular severity of his distress to his position as a worker, but the 
distress as such is a result of the situation of society. 
 But, when society is in a state of progress, the decline and impoverishment of 
the worker is the product of his labor and the wealth produced by him. This 
misery, therefore, proceeds from the very essence of present-day labor. 
 A society at the peak of prosperity -- an ideal, but one which is substantially 
achieved, and which is at least the goal of the economic system and of civil 
society -- is static misery for the worker. 
 It goes without saying that political economy regards the proletarian -- i.e., 
he who lives without capital and ground rent, from labor alone, and from 
one-sided, abstract labor at that -- as nothing more than a worker. It can, 
therefore, advance the thesis that, like a horse, he must receive enough to 
enable him to work. It does not consider him, during the time when he is not 
working, as a human being. It leaves this to criminal law, doctors, religion, 
statistical tables, politics, and the beadle. 
 Let us now rise above the level of political economy and examine the ideas 
developed above, taken almost word for word from the political economists, for 
the answers to these two questions: 
 (1) What is the meaning, in the development of mankind, of this reduction of 
the greater part of mankind to abstract labor? 
 (2) What mistakes are made by the piecemeal reformers, who either want to raise 
wages and thereby improve the situation of the working class, or -- like 
Proudhon -- see equality of wages as the goal of social revolution? 
 In political economy, labor appears only in the form of wage-earning activity. 
  
*
     "It can be argued that those occupation which demand specific
     abilities or longer training have on the whole become more
     lucrative; while the commensurate wage for mechanically uniform
     activity, in which everyone can be quickly and easily trained, has
     fallen, and inevitably so, as a result of growing competition. And
     it is precisely this kind of labor which, under the present
     system of labor organization, is by far the most common.

     "So, if a worker in the first category now earns seven times as
     much as he did 50 years ago, while another in the second category
     continues to earn the same as he did then, then on average
     they earn four times as much.

     "But if in a given country there are only a thousand workers in the
     first category and a million in the second, then 999,000 are no
     better off than 50 years ago, and they are worse off if the
     prices of staple goods have risen.

     "And yet people are trying to deceive themselves about the most
     numerous class of the population with superficial average
     calculations of this sort.

     "Moreover, the size of wages is only one factor in evaluating a
     worker's income: it is also essential to take into account the
     length of time for which such wages are guaranteed, and there is no
     question of guarantees in the anarchy of so-called free competition
     with its continual fluctuations and stagnation. Finally, we must
     bear in mind the hours of work which were usual earlier and those
     which are usual now. And for the English cotton workers, the
     working day has been increased, as a result of the employers'
     greed, from 12 to 16 hours during the past 25 years or so -- i.e.,
     since labor-saving machines were introduced. This increase in one
     country and in one branch of industry inevitably carried over to a

     greater or lesser degree into other areas, for the rights of the
     wealthy to subject the poor to boundless exploitation are still
     universally acknowledged."

                           [ Wilhelm Schulz, Die Bewegung der Produktion,
                              eine geschichtlichstatistiscke Abhandlung.
                                      Zurich and Winterthur, 1843, p. 65 ]

     "But even even this were as true as it is false, that the average
     income of all classes of society has grown, the differences and
     relative intervals between incomes can still have grown bigger, so
     that the contrast between wealth and poverty becomes sharper. For
     it is precisely because total production rises that needs,
     desires, and claims also increase, and they increase in the same
     measure as production rises; relative poverty can therefore grow
     while absolute poverty diminishes. The Samoyed is not poor with
     his blubber and rancid fish, for in his self-contained society,
     everyone has the same needs. But, in a state which is making rapid
     headway, which, in the course of a decade, increases its total
     production in relation to the population by a third, the worker who
     earns the same at the end of the 10 years as he did at the
     beginning has not maintained his standard of living, he has grown
     poorer by a third."

                                             [ Wilhelm Schulz, pp. 65-6 ]
But political economy knows the worker only as a beast of burden, as an animal 
reduced to the minimum bodily needs. 
  
     "If a people is to increase its spiritual freedom, it can no longer
     remain in thrall to its bodily needs, it can no longer be the
     servant of the flesh. Above all, it needs time for intellectual
     exercise and recreation. This time is won through new developments
     in the organization of labor.

     "Nowadays, a single worker in the cotton mills, as a result of new
     ways of producing power and new machinery, can often do work that
     previously needed 100 or even 250-300 workers. All branches of
     industry have witnessed similar consequences, since external
     natural forces are increasingly being brought to bear on human
     labor. If the amount of time and human energy needed earlier to
     satisfy a given quantity of material needs was later reduced by
     half, then, without any forfeiture of material comfort, the margin
     for intellectual creation and recreation will have increased by
     half.

     "But, even the sharing of the spoils which we win from old Chronos
     on his very own territory still depends on blind and unjust chance.

     "In France, it has been estimated that, at the present stage of
     production, an average working day of five hours from each person
     capable of work would be sufficient to satisfy all society's
     material needs.... In spite of the time saved through improvements
     in machinery, the time spent in slave labor in the factories has
     increased for many people."

                                             [ Wilhelm Schulz, pp. 67-8 ]

     "The transition from complicated handicrafts presupposes a breaking
     down of such work into the simple operations of which it consists. 
     To begin with, however, only a part of the uniformly recurring
     operations falls to the machines, while another part falls to men. 
     Permanently uniform activity of this kind is by its very nature
     harmful to both soul and body -- a fact which is also confirmed by
     experience; and so, when machinery is combined in this way, with
     the mere division of labor among a larger number of men, all the
     shortcomings of the latter inevitably make their appearance. These
     shortcomings include the greater mortality of factory workers....

     "No attention has been paid to the essential distinction between
     how far men work through machines and how far they work
     as machines."

                                               [ Wilhelm Schulz, pp. 69 ]

     "In the future life of the nations, however, the mindless forces of
     nature operating in machines will be our slaves and servants."

                                               [ Wilhelm Schulz, pp. 74 ]

     "In the English spinning mills, only 158,818 men are employed,
     compared with 196,818 women. For every 100 men workers in the
     Lancashire cotton mills, there are 103 women workers' in Scotland,
     the figure is as high as 209. In the English flax mills in Leeds,
     there are 147 women for every 100 men workers; in Dundee, and on
     the east coast of Scotland, this figure is as high as 280. In the
     English silk-factories, there are many women workers; in the wool
     factories, where greater strength is needed, there are more men. 
     As for the North American cotton mills, in 1833 there were no fewer
     than 38,927 women alongside 18,593 men.

     "So, as a result of changes in the organization of labor, a wider
     area of employment opportunities has been opened up to members of
     the female sex... more economic independence for women... both
     sexes brought closer together in their social relations."

                                             [ Wilhelm Schulz, pp. 71-2 ]

     "Employed in the English spinning mills operated by steam and water
     in the year 1835 were: 20,558 children between 8 and 12 years of
     age; 35,867 between 12 and 13; and, finally, 108,208 between 13 and
     18....

     "True, the advances in mechanization, which remove more and more of
     the monotonous tasks from human hands, are gradually eliminating
     these ills. But, standing in the way of these more rapid advances
     is the fact that the capitalists are in a position to make use of
     the energies of the lower classes, right down to children, very
     easily and very cheaply, and to use them instead of machinery."

                                             [ Wilhelm Schulz, pp. 70-1 ]

     "Lord Brougham's appeal to the workers: 'Become capitalists!'...

     "The evil that million are only able to eke out a living through
     exhausting, physically destructive, and morally and intellectually
     crippling, labor; that they are even forced to regard the
     misfortune of finding such work as fortunate."

                                               [ Wilhelm Schulz, pp. 60 ]

     "So, in order to live, the non-owners are forced to place
     themselves directly or indirectly at the service of owners --
     i.e., become dependent upon them."
[ C. Pecqueur, Theorie nouvelle d'economie sociale et politique, ou etudes sur 
l'organisation des societes, Paris, 1842, p. 409 ] "Servants -- pay; workers -- 
wages; clerks -- salaries or emoluments.... "hire out one's labor", "lend out 
one's labor at interest", "work in another's place". "hire out the materials of 
labor", "lend the materials of labor at interest", "make another work in one's 
place". [ C. Pecqueur, p. 409-10, 411 ] "This economic constitution condemns men 
to such abject employments, such desolate and bitter degradation, that by 
comparison savagery appears like a royal condition." "Prostitution of the 
non-owning class in all its forms." Rag-and-bone men. [ C. Pecqueur, p. 417-18, 
421 ] Charles Loudon, in his work Solution du probleme de la population, gives 
the number of prostitutes in England as 60-70,000. The number of women of 
"doubtful virtue" is roughly the same. 
  
     "The average life span of these unfortunate creatures on the
     streets, after they have embarked on their career of vice, is about
     six or seven years. This means that, if the number of 60-70,000
     prostitutes is to be maintained, there must be in the three kingdoms
     at least 8-9,000 women a year who take up this infamous trade --
     i.e., roughly 24 victims a day, which is an average of one an hour. 
     So, if the same proportion is true for the whole surface of the
     planet, then at all times there must be one-and-a-half million of
     these unhappy creatures."

               [ Charles Loudon, Solution du probleme de la population
                             et de la subsistence, soumise a un medecin
                       dans une serie du lettres, Paris, 1842, p. 229 ]

     "The population of the poor grows with their poverty, and it is at
     the most extreme limit of need that human beings crowd together in
     the greatest numbers in order to fight among themselves for the
     right to suffer....
"In 1821, the population of Ireland was 6,801,827. By 1831, it had risen to 
7,764,010; that is, a 14 per cent increase in 10 years. In Leinster, the most 
prosperous of the provinces, the population only grew by 8 per cent, while in 
Connaught, the poorest of the provinces, the increase was as high as 21 per 
cent. (Extract from Inquiries Published in England on Ireland, Vienna, 1840.) 
 [ Eugene Buret, De la misere des classes laborieuses en Angleterre et en 
France, 2 vols., Paris, 1840, Vol. I, pp. 36-7 ] Political economy regards labor 
abstractly, as a thing; labor is a commodity; if the price is high, the 
commodity is much in demand; if it is low, then it is much in supply; "the price 
of labor as a commodity must fall lower and lower". [ ibid., p. 43 ] This is 
brought about partly by the competition among the workers themselves. 
  
     "... the working population, seller of labor, is forced to accept
     the smallest part of the product... Is the theory of labor as a
     commodity anything other than a disguised theory of slavery?"

     "Why then was labor regarded as nothing more than an exchange
     value?"

                                                  [ Eugene Buret, p. 43 ]
The big workshops prefer to buy the labor of women and children, because it 
costs less than that of men. 
  
     "Vis-a-vis his employer, the worker is not at all in the position
     of a free seller.... The capitalist is always free to employ
     labor, and the worker is always forced to sell it. The value of
     labor is completely destroyed if it is not sold at every instant. 
     Unlike genuine commodities, labor can be neither accumulated nor
     saved.

     "Labor is life, and if life is not exchanged every day for food, it
     suffers and soon perishes. If human life is to be regarded as a
     commodity, we are forced to admit slavery."

                                               [ Eugene Buret, p. 49-50 ]
So, if labor is a commodity, it is a commodity with the most unfortunate 
characteristics. But, even according to economic principles, it is not one, for 
it is not the "free product of a free market". [ ibid., p. 50 ] The present 
economic regime "reduces at the same time both the price and the remuneration of 
labor; it perfects the worker and degrades the man." [ ibid., p. 52-3 ] 
"Industry has become a war, commerce a game." [ ibid., p. 62 ] 
  
     "The machines for spinning cotton (in England) alone represent
     84,000,000 handworkers."

                                                [ Eugene Buret, p. 193 ]
Up to now, industry has been in the situation of a war of conquest: 
  
     "it has squandered the lives of the men who composed its army with
     as much indifference as the great conquerors. Its goal was the
     possession of riches, and not human happiness." "These interests
     (i.e., economic interests), left to their own free development, 
     ... cannot help coming into conflict; war is their only arbiter,
     and the decisions of war assign defeat and death to some and
     victory to others.... It is in the conflict of opposing forces
     that science looks for order and equilibrium; perpetual was, in
     the view of science, is the only means of achieving peace; this war
     is called competition."

                                              [ Eugene Buret, pp. 20,23 ]

     "The industrial war, if it is to be waged successfully, needs large
     armies which it can concentrate at one point and decimate at will. 
     And neither devotion nor duty moves the soldiers of this army to
     bear the burden placed upon them; what moves them is the need to
     escape the harshness of starvation. They feel neither affection
     nor gratitude for their bosses, who are not bound in their
     subordinates by any feeling of goodwill and who regard them not as
     human beings but as instruments of production which bring in as
     much and cost as little as possible. These groups of workers, who
     are more and more crowded together, cannot even be sure they they
     will always be employed; the industry which has summoned them
     together allows them to live only because it needs them; as soon as
     it can get rid of them, it abandons them without the slightest
     hesitation; and the workers are forced to offer their persons and
     their labor for whatever is the going price. The longer, more
     distressing and loathsome the work which is given them, the less
     they are paid; one can see workers who toil their way non-stop
     through a 16-hour day and who scarcely manage to buy the right not
     to die."

                                              [ Eugene Buret, pp. 68-9 ]

     "We are convinced... as are the commissioners appointed to look
     into the conditions of the handloom weavers, that the large
     industrial towns would quickly lose their population of workers if
     they did not all the time receive a continual stream of healthy
     people and fresh blood from the surrounding country areas."

                                               [ Eugene Buret, pp. 362 ]



PROFIT OF CAPITAL



1. Capital
 
(1) What is the basis of capital -- i.e., of private property in the products of 
another's labor? 
  
     "Even if capital cannot be reduced to simple theft or fraud, it
     still needs the assistance of legislation to sanctify inheritance."

                      [ Jean-Baptiste Say, Traie d'economie politique,
             third edition, 2 volumes, Paris, 1817, I, p. 136, footnote ]
How does one become an owner of productive stock? How does on become owner of 
the products created by means of this stock? 
 Through positive law. [Say, II, p. 4] 
 What does one acquire with capital, with the inheritance of a large fortune, 
for example? 
  
     "The person who acquires, or succeeds to a great fortune, does not
     necessarily acquire or succeed to any political power.... The power
     which that possession immediately and directly conveys to him, is
     the power of purchasing; a certain command over all the labor, or
     over all the produce of labor, which is then in the market."

                                [ Smith, Wealth of Nations, I, pp. 26-7 ]
Capital is, therefore, the power to command labor, and its products. The 
capitalist possesses this power not on account of his personal or human 
properties but insofar as he is an owner of capital. His power is the purchasing 
power of his capital, which nothing can withstand. 
 Later, we shall see how the capitalist, by means of capital, exercises his 
power to command labor; but we shall then go on to see how capital, in its turn, 
is able to rule the capitalist himself. 
 What is capital? 
  
     "A certain quantity of labor stocked and stored up. .."

                                                        [ Smith, p. 295 ]
Capital is stored up-labor. 
 (2) Bonds, or stock, is any accumulation of the products of the soil or of 
manufacture. Stock is only called capital when it yields its owner a revenue or 
profit. 
  
2. The Profit of Capital
 
The profit or gain of capital is altogether different from the wages of labor. 
This difference manifests itself in two ways: firstly, the profits of capital 
are regulated altogether by the value of the stock employed, although the labor 
of inspection and direction for different capitals may be the same. Furthermore, 
in many large factories, the whole labor of this kind is committed to some 
principal clerk, whose wages never bear any regular proportion to the capital of 
which he oversees the management. And the owner of this capital, though he is 
thus discharged of almost all labor, still expects that his profits should bear 
a regular proportion to his capital. [Smith, p. 43] 
 Why does the capitalist demand this proportion between profit and capital? 
 He could have no interest in employing these workers, unless he expected from 
the sale of their work something more than was sufficient to replace the stock 
advanced by him as wages; and he could have no interest to employ a great stock 
rather than a small one, unless his profits were to bear some proportion to the 
extent of his stock. [Smith, p. 42] 
 So the capitalist makes a profit first on the ages and secondly on the raw 
materials advanced by him. 
 What relation, then, does profit have to capital? 
 It is not easy to ascertain what are the average wages of labor even in a 
particular place and at a particular time, and it is even more difficult to 
determine the profit on capital. Variations of price in commodities which the 
capitalist deals in, the good or bad fortune both of his rivals and of his 
customers, a thousand other accidents to which his goods are liable in transit 
and in warehouses, all produce a daily, almost hourly, variation in profits. 
[Smith, pp. 78-9] But although it may be impossible to determine, with any 
degree of precision, the average profits of capital, some notion may be formed 
of them from the interest of money. Wherever a great deal can be made by the use 
of money, a great deal will be given for the use of it; wherever little can be 
made, little will be given. [Smith, p. 79] 
  
     "The proportion which the usual market rate of interest ought to
     bear to the ordinary rate of clear profit, necessarily varies as
     profit rises or falls. Double interest is in Great Britain
     reckoned what the merchants call a good, moderate, reasonable
     profit, terms which... mean no more than a common and usual
     profit."

                                                        [ Smith, p. 87 ]
What is the lowest rate of profit? And what is the highest? 
 The lowest rate of ordinary profit on capitals must always be something more 
than what is sufficient to compensate the occassional losses to which every 
employment of capital is exposed. It is this surplus value only which is the 
neat or clear profit. The same holds for the lowest rate of interest. [Smith, p. 
86] 
 The highest rate to which ordinary profits can rise may be such as, in the 
price of the greater part of commodities, easts up the whole of the rent of the 
land and reduces the wages of labor expended in preparing the commodity and 
bringing it to market to the lowest rate, the bare subsistence of the laborer. 
The workman must always have been fed in some way or other while he was about 
the work; but the rent of land can disappear entirely. Examples: the servants of 
the East India Company in Bengal. [Smith, pp. 86-7] 
 Besides all the advantages of limited competition which the capitalist can 
exploit in such a case, he can keep the market price above the natural price, by 
quite honorable means. 
 Firstly, by secrets in trade, where the market is at a great distance from the 
residence of those who supply it; that is, by concealing a change in price, an 
increase above the natural level. The effect of this concealment is that other 
capitalists do not invest their capital in this branch of industry. 
 Secondly, by secrets in manufacture, which enable the capitalist to cut 
production costs and sell his goods at the same price, or even at a lower price 
than his competitors, while making a bigger profit. (Deceit by concealment is 
not immoral? Dealings on the Stock Exchange.) Furthermore, where production is 
confined to a particular locality (as in the case of select wines) and the 
effective demand can never be satisfied. Finally, through monopolies granted to 
individuals or companies. The price of monopoly is the highest which can be got. 
[Smith, pp. 53-4] 
 Other chance causes which can raise the profit on capital: 
 The acquisition of new territory, or of new branches of trade, may sometimes 
rise the profits of stock even in a wealthy country, because part of the capital 
is withdrawn from the old branches of trade, competition comes to be less than 
before, and the market is less fully supplies with commodities, the prices of 
which then rise: those who deal in these commodities can then afford to borrow 
at a higher interest. [Smith, p. 83] As any particular commodity comes to be 
more manufactured, that part of the price which resolves itself into wages and 
profit comes to be greater in proportion to that which resolves itself into 
rent. In the progress of the manufacture of commodity, not only the number of 
the profits increase, but every subsequent profit is greater than the preceding 
one; because the capital from which it is derived must always be greater. The 
capital which employs the weavers, for example, must be greater than that which 
employs the spinners; because it not only replaces that capital with its 
profits, but pays besides, the wages of the weavers; and the profits must always 
bear some proportion to the capital. [Smith, p. 45] 
 So, the growing role played by human labor in fashioning the natural product 
increases not the wages of labor but partly the number of profitable capitals 
and partly the size of each capital in proportion to those that precede it. 
 More later about the profit which the capitalist derives from the division of 
labor. 
 He profits in two ways: firstly, from the division of labor and secondly, and 
more generally, from the growing role played by human labor in fashioning the 
natural product. The larger the human share in a commodity, the larger the 
profit of dead capital. 
 In one and the same society, the average rates of profit on capital are more 
nearly upon a level than are the wages of different kinds of labor. [Smith, p. 
45] In the different employments of capital, the ordinary rate of profit varies 
more or less with the certainty or uncertainty of the returns; 
  
     "... the ordinary profit of stock, though it rises with the risk,
     does not always seem to rise in proportion to it."

                                                    [ Smith, pp. 99-100 ]
Needlesstosay, profits also rise if the means of circulation (e.g., paper money) 
improve or become less expensive. 
  
3. The Rule of Capital over Labor
and the Motives of the Capitalist
 
     "The consideration of his own private profit is the sole motive
     which determines the owner of any capital to employ it either in
     agriculture, in manufactures, or in some particular branch of the
     wholesale or retail trade. The different quantities of productive
     labor which may put it into motion, and the different values which
     it may add to the annual produce of the land and labor of the
     society, according as it is employed in one or other of those
     different ways, never enter into his thoughts."

                                                        [ Smith, p. 355 ]

     "The most useful employment of capital for the capitalist is that
     which, with the same degree of security, yields him the largest
     profit; but this employment is not always the most useful for
     society... the most useful is that which... stimulates the
     productive power of its land and labor."

                                                  [ Say, II, pp. 130-31 ]

     "The plans and projects of the employers of stock regulate and
     direct all the most important operations of labor, and profit is
     the end proposed by all those plans and projects. But the rate of
     profit does not, like rent and wages, rise with the prosperity and
     fall with the declension of the society. On the contrary, it is
     naturally low in rich and high in poor countries, and it is always
     highest in countries which are going fastest to ruin. The interest
     of this third order [those who live by profit], therefore, has not
     the same connection with the general interest of the society as
     that of the other two.... The interest of the dealer, however, in
     any particular branch of trade or manufactures, is always in some
     respects different from, and even opposite to, that of the public. 
     To widen the market and to narrow the competition, is always the
     interest of the dealers... and order of men whose interest is
     never exactly the same as that of the public, who have generally an
     interest to decisive and even to oppress the public..."

                                                   [ Smith I, pp. 231-2 ]
4. The Accumulation of Capitals
and the Competition among the Capitalists
 
The increase of capitals, which raises wages, tends to lower profits, as a 
result of the competition among capitalists. [Smith, p. 78] 
 If, for example, the capital which is necessary for the grocery trade of a 
particular town 
  
     "is divided between two different grocers, their competition will
     tend to make both of them sell cheaper than if it were in the hands
     of one only; and if it were divided among 20, their competition
     would be just so much the greater, and the chance of their
     combining together, in order to raise the price, just so much the
     less."

                                                      [ Smith I, p. 322 ]
Since we already know that monopoly prices are as high as possible, since the 
interest of the capitalists, even from a straight-forwardly economic point of 
view, is opposed to the interest of society, and since the growth of profits 
acts on the price of the commodity like compound interest [Smith, pp. 87-8], it 
follows that the sole defense against the capitalists is competition, which in 
the view of political economy has the beneficial effect both of raising wages 
and cheapening commodities to the advantage of the consuming public. 
 But, competition is possible only if capitals multiply and are held by many 
different people. It is only possible to generate a large number of capitals as 
a result of multilateral accumulation, since capital in general stems from 
accumulation. But, multilateral accumulation inevitably turns into unilateral 
accumulation. Competition among capitalists increases accumulation of capitals. 
Accumulation -- which, under the rule of private property, means concentration 
of capital in few hands -- inevitably ensues if capitals are allowed to follow 
their own natural course. It is only through competition that this natural 
proclivity of capital begins to take shape. 
 We have already seen that the profit on capital is in proportion to its size. 
If we ignore deliberate competition for the moment, a large capital accumulates 
more rapidly, in proportion to its size, than does a small capital. 
 This means that, quite apart from competition, the accumulation of large 
capital takes place at a much faster rate than that of small capital. But, let 
us follow this process further. 
 As capitals multiply, the profits on capital diminish, as a result of 
competition. So, the first to suffer is the small capitalist. 
  
     "In a country which had acquired its full complement of riches, 
     ... as the ordinary rate of clear profit would be very small, so
     the usual market rate of interest which could be afforded out of it
     would be so low as to render it impossible for any but the very
     wealthiest of people to live upon the interest of their money. All
     people of small or middling fortunes would be obliged to
     super-intend themselves the employment of their own stocks. It
     would be necessary that almost every man should be a man of
     business, or engage in some sort of trade."

                                                       [ Smith I, p. 86 ]
This is the situation most dear to the heart of political economy. 
  
     "The proportion between capital and revenue, therefore, seems
     everywhere to regulate the proportion between industry and
     idleness. Wherever capital predominates, industry prevails:
     wherever revenue, idleness."

                                                        [ Smith, p. 301 ]
But, what about the employment of capital in this increased competition? 
  
     "As the quantity of stock to be lent at interest increases, the
     interest, or the price which must be paid for the use of that
     stock, necessarily diminishes, not only from those general causes,
     which make the market price of things commonly diminish as their
     quantity increases, but from other causes which are peculiar to
     this particular case.

     "As capitals increase in any country, the profits which can be made
     by employing them necessarily diminish. It becomes gradually more
     and more difficult to find within the country a profitable method
     of employing any new capital. There arises, in consequence, a
     competition between different capitals, the owner of one
     endeavoring to get possession of that employment which is occupied
     by another.

     "But, on most occassions he can hope to jostle that other out of
     this employment by no other means but by dealing upon more
     reasonable terms. He must not only sell what he deals in somewhat
     cheaper, but, in order to get it to sell, he must sometimes, too,
     buy it dearer.

     "The demand for productive labor, by the increase of the funds
     which are destined for maintaining it, grows every day greater and
     greater. Laborers easily find employment, but the owners of
     capitals find it difficult to get laborers to employ. Their
     competition raises the wages of labor and sinks the profits of
     stock."

                                                         [ Smith p. 316 ]
The small capitalist, therefore, has two choices: he can either consume his 
capital, since he can no longer live on the interest -- i.e., cease to be a 
capitalist; or, he can himself set up a business, sell his goods at a lower 
price, and buy them at a dearer price than the richer capitalist, and pay higher 
wages, which means that he would go bankrupt -- since the market price is 
already very low as a result of the intense competition we presupposed. If, on 
the other hand, the big capitalist wants to squeeze out the smaller one, he has 
all the same advantages over him as the capitalist has over the worker. He is 
compensated for the smaller profits by the larger size of his capital, and he 
can even put up with short-term losses until the smaller capitalist is ruined 
and he is freed of this competition. In this way, he accumulates the profits of 
the small capitalist. 
 Furthermore: the big capitalist always buys more cheaply than the small 
capitalist, because he buys in larger quantities. He can, therefore, afford to 
sell at a lower price. 
 But, if a fall in the rate of interest turns the middle capitalists from 
rentiers into businessmen, conversely the increase in business capitals and the 
resulting lower rate of profit produce a fall in the rate of interest. 
  
