Karl Marx Quotes on the Question of Work

Karl Marx Quotes on the Question of Work

"The realm of freedom begins only where one ceases to work out of necessity and externally imposed opportunity ; it is therefore by nature beyond the sphere of material production itself."

Karl Marx, in "Capital", Book III)

“Work itself is harmful and disastrous not only under present conditions, but in general, insofar as its aim is the mere increase of wealth…

Labor does not only produce commodities ; it produces itself and the worker as a commodity, and this to the extent that it produces commodities in general.

Karl Marx, in "Manuscripts of 1844"

“Labor is not the source of all wealth. Nature is just as much the source of use values ​​(which are, after all, real wealth !) as labor, which is itself only the expression of a natural force, the labor power of man. This hackneyed phrase is found in all primers, and it is true only on condition that it is implied that labor is prior, with all the objects and processes that accompany it. But a socialist program cannot allow this bourgeois phraseology to pass over in silence the conditions that alone can give it meaning. And it is only to the extent that man, from the outset, acts as an owner with regard to nature, this primary source of all the means and materials of labor, it is only if he treats it as an object belonging to him that his labor becomes the source of use values, hence of wealth. The bourgeois have excellent reasons for attributing to labor this supernatural power of creation : for, from the fact that labor is dependent on nature, it follows that the man who possesses nothing other than his labor power will necessarily, in any state of society and civilization, be the slave of other men who have set themselves up as possessors of the objective conditions of labor. He can work, and consequently live, only with the permission of the latter...

Karl Marx, in "Marginal Glosses on the Program of the German Workers’ Party"

"The bourgeois have excellent reasons for attributing to labor this supernatural power of creation : for, from the fact that labor is dependent on nature, it follows that the man who possesses nothing other than his labor power will necessarily, in any state of society and civilization, be the slave of other men who have set themselves up as possessors of the objective conditions of labor. He can work, and consequently live, only with the permission of the latter."

Karl Marx, in "Marginal Glosses on the Program of the German Workers’ Party"

“One of the prerequisites for the emergence of wage labor, and one of the historical conditions of capital, is free labor and the exchange of free labor for money, in order to produce money and convert it into values, in order to be consumed by money, not as use value for pleasure, but as exchange value for money. Another prerequisite is the separation of free labor from the objective conditions of its realization—from the means and means of labor. This means, above all, that workers must be separated from the land, which serves as a natural laboratory. This means the dissolution of small, free landownership and common landownership, based on the oriental type of commune.

In both cases, the relationship between the worker and the objective conditions of his work is determined by a question of property : it is the natural unity of labor and the material conditions required for that work. In fact, the worker has an objective existence, independent of his labor. The individual is linked to himself as owner, as master of the conditions of his reality. The same relationship exists between an individual and the rest. Where this prerequisite comes from the community, the others are its co-owners, who are so many embodiments of common property. When it comes from the individual families that jointly constitute the community, they are independent owners coexisting with it, independent private owners. The common property that previously absorbed everything and encompassed them all now subsists as a special "ager publicus," separate from the many private owners. (ager publicus means common possession of land)

In both cases, individuals behave not as workers, but as owners—and as members of a community who also work. The object of this work is not the creation of value, although they may perform surplus labor to exchange for alien labor—that is, for surplus products. Its purpose is to maintain the owner and his family, as well as the common body as a whole. The establishment of the individual as a worker, stripped of all qualities except this one, is itself a product of history….

Once men have finally settled down, and to a lesser extent, the way in which this original community is modified, will depend on various external conditions, climatic, geographical, physical, etc., as well as on their particular natural constitution – on their tribal character. The spontaneously evolved tribal community, or, if you will, the herd – the common bonds of blood, language, custom, etc. – is the first condition for the appropriation of the purpose of life and of the activity that reproduces and gives its material expression or purpose [vergegenständlichenden] (activity of shepherd, hunter, farmer, etc.). The Earth is the great laboratory, the arsenal that provides both the means and the material for work, as well as the location, the basis of the community. Men’s relations with it are naive ; they consider themselves its common owners and those of the community that produces and reproduces itself through living labor. Only to the extent that the individual is a member—literally and figuratively—of such a community does he consider himself an owner or possessor. In reality, appropriation by means of the labor process takes place under those preconditions, which are not the product of labor, but appear as its natural or divine preconditions.

