No More Learning

8 We may well, therefore, feel astonished at the cleverness Of Proudhon, who would abolish capitalistic property by enforcing the eternal laws of property that are based on commodity production!
9 --Capital, viz. , accumulated wealth employed with a view to profit. ? (Malthus, l. c. ) --Capital . . . consists of wealth saved from revenue, and used with a view to profit. ? (R. Jones: --An Introductory Lecture on Polit. Econ. ,? Lond. , 1833, p. 16. )
10 --The possessors of surplus-produce or capital. ? (--The Source and Remedy of the National Difficulties. A Letter to Lord John Russell. ? Lond. , 1821. )
11 --Capital, with compound interest on every portion of capital saved, is so all engrossing that all the wealth in the world from which income is derived, has long ago become the interest on capital. ? (London, Economist, 19th July, 1851. )
12 --No political economist of the present day can by saving mean. mere hoarding: and beyond this contracted and insufficient proceeding, no use of the term in reference to the national wealth can well be imagined,. but that which must arise from a different application of what is saved, founded upon a real distinction between the different kinds of labour maintained by it. ? (Malthus, l. c. , pp. 38, 39. )
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13 Thus for instance, Balzac, who so thoroughly studied every shade of avarice, represents the old usurer Gobseck as in his second childhood when he begins to heap up a hoard of commodities.
14 --Accumulation of stocks . . . upon-exchange . . . over-production. ? (Th. Corbet. l. c. , p. 104. )
15 In this sense Necker speaks of the --objets de faste et de somptuosite? ,? [things of pomp and luxury] of which --le temps a grossi l'accummulation,? [accumulation has grown with time] and which --les lois de proprie? te? ont rassemble? s dans une seule classe de la socie? te? . ? [the laws of property have brought into the hands of one class of society alone] (Oeuvres de M. Necker, Paris and Lausanne, 1789, t. ii. , p. 291. )
16 Ricardo, 1. c. , p. 163, note.
17 In spite of his --Logic,? John St. Mill never detects even such faulty analysis as this when made by his predecessors, an analysis which, even from the bourgeois standpoint of the science, cries out for rectification. In every case he registers with the dogmatism of a disciple, the confusion of his master's thoughts. So here: --The capital itself in the long run becomes entirely wages, and when replaced by the sale of produce becomes wages again. ?
18 In his description of the process of reproduction, and of accumulation, Adam Smith, in many ways, not only made no advance, but even lost considerable ground, compared with his predecessors, especially by the Physiocrats. Connected with the illusion mentioned in the text, is the really wonderful dogma, left by him as an inheritance to Political Economy, the dogma, that the price of commodities is made up of wages, profit (interest) and rent, i. e. , of wages and surplus value. Starting from this basis, Storch naively confesses, --Il est impossible de re? soudre le prix ne? cessaire dans ses e? le? ments les plus simples. ? [. . . it is impossible to resolve the necessary price into its simplest elements] (Storch, l. c. , Petersb. Edit. , 1815, t. ii. , p. 141, note. ) A fine science of economy this, which declares it impossible to resolve the price of a commodity into its simplest elements! This point will be further investigated in the seventh part of Book iii.
19 The reader will notice, that the word revenue is used in a double sense: first, to designate surplus value so far as it is the fruit periodically yielded by capital; secondly, to designate the part of that fruit which is periodically consumed by the capitalist, or added to the fund that supplies his private consumption. I have retained this double meaning because it harmonises with the language of the English and French economists.