     "But, when the profits which can be made by use of a capital are
     diminished... the price which can be paid for the use of it... 
     must necessarily be diminished with them."

                                                         [ Smith p. 316 ]

     "As riches, improvement, and population, have increased, interest
     has declined", and consequently the profits of stock; "...after
     these are diminished, stock may not only continue to increase, but
     to increase much faster than before.... A great stock, though with
     small profits, generally increases faster than a small stock with
     great profits. Money, says the proverb, makes money."
 
                                                          [ Smith p. 83 ]
So, if this large capital is opposed by small capitals with small profits, as in 
the case under the conditions of intense competition which we have presupposed, 
it crushes them completely. 
 The inevitable consequence of this competition is the deterioration in the 
quality of goods, adulteration, spurious production, and universal pollution to 
be found in large towns. 
 Another important factor in the competition between big and small capitals is 
the relationship between fixed capital and circulating capital. 
 Circulating capital is capital 
  
     "employed in raising, manufacturing, or purchasing goods, and
     selling them again at a profit. The capital employed in this
     manner yields no revenue or profit to its employer, while it either
     remains in his possession or continues in the same shape.... His
     capital is continually going from him in one shape, and returning
     to him in another, and it is only by means of such circulation, or
     successive exchanges, that is can yield him any profit...."

Fixed capital is capital 
  
     "employed in the improvement of land, in the purchase of useful
     machines and instruments, or in such like things....

     "...every saving in the expense of supporting the fixed capital of
     the undertaker of every work is necessarily divided between his
     fixed and his circulating capital. While his whole capital remains
     the same, the smaller the one part, the greater must necessarily be
     the other. It is the circulating capital which furnishes the
     materials and wages of labor, and puts industry into motion. Every
     saving, therefore, in the expense of maintaining the fixed capital,
     which does not diminish the productive powers of labor, must
     increase the fund which puts industry into motion...."

                                                        [ Smith, p. 257 ]

It is immediately clear that the relation between fixed capital and circulating 
capital is much more favorable to the big capitalist than it is to the smaller 
capitalist. The difference in volume between the amount of fixed capital needed 
by a very big banker and the amount needed by a very small one is insignificant. 
The only fixed capital they need is an office. The equipment needed by a big 
landowner does not increase in proportion to the extent of his land. Similarly, 
the amount of credit available to a big capitalist, compared with a smaller one, 
represents a bigger saving in fixed capital -- namely, in the amount of money 
which he must have available at all times. Finally, it goes without saying that 
where industrial labor is highly developed -- i.e., where almost all manual 
crafts have become factory labor -- the entire capital of the small capitalist 
is not enough to procure for him even the necessary fixed capital. It is well 
known that large-scale [agricultural] cultivation generally requires only a 
small number of hands. 
 The accumulation of large capitals is generally accompanied by a concentration 
and simplification of fixed capital, as compared with the smaller capitalists. 
The big capitalist establishes for himself some kind of organization of the 
instruments of labor. 
  
     "Similarly, in the sphere of industry every factory and every
     workshop is a more comprehensive combination of a larger material
     property with numerous and varied intellectual abilities and
     technical skills which have as their shared aim the development
     of production.... Where legislation preserves the unity of large
     landed properties, the surplus quantity of a growing population
     crowds together into industry, and it is therefore mainly in
     industry that the proletariat gathers in large numbers, as in Great
     Britain. But, where legislation allows the continuous division of
     the land, as in France, the number of small, debt-ridden
     proprietors increases and many of them are forced into the class of
     the needy and the discontented. Should this division and
     indebtedness go far enough, in the same way as big industry
     destroys small industry; and since larger landholding complexes
     once more come into being, many propertyless workers no longer
     needed on the land are, in this case too, forced into industry."

                                                     [ Schulz, pp. 58-9 ]

     "The character of commodities of the same sort changes as a result
     of changes in the nature of production, and in particular as a
     result of mechanization. Only by eliminating human labor has it
     become possible to spin from a pound of cotton worth 3s. 8d., 350
     hanks worth 25 guineas and 167 miles in length."

                                                        [ Schulz, p. 62 ]

     "On average, the prices of cotton goods have fallen by 11/12ths
     over the past 45 years, and according to Marshall's calculations a
     quantity of manufacture costing 16s. in 1814 now cost 1s. 10d. The
     drop in prices of industrial products has meant both a rise in home
     consumption and an increase in the foreign market; as a result, the
     number of cotton workers in Great Britain not only did not fall
     after the introduction of machinery, but rose from 40,000 to 1.5
     million. As for the earnings of industrial employers and workers,
     the growing competition among factory owners has inevitably
     resulted in a drop in profits in proportion to the quantity of
     products. Between 1820 and 1833, the gross profit made by
     Manchester manufacturers on a piece of calico fell from 4s. 1.5d.
     to 1s. 9d. But, to make up for this loss, the rate of production
     has been correspondingly increased. The consequence is that there
     have been instances of overproduction in some branches of industry;
     that there are frequent bankruptcies, which create fluctuations of
     property within the class of capitalists and masters of labor,
     and force a number of those who have been ruined economically into
     the ranks of the proletariat; and that frequent and sudden
     restriction in employment among the class of wage-earners."

                                                        [ Schulz, p. 63 ]

     "To hire out one's labor is to begin one's enslavement; to hire out
     the materials of labor is to achieve one's freedom.... Labor is
     man, while matter contains nothing human."

                                                 [ Pecqueur, pp. 411-12 ]

     "The element of matter, which can do nothing to create wealth
     without the element of labor, acquires the magical property of
     being fruitful for them [that is, for the property owners], as if
     they themselves had provided this indispensable element."

                                                     [ Pecqueur, p. 412 ]

     "If we assume that a worker can earn an average of 400 francs a
     year from his daily labor, and that this sum is sufficient for one
     adult to eke out a living, then anyone who receives 2,000 francs in
     interest or rent is indirectly forcing 5 men to work for him; an
     income of 100,000 francs represents the labor of 250 men; and
     1,000,000 francs the labor of 2,500 (300 million -- Louis Philippe
     -- therefore represents the labor of 750,000 workers)."

                                                 [ Pecqueur, pp. 412-13 ]

     "The property owners have received from human law the right to use
     and abuse the materials of all labor -- i.e., to do as they wish
     with them.... There is no law which obliges them punctually and at
     all time to provide work for those who do not own property or to
     pay them a wage which is at all times adequate, etc."

                                                     [ Pecqueur, p. 413 ]

     "Complete freedom as to the nature, the quantity, the quality, and
     the appropriateness of production, the use and consumption of
     wealth and the disposal of the materials of all labor. Everyone is
     free to exchange his possessions as he chooses, without any other
     consideration than his own interest as an individual."

                                                     [ Pecqueur, p. 413 ]

     "Competition is simply an expression of free exchange, which is
     itself the immediate and logical consequence of the right of any
     individual to use and abuse all instruments of production. These
     three economic moments, which are in reality only one -- the right
     to use and abuse, freedom of exchange and unrestricted competition
     -- have the following consequences: each produces what he wants,
     how he wants, when he wants, where he wants; he produces well or he
     produces badly, too much or not enough, too late or too early, too
     dear or too cheap; no one knows whether he will sell, to whom he
     will sell, how he will sell, when he will sell, where he will sell;
     the same goes for buying. The producer is acquainted with neither
     the needs nor the resources, neither the demand nor the supply. He
     sells when he wants, then he can, where he wants, to whom he wants
     and at the price he wants. The same goes for buying. In all this
     he is at all times the plaything of chance, the slave of the law of
     the strongest, of the least pressed, of the richest.... While at
     one point there is a shortage of wealth, at another there is a
     surfeit and squandering of the same. While one producer sells a
     great deal, or at high prices and with an enormous profit, another
     sells nothing or sells at a loss.... Supply is ignorant of demand,
     and demand is ignorant of supply. You produce on the basis of a
     preference or a fashion prevalent among the consuming public; but
     by the time you are preparing to put your commodity on the market,
     the mood has passed and some other kind of product has come into
     fashion.... The inevitable consequences are continual and
     spreading bankruptcies, miscalculations, sudden collapses, and
     unexpected fortunes; trade crises, unemployment, periodic surfeits
     and shortages; instability and decline of wages and profits; the
     loss or enormous waste of wealth, of time, and of effort in the
     arena of fierce competition."

                                                  [ Pecqueur, p. 414-16 ]
Ricardo in his book [On the Principles of Political Economy et al] (rent of 
land): Nations are merely workshops for production, and man is a machine for 
consuming and producing. Human life is a piece of capital. Economic laws rule 
the world blindly. For Ricardo, men are nothing, the product everything. In 
Chapter 26, of the French translation, we read: 
  
     "To an individual with a capital of 20,000 pounds, whose profits
     were 2,000 per annum, it would be a matter quite indifferent
     whether his capital would employ a hundred or a thousand men... is
     not the real interest of the nation similar? Provided its net real
     income, its rents and profits, be the same, it is of no importance
     whether the nation consists of 10 or 12 million inhabitants."

                                                   [ Ricardo, pp. 234-5 ]

     "In truth," says M. de Sismondi, "it remains only to desire that
     the king, who has been left quite alone on the island, should, by
     continuously cranking up a number of automatons, get all England's
     work done."

                     [ J. C. L. Simonde de Sismondi, Nouveaux principes 
              d'economic politique, 2 volumes, Paris, 1819, II, p. 331 ]

     "The master who buys a worker's labor at a price so low that it is
     barely enough to meet his most pressing needs is responsible
     neither for the low wages nor the long hours of work: he himself
     is subject to the law which he imposes.... Misery is the product
     not so much of men as of the power of things."

                                                      [ Buret, I, p. 82 ]

     "The inhabitants of many different parts of Great Britain have not
     capital sufficient to improve and cultivate all their lands. The
     wool of the southern counties of Scotland is, a great part of it,
     after a long land carriage through very bad roads, manufactured in
     Yorkshire, for want of capital to manufacture it at home. There
     are many little manufacturing towns in Great Britain, of which the
     inhabitants have not capital sufficient to transport the produce of
     their own industry to those distant markets where there is demand
     and consumption for it. If there are any merchants among them,
     they are properly only the agents of wealthier merchants who reside
     in some of the greater commercial cities."

                                                  [ Smith, I, pp. 326-7 ]

     "The annual produce of the land and labor of any nation can be
     increased in its value by no other means but by increasing either
     the number of its productive laborers, or the productive powers
     of those laborers who had before been employed.... In either
     case, an additional capital is almost always required."

                                                  [ Smith, I, pp. 306-7 ]

     "As the accumulation of stock must, in the nature of things,
     previous to the division of labor, so labor can be more and more
     subdivided in proportion only as stock is previously more and more
     accumulated. The quantity of materials which the same number of
     people can work up, increases in a great proportion as labor comes
     to be more and more subdivided; and as the operations of each
     workman are gradually reduced to a greater degree of simplicity, a
     variety of new machines come to be invented for facilitating and
     abridging these operations. As the division of labor advances,
     therefore, in order to give constant employment to an equal number
     of workmen, an equal stock of provisions, and a greater stock of
     materials and tools than what would have been necessary in a ruder
     state of things, must be accumulated beforehand. But the number of
     workmen in every branch of business generally increases with the
     division of labor in that branch, or rather it is the increase of
     their number which enables them to class and subdivide themselves
     in this manner."

                                                  [ Smith, I, pp. 241-2 ]

     "As the accumulation of stock is previously necessary for carrying
     on this great improvement in the productive powers of labor, so
     that accumulation naturally leads to this improvement. The person
     who employs his stock in maintaining labor, necessarily wishes to
     employ it in such a manner as to produce as great a quantity of
     work as possible. He endeavors, therefore, both to make among his
     workmen the most proper distribution of employment, and to furnish
     them with the best machines which he can either invent or afford to
     purchase. His abilities in both these respects are generally in
     proportion to the extent of his stock, or to the number of people
     it can employ. The quantity of industry, therefore, not only
     increases in every country with the increase of the stock which
     employs it, but, in consequence of that increase, the same quantity
     of industry produces a much greater quantity of work."

                                                     [ Smith, I, p. 242 ]

Hence overproduction. 
  
     "More extensive combinations of productive forces... in trade and
     industry through the unification of more numerous and more varied
     human and natural forces for undertakings on a larger scale. Also,
     there are already a number of cases of closer links among the main
     branches of production themselves. Thus, large manufacturers will
     try to acquire large estates in order to avoid depending on others
     for at least a part of the raw materials they need for their
     industry; or they will set up a trading concern linked to their
     industrial enterprises and not only sell their own products but buy
     up and retail other sorts of goods to their workers. In England,
     where there are some factory owners who employ between 10- and
     12,000 workers... similar combinations of different branches of
     production under the control of one man, small states or
     provinces within a state, are not uncommon. For example, the
     mine-owners near Birmingham recently took over the entire process
     of iron production, which was previously in the hands of several
     different entrepreneurs and owners. See 'Der bergannische Distrikt
     bei Birmingham', Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift, no.3, 1838. 
     Finally, in the larger joint-stock companies, which have become so
     numerous, we find extensive combinations of the financial resources
     of many shareholders with the scientific and technical knowledge
     and skills of others to whom the execution of the work is
     entrusted. In this way, it is possible for many capitalists to
     apply their savings in a more diversified way and even invest them
     simultaneously in agricultural, industrial, and commercial
     production; as a result, their interests also become more
     diversified and the conflict between agricultural, industrial, and
     commercial interests begins to fade away. But the greater ease
     with which capital can be employed fruitfully in the most varied
     fields inevitably increases the conflict between the propertied and
     the propertyless classes."

                                                    [ Schulz, pp. 241-2 ]
The enormous profit which the landlords make out of misery. The greater the 
misery caused by industry, the higher the rent. 
 It is the same with the rate of interest on the vices of the proletariat. 
(Prostitution, drinking, the pawnbroker.) 
 The accumulation of capitals increases and the competition between them 
diminishes, as capital and landed property are united together in one hand and 
capital is enabled, because of its size, to combine different branches of 
production. 
 Indifference towards men. Smith's 20 lottery tickets. [Smith, I, p. 94] 
 Say's net and gross revenue. 
  



RENT OF LAND



The right of the landowners can be traced back to robbery. [Say, I, p. 136, n.2] 
Landowners, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand 
a rent even for the natural produce of the land. [Smith, I, p. 44] 
  
     "The rent of land, it may be thought, is frequently no more than a
     reasonable profit or interest for the stock laid out by the
     landlord upon its improvement. This, no doubt, may be partly the
     case upon some occassions.... The landlord demands a rent even for
     unimproved land, and the supposed interest or profit upon the
     expense of improvement is generally an addition to this original
     rent. Those improvements, besides, are not always made by the
     stock of the landlord, but sometimes by that of the tenant. When
     the lease comes to be renewed, however, the landlord commonly
     demands the same augmentation of rent as if they had been all made
     by his own. 
 
     "He sometimes demands rents for what is altogether incapable of
     human improvements."

                                                     [ Smith, I, p. 131 ]
Smith gives as an example of this last case, kelp, a species of seaweed which, 
when burnt, yields an alkaline salt useful for making glass,soap, etc. It grows 
in several parts of Great Britain, especially in Scotland, but only upon such 
rocks as lie within the high water mark, which are twice every day covered with 
the sea and of which the produce, therefore, was never augmented by human 
industry. The landlord, however, whose estate is bounded by a kelp shore of this 
kind, demands a rent for it as much as for his corn fields. The sea in the 
neighborhood of the islands of Shetland is more than commonly abundant in fish, 
which make a great part of the subsistence of their inhabitants. But in order to 
profit by the produce of the water, they must have a habitation on the 
neighboring land. The rent of the landlord is in proportion, not to what the 
farmer can make by the land, but by what he can make both by the land and by the 
water. 
  
     "This rent may be considered as the produce of those power, the use
     of which the landlord lends to the farmer. It is greater or
     smaller according to the supposed extent of those powers, or in
     other words, according to the supposed natural of improved
     fertility of the land. It is the work of nature which remains after
     deducting or compensation everything which can be regarded as the
     work of man."

                                                  [ Smith, I, pp. 324-5 ]

     "The rent of land, therefore, considered as the price paid for the
     use of land, is naturally a monopoly price. It is not at all
     proportioned to what the landlord may have laid out upon the
     improvement of the land, or to what he can afford to take; but to
     what the farmer can afford to give."

                                                     [ Smith, I, p. 131 ]

     "They [landlords] are the only ones of the three orders whose
     revenue costs them neither labor nor care, but comes to them, as it
     were, of its own accord, and independent of any plan or project of
     their own.

                                                     [ Smith, I, p. 230 ]
We have already seen how the volume of rent depends upon the degree of fertility 
of the land. 
  
     "The rent of land not only varies with its fertility, whatever be
     its produce, but with its situation, whatever be its fertility."

                                                     [ Smith, I, p. 133 ]

     "The produce of lands, mines, and fisheries, when their natural
     fertility is equal, is in proportion to the extent and proper
     application of the capitals employed about them. When the capitals
     are equal and equally well applied, it is in proportion to their
     natural fertility."
 
                                                     [ Smith, I, p. 249 ]
These proportions of Smith are important, because they reduce the rent land, 
where costs of production and size are equal, to the degree of fertility of the 
soil. This clearly demonstrates the perversion of concepts in political economy, 
which turns the fertility of the soil into an attribute of the landlord. 
 But let us now examine the relation between landlord and tenant. 
  
     "In adjusting the terms of the lease, the landlord endeavors to
     leave him no greater share of the product than what is sufficient
     to keep up the stock from which he furnishes the seed, pays the
     labor, and purchases and maintains the cattle and other instruments
     of husbandry, together with the ordinary profits of farming stock
     in the neighborhood. This is evidently the smallest share with
     which the tenant can content himself without being a loser, and the
     landlord seldom means to leave him any more. Whatever part of the
     produce, or, what is the same thing, whatever part of the price is
     over and above this share, he naturally intends to reserve himself
     as the rent of his land, which is evidently the highest the tenant
     can afford to pay in the actual circumstances of the land.... This
     portion... may still be considered as the natural rent of land, or
     the rent for which it is actually meant that land should for the
     most part be let."

                                                  [ Smith, I, p. 130-31 ]

     "The landlords," says Say, "operate a certain kind of monopoly
     against the tenants. The demands for their commodity, which is
     land, is capable of an infinite expansion; but the supply can only
     increase up to a certain point.... The agreement reached between
     landlord and tenant is always as advantageous as possible to the
     former.... Apart from the advantage which he derives from the
     nature of the case, he derives a further one from his position, his
     larger fortune, his credit and his standing; but the first of these
     advantages is in itself enough to enable him at all times to profit
     from the favorable circumstances of the land. The opening of a
     canal or road and a growth in population and prosperity in a canton
     always raise the price of the rent.... What is more, even if the
     tenant makes improvement on his plot of land at his own expense, he
     can only benefit from this capital for the duration of his lease;
     when his lease runs out, this capital remains in the hands of the
     landlord. From this moment on, it is the latter who reaps the
     interest, even though it was not he who made the original outlay;
     for now the rent is raised proportionately."

                                                   [ Say, II, pp. 142-3 ]

     "Rent, considered as the price paid for the use of land, is
     naturally the highest which the tenant can afford to pay in the
     actual circumstances of the land."

                                                     [ Smith, I, p. 130 ]

     "The rent of an estate above ground commonly mounts to what is
     supposed to be a third of the gross produce; and it is generally a
     rent certain and independent of the occassional variations in the
     crop."

                                                     [ Smith, I, p. 153 ]

     Rent "is seldom less than a fourth, and frequently more than a
     third of the whole produce."

                                                     [ Smith, I, p. 325 ]

Ground rent cannot be paid in the case of all commodities. For example, in many 
districts no rent is paid for stones. 
  
     "Such parts only of the produce of land can commonly be brought to
     market of which the ordinary price is sufficient to replace the
     stock which must be employed in bringing them thither, together
     with its ordinary profits. If the ordinary price is more than
     this, the surplus part of it will naturally go to the rent of the
     land. If it is not more, though the commodity may be brought to
     market, it can afford no rent to the landlord. Whether the price
     is or is not more depends upon the demand."

                                                     [ Smith, I, p. 132 ]

     "Rent, it is to be observed, therefore, enters into the composition
     of the price of commodities in a different way from wages and
     profit. High or low wages and profit are the causes of high or low
     prices; high or low rent is the effect of it."

                                                     [ Smith, I, p. 132 ]

Among the products which always yield a rent is food. 
  
     "As men, like all other animals, naturally multiply in proportion
     the means of subsistence, food is always, more or less, in demand. 
     It can always purchase or command a greater or smaller quantity of
     labor, and somebody can always be found who is willing to do
     something in order to obtain it. The quantity of labor, indeed,
     which it can purchase is not always equal to what it could
     maintain, if managed in the most economical manner, on account of
     the high wages which are sometimes given to labor. But it can
     always purchase such a quantity of labor as it can maintain,
     according to the rate at which that sort of labor is commonly
     maintained in the neighborhood.

     "But land, in almost any situation, produces a greater quantity of
     food than what is sufficient to maintain all the labor necessary
     for bringing it to market in the most liberal way in which that
     labor is ever maintained. The surplus, too, is always more than
     sufficient to replace the stock which employed that labor, together
     with its profits. Something, therefore, always remains for a rent
     to the landlord."

                                                   [ Smith, I, p. 132-3 ]

     "Food is, in this manner, not only the original source of rent, but
     every other part of the produce of land which afterwards affords
     rent derives that part of its value from the improvement of the
     powers of labor in producing food by means of the improvement and
     cultivation of land."

                                                     [ Smith, I, p. 150 ]

     "Human food seems to be the only produce of land which always and
     necessarily affords a rent to the landlord."

                                                     [ Smith, I, p. 147 ]

     "Countries are populous not in proportion to the number of people
     whom their produce can clothe and lodge, but in proportion to that
     of those whom it can feed."

                                                     [ Smith, I, p. 149 ]

"After food, clothing, and lodging, are the two great wants of mankind." [Smith, 
I, p. 147] They generally yield a rent, but not necessarily. 
 Let us now sees how the landlord exploits everything which is to the benefit of 
society. 
 (1) The rent of land increases with population. 
 (2) We have already learnt from Say how ground rent rises with railways, etc., 
and with the improvement, security, and multiplication of the means of 
communication. 
  
     (3)  "... every improvement in the circumstances of the society
     tends either directly or indirectly to raise the real rent of
     land, to increase the real wealth of the landlord, his power
     of purchasing the labor, or the produce of the labor of other
     people.

     "The extension of improvement and cultivation tends to raise
     it directly. The landlord's share of the produce necessarily
     increases with an increase of the produce.

     "That rise in the real price of those parts of the rude
     produce of land... the rise in the price of cattle, for
     example, tends too to raise the rent of land directly, and in
     a still greater proportion. The real value of the landlord's
     share, his real command of the labor of other people, not only
     rises with the real value of the produce, but the proportion
     of his share to the whole produce rises with it. That
     produce, after the rise in its real price, requires no more
     labor to collect it than before. A smaller proportion of it
     will, therefore, be sufficient to replace, with the ordinary
     profit, the stock which employs that labor. A greater
     proportion of it must, consequently, belong to the landlord."

                                                 [ Smith, I, pp. 228-29 ]
The greater the demand for raw products and the consequent rise in their value 
may partly be a result of the increase in population and the growth of their 
needs. But every new invention and every new application in manufacture of a raw 
material which was previously not used at all or only used rarely, makes for an 
increase in the ground rent. For example, the rent of coal-mines rose enormously 
when railways, steamships, etc., were introduced. 
 Besides this advantage which the landlord derives from manufacture, 
discoveries, and labor, there is another that we shall see presently. 
  
     (4) "All those improvements in the productive powers of labor,
     which tend directly to reduce the real price of manufactures,
     tend indirectly to raise the real rent of land. The landlord
     exchanges that part of his rude produce, which is over and
     above his own consumption, or what comes to the same thing,
     the price of that part of it, for manufactured produce. 
     Whatever reduces the real price of the latter, raises that of
     the former. An equal opportunity of the former becomes
     thereby equivalent to a greater quantity of the latter; and
     the landlord is enabled to purchase a greater quantity of the
     conveniences, ornaments, or luxuries, which he has occassion
     for."

                                                 [ Smith, I, pp. 228-29 ]

But it is foolish to conclude, as Smith does, that since the landlord exploits 
everything which is of benefit to society, the interest of the landlord is 
always identical with that of society. In the economic system, under which the 
rule of private property, the interest which any individual has in society is in 
inverse proportion to the interest which society has in him, just as the 
interest of the moneylender in the spendthrift is not at all identical with the 
interest of the spendthrift. 
 We mention only in passing the landlord's obsession with monopoly against the 
landed property of foreign countries, which is the reason, for example, for the 
corn laws. We shall similarly pass over mediaeval serfdom, slavery in the 
colonies and the distress of the rural population -- the day-laborers -- in 
Great Britain. Let us confine ourselves to the propositions of political economy 
itself. 
 (1) The landlord's interest in the well-being of society means, according to 
the principles of political economy, that he is interested in the growth of its 
population and its production and the increase of its needs, in a word, in the 
increase of wealth; and the increase of wealth is, if our previous observations 
are correct, identical with the growth of misery and slavery. The relationship 
of rising rents and rising misery is one example of the landlord's interest in 
society, for a rise in house rent also means a rise in ground rent -- the 
interest on the land on which the house stands. 
 (2) According to the political economists themselves, the interest of the 
landlord is fiercely opposed to that of the tenant, and therefore of a 
considerable section of society. 
 (3) The landlord is in a position to demand more rent from the tenant the less 
wages the tenant pays out, and the more rent the landlord demands the further 
the tenant pushes down the wages. For this reason, the landlord's interest is 
just as opposed to that of the farm laborer as the manufacturer's is to that of 
the workers. It likewise pushes wages down to a minimum. 
 (4) Since a real reduction in the price of manufactured products puts up the 
rent of land, the landowner has a direct interest in depressing the wages of the 
factory worker, in competition among the capitalists, in overproduction and in 
all the misery occassioned by industry. 
 (5) So the interest of the landowner, far from being identical with the 
interest of society, is fiercely opposed to the interests of the tenants, the 
farm laborers, the factory workers, and the capitalists. But, as a result of 
competition, the interest of one landowner is not even identical with that of 
another. We shall now take a look at competition. 
 Generally speaking, large landed property and small landed property are in the 
same relation to one another as large and small capital. In addition, however, 
there are special circumstances which lead, without fail, to the accumulation of 
large landed property and the swallowing up of small properties. 
 (1) Nowhere does the number of workers and the amount of equipment decline so 
greatly in proportion to the size of the stock as in landed property. Similarly, 
nowhere does the possibility of many-sided exploitation,the saving of proportion 
costs and the judicious division of labor increase more in proportion to that 
stock than in this sphere. Whatever the size of the plot, there is a certain 
minimum of tools required -- a plough, a saw, etc. -- below which it is 
impossible to go, whereas there is no such lowermost limit to the size of the 
property. 
 (2) Large landed property accumulated for itself the interest on the capital 
which the tenant has invested in the improvement of the land. Small landed 
property must employ its own capital. The entire profit on this capital is lost 
to the investor. 
 (3) While every social improvement benefits the large landed property, it harms 
the small one, since it makes an increasingly large amount of ready money 
necessary. 
 (4) There are two further important laws of this competition to be considered: 
  
     (a)  "... the rent of the cultivated land, of which the produce 
     is human food, regulates the rent of the greater part of the
     other cultivated land."