Karl Marx, in "Pre-capitalist Economic Formations"

“Capital is a contradiction in action : it tends to reduce labor time to a minimum, while making it the sole source and measure of wealth. It therefore diminishes it in its necessary form in order to increase it in its useless form, making superfluous labor time the condition—a matter of life and death—of necessary labor time. On the one hand, capital sets in motion all the forces of science and nature, it stimulates social cooperation and commerce in order to (relatively) free the creation of wealth from labor time ; on the other hand, it intends to measure in labor time the immense social forces thus created, so that it contains, immobilizes, and limits their achievements. Productive forces and social relations—the double principle of the development of the individual—are and mean for capital only simple means for maintaining itself on its own narrow basis. In reality, these are the material conditions that will shatter the foundations of capital.” (…) What is new in capital is that it increases the surplus labor time of the masses by all means of art and science, since its immediate aim is not use value but value in itself, which it cannot realize without the direct appropriation of surplus labor time, which constitutes its wealth. Thus, by reducing labor time to a minimum, capital contributes in spite of itself to creating social time available for the service of all, for the development of each. But, while creating available time, it tends to transform it into surplus labor. The more it succeeds in this task, the more it suffers from overproduction ; and as soon as it is unable to exploit surplus labor, capital stops necessary work. The more this contradiction becomes acute, the more it is realized that the increase in productive forces must depend on the appropriation of surplus labor not by others but by the working masses themselves. (…) True wealth being the full productive power of all individuals, the standard of measurement will not be working time, but available time. To adopt working time as the standard of wealth is to base the latter on poverty, it is to want leisure to exist only in and through opposition to surplus labor time ; it is to reduce all time to working time alone and to degrade the individual to the exclusive role of worker, of instrument of labor. This is why the most perfected machinery forces the worker to devote more time to work than the savage of the bush or the craftsman with his simple and crude tools ever did. (…) Work cannot become a game, as Fourier wants, who had the great merit of having proclaimed as the ultimate goal the overcoming, in a higher form, not of the mode of distribution but of production. (…) Just as the system of bourgeois economy develops little by little, so,The ultimate outcome of this system gradually develops its own negation.

Karl Marx in "Principles of the Critique of Political Economy"

"The worker’s nationality is not French, English, or German ; it is labor, free slavery, the traffic in oneself. His government is not French, English, or German ; it is capital. The air he breathes at home is not French, English, or German ; it is the air of factories. The soil that belongs to him is not French, English, or German ; it is a few feet underground."

Karl Marx, in "Critical Notes on Friedrich List"

“When the Paris Commune took the direction of the revolution into its own hands ; when ordinary workers, for the first time, dared to touch the governmental privilege of their “natural superiors,” the propertied classes, and, under circumstances of unparalleled difficulty, accomplished their work modestly, conscientiously, and efficiently (and accomplished it for wages the highest of which barely reached one-fifth of what, according to a high scientific authority, Professor Huxley, is the minimum required for a secretary to the London Board of Education), the old world writhed in convulsions of rage at the sight of the red flag, symbol of the Republic of Labor, waving over the Hôtel de Ville.”

Karl Marx, in "The Civil War in France"

"The workers... must inscribe on their flag the revolutionary slogan : ’Abolition of wage labor,’ which is their ultimate objective."

Karl Marx, in "Wages, Prices and Profit"

"We then observe that the economic categories already existing in pre-capitalist periods of production acquire, on the basis of the capitalist mode of production, a new and specific historical character.
Money - a simple metamorphosed figure of the commodity - only becomes capital from the moment when the worker’s capacity to work is transformed into a commodity. This implies that commerce has conquered a sphere where it appeared only sporadically, or was even excluded. In other words, the working population must no longer be part of the objective conditions of work, or present itself on the market as a producer of commodities : instead of selling the product of its labor, it must sell its labor, or better its capacity to work. Only then does production, in all its magnitude, in depth as well as extension, become commodity production. In conclusion, the commodity only becomes the general elementary form of wealth on the basis of capitalist production.
For example, as long as capital does not yet dominate agriculture, a large part of food products continue to be produced as simple means of subsistence, and not as commodities. Similarly, a large fraction of the working population remains unsalaried, and most working conditions are not yet capital. *
All this implies that the developed division of labor—as it appears by chance within society—and the capitalist division of labor within the workshop generate and condition each other. Indeed, the commodity—the determinate form of the product—and therefore the alienation of the product as a necessary form of appropriation presuppose a fully developed social division of labor. Now, it is only on the basis of capitalist production—and therefore also of the capitalist division of labor within the workshop—that every product necessarily assumes the mercantile form, and that all producers are necessarily commodity producers. It is therefore only on the basis of capitalist production that use value is generally mediated by exchange value.

Karl Marx, in "Capital," The Production Process of Capital, Chapter Six

"In this social war, capital, the direct or indirect ownership of subsistence and the means of production, is the weapon with which one fights ; so it is clear as day that the poor bear all the disadvantages of such a state. No one cares about him ; thrown into this chaotic whirlwind, he must struggle as best he can. If he is lucky enough to find work, that is to say, if the bourgeoisie grants him the grace of enriching itself at its expense, a salary awaits him, which is barely enough to keep him on this earth ; if he does not find work, he can steal, if he does not fear the police, or die of hunger, and there too the police will see to it that he dies of hunger in a quiet manner, in no way offensive to the bourgeoisie."

"The Condition of the Working Class in England" by Engels, Marx’s companion

“Work is primarily an act that takes place between man and nature. Man himself plays the role of a natural power in relation to nature. The forces with which his body is endowed, arms and legs, head and hands, he sets in motion, in order to assimilate materials by giving them a form useful to his life. At the same time that he acts by this movement on external nature and modifies it, he modifies his own nature, and develops the faculties that lie dormant within it.

