Cooking the Books: Manchesterism (2026)

The Cooking The Books column from the August 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Until Andy Burnham, as Mayor of Greater Manchester, re-coined the word, ‘Manchesterism’ meant the economic doctrine of the Manchester and district cotton mill owners who favoured a policy of complete tariff-free trade and opposed state interference in industry, as expressed by Richard Cobden, one of the leaders of the Anti-Corn Law League of the 1840s. In England they were known as the Manchester School. On the continent their doctrine was called manchesterisme in French and Manchesterismus in German. It wasn’t that popular there as the local factory owners realised what was behind it — that their British rivals wanted wider access to continental markets for their cheaper goods.

Engels lived and worked in Manchester for over twenty years and was well aware of the views of the Manchester School, if only from socialising with them. Writing in English he used ‘Manchester School’, but in German he used the word ‘Manchesterismus’ as in a note he wrote about a May Day meeting in London in 1890 where he refers to new trade union members wanting ‘no more to do with the Manchesterism of the old Trade Unions’ (‘4 May’, Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 27).

When he re-coined the term, Burnham may not have been aware of its previous use and meaning, but others were and asked him if there was any connection. PoliticsHome (15 April) recorded:

‘Asked whether he identifies more with Richard Cobden or Friedrich Engels, he chooses Cobden, the Mancunian Radical and free-trader.’

There is not in fact that much in common between Burnham’s and Cobden’s Manchesterism. Cobden was a free marketeer while Burnham has defined it as ‘business-friendly socialism’. It is, however, revealing that when asked to choose between a capitalist free-marketeer and an opponent of capitalism in all its forms, Burnham identified more with the former.

What Cobden and Burnham have in common is that they both support capitalism. ‘Business-friendly socialism’ is an oxymoron but if you understand ‘socialism’ to mean Labourism then it becomes, like a ‘round circle’, a pleonasm. Starmer and Reeves expressed it more directly when they said that Labour was ‘the party of business’.

Insofar as Burnham’s Manchesterism is more than a populist slogan which sets workers in the North against workers in London and the South East, it seems to mean giving regional authorities more freedom to raise money locally and to attract capitalist investment to their region. In other words, a mere change in the political superstructure in the hope that it will stimulate ‘growth’. But what drives growth is the pursuit, and accumulation as new capital, of profits. If the prospect of a profit is not good, then investment won’t take place, whatever the political arrangements.

But what sort of investment? These days British capitalism lives not so much by producing surplus value directly in industry as by capturing, through selling financial and legal services, surplus value produced elsewhere in the world. Under Burnham, Manchester has been able to divert some of this from London to Manchester, but not everywhere will be able to do this.

The other type of capitalist investment that regional authorities can seek is ‘property development’. In fact the two businesspeople that the Times’s Economics Editor, Meerhen Khan, interviewed (25 June) who had found Burnham ‘business friendly’ were both in the property business. One said that ‘all the evidence suggests that he’s incredibly pro-business’ and that ‘his comments on the excesses of neo-liberalism were also a critique of its social impact on communities in post-industrial cities like Manchester rather than an outright rejection of market capitalism’.

So says a Labour-friendly capitalist.

Cooking the Books: AI, profits and Engels (2026)

The Cooking The Books column from the April 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

City gents reading the business section of their Times (24 February) might have been surprised to come across a photo of Engels. Socialists would have been intrigued more by the caption ‘could AI create a new Engels pause, named after Friedrich Engels’. The term ‘Engels pause’ was not coined by Engels but by an economic historian, Robert Allen, to describe the course of economic development that led to the workers being in the situation described by Engels in his 1845 book The Condition of the Working Class in England.

Normally, a period of sustained capital accumulation should lead to some increase in working-class living standards, both because of employers bidding up wages as they compete for workers and because the increase in profits means they can afford to pay more. Allen noted that this had not happened in Britain during the period of rapid industrialisation from 1790 to 1840 as wages had stagnated. As in the period after 1840 wages did increase, Allen called this a ‘pause’ and named it after Engels.

Engels might not have regarded this as a compliment. He might have preferred the term ‘the Engels profit bonanza’ as, if wages stagnate in a period of economic growth, that means that profits will be more than they otherwise would.

The article in the Times, by its former business editor David Wighton, discussed two views of the possible economic impact of AI. He quoted a former Google executive as saying that ‘the most likely outcome is an economy in which corporate profits explode as labour costs fall, while workers’ share of output shrinks’. In short, another ‘Engels pause’. The opposite view was put by Jamie Dimon, the head of the bank JP Morgan Chase, who is quoted as saying that while AI will increase profits, ‘this isn’t like you’re going to build three points of margin and you get to keep it — you don’t’. Competition sees to that.

Who is more likely to be right? Critics of capitalism might be tempted to agree with the one-time Google executive as it would be another good argument against capitalism. However, Dimon has a point. His view reflects more accurately what happens when one capitalist enterprise makes extra profits by reducing its costs through some innovation and outcompetes its rivals.

‘An enterprise or industrial sector with an above average level of productivity (…) economizes in its expenditure of social labour and therefore makes a surplus profit, that is to say, the difference between its costs and selling prices will be greater than the average profit. The pursuit of this surplus profit is, of course, the driving force behind the entire capitalist economy. Every capitalist enterprise is forced by competition to try to get greater profits, for this is the only way it can constantly improve its technology and labour productivity. Consequently all firms are forced to take this same direction, and this of course implies that what at one time was an above-average productivity ends up as the new average productivity, whereupon the surplus profit disappears. All the strategy of capitalist industry stems from this desire on the part of every enterprise to achieve a rate of productivity superior to the national average and thereby make a surplus profit, and this in turn provokes a movement which causes the surplus profit to disappear, by virtue of the trend for the average rate of labour productivity to rise continuously’ (E. Mandel, An Introduction to Marxist Economic Theory.)

That’s the likely outcome of the spread of AI to production and business. A temporary increase in profits for the firms that are the first to use AI in their branch of activity but no ‘profit explosion’ in the sense of a general increase in profits for all firms which eventually adopt it.

The Socialist Forum: Engels and Minority Action. (1932)

Letter to the Editors from the April 1932 issue of the Socialist Standard

Islington, London, N.1.