                                                     [ Smith, I, p. 144 ]
In the long run, only the large estate can produce sources of food such as 
cattle, etc. It is, therefore, in a position to regulate the rent of other land 
and force it down to a minimum. 
 The small landowner who works on his own account is, therefore, in the same 
relation to the big landowner as the craftsman who owns his own tools is to the 
factory owner. The small estate has become a mere tool. Ground rent disappears 
entirely for the small landowner; at the most, there remains to him the interest 
on his capital and the wages of his labor, for ground rent can be forced so low 
by competition that it becomes nothing more than the interest on capital not 
invested by the owner himself. 
 (b) Furthermore, we have already seen that given equal fertility and equally 
effective exploitation of lands, mines, and fisheries, the produce is in 
proportion to the extent of capital employed. Hence, the victory of the large 
landowner. Similarly, where equal amounts of capital are invested, the produce 
is in proportion to the degree of fertility. That is to say, where capitals are 
equal, victory goes to the owner of the more fertile land. 
  
     (c) "A mine of any kind may be said to be either fertile or
     barren, according as the quantity of mineral which can be
     brought from it by a certain quantity of labor is greater or
     less than what can be brought by an equal quantity from the
     greater part of other mines of the same kind."

                                                     [ Smith, I, p. 151 ]

     "The most fertile coal-mine, too, regulates the price of
     coals at all the other mines in its neighborhood. Both the
     proprietor and the undertaker of the work find, the one that
     he can get a greater rent, the other that he can get a
     greater profit by somewhat underselling all their neighbors. 
     Their neighbors are soon obliged to sell at the same price,
     though they cannot so well afford it, and though it always
     diminishes, and sometimes takes away altogether both their
     rent and their profit. Some works are abandoned altogether;
     others can afford no rent, and can be wrought only by the
     proprietor."

                                                  [ Smith, I, pp. 152-3 ]


     "After the discover of the mines of Peru, the silver-mines
     of Europe were, the greater part of them, abandoned.... 
     This was the case, too, with the ancient mines of Peru,
     after the discovery of those of Potosi."

                                                     [ Smith, I, p. 154 ]
What Smith says here of mines is more-or-less true of landed property in 
general. 
  
     (d) "The ordinary market price of land, it is to be observed,
     depends everywhere upon the ordinary market rate of
     interest... if the rent of land should fall short of the
     interest of money by a greater difference, nobody would buy
     the land, which would soon reduce its ordinary price. On the
     contrary, if the advantages should much more than compensate
     the difference, everybody would buy the land, which would
     soon raise its ordinary price."

                                                     [ Smith, I, p. 320 ]
If follows from this relation between ground rent and interest on money that 
ground rent must continue to fall until eventually only the richest people can 
afford to live from it. This means an increase in competition between those 
landowners who do not lease out their land. Some of them are ruined. There is 
once again an accumulation of large landed property. 
 This competition has the further consequence that a large part of landed 
property falls into the hands of the capitalists; thus, the capitalist becomes 
landowners, just as the smaller landowners are, in general, nothing more than 
capitalists. In this way, a part of large landed property becomes industrial. 
 So, the final consequence of the abolition of the distinction between 
capitalist and landowner -- which means that, in general, there remain only two 
classes in the population: the working class and the capitalist class. This 
selling off of landed property, and transformation of such property into a 
commodity, marks the final collapse of the old aristocracy and the final victory 
of the aristocracy of money. 
 (1) We refuse to join in the sentimental tears which romanticism sheds on this 
account. Romanticism always confuses the infamy of selling off the land with the 
entirely reasonable and, within the system of private property, inevitable and 
desirable consequence of the selling off of private property in land. In the 
first place, feudal landed property is already in essence land which has been 
sold off, land which has been estranged from man and now confronts him in the 
shape of a handful of great lords. 
 In feudal landownership, we already find the domination of the earth as of an 
alien power over men. The serf is an appurtenance of the land. Similarly, the 
heir through primogeniture, the firstborn son, belongs to the land. It inherits 
him. The rule of private property begins with property in land, which is its 
basis. But in the system of feudal landownership, the lord at least appears to 
be king of the land. In the same way, there is still the appearance of a 
relationship between owner and land which is based on something more intimate 
than mere material wealth. The land is individualized with its lord, it acquires 
his status, it is baronial or ducal with him, has his privileges, his 
jurisdiction, his political position, etc. It appears as the inorganic body of 
its lord. Hence the proverb, nulle terre sans maitre ["No land without its 
master"], which expresses the blending of nobility and landed property. In the 
same way, the rule of landed property does not appear directly as the rule of 
mere capital. Its relationship to those dependent upon it is more like that of a 
fatherland. It is a sort of narrow personality. 
 In the same way, feudal landed property gives its name to its lord, as does a 
kingdom to its king. His family history, the history of his house, etc. -- all 
this individualizes his estate for him, and formally turns it into his house, 
into a person. Similarly, the workers on the estate are not in the position of 
day-laborers; rather, they are partly the property of the landowner, as are 
serfs, and they are partly linked to him through a relationship based on 
respect, submissiveness, and duty. His relation to them is therefore directly 
political, and even has an agreeable aspect. Customs, character, etc., vary from 
one estate to another and appear to be one with their particular stretch of 
land; later, however, it is only a man's purse, and not his character or 
individuality, which ties him to the land. Finally, the feudal landowner makes 
no attempt to extract the maximum profit from his property. Rather, he consumes 
what is there and leaves the harvesting of it to his serfs and tenants. Such is 
the aristocratic condition of landownership, which sheds a romantic glory on its 
lords. 
 It is inevitable that this appearance should be abolished and that landed 
property, which is the root of private property, should be drawn entirely into 
the orbit of private property and become a commodity; that the rule of the 
property owner should appear as the naked rule of private property, of capital, 
divested of all political tincture; that the relationship between property owner 
and worker should be reduced to the economic relationship between the property 
owner and his property should come to an end, and that the property itself 
should become purely material wealth; that the marriage of interest with the 
land should take over from the marriage of honor, and that land, like man, 
should sink to the level of a venal object. It is inevitable that the root of 
landed property -- sordid self-interest -- should also manifest itself in its 
cynical form. It is inevitable that immovable monopoly should become mobile and 
restless monopoly, competition; and that the idle employment of the products of 
the sweat and blood of other people should become a brisk commerce in the same. 
Finally, it is inevitable under these conditions of competition that landed 
property, in the form of capital, should manifest its domination both over the 
working class and over the property owners themselves, inasmuch as the laws of 
the movement of capital are either ruining or raising them. In this way, the 
mediaeval saying nulle terre sans seigneur gives way to the modern saying 
l'argent n'a pas de maitre ["Money knows no master"], which is an expression of 
the complete domination of dead matter over men. 
 (2) The following observations can be made in connection with the controversy 
over whether or not to divide up landed property. 
 The division of landed property negates the large-scale monopoly of landed 
property, abolishes it, but only by generalizing it. It does not abolish the 
basis of monopoly, which is private property. It attacks the existence, but not 
the essence, of monopoly. The consequence is that it falls foul of the laws of 
private property. For to divide up landed property corresponds to the movement 
of competition in the industrial sphere. Apart from the economic disadvantages 
of this division of the instruments of labor and separation of labor (not to be 
confused with the division of labor; this is not a case of dividing up work 
among a number of individuals, but of each individual doing the same work; it is 
a multiplication of the same work), this division of the land, like competition 
in industry, inevitably leads to further accumulation. 
 So wherever landed property is divided up, monopoly will inevitably reappear in 
an even more repulsive form -- unless, that is, the division of landed property 
itself is negated or abolished. This does not mean a return to feudal property, 
but the abolition [Aufhebung] of private property is land altogether. The first 
step in the abolition of monopoly is always to generalize and extend its 
existence. The abolition of monopoly, when it has reached its broadest and most 
comprehensive existence, is its complete destruction. Association, when applied 
to the land, retains the benefits of large landed property from an economic 
point of view and realizes for the first time the tendency inherent in the 
division of land, namely equality. At the same time, association restores man's 
intimate links to the land in a rational way, no longer mediated by serfdom, 
lordship, and an imbecile mystique of property. This is because the earth ceases 
to be an object of barter, and through free labor and free employment once again 
becomes authentic, personal property for man. One great advantage of the 
division of the land is that its masses, who are no longer prepared to tolerate 
servitude, are destroyed by property in a different way from those in industry. 
 As for large landed property, its apologists have always sophistically 
identified the economic advantages inherent in large-scale agriculture with 
large landed property, as if these advantages would not on the one hand attain 
their fullest degree of development and on the other hand become socially useful 
for the first time once property abolished. Similarly, they have attacked the 
trading spirit of the small landowners, as if large-scale landownership, even in 
its feudal form, did not already contain within it the elements of barter -- not 
to mention the modern English form, in which the feudalism of the landowner is 
combined with the huckstering and the industry of the tenant farmer. 
 Just as large-scale landed property can return the reproach of monopoly made 
against it by the advocated of division of the land, for the division of the 
land is also based on the monopoly of private property, so can the advocates of 
division return the reproach of partition, for partition of the land also exists 
-- though in a rigid, ossified form -- on the large estates. Indeed, division is 
the universal basis of private property. Besides, as the division of landed 
property leads once more to large landed property in the form of capital wealth, 
feudal landed property inevitably advances towards division or at least falls 
into the hands of the capitalists, however much it might twist and turn. 
 For large-scale landed property, as in England, drives the overwhelming 
majority of the population into the arms of industry and reduces its own workers 
to total misery. In this way, it creates and increases the power of its enemy, 
capital and industry, by driving the poor and an entire range of activities over 
to the other side. It makes the majority of the country industrial, and hence 
antagonistic to landed property. Where industry has acquired great power, as in 
England, it gradually forces large landed property to give up its monopoly 
against foreign countries and obliges it to compete with foreign landed 
property. For under the rule of industry, landed property could maintain its 
feudal proportions only by means of a monopoly against foreign countries, so as 
to protect itself against the universal laws of trade which contradict its 
feudal nature. Once exposed to competition, it is forced to obey the laws of 
competition, just like any other commodity which is subject to them. It too 
begins to fluctuate, to increase and diminish, to fly from one hand into 
another, and no law is any longer capable of keeping it in a few predestined 
hands, or, at any event, surrender to the power of the industrial capitalists. 
 Finally, large landed property, which has been forcibly preserved in this way 
and which has given rise alongside itself to an extensive industry, leads more 
rapidly to a crisis than does the division of landed property, alongside which 
the power of industry invariably takes second place. 
 It is clear from the case of England that large landed property has cast off 
its feudal character and assumed an industrial character insofar as it wants to 
make as much money as possible. It yields the owner the biggest possible rent 
and the tenant the biggest possible profit on his capital. As a consequence, the 
agricultural workers have already been reduced to a minimum, and the class of 
tenant farmers already represents within landed property the might of industry 
and capital. As a result of foreign competition, ground rent more or less ceases 
to be an independent source of income. A large part of the landowners is forced 
to take over from the tenants, some of whom are consequently reduced to the 
proletariat. On the other hand, many tenants will take possession of landed 
property; for the big landowners, who have given themselves up for the most part 
to squandering their comfortable revenue and are generally not capable of 
large-scale agricultural management, in many cases have neither the capital nor 
the ability to exploit the land. Therefore, a section of the big landowners is 
also ruined. Eventually wages, which have already been reduced to a minimum, 
must be reduced even further in order to meet the new competition, This then 
leads necessarily to revolution. 
 Landed property had to develop in each of these two ways, in order to 
experience in both of them its necessary decline; just as industry had to ruin 
itself both in the form of monopoly and in the form of competition before it 
could believe in man. 
  



ESTRANGED LABOR



We have started out from the premises of political economy. We have accepted its 
language and its laws. We presupposed private property; the separation of labor, 
capital, and land, and likewise of wages, profit, and capital; the division of 
labor; competition; the conception of exchange value, etc. From political 
economy itself, using its own words, we have shown that the worker sinks to the 
level of a commodity, and moreover the most wretched commodity of all; that the 
misery of the worker is in inverse proportion to the power and volume of his 
production; that the necessary consequence of competition is the accumulation of 
capital in a few hands and hence the restoration of monopoly in a more terrible 
form; and that, finally, the distinction between capitalist and landlord, 
between agricultural worker and industrial worker, disappears and the whole of 
society must split into the two classes of property owners and propertyless 
workers. 
 Political economy proceeds from the fact of private property. It does not 
explain it. It grasps the material process of private property, the process 
through which it actually passes, in general and abstract formulae which it then 
takes as laws. It does not Comprehend these laws -- i.e., it does not show how 
they arise from the nature of private property. Political economy fails to 
explain the reason for the division between labor and capital. For example, when 
it defines the relation of wages to profit, it takes the interests of the 
capitalists as the basis of its analysis -- i.e., it assumes what it is supposed 
to explain. Similarly, competition is frequently brought into the argument and 
explained in terms of external circumstances. Political economy teaches us 
nothing about the extent to which these external and apparently accidental 
circumstances are only the expression of a necessary development. We have seen 
how exchange itself appears to political economy as an accidental fact. The only 
wheels which political economy sets in motion are greed, and the war of the 
avaricious -- Competition. 
 Precisely because political economy fails to grasp the interconnections within 
the movement, it was possible to oppose, for example, the doctrine of 
competition to the doctrine of monopoly, the doctrine of craft freedom to the 
doctrine of the guild, and the doctrine of the division of landed property to 
the doctrine of the great estate; for competition, craft freedom, and division 
of landed property were developed and conceived only as accidental, deliberate, 
violent consequences of monopoly, of the guilds, and of feudal property, and not 
as their necessary, inevitable, and natural consequences. 
 We now have to grasp the essential connection between private property, greed, 
the separation of labor, capital and landed property, exchange and competition, 
value and the devaluation [Entwertung] of man, monopoly, and competition, etc. 
-- the connection between this entire system of estrangement [Entfremdung] and 
the money system. 
 We must avoid repeating the mistake of the political economist, who bases his 
explanations on some imaginary primordial condition. Such a primordial condition 
explains nothing. It simply pushes the question into the grey and nebulous 
distance. It assumes as facts and events what it is supposed to deduce -- 
namely, the necessary relationships between two things, between, for example, 
the division of labor and exchange. Similarly, theology explains the origin of 
evil by the fall of Man -- i.e., it assumes as a fact in the form of history 
what it should explain. 
 We shall start out from a present-day economic fact. 
 The worker becomes poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production 
increases in power and extent. The worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity the 
more commodities he produces. The devaluation of the human world grows in direct 
proportion to the increase in value of the world of things. Labor not only 
produces commodities; it also produces itself and the workers as a commodity and 
it does so in the same proportion in which it produces commodities in general. 
 This fact simply means that the object that labor produces, it product, stands 
opposed to it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer. The 
product of labor is labor embodied and made material in an object, it is the 
objectification of labor. The realization of labor is its objectification. In 
the sphere of political economy, this realization of labor appears as a loss of 
reality for the worker, objectification as loss of and bondage to the object, 
and appropriation as estrangement, as alienation [Entausserung]. 
 So much does the realization of labor appear as loss of reality that the worker 
loses his reality to the point of dying of starvation. So much does 
objectification appear as loss of the object that the worker is robbed of the 
objects he needs most not only for life but also for work. Work itself becomes 
an object which he can only obtain through an enormous effort and with spasmodic 
interruptions. So much does the appropriation of the object appear as 
estrangement that the more objects the worker produces the fewer can he possess 
and the more he falls under the domination of his product, of capital. 
 All these consequences are contained in this characteristic, that the workers 
is related to the product of labor as to an alien object. For it is clear that, 
according to this premise, the more the worker exerts himself in his work, the 
more powerful the alien, objective world becomes which he brings into being over 
against himself, the poorer he and his inner world become, and the less they 
belong to him. It is the same in religion. The more man puts into God, the less 
he retains within himself. The worker places his life in the object; but now it 
no longer belongs to him, but to the object. The greater his activity, 
therefore, the fewer objects the worker possesses. What the product of his labor 
is, he is not. Therefore, the greater this product, the less is he himself. The 
externalization [Entausserung] of the worker in his product means not only that 
his labor becomes an object, an external existence, but that it exists outside 
him, independently of him and alien to him, and beings to confront him as an 
autonomous power; that the life which he has bestowed on the object confronts 
him as hostile and alien. 
 Let us not take a closer look at objectification, at the production of the 
worker, and the estrangement, the loss of the objet, of his product, that this 
entails. 
 The workers can create nothing without nature, without the sensuous external 
world. It is the material in which his labor realizes itself, in which it is 
active and from which, and by means of which, it produces. 
 But just as nature provides labor with the means of life, in the sense of labor 
cannot live without objects on which to exercise itself, so also it provides the 
means of life in the narrower sense, namely the means of physical subsistence of 
the worker. 
 The more the worker appropriates the external world, sensuous nature, through 
his labor, the more he deprives himself of the means of life in two respects: 
firstly, the sensuous external world becomes less and less an object belonging 
to his labor, a means of life of his labor; and, secondly, it becomes less and 
less a means of life in the immediate sense, a means for the physical 
subsistence of the worker. 
 In these two respects, then, the worker becomes a slave of his object; firstly, 
in that he receives an object of labor, i.e., he receives work, and, secondly, 
in that he receives means of subsistence. Firstly, then, so that he can exists 
as a worker, and secondly as a physical subject. The culmination of this slavery 
is that it is only as a worker that he can maintain himself as a physical 
subject and only as a physical subject that he is a worker. 
 (The estrangement of the worker in his object is expressed according to the 
laws of political economy in the following way: 
  
     the more the worker produces, the less he has to consume;

     the more value he creates, the more worthless he becomes;

     the more his product is shaped, the more misshapen the worker;

     the more civilized his object, the more barbarous the worker;

     the more powerful the work, the more powerless the worker;

     the more intelligent the work, the duller the worker and the
              more he becomes a slave of nature.)
Political economy conceals the estrangement in the nature of labor by ignoring 
the direct relationship between the worker (labor) and production. It is true 
that labor produces marvels for the rich, but it produces privation for the 
worker. It produces palaces, but hovels for the worker. It produces beauty, but 
deformity for the worker. It replaces labor by machines, but it casts some of 
the workers back into barbarous forms of labor and turns others into machines. 
It produces intelligence, but it produces idiocy and cretinism for the worker. 
 The direct relationship of labor to its products is the relationship of the 
worker to the objects of his production. The relationship of the rich man to the 
objects of production and to production itself is only a consequence of this 
first relationship, and confirms it. Later, we shall consider this second 
aspect. Therefore, when we ask what is the essential relationship of labor, we 
are asking about the relationship of the worker to production. 
 Up to now, we have considered the estrangement, the alienation of the worker, 
only from one aspect -- i.e., his relationship to the products of his labor. But 
estrangement manifests itself not only in the result, but also in the act of 
production, within the activity of production itself. How could the product of 
the worker's activity confront him as something alien if it were not for the 
fact that in the act of production he was estranging himself from himself? After 
all, the product is simply the resume of the activity, of the production. So if 
the product of labor is alienation, production itself must be active alienation, 
the alienation of activity, the activity of alienation. The estrangement of the 
object of labor merely summarizes the estrangement, the alienation in the 
activity of labor itself. 
 What constitutes the alienation of labor? 
 Firstly, the fact that labor is external to the worker -- i.e., does not belong 
to his essential being; that he, therefore, does not confirm himself in his 
work, but denies himself, feels miserable and not happy, does not develop free 
mental and physical energy, but mortifies his flesh and ruins his mind. Hence, 
the worker feels himself only when he is not working; when he is working, he 
does not feel himself. He is at home when he is not working, and not at home 
when he is working. His labor is, therefore, not voluntary but forced, it is 
forced labor. It is, therefore, not the satisfaction of a need but a mere means 
to satisfy needs outside itself. Its alien character is clearly demonstrated by 
the fact that as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists, it is shunned 
like the plague. External labor, labor in which man alienates himself, is a 
labor of self-sacrifice, of mortification. Finally, the external character of 
labor for the worker is demonstrated by the fact that it belongs not to him but 
to another, and that in it he belongs not to himself but to another. Just as in 
religion the spontaneous activity of the human imagination, the human brain, and 
the human heart, detaches itself from the individual and reappears as the alien 
activity of a god or of a devil, so the activity of the worker is not his own 
spontaneous activity. It belongs to another, it is a loss of his self. 
 The result is that man (the worker) feels that he is acting freely only in his 
animal functions -- eating, drinking, and procreating, or at most in his 
dwelling and adornment -- while in his human functions, he is nothing more than 
animal. 
 It is true that eating, drinking, and procreating, etc., are also genuine human 
functions. However, when abstracted from other aspects of human activity, and 
turned into final and exclusive ends, they are animal. 
 We have considered the act of estrangement of practical human activity, of 
labor, from two aspects: (1) the relationship of the worker to the product of 
labor as an alien object that has power over him. The relationship is, at the 
same time, the relationship to the sensuous external world, to natural objects, 
as an alien world confronting him, in hostile opposition. (2) The relationship 
of labor to the act of production within labor. This relationship is the 
relationship of the worker to his own activity as something which is alien and 
does not belong to him, activity as passivity [Leiden], power as impotence, 
procreation as emasculation, the worker's own physical and mental energy, his 
personal life -- for what is life but activity? -- as an activity directed 
against himself, which is independent of him and does not belong to him. 
Self-estrangement, as compared with the estrangement of the object [Sache] 
mentioned above. 
 We now have to derive a third feature of estranged labor from the two we have 
already examined. 
 Man is a species-being, not only because he practically and theoretically makes 
the species -- both his own and those of other things -- his object, but also -- 
and this is simply another way of saying the same thing -- because he looks upon 
himself as the present, living species, because he looks upon himself as a 
universal and therefore free being. 
 Species-life, both for man and for animals, consists physically in the fact 
that man, like animals, lives from inorganic nature; and because man is more 
universal than animals, so too is the area of inorganic nature from which he 
lives more universal. Just as plants, animals, stones, air, light, etc., 
theoretically form a part of human consciousness, partly as objects of science 
and partly as objects of art -- his spiritual inorganic nature, his spiritual 
means of life, which he must first prepare before he can enjoy and digest them 
-- so, too, in practice they form a part of human life and human activity. In a 
physical sense, man lives only from these natural products, whether in the form 
of nourishment, heating, clothing, shelter, etc. The universality of man 
manifests itself in practice in that universality which makes the whole of 
nature his inorganic body, (1) as a direct means of life and (2) as the matter, 
the object, and the tool of his life activity. Nature is man's inorganic body -- 
that is to say, nature insofar as it is not the human body. Man lives from 
nature -- i.e., nature is his body -- and he must maintain a continuing dialogue 
with it is he is not to die. To say that man's physical and mental life is 
linked to nature simply means that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part 
of nature. 
 Estranged labor not only (1) estranges nature from man and (2) estranges man 
from himself, from his own function, from his vital activity; because of this, 
it also estranges man from his species. It turns his species-life into a means 
for his individual life. Firstly, it estranges species-life and individual life, 
and, secondly, it turns the latter, in its abstract form, into the purpose of 
the former,also in its abstract and estranged form. 
 For in the first place labor, life activity, productive life itself, appears to 
man only as a means for the satisfaction of a need, the need to preserve 
physical existence. But productive life is species-life. It is life-producing 
life. The whole character of a species, its species-character, resides in the 
nature of its life activity, and free conscious activity constitutes the 
species-character of man. Life appears only as a means of life. 
 The animal is immediately one with its life activity. It is not distinct from 
that activity; it is that activity. Man makes his life activity itself an object 
of his will and consciousness. He has conscious life activity. It is not a 
determination with which he directly merges. Conscious life activity directly 
distinguishes man from animal life activity. Only because of that is he a 
species-being. Or, rather, he is a conscious being -- i.e., his own life is an 
object for him, only because he is a species-being. Only because of that is his 
activity free activity. Estranged labor reverses the relationship so that man, 
just because he is a conscious being, makes his life activity, his being 
[Wesen], a mere means for his existence. 
 The practical creation of an objective world, the fashioning of inorganic 
nature, is proof that man is a conscious species-being -- i.e., a being which 
treats the species as its own essential being or itself as a species-being. It 
is true that animals also produce. They build nests and dwelling, like the bee, 
the beaver, the ant, etc. But they produce only their own immediate needs or 
those of their young; they produce only when immediate physical need compels 
them to do so, while man produces even when he is free from physical need and 
truly produces only in freedom from such need; they produce only themselves, 
while man reproduces the whole of nature; their products belong immediately to 
their physical bodies, while man freely confronts his own product. Animals 
produce only according to the standards and needs of the species to which they 
belong, while man is capable of producing according to the standards of every 
species and of applying to each object its inherent standard; hence, man also 
produces in accordance with the laws of beauty. 
 It is, therefore, in his fashioning of the objective that man really proves 
himself to be a species-being. Such production is his active species-life. 
Through it, nature appears as his work and his reality. The object of labor is, 
therefore, the objectification of the species-life of man: for man produces 
himself not only intellectually, in his consciousness, but actively and 
actually, and he can therefore contemplate himself in a world he himself has 
created. In tearing away the object of his production from man, estranged labor 
therefore tears away from him his species-life, his true species-objectivity, 
and transforms his advantage over animals into the disadvantage that his 
inorganic body, nature, is taken from him. 
 In the same way as estranged labor reduces spontaneous and free activity to a 
means, it makes man's species-life a means of his physical existence. 
 Consciousness, which man has from his species, is transformed through 
estrangement so that species-life becomes a means for him. 
 (3) Estranged labor, therefore, turns man's species-being -- both nature and 
his intellectual species-power -- into a being alien to him and a means of his 
individual existence. It estranges man from his own body, from nature as it 
exists outside him, from his spiritual essence [Wesen], his human existence. 
 (4) An immediate consequence of man's estrangement from the product of his 
labor, his life activity, his species-being, is the estrangement of man from 
man. When man confront himself, he also confronts other men. What is true of 
man's relationship to his labor, to the product of his labor, and to himself, is 
also true of his relationship to other men, and to the labor and the object of 
the labor of other men. 
 In general, the proposition that man is estranged from his species-being means 
that each man is estranged from the others and that all are estranged from man's 
essence. 
 Man's estrangement, like all relationships of man to himself, is realized and 
expressed only in man's relationship to other men. 
 In the relationship of estranged labor, each man therefore regards the other in 
accordance with the standard and the situation in which he as a worker finds 
himself. 
 We started out from an economic fact, the estrangement of the worker and of his 
production. We gave this fact conceptual form: estranged, alienated labor. We 
have analyzed this concept, and in so doing merely analyzed an economic fact. 
 Let us now go on to see how the concept of estranged, alienated labor must 
express and present itself in reality. 
 If the product of labor is alien to me, and confronts me as an alien power, to 
whom does it then belong? 
 To a being other than me. 
 Who is this being? 
 The gods? It is true that in early times most production -- e.g., temple 
building, etc., in Egypt, India, and Mexico -- was in the service of the gods, 
just as the product belonged to the gods. But the gods alone were never the 
masters of labor. The same is true of nature. And what a paradox it would be if 
the more man subjugates nature through his labor and the more divine miracles 
are made superfluous by the miracles of industry, the more he is forced to forgo 
the joy or production and the enjoyment of the product out of deference to these 
powers. 
 The alien being to whom labor and the product of labor belong, in whose service 
labor is performed, and for whose enjoyment the product of labor is created, can 
be none other than man himself. 
 If the product of labor does not belong to the worker, and if it confronts him 
as an alien power, this is only possible because it belongs to a man other than 
the worker. If his activity is a torment for him, it must provide pleasure and 
enjoyment for someone else. Not the gods, not nature, but only man himself can 
be this alien power over men. 
 Consider the above proposition that the relationship of man to himself becomes 
objective and real for him only through his relationship to other men. If, 
therefore, he regards the product of his labor, his objectified labor, as an 
alien, hostile, and powerful object which is independent of him, then his 
relationship to that object is such that another man -- alien, hostile, 
powerful, and independent of him -- is its master. If he relates to his own 
activity as unfree activity, then he relates to it as activity in the service, 
under the rule, coercion, and yoke of another man. 
 Every self-estrangement of man from himself and nature is manifested in the 
relationship he sets up between other men and himself and nature. Thus, 
religious self-estrangement is necessarily manifested in the relationship 
between layman and priest, or, since we are dealing here with the spiritual 
world, between layman and mediator, etc. In the practical, real world, 
self-estrangement can manifest itself only in the practical, real relationship 
to other men. The medium through which estrangement progresses is itself a 
practical one. So through estranged labor man not only produces his relationship 
to the object and to the act of production as to alien and hostile powers; he 
also produces the relationship in which other men stand to his production and 
product, and the relationship in which he stands to these other men. Just as he 
creates his own production as a loss of reality, a punishment, and his own 
product as a loss, a product which does not belong to him, so he creates the 
domination of the non-producer over production and its product. Just as he 
estranges from himself his own activity, so he confers upon the stranger and 
activity which does not belong to him. 
 Up to now, we have considered the relationship only from the side of the 
worker. Later on, we shall consider it from the side of the non-worker. 
 Thus, through estranged, alienated labor, the worker creates the relationship 
of another man, who is alien to labor and stands outside it, to that labor. The 
relation of the worker to labor creates the relation of the capitalist -- or 
whatever other word one chooses for the master of labor -- to that labor. 
Private property is therefore the product, result, and necessary consequence of 
alienated labor, of the external relation of the worker to nature and to 
himself. 
 Private property thus derives from an analysis of the concept of alienated 
labor -- i.e., alienated man, estranged labor, estranged life, estranged man. 
 It is true that we took the concept of alienated labor (alienated life) from 
political economy as a result of the movement of private property. But it is 
clear from an analysis of this concept that, although private property appears 
as the basis and cause of alienated labor, it is in fact its consequence, just 
as the gods were originally not the cause but the effect of the confusion in 
men's minds. Later, however, this relationship becomes reciprocal. 
 It is only when the development of private property reaches its ultimate point 
of culmination that this, its secret, re-emerges; namely, that is (a) the 
product of alienated labor, and (b) the means through which labor is alienated, 
the realization of this alienation. 
 This development throws light upon a number of hitherto unresolved 
controversies. 
 (1) Political economy starts out from labor as the real soul of production and 
yet gives nothing to labor and everything to private property. Proudhon has 
dealt with this contradiction by deciding for labor and against private property 
[see his 1840 pamphlet, Qu'est-ce que la propriete?]. But we have seen that this 
apparent contradiction is the contradiction of estranged labor with itself and 
that political economy has merely formulated laws of estranged labor. 
 It, therefore, follows for us that wages and private property are identical: 
for there the product,the object of labor, pays for the labor itself, wages are 
only a necessary consequence of the estrangement of labor; similarly, where 
wages are concerned, labor appears not as an end in itself but as the servant of 
wages. We intend to deal with this point in more detail later on: for the 
present we shall merely draw a few conclusions. 
 An enforced rise in wages (disregarding all other difficulties, including the 
fact that such an anomalous situation could only be prolonged by force) would 
therefore be nothing more than better pay for slaves and would not mean an 
increase in human significance or dignity for either the worker or the labor. 
 Even the equality of wages,which Proudhon demands, would merely transform the 
relation of the present-day worker to his work into the relation of all men to 
work. Society would then be conceived as an abstract capitalist. 
 Wages are an immediate consequence of estranged labor, and estranged labor is 
the immediate cause of private property. If the one falls, then the other must 
fall too. 
 (2) It further follows from the relation of estranged labor to private property 
that the emancipation of society from private property, etc., from servitude, is 
expressed in the political form of the emancipation of the workers. This is not 
because it is only a question of their emancipation, but because in their 
emancipation is contained universal human emancipation. The reason for this 
universality is that the whole of human servitude is involved in the relation of 
the worker to production, and all relations of servitude are nothing but 
modifications and consequences of this relation. 
 Just as we have arrived at the concept of private property through an analysis 
of the concept of estranged,alienated labor, so with the help of these two 
factors it is possible to evolve all economic categories, and in each of these 
categories -- e.g., trade, competition, capital, money -- we shall identify only 
a particular and developed expression of these basic constituents. 
 But, before we go on to consider this configuration, let us try to solve two 
further problems. 
 (1) We have to determine the general nature of private property, as it has 
arisen out of estranged labor, in its relation to truly human and social 
property. 
 (2) We have taken the estrangement of labor, its alienation, as a fact and we 
have analyzed that fact. How, we now ask, does man come to alienate his labor, 
to estrange it? How it this estrangement founded in the nature of human 
development? We have already gone a long way towards solving this problem by 
transforming the question of the origin of private property into the question of 
the relationship of alienated labor to the course of human development. For, in 
speaking of private property, one imagines that one is dealing with something 
external to man. In speaking of labor, one is dealing immediately with man 
himself. This new way of formulating the problem already contains its solution. 
 As to (1): The general nature of private property and its relationship to truly 
human property. 
 Alienated labor has resolved itself for us into two component parts, which 
mutually condition one another, or which are merely different expressions of one 
and the same relationship. Appropriation appears as estrangement, as alienation; 
and alienation appears as appropriation, estrangement as true admission to 
citizenship. 
 We have considered the one aspect, alienated labor in relation to the worker 
himself -- i.e., the relation of alienated labor to itself. And as product, as 
necessary consequence of this relationship, we have found the property relation 
of the non-worker to the worker and to labor. Private property as the material, 
summarized expression of alienated labor embraces both relations -- the relation 
of the worker to labor and to the product of his labor and the non-workers, and 
the relation of the non-worker to the worker and to the product of his labor. 
 We have already seen that, in relation to the worker who appropriates nature 
through his labor, appropriation appears as estrangement, self-activity as 
activity for another and of another, vitality as a sacrifice of life, production 
of an object as loss of that object to an alien power, to an alien man. Let us 
now consider the relation between this man, who is alien to labor and to the 
worker, and the worker, labor, and the object of labor. 
 The first thing to point out is that everything which appears for the worker as 
an activity of alienation, of estrangement, appears for the non-worker as a 
situation of alienation, of estrangement. 
 Secondly, the real, practical attitude of the worker in production and to the 
product (as a state of mind) appears for the non-worker who confronts him as a 
theoretical attitude. 
 Thirdly, the non-worker does everything against the worker which the worker 
does against himself, but he does not do against himself what he does against 
the worker. 
 Let us take a closer look at these three relationships. 
  