At the same time that mechanical work overexcites the nervous system to the utmost, it prevents the varied play of the muscles and compresses all free activity of body and mind. The very ease of work becomes torture in the sense that the machine does not free the worker from work, but strips work of its interest.

A certain stunting of body and mind is inseparable from the division of labor in society. But since the manufacturing period pushes this social division much further, at the same time that by its own division it attacks the individual at the very root of his life, it is this which first provides the idea and the material for an industrial pathology.
The economy of collective means of labor, activated and matured as in a hothouse by the factory system, becomes in the hands of capital a system of robberies committed on the vital conditions of the worker during his work, on space, air, light and measures of personal protection against the dangerous and unhealthy circumstances of the production process, not to mention the arrangements which the comfort and convenience of the worker would require.

It [manufacturing] cripples the worker, it makes him into something monstrous by activating the artificial development of his dexterity in detail, by sacrificing a whole world of productive dispositions and instincts, just as, in the States of La Plata, a bull is sacrificed for its skin and tallow. It is not only labor that is divided, subdivided, and distributed among various individuals, it is the individual himself who is fragmented and metamorphosed into the automatic spring of an exclusive operation, so that we find realized the absurd fable of Menenius Agrippa representing a man as a fragment of his own body.

In history, as in nature, decay is the laboratory of life.

Karl Marx, in "Capital"

"Unlike Adam Smith, David Ricardo has clearly delineated the principle of the determination of the value of commodities by labor time and shows that this law also governs those bourgeois relations of production which seem most in contradiction with it. Ricardo’s research is confined exclusively to the magnitude of value and, with regard to the latter, he at least suspects that the realization of the law presupposes definite historical conditions. Thus, he says that the determination of the magnitude of value by labor time is valid only for commodities "which can be multiplied at will by industry and whose production is subject to unlimited competition." This only means, in fact, that the law of value presupposes, for its complete development, the society of large-scale industrial production and free competition, that is, modern bourgeois society. Moreover, Ricardo regards the bourgeois form of labor as the eternal natural form of social labor. To the primitive fisherman and hunter, whom he considers as owners of goods, he immediately makes them exchange fish and game proportionally to the labor time materialized in these exchange values. He commits on this occasion the anachronism which would consist in making the primitive fisherman and hunter refer, for the evaluation of their instruments of work, to the annuity tables current on the London Stock Exchange in 1817. The "Parallelograms of Mr. Owen" seem to be the only form of society he has known outside the bourgeois form. Although a prisoner of this bourgeois horizon, Ricardo dissects the bourgeois economy, which has in its depths a totally different aspect from what it appears to be on the surface, with such theoretical rigor, that Lord Brougham was able to say of him "Mr. Ricardo seemed to have fallen from another planet." » In a direct polemic with Ricardo, Sismondi, while insisting on the specifically social character of labor creating exchange value, indicated as "the characteristic of our economic progress" the reduction of the magnitude of value to necessary labor time, to "the ratio between the need of the whole of society and the quantity of labor sufficient to satisfy this need." (...) Since
it was Ricardo who, giving classical political economy its completed form, formulated and developed in the clearest way the law of the determination of value by labor time, it is naturally on him that the polemic raised by the economists is concentrated. If we strip this polemic of the inept form it most often assumes, it can be summed up in the following points :
First – Labor itself has an exchange value, and different labors have different exchange values. It is a vicious circle to make an exchange value the measure of exchange value, since exchange value, which serves as a measure, itself in turn needs a measure. This objection is based on the following problem : given labor time as an immanent measure of exchange value, develop the worker’s wage on this basis. The answer is given by the theory of wage labor.
Second. – If the exchange value of a product is equal to the labor time it contains, the exchange value of a day’s labor is equal to the product of a day’s labor. Or again, the wage must be equal to the product of labor. But the opposite is true. So this objection merges into the following problem : how does production, on the basis of exchange value, determined by labor time alone, lead to the result that the exchange value of labor is less than the exchange value of its product ? We will solve this problem by studying capital.
Third. – The market price of commodities falls below or exceeds their exchange value according to the changes in supply and demand. Consequently, the exchange value of commodities is determined by the ratio of supply and demand and not by the labor time they contain. Practically, this strange conclusion simply raises the following question : how is a market price formed on the basis of exchange value that is different from this value, or more precisely, how is the law of exchange value realized only in its own opposite ? This problem is solved in the theory of competition.
Fourth. – The last contradiction and the most peremptory in appearance, when it is not, as usual, presented in the form of baroque examples, is the following : if the exchange value is nothing other than the labor time contained in a commodity, how can commodities which do not contain labor possess an exchange value, or, in other words, where does the exchange value of simple forces of nature come from ? This problem is resolved in the theory of ground rent.