Editor, “The Socialist Standard.”

Dear Comrade,

On page 77, Engels’ “Socialism, Utopian and Scientific,” the writer, referring to the socialist revolution says: “Like every other social advance it becomes practicable, not by men understanding that the existence of classes is in contradiction to justice, equality, etc., not by the mere willingness to abolish these classes, but by virtue of certain new economic conditions.”

This statement clearly shows that Engels was of the opinion that, given the necessary conditions and an intelligent minority, the establishment of a socialist system could become an accomplished fact, and seems to refute your teaching that it is necessary to have a class-conscious majority before a successful revolution could be guaranteed.

I should be pleased to have your opinion on this question, and thank you in anticipation for same. Yours, etc.,

G. W. Jones (Junr.).

Reply

Our correspondent is completely mistaken about Engels’ views. Engels did not believe that “an intelligent Minority” could establish Socialism. It will be seen that the only evidence our correspondent quotes in support of his view about Engels is a passage in which Engels makes no reference whatever either to majority or to minority action. If we turn to page 60 of the same work (“Socialism, Utopian and Scientific.” Allen & Unwin edition) we find Engels writing this :—

“It is the compelling force of anarchy in the production of society at large that more and more completely turns the great majority of men into proletarians ; and it is the masses of the proletariat again who will finally put an end to anarchy in production.”

There is nothing here about minority action. Nor is there on page 86, where Engels says : —

“The proletariat seizes the public power. . . .”

In Engels’ introduction to Marx’s “The Class Struggles in France, 1848-1850 ” (the introduction being written in 1895), Engels said : —

“The day of surprise attacks has passed, the day when small but resolute minorities could achieve revolutions by leading the unwitting masses to the onslaught. Where the question is one of a complete transformation in the social organism, the masses must wittingly participate, must fully understand what they are about.”

What Engels had in mind in the passage that our correspondent quotes is to emphasise that social changes do not come about because of ideas that have miraculously appeared in men’s minds, out of nothing. The development of the economic forces makes possible certain social changes, and it is out of this material basis that the ideas of change arise. Marx put it clearly in his preface to the “Critique of Political Economy.”

“No social order ever disappears before all the productive forces, for which there is room in it, have been developed ; and new higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society. Therefore, mankind always takes up only such problems as it can solve ; since, looking at the matter more closely, we will always find that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions necessary for its solution already exist or are at least in the process of formation.” (P. 12, Kerr Edition, 1911.)

Ed. Comm.

Cooking the Books: Outdated measures (2026)

The Cooking The Books column from the April 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Communist Manifesto was published on 21 February 1848. The Morning Star, the paper run by nostalgics for the former USSR, chose that date this year for an editorial headed ‘The Communist Manifesto is as relevant today as it was in 1848’. Yes, most of it is. It is a brilliant description and analysis of the development of capitalism, its role in history in bringing into existence a working class struggling against exploitation and to replace capitalism with a society based on the common ownership of the means and instruments of production. It remains today a good introduction to socialist ideas which those interested in understanding the society we live in should read.

However, it was not this part that the Morning Star considered ‘relevant today’ but the ten measures listed at the end of Chapter 2, which include: abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes; a heavy progressive or graduated income tax; centralisation of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly; centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the state; extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the state; and free education for all children in public schools.

The Morning Star sees them ‘as a series of direct demands which challenge the material basis of existing society’, as reforms which the working class should campaign for under capitalism. But this is a misinterpretation as the context, both textual and historical, makes clear. The preceding paragraphs indicate that they were measures that the working class should implement after it had won control of political power. One of the measures — the ‘confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels’ — doesn’t make sense except in that context.

The historical context is the uprising that had broken out in Germany against autocratic dynastic rule. Marx and Engels thought that this ‘bourgeois revolution will be but the prelude to an immediately following proletarian revolution’. In other words, they were measures for the working class to implement on winning political control in 1848. This didn’t happen and, in exile in London three years later, Marx and Engels recognised that they had been mistaken and that this was never really on the cards. So the listed measures weren’t relevant even in 1848, let alone today 178 years later.

Some of them, such as a progressive income tax, a state bank, railway nationalisation, and free education, have since been implemented under capitalism; which rather undermines the Morning Star’s claim that they ‘challenge the basis of existing society’. In fact, that claim reveals that those behind it envisage existing capitalism being gradually transformed into state capitalism by a series of reforms and nationalisations.

But the killer quote that disposes of the Morning Star’s misinterpretation is what Engels wrote in the Preface to the 1872 re-edition:

‘The practical application of the principles will depend, as the Manifesto itself states, everywhere and at all times, on the historical conditions for the time being existing, and, for that reason, no special stress is laid on the revolutionary measures proposed at the end of Section II. That passage would, in many respects, be very differently worded today’ (Our emphasis).

Today of course they would be even more differently worded, not that it would make sense to draw any up today since we don’t know what the conditions will be in which the working class will assume control of political power. But we can safely say that they won’t need to include any of those listed in 1848.

Letter: Engels (2026)

Letter to the Editors from the March 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Engels

Hello

There’s a certain irony in being accused (Pathfinders, February) of not having read Engels when my point (very much a side point) was that Engels’ arguments were based on no evidence of how people organised themselves in prehistory. My main point was that no, prehistory was not a feminist utopia, but there was a huge diversity of relations between men and women of which, until recently, we were completely ignorant. My reason for not including Engels in Further Reading was not that it was old hat, though perhaps even the author of this piece would agree that Engels’ ideas have been around a while, but that the rule for that particular section of The Guardian’s books pages is that it should be inspired by recent thinking and recent books – which are then cited in Further Reading. If this author were himself better read, he would know that I’ve written on this subject in greater depth, with a less restrictive word count, for New Scientist – written and he would, I hope, feel a little ashamed of his groundless (rather like Engels’) statements.