Karl Marx's
ECONOMIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL MANUSCRIPTS
Second Manuscript



THE RELATIONSHIP OF PRIVATE PROPERTY



... forms the interest on his capital. The worker is the subjective 
manifestation of the fact that capital is man completely lost to himself, just 
as capital is the objective manifestation of the fact that labor is man lost to 
himself. But the worker has the misfortune to be a living capital, and, hence, a 
capital with needs, which forfeits its interest and hence its existence every 
moment it is not working. As capital, the value of the worker rises or falls in 
accordance with supply and demand, and even in a physical sense his existence, 
his life, was and is treated as a supply of a commodity, like any other 
commodity. The worker produces capital and capital produces him, which means 
that he produces himself; man as a worker, as a commodity, is the product of 
this entire cycle. The human properties of man as a worker -- man who is nothing 
more than a worker -- exist only insofar as they exist for a capital which is 
alien to him. But, because each is alien to the other, and stands in an 
indifferent, external, and fortuitous relationship to it, this alien character 
inevitably appears as something real. So, soon as it occurs to capital -- 
whether from necessity or choice -- not to exist any longer for the worker, he 
no longer exists for himself; he has no work, and hence no wages, and since he 
exists not as a man but as a worker, he might just as well have buried himself, 
starve to death, etc. The worker exists as a worker only when he exists for 
himself as capital, and he exists as capital only when capital exists for him. 
The existence of capital is his existence, his life, for it determines the 
content of his life in a manner indifferent to him. Political economy, 
therefore, does not recognize the unoccupied worker, the working man insofar as 
he is outside this work relationship. The swindler, the cheat, the beggar, the 
unemployed, the starving, the destitute, and the criminal working man are 
figures which exist not for it, but only for other eyes -- for the eyes of 
doctors, judges, grave-diggers, beadles, etc. Nebulous figures which do not 
belong within the province of political economy. Therefore, as far as political 
economy is concerned, the requirements of the worker can be narrowed down to 
one: the need to support him while he is working and prevent the race of workers 
from dying out. Wages, therefore, have exactly the same meaning as the 
maintenance and upkeep of any other productive instrument, or as the consumption 
of capital in general which is necessary if it is to reproduce itself with 
interest -- e.g., the oil which is applied to wheels to keep them turning. 
Wages, therefore, belong to the necessary costs of capital and of the 
capitalist, and must not be in excess of this necessary amount. It was, 
therefore, quite logical for the English factory owners, before the Amendment 
Bill of 1834 [Poor Laws], to deduct from the worker's wages the public alms 
which he received from the Poor Rate, and to consider these aims as an integral 
part of those wages. 
Production does not produce man only as a commodity, the human commodity, man in 
the form of a commodity; it also produces him as a mentally and physically 
dehumanized being... Immorality, malformation, stupidity of workers and 
capitalists... the human commodity... A great advance by Ricardo, Mill, etc., on 
Smith and Say, to declare the existence of the human being -- the greater or 
lesser human productivity of the commodity -- to be indifferent and even 
harmful. The real aim of production is not how many workers a particular sum of 
capital can support, but how much interest it brings in and how much it saves 
each year. Similarly, English political economy took a big step forward, and a 
logical one, when -- while acknowledging labor as the sole principle of 
political economy -- it showed with complete clarity that wages and interest on 
capital are inversely related and that, as a rule, the capitalist can push up 
his profits only by forcing down wages, and vice versa. Clearly, the normal 
relationship is not one in which the customer is cheated, but in which the 
capitalist and the worker cheat each other. The relation of private property 
contains latent within itself the relation of private property as labor, the 
relation of private property as capital, and the connection of these two. On the 
one hand, we have the production of human activity as labor -- i.e., as an 
activity wholly alien to itself, to man, and to nature, and hence to 
consciousness and vital expression, the abstract existence of man as a mere 
workman who, therefore, tumbles day-after-day from his fulfilled nothingness 
into absolute nothingness, into his social and, hence, real non-existence; and, 
on the other, the production of the object of human labor as capital, in which 
all the natural and social individuality of the object is extinguished and 
private property has lost its natural and social quality (i.e., has lost all 
political and social appearances and is not even apparently tainted with any 
human relationships), in which the same capital stays the same in the most 
varied natural and social circumstance, totally indifferent to its real content. 
This contradiction, driven to its utmost limit, is necessarily the limit, the 
culmination and the decline of the whole system of private property. 
It is, therefore, yet another great achievement of recent English political 
economy to have declared ground rent to be the difference between the interest 
on the worst and the best land under cultivation, to have confuted the romantic 
illusions of the land-owner -- his alleged social importance and the identity of 
his interest with the interest of society, which Adam Smith continued to 
propound after the Physiocrats -- and to have anticipated and prepared the 
changes in reality which will transform the land-owner into a quite ordinary and 
prosaic capitalist, thereby simplifying the contradiction, bringing it to a head 
and hastening its resolution. Land as land and ground rent as ground rent have 
thereby lost their distinction in rank and have become dumb capital and interest 
-- or, rather, capital and interest which only talk hard cash. The distinction 
between capital and land, between profit and ground rent, and the distinction 
between both and wages, industry, agriculture, and immovable and movable private 
property, is not one which is grounded in the nature of things, it is a 
historical distinction, a fixed moment in the formation and development of the 
opposition between capital and labor. In industry, etc., as opposed to immovable 
landed property, only the manner in which industry first arose and the 
opposition to agriculture within which industry developed, are expressed. As a 
special kind of work, as an essential, important, and life-encompassing 
distinction, this distinction between industry and agriculture survives only as 
long as industry (town life) is developing in opposition to landed property 
(aristocratic feudal life) and continues to bear the feudal characteristics of 
its opposite in the form of monopoly, crafts, guilds, corporations, etc. Given 
these forms, labor continues to have an apparently social meaning, the meaning 
of genuine community, and has not yet reached the stage of indifference towards 
its content and of complete being-for-itself -- i.e., of abstraction from all 
other being and, hence, of liberated capital. 
But, the necessary development of labor is liberated industry constituted for 
itself as such, and liberated capital. The power of industry over its antagonist 
is, at once, manifested in the emergence of agriculture as an actual industry, 
whereas previously most of the work was left to the soil itself and to the slave 
of the soil, through whom the soil cultivated itself. With the transformation of 
the slave into a free worker -- i.e., a hireling -- the landowner himself is 
transformed into a master of industry, a capitalist. This transformation at 
first took place through the agency of the tenant farmer. But the tenant farmer 
is the representative, the revealed secret, of the landowner; only through him 
does the landowner have his economic existence, his existence as a property 
owner -- for the ground rent of his land exists only because of the competition 
between the tenants. So, in the person of the tenant the landowner has already 
essentially become a common capitalist. And this must also be effected in 
reality; the capitalist engaged in agriculture -- the tenant -- must become a 
landlord, or vice-versa. The industrial trade of the tenant is the industrial 
trade of the landlord, for the existence of the former posits the existence of 
the latter. 
But, remembering their conflicting origins and descent, the landowner sees the 
capitalist as his presumptuous, liberated, and enriched slave of yesterday, and 
himself as a capitalist who is threatened by him; the capitalist sees the 
landowner as the idle, cruel, and egotistical lord of yesterday; he knows that 
the landowner is harmful to him as a capitalist, and yet that he owes his entire 
present social position, his possessions and his pleasures, to industry; the 
capitalist sees in the landowner the antithesis of free industry and free 
capital, which is independent of all natural forces -- this opposition is 
extremely bitter, and each side tells the truth about the other. One only need 
read the attacks launched by immovable on movable property, and vice-versa, in 
order to gain a clear picture of their respective worthlessness. The land-owner 
emphasizes the noble lineage of his property, the feudal reminiscences, the 
poetry of remembrance, his high-flown nature, his political importance, etc. 
When he is talking economics, he avows that agriculture alone is productive. At 
the same time, he depicts his opponent as a wily, huckstering, censorious, 
deceitful, greedy, mercenary, rebellious, heartless, and soulless racketeer who 
is estranged from his community and busily trades it away, a profiteering, 
pimping, servile, smooth, affected trickster, a desiccated sharper who breeds, 
nourishes, and encourages competition and pauperism, crime and the dissolution 
of all social ties, who is without honor, principles, poetry, substance, or 
anything else. (See, among others, the Physiocrat Bergasse, whom Camille 
Desmoulins has already flayed in his journal Revolutions de France et de 
Brabant; see also von Vincke, Lancizolle, Haller, Leo, Kosegarten, and 
Sismondi.) 
 MARX NOTE: See also the pompous Old Hegelian theologian Funke, who, according 
to Herr Leo, told with tears in his eyes how a slave had refused, when serfdom 
was abolished, to cease being a noble possession. See also Justus Moser's 
Patriotische Phantasien, which are distinguished by the fact that they never for 
one moment leave the staunch, petty-bourgeois, "Home-baked", ordinary, 
narrow-minded horizon of the philistine, and, yet still, remain pure fantasy. It 
is this contradiction which has made them so plausible to the German mind. 
 Movable property, for its part, points to the miracles of industry and change. 
It is the child, the legitimate, only-begotten son, of the modern age. It feels 
sorry for its opponent, whom it sees as a half-wit unenlightened as to his own 
nature (an assessment no one could disagree with) and eager to replace moral 
capital and free labor by brute, immoral force and serfdom. It paints him as a 
Don Quixote, who, under the veneer of directness, probity, the general interest, 
and stability, hides an inability and evil intent. It brands him as a cunning 
monopolist. It discountenances his reminiscences, his poetry, and his 
enthusiastic gushings, by a historical and sarcastic recital of the baseness, 
cruelty, degradation, prostitution, infamy, anarchy, and revolt forged in the 
workshops of his romantic castles. 
Movable property, itself, claims to have won political freedom for the world, to 
have loosed the chains of civil society, to have linked together different 
worlds, to have given rise to trade, which encourages friendship between peoples 
and to have created a pure morality and a pleasing culture; to have given the 
people civilized instead of crude wants and the means with which it satisfy 
them. The landowner, on the other hand -- this idle and vexatious speculator in 
grain -- puts up the price of the people's basic provisions and thereby forces 
the capitalist to put up wages without being able to raise productivity, so 
making it difficult, and eventually impossible, to increase the annual income of 
the nation and to accumulate the capital which is necessary if work is to be 
provided for the people and wealth for the country. As a result, the landowner 
brings about a general decline. Moreover, he inordinately exploits all the 
advantages of modern civilization without doing the least thing in return, and 
without mitigating a single one of his feudal prejudices. Finally, the landlord 
-- for whom the cultivation of the land and the soil itself exist only as a 
heaven-sent source of money -- should take a look at the tenant farmer and say 
whether he himself is not a downright, fantastic, cunning scoundrel, who in his 
heart and in actual fact has for a long time been part of free industry and 
well-loved trade, however much he may resist them and prattle of historical 
memories and moral or political goals. All the arguments he can genuinely 
advance in his own favor are only true for the cultivator of the land (the 
capitalist and the laborers), of whom the landowner is rather the enemy; thus, 
he testifies against himself. Without capital, landed property is dead, 
worthless matter. The civilized victory of movable capital has precisely been to 
reveal and create human labor as the source of wealth in place of the dead 
thing. (See Paul-Louis Courier, Saint-Simon, Ganilh, Ricardo, Mill, MacCulloch, 
Destutt de Tracy, and Michael Chevalier.) 
 The real course of development (to be inserted here) leads necessarily to the 
victory of the capitalist -- i.e., of developed private property -- over 
undeveloped, immature private property -- the landowner. In the same way, 
movement inevitably triumphs over immobility, open and self-conscious baseness 
over hidden and unconscious baseness, greed over self-indulgence, the avowedly 
restless and versatile self-interest of enlightenment over the parochial, 
worldly-wise, artless, lazy and deluded self-interest of superstition, just as 
money must triumph over the other forms of private property. Those states which 
have a foreboding of the danger of allowing the full development of free 
industry, pure morality, and that trade which encourages friendship among 
peoples, attempt -- although quite in vain -- to put a stop to the 
capitalization of landed property. 
Landed property, as distinct from capital, is private property, capital, which 
is still afflicted with local and political prejudices, which has not yet 
entirely emerged from its involvement with the world and come into its own; it 
is capital which is not yet fully developed. In the course of its formation on a 
world scale, it must attain its abstract, i.e., pure, expression. The relation 
of private property is labor, capital, and the connection between these two. The 
movement through which these parts [Glieder] have to pass is: 
 First -- Unmediate or mediated unity of the two. Capital and labor, at first, 
still united; later, separated and estranged, but reciprocally developing and 
furthering each other as positive conditions. 
Second -- Opposition of the two. They mutually exclude each other; the worker 
sees in the capitalist his own non-existence, and vice-versa; each tries to 
wrench from the other his existence. 
Third -- Opposition of each to itself. Capital = stored-up labor = labor. As 
such, it divides into itself (capital) and its interest; this latter divides 
into interest and profit. Complete sacrifice of the capitalist. He sinks into 
the working class, just as the worker -- but only by way of exception -- becomes 
a capitalist. Labor as a moment of capital, its costs. i.e., wages a sacrifice 
of capital. 
Labor divides into labor itself and wages of labor. The workers himself a 
capital, a commodity. 
Hostile reciprocal opposition. 
  




Karl Marx's
ECONOMIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL MANUSCRIPTS
Third Manuscript



PRIVATE PROPERTY AND LABOR



ad page XXXVI. [ Marx numbered the pages of these manuscripts in roman numerals. 
The page referred to is one of those missing between the First and Second 
Manuscripts. ] 
 The subjective essence of private property, private property as activity for 
itself, as subject, as person, is labor. It, therefore, goes without saying that 
only that political economy which recognized labor as its principle (Adam 
Smith), and which therefore no longer regarded private property as nothing more 
than a condition external to man, can be regarded as both a product of the real 
energy and movement of private property (it is the independent movement of 
private property become conscious of itself, it is modern industry as self), a 
product of modern industry, and a factor which has accelerated and glorified the 
energy and development of this industry and transformed it into a power 
belonging to consciousness. Therefore, the supporters of the monetary and 
mercantile system, who look upon private property as a purely objective being 
for man, appear as fetish-worshippers, as Catholics, to this enlightened 
political economy, which has revealed -- within the system of private property 
-- the subjective essence of wealth. Engels was, therefore, right to call Adam 
Smith the Luther of political economy [in Engels 1843 Outlines of a Critique of 
Political Economy]. Just as Luther recognized religion and faith as the essence 
of the external world and, in consequence, confronted Catholic paganism; just as 
he transcended religion external religiosity by making religiosity the inner 
essence of man; just as he negated the idea of priests as something separate and 
apart from the layman by transferring the priest into the heart of the layman; 
so wealth as something outside man, and independent of him -- and, therefore, 
only to be acquired acquired and maintained externally -- is abolished 
[aufgehoben]. i.e., its external and mindless objectivity is abolished inasmuch 
as private property is embodied in man himself and man himself is recognized as 
its essence -- but this brings man himself into the province of religion. So, 
although political economy, whose principle is labor, appears to recognize man, 
it is, in fact, nothing more than the denial of man carried through to its 
logical conclusion: for man himself no longer stands in a relation of external 
tension to the external essence of private property -- he himself has become the 
tense essence of private property. What was formerly being-external-to-oneself, 
man's material externalization, has now become the act of alienation -- i.e., 
alienation through selling [Verausserung]. This political economy, therefore, 
starts out by seeming to recognize man, his independence, his spontaneous 
activity, etc. Since it transfers private property into the very being of man, 
it can no longer be conditioned by local or national features of private 
property as something existing outside it. It (political economy) develops a 
cosmopolitan, universal energy which breaks through every limitation and bond 
and sets itself up as the only policy, the only universality, the only 
limitation, and the only bond. But then, as it continues to develop, it is 
forced to cast off its hypocrisy and step forth in all its cynicism. This it 
does, without troubling its head for one moment about all the apparent 
contradiction to which this doctrine leads, by developing in a more one-sided 
way, and, thus, more sharply and more logically, the idea of labor as the sole 
essence of wealth, by showing that the conclusions of this doctrine, unlike the 
original conception, are anti-human, and finally be delivering the death-blow to 
ground rent -- that last individual and natural form of private property and 
source of wealth independent of the movement of labor, that expression of feudal 
property which has already become entirely economic and is therefore incapable 
of putting up any resistance to political economy. (The Ricardo School.) Not 
only does political economy become increasingly cynical from Smith through Say 
to Ricardo, Mill etc., inasmuch as the consequences of industry appeared more 
developed and more contradictory to the latter; the latter also became more 
estranged -- consciously estranged -- from man than their predecessors. But this 
is only because their science develops more logically and more truly. Since they 
make private property in its active form the subject, thereby making man as a 
non-being [Unwesen] the essence [Wesen], the contradiction in reality 
corresponds entirely to the contradictory essence which they have accepted as 
their principle. The discordant reality of industry, far from refusing their 
internally discordant principle, actually confirms it. Their principle is in 
fact the principle of this discordance. 
 The physiocratic doctrine of Dr Quesnay forms the transition from the 
mercantile system to Adam Smith. Physiocracy is, in a direct sense, the economic 
dissolution of feudal property, but it is therefore just as directly the 
economic transformation and restoration of that property. The only real 
difference is that its language is no longer feudal but economic. All wealth is 
resolved into land and agriculture. The land is not yet capital; it is still a 
particular mode of existence of capital whose value is supposed to lie in its 
natural particularity. But land is a universal natural element, whereas the 
mercantile system considered that wealth existed only in precious metals. The 
object of wealth, its matter, has therefore attained the greatest degree of 
universality possible within the limits of nature -- insofar as it is directly 
objective wealth even as nature. And it is only through labor, through 
agriculture, that land exists for man. Consequently, the subjective essence of 
wealth is already transferred to labor. But, at the same time, agriculture is 
the only productive labor. Labor is, therefore, not yet grasped in its universal 
and abstract form, but is still tied to a particular element of nature as its 
matter and if for that reason recognized only in a particular mode of existence 
determined by nature. It is, therefore, still only a determinate, particular 
externalization of man -- just as its product is conceived as a determinate form 
of wealth, due more to nature than to itself. Here, the land is still regarded 
as part of nature which is independent of man, and not yet as capital -- i.e., 
as a moment of labor itself. Rather, labor appears as a moment of nature. But, 
since the fetishism of the old external wealth, which exists only as an object, 
has been reduced to a very simple element of nature, and since its essence has 
been recognized -- even if only partially and in a particular way -- in its 
subjective essence, the necessary advance has taken place in the sense that the 
universal nature of wealth has been recognized and labor has, therefore, been 
elevated in its absolute -- i.e., abstract -- form to that principle. It is 
possible to argue against the Physiocrats that agriculture is no different from 
an economic point of view -- that is, from the only valid point of view -- from 
any other industry, and that the essence of wealth is therefore not a particular 
form of labor tied to a particular element, a particular manifestation of labor, 
but labor in general. 
 Physiocracy denies particular, external, purely objective wealth by declaring 
labor to be its essence. But, for physiocracy, labor is in the first place 
merely the subjective essence of landed property -- it starts out from the type 
of property which appears historically as the dominant and recognized type. It 
simple turns landed property into alienated man. It abolishes the feudal 
character of landed property by declaring industry (agriculture) to be its 
essence; but it sets its face against the world of industry and acknowledges the 
feudal system by declaring agriculture to be the only industry. 
 Clearly, once the subjective essence is grasped of industry constituting itself 
in opposition to landed property -- i.e., as industry -- this essence includes 
within it that opposition. For, just as industry absorbs annulled landed 
property, so the subjective essence of industry at the same time absorbs the 
subjective essence of landed property. 
 Just as landed property is the first form of private property, and industry at 
first confronts it historically as nothing more than a particular sort of 
private property -- or, rather, as the liberated slave of landed property -- so 
this process is repeated in the scientific comprehension of the subjective 
essence of private property, of labor; labor appears at first only as 
agricultural labor, but later assumes the form of labor in general. 
 All wealth has become industrial wealth, wealth of labor, and industry is fully 
developed labor, just as the factory system is the perfected essence of industry 
-- i.e., of labor -- and industrial capital the fully developed objective form 
of private property. 
 Thus, we see that it is only at this point that private property can perfect 
its rule over men and become, in its most universal form, a world-historical 
power. 
  