Karl Marx, in "Critique of Political Economy"

“Labor that creates exchange value is finally characterized by the fact that the social relations between people appear, so to speak, as reversed, as a social relation between things. Only if one use-value is compared with another in its quality of exchange-value, is the labor of the various people compared in its aspect of equal and general labor. If, therefore, it is right to say that exchange-value is a relation between people, it must be added : a relation that is hidden beneath the envelope of things. Just as, despite the difference in their physical and chemical properties, a pound of iron and a pound of gold represent the same mass, so the use-values ​​of two commodities, containing the same labor-time, represent the same exchange-value. Exchange value thus appears as a socially determined natural form of use-values, a determined form assigned to them as objects and by means of which, in the process of exchange, they replace one another in definite quantitative relations and form equivalents, just as simple chemical substances combine in certain quantitative relations and form chemical equivalents. Only the habit of everyday life makes it considered commonplace and self-evident that a social relation of production takes the form of an object, giving the relation between people in their work the appearance of a relation established between things and between these things and people. This mystification is still quite simple in the commodity. Everyone suspects, more or less vaguely, that the relation between commodities as exchange-values ​​is rather a relation between people and their reciprocal productive activity. This appearance of simplicity disappears in higher-level relations of production. All the illusions of the monetary system arise from the failure to see that money, in the form of a natural object with definite properties, represents a social relation of production. Among modern economists, who smile sardonically at the illusions of the monetary system, the same illusion betrays itself as soon as they deal with higher economic categories, for example, capital. It is revealed in the admission of their naive astonishment when the object they clumsily imagined they were holding in their hands at that very moment suddenly appears to them as a social relation, and conversely, what they have just catalogued in the category of social relations taunts them in the form of an object.

Since exchange value is, in fact, nothing other than the ratio of the labors of individuals, considered as equal and general labor, nothing other than the objective expression of a specifically social form of labor, it is a tautology to say that labor is the sole source of exchange value and, consequently, of wealth, insofar as the latter consists of exchange values. It is the same tautology to say that matter in itself in its natural state does not contain exchange value, since it does not contain labor, and that exchange value in itself does not contain matter in its natural state. But when William Petty calls it "labor the father, and the earth the mother of wealth" ; when Bishop Berkeley asks "whether the four elements and the human labor mingled with them are not the true source of wealth" ; or again, when the American Th. Cooper explains in a popular form :

Take away from a loaf of bread the labor it has cost, the labor of the baker, the miller, the farmer, etc., what remains ? A few seeds of wild grass unfit for any human use ; in all these ways of seeing things, it is not a question of abstract labor, the source of exchange value, but of concrete labor, insofar as it is a source of material wealth, in short, of labor producing use values. In positing the use value of the commodity, one presupposes the particular utility, the determinate and systematic character of the labor it has absorbed ; but, from the point of view of the commodity, these considerations exhaust all reference to this labor as useful labor. What interests us in bread as use value are its alimentary properties, and not at all the labors of the farmer, the miller, the baker, etc. If some invention were to eliminate nineteen-twentieths of this labor, the loaf of bread would render the same services as before. If it were to fall from the sky fully baked, it would not lose an atom of its use-value. While labor creating exchange value is realized in the equality of commodities as general equivalents, labor as systematic productive activity is realized in the infinite diversity of the use-values ​​it creates. While labor creating exchange value is an abstract and equal general labor, labor creating use-value is a concrete and particular labor which, according to form and matter, is divided into an infinite variety of kinds of labor.
It is incorrect to say that labor, which creates use values, is the sole source of the wealth it produces, that is, of material wealth. It is the activity that adapts matter to a particular end ; it therefore necessarily presupposes matter. The relationship between labor and natural matter varies greatly according to different use values, but use value always contains a natural substratum. As a systematic activity aimed at appropriating the products of nature in one form or another, labor is the natural condition of human existence, the condition—independent of any social form—of the exchange of substances between man and nature. Labor, which creates exchange value, on the other hand, is a specifically social form of labor. In its material determination as a particular productive activity, the work of a tailor, for example, produces the garment, but not the exchange value of the garment. It is not in its capacity as tailor’s work, but as abstract general labor, that it produces this value, and the latter is part of a social whole to the construction of which the tailor’s needle has contributed nothing. Thus, in ancient domestic industry, women produced clothing, without producing the clothing’s exchange value. Labor, the source of material wealth, was no less known to the lawgiver Moses than to the customs official Adam Smith.

Let us now consider some more precise determinations which result from the reduction of exchange value to labor time.

As a use-value, the commodity exercises a causal action. Wheat, for example, acts as food. A machine replaces labor in definite proportions. This action of the commodity, the action which alone makes it a use-value, an object of consumption, can be called its service, the service it renders as a use-value. But, as an exchange-value, the commodity is never considered anything other than a result. It is not a question of the service it renders, but of the service which has been rendered to itself in producing it. Thus the exchange-value of a machine, for example, is determined not by the quantity of labor-time which it replaces, but by the quantity of labor-time which has been employed in constructing it and which is consequently required to produce a new machine of the same kind.