Best wishes,

Laura Spinney

Reply from the writer

As a New Scientist subscriber for twenty years I’ve appreciated many of your interesting articles, but I must have missed the one you wrote on Engels. You say there’s no evidence for his hypothesis on the subjection of women (actually derived from pioneering anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan), even calling it ‘groundless’. This seems a little harsh given that whole theoretical edifices are sometimes constructed based on one finger bone. The evidence of patriarchy is all around you and everywhere in history. Is the alternative origin story simply that ‘it’s complicated?’ To discuss Engels’ argument while omitting the crucial role of emerging property relations is a bit like discussing gravity without mentioning mass, or Newton, or relativity. That’s why your representation of Engels came across as woolly, hence the speculation that you might not have gone to the source. Angela Saini, as the article points out, instead takes the argument and runs with it in a way that sheds further light rather than confusion on the subject.

PJS

Pathfinders: Human factories (2026)

The Pathfinders Column from the February 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

With cinema takings falling in recent years due to online streaming, Hollywood has resorted to transparent attempts to lure in the lucrative female demographic through ‘girl-boss’ films, which show women in history dramas wielding huge swords and beating up men twice their size, outshining, outsmarting and indeed humiliating them at every turn. This has been widely derided as ‘wokism’, but women are unlikely to be fooled by such patronising efforts to ’empower’ them for the sake of box-office revenue. Unlike media executives spinning fantasies, they know what reality looks like in capitalism, where the pay gap is as wide as ever and domestic violence against women is at epidemic levels.

Late last year a Cornell University study looked at why so few women were found in senior job roles, and suggested that women had two strategies or ‘pathways’, one that gave them status, and the other that gave them power. The study concluded that women achieved status but not power through ‘gender-congruent’ behaviour (ie, being ‘ladylike’ and nice to men), whereas ‘gender-incongruent’ behaviour (ie, being assertive like men, aka ‘pushy’), might achieve power but was less likely to succeed.

Small wonder, perhaps, that writers from Charlotte Perkins Gilman onward have speculated about past or future feminist utopias. Back in October science writer Laura Spinney authored a somewhat tongue-in-cheek Guardian piece entitled ‘Was prehistory a feminist paradise?‘ Predictable answer: no. She discusses the ‘Marxist idea’ that the roots of patriarchy lay in the agricultural revolution, without once mentioning the word ‘property’, and with a hand-wavy vagueness that suggests she’s never read Engels on The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, or possibly even heard of it. That might be why the book does not appear in her ‘Further reading’ section.

One book that does appear, however, is The Patriarchs, by Angela Saini (2023) reviewed last January. This author clearly has read Engels, though initially she seems oddly dismissive. Some property-based communities in India and China, she points out, are known up to comparatively modern times to have been matrilineal (inheritance via the female line) and matrilocal (brides staying at home, husbands relocating). In these communities, women knew each other whereas the men didn’t, giving women the greater collective influence, and girls tended to be taller than in patrilocal groups, suggesting they were better fed. Given these examples, Saini proposes that Engels overstated the crucial importance of the property mechanism in bringing about the ‘world historic defeat of the female sex’. Essentially, she says, it was never that fast or that simple.

It becomes clear, in the second half of the book, that far from dismissing Engels, she is seeking to further develop the implicit consequences of his argument. Property may have provided the mechanism for this historic defeat, she says, but it wasn’t initially decisive. What was decisive was the growth of the ‘state machine’. Power, she argues, relies on a big army, and this in turn depends on population size. To increase the one, you need to increase the other. How to achieve this? Ruthlessly enforce strict gender roles, as either soldier or mother. Use disposable males for farm labour and the military, and turn women into baby factories and stay-at-home textile workers. Ancient wars, Saini says, were as much about grabbing extra women as extra land. Women were the first known slaves in Mesopotamia, and obedience to men was baked into ancient cultures and religious texts, including the Bible and Koran.

There is a contemporary resonance. Population size today may not equate to military might as it once did, but it’s still important to capitalist states. More workers, potentially, equal more productivity and more profits, properly staffed infrastructures, healthy tax-funded governments, thriving towns and small businesses, high house prices and high demand for construction, transport systems, energy use, and so on.

Globally, the opposite is happening. Almost everywhere outside sub-Saharan Africa, birth rates are well below replacement levels and falling. While voters in many countries are hypnotised by the populist fever-dream of the ‘immigration problem’, the better-informed know the truth. Capitalism is facing a demographic crisis. When population falls below a certain critical mass, things start to fall apart. Profits shrink, offices are deserted, whole towns are abandoned. Pension and health costs rise inexorably with the median age, paid from a shrinking tax fund and understaffed via a shrinking workforce. The European Commission predicts that by 2070 there will be barely two working-age people for every one person over 65 (Economist). China is thought to be massaging its official figures to disguise a catastrophic population decline. The reasons for all this are well known, to do with better education and access to contraception, and the rising costs of living, housing and parenthood. And states have begun to fight back.

The USSR in 1920 was the first country in the world to legalise abortion, but Stalin reversed the ruling just sixteen years later, when birth rates started falling. Now pressure is being applied to women in many countries to have more children. The right wing is morphing in sinister and cult-like pro-natalist and Christian trad-wife directions. In 2022 the US Supreme Court reversed the Roe vs Wade ruling, effectively banning abortion in many states. In 2024, US republicans voted against contraception as a federal right. China’s president Xi Jinping ‘told a meeting of the All-China Women’s Federation in 2023 that women should “actively cultivate a new culture of marriage and child-bearing”’.

If Saini’s historical analysis is right, the global outlook for women is not encouraging. Capitalist states need more babies, and never mind what women want. And never mind what men want either. The market system makes everyone suffer. For socialists, there’s really only one way to permanently destroy the forces that make us all into human factories, of one kind or another, for the benefit of the rich. And that’s by joining forces to bring down, not just glass ceilings, but ruling class power.

Paddy Shannon

Blogger's Note:

Laura Spinney replied to this article on the SPGB website.

This Month's Quotation: F. Engels. (1933)

The Front Page quote from the October 1933 issue of the Socialist Standard

"The time is past for revolutions carried through by small minorities at the head of unconscious masses."