PRIVATE PROPERTY AND COMMUNISM



ad page XXXIX. [ This section, "Private Property and Communism", formed an 
appendix to page XXXIX of the incomplete Second Manuscript. ] 
 But the antithesis between propertylessness and property is still an 
indifferent antithesis, not grasped in its active connection, its inner 
relation, not yet grasped as contradiction, as long as it is not understood as 
the antithesis between labor and capital. In its initial form, this antithesis 
can manifest itself even without the advanced development of private property -- 
as, for example, in ancient Rome, in Turkey, etc. In such cases, it does not yet 
appear as established by private property itself. But labor, the subjective 
essence of private property as exclusion of property, and capital, objective 
labor as exclusion of labor, constitute private property in its developed 
relation of contradiction: a vigorous relation, therefore, driving towards 
resolution. 
 ad ibidem. 
 The supersession [Aufhebung] of self-estrangement follows the same course 
self-estrangement. Private property is first considered only in its objective 
aspect, but still with labor as its essence. Its form of existence is therefore 
capital, which is to be abolished "as such" (Proudhon). Or the particular form 
of labor -- levelled down, parcelled, and, therefore, unfree -- is taken as the 
source of the harmfulness of private property and its humanly estranged 
existence. For example, Fourier, like the Physiocrats, regarded agriculture as 
at least the best form of labor, while Saint-Simon, on the other hand, declared 
industrial labor as such to be the essence and consequently wants exclusive rule 
by the industrialists and the improvement of the condition of the workers. 
Finally, communism [that is, crude or utopian communism, like Proudhon et al 
above] is the positive expression of the abolition of private property, and, at 
first, appears as universal private property. In grasping this relation in its 
universality, communism is 
 (1) in its initial form only a generalization and completion of that relation 
(of private property). As such, it appears in a dual form: on the one hand, the 
domination of material property bulks so large that it threatens to destroy 
everything which is not capable of being possessed by everyone as private 
property; it wants to abstract from talent, etc., by force. Physical, immediate 
possession is the only purpose of life nd existence as far as this communism is 
concerned; the category of worker is not abolished but extended to all men; the 
relation of private property remains the relation of the community to the world 
of things; ultimately, this movement to oppose universal private property to 
private property is expressed in bestial form -- marriage (which is admittedly a 
form of exclusive private property) is counterposed to the community of women, 
where women become communal and common property. One might say that this idea of 
a community of women is the revealed secret of this as yet wholly crude and 
unthinking communism. Just as women are to go from marriage into general 
prostitution, so the whole world of wealth -- i.e., the objective essence of man 
-- is to make the transition from the relation of exclusive marriage with the 
private owner to the relation of universal prostitution with the community. This 
communism, inasmuch as it negates the personality of man in every sphere, is 
simply the logical expression of the private property which is this negation. 
Universal envy constituting itself as a power is the hidden form in which greed 
reasserts itself and satisfies itself, but in another way. The thoughts of every 
piece of private property as such are at least turned against richer private 
property in the form of envy and the desire to level everything down; hence 
these feelings in fact constitute the essence of competition. The crude 
communist is merely the culmination of this envy and desire to level down on the 
basis of a preconceived minimum. It has a definite, limited measure. How little 
this abolition of private property is a true appropriation is shown by the 
abstract negation of the entire world of culture and civilization, and the 
return to the unnatural simplicity of the poor, unrefined man who has no needs 
and who has not yet even reached the stage of private property, let along gone 
beyond it. 
 (For crude communism) the community is simply a community of labor and equality 
of wages, which are paid out by the communal capital, the community as universal 
capitalist. Both sides of the relation are raised to an unimaginary universality 
-- labor as the condition in which everyone is placed and capital as the 
acknowledged universality and power of the community. 
 In the relationship with woman, as the prey and handmaid of communal lust, is 
expressed the infinite degradation in which man exists for himself -- for the 
secret of this relationship has its unambiguous, decisive, open and revealed 
expression in the relationship of man to woman and in the manner in which the 
direct, natural species- relationship is conceived. The immediate, natural, 
necessary relation of human being to human being is the relationship of man to 
woman. In this natural species-relationship, the relation of man to nature is 
immediately his relation to man, just as his relation to man is immediately his 
relation to nature, his own natural condition. Therefore, this relationship 
reveals in a sensuous form, reduced to an observable fact, the extent to which 
the human essence has become nature for man or nature has become the human 
essence for man. It is possible to judge from this relationship the entire level 
of development of mankind. It follows from the character of this relationship of 
this relationship how far man as a species-being, as man, has become himself and 
grasped himself; the relation of man to woman is the most natural relation of 
human being to human being. It therefore demonstrates the extent to which man's 
natural behavior has become human or the extent to which his human essence has 
become a natural essence for him, the extent to which his human nature has 
become nature for him. This relationship also demonstrates the extent to which 
man's needs have become human needs, hence the extent to which the other, as a 
human being, has become a need for him, the extent to which in his most 
individual existence he is at the same time a communal being. 
 The first positive abolition of private property -- crude communism -- is 
therefore only a manifestation of the vileness of private property trying to 
establish itself as the positive community. 
 (2) Communism 
 (a) still of a political nature, democratic or despotic; 
 (b) with the abolition of the state, but still essentially incomplete and 
influenced by private property -- i.e., by the estrangement of man. 
 In both forms, communism already knows itself as the reintegration, or return, 
of man into himself, the supersession of man's self-estrangement; but since it 
has not yet comprehended the positive essence of private property, or understood 
the human nature of need, it is still held captive and contaminated by private 
property. True, it has understood its concept, but not yet in essence. 
 [Marx now endeavors to explore if own version of communism, as distinct from 
Proudhon et al above.] 
 (3) Communism is the positive supersession of private property as human 
self-estrangement, and hence the true appropriation of the human essence through 
and for man; it is the complete restoration of man to himself as a social -- 
i.e., human -- being, a restoration which has become conscious and which takes 
place within the entire wealth of previous periods of development. This 
communism, as fully developed naturalism, equals humanism, and as fully 
developed humanism equals naturalism; it is the genuine resolution of the 
conflict between man and nature, and between man and man, the true resolution of 
the conflict between existence and being, between objectification and 
self-affirmation, between freedom and necessity, between individual and species. 
It is the solution of the riddle of history and knows itself to be the solution. 

 The entire movement of history is therefore both the actual act of creation of 
communism -- the birth of its empirical existence -- and, for its thinking 
consciousness, the comprehended and known movement of its becoming; whereas the 
other communism, which is not yet fully developed, seeks in isolated historical 
forms opposed to private property a historical proof for itself, a proof drawn 
from what already exists, by wrenching isolated moments from their proper places 
in the process of development (a hobbyhorse Cabet, Villegardelle, etc., 
particularly like to ride) and advancing them as proofs of its historical 
pedigree. But all it succeeds in showing is that be far the greater part of this 
development contradicts its assertions and that if it did not once exist, then 
the very fact that it existed in the past refutes its claim to essential being 
[Wesen]. 
 It is easy to see how necessary it is for the whole revolutionary movement to 
find both its empirical and its theoretical basis in the movement of private 
property or, to be exact, of the economy. 
 This material, immediately sensuous private property is the material, sensuous 
expression of estranged human life. Its movement --production and consumption -- 
is the sensuous revelation of the movement of all previous production -- i.e., 
the realization or reality of man. Religion, the family, the state, law, 
morality, science, art, etc., are only particular modes of production and 
therefore come under its general law. The positive supersession of private 
property, as the appropriation of human life, is therefore the positive 
supersession of all estrangement, and the return of man from religion, the 
family, the state, etc., to his human -- i.e., social -- existence. Religious 
estrangement as such takes place only in the sphere of consciousness, of man's 
inner life, but economic estrangement is that of real life -- its supersession 
therefore embraces both aspects. Clearly the nature of the movement in different 
countries initially depends on whether the actual and acknowledged life of the 
people has its being more in consciousness or in the external world, in ideal or 
in real life. Communism begins with atheism (Owen), but atheism is initially far 
from being communism, and is for the most part an abstraction. The philanthropy 
of atheism is therefore at first nothing more than an abstract philosophical 
philanthropy, while that of communism is at once real and directly bent towards 
action. 
 We have seen how, assuming the positive supersession of private property, man 
produces man, himself and other men; how the object, which is the direct 
activity of his individuality, is at the same time his existence for other men, 
their existence and their existence for him. Similarly, however, both the 
material of labor and man as subject are the starting-point as well as the 
outcome of the movement (and the historical necessity of private-property lies 
precisely in the fact that they must be this starting-point). So the social 
character is the general character of the whole movement; just as society itself 
produces man as man, so it is produced by him. Activity and consumption, both in 
their content and in their mode of existence, are social activity and social 
consumption. The human essence of nature exists only for social man; for only 
here does nature exist for him as a bond with other men, as his existence for 
others and their existence for him, as the vital element of human reality; only 
here does it exist as the basis of his own human existence. Only here has his 
natural existence become his human existence and nature become man for him. 
Society is therefore the perfected unity in essence of man with nature, the true 
resurrection of nature, the realized naturalism of man and the realized humanism 
of nature. [Marx note at the bottom of the page: Prostitution is only a 
particular expression of the universal prostitution of the worker, and since 
prostitution is a relationship which includes not only the prostituted but also 
the prostitutor -- whose infamy is even greater -- the capitalist is also 
included in this category.] 
 Social activity and social consumption by no means exist solely in the form of 
a directly communal activity and a directly communal consumption, even though 
communal activity and communal consumption -- i.e., activity and consumption 
that express and confirm themselves directly in real association with other men 
-- occur wherever that direct expression of sociality [Gesellschaftlichkeit] 
springs from the essential nature of the content of the activity and is 
appropriate to the nature of the consumption. 
 But even if I am active in the field of science, etc. -- an activity which I am 
seldom able to perform in direct association with other men -- I am still 
socially active because I am active as a man. It is not only the material of my 
activity -- including even the language in which the thinker is active -- which 
I receive as a social product. My own existence is social activity. Therefore 
what I create from myself I create for society, conscious of myself as a social 
being. 
 My universal consciousness is only the theoretical form of that whose living 
form is the real community, society, whereas at present universal consciousness 
is an abstraction from real life and as such in hostile opposition to it. Hence 
the activity of my universal consciousness -- as activity -- is my theoretical 
existence as a social being. 
 It is, above all, necessary to avoid once more establishing "society" as an 
abstraction over against the individual. The individual is the social being. His 
vital expression -- even when it does not appear in the direct form of a 
communal expression, conceived in association with other men -- is therefore an 
expression and confirmation of social life. Man's individual and species-life 
are not two distinct things, however much -- and this is necessarily so -- the 
mode of existence of individual life is a more particular or a more general mode 
of the species-life, or species-life a more particular or more general 
individual life. 
 As species-consciousness man confirms his real social life and merely repeats 
in thought his actual existence; conversely, species-being confirms itself in 
species-consciousness and exists for itself in its universality, as a thinking 
being. 
 Man, however much he may therefore be a particular individual -- and it is just 
this particularity which makes him an individual totality, the ideal totality, 
the subjective existence of thought and experienced society for itself; he also 
exists in reality as the contemplation and true enjoyment of social existence 
and as a totality of vital human expression. 
 It is true that thought and being are distinct, but at the same time they are 
in unity with one another. 
 Death appears as the harsh victory of the species over the particular 
individual, and seemingly contradicts their unity; but the particular individual 
is only a particular species-being, and, as such, mortal. 
 (4) Just as private property is only the sensuous expression of the fact that 
man becomes objective for himself and at the same time becomes an alien and 
inhuman object for himself, that his expression of life [Lebensausserung] is his 
alienation of life [Lebensentausserung], and that his realization is a loss of 
reality, an alien reality, so the positive supersession of private property -- 
i.e., the sensuous appropriation of the human essence and human life, of 
objective man and of human works by and for man -- should not be understood only 
in the sense of direct, one-sided consumption, of possession, of having. Man 
appropriates his integral essence in an integral way, as a total man. All his 
human elations to the world -- seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, 
thinking, contemplating, sensing, wanting, acting, loving -- in short, all the 
organs of his individuality, like the organs which are directly communal in 
form, are in their objective approach or in their approach to the object the 
appropriation of that object. This appropriation of human reality, their 
approach to the object, is the confirmation of human reality. [Marx's note: It 
is therefore just as varied as the determinations of the human essence and 
activities.] It is human effectiveness and human suffering, for suffering, 
humanly conceived, is an enjoyment of the self for man. 
 Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only 
ours when we have it, when it exists for us as capital or when we directly 
possess, eat, drink, wear, inhabit it, etc., in short, when we use it. Although 
private property conceives all these immediate realizations of possession only 
as means of life; and the life they serve is the life of private property, 
labor, and capitalization. 
 Therefore all the physical and intellectual senses have been replaced by the 
simple estrangement of all these senses -- the sense of having. So that it might 
give birth to its inner wealth, human nature had to be reduced to this absolute 
poverty. (On the category of having see Hess in Einundzwanzig Bogen.) 
 The supersession of private property is therefore the complete emancipation of 
all human senses and attributes; but it is this emancipation precisely because 
these senses and attributes have become human, subjectively as well as 
objectively. The eye has become a human eye, just as its object has become a 
social, human object, made by man for man. The senses have therefore become 
theoreticians in their immediate praxis. They relate to the thing for its own 
sake, but the thing itself is an objective human relation to itself and to man, 
and vice versa. [Marx's note: In practice I can only relate myself to a thing in 
a human way if the thing is related in a human way to man.] Need or employment 
have therefore lost their egoistic nature, and nature has lost its mere utility 
in the sense that its use has become human use. 
 Similarly, senses and enjoyment of other men have become my own appropriation. 
Apart from these direct organs, social organs are therefore created in the form 
of society; for example, activity in direct association with others, etc., has 
become an organ of my life expressions and a mode of appropriation of human 
life. 
 Obviously the human eye takes in things in a different way from the crude 
non-human eye, the hum ear in a different way from the crude ear, etc. 
 To sum up: it is only when man's object becomes a human object or objective 
that man does not lose himself in that object. This is only possible when it 
becomes a social object for him and when he himself becomes a social being for 
himself, just as society becomes a being for him in this object. 
 On the one hand, therefore, it is only when objective reality universally 
becomes for man in society the reality of man's essential powers, becomes human 
reality, and thus the reality of his own essential powers, that all objects 
become for him the objectification of himself, objects that confirm and realize 
his individuality, his objects -- i.e., he himself becomes the object. The 
manner in which they become his depends on the nature of the object and the 
nature of the essential power that corresponds to it; for it is just the 
determinateness of this relation that constitutes the particular, real mode of 
affirmation. An object is different for the eye from what it is for the ear, and 
the eye's object is different for from the ear's. The peculiarity of each 
essential power is precisely its peculiar essence, and thus also the peculiar 
mode of its objectification, of its objectively real, living being. Man is 
therefore affirmed in the objective world not only in thought but with all the 
senses. 
 On the other hand, let us look at the question in its subjective aspect: only 
music can awaken the musical sense in man and the most beautiful music has no 
sense for the unmusical ear, because my object can only be the confirmation of 
one of my essential powers -- i.e., can only be for me insofar as my essential 
power exists for me as a subjective attribute (this is because the sense of an 
object for me extends only as far as my sense extends, only has sense for a 
sense that corresponds to that object). In the same way, and for the same 
reasons, the senses of social man are different from those of non-social man. 
Only through the objectively unfolded wealth of human nature can the wealth of 
subjective human sensitivity -- a musical ear, an eye for the beauty of form, in 
short, senses capable of human gratification -- be either cultivated or created. 
For not only the five senses, but also the so-called spiritual senses, the 
practical senses (will, love, etc.), in a word, the human sense, the humanity of 
the senses -- all these come into being only through the existence of their 
objects, through humanized nature. The cultivation of the five senses is the 
work of all previous history. Sense which is a prisoner of crude practical need 
has only a restricted sense. For a man who is starving, the human form of food 
does not exist, only its abstract form exists; it could just as well be present 
in its crudest form, and it would be hard to say how this way of eating differs 
from that of animals. The man who is burdened with worries and needs has no 
sense for the finest of plays; the dealer in minerals sees only the commercial 
value, and not the beauty and peculiar nature of the minerals; he lacks a 
mineralogical sense; thus the objectification of the human essence, in a 
theoretical as well as a practical respect, is necessary both in order to make 
man's senses human and to create an appropriate human sense for the whole of the 
wealth of humanity and of nature. 
 Just as in its initial stages society is presented with all the material for 
this cultural development through the movement of private property, and of its 
wealth and poverty -- both material and intellectual wealth and poverty -- so 
the society that is fully developed produces man in all the richness of his 
being, the rich man who is profoundly and abundantly endowed with all the 
senses, as its constant reality. It can be seen how subjectiveness and 
objectivism, spiritualism and materialism, activity and passivity [Leiden], lose 
their antithetical character, and hence their existence as such antithesis, only 
in the social condition; it can be seen how the resolution of the theoretical 
antitheses themselves is possible only in a practical way, only through the 
practical energy of man, and how their resolution is for that reason by no means 
only a problem of knowledge, but a real problem of life, a problem which 
philosophy was unable to solve precisely because it treated it as a purely 
theoretical problem. 
 It can be seen how the history of industry and the objective existence of 
industry as it has developed is the open book of the essential powers of man, 
man's psychology present in tangible form; up to now this history has not been 
grasped in its connection with the nature of man, but only in an external 
utilitarian aspect, for man, moving in the realm of estrangement, was only 
capable of conceiving the general existence of man -- religion, or history in 
its abstract and universal form of politics, art, literature, etc. -- as the 
reality of man's essential powers and as man's species-activity. In everyday, 
material industry (which can just as easily be considered as a part of that 
general development as that general development itself can be considered as a 
particular part of industry, since all human activity up to now has been labor 
-- i.e., industry, self-estranged activity) we find ourselves confronted with 
the objectified powers of the human essence, in the form of sensuous, alien, 
useful objects, in the form of estrangement. A psychology for which this book, 
the most tangible and accessible part of history, is closed, can never become a 
real science with a genuine content. What indeed should we think of a science 
which primly abstracts from this large area of human labor, and fails to sense 
its own inadequacy, even though such an extended wealth of human activity says 
nothing more to it perhaps than what can be said in one word -- "need", "common 
need"? 
 The natural sciences have been prolifically active and have gathered together 
an ever growing mass of material. But philosophy has remained just as alien to 
them as they have remained alien to philosophy. Their momentary union was only a 
fantastic illusion. The will was there, but not the means. Even historiography 
only incidentally takes account of natural science, which it sees as 
contributing to enlightenment, utility and a few great discoveries. But natural 
science has intervened in and transformed human life all the more practically 
through industry and has prepared the conditions for human emancipation, however 
much its immediate effect was to complete the process was to complete the 
process of dehumanization. Industry is the real historical relationship of 
nature, and hence of natural science, to man. If it is then conceived as the 
exoteric revelation of man's essential powers, the human essence of nature or 
the natural essence of man can also be understood. Hence natural science will 
lose its abstractly material, or rather idealist, orientation and become the 
basis of a human science, just as it has already become -- though in an 
estranged form -- the basis of actual human life. The idea of one basis for life 
and another for science is from the very outset a lie. Nature as it comes into 
being in human history -- in the act of creation of human society -- is the true 
nature of man; hence nature as it comes into being through industry, though in 
an estranged form, is true anthropological nature. 
 Sense perception (see Feuerbach) must be the basis of all science. Only when 
science starts out from sense perception in the dual form of sensuous 
consciousness and sensuous need -- i.e., only when science starts out from 
nature -- is it real science. The whole of history is a preparation, a 
development, for "man" to become the object of sensuous consciousness and for 
the needs of "man as man" to become [sensuous] needs. History itself is a real 
part of natural history and of nature's becoming man. Natural science will, in 
time, subsume the science of man, just as the science of man will subsume 
natural science: there will be one science. 
 Man is the immediate object of natural science; for immediate sensuous nature 
for man is, immediately, human sense perception (an identical expression) in the 
form of the other man who is present in his sensuous immediacy for him. His own 
sense perception only exists as human sense perception for himself through the 
other man. But nature is the immediate object of the science of man. Man's first 
object -- man -- is nature, sense perception; and the particular sensuous human 
powers, since they can find objective realization only in natural objects, can 
find self-knowledge only in the science of nature in general. The element of 
thought itself, the element of the vital expression of thought -- language -- is 
sensuous nature. The social reality of nature and human natural science or the 
natural science of man are identical expressions. 
 It can be seen how the rich man and the wealth of human need take the place of 
the wealth and poverty of political economy. The rich man is simultaneously the 
man in need of totality of vital human expression; he is the man in whom his own 
realization exists as inner necessity, as need. Given socialism, not only man's 
wealth but also his poverty acquire a human and hence a social significance. 
Poverty is the passive bond which makes man experience his greatest wealth -- 
the other man -- as need. The domination of the objective essences within me, 
the sensuous outburst of my essential activity, is passion, which here becomes 
the activity of my being. 
 (5) A being sees himself as independent only when he stands on his own feet, 
and he only stands on his own feet when he owes this existence to himself. A man 
who lives by the grace of another regards himself as a dependent being. But I 
live completely by the grace of another if I owe him not only the maintenance of 
my life, but also its creation, if he is the source of my life. My life is 
necessarily grounded outside itself if it is not my own creation. The creation 
is therefore an idea which is very hard to exorcize from the popular 
consciousness. This consciousness is incapable of comprehending the 
self-mediated being [Durchsichselbstsein] of nature and of man, since such a 
being contradicts all the palpable evidence of practical life. 
 The creation of the Earth receives a heavy blow from the science of geogeny -- 
i.e., the science which depicts the formation of the Earth, its coming to be, as 
a process of self-generation. Generatio aequivoca [spontaneous generation] is 
the only practical refutation of the theory of creation. 
 Now, it is easy to say to a particular individual what Aristotle said: You were 
begotten by your father and your mother, which means that in you the mating of 
two human beings, a human species-act, produced another human being. Clearly, 
then, man also owes his existence to man in a physical sense. Therefore, you 
should not only keep sight of the one aspect, the infinite progression which 
leads you on to the question: "Who begot my father, his grandfather, etc.?" You 
should also keep in mind the circular movement sensuously perceptible in that 
progression whereby man reproduces himself in the act of begetting and thus 
always remains the subject. But you will reply: I grant you this circular 
movement, but you must also grant me the right to progress back to the question: 
Your question is itself a product of abstraction. Ask yourself how you arrived 
at that question. Ask yourself whether your question does not arise from a 
standpoint to which I cannot reply because it is a perverse one. Ask yourself 
whether that progression exists as such for rational thought. If you ask about 
the creation of nature and of man, then you are abstracting from nature and from 
man. You assume them as non-existent and want me to prove to you that they 
exist. My answer is: Give up your abstraction and you will them give up your 
question. But if you want to hold on to your abstraction, then do so 
consistently, and if you assume the non-existence of man and nature, then assume 
also your own non-existence, for you are also nature and man. Do not think and 
do not ask me questions, for as soon as you think and ask questions, your 
abstraction from the existence of nature and man has no meaning. Or are you such 
an egoist that you assume everything as non-existence and still want to exist 
yourself? 
 You can reply: I do not want to assume the nothingness of nature, etc. I am 
only asking how it arose, just as I might ask the anatomist about the formation 
of bones, etc. 
 But since for socialist man the whole of what is called world history is 
nothing more than the creation of man through human labor, and the development 
of nature for man, he therefore has palpable and incontrovertible proof of his 
self-mediated birth, of his process of emergence. Since the essentiality 
[Wesenhaftigkeit] of man and nature, a man as the existence of nature for man 
and nature as the existence of man for man, has become practically and 
sensuously perceptible, the question of an alien being, being above nature and 
man -- a question which implies an admission of the unreality of nature and of 
man -- has become impossible in practice. Atheism, which is a denial of this 
unreality, no longer has any meaning, for atheism is a negation of God, through 
which negation it asserts the existence of man. But socialism as such no longer 
needs such mediation. Its starting point is the theoretically and practically 
sensuous consciousness of man and of nature as essential beings. It is the 
positive self-consciousness of man, no longer mediated through the abolition of 
religion, just as real life is positive reality no longer mediated through the 
abolition of private property, through communism. Communism is the act of 
positing as the negation of the negation, and is therefore a real phase, 
necessary for the next period of historical development, in the emancipation and 
recovery of mankind. Communism is the necessary form and the dynamic principle 
of the immediate future, but communism is not as such the goal of human 
development -- the form of human society. 
  