If, therefore, the quantity of labor required for the production of commodities remained constant, their exchange value would be invariable. But the ease and difficulty of production vary continually. When the productive power of labor increases, the same use-value is produced in a shorter time. If the productive power of labor decreases, the production of the same use-value will require more time. The magnitude of the labor time contained in a commodity, that is, its exchange value, is therefore a variable value : it increases or decreases in inverse proportion to the increase or decrease in the productive power of labor. The productive power of labor, which manufacturing industry uses in a predetermined proportion, is also conditioned in agriculture and mining by uncontrollable natural circumstances. The same labor will allow a greater or lesser extraction of different metals according to the relative rarity or abundance of these metals in the earth’s crust. The same labor may, if the season is favorable, materialize in the form of two bushels of wheat, and perhaps only one bushel, if it is unfavorable. In the form of natural circumstances, scarcity or abundance seem here to determine the exchange value of commodities, because they determine the productive force, linked to natural circumstances, of a particular concrete labor.

Different use-values ​​contain, under unequal volumes, the same labor-time or the same exchange-value. The smaller, in relation to other use-values, the volume of use-value under which a commodity contains a definite quantum of labor-time, the greater is its specific exchange-value. If it is observed that at different periods of civilization, very distant from one another, certain use-values ​​form among themselves a series of specific exchange-values, between which subsists, if not exactly the same numerical relation, at least the same general relation of hierarchy, as, for example, gold, silver, copper, iron, or wheat, rye, barley, oats, this only proves that the progress in the development of the social productive forces influences in a uniform or approximately uniform manner the labor-time required for the production of these different commodities.

The exchange value of a commodity does not appear in its own use value. However, since the use value of a commodity is the materialization of general social labor time, there are certain relationships between the use value of this commodity and the use values ​​of other commodities. The exchange value of one is thus manifested in the use values ​​of others. Equivalence is, in fact, the exchange value of one commodity expressed in the use value of another. When we say, for example, that one yard of linen is worth two pounds of coffee, the exchange value of the linen is expressed in the use value of the coffee, in a definite quantity of this use value. Once the proportion is given, we can express the value of any quantity of linen in coffee. It is obvious that the exchange value of a commodity, such as linen, does not find its exhaustive expression in the proportion in which another particular commodity, such as coffee, constitutes its equivalent. The quantity of general labor time represented by an ell of linen is simultaneously realized in the infinite variety of volumes of the use values ​​of all other commodities. In the proportion in which the use value of any other commodity represents labor time of the same magnitude, it constitutes an equivalent of an ell of linen. The exchange value of this commodity taken in isolation therefore finds its exhaustive expression only in the infinity of equations in which its equivalent term is the use values ​​of all other commodities. It is only in the sum of these equations, or in the totality of the different ratios indicating in what proportion such and such a commodity can be exchanged for any other, that it finds its exhaustive expression as a general equivalent.

Karl Marx, in "Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy"

“It is of no consequence to the capitalist whether he advances constant capital in order to extract a profit from variable capital or advances variable capital in order to valorize constant capital, whether he invests money in the form of wages in order to increase the value of machinery and raw materials, or invests it in the form of machinery and raw materials in order to exploit labor power. Although the variable part of capital alone creates surplus value, it does so only on condition that the other parts of capital, the instruments of production, are also advanced. Since the capitalist can exploit labor only if he advances constant capital and can valorize constant capital only if he advances variable capital, these different elements are identified in his conception, and this all the more easily since the real rate of his gain is determined by the ratio of the latter, not to variable capital, but to total capital, by the rate of profit and not by the rate of surplus value. (We shall see later that the same rate of profit can correspond to different rates of surplus value). (...)
The only thing that interests the capitalist is the ratio of surplus value (the excess value that the sale of his commodities brings him) to the total capital that he has advanced ; as for the ratio between this surplus and the various elements of his capital, he is hardly concerned with it and he even has every interest in forming a false idea of ​​it. Although the excess of the value of the commodity over the cost price arises in the process of production, it is realized only in the process of circulation, and since its realization and its magnitude are determined by competition and market conditions, it is also in the process of circulation that it seems to originate. However, whether a commodity is sold above or below its value, the result is only a change in the distribution of surplus value, which affects neither the magnitude nor the nature of the latter. Furthermore, real circulation is not only accompanied by the transformations we studied in Volume II, but these go hand in hand with competition as well as with the buying and selling of commodities above and below their value, which means that the surplus value realized by each capitalist depends as much on fraud as on the exploitation of labor. (...)
During the process of production, the nature of surplus value does not escape for a moment the capitalist, greedy for the labor of others, as we have seen in the study of surplus value. But the process of production is transient and continually merges with the process of circulation : so that if the capitalist can assimilate with more or less clarity the conception of a gain arising from production and if, consequently, he realizes the nature of surplus value, this notion manages at most to acquire the same importance as the idea that surplus value results from circulation independently of production, from the movement of capital outside its relations to labor. Even modern economists, like Ramsay, Malthus, Senior, Torrens, invoke the phenomena of circulation as proof that capital alone, in its objective existence and freed from its social relations to labor (relations without which it would not be capital), is a source of surplus value.