Frederick Engels

A word of advice to Labour Party supporters (1952)

From the October 1952 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Labour Party is searching for a policy. The nationalisation of the basic industries and the extension of the social services have been brought about and still the position of the working class remains unchanged, the workers must sell their ability to work for a wage that scarcely buys the necessities of life. At the last general election a large number of workers showed their discontent with the Labour Party’s administration by placing the Tories in power. To rally the support of the workers next time, a host of publications have been issued recently by the Labour Party and groups within it. All attempt to find some new solution to the problems of Capitalism, since nationalisation and the welfare state have failed to solve them.

One of these publications, the “New Fabian Essays,” was reviewed in the Economist (May 25th, 1952). The reviewer wrote:—

“Mr. Crosland presents a skilful analysis of the mixed economy, neither Capitalism nor Socialism, that war and six years of Labour rule have created. Mr. Strachey thinks rather well of the result and Mr. Crossman, naturally, dismisses it contemptuously as ‘welfare capitalism.' Neither manages to define the Socialism which he wants to evolve from it. Mr. Crosland himself effectively challenges the stock Left-wing assumption that the mixed economy is naturally transitory and must pass quickly into some sort of Socialism; and he dismisses several of the orthodox lines of advance—more social services, more nationalisation, more controls, more direct taxation—without making the alternatives at all clear . . . 

“. . . . The gross result is certainly not even the beginnings of a new philosophy either of socialist change or of consolidation in the welfare state."

The Glasgow Forward (23rd August, 1952) commented upon another of these publications:—

“The Labour Party's latest policy statement—ironically titled 'Facing the Facts'—has met with all-round criticism. It tries to please everybody in the party and ends of pleasing nobody. At the moment the Labour Party is suffering from too many personalities, too many platitudes—and too few policies."

Another pamphlet published by the Socialist Union, “Socialism—A Restatement of Principles,” is called by the Tribune (11th July, 1952) “ Sunday School Socialism.” According to the Economist (June 28th, 1952), the pamphlet argues that “The Labour movement is not . . . concerned with overthrowing Capitalism and replacing it by something called Socialism . . . All the social and economic changes from the Capitalism of the nineteenth century cannot be seen as part of the transition to some definite socialist system . . .” 

From this the pamphlet goes on to protest against the class war as an instrument of socialist advance: it declares roundly that the programmes and thoughts of socialists “have all grown out of the discontents of the past, and were designed to meet the injustices of a past age it not only objects to the identification of nationalisation with Socialism, but asks whether anyone knows what “socialisation” means. . . .

“All this is, of course, destructive,” wrote the Economist. “Positively, socialist union offers as yet ethical, not political, principles; and the best of ethics can lead men to almost any practical conclusion.”

Over 70 years ago. Frederick Engels had something to say about the relation of ethics to Socialism which was later published as “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific.” Here Engels traced the origin and development of Socialism, its historical conditions and philosophical ideas. He called those who sought to bring about a better society by appealing to ethical principles. Utopians. He wrote:

"The ‘Utopians” mode of thought has for a long time governed the Socialist ideas of the nineteenth century. and still governs some of them. Until very recently all French and English socialists did homage to it. The earlier German Communism, including that of Weitling was of the same school. To all these Socialism is the expression of absolute truth, reason and justice, and has only to be discovered to conquer all the world by virtue of its own power. And as absolute truth is independent of time, space, and of the historical development of man, it is a mere accident when and where it is discovered. With all this, absolute truth, reason, and justice are different with the founder of each different school. And as each one’s special kind of absolute truth, reason, and justice is again conditioned by his subjective understanding. his conditions of existence, the measure of his knowledge and his intellectual training, there is no other ending possible in this conflict of absolute truths than that they shall be mutually exclusive one of the other. Hence from this nothing could come but a kind of eclectic, average Socialism, which, as a matter of fact, has up to the present time dominated the minds of most of the socialist workers in France and England. Hence a mish-mash allowing of the most manifold shades of opinion, a mish-mash of such critical statements, economic theories, pictures of future society by the founders of the different sects, as excite a minimum of opposition, a mish-mash which is the more easily brewed, the more the definite sharp edges of the individual constituents are rubbed down in the stream of debate, like rounded pebbles in a brook.

“To make a science of Socialism, it had first to be placed upon a real basis.” (“Socialism: Utopian and Scientific,” Vol. II, pp. 117-8, Marx Engels' Sel. Works, published by Lawrence & Wishart, Ltd.)

As the foregoing comments on the Labour publications show, Engels’ words also describe the Labourites of the 20th century.

Engels pointed to the working class struggles in the early 19th century and argued that these ’’facts more and more strenuously gave the lie to the teachings of bourgeois economy as to the identity of the interests of capital and labour. As to the universal harmony and universal prosperity that would be the consequence of unbridled competition . . .”

"The new facts made imperative a new examination of all past history. Then it was seen that all past history, with the exception of its primitive stages, was the history of class struggles; that these warring classes of society are always the products of the modes of production and of exchange—in a word, of the economic conditions of their time; that the economic structure of society always furnishes the real basis, starting from which we can alone work out the ultimate explanation of the whole superstructure of juridical and political institutions as well as the religious, philosophical and other ideas of a given historical period. . . .”

"The Socialism of earlier days certainly criticised the existing capitalist mode of production and its consequences. But it could not explain them, and therefore, could not get the mastery of them. It could only simply reject them as bad. The more strongly this earlier Socialism denounced the exploitation of the working class, inevitable under Capitalism, the less able was it clearly to show in what this exploitation consisted and how it arose. But for this it was necessary—(1) to present the capitalistic mode of production in its historical connection and its inevitableness during a particular historical period, and therefore, also, to present its inevitable downfall; and (2) lo lay bare its essential character, which was still a secret. This was done by the discovery of surplus value. It was shown that the appropriation of unpaid labour is the basis of the capitalist mode of production and of the exploitation of the worker that occurs under it; that even if the capitalist buys the labour power of his labourer at its full value as a commodity on the market, he yet extracts more value from it than he paid for; and that in the ultimate analysis this surplus value forms those sums of value from which are heaped up the constantly increasing masses of capital in the hands of possessing classes. The genesis of capitalist production and production of capital were both explained.” (“Socialism: Utopian and Scientific,” Vol. II, M.E.S.W., pp. 123-5.)

