Part 14 (2/2)

”The profits produced in many American mills, factories, mines, and railway systems go in part to Englishmen or Belgians or Germans who never set foot in America, and who obviously can have no share in even the mental labor of direction. A certificate of stock may belong to a child, to a maniac, to an imbecile, to a prisoner behind the bars, and it draws profit for its owner just the same. Stocks and bonds may lie for months or years in a safe-deposit vault, while an estate is being disputed, before their owners.h.i.+p is determined; but whoever is declared to be the owner gets the dividends and interest ”earned” during all that time.”[179]

It is an easy task to set up imaginary figures labeled ”Marxism,” and then to demolish them by learned argument--but the occupation is as fruitless as it is easy. It remains the one central fact of capitalism, however, that a surplus-value is created by the working cla.s.s and taken by the exploiting cla.s.s, from which develops the cla.s.s struggle of our time.

FOOTNOTES:

[163] _The People's Marx_, by Gabriel Deville, page 288.

[164] _Capital_, Vol. I, Kerr edition, page 41.

[165] Professor J. S. Nicholson, a rather pretentious critic of Marx, has called suns.h.i.+ne a commodity because of its utility, _Elements of Political Economy_, page 24. Upon the same ground, the song of the skylark and the sound of ocean waves might be called commodities. Such use of language serves for nothing but the obscuring of thought.

[166] William Petty, _A Treatise on Taxes and Const.i.tutions_ (1662), pages 31-32.

[167] _The Wealth of Nations_, Vol. I, Chapters V-VI.

[168] Benjamin Franklin, _Remarks and Facts Relative to the American Paper Money_ (1764), page 267.

Marx thus speaks of Franklin as an economist: ”The first sensible a.n.a.lysis of exchange-value as labor-time, made so clear as to seem almost commonplace, is to be found in the work of a man of the New World, where the bourgeois relations of production, imported together with their representatives, sprouted rapidly in a soil which made up its lack of historical traditions with a surplus of _humus_. That man was Benjamin Franklin, who formulated the fundamental law of modern political economy in his first work, which he wrote when a mere youth (_A Modest Inquiry into the Nature and Necessity of a Paper Currency_), and published in 1721.” _A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy_, by Karl Marx, English translation by N. I. Stone, 1894, page 62.

[169] David Ricardo, _Principles of Political Economy and Taxation_, Chapter I, -- III.

[170] _Wealth of Nations_, Book I, Chapter X.

[171] _Principles of Political Economy and Taxation_, Chapter I, Sec. 1, -- 4.

[172] See ”The Final Futility of Final Utility,” in H. M. Hyndman's _Economics of Socialism_, for a remarkable criticism of the ”final utility” theory, showing its ident.i.ty with the doctrine of supply and demand as the basis of value.

I refer to the theory of final or marginal utility as the ”so-called Austrian theory” for the purpose, mainly, or calling attention to the fact that, as Professor Seligman has ably and clearly demonstrated, it was conceived and excellently stated by W. F. Lloyd, Professor of Political Economy at Oxford, in 1833. (See the paper, _On Some Neglected British Economists_, in the _Economic Journal_, V, xiii, pages 357-363.) This was two decades before Gossen and a generation earlier than Menger and Jevons. In view of this fact, the criticism of Marx for his lack of originality by members of the ”Austrian” school is rather amusing.

[173] _Principles of Economics_, by Edwin R. A. Seligman (1905), page 198.

[174] Cf., for instance, my little volume, in the _Standard Socialist Series_ (Kerr), ent.i.tled _Capitalist and Laborer_; Part II, _Modern Socialism_, page 112.

[175] _Principles of Political Economy and Taxation_, Chapter V, -- 35.

[176] _Value, Price, and Profit_, by Karl Marx, Chapter XIV.

[177] It is worthy of note that the taxation of land values, commonly a.s.sociated with the name of Henry George, was advocated as a palliative in the _Communist Manifesto_ of Marx and Engels.

[178] _Capital_, by Karl Marx, Vol. I, Chapter XIII, of Part IV.

[179] _The Worker_ (New York), February 5, 1905.

CHAPTER IX

OUTLINES OF THE SOCIALIST STATE

I

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