Karl Marx, in "Capital", Book III, Paragraph 1

"The best thing about my book ("Capital") is : 1. that it highlights, from the very first chapter, the dual character of labor, depending on whether it is expressed in use value or in exchange value, and this is what the whole intelligence of the text is based on ; 2. that it analyzes surplus value, independently of its particular forms (profit, interest, ground rent, etc.). It is in the second volume especially that all this will become apparent. In classical economics, these particular forms are constantly mixed and confused with the general form, so that the result is an inextricable jumble."

Karl Marx, in his letter to Engels of 24.8.1867

“Political economy hides the alienation in the essence of labor by not considering the direct relationship between the worker (labor) and production. Certainly, labor produces wonders for the rich, but it produces destitution for the worker. It produces palaces, but dens for the worker. It produces beauty, but wasting for the worker. It replaces labor with machines, but it throws some workers into barbaric labor and turns the rest into machines. It produces wit, but it produces imbecility, cretinism for the worker. [...] Until now, we have considered the alienation, the dispossession of the worker only from one aspect, that of his relationship to the products of his labor. But alienation does not appear only in the result, but in the act of production, within the activity of production itself. [...] Now, in what does the alienation of labor consist ? First, in the fact that work is external to the worker, that is, it does not belong to his essence, that therefore, in his work, the latter does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel comfortable but unhappy, does not display free physical and intellectual activity, but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. This is why the worker has the feeling of being with himself only outside of work and, in work, he feels outside of himself. He is at home when he is not working and, when he is working, he does not feel at home. His work is therefore not voluntary, but forced, it is forced labor. It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need, but only a means of satisfying needs outside of work. The alien character of work clearly appears in the fact that, as soon as there is no physical or other constraint, work is avoided like the plague. External work, work in which man alienates himself, is a work of self-sacrifice, of mortification. Finally, the external character of work for the worker appears in the fact that it is not his own property, but that of another, that it does not belong to him, that in work the worker does not belong to himself, but belongs to another. [...] We thus arrive at the result that man (the worker) no longer feels freely active except in his animal functions, eating, drinking and procreation, at most in dwelling, adornment, etc., and that, in his functions as a man, he no longer feels himself anything but an animal. The bestial becomes the human and the human becomes the bestial.

Karl Marx, in "Manuscripts of 1844"

"For the owner of money to find labor power as a commodity on the market, however, various conditions must first be met. The exchange of commodities, by itself, does not entail any other relations of dependence than those which arise from its nature. In these circumstances, labor power can only appear on the market as a commodity if it is offered or sold by its own owner. The latter must therefore be able to dispose of it, that is, be the free owner of his labor power, of his own person. The owner of money and he meet on the market and enter into relations with each other as exchangers in the same capacity. They differ only in this : one buys and the other sells, and by this very fact, both are legally equal persons.

For this relationship to persist, the owner of the labor power must never sell it for more than a fixed time, because if he sells it in bulk, once and for all, he sells himself, and from being free he becomes a slave, from being a merchant, a commodity. If he wants to maintain his personality, he must only place his labor power temporarily at the disposal of the buyer, so that by alienating it he does not thereby renounce his ownership of it.

The second essential condition for the man with money to be able to buy labor power is that the owner of the latter, instead of being able to sell commodities in which his labor has been realized, is forced to offer and put up for sale, as a commodity, his labor power itself, which resides only in his organism.

Anyone who wants to sell commodities distinct from his own labor power must naturally possess means of production such as raw materials, tools, etc. It is impossible for him, for example, to make boots without leather, and moreover he needs means of subsistence. No one, not even the musician of the future, can live on the products of posterity, nor subsist on use values ​​whose production is not yet complete ; today, as on the first day of his appearance on the world stage, man is obliged to consume before producing and while he is producing. If products are commodities, they must be sold in order to satisfy the producer’s needs. To the time necessary for production is added the time necessary for sale.

The transformation of money into capital therefore requires that the owner of money find the free worker on the market, and free from a double point of view. First, the worker must be a free person, disposing at will of his labor power as his own commodity ; second, he must have no other commodity to sell ; be, so to speak, free from everything, completely deprived of the things necessary for the realization of his labor power.

Why does this free worker find himself in the sphere of circulation ? This is a question that is of little interest to the owner of money, for whom the labor market is only a particular branch of the commodity market ; and for the moment it is of no interest to us either. Theoretically, we stick to the fact, as he does practically. In any case, one thing is quite clear : nature does not produce owners of money or commodities on the one hand and owners of their own labor power purely and simply on the other. Such a relation has no natural basis, nor is it a social relation common to all periods of history. It is obviously the result of a preliminary historical development, the product of a large number of economic revolutions, arising from the destruction of a whole series of old forms of social production.