20 Taking the usurer, that old-fashioned but ever renewed specimen of the capitalist for his text, Luther shows very aptly that the love of power is an element in the desire to get rich. --The heathen were able, by the light of reason, to conclude that a usurer is a double-dyed thief and murderer. We Christians, however, hold them in such honour, that we fairly worship them for the sake of their money. . . . Whoever eats up, robs, and steals the nourishment of another, that man commits as great a murder (so far as in him lies) as he who starves a man or utterly undoes him. Such does a usurer, and sits the while safe on his stool, when he ought rather to be hanging on the gallows, and be eaten by as many ravens as he has stolen guilders, if only there were so much flesh on him, that so many ravens could stick their beaks in and share it. Meanwhile, we hang the small thieves. . . . Little thieves are put in the stocks, great thieves go flaunting in gold and silk. . . . Therefore is there, on this earth, no greater enemy of man (after the devil) than a gripe-money, and usurer, for he wants to be God over all men. Turks, soldiers, and tyrants are also bad men, yet must they let the people live, and Confess that they are bad, and enemies, and do, nay, must, now and then show pity to some. But a usurer and money-glutton, such a one would have the whole world perish of hunger and thirst, misery and want, so far as in him lies, so that he may have all to himself, and every one may receive from him as from a God, and be his serf for ever. To wear fine cloaks, golden chains, rings, to wipe his mouth, to be deemed and taken for a worthy, pious man . . . . Usury is a great huge monster, like a werewolf, who lays waste all, more than any Cacus, Gerion or Antus. And yet decks himself out, and would be thought pious, so that people
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may not see where the oxen have gone, that he drags backwards into his den. But Hercules shall hear the cry of the oxen and of his prisoners, and shall seek Cacus even in cliffs and among rocks, and shall set the oxen loose again from the villain. For Cacus means the villain that is a pious usurer, and steals, robs, eats everything. And will not own that he has done it, and thinks no one will find him out, because the oxen, drawn backwards into his den, make it seem, from their foot-prints, that they have been let out. So the usurer would deceive the world, as though he were of use and gave the world oxen, which he, however, rends, and eats all alone. . . And since we break on the wheel, and behead highwaymen, murderers and housebreakers, how much more ought we to break on the wheel and kill. . . . hunt down, curse and behead all usurers. ? (Martin Luther, l. c. )
21 See Goethe's --Faust. ?
22 Dr. Aikin: --Description of the Country from 30 to 40 miles round Manchester. ? Lond. , 1795, p. 182, sq.
23 A. Smith, l. c. , bk. iii. , ch. iii.
24 Even J. B. Say says: --Les e? pargnes des riches se font aux de? pens des pauvres. ? [the savings of the rich are made at the expense of the poor] --The Roman proletarian lived almost entirely at the expense of society. . . . It can almost be said that modern society lives at the expense of the proletarians, on what it keeps out of the remuneration of labour. ? (Sismondi: --e? tudes, &c. ,? t. i. , p. 24. )
25 Malthus, l. c. , pp. 319, 320.
26 --An Inquiry into those Principles Respecting the Nature of Demand, &c. ,? p. 67. 27 l. c. , p. 59.
28 (Senior, --Principes fondamentaux del'E? con. Pol. ? trad. Arrivabene. Paris, 1836, p. 308. ) This was rather too much for the adherents of the old classical school. --Mr.
Senior has substituted for it? (the expression, labour and,profit) --the expression labour and Abstinence. He who converts his revenue abstains from the enjoyment which its expenditure would afford him. It is not the capital, but the use of the capital productively, which is the cause of profits. ? (John Cazenove, l. c. , p. 130, Note. ) John St. Mill, on the contrary, accepts on the one hand Ricardo's theory of profit, and annexes on the other hand Senior's --remuneration of abstinence. ? He is as much at home in absurd contradictions, as he feels at sea in the Hegelian contradiction, the source of all dialectic. It has never occurred to the vulgar economist to make the simple reflexion, that every human action may be viewed, as --abstinence? from its opposite. Eating is abstinence from fasting, walking, abstinence from standing still, working, abstinence from idling, idling, abstinence from working, &c. These gentlemen would do well, to ponder, once in a wwhile, over Spinoza's: --Determinatio est Negatio. ?
29 Senior, l. c. , p. 342.
30 --No one . . . will sow his wheat, for instance, and allow it to remain a twelvle month in the ground, or leave his wine in a cellar for years, instead of consuming these things or their equivalent at once . . . unless he expects to acquire additional value, &c. ? (Scrope, --Polit. Econ. ,? edit. by A. Potter, New York, 1841, pp. 133-134. )
31 --La privation que s'impose le capitaliste? , en pre^tant [The deprivation the capitalist imposes on himself by lending . . . ] (this euphemism used, for the purpose of identifying, according to the approved method of vulgar economy, the labourer who is exploited, with the industrial capitalist who exploits, and to whom other capitalists lend money) ses instruments de production au travailleur, au lieu d'en consacrer la valeur a` son propre usage, en la transforment en objets d'utilite? ou d'agre? ment. ? [his instruments of production to the worker, instead of devoting their value to his own consumption, by transforming them into objects of utility or pleasure] (G. de Molinari, l. c. , p. 36. )
32 --La conservation d'un capital exige . . . un effort constant pour re? sister a la tentation de le consommer. ? (Courcelle-Seneuil, l. c. , p. 57. )
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33 --The particular classes of income which yield the most abundantly to the progress of national capital, change at different stages of their progress, and are, therefore, entirely different in nations occupying different positions in that progress. . . . Profits . . . unimportant source of accumulation, compared with wages and rents, in the earlier stages of society. . . . When a considerable advance in the powers of national industry has actually taken place, profits rise into comparative importance as a source of accumulation. ? (Richard Jones, --Textbook, &c. ,? pp. 16, 21. )
34 l. c. , p. 36, sq.