NEED, PRODUCTION AND DIVISION OF LABOR



We have seen what significance the wealth of human needs has, on the 
presupposition of socialism, and consequently what significance a new mode of 
production and a new object of production have. A fresh confirmation of human 
powers and a fresh enrichment of human nature. Under the system of private 
property their significance is reversed. Each person speculates on creating a 
new need in the other, with the aim of forcing him to make a new sacrifice, 
placing him in a new dependence and seducing him into a new kind of of enjoyment 
and hence into economic ruin. Each attempts to establish over the other an alien 
power, in the hope of thereby achieving satisfaction of his own selfish needs. 
With the mass of objects grows the realm of alien powers to which mn is 
subjected, and each new product is a new potentiality of mutual fraud and mutual 
pillage. Man becomes ever poorer as a man, and needs ever more money if he is to 
achieve mastery over the hostile being. The power of his money falls in inverse 
proportion to the volume of productions -- i.e., his need grows as the power of 
money increases. The need for money is for that reason the real need created by 
the modern economic system, and the only need it creates. The quantity of money 
becomes more and more its sole important property. Just as it reduces everything 
to its own form of abstraction, so it reduces itself in the course of its own 
movement to something quantitative. Lack of moderation and intemperance become 
its true standard. Subjectively this is manifested partly in the fact that the 
expansion of production and needs becomes the inventive and ever calculating 
slave of inhuman, refined, unnatural and imaginary appetites -- for private 
property does not know how to transform crude need into human need. Its idealism 
is fantasy, caprice, and infatuation. No eunuch flatters his despot more basely, 
or uses more infamous means to revive his flagging capacity for pleasure, in 
order to win a surreptitious favor for himself, than does the eunuch of 
industry, the manufacturer, in order to sneak himself a silver penny or two, or 
coax the gold from the pocket of his dearly beloved neighbor. (Every product is 
a bait with which to entice the essence of the other, his money. Every real or 
potential need is a weakness which will tempt the fly onto the lime-twig. 
Universal exploitation of communal human nature. Just as each one of man's 
inadequacies is a bond with heaven, a way into his heart for the priest, so 
every need is an opportunity for stepping up to one's neighbor in sham 
friendship and saying to him: "Dear friend, I can give you want you need, but 
you know the terms. You know which ink you must use in signing yourself over to 
me. I shall cheat you while I provide your pleasure." He places himself at the 
disposal of his neighbor's most depraved fancies, panders to his needs, excites 
unhealthy appetites in him, and pounces on every weakness, so that he can then 
demand the money for his labor of love. 
 This estrangement partly manifests itself in the fact that the rent of needs 
and of the means of fulfilling them gives rise to a bestial degeneration and a 
complete, crude and abstract simplicity of need; or rather, that it merely 
reproduces itself in its opposite sense. Even the need for fresh air ceases to 
be a need for the worker. Man reverts once more to living in a cave, but the 
cave is now polluted by the mephitic and pestilential breath of civilization. 
Moreover, the worker has no more than a precarious right to live in it, for it 
is for him an alien power that can be daily withdrawn and from which, should he 
fail to pay, he can be evicted at any time. He actually has to pay for this 
mortuary. A dwelling in the light, which Prometheus describes in Aeschylus as 
one of the great gifts through which he transformed savages into men, ceases to 
exist for the worker. Light, ire, etc. -- the simplest animal cleanliness -- 
cases be a need for man. Dirt -- this pollution and putrefaction of man, the 
sewage (this word is to be understood in its literal sense) of civilization -- 
becomes an element of life for him. Universal unnatural neglect, putrefied 
nature, becomes an element of life for him. None of this sense exist any longer, 
either in their human form or in their inhuman form -- i.e., not even in their 
animal form. The crudest modes (and instruments) of human labor reappear; for 
example, the tread-mill used by Roman slave has become the mode of production 
and mode of existence of many English workers. It is not only human needs which 
man lacks -- even his animal needs cease to exist. The Irishman has only one 
need left -- the need to eat, to eat potatoes, and, more precisely, to eat 
rotten potatoes, the worst kind of potatoes. But England and France already have 
a little Ireland in each of their industrial cities.. The savage and the animal 
at least have the need to hunt,to move about, etc., the need of companionship. 
The simplification of machinery and of labor is used to make workers out of 
human beings who are still growing, who are completely immature, out of 
children, while the worker himself becomes a neglected child. The machine 
accommodates itself to man's weakness, in order to turn weak man into a machine. 

 The fact that the multiplication of needs and of the means of fulfilling them 
gives rise to a lack of needs and of means is proved by the political economist 
(and by the capitalist -- we invariably mean empirical businessmen when we refer 
to political economists, who are the scientific exposition and existence of the 
former) in the following ways: 
 (1) By reducing the worker's needs to the paltriest minimum necessary to 
maintain his physical existence and by reducing his activity to the most 
abstract mechanical movement. In so doing, the political economist declares that 
man has no other needs, either in the sphere of activity or in that of 
consumption. For even this life he calls human life and human existence. 
 (2) By taking as his standard -- his universal standard, in the sense that it 
applies to the mass of men -- the worst possible state of privation which life 
(existence) can know. He turns the worker into a being with neither needs nor 
senses and turn the worker's activity into a pure abstraction from all activity. 
Hence any luxury that the worker might enjoy is reprehensible, and anything that 
goes beyond the most abstract need -- either in the form of passive enjoyment or 
active expression -- appears to him as a luxury. Political economy, this science 
of wealth, is therefore at the same time the science of denial, of starvation, 
of saving, and it actually goes so far as to save man the need for fresh air or 
physical exercise. This science of the marvels of industry is at the same time 
the science of asceticism, and its true ideal is the ascetic but rapacious 
skinflint and the ascetic but productive slave. Its moral ideal is the worker 
who puts a part of his wages into savings, and it has even discovered a servile 
art which can dignify this charming little notion and present a sentimental 
version of it on the stage. It is therefore -- for all its worldly and debauched 
appearance -- a truly moral moral science, the most moral science of all. 
Self-denial, the denial of life and of all human needs, is its principal 
doctrine. The less you eat, drink, buy books, go to the theatre, go dancing, go 
drinking, think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save and 
the greater will become that treasure which neither moths nor maggots can 
consume -- your capital. The less you are, the less you give expression to your 
life, the more you have, the greater is your alienated life and the more you 
store up of your estranged life. Everything which the political economist takes 
from you in terms of life and humanity, he restores to you in the form of money 
and wealth, and everything which you are unable to do, your money can do for 
you: it can eat, drink, go dancing, go to the theatre, it can appropriate art, 
learning, historical curiosities, political power, it can travel, it is capable 
of doing all those thing for you; it can buy everything it is genuine wealth, 
genuine ability. But for all that, it only likes to create itself, to buy 
itself, for after all everything else is its servant. And when I have the master 
I have the servant, and I have no need of his servant. So all passions and all 
activity are lost in greed. The worker is only permitted to have enough for him 
to live, and he is only permitted to live in order to have. 
 It is true that a controversy has arisen in the field of political economy. One 
school (Lauderdale, Malthus, etc.) advocates luxury and execrates thrift. The 
other (Say, Ricardo, etc.) advocates thrift and execrates luxury. But the former 
admits that it wants luxury in order to produce labor -- i.e., absolute thrift; 
and the latter admits that it advocates thrift in order to produce wealth -- 
i.e., luxury. The former has the romantic notion that greed alone should not 
regulate the consumption of the rich, and it contradicts its own laws when it 
forwards the idea of prodigality as a direct means of enrichment. The other side 
then advances earnest and detailed arguments to show that through prodigality I 
diminish rather than increase my possessions; but its supporters hypocritically 
refuse to admit that production is regulated by caprice and luxury; they forget 
the "refined needs" and forget that without consumption there can be no 
production; they forget that, through competition, production becomes more 
extensive and luxurious; they forget that it is use which determines the value 
of a thing, and that it is fashion which determines use; they want only "useful 
things" to be produced, but they forget that the production of too many useful 
things produces too many useless people. Both sides forget that prodigality and 
thrift, luxury and privation, wealth and poverty are equal. 
 And you must not only be parsimonious in gratifying your immediate senses, such 
as eating, etc. You must also be chary of participating in affairs of general 
interest, showing sympathy and trust, etc., if you want to be economical and if 
you want to avoid being ruined by illusions. 
 You must make everything which is yours venal -- i.e., useful. I might ask the 
political economist: am I obeying economic laws if I make money by prostituting 
my body to the lust of another (in France, the factory workers call the 
prostitution of their wives and daughters the nth working hour, which is 
literally true), or if I sell my friend to the Moroccans [where they still had 
Christian slaves] (and the direct sale of men in the form of trade in 
conscripts, etc., occurs in all civilized countries)? His answer will be: your 
acts do not contravene my laws, but you find out what Cousin Morality and Cousin 
Religion have to say about it; the morality and religion of my political economy 
have no objection to make, but... But who should I believe, then? Political 
economy or morality? The morality of political economy is gain, labor and 
thrift, sobriety -- and yet political economy promises to satisfy my needs. The 
political economy of morality is the wealth of a good conscience, of virtue, 
etc. But how can I be virtuous if I do not exist? And how can I have a good 
conscience if I am not conscious of anything? It is inherent in the very nature 
of estrangement that each sphere imposes upon me a different and contrary 
standard; one standard for morality, one for political economy, and so on. This 
is because each of them is a particular estrangement of man and each is centred 
upon one particular area of estranged essential activity: each is related in an 
estranged way to the other... Thus M. Michael Chevalier accuses Ricardo of 
abstracting from morality. But Ricardo allows political economy to speak its own 
language. If this language is not that of morality, it is not the fault of 
Ricardo. M. Chevalier abstracts from political economy insofar as he moralizes, 
but he really and necessarily abstracts from morality insofar as he deals with 
political economy. The relationship of political economy to morality is either 
an arbitrary and contingent one which is neither founded nor scientific, a 
simulacrum, or it is essential and can only be the relationship of economic laws 
to morality. If such a relationship does not exist, or if the opposite is rather 
the case, can Ricardo do anything about it? Moreover, the opposition between 
political economy and morality is only an apparent one. It is both an opposition 
and not an opposition. Political economy merely gives expression to moral laws 
in its own way. 
 Absence of needs as the principle of political economy is most in its theory of 
population. There re too many people. Even the existence of man is a pure 
luxury, and if the worker is "moral" he will be economical in procreation. (Mill 
suggests public commendation of those who show themselves temperate in sexual 
matters and public rebukes of those who sin against this barrenness of 
marriage... Is this not the morality, the doctrine, of asceticism?) The 
production of people appears as a public disaster. 
 The meaning which production has for the wealthy is revealed in the meaning 
which it has for the poor. At the top, it always manifests itself in refined, 
concealed, and ambiguous way -- as an appearance. At the bottom, it manifests 
itself in a crude, straightforward, and overt way -- as a reality. The crude 
need of the worker is a much greater source of profit than the refined need of 
the rich. The basement dwellings in London bring in more for the landlords than 
the palaces -- i.e., they constitute a greater wealth for him and, from an 
economic point of view, a greater social wealth. 
 Just as industry speculates on the refinement of needs, so too it speculated on 
their crudity. But the crudity on which it speculates is artificially produced, 
and its true manner of enjoyment is therefore self-stupefaction, this apparent 
satisfaction of need, this civilization within the crude barbarism of need. The 
English ginshops are, therefore, the symbolic representation of private 
property. Their luxury demonstrated to man the true relation of industrial 
luxury and wealth. For that reason, they are rightly the only Sunday enjoyment 
of the English people, and are at least treated mildly by the English police. 
 We have already seen how the political economist establishes the unity of labor 
and capital in a number of different ways: 
 (1) capital is accumulated labor; 
 (2) the purpose of capital within production -- partly the reproduction of 
capital with profit, partly capital as raw material (material of labor) and 
partly as itself a working instrument (the machine is capital directly 
identified with labor) -- is productive labor; 
 (3) the worker is a piece of capital; 
 (4) wages belong to the costs of capital; 
 (5) for the worker, labor is the reproduction of his life capital; 
 (6) for the capitalist, it is a factor in the activity of his capital. Finally, 

 (7) the political economist postulates the original unity of capital and labor 
as the unity of capitalist and worker, which he sees as the original state of 
bliss. The fact that these two elements leap at each other's throats in the form 
of two persons is a contingent event for the political economist, and hence only 
to be explained by external factors (see Mill). 
 Those nations which are still dazzled by the sensuous glitter of precious 
metals and, therefore, make a fetish of metal money are not yet fully developed 
money nations. Compare England and France. The extent to which the solution of 
theoretical problems is a function of practice and is mediated through practice, 
and the extent to which true practice is the condition of a real and positive 
theory is shown, for example, in the case of fetish-worship. The sense 
perception of a fetish-worshipper is different from that of a Greek because his 
sensuous existence is different. The abstract hostility between sense and 
intellect is inevitable so long as the human sense [Sinn] for nature, the human 
significance [Sinn] of nature, and, hence, the natural sense of man, has not yet 
been produced by man's own labor. 
 Equality is nothing but a translation into French -- i.e., into political form 
-- of the German "Ich - Ich". Equality as the basis of communism is its 
political foundation. It is the same as when the German founds it on the fact 
that he sees man as universal self-consciousness. It goes without saying that 
the supersession of estrangement always emanates from the form of estrangement 
which is the dominant power -- in Germany, self-consciousness; in France, 
equality, because politics; in England, real, material, practical need, which 
only measures itself against itself. It is from this point of view that Proudhon 
should be criticized and acknowledged. 
 If we characterize communism itself -- which because of its character as 
negation of the negation, as appropriation of the human essence which is 
mediated with itself through the negation of private property, is not yet the 
true, self-generating position [Position], but one generated by private 
property... [Here, the corner of the page has been torn away, and only fragments 
on the six sentences remain, rendering it impossible to understand.] 
 ... the real estrangement of human life remains and is all the greater the more 
one is conscious of it as such, it can only be attained once communism is 
established. In order to supersede the idea of private property, the idea of 
communism is enough. In order to supersede private property as it actually 
exists, real communist activity is necessary. History will give rise to such 
activity, and the movement which we already know in thought to be a 
self-superseding movement will in reality undergo a very difficult and 
protracted process. But we must look upon it as a real advance that we have 
gained, at the outset, an awareness of the limits as well as the goal of this 
historical movement and are in a position to see beyond it. 
 When communist workmen gather together, their immediate aim is instruction, 
propaganda, etc. But at the same time, they acquire a new need -- the need for 
society -- and what appears as a means had become an end. This practical 
development can be most strikingly observed in the gatherings of French 
socialist workers. Smoking, eating, and drinking, etc., are no longer means of 
creating links between people. Company, association, conversation, which in turn 
has society as its goal, is enough for them. The brotherhood of man is not a 
hollow phrase, it is a reality, and the nobility of man shines forth upon us 
from their work-worn figures. 
 When political economy maintains that supply and demand always balance each 
other, it immediately forgets its own assertion that the supply of people (the 
theory of population) always exceeds the demand and that therefore the 
disproportion between supply and demand finds its most striking expression in 
what is the essential goal of production -- the existence of man. 
 The extent to which money, which appears to be a means, is the true power and 
the sole end -- the extent to which in general the means which gives me being 
and which appropriates for me alien and objective being, is an end in itself... 
is apparent from the fact that landed property, where the soil is the source of 
life, and the horse and the sword, where they are the true means of life, are 
also recognized as the actual political powers. In the Middle Ages, an Estate 
becomes emancipated as soon as it is allowed to bear a sword. Among nomadic 
peoples, it is the horse which makes one into a free man and a participant in 
the life of the community. 
 We said above that man is regressing to the cave dwelling, etc. -- but in an 
estranged, repugnant form. The savage in his cave -- an element of nature which 
is freely available for his use and shelter -- does not experience his 
environment as alien; he feels just as much at home as a fish in water. But the 
poor man's basement dwelling is an uncongenial element, an "alien, restrictive 
power which only surrenders itself to him at the expense of his sweat and 
blood". He cannot look upon it as his home, as somewhere he can call his own. 
Instead, he finds himself in someone else's house, in an alien house, whose 
owner lies in wait for him every day, and evicts him if he fails to pay the 
rent. At the same time, he is aware of the difference in quality between his own 
dwelling and those other-worldly human dwellings which exist in the heaven of 
wealth. 
 Estrangement appears not only in the fact that the means of my life belong to 
another and that my desire is the inaccessible possession of another, but also 
in the fact that all things are other than themselves, that my activity is other 
than itself, and that finally -- and this goes for the capitalists too -- an 
inhuman power rules over everything. 
 There is one form of inactive and extravagant wealth, given over exclusively to 
pleasure, the owner of which is active as a merely ephemeral individual, rushing 
about erratically. He looks upon the slave labor of others, their human sweat 
and blood, as they prey of his desires, and regards man in general -- including 
himself -- as a futile and sacrificial being. He arrogantly looks down upon 
mankind, dissipating what would suffice to keep alive a hundred human beings, 
and propagates the infamous illusion that his unbridled extravagance and 
ceaseless, unproductive consumption is a condition of the labor, and, hence, 
subsistence of the others. For him, the realization of man's essential powers is 
simply the realization of his own disorderly existence, his whims, and his 
capricious and bizarre notions. But this wealth, which regards wealth as a mere 
means, worthy only of destruction, and which is therefore both slave and master, 
both generous and mean, capricious, conceited, presumptuous, refined, cultured, 
and ingenious -- this wealth has not yet experienced wealth as an entirely alien 
power over itself; it sees in wealth nothing more than its own power, the final 
aim of which is not wealth but consumption... [Here, the bottom of the page is 
gone, losing perhaps three or four lines] 
 ... and the glittering illusion about the nature of wealth -- an illusion which 
derives from its sensuous appearance -- is confronted by the working, sober, 
prosaic, economical industrialist who is enlightened about the nature of wealth 
and who not only provides a wider range of opportunities for the other's 
self-indulgence and flatters him through his products -- for his products are so 
many base compliments to the appetites of the spendthrift -- but also manages to 
appropriate for himself in the only useful way the other's dwindling power. So 
if industrial wealth at first appears to be the product of extravagant, 
fantastic wealth, in its inherent course of development it actively supplants 
the latter. For the fall in the interest on money is a necessary consequence and 
result of industrial development. Therefore, the means of the extravagant 
rentier diminish daily in inverse proportion to the growing possibilities and 
temptations of pleasure. He must, therefore, either consume his capital himself, 
and in so doing bring about his own ruin, or become an industrial capitalist.... 
On the other hand, it is true that there is a direct and constant rise in the 
rent of land as a result of industrial development, but as we have already seen 
there inevitably comes a time when landed property, like every other kind of 
property, falls into the category of capital which reproduces itself with profit 
-- and this is a result of the same industrial development. Therefore, even the 
extravagant landlord is forced either to consume his capital -- i.e., ruin 
himself -- or become the tenant farmer of his own property -- an agricultural 
industrialist. 
 The decline in the rate of interest -- which Proudhon regards as the abolition 
of capital and as a tendency towards the socialization of capital -- is 
therefore rather a direct symptom of the complete victory of working capital 
over prodigal wealth -- i.e., the transformation of all private property into 
industrial capital. It is the complete victory of private property over all 
those of its qualities which are still apparently human and the total 
subjugation of the property owner to the essence of private property -- labor. 
To be sure, the industrial capitalist also seek s enjoyment. He does not by any 
means regress to an unnatural simplicity of need, but his enjoyment is only 
incidental, a means of relaxation; it is subordinated to production, it is a 
calculated and even an economical form of pleasure, for it is charged as an 
expense of capital; the sum dissipated may therefore not be in excess of what 
can be replaced by the reproduction of capital with profit. Enjoyment is, 
therefore, subsumed under capital, and the pleasure-seeking individual under the 
capitalizing individual, whereas earlier the contrary was the case. The decline 
in the rate of interest is therefore a symptom of the abolition of capital only 
insofar as it is a symptom of the growing domination of capital, of that growing 
estrangement which is hastening towards its own abolition. This is the only way 
in which that which exists affirms its opposite. 
 The wrangle among political economists about luxury and saving is therefore 
merely a wrangle between that section of political economy which has become 
aware of the nature of wealth and that section which is still imprisoned within 
romantic and anti-industrial memories. But neither of them knows how to express 
the object of the controversy in simple terms, and neither of them is therefore 
in a position to clinch the argument. 
 Furthermore, the rent of land qua rent of land has been abolished, for the 
argument of the Physiocrats, who say that the landowner is the only true 
producer, has been demolished by the political economists, who show that the 
landowner as such is the only completely unproductive rentier. Agriculture is a 
matter for the capitalist, who invests his capital in this way when he can 
expect to make a normal profit. The argument of the Physiocrats that landed 
property, as the only productive property, should alone pay state taxes and 
should therefore alone give its consent to them and take part in state affairs, 
is turned into the opposite argument that the tax on rent of land is the only 
tax on unproductive income and hence the only tax which does not harm national 
production. Naturally, it follows from this argument that the landowner can no 
longer derive political privileges from his position as principal tax-payer. 
 Everything which Proudhon interprets as the growing power of labor as against 
capital is simply the growing power of labor in the form of capital, industrial 
capital, as against capital which is not consumed as capital -- i.e, 
industrially. And this development is on its way to victory -- i.e., the victory 
of industrial capital. 
 Clearly, then, it is only when labor is grasped as the essence of private 
property that the development of the economy as such can be analyzed in its real 
determinateness. 
 Society, as it appears to the political economist, is civil society, in which 
each individual is a totality of needs and only exists for the other as the 
other exists for him -- insofar as each becomes a means for the other. The 
political economist, like politics in its rights of man, reduces everything to 
man -- i.e., to the individual, whom he divests of all his determinateness in 
order to classify him as a capitalist or a worker. 
 The division of labor is the economic expression of the social nature of labor 
within estrangement. Or, rather, since labor is only an expression of human 
activity within alienation, an expression of life as alienation of life, the 
division of labor is nothing more than the estranged, alienated positing of 
human activity as a real species-activity or as activity of man as a 
species-being. 
 Political economists are very unclear and self-contradictory about the essence 
of the division of labor, which was naturally seen as one of the main driving 
forces in the production of wealth as soon as labor was seem to be the essence 
of private property. That is to say, they are very unclear about human activity 
as species activity in this its estranged and alienated form. 
 Adam Smith: 
  
     "The division of labor... is not originally the effect of any
     human wisdom.... It is the necessary, though very slow and gradual
     consequence of the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one
     thing for another. Whether this propensity be one of those
     original principles of human nature... or whether, as seems more
     probably, it be the necessary consequence of the faculties of
     reason and of speech it belongs not to our present subject to
     inquire. It is common to all men, and to be found in no other race
     of animals.... In almost every other race of animals the
     individual when it is grown up to maturity is entirely
     independent.... But man has almost constant occassion for the help
     of his brethren, and it is in vain for him to expect it from their
     benevolence only. He will be more likely to prevail if he can
     interest their self-love in his favor, and show them that it is for
     their own advantage to do for him what he requires of them.... We
     address ourselves not to their humanity but to their self-love, and
     never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages."

     "As it is by treaty, by barter, and by purchase that we obtain from
     one another the greater part of those mutual good offices that we
     stand in need of, so it is this same trucking disposition which
     originally gives occassion to the division of labor. In a tribe of
     hunters or shepherds a particular person makes bows and arrows, for
     example, with more readiness and dexterity than any other. He
     frequently exchanges them for cattle or for venison with his
     companions; and he finds at last that he can in this manner get
     more cattle and venison than if he himself went to the field to
     catch them. From a regard to his own interest, therefore, the
     making of bows and arrows grows to be his chief business..."

     "The difference of natural talents in different men... is not... 
     so much the cause as the effect of the division of labor.... 
     Without the disposition to truck, barter, and exchange, every man
     must have procured to himself every necessary and conveniency of
     life which he wanted. All must have had... the same work to do,
     and there could have been no such difference of employment as could
     alone give occassion to any great difference of talent."

     "As it is this disposition which forms that difference of
     talents... among men, so it is this same disposition which renders
     that difference useful. Many tribes of animals... of the same
     species derive from nature a much more remarkable distinction of
     genius than what, antecedent to custom and education, appears to
     take place among men. By nature a philosopher is not in genius and
     in disposition half so different from a street-porter, as a mastiff
     is from a greyhound, or a greyhound from a spaniel, or this last
     from a shepherd's dog. Those different tribes of animals, however,
     though all of the same species, are of scarce any use to one
     another. The strength of the mastiff is not, in the least,
     supported for example by the swiftness of the greyhound.... The
     effects of those geniuses and talents, for want of the power or
     disposition to barter and exchange, cannot be brought into a common
     stock, and do not in the least contribute to the better
     accommodation and conveniency of the species. Each animal is still
     obliged to support and defend itself, separately and independently,
     and derives no sort of advantage from that variety of talents with
     which nature has distinguished its fellows. Among men, on the
     contrary, the most dissimilar geniuses are of use to one another;
     the different produces of their respective talents, by the general
     disposition to truck, barter, and exchange, bring brought, as it
     were, into a common stock, where every man may purchase whatever
     part of the produce of other men's talents he has occassion for."

     "As it is the power of exchanging that gives occassion to the
     division of labor, so the extent of this division must always be
     limited by the extent of that power, or in other words, by the
     extent of the market. When the market is very small, no person can
     have any encouragement to dedicate himself entirely to one
     employment, for want of the power to exchange all that surplus
     part of the produce of his own labor, which is over and above his
     own consumption, for such parts of the produce of other men's labor
     as he has occassion for."

                                             [ Smith, I, p.12,13,14,15 ]

     In an advanced state of society "every man thus lives by
     exchanging, or becomes in some measure a merchant, and the society
     itself grows to be what is properly a commercial society."

                                                     [ Smith, I, pp.20 ]
(See Destutt de Tracy: "Society is a series of reciprocal exchanges; commerce 
contains the whole essence of society.") The accumulation of capitals increases 
with the division of labor, and vice-versa. 
 Thus far Adam Smith. 
  
     "If every family produced all that it consumed, society could keep
     going even if no exchange of any sort took place... Although it is
     not fundamental, exchange is indispensable in our advanced state of
     society... The division of labor is a skilful application of the
     powers of man; it increases society's production -- its power and
     its pleasures -- but it robs the individual, reduces the capacity
     of each person taken individually. Production cannot take place
     without exchange."

                                                     [Smith, I, pp.76-7]
Thus J.-B. Say. 
  
     "The powers inherent in man are his intelligence and his physical
     capacity for work. Those which spring from the condition of
     society consist of the capacity to divide labor and to distribute
     different tasks among the different people... and the power to
     exchange mutual services and the products which constitute these
     means... The motive which induces a man to give his services to
     another is self-interest -- he demands a recompense for the
     services rendered. The right of exclusive private property is
     indispensable to the establishment of exchange among men."

     "Exchange and division of labor mutually condition each other."

            [Theorie des richesses sociales, suivie d'une bibliographie
                   de l'economie politique, Paris, 1829, Vol. I, p.25f]
Thus Skarbek. 
 Mill presents developed exchange, trade, as a consequence of the division of 
labor. 
  
     "... the agency of man can be traced to very simple elements. He
     can, in fact, do nothing more than produce motion. He can move
     things towards one another; and he can separate them from one
     another; the properties of matter perform all the rest....