Likewise, the economic categories we have considered previously bear a historical stamp. Certain historical conditions must be fulfilled before the product of labor can be transformed into a commodity. For example, as long as it is intended only to immediately satisfy the needs of its producer, it does not become a commodity. If we had pursued our research further, if we had asked ourselves under what circumstances all products, or at least most of them, take the form of commodities, we would have found that this only happens on the basis of a very special mode of production, capitalist production. But such an investigation would have been entirely outside the scope of a simple analysis of commodities. Commodity production and circulation can take place even when the greater part of the products consumed by their producers themselves do not enter into circulation as commodities. In this case, social production is far from being governed in its entire extent and depth by exchange value. The product, in order to become a commodity, requires in society a division of labor so developed that the separation between use value and exchange value, which is only just beginning to appear in barter trade, is already accomplished. However, such a degree of development is, as history proves, compatible with the most diverse economic forms of society.

Karl Marx, "Capital," Book One, Buying and Selling Labor Power

“Capitalist appropriation, in accordance with the capitalist mode of production, constitutes the first negation of this private property which is only the corollary of independent and individual labor. But capitalist production itself engenders its own negation with the fatality which presides over the metamorphoses of nature. It is the negation of the negation. It reestablishes not the private property of the worker, but his individual property, based on the acquisitions of the capitalist era, on cooperation and the common possession of all the means of production, including the land.”

Karl Marx, "Capital," Book One

“As the number of potentates of capital who usurp and monopolize all the advantages of this period of social evolution diminishes, so does misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation, but also the resistance of the ever-growing and increasingly disciplined working class, united and organized by the very mechanism of capitalist production. The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter for the mode of production that has grown and prospered with it and under its auspices. The socialization of labor and the centralization of its material springs reach a point where they can no longer fit within their capitalist envelope. This envelope shatters. The hour of capitalist property has come. The expropriators are in turn expropriated.”

Karl Marx, "Capital," Book One

"If working time is the measure of wealth, it is because wealth is founded on poverty, and free time results from the contradictory basis of surplus labor ; in other words, this supposes that all the worker’s time is posited as working time and that he himself is reduced to the rank of simple worker and subordinated to work. This is why the most developed machinery today forces the worker to work longer than the savage or himself did when he had more rudimentary and primitive tools."

Karl Marx, in "Grundisse"

The following is Karl Marx’s critique of the German Socialist Party program :

"The emancipation of labor requires that the instruments of labor be elevated to the status of common heritage of society and that collective labor be regulated by the community with equitable sharing of the product." (excerpt from the program of the Social Democratic Party)

Marx’s comment :

"The instruments of work raised to the status of common heritage" must undoubtedly mean : "transformed into common heritage." But this is only in passing.

What is the "product of labor" ? The object created by labor or its value ? And, in the latter case, the total value of the product or only the fraction of value that labor has added to the value of the means of production consumed ?

The "product of labor" is a vague notion which, for Lassalle, took the place of positive economic concepts.

What is “fair sharing” ?

Do not the bourgeoisie maintain that the present division is "fair" ? And, in fact, on the basis of the present mode of production, is it not the only "fair" division ? Are economic relations regulated by legal ideas or are not, conversely, legal relations born of economic relations ? Do not the socialists of the sects also have the most diverse conceptions of this "fair" division ?

To understand what is meant by the empty expression "fair sharing," we must compare the first paragraph with this one. The latter assumes a society in which "the instruments of labor are common property and collective labor is regulated by the community," while the first paragraph shows us that "the product belongs entirely, by equal right, to all members of society."

"To all members of society" ? Even to those who do not work ? What then becomes of the "full product of labor" ? - Only to members of society who work ? What then becomes of the "equal right" of all members of society ?

But "all members of society" and "equal rights" are clearly only figures of speech. The essence is that, in this communist society, every worker must receive, in the Lasallian fashion, a "full product of labor."

If we first take the word "product of labor" in the sense of an object created by labor (Produkt der Arbeit), then the product of the community’s labor is "the totality of the social product."

From this, it is necessary to deduct : First : a fund intended for the replacement of used means of production ; Second : an additional fraction to increase production ; Third : a reserve or insurance fund against accidents, disturbances due to natural phenomena, etc.

These deductions from the "full product of labor" are an economic necessity, the importance of which will be determined in part, taking into account the state of the means and forces in play, with the help of the calculation of probabilities ; in any case, they cannot be calculated in any way on the basis of equity.

The other part of the total product remains, intended for consumption.

But before proceeding with the individual distribution, it is still necessary to subtract :

First, the general administrative costs, which are independent of production. Compared to what happens in today’s society, this fraction is immediately reduced to a minimum and decreases as the new society develops.
Second, what is intended to satisfy the needs of the community : schools, sanitary facilities, etc. This fraction immediately gains in importance, compared to what happens in today’s society, and this importance increases as the new society develops.

Thirdly : the fund necessary for the maintenance of those who are unable to work, etc., in short, what falls under what is today called official public assistance.

It is only then that we arrive at the only "sharing" that, under the influence of Lassalle and in a limited way, the program has in mind, that is to say, that fraction of the objects of consumption which is distributed individually among the producers of the community.

The "full product of labor" has already been secretly transformed into a "partial product," although what is taken away from the producer, as an individual, he regains directly or indirectly, as a member of society.