35 --Ricardo says: ? In different stages of society the accumulation of capital or of the means of employing' (i. e. , exploiting) ? labour is more or less rapid, and must in all cases depend on the productive powers of labour. The productive powers of labour are generally greatest where there is an abundance of fertile land. ' If, in the first sentence, the productive powers of labour mean the smallness of that aliquot part of any produce that goes to those whose manual labour produced it, the sentence is nearly identical, because the remaining aliquot part is the fund whence capital can, if the owner pleases, be accumulated. But then this does not generally happen, where there is most fertile land. ? (--Observations on Certain Verbal Disputes, &c. ? pp. 74, 75. )
36 J. Stuart Mill: --Essays on Some Unsettled Questions of Political Economy,? Lond. , 1844, p. 90.
37 --An Essay on Trade and Commerce,? Lond. , 1770, P. 44. The Times of December, 1866, and January, 1867, in like manner published certain outpourings of the heart of the English mine-owner, in which the happy lot of the Belgian miners was pictured, who asked and received no more than was strictly necessary for them to live for their --masters. ? The Belgian labourers have to suffer much, but to figure in The Times as model labourers! In the beginning of February, 1867, came the answer: strike of the Belgian miners at Marchienne, put down by powder and lead.
38 l. c. , pp. 44, 46.
39 The Northamptonshire manufacturer commits a pious fraud, pardonable in one whose heart is so full. He nominally compares the life of the English and French manufacturing labourer, but in the words just quoted he is painting, as he himself confesses in his confused way, the French agricultural labourers.
40 l. c. , pp. 70, 71. Note in the 3rd German edition: today, thanks to the competition on the world- market, established since then, we have advanced much further. --If China,? says Mr. Stapleton, M. P. , to his constituents, --should become a great manufacturing country, I do not see how the manufacturing population of Europe could sustain the contest without descending to the level of their competitors. ? (Times, Sept. 3, 1873, p. 8. ) The wished-for goal of English capital is no longer Continental wages but Chinese.
41 Benjamin Thompson: --Essays, Political, Economical, and Philosophical, &c. ,? 3 vols. , Lond, 1796- 1802, vol. i. , p. 294. In his --The State of the Poor, or an History of the labouring Classes in England, &c. ,? Sir F. M. Eden strongly recommends the Rumfordian beggar-soup to workhouse overseers, and reproachfully warns the English labourers that --many poor people, particularly in Scotland, live, and that very comfortably, for months together, upon oat-meal and barley-meal, mixed with only water and salt. ? (l. c. , vol. i, book i. , ch. 2, p. 503. ) The same sort of hints in the 19th century. --The most wholesome mixtures of flour having been refused (by the English agricultural labourer). . . in Scotland, where education is better, this prejudice is, probably, unknown. ? (Charles H. Parry, M. D. , --The Question of the Necessecity of the Existing Corn Laws Considered. ? London, 1816,, p. 69. ) This same Parry, however, complains that the English labourer is now (1815) in a much worse condition than in Eden's time (1797. )
42 From the reports of the last Parliamentary Commission on adulteration of means of subsistence, it will be seen that the adulteration even of medicines is the rule, not the exception in England. E. g. , the
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examination of 34 specimens of opium, purchased of as many different chemists in London, showed that 31 were adulterated with poppy heads, wheat-flour, gum, clay, sand, &c. Several did not contain an atom of morphia.
43 G. B. Newnham (barrister-at-law): --A Review of the Evidence before the Committee of the two Houses of Parliament on the Com Laws. ? Lond. , 1815, p. 20, note.
44 l. c. , pp. 19, 20.
45 C. H. Parry, l. c. , pp. 77, 69. The landlords, on their side, not only --indemnified? themselves for the Anti-Jacobin War, which they waged in the name of England, but enriched themselves enormously. Their rents doubled, trebled, quadrupled, --and in one instance, increased sixfold in eighteen years. ? (I. c. , pp. 100, 101. )
46 Friedrich Engels, --Lage der arbeitenden Klasse in England,? p. 20.
47 lassic economy has, on account of a deficient analysis of the labour process, and of the process of creating value-, never properly grasped this weighty element of reproduction, as may be seen in Ricardo; he says, e. g.