     "In the employment of labor and machinery, it is often found that
     the effects can be increased by skilful distribution, by separating
     all those operations which have any tendency to impede one another,
     by bringing together all those operations which can be made in any
     way to aid one another. As men in general cannot perform many
     different operations with the same quickness and dexterity with
     which they can, by practice, learn to perform a few, it is always
     an advantage to limit as much as possible the number of operations
     imposed upon each. For dividing labor, and distributing the power
     of men and machinery, to the greatest advantage, it is in most
     cases necessary to operate upon large scale; in other words, to
     produce the commodities in great masses. It is this advantage
     which gives existence to the great manufactories; a few of which,
     placed in the most convenient situations, sometimes supply not one
     country, but many countries, with as much as they desire of the
     commodity produced."

                                    [ James Mill, Elements of Political 
                                        Economy, London, 1821, pp.5-9 ]
Thus Mill. 
 But all the modern political economists agree that division of labor and volume 
of production, division of labor and accumulation of capital, are mutually 
determining, and that only liberated private property, left to itself, is 
capable of producing the most effective and comprehensive division of labor. 
 Adam Smith's argument can be summed up as follows: the division of labor gives 
labor an infinite capacity to produce. It has its basis in the propensity to 
exchange and barter, a specifically human propensity which is probably not 
fortuitous but determined by the use of reason and of language. The motive of 
those engaged in exchange is not humanity but egoism. The diversity of human 
talents is more the effect than the cause of the division of labor -- i.e., of 
exchange. Moreover, it is only on account of the latter that this diversity is 
useful. The particular qualities of the different races within a species of 
animal are by nature more marked than the difference between human aptitudes and 
activities. But since animals are not able to exchange, the diversity of 
qualities in animals of the same species but of different races does not benefit 
any individual animal. Animals are unable to combine the different qualities of 
their species; they are incapable of contributing anything to the common good 
and the common comfort of their species. This is not the case with men, whose 
most disparate talents and modes of activity are of benefit to each other, 
because they can gather together their different products in a common reserve 
from which each can make his purchases. Just as the division of labor stems from 
the propensity to exchange, so it grows and is limited by the extent of 
exchange, of the market. In developed conditions each man is a merchant and 
society is a trading association. 
 Say regards exchange as fortuitous and not basic. Society could exist without 
it. It becomes indispensable in an advanced state of society. Yet production 
cannot take place without it. The division of labor is a convenient, useful 
means, a skilful application of human powers for social wealth, but it is a 
diminution of the capacity of each man taken individually. This last remark is 
an advance of Say's part. 
 Skarbek distinguishes the individual powers inherent in man -- intelligence and 
physical capacity for work -- from those powers which are derived from society 
-- exchange and division of labor, which mutually condition each other. But the 
necessary precondition of exchange is private property. Skarbek is here giving 
expression in objective form to what Smith, Say, Ricardo, etc., say when they 
designate egoism and private self-interest as the basis of exchange and haggling 
as the essential and adequate form of exchange. 
 Mill presents trade as a consequence of the division of labor. For him, human 
activity is reduced to mechanical movement. The division of labor and the use of 
machinery promote abundance of production. Each person must be allocated the 
smallest possible sphere of operations. The division of labor and the use of 
machinery, for their part, require the production of wealth en masse, which 
means a concentration of production. This is the reason for the big factories. 
 The consideration of the division of labor and exchange is of the highest 
interest, because they are the perceptibly alienated expressions of human 
activity and essential powers as species-activity and species-power. 
 To say that the division of labor and exchange are based on private property is 
simply to say that labor is the essence of private property -- an assertion that 
the political economist is incapable of proving and which we intend to prove for 
him. It is precisely in the fact that the division of labor and exchange are 
configurations of private property that we find the proof, both that human life 
needed private property for its realization and that it now needs the abolition 
of private property. 
 The division of labor and exchange are the two phenomena on whose account the 
political economist brags about the social nature of his science, while in the 
same breath he unconsciously expresses the contradiction which underlies his 
science -- the establishment of society through unsocial, particular interests. 
 The factors we have to consider are these: the propensity to exchange, which is 
grounded in egoism, is regarded as the cause or the reciprocal effect of the 
division of labor. Say regards exchange as not fundamental to the nature of 
society. Wealth and production are explained by the division of labor and 
exchange. The impoverishment and denaturing [Entwesung] of individual activity 
by the division of labor are admitted. Exchange and division of labor are 
acknowledged as producers of the great diversity of human talents, a diversity 
which becomes useful because of exchange. Skarbek divides man's powers of 
production or essential powers into two parts: 
 (1) those which are individual and inherent in him, his intelligence and his 
special disposition or capacity for work; and 
 (2) those which are derived not from the real individual but from society, the 
division of labor and exchange. 
 Furthermore, the division of labor is limited by the market. HUman labor is 
simply mechanical movement; most of the work is done by the material properties 
of the objects. Each individual must be allocated the smallest number of 
operations possible. Fragmentation of labor and concentration of capital; the 
nothingness of individual production and the production of wealth en masse. 
Meaning of free private property in the division of labor. 
  



MONEY



If man's feelings, passions, etc., are not merely anthropological 
characteristics in the narrower sense, but are truly ontological affirmations of 
his essence (nature), and if they only really affirm themselves insofar as their 
object exists sensuously for them, then it is clear: 
 (1) That their mode of affirmation is by no means one and the same, but rather 
that the different modes of affirmation constitute the particular character of 
their existence, of their life. The mode in which the object exists for them is 
the characteristic mode of their gratification. 
 (2) Where the sensuous affirmation is a direct annulment [Aufheben] of the 
object in its independent form (eating, drinking, fashioning of objects, etc.), 
this is the affirmation of the object. 
 (3) Insofar as man, and hence also his feelings, etc., are human, the 
affirmation of the object by another is also his own gratification. 
 (4) Only through developed industry -- i.e., through mediation of private 
property, does the ontological essence of human passion come into being, both in 
its totality and in its humanity; the science of man is, therefore, itself a 
product of the self-formation of man through practical activity. 
 (5) The meaning of private property, freed from its estrangement, is the 
existence of essential objects for man, both as objects of enjoyment and of 
activity. 
 Money, inasmuch as it possess the property of being able to buy everything and 
appropriate all objects, is the object most worth possessing. The universality 
of this property is the basis of money's omnipotence; hence, it is regarded as 
an omnipotent being... Money is the pimp between need and object, between life 
and man's means of life. But that which mediates my life also mediates the 
existence of other men for me. It is for me the other person. 
  
          What, man! confound it, hands and feet
          And head and backside, all are yours!
          And what we take while life is sweet,
          Is that to be declared not ours?
            Six stallions, say, I can afford,
          Is not their strength my property?
          I tear along, a sporting lord, 
          As if their legs belonged to me.

                      (Goethe, Faust -- Mephistopheles)
                                      [ Part I, scene 4 ]
Shakespeare, in Timon of Athens: 
  
          Gold? Yellow, glittering, precious gold! No, gods,
          I am no idle votarist; roots, you clear heavens!
          Thus much of this will make black, white; foul, fair;
          Wrong, right; base, noble; old, young; coward, valiant.
          ... Why, this
          Will lug your priests and servants from your sides;
          Pluck stout men's pillows from below their heads:
          This yellow slave
          Will knit and break religions; bless th'accurst;
          Make the hoar leprosy adored; place thieves,
          And give them title, knee, and approbation, 
          With senators on the bench: this is it
          That makes the wappen'd widow wed again;
          She whom the spital-house and ulcerous sores
          Would cast the gorge at, this embalms and spices
          To th'April day again. Come, damned earth,
          Thou common whore of mankind, that putt'st odds 
          Among the rout of nations, I will make thee
          Do thy right nature.
And, later on: 
  
          O thou sweet king-killer, and dear divorce
          'Twixt natural son and sire!  Thou bright defiler
          Of Hymen's purest bed!  Thou valiant Mars!
          Thou ever young, fresh, loved and delicate wooer,
          Whose blush doth thaw the consecrated snow
          That lies on Dian's lap!  Thous visible god, 
          That solder'st close impossibilities,
          And mak'st them kiss!  That speak'st with every tongue,
          To every purpose!  O thou touch of hearts!
          Think, thy slave man rebels; and by thy virtue
          Set them into confounding odds, that beasts
          May have in world empire!
Shakespeare paints a brilliant picture of the nature of money. To understand 
him, let us begin by expounding the passage from Goethe. 
 That which exists for me through the medium of money, that which I can pay for, 
i.e., that which money can buy, that am I, the possessor of money. The stronger 
the power of my money, the stronger am I. The properties of money are my, the 
possessor's, properties and essential powers. Therefore, what I am and what I 
can do is by no means determined by my individuality. I am ugly, but I can buy 
the most beautiful woman. Which means to say that I am not ugly, for the effect 
of ugliness, its repelling power, is destroyed by money. As an individual, I am 
lame, but money procurs me 24 legs. Consequently, I am not lame. I am a wicked, 
dishonest, unscrupulous and stupid individual, but money is respected, and so 
also is its owner. Money is the highest good, and consequently its owner is also 
good. Moreover, money spares me the trouble of being dishonest, and I am 
therefore presumed to be honest. I am mindless, but if money is the true mind of 
all things, how can its owner be mindless? What is more, he can buy clever 
people for himself, and is not he who has power over clever people cleverer than 
them? Through money, I can have anything the human heart desires. Do I not 
possess all human abilities? Does not money therefore transform all my 
incapacities into their opposite? 
 If money is the bond which ties me to human life and society to me, which links 
me to nature and to man, is money not the bond of all bonds? Can it not bind and 
loose all bonds? Is it therefore not the universal means of separation? It is 
the true agent of separation and the true cementing agent, it is the chemical 
power of society. 
 Shakespeare brings out two properties of money in particular: 
 (1) It is the visible divinity, the transformation of all human and natural 
qualities into their opposites, the universal confusion and inversion of things; 
it brings together impossibilities. 
 (2) It is the universal whore, the universal pimp of men and peoples. 
 The inversion and confusion of all human and natural qualities, the bringing 
together of impossibilities, the divine power of money lies in its nature as the 
estranged and alienating species-essence of man which alienates itself by 
selling itself. It is the alienated capacity of mankind. 
 What I, as a man, do -- i.e., what all my individual powers cannot do -- I can 
do with the help of money. Money, therefore, transforms each of these essential 
powers into something which it is not, into its opposite. 
 If I desire a meal, or want to take the mail coach because I am not strong 
enough to make the journey on foot, money can provide me both the meal and the 
mail coach -- i.e., it transfers my wishes from the realm of imagination, it 
translates them from their existence as thought, imagination, and desires, into 
their sensuous, real existence, from imagination into life, and from imagined 
being into real being. In this mediating role, money is the truly creative 
power. 
 Demand also exists for those who have no money, but their demand is simply a 
figment of the imagination. For me, or for any other third party, it has no 
effect, no existence. For me, it therefore remains unreal and without an object. 
The difference between effective demand based on money and ineffective demand 
based on my need, my passion, my desire, etc., is the difference between being 
and thinking, between a representation which merely exists within me and one 
which exists outside me as a real object. 
 If I have money for travel, I have no need -- i.e., no real and self-realizing 
need -- to travel. If I have a vocation to study, but no money for it, I have no 
vocation to study -- i.e., no real, true vocation. But, if I really do not have 
any vocation to study, but have the will and the money, then I have an effective 
vocation do to so. Money, which is the external, universal means and power -- 
derived not from man as man, and not from human society as society -- to turn 
imagination into reality and reality into more imagination, similarly turns real 
human and natural powers into purely abstract representations, and therefore 
imperfections and phantoms -- truly impotent powers which exist only in the 
individual's fantasy -- into real essential powers and abilities. Thus 
characterized, money is the universal inversion of individualities, which it 
turns into their opposites and to whose qualities it attaches contradictory 
qualities. 
 Money, therefore, appears as an inverting power in relation to the individual 
and to those social and other bonds which claim to be essences in themselves. It 
transforms loyalty into treason, love into hate, hate into love, virtue into 
vice, vice into virtue, servant into master, master into servant, nonsense into 
reason, and reason into nonsense. 
 Since money, as the existing and active concept of value, confounds and 
exchanges everything, it is the universal confusion and exchange of all things, 
an inverted world, the confusion and exchange of all natural and human 
qualities. 
 He who can buy courage is brave, even if he is a coward. Money is not exchange 
for a particular quality, a particular thing, or for any particular one of the 
essential powers of man, but for the whole objective world of man and of nature. 
Seen from the standpoint of the person who possesses it, money exchanges every 
quality for every other quality and object, even if it is contradictory; it is 
the power which brings together impossibilities and forces contradictions to 
embrace. 
 If we assume man to be man, and his relation to the world to be a human one, 
then love can be exchanged only for love, trust for trust, and so on. If you 
wish to enjoy art, you must be an artistically educated person; if you wish to 
exercise influence on other men, you must be the sort of person who has a truly 
stimulating and encouraging effect on others. Each one of your relations to man 
-- and to nature -- must be a particular expression, corresponding to the object 
of your will, of your real individual life. If you love unrequitedly -- i.e., if 
your love as love does not call forth love in return, if, through the vital 
expression of yourself as a loving person, you fail to become a loved person -- 
then your love is impotent, it is a misfortune. 
  



CRITIQUE OF HEGEL'S DIALECTIC AND GENERAL PHILOSOPHY



This is, perhaps, the place to make a few remarks, by way of explanation and 
justification, about the Hegelian dialectic -- both in general and in 
particular, as expounded in the Phenomenology and Logic, as well as about its 
relation to the modern critical movement. 
 Modern German criticism was so pre-occupied with the old world, and so 
entangled during the course of its development with its subject-matter, that it 
had a completely uncritical attitude to the method of criticism, and was 
completely unaware of the seemingly formal but in fact essential question of how 
we now stand in relation to the Hegelian dialectic. The lack of awareness about 
the relation of modern criticism to Hegelian philosophy in general and to the 
dialectic in particular has been so pronounced that critics like Strauss and 
Bruno Bauer are still, at least implicitly, imprisoned within Hegelian logic, 
the first completely so and the second in his Synoptiker (where, in opposition 
to Strauss, he substitutes the "self-consciousness" of abstract man for the 
substance of abstract nature) and even in his Das entdeckte Christentum. For 
example, in Das entdeckte Christentum we find the following passage: 
  
     "As if self-consciousness, in positing the world, that which is
     different, and in producing itself in that which it produces, since
     it then does away with the difference between what it has produced
     and itself and since it is only in the producing and in the
     movement that it is itself -- as if it did not have its purpose in
     this movement," etc.

              [ Bruno Bauer, Das entdeckte Christentum, Eine Erinnerung 
                an das achtzehnte Jahrhundert une ein Beitrag zur Krisis
                  des neunzehnten, Zurich and Winterthur, 1843, p.113 ]
Or again: 
  
     "They (the French Materialists) could not yet see that the movement
     of the universe only really comes to exist for itself and enters
     into unity with itself as the movement of self-consciousness."

                                              [ Bauer, ibid., p.114 f. ]
These expressions are not even different in their language from the Hegelian 
conception. They reproduce it word for word. 
 How little awareness there was of the relation to Hegel's dialectic while this 
criticism was under way (Bauer's Synoptiker), and how little even the completed 
criticism of the subject-matter contributed to such an awareness, is clear from 
Bauer's Gute Sache der Freiheit, where he dismisses Herr Gruppe's impertinent 
question "and now what will happen to logic?" by referring him to future 
Critics. 
 But, now that Feuerbach, both in his "Thesen" in the Anekdota and in greater 
detail in his Philosophie der Zukunft, has destroyed the foundations of the old 
dialectic and philosophy, that very school of Criticism, which was itself 
incapable of taking such a step but instead watched while it was taken, has 
proclaimed itself the pure, resolute, absolute Criticism which has achieved 
self-clarity, and in its spiritual pride has reduced the whole process of 
history to the relation between the rest of the world, which comes into the 
category of the "masses", and itself. It has assimilated all dogmatic antitheses 
into the one dogmatic antithesis between its own sagacity and the stupidity of 
the world, between the critical Christ and mankind -- the "rabble". It has daily 
and hourly demonstrated its own excellence against the mindlessness of the 
masses and has finally announced that the critical Day of Judgment is drawing 
near, when the whole of fallen humanity will be arrayed before it and divided 
into groups, whereupon each group will receive its certificate of poverty. The 
school of Criticism has made known in print its superiority to human feelings 
and the world, above which it sits enthroned in sublime solitude, with nothing 
but an occassional roar of sarcastic laughter from its Olympian lips. After all 
these delightful capers of idealism (Young Hegelianism) which is expiring in the 
form of Criticism, it (the critical school) has not once voiced so much as a 
suspicion of the need for a critical debate with its progenitor, the Hegelian 
dialectic. It has not even indicated a critical attitude to Feuerbach's 
dialectic. A completely uncritical attitude towards itself. 
 Feuerbach is the only person who has a serious and critical attitude to the 
Hegelian dialectic and who has made real discoveries in this field. He is the 
true conqueror of the old philosophy. The magnitude of his achievement and the 
quiet simplicity with which he present to to the world are in marked contrast to 
the others. 
 Feuerbach's great achievement is: 
 (1) To have shown that philosophy is nothing more than religion brought into 
thought and developed in thought, and that it is equally to be condemned as 
another form and mode of existence of the estrangement of man's nature. 
 (2) To have founded true materialism and real science by making the social 
relation of "man to man" the basic principle of this theory. 
 (3) To have opposed to the negation of the negation, which claims to be the 
absolute positive, the positive which is based upon itself and positively 
grounded in itself. 
 Feuerbach explains the Hegelian dialectic, and in so doing justifies taking the 
positive, that is sensuously ascertained, as his starting-point, in the 
following way: 
 Hegel starts out from the estrangement of substance (in logical terms: from the 
infinite, the abstractly universal), from the absolute and fixed abstraction. In 
ordinary language, he starts out from religion and theology. 
 Secondly, he supercedes the infinite and posits the actual, the sensuous, the 
real, the finite, the particular. (Philosophy as supersession of religion and 
theology.) 
 Thirdly, he once more supersedes the positive, and restores the abstraction, 
the infinite. Restoration of religion and theology. 
 Feuerbach, therefore, conceives the negation of the negation only as a 
contradiction of philosophy with itself, as philosophy which affirms theology 
(supersession, etc.) after having superseded it and, hence, affirms it in 
opposition to itself. 
 The positing or self-affirmation and self-confirmation present in the negation 
of the negation is regarded as a positing which is not yet sure of itself, which 
is still preoccupied with its opposite, which doubts itself and therefore stands 
in need of proof, which does not prove itself through its own existence, which 
is not admitted. It is, therefore, directly counterposed to that positing which 
is sensuously ascertained and grounded in itself. (Feuerbach sees negation of 
the negation, the concrete concept, as thought which surpasses itself in thought 
and as thought which strives to be direct awareness, nature, reality.) 
 But, since he conceives the negation of the negation from the aspect of the 
positive relation contained within it as the true and only positive and from the 
aspect of the negative relation contained within it as the only true act and 
self-realizing act of all being, Hegel has merely discovered the abstract, 
logical, speculative expression of the movement of history. This movement of 
history is not yet the real history of man as a given subject, it is simply the 
process of his creation, the history of his emergence. We shall explain both the 
abstract form of this movement and the difference between Hegel's conception of 
this process and that of modern criticism as formulated in Feuerbach's Das Wesen 
des Christentums, or, rather, the critical form of a movement which in Hegel is 
still uncritical. 
 Let us take a look at Hegel's system. We must begin with his Phenomenology, 
which is the true birthplace and secret of the Hegelian philosophy. 
  
     [ chapter and section headings ]
     Phenomenology

     A. Self-consciousness

         1. Consciousness.
             (a) Certainty in sense experience, or the "this" and
                 meaning. 
             (b) Perception or the thing with its properties and
                 illusion. 
             (c) Power and understanding, phenomena and the
                    super-sensible world.

         2. Self-consciousness. The truth of certainty of
             oneself.

             (a) Independence and dependence of self-consciousness
             (b) Freedom of self-consciousness. Stoicism,
                 scepticism, the unhappy consciousness.

         3. Reason. Certainty and truth.

             (a) Observational reason; observation of nature and of
                 self-consciousness. 
             (b) Realization of rational self-consciousness through
                 itself. Pleasure and necessity. The law of the
                 heart and the madness of self-conceit. Virtue and
                 the way of the world. 
             (c) Individuality which is real in and for itself. The
                 spiritual animal kingdom and deception or the thing
                 itself. Legislative reason. Reason which tests
                 laws.

     B. Mind.

         1. True mind, morality.
         2. Self-estranged mind, culture. 
         3. Mind certain of itself, morality.

     C. Religion.
         Natural religion, the religion of art, revealed religion.

     D. Absolute knowledge.
Hegel's Encyclopaedia begins with logic, with pure speculative thought, and ends 
with absolute knowledge, with the self-conscious, self-comprehending 
philosophical or absolute mind -- i.e., super-human, abstract mind. In the same 
way, the whole of the Encyclopaedia is nothing but the extended being or 
philosophical mind, its self-objectification; and the philosophical mind is 
nothing but the estranged mind of the world thinking within its 
self-estrangement -- i.e., conceiving itself abstractly. Logic is the currency 
of the mind, the speculative thought-value of man and of nature, their essence 
which has become completely indifferent to all real determinateness and hence 
unreal, alienated thought, and therefore though which abstract from nature and 
from real man; abstract thought. The external character of this abstract 
thought... nature as it is for this abstract thought. Nature is external to it, 
its loss of self; it grasps nature externally, as abstract thought, but as 
alienated abstract thought. Finally mind, which is thought returning to its 
birthplace and which as anthropological, phenomenological, psychological, moral, 
artistic-religious mind, is not valid for itself until it finally discovers and 
affirms itself as absolute knowledge and therefore as absolute, i.e., abstract 
mind, receives its conscious and appropriate existence. For its real existence 
is abstraction. 
 Hegel commits a double error. 
 The first appears most clearly in the Phenomenology, which is the birthplace of 
Hegelian philosophy. When, for example, Hegel conceives wealth, the power of the 
state, etc., as entities estranged from the being of man, he conceives them only 
in their thought form... They are entities of thought, and therefore simply an 
estrangement of pure -- i.e., abstract -- philosophical thought. Therefore, the 
entire movement ends with absolute knowledge. What these objects are estranged 
from and what they confront with their claim to reality is none other than 
abstract thought. The philosopher -- himself an abstract form of estranged man 
-- sets himself up as the yardstick of the estranged world. The entire history 
of alienation, and the entire retraction of this alienation, is, therefore, 
nothing more than the history history of the production of abstract (i.e., 
absolute), though, of logical, speculative thought. Estrangement, which thus 
forms the real interest of this alienation and its super-session, is the 
opposition of in itself and for itself, of consciousness and self-consciousness, 
of object and subject -- i.e., the opposition within thought itself of abstract 
thought and sensuous reality, or real sensuousness. All other oppositions and 
the movements of these oppositions are only the appearance, the mask, the 
exoteric form of these two opposites which are alone important and which form 
the meaning of these other, profane oppositions. It is not the fact that the 
human essence objectifies itself in an inhuman way, in opposition to itself, but 
that it objectifies itself in distinction from and in opposition to abstract 
thought, which constitutes the essence of estrangement as it exists and as it is 
to be superseded. 
 The appropriation of man's objectified and estranged essential powers is, 
therefore, firstly only an appropriation which takes place in consciousness, in 
pure thought -- i.e., in abstraction. In the Phenomenology, therefore, despite 
its thoroughly negative and critical appearance, and despite the fact that its 
criticism is genuine and often well ahead of its time, the uncritical 
positivism, and equally uncritical idealism of Hegel's later works, the 
philosophical dissolution and restoration of the empirical world, is already to 
be found in its latent form, in embryo, as a potentiality and a secret. 
Secondly, the vindication of the objective world for man -- e.g., the 
recognition that sensuous consciousness is not abstractly sensuous 
consciousness, but humanly sensuous consciousness; that religion, wealth, etc., 
are only the estranged reality of human objectification, of human essential 
powers born into work, and therefore only the way to true human reality -- this 
appropriation, or the insight into this process, therefore appears in Hegel in 
such a way that sense perception, religion, the power of the state, etc., are 
spiritual entities, for mind alone is the true essence of man, and the true form 
of mind is the thinking mind, the logical, speculative mind. The humanity of 
nature and of nature as produced by history, of man's products, is apparent from 
the fact that they are products of abstract mind and therefore factors of the 
mind, entities of thought. The Phenomenology is therefore concealed and 
mystifying criticism, criticism which has not attained self-clarity; but insofar 
as it grasps the estrangement of man -- even though man appears only in the form 
of mind -- all the elements of criticism are concealed within it, and often 
prepared and worked out in a way that goes far beyond Hegel's own point of view. 
The "unhappy consciousness", the "honest consciousness", the struggle of the 
"noble and base consciousness", etc., etc., these separate sections contain the 
critical elements -- but still in estranged form -- of entire spheres, such as 
religion, the state, civil life and so fort. Just as the entity, the 
object,appears as a thought-entity, so also the subject is always consciousness 
of self-consciousness; or rather, the object appears only as abstract 
consciousness and men only as self-consciousness. The various forms of 
estrangement which occur are therefore merely different forms of consciousness 
and self-consciousness. Since abstract consciousness, which is how the object is 
conceived, is in itself only one moment in the differentiation of 
self-consciousness, the result of the movement is the identity of 
self-consciousness and consciousness, absolute knowledge, the movement of 
abstract thought no longer directed outwards but proceeding only within itself; 
i.e., the result is the dialectic of pure thought. 
 The importance of Hegel's Phenomenology and its final result -- the dialectic 
of negativity as the moving and producing principle -- lies in the fact that 
Hegel conceives the self-creation of man as a process, objectification as loss 
of object [Entgegenstandlichung], as alienation and as supersession of this 
alienation; that he therefore grasps the nature of labor and conceives objective 
man -- true, because real man -- as the result of his own labor. The real, 
active relation of man to himself as a species-being, or the realization of 
himself as a real species-being -- i.e., as a human being, is only possible if 
he really employs all this species-powers -- which again is only possible 
through the cooperation of mankind and as a result of history -- and treats them 
as objects, which is at first only possible in the form of estrangement. 
  