After tracing the development of modern social production from small handicraft, Engels wrote:

“The means of production, and production itself, had become in essence socialised. But they were subjected to a form of appropriation which presupposes the private production of individuals, under which, therefore, everyone owns his own product and brings it to the market. The mode of production is subjected to this form of appropriation although it abolishes the conditions upon which the latter rests.

“This contradiction, which gives to the new mode of production its capitalistic character, contains the germ of the whole of the social antagonism of to-day.” (M.E.S.W.. Vol. II. pp. 128-9.)

Engels explained in detail the social antagonisms that follow from this fundamental contradiction and pointed out how it would be eliminated ”with the seizing of the means of production by society.” (P. 140.)

By this Engels didn’t mean nationalisation. He claimed that

"the transformation . . . into state ownership does not do away with the capitalistic nature of the productive forces . . . the modern State . . . is only the organisation that bourgeois society takes on in order to support the external conditions of the capitalist mode of production against the encroachments as well of the workers as the individual capitalists. The modem State, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of productive forces, the more does it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. The workers remain wage workers—proletarians.” (P. 136.) 

Members and sympathisers of the Labour Party seeking a policy to which they can give their support should lay hold of ”Socialism: Utopian and Scientific,” and read it carefully. They can find it included in “Marx, Engels, Selected Works,” Vol. II. The language may reflect the conditions under which it was written, but as an exposition of the rise and development of capitalist society and the solution to its problems. Socialism, it is right up to date.

We hope that many of them would then realise that the object of their policy should be the common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments of production and that to ” thoroughly comprehend the historical conditions and thus the very nature of this act, to impart to the now oppressed proletarian class a full knowledge of the conditions and of the meaning of the momentous act it is called upon to accomplish, this is the task of the theoretical expression of the proletarian movement, scientific Socialism.”

J. T.

Notes on Russia: Squaring the circle (1962)

From the July 1962 issue of the Socialist Standard

Alongside the development of Russia as a great capitalist trading power it is interesting to look at the attempt made by Stalin a few years before his death to square Russian policy with Marxist principles.

Frederick Engels in his Socialism, Utopian and Scientific (1892) had written that with the capture of power and “the seizing of the means of production of society, production of commodities is done away with, and simultaneously, the mastery of the product over the producer ". He also wrote that as a first step “The proletariat seizes political power and turns the means of production into State property.”

Someone put the question to Stalin, why was it that years after capturing power the Russian Communist Party still continued commodity production, i.e. production of articles for sale. Stalin, in his Economic Problems of Socialism in the U.S.S.R. (Published in Moscow in 1952) set out to answer the question. He did so by arguing that in the first of the two passages quoted above Engels meant all the means of production, and the Russian Government had in fact taken possession of only some of them, the industrial means of production, but not the agricultural means of production.

This in itself is a hollow excuse as far as Engels is concerned because Engels certainly did not write, or think, that 35 or more years after gaining political power an essential part of the means of production would still not have been taken over.

But Stalin had another and even more curious defence. It was that Engels had had in mind the one country, Britain, in which agriculture had in 1892 been “capitalised” and concentrated; and Stalin then expressed doubt whether Britain could abolish commodity production, because of its dependence on foreign trade.

Why Stalin's thoughts were concerned with the problem of foreign trade was made clear elsewhere in Stalin’s book because he had realised that Russia too was becoming more dependent on foreign trade. He wrote: -

. . . it will soon come to pass that these countries will not only be in no need of imports from capitalist countries but will themselves feel the necessity of finding an outside market for their surplus products, (p. 36)

By “these countries” Stalin meant Russia and the other miscalled “socialist” countries.

Though Stalin's tortuous “explanation” may have satisfied his questioner it landed him in the further dilemma that while Engels had seen the capture of power and the ending of commodity production bringing to an end “ the mastery of the product over the producer”, for Mr. Stalin the producers in Russia and the other countries were increasingly coming under the “necessity” of finding foreign markets for exports, just like the rest of the capitalist world.

The recent big increase of prices of meat and other foods in Russia in order to increase the income of the collective farms and peasants and encourage them to raise output and efficiency of production, shows that the problem of agriculture is still far from being settled. British capitalism solved the problem in 1846 from the standpoint of the industrial capitalists by abolishing the corn laws which protected the landed interest and maintained high food prices. Agriculture was allowed to decline, cheap food was imported from abroad which kept prices (and wages) low and enlarged the profits of the manufacturers and shipowners. Russia now is in a somewhat similar position since the Russian Government could lower its own food prices if it allowed the importation of cheap food from America and other countries in which agricultural production is more efficient and cheaper. But this of course would involve problems even greater than those faced by British capitalism over a century ago.

To put the matter into perspective from a socialist point of view it need only be added that trade problems are capitalist not socialist. The idea of “socialism in one country” is a false one. In a capitalist world there can only be capitalist economy, with its associated need for commodity production and foreign markets. Socialism is an international concept and in that framework such problems do not exist.

Edgar Hardcastle

The International. (1907)

From the December 1907 issue of the Socialist Standard

Marx and Engels had no misapprehension whatsoever as to the fact that the first International could only be the means of carrying and spreading a knowledge of Socialism among the wage-workers throughout the world. Such a task, in face of the great apathy and ignorance of the toilers, was a tremendous one, as the history of the first International has demonstrated. Yet it cannot be gainsaid that the International from 1863 till 1872 was a far greater educational power among the proletariat than the present International, which was inaugurated in 1889. This comparison becomes more significant still when it is asserted by prominent writers and speakers of the present labour movement that the first International was only a roof without the house, while the second, the present International, is a house with a roof. Marx and Engels never claimed any more for the first International than that it was an awning under which the toilers of the world were to be gathered in order to acquire a sound knowledge of capitalist society and of their position therein. And during the nine years of its existence it was indeed a powerful factor in the class struggle throughout the civilised world. The present International, however, is a house without a roof for all the good it is to the proletariat. Look back at that old International and you must feel astounded at the terror it drove into the hearts of the possessing class and their satellites; and why? Simply because it breathed revolution through and through; and Marx and Engels did their utmost to maintain the flame of the revolution.