Just as the term "full product of labor" has vanished, so we will see the term "product of labor" in general vanish.

Within a communal social order, based on the common ownership of the means of production, producers do not exchange their products ; similarly, the labor incorporated in products does not appear here as the value of these products, as a real quality possessed by them, since henceforth, contrary to what happens in capitalist society, it is no longer by a roundabout way, but directly, that the labors of the individual become an integral part of the labor of the community. The expression : "product of labor," condemnable even today because of its ambiguity, thus loses all meaning.

What we are dealing with here is a communist society not as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, as it has just emerged from capitalist society ; a society, therefore, which, in all respects, economic, moral, intellectual, still bears the stigmata of the old society from whose bosom it sprang. The producer therefore receives individually—after deductions have been made—the exact equivalent of what he has given to society. What he has given is his individual quantum of labor. For example, the social workday represents the sum of the hours of individual labor ; the individual labor time of each producer is the portion he has provided of the social workday, the part he has taken in it. He receives from society a voucher stating that he has provided so much labor (after deduction of the labor done for the collective funds) and, with this voucher, he withdraws from the social stocks of consumer goods as much as an equal quantity of his labor costs. The same amount of labor that he has provided to society in one form, he receives from it, in return, in another form.

This is clearly the same principle as that which governs the exchange of commodities insofar as it is an exchange of equal values. The substance and the form differ because, the conditions being different, no one can provide anything other than his labor and, moreover, nothing can become the property of the individual except objects of individual consumption. But as regards the sharing of these objects between individual producers, the guiding principle is the same as for the exchange of equivalent commodities : the same quantity of labor in one form is exchanged for the same quantity of labor in another form.

Equal law is therefore still here in its principle... bourgeois law, although principle and practice no longer go toe-to-toe, while today the exchange of equivalents exists for commodities only on average and not in the individual case.

Despite this progress, equal rights still remain burdened by a bourgeois limit. The producer’s rights are proportional to the work he has done ; equality here consists of employment as a common unit of measurement.

But one individual physically or morally surpasses another, so he provides more work at the same time or can work for a longer time ; and for work to serve as a measure, its duration or intensity must be determined, otherwise it would cease to be a unit. This equal right is an unequal right for unequal work. It recognizes no class distinction, because every man is only a worker like any other ; but it tacitly recognizes the inequality of individual gifts and, consequently, of productive capacity as natural privileges. It is therefore, in its content, a right founded on inequality, like all rights. Law by its nature can consist only in the use of the same unit of measurement ; but unequal individuals (and they would not be distinct individuals if they were not unequal) are measurable according to a common unit only insofar as they are considered from the same point of view, only insofar as they are grasped from a specific aspect ; for example, in the present case, that we only consider them as workers and nothing more, and that we disregard everything else. On the other hand : one worker is married, the other is not ; one has more children than the other, etc., etc. With equal work and consequently, with equal participation in the social consumption fund, one therefore actually receives more than the other, one is richer than the other, etc. To avoid all these disadvantages, the law should not be equal, but unequal.

But these defects are inevitable in the first phase of communist society, as it has just emerged from capitalist society, after a long and painful birth. Law can never be higher than the economic state of society and the degree of civilization corresponding to it.

In a higher phase of communist society, when the enslaving subordination of individuals to the division of labor and, with it, the opposition between intellectual and manual labor have disappeared ; when labor is not only a means of living, but itself becomes the first vital need ; when, with the manifold development of individuals, the productive forces have also increased and all the sources of collective wealth are gushing forth in abundance, only then can the limited horizon of bourgeois law be definitively transcended and society will be able to write on its banners "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs !"

I have dwelt particularly on the "full product of labor," as well as on "equal rights," "fair sharing," in order to show how criminal is the enterprise of those who, on the one hand, want to impose once again on our Party, as dogmas, conceptions which meant something at a certain time, but are today nothing more than outdated phraseology, and on the other hand, distort the realistic conception inculcated with great difficulty in the Party, but today well rooted in it, and this with the help of the nonsense of a legal or other ideology, so familiar to French democrats and socialists.

Apart from what has just been said, it was in any case a mistake to make so much of what is called sharing, and to put the emphasis on it.

In any epoch, the distribution of objects of consumption is only the consequence of the way in which the conditions of production themselves are distributed. But this distribution is a characteristic of the mode of production itself. The capitalist mode of production, for example, consists in this : the material conditions of production [8] are allocated to the non-workers in the form of capitalist property and landed property, while the masses possess only the personal conditions of production : labor power. If the elements of production are distributed in this way, the present distribution of objects of consumption follows of itself. If the material conditions of production are the collective property of the workers themselves, a distribution of objects of consumption different from that of today will likewise follow. Vulgar socialism (and through it, in turn, a fraction of democracy) has inherited from bourgeois economists the habit of regarding and treating distribution as something independent of the mode of production and of representing socialism for this reason as essentially revolving around distribution. The real relations having long since been elucidated, what is the point of going back ?

Excerpts from Karl Marx’s "Marginal Glosses on the Program of the German Socialist Party"