*
We shall now demonstrate, in detail, the one-sidedness and the limitations of 
Hegel, as observed in the closing chapter of the Phenomenology. This chapter 
("Absolute Knowledge") contains the concentrated essence of the Phenomenology, 
its relation to the dialectic, and Hegel's consciousness of both and their 
interrelations. 
 For the present, let us observe that Hegel adopts the standpoint of modern 
political economy. He sees labor as the essence, the self-confirming essence, of 
man; he sees only the positive and not the negative side of labor. Labor is 
man's coming to be for himself within alienation or as an alienated man. The 
only labor Hegel knows and recognizes is abstract mental labor. So that which 
above all constitutes the essence of philosophy -- the alienation of man who 
knows himself or alienated science that thinks itself -- Hegel grasps as its 
essence, and is therefore able to bring together the separate elements of 
previous philosophies and present his own philosophy as the philosophy. What 
other philosophers did -- that they conceived separate moments of nature and of 
man's life as moments of self-consciousness, indeed, of abstract 
self-consciousness -- this Hegel knows by doing philosophy. Therefore, his 
science is absolute. 
 Let us now proceed to our subject. 
 "Absolute Knowledge." The last chapter of the Phenomenology. 
 The main point is that the object of consciousness is nothing else but 
self-consciousness, or that the object is only objectified self- consciousness, 
self-consciousness as object. (The positing of man = self-consciousness.) 
 It is, therefore, a question of surmounting the object of consciousness. 
Objectivity as such is seen as an estranged human relationship which does not 
correspond to human nature, to self-consciousness. The reappropriation of the 
objective essence of man, produced in the form of estrangement as something 
alien, therefore means transcending not only estrangement but also objectivity. 
That is to say, man is regarded as a non-objective, spiritual being. 
 Hegel describes the process of surmounting the object of consciousness in the 
following way: 
 The object does not only show itself as returning into the self, (according to 
Hegel that is a one-sided conception of the movement, a conception which grasps 
only one side). Man is equated with self. But the self is only abstractly 
conceived man, man produced by abstraction. Man is self [selbstisch]. His eyes, 
his ears, etc., have the quality of self; each one of his essential powers has 
this quality of self. But therefore it is quite wrong to say that 
self-consciousness has eyes, ears, essential powers. Self-consciousness is 
rather a quality of human nature, of the human eye, etc.; human nature is not a 
quality of self-consciousness. 
 The self abstracted and fixed for itself is man as abstract egoist, egoism 
raised to its pure abstraction in thought. (We shall come back to this later.) 
 For Hegel, human nature, man, is equivalent to self-consciousness. All 
estrangement of human nature is therefore nothing but estrangement of 
self-consciousness not as the expression, reflected in knowledge and in thought, 
of the real estrangement of human nature. On the contrary, actual estrangement, 
estrangement which appears real, is in its innermost hidden nature -- which 
philosophy first brings to light -- nothing more than the appearance of the 
estrangement of real human nature, of self-consciousness. The science which 
comprehends this is therefore called phenomenology. All reappropriation of 
estranged objective being, therefore, appears as an incorporation into 
self-consciousness; the man who takes hold of his being is only the 
self-consciousness which takes hold of objective being. The return of the object 
into the self is therefore the reappropriation of the object. 
 Expressed comprehensively, the surmounting of the object of consciousness means 
[the following eight points taken almost verbatim from Phenomenology, chapter 
"Absolute Knowledge"]: 
 (1) That the object as such presents itself to consciousness as something 
disappearing. 
 (2) That it is the alienation of self-consciousness which establishes thingness 
[Dingheit]. 
 (3) That this alienation has not only a negative but also a positive 
significance. (4) That this significance is not only for us or in itself, but 
for self-consciousness itself. 
 (5) For self-consciousness the negative of the object, its own supersession of 
itself, has a positive significance -- or self-consciousness knows the nullity 
of the object -- in that self-consciousness alienates itself, for in this 
alienation it establishes itself as object of establishes the object as itself, 
for the sake of the indivisible unity of being-for-itself. 
 (6) On the other hand, this other moment is also present in the process, 
namely, that self-consciousness has superseded and taken back into itself this 
alienation and objectivity, and is therefore at home in its other-being as such. 

 (7) This is the movement of consciousness, and consciousness is therefore the 
totality of its moments. 
 (8) Similarly, consciousness must have related itself to the object in terms of 
the totality of its determinations, and have grasped it in terms of each of 
them. This totality of determinations make the object intrinsically [an sich] a 
spiritual being, and it becomes that in reality for consciousness through the 
apprehending of each one of these determinations as determinations of self or 
through what we earlier called the spiritual attitude towards them. 
 As to (1) 
 That the object as such presents itself to consciousness as something 
disappearing is the above-mentioned return of the object into self. 
 As to (2) 
 The alienation of self-consciousness establishes thingness. Because man is 
equivalent to self-consciousness, his alienated objective being or thingness 
(that which is an object for him, and the only true object for him is that which 
is an essential object -- i.e., his objective essence; since it is not real man, 
and therefore not nature, for man is human nature, who becomes as such the 
subject, but only the abstraction of man, self-consciousness, thingness can only 
be alienated self-consciousness) is the equivalent of alienated 
self-consciousness, and thingness is established by this alienation. It is 
entirely to be expected that a living, natural being equipped and endowed with 
objective -- i.e., material -- essential powers should have real natural objects 
for the objects of its being, and that its self-alienation should take the form 
of the establishment of a real, objective world, but as something external to 
it, a world which does not belong to its being and which overpowers it. There is 
nothing incomprehensible or mysterious about that. It would only be mysterious 
if the contrary were true. But it is equally clear that a self-consciousness, 
through its alienation, can only establish thingness -- i.e., and abstract 
thing, a thing of abstraction and not a real thing. It is also clear that 
thingness is therefore in no way something independent or substantial vis-a-vis 
self-consciousness; it is a mere creature, a postulate of self-consciousness. 
And what is postulated, instead of confirming itself, is only a confirmation of 
the act of postulating; an act which, for a single moment, concentrates its 
energy as product and apparently confers upon that product -- but only for a 
moment -- the role of an independent, real being. 
 When real, corporeal man, his feet firmly planted on the solid earth and 
breathing all the powers of nature, establishes his real, objective essential 
powers as alien objects by externalization [Entausserung], it is not the 
establishing [Setzen] which is subject; it is the subjectivity of objective 
essential powers whose action must therefore be an objective one. An objective 
being acts objectively, and it would not act objectively is objectivity were not 
an inherent part of its essential nature. It creates and establishes only 
objects because it is established by objects, because it is fundamentally 
nature. In the act of establishing, it, therefore, does not descend from its 
"pure activity" to the creation of objects; on the contrary, its objective 
product simply confirms its objective activity, its activity as the activity of 
an objective, natural being. 
 Here we see how the constant naturalism or humanism differs both from idealism 
and materialism and is at the same time their unifying truth. We also see that 
only naturalism is capable of comprehending the process of world history. 
 Man is directly a natural being. As a natural being, and as a living natural 
being, he is on the one hand equipped with natural powers, with vital powers, he 
is an active natural being; these powers exist in him as dispositions and 
capacities, as drives. On the other hand, as a natural, corporeal, sensuous, 
objective being, he is a suffering, conditioned, and limited being, like animals 
and plants. that is to say, the objects of his drives exist outside him as 
objects independent of him; but these objects are objects of his need, essential 
objects, indispensable to the exercise and confirmation of his essential powers. 
To say that man is a corporeal, living, real, sensuous, objective being with 
natural powers means that he has real, sensuous objects as the object of his 
being and of his vital expression, or that he can only express his life in real, 
sensuous objects. To be objective, natural, and sensuous, and to have object, 
nature, and sense outside oneself, or to be oneself object, nature, and sense 
for a third person is one and the same thing. Hunger is a natural need; it 
therefore requires a nature and an object outside itself in order to satisfy and 
still itself. Hunger is the acknowledged need of my body for an object which 
exists outside itself and which is indispensable to its integration and to the 
expression of its essential nature. The Sun is an object for the plant, an 
indispensable object with confirms its life, just as the plant is an object for 
the Sun, as expression of its life-awakening power and its objective essential 
power. 
 A being which does not have its nature outside itself is not a natural being 
and plays no part in the system of nature. A being which has no object outside 
it, it would exist in a condition of solitude. For as soon as there are objects 
outside me, as soon as I am not alone, I am another, a reality other than the 
object outside me. For this third object I am therefore a reality other than it 
-- i.e., its object. A being which is not the object of another being therefore 
presupposes that no objective being exists. As soon as I have an object, this 
object has me for its object. But a non-objective being is an unreal, 
non-sensuous, merely thought -- i.e., merely conceived -- being, a being of 
abstraction. To be sensuous -- i.e., to be real -- is to be an object of sense, 
a sensuous object, and thus to have sensuous objects outside oneself, objects of 
one's sense perception. To be sensuous is to suffer (to be subjected to the 
actions of another). 
 Man as an objective sensuous being is therefore a suffering being, and because 
he feels his suffering [Leiden], he is a passionate [leidenschaftliches] being. 
Passion is man's essential power vigorously striving to attain its object. 
 But man is not only a natural being; he is a human natural being; i.e., he is a 
being for himself and hence a species-being, as which he must confirm and 
realize himself both in his being and in his knowning. Consequently, human 
objects are not natural objects as they immediately present themselves, nor is 
human sense, in its immediate and objective existence, human sensibility and 
human objectivity. Neither objective nor subjective nature is immediately 
present in a form adequate to the human being. And as everything natural must 
come into being, so man also has his process of origin in history. But for him 
history is a conscious process, and hence one which consciously superseded 
itself. History is the true natural history of man. (We shall return to this 
later.) 
 Thirdly, since this establishing of thingness is itself only an appearance, n 
act which contradicts the nature of pure activity, it must be superseded once 
again and thingness must be denied. 
 As to 3, 4, 5, 6. 
 (3) This alienation of consciousness has not only a negative but also a 
positive significance, and (4) it has this positive significance not only for us 
or in itself, but for consciousness itself. 
 (5) For self-consciousness, the negative of the object or its own supersession 
of itself has a positive significance -- or self-consciousness knows the nullity 
of the object -- in that self-consciousness alienates itself, for in this 
alienation it knows itself as object or, for the sake of the individisible unity 
of being-for-itself, the object as itself. 
 (6) On the other hand, the other moment is also present in the process, namely, 
that self-consciousness has superseded and taken back into itself this 
alienation and objectivity, and is therefore at home in its other-being as such. 

 To recapitulate. The appropriation of estranged objective being or the 
supersession of objectivity in the form of estrangement -- which must proceed 
from indifferent otherness to real, hostile estrangement -- principally means 
for Hegel the supersession of objectivity, since it is not the particular 
character of the object but its objective character which constitutes the 
offense and the estrangement as far as self-consciousness is concerned. The 
object is therefore negative, self-superseding, a nullity. This nullity of the 
object has not only a negative but also a positive significance for 
consciousness, for it is precisely the self-confirmation of its non-objectivity 
and abstraction. For consciousness itself, the nullity of the object therefore 
has a positive significance because it knows this nullity, the objective being, 
as its self-alienation, because it knows that this nullity exists only as a 
result of its own self-alienation... 
 The way in which consciousness is, and in which something is for it, is 
knowing. Knowing is its only act. Hence, something comes to exist for 
consciousness insofar as it knows that something. Knowing is its only objective 
relationship. It knows the nullity of the object -- i.e., that the object is not 
direct from it, the non-existence of the object for it, in that it knows the 
object as its own self-alienation; that is, it knows itself -- i.e., it knows 
knowing, considered as an object -- in that the object is only the appearance of 
an object, an illusion, which in essence is nothing more than knowing itself 
which has confronted itself with itself and hence a nullity, a something which 
has no objectivity outside knowing. Knowing knows that when it relates itself to 
an object it is only outside itself, alienates itself; that it only appears to 
itself as an object, or rather, that what appears to it as an object is only 
itself. 
 On the other hand, says, Hegel, this other moment is also present in the 
process, namely, that self-consciousness has superseded and taken back into 
itself this alienation and objectivity, and is therefore at home in its 
other-being as such. 
 This discussion is a compendium of all the illusions of speculation. 
 Firstly, consciousness -- self-consciousness -- is at home in its other-being 
as such. It is therefore, if we here abstract from Hegel's abstraction and talk 
instead of self-consciousness, of the self-consciousness of man, at home in its 
other-being as such. This implies, for one thing, that consciousness -- knowing 
as knowing, thinking as thinking -- claims to be the direct opposite of itself, 
claims to be the sensuous world, reality, life -- thought over-reaching itself 
in thought (Feuerbach). This aspect is present insofar as consciousness as mere 
consciousness is offended not by estranged objectivity but by objectivity as 
such. 
 Secondly, it implies that self-conscious man, insofar as he has acknowledged 
and superseded the spiritual world, or the general spiritual existence of his 
world, as self-alienation, goes on to reaffirm it in this alienated form and 
presents it as his true existence, restores it and claims to be at home in his 
other-being as such. Thus, for example, having superseded religion and 
recognized it as a product of self-alienation, he still finds himself confirmed 
in religion as religion. Here is the root of Hegel's false positivism or of his 
merely apparent criticism; it is what Feuerbach calls the positing, negating, 
and re-establishing of religion or theology, but it needs to be conceived in a 
more general way. So reason is at home in unreason as unreason. Man, who has 
realized that in law, politics, etc., he leads an alienated life as such. 
Self-affirmation, self-confirmation in contradiction with itself and with the 
knowledge and the nature of the object is therefore true knowledge and true 
life. 
 Therefore there can no longer be any question abut a compromise on Hegel's part 
with religion, the state, etc., since this untruth is the untruth of his 
principle. 
 If I know religion as alienated human self-consciousness, then what I know in 
it as religion is not my self-consciousness but my alienated self-consciousness 
confirmed in it. Thus I know that the self-consciousness which belongs to the 
essence of my own self is confirmed not in religion but in the destruction and 
supersession of religion. 
 In Hegel, therefore, the negation of the negation is not the confirmation of 
true being through the negation of apparent being. It is the confirmation of 
apparent being or self-estranged being in its negation, or the negation of this 
apparent being as an objective being residing outside man and independent of him 
and its transformation into the subject. 
 The act of superseding therefore plays a special role in which negation and 
preservation (affirmation) are brought together. 
 Thus, for example, in Hegel's Philosophy of Right, private right superseded 
equals morality, morality superseded equals family, family superseded equals 
civil society, civil society superseded equals state, and state superseded 
equals world history. In reality, private right, morality, family, civil 
society, state, etc., continue to exist, but have become moments and modes of 
human existence which are meaningless in isolation but which mutually dissolve 
and engender one another. They are moments of movement. 
 In their real existence this character of mobility is hidden. It first appears, 
is first revealed, in thought and in philosophy. Hence, my true religious 
existence is my existence in the philosophy of religion, my true political 
existence is my existence in the philosophy of right, my true natural existence 
is my existence in the philosophy of nature, my true artistic existence is my 
existence in the philosophy of art and my true human existence is my existence 
in philosophy. Similarly, the true existence of religion, state, nature, and art 
is the philosophy of religion, nature, the state and art. But if the philosophy 
of religions, etc., is for me the true existence of religion, then I am truly 
religious only as a philosopher of religion, and I therefore deny real 
religiosity and the really religious man. But at the same time I confirm them, 
partly in my own existence or in the alien existence which I oppose to them -- 
for this is merely their philosophical expression -- and partly in their 
particular and original form, for I regard them as merely apparent other-being, 
as allegories, forms of their own true existence concealed under sensuous 
mantles -- i.e. forms of my philosophical existence. 
 Similarly, quality superseded equals quantity, quantity superseded equals 
measure, measure superseded equals essence, essence superseded equals 
appearance, appearance superseded equals reality, reality superseded equals the 
concept, the concept superseded equals objectivity, objectivity superseded, 
equals the absolute idea, the absolute idea superseded equals nature, nature 
superseded equals subjective spirit, subjective spirit superseded equals ethical 
objective spirit. ethical spirit superseded equals art, art superseded equals 
religion, religion superseded equals absolute knowledge. 
 On the one hand, this act of superseding is the act of superseding an entity of 
thought; thus, private property as thought is superseded in the thought of 
morality. And because thought imagines itself to be the direct opposite of 
itself -- i.e., sensuous reality -- and therefore regards its own activity as 
sensuous, real activity, this supersession in thought, which leaves its object 
in existence in reality, thinks it has actually overcome it. On the other hand, 
since the object has now become a moment of thought for the thought which is 
doing the superseding, it is regarded in its real existence as a continuation of 
thought, so self-consciousness, of abstraction. 
 From one aspect the existence which Hegel superseded in philosophy is therefore 
not real religion, state, nature, but religion already in the form of an object 
of knowledge -- i.e., dogmatics; hence also jurisprudence, political science, 
and natural science. From this aspect, he therefore stands in opposition both to 
the actual being and to the immediate non-philosophical science or 
non-philosophical concepts of being. He therefore contradicts their current 
conceptions. 
 From the other aspect the man who is religious, etc., can find his final 
confirmation in Hegel. 
 We should now examine the positive moments of the Hegelian dialectic, within 
the determining limits of estrangement. 
 (a) The act of superseding as an objective movement which re-absorbs alienation 
into itself. This is the insight, expressed within estrangement, into the 
appropriation of objective being through the supersession of its alienation; it 
is the estranged insight into the real objectification of man, into the real 
appropriation of his objective being through the destruction of the estranged 
character of the objective world, through the supersession of its estranged mode 
of existence, just as atheism as the supersession of God is the emergence of 
theoretical humanism, and communism as the supersession of private property the 
vindication of real human life as man's property, the emergence of practical 
humanism. Atheism is humanism mediated with itself through the supersession of 
religion; communism is humanism mediated with itself through the supersession of 
private property. Only when we have superseded this mediation -- which is, 
however, a necessary precondition -- will positive humanism, positively 
originating in itself, come into being. 
 But atheism and communism are no flight, no abstraction, no loss of the 
objective world created by man or of his essential powers projected into 
objectivity. No impoverished regression to unnatural, primitive simplicity. They 
are rather the first real emergence, the realization become real for man, of his 
essence as something real. 
 Therefore, in grasping the positive significance of the negation which has 
reference to itself, even if once again in estranged form, Hegel grasps man's 
self-estrangement alienation of being, loss of objectivity, and loss of reality 
as self-discovery, expression of being, objectification and realization. In 
short, he sees labor -- within abstraction -- as man's act of self-creation and 
man's relation to himself as an alien being and the manifestation of himself as 
an alien being as the emergence of species-consciousness and species-life. 
 (b) But in Hegel, apart from or rather as a consequence of the inversion we 
have already described, this act appears,firstly, to be merely formal because it 
is abstract and because human nature itself is seen only as abstract thinking 
being, as self-consciousness. 
 And secondly, because the conception is formal and abstract, the supersession 
of alienation becomes a confirmation of alienation. In other words, Hegel sees 
this movement of self-creation and self-objectification in the form of 
self-alienation and self-estrangement as the absolute and hence the final 
expression of human life which has itself as its aim, is at rest in itself and 
has attained its own essential nature. 
 This movement in its abstract form as dialectic is therefore regarded as truly 
human life. And since it is still an abstraction, an estrangement of human life, 
it is regarded as a divine process, but as the divine process of man. It is 
man's abstract, pure, absolute being (as distinct from himself), which itself 
passes through this process. 
 Thirdly, this process must have a bearer, a subject; but the subject comes into 
being only as the result; this result, the subject knowing itself as absolute 
self-consciousness, is therefore God, absolute spirit, the self-knowing and 
self-manifesting idea. Real man and real nature become mere predicates, symbols 
of this hidden, unreal man and this unreal nature. Subject and predicate 
therefore stand in a relation of absolute inversion to one another; a mystical 
subject-object or subjectivity encroaching upon the object, the absolute subject 
as a process, as a subject which alienates itself and returns to itself from 
alienation, while at the same time re-absorbing this alienation, and the subject 
as this process; pure, ceaseless revolving within itself. 
 First, the formal and abstract conception of man's act of self-creation of 
self-objectification. 
 Because Hegel equates man with self-consciousness, the estranged object, the 
estranged essential reality of man is nothing but consciousness, nothing but the 
thought of estrangement, its abstract and hence hollow and unreal expression, 
negation. The supersession of alienation is therefore likewise nothing but an 
abstract, hollow supersession of that hollow abstraction, the negation of the 
negation. The inexhaustible, vital, sensuous, concrete activity of 
self-objectification is therefore reduced to its mere abstraction, absolute 
negativity, an abstraction which is then given permanent form as such and 
conceived as independent activity, as activity itself. Since this so-called 
negativity is nothing more than the abstract, empty form of that real living 
act, its content can only be a formal content, created by abstraction from all 
content. Consequently there are general, abstract forms of abstraction which fit 
every content and are therefore indifferent to all content: forms of thought and 
logical categories torn away from real mind and real nature. (We shall expound 
the logical content of absolute negativity later.) 
 Hegel's positive achievement in his speculative logic is to present determinate 
concepts, the universal fixed thought-forms in their independence of nature and 
mind, as a necessary result of the universal estrangement of human existence, 
and thus also of human thought, and to comprehend them as moments in the process 
of abstraction. For example, being superseded is essence, essence superseded is 
the concept, the concept superseded is... the absolute idea. But what is the 
absolute idea? It is compelled to supersede its own self again, if it does not 
wish to go through the whole act of abstraction once more from the beginning and 
to reconcile itself to being a totality of abstraction which comprehends itself 
as abstraction knows itself to be nothing; it must relinquish itself, the 
abstraction, and so arrives at something which is its exact opposite, nature. 
Hence the whole of the Logic is proof of the fact that abstract thought is 
nothing for itself, that the absolute idea is nothing for itself, and that only 
nature is something. 
 The absolute idea, the abstract idea which "considered from the aspect of its 
unity with itself in intuition [Anschauen]", and which "in its own absolute 
truth resolves to let the moment of it s particularity or of initial 
determination and other-being, the immediate-idea, as its reflection, issue 
freely from itself as nature", this whole idea, which conducts itself in such a 
strange and baroque fashion, and which has caused the Hegelians such terrible 
headaches, is purely and simply abstraction -- i.e., the abstract thinker; 
abstraction which, taught by experience and enlightened as to its own truth, 
resolves under various conditions -- themselves false and still abstract -- to 
relinquish itself and to establish its other-being, the particular, the 
determinate, in place of its self-pervasion [Beisichsein], non-being, 
universality, and indeterminateness; to let nature, which is concealed within 
itself as a mere abstraction, as a thing of things, issue freely from itself -- 
i.e., to abandon abstractions and to take a look at nature, which exists free 
from abstraction. The abstract idea, which directly becomes intuition, is quite 
simply nothing more than abstract thought which relinquishes itself and decides 
to engage in intuiting. This entire transition from logic to philosophy of 
nature is nothing more than the transition -- so difficult for the abstract 
thinker to effect, and hence described by him in sich a bizarre manner -- from 
abstracting to intuiting. The mystical feeling which drives the philosopher from 
abstract thinking to intuition is boredom, the longing for a content. 
 The man estranged from himself is also the thinker estranged from his essence 
-- i.e., from his natural and human essence. His thoughts are therefore fixed 
phantoms existing outside nature and man. In his Logic, Hegel has locked up all 
these phantoms, conceiving each of them firstly as negative -- i.e., as 
alienation of human thought -- and secondly as negation of the negation -- i.e., 
as supersession of this alienation, as a real expression of human thought. But 
since this negation of the negation is itself still trapped in estrangement, 
what this amounts to is in part a failure to move beyond the final stage, the 
stage of self-reference in alienation, which is the true existence of these 
phantoms. 
 [Marx note: That is, Hegel substitutes the act of abstraction revolving within 
itself for these fixed abstractions; in so doing he has the merit, first of all, 
of having revealed the source of all these inappropriate concepts which 
originally belonged to separate philosophers, of having combined them and of 
having created as the object of criticism the exhaustive range of abstraction 
rather than one particular abstraction. We shall later see why Hegel separates 
thought from the subject; but it is already clear that if man is not human, then 
the expression of his essential nature cannot be human, and therefore that 
thought itself could not be conceived as an expression of man's being, of man as 
a human and natural subject, with eyes, ears, etc., living in society, in the 
world, and in nature.] 
 Insofar as this abstraction apprehends itself and experiences an infinite 
boredom with itself, we find in Hegel an abandonment of abstract thought which 
moves solely within thought, which has no eyes, teeth, ears, anything, and a 
resolve to recognize nature as being and to go over to intuition. 
 But nature, too, taken abstractly, for itself, and fixed in its separation from 
man, is nothing for man. It goes without saying that the abstract thinker who 
decides on intuition, intuits nature abstractly. Just as nature lay enclosed in 
the thinker in a shape which even to him was shrouded and mysterious, as an 
absolute idea, a thing of thought, so what he allowed to come forth from himself 
was simply this abstract nature, nature as a thing of thought -- but with the 
significance now of being the other-being of thought, real, intuited nature as 
distinct from abstract thought. Or, to put it in human terms, the abstract 
thinker discovers from intuiting nature that the entities which he imagined he 
was creating out of nothing, out of pure abstraction, in a divine dialectic, as 
the pure products of the labor of thought living and moving within itself and 
never looking out into reality, are nothing more than abstractions from natural 
forms. The whole of nature only repeats to him in a sensuous, external form the 
abstractions of logic. He analyzes nature and these abstractions again. His 
intuiting of nature is therefore only the act of confirmation of his abstraction 
from the intuition of nature, a conscious re-enactment of the process by which 
he produced his abstraction. Thus, for example, Time is equated with Negativity 
referred to itself. In the natural form, superseded Movement as Matter 
corresponds to superseded Becoming as Being. Light is the natural form of 
Reflection-in-itself. Body as Moon and Comet is the natural form of the 
antithesis which, according to the Logic, is the positive grounded upon itself 
and the negative grounded upon itself. The Earth is the natural form of the 
logical ground, as the negative unity of the antithesis, etc. 
 Nature as nature -- i.e., insofar as it is sensuously distinct from the secret 
sense hidden within it -- nature separated and distinct from these abstractions 
is nothing, a nothing proving itself to be nothing, it is devoid of sense, or 
only has the sense of an externality to be superseded. 
  
     "In the finite-teleological view is to be found the correct premise
     that nature does not contain the absolute end within itself."
Its end is the confirmation of abstraction. 
  
     "Nature has revealed itself as the idea in the form of other-being. 
     Since the idea in this form is the negative of itself, or external
     to itself, nature is not only external relative to this idea, but
     externality constitutes the form in which it exists as nature."

                                                         [ Hegel p.225 ]

     "For us, mind has nature as its premise, since it is nature's truth
     and, therefore, its absolute primus. In this truth, nature has
     disappeared, and mind has yielded as the idea which has attained
     being-for-itself, whose object as well as subject is the concept. 
     This identity is absolute negativity, for, whereas in nature the
     concept has its perfect external objectivity, in this its
     alienation has been superseded and the concept has become
     identical with itself. It is this identity only in that it is a
     return from nature."

     "Revelation, as the abstract idea, is unmediated transition to, the
     coming-to-be, nature; as the revelation of the mind which is free it
     is the establishing of nature as its own world; an establishing
     which, as reflection, is at the same time a presupposing of the
     world as independently existing nature. Revelation in its concept
     is the creation of nature as the mind's being, in which it procures
     the affirmation and truth of its freedom."

     "The absolute is mind; this is the highest definition of the
     absolute."