With the tremendous advantages the present International possesses and has since it was inaugurated, as compared with the great difficulties of the first International, it is evident that the present International has by no means made the most of its opportunities. When in 1863 the first International saw the light there were practically only Marx, Engels, and a few other stalwarts to take up the gigantic task. Marx and Engels were then in the midst of their analysis of the capitalist system, which later on became the basis of the scientific Socialist movement. At the beginning of the first International there was only the Communist Manifesto, a work excellent in its way, but lacking the detailed exposition that followed in Das Capital. The Franco-German War, the Paris Commune, the many great fights and skirmishes of the workers with the capitalist class in every country from that period until 1889, when the second International was inaugurated, were certainly historic events from which splendid lessons ought to have been drawn by the international proletariat; but that was not to be.

The first International shines in the history of the international working-class movement as an epoch of revolutionary propaganda among the proletariat that is not in the least degree approached by the newer movement.

The first International Congress in connection with the first International was held at Geneva in 1866, followed by similar Congresses in 1867 at Lausanne, in 1868 at Brussels, 1869 at Basle, and in 1872 at The Hague. No Congresses were held in 1870 and 1871. During these two years the young international was sorely tried and proved too weak to withstand the exceptionally heavy onslaught made upon it. The Franco-German War and the subsequent Paris Commune were the primary causes of the collapse of the International in 1872, while the hostile position taken up by the bulk of the English Trade Unions against the brave and noble Communards, together with the fact that anarchist tactics were introduced and insisted upon by Bakounin and others were certainly most effective contributory factors to the ultimate fall of the first International. It has been frequently asserted by bourgeois writers and speakers and occasionally repeated by so-called Socialists that Marx was mainly responsible for the Paris Commune. Nothing is more erroneous. Marx knew the extent, power and possibilities of the first International too well to have advocated a sectional trial of strength between the practically unorganised proletariat and the capitalist class.

Marx and Engels, who had throughout the first International aided and advised it in person and by correspondence, continued to be helpers and guides in the different countries even after the first International had collapsed in 1872. When in 1883 Marx died, Engels remained in personal touch with the working-class organisations until his death in 1895, paying them visits in the summer and corresponding with them during the winter.

But although the Socialist movement in the different countries had since the fall of the first International nominally accepted the Socialist teachings of Marx and Engels and the principles of the class-struggle underlying them, the development of the political action of the respective Socialist parties almost in every country tended more and more towards opportunism, so that when the second International was inaugurated in 1889 the opportunist Parliamentarism of the German, Austrian and French parties and the reform tendency of the English, American, Belgian, Dutch, Italian, Swiss and other national parties, that had not yet entered upon a Parliamentary career, naturally found their reflection in the first and following assemblies of the present International. At each of these re-unions the opportunists and reformers were to the fore and easily overpowered the few valiant revolutionaries to whom the policy and tactics of negotiating with the capitalist class for “dirty patches on the wage-slavery garden” were treachery and abomination. And just in the proportion in which in the different countries the Socialist parties attached ever more importance to catching votes for Parliamentary and Municipal candidates running on reform programmes, the revolutionary propaganda was more and more relegated to the rear, till to-day we have a so-called International Socialist movement embracing organisations and individuals that are beyond a doubt purely bourgeois-radical in composition and action. As long as such conditions prevail the working-class movement will make no headway.

The constitution of the International Congress is, as we know so well, a purely theoretic one. Any working-class organisations avowing recognition of the class-struggle at the time of claiming admission have no difficulty whatever in being accepted. They may immediately before and after each Congress repudiate or grossly violate the principles of the class struggle; they may, in fact, be Liberal or Radical organisations at home; but so long as they pretend to be in accord with the class-war attitude, they are heartily welcome at these triennial gatherings.

And what is the composition of these Congresses in consequence? Let us briefly analyse it for our readers’ benefit. The English delegation undoubtedly carries off the palm.

First and foremost comes the Labour Party with a constitution supposing independence on pronouncedly non-Socialist lines. In Parliament they are represented by 30 members, who were elected mainly by open or secret compromise with the Liberal Party and on Radical programmes. In Parliament and out of it they have over and over again assured the Liberal Party that they would be perfectly friendly with them so long as that friendliness was reciprocated.

Next comes the bourgeois Fabian Society with its four members, who were at the last General Election returned as official Liberal representatives, and with a host of official progressive Municipal councillors. The Fabians want a state of Society where “Fabian intellect” shall dominate the masses on the “economic” basis of the “rent of ability”.

A further composite of the English section is the I.L.P., who deny and violate the principles of the class war all the time they are at home. Their members of Parliament were returned by the help of the Labour and Liberal parties. They spend all their efforts in propagating hopeless palliatives and reforms and in the real class struggle continually compromise with the capitalist class.

The S.D.F. support capitalist cat’s paws of the anti-Socialist labour type, and pursue a propaganda of palliatives and reforms, which finds its highest expression in waiting upon capitalist Cabinet Ministers and bourgeois Members of Parliament, to beg of them to push forward “Healthy Legislation for the Suffering Proletariat, etc.”

Besides this array of “sound revolutionary” organisations there are a few “craft-unions” that keep up their membership by their “starvation pension schemes and coffin clubs” mingled with the hope of being able to do something “very soon” for the unemployed with the most valuable aid of the Right Honourable John Burns, whom they support during his election, and then denounce as traitor if the hoped-for reforms are not forthcoming.

But this confusion and opportunism is not, as pointed out previously, only rampant among the organisations that form the British Section of this unhappy International. Take Germany for instance. Here you have the much-boasted of three and a quarter million votes at the last general election, yet the membership of the Socialist Party comprises about 600,000 only, scarcely 18 per cent of the number of voters. It is true that the number of trade unionists has risen to nearly two millions; but a third of these are members of Liberal or religious trade unions, that are entirely under the sway of the capitalist class; and other trade unions are so-called “neutral” ones, that is to say, they are craft unions, independent of the Socialist Party. In the political arena the German Party is dominated by the Reformers and the Revisionists, and in their Parliamentary and Municipal actions they are steeped to the eyebrows in bourgeois reforms and palliatives, while the revolutionary propaganda is left to the very much despised “Rickers”.

In France there was until the International Congress in 1904 at Amsterdam, a body of real revolutionaries – the Guesdists. But in consequence of the “unity” craze these revolutionary fighters fused with the Reformers, the followers of Jaurès, about two years ago on the following terms:

“The United Party is a party of the class struggle, which, even if for the benefit of the workers it takes advantage of minor conflicts among the possessing class or joins in action with a political party for the purpose of defending the rights and interests of the proletariat, remains nevertheless an opposition party, which in principle irreconcilably faces the bourgeois class and their tool – the State.”

The Reformers have, at least temporarily, bamboozled the Guesdists; but judging from the proceedings at the last Congress of the Party, some few weeks ago, there are already many bad sores, which can only lead to a split in the near future. The trade union question, the anti-militarist agitation and the Revisionist tendencies of the followers of Jaurès must bring matters to a head very soon. The United Party during the last general election obtained nearly 900,000 votes, 52 of their candidates having been elected. Yet the members of the United Party number only about 52,000. There are about one and a half million trade unionists in France. Half of these are either Nationalists or Radicals, or do not believe in political action at all. The remaining half are composed of men, most of whom consider it detrimental to the cause of Labour for the trade unions to work in co-operation with the Socialist Party. This question is the great bone of contention between the Guesdists and the followers of Jaurès, who insist upon the trade unions remaining “neutral”, whatever that may mean. it is probable that mainly through the difference the Guesdists will leave the United Party very shortly.

A similar state of things is reflected in the delegations of almost every country, and the truth forces itself upon us that the International Socialist Congress is, as far as the majority is concerned, Socialist in name only, many indeed repudiating even the name.

For the triumph of Socialism, national and international, organisation is essential, but the organisation must be for Socialism and based on Socialist principles or such organisation can be nothing to the workers but a delusion and a snare,

Hans Neumann

Further reading:

In 1968 the late John Crump wrote a three-part article in the Socialist Standard on the subject of the Socialist Party and the Second International. Click on the links:

• May 1968
• June 1968
• July 1968

Cooking the Books: The King of Tariffs (2025)

The Cooking The Books column from the May 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Trump often cites the “gilded age” of William McKinley, the late 19th-century president, who imposed tariffs at an average rate of 50 percent to protect the domestic farming sector from foreign competition’ (Times, 4 April).

Actually, it was the manufacturing sector that McKinley wanted to protect. When he was a congressman for Ohio he drew up the Tariff Act of 1890 that came to be known as the McKinley Tariff. Trump calls him the ‘Tariff King’, a crown he himself clearly wants to wear.

In 1888, with the campaign for tariffs in America in full swing, Engels published an English translation, with his introduction, of a talk on free trade that Marx had given in French in Brussels in 1848. Engels quoted Marx as saying (in chapter 31 of Capital) that historically protectionism had been ‘an artificial means of manufacturing manufacturers’. In his talk Marx criticised free trade too but came out in favour of it because it would hasten the development of capitalism and so bring on the final confrontation between the working class and the capitalist class. As he put it:

‘The free trade system hastens the social revolution. It is in this revolutionary sense alone, gentlemen, that I vote in favour of free trade’.

Engels’s introduction provided a useful historical survey of protectionism — including which sections of the propertied classes in different countries had benefited from it and which had not at various times — and some background on what led to the McKinley Tariff, but also made some points about the effect of tariffs on different sectors of capitalist business which are still relevant today.

One difference he mentioned was between those sectors which relied on imported materials and those which didn’t. Manufacturers who obtained within the country the materials to transform into what they sold welcomed a tariff on imports of their product as protecting them from outside competition. On the other hand, those manufacturers who relied on imported materials did not want a tariff on them as this would increase the cost of producing their product. Nor did importers want tariffs generally.

This was seen today in the immediate reaction to Trump’s 2 April ‘Liberation Day’ on Wall Street, where share prices reflect traders’ views on the future profit prospects of the quoted firms. Shares in Apple whose smartphones are manufactured in Asia fell by 9 percent and ‘Big multinational consumer groups were heavily in the red, reeling from tariffs on Asian production hubs. Nike slumped 14 per cent’.

Exporters are not keen on tariffs either as their products are likely to be targets of any retaliatory action taken by other countries. America doesn’t export much manufactured stuff (except weapons of war and pharmaceuticals). Apart from oil and gas, its main exports are agricultural products. Sure enough, this is what China’s retaliatory tariffs, announced two days later, were aimed at. ‘The latest measures are likely to have the most impact on US agricultural exports, including soya beans, wheat and corn’ (Financial Times, 4 April).

In short, not all its business sectors benefit when a country imposes tariffs. America today is no exception. Some capitalist businesses are in favour of Trump’s policy but some will be lobbying for exemptions, even campaigning against him. Not that there is any guarantee that his protectionism will succeed in ‘manufacturing manufacturers’ in America, or, rather, in raising them from the dead.

In any event, as Engels noted:

‘The question of Free Trade or Protection moves entirely within the bounds of the present system of capitalist production, and has, therefore, no direct interest for us socialists who want to do away with that system.’

McKinley was elected president in 1896 but was assassinated by an anarchist in 1901.

Marx's partner (1983)

From the March 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialists cannot pay tribute to Marx without at the same time noting the role of his comrade and collaborator, Engels. It was Engels’ financial support which enabled the penurious Marx to carry out his researches into political economy.

But this financial support was not the least of Engels’ contributions. It is reckoned that about 1500 letters passed between Marx and Engels. They thought along the same lines, they spoke the same language, yet their life-experience was different. For Engels, there was the practical world of the Manchester cotton trade, he read widely, keeping himself fully informed of the latest developments in physics, chemistry and other sciences, with a special interest in comparative physiology and the controversies surrounding Darwin’s theory of evolution.

To Engels we owe volumes II and III of Marx's unfinished Capital, which he completed with difficulty from quantities of rough drafts and notes. After Marx’s death. Engels continued to publish translations and new editions of Marx’s works, providing prefaces in many languages. Yet it would be wrong to regard Engels only as Marx's editor, publisher and lifelong friend. His contributions to the socialist movement stand in their own right.

Many of the issues he discussed in his early work, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, were taken up again by Marx in volume 1 of Capital. Engels' passionate indictment of slums, and the diseases and deformities of children at sweated labour (as in his analysis of the real cost of lace for fashionable ladies), such themes permeate his book. Yet there is more in it than indignation at the social evils of industrial capitalism.

Engels described how new technology and the division of labour were accompanied by the emergence of a new class, the urban proletariat. He posed the fundamental question: "What is to become of these propertyless millions who own nothing and consume today what they earned yesterday?’’ Industry, he wrote. ". . . regards its workers not as human beings but simply as so much capital for the use of which the industrialist has to pay interest under the name of wages”. Describing how competition affected the level of wages, he also emphasised the "cycles of boom and slump”; the Malthusian "surplus population” was the reserve army of the unemployed, available for industry's booms, and condemned to destitution and the Poor Law workhouses between-times.

Discussing both the value and the limitations of trade unionism (a theme to which he returned in some later writings [1]), and the main working class movements of the time. Engels criticised the English socialists for being metaphysical, lacking awareness of the significance of historical development. It seemed to him that they preached "philanthropy and universal love . . . the improvement of humanity in the abstract". He reiterated this criticism in his preface to the 1892 edition:

And today, the very people who. from the ’impartiality' of their superior standpoint, preach to the workers a Socialism soaring high above their class interests and class struggles, and tending to reconcile in a higher humanity the interests of both the contending classes — these people are either neophytes, who have still to learn a great deal, or they are the worst enemies of the workers — wolves in sheep’s clothing.

This first socialist examination of the effects of industrial capitalism, written from the standpoint of historical materialism, touched on many issues later developed in other works by Marx and Engels. Written in Germany on Engels’ return from two years in Manchester, The Condition of the Working Class has some faults. He was not able to check all of his quotations, and some are inaccurate; later, he acknowledged that his prediction that with the next crisis would come the revolution was “youthful ardour”.

Although the Communist Manifesto was published as their joint work, Engels himself expressly stated:

The basic thought running through the Manifesto — that economic production and the structure of society of every historical epoch necessarily arising therefrom constitute the foundation for the political and intellectual history of that epoch; that consequently (ever since the dissolution of the primeval communal ownership of land) all history has been a history of class struggles, of struggles between exploited and exploiting, between dominated and dominating classes at various stages of social development; that this struggle, however, has now reached a stage where the exploited and oppressed class (the proletariat) can no longer emancipate itself from the class which exploits and oppresses it (the bourgeoisie), without at the same time forever freeing the w'hole of society from exploitation, oppression and class struggle — this basic thought belongs solely and exclusively to Marx. [2]

One persistent criticism of Marx is that human behaviour is said to be influenced exclusively by class interests and material factors and nothing else. This is a gross distortion and Engels explicitly argued against such nonsense:

According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life. More than this neither Marx nor I has ever asserted. Hence if somebody twists this into saying that the economic role is the only determining one he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase. [3]

In much of Engels' writing, we find the dialectical method explained. He considered phenomena as evolving through often complex interactions. His conception of history was not a simplistic model of a superstructure of laws, religions, ideologies and dogmas perched on top of a separate economic base, with something like a damp course separating one from another. On the contrary, the various elements of the superstructure "also exercise their influence upon the course of historical struggles and in many cases preponderate in determining their form"'. [3]

Criticisms of Marx as an "economic determinist” arise from "the common undialectical conception of cause and effect as rigidly opposite poles, the total disregarding of interaction. These gentlemen often almost deliberately forget that once a historic element has been brought into the world by other, ultimately economic causes it reacts, can react upon its environment and even on the causes that have given rise to it" [4]. In Anti-Dühring Engels showed that science had revealed just such a dialectical process in nature. There are no absolute truths, everything is changing: "motion is the mode of existence of matter".

Anti-Dühring supplies a thorough grounding in dialectical materialism, applied not only to science and philosophy (attacking with gusto the nonsense about "eternal truths" propounded by metaphysical thinkers), but also to the development of socialist theory from "Utopian" socialism to "scientific” socialism. Some chapters from Anti-Dühring were soon republished as a pamphlet, Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, and the central section of the book ("Political Economy”) serves as a helpful introduction to Marx’s Capital. Both the book and the pamphlet had an immediate and lasting influence in many countries.

In his next book, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884). based on Lewis H. Morgan’s Ancient Society, Engels analysed the way civilised, class-divided society had evolved from barbaric and savage societies, and how property relationships changed family relationships. Engels also showed how the changing division of labour, with the introduction of herding, "forced women into second place": mother-right gave place to father-right. He showed how the state arose from the need to hold class antagonisms in check, so that the state "is, as a rule, the state of the most powerful, dominant class, which, through the medium of the state, becomes also the politically dominant class". It follows that the socialist has no choice but to emphasise that every class struggle is a political one.

The superficial objection to socialism — that it is against "human nature” — is based on ignorance of the fact that civilised society, with its class divisions and state coercive institutions, "has not existed from all eternity. There have been societies that did without it (the state), that had no conception of the state and state power". Engels described primitive societies which managed their affairs democratically and without the coercion that is considered right and natural today. Such societies demonstrate that it is not "human nature" which requires humanity to be divided into nation-states and opposing classes, or which would make socialism impossible.

This article has only discussed Engels's main works. There were others which are both readable and helpful. How far was the theory of "Marxism” his work? His own view was emphatic and consistent:

What I contributed — at any rate with the exception of a few special studies — Marx could very well have done without me. What Marx accomplished I would not have achieved . . . Marx was a genius; we others were at best talented. Without him the theory would not be what it is today. It therefore rightly bears his name. [5]

Charmian Skelton

References:

1. Cf. The Wages System (Progress Publishers)

2. Preface to the German edition. 1883

3. Letter to Bloch, 1890 (Marx and Engels — basic writings ed. Feuer, Fontana)

4. Letter to Mehring, 1893 (Feuer)

5. Ludwig Feuerbach, 1886 (Chap. IV. footnote)

Engels' review of Capital (1983)

From the March 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

Universal suffrage has added to the already existing parliamentary parties a new one, the Social-Democratic Party. In the last elections to the North-German Reichstag it nominated its own candidates in most large towns, in all factory districts, and six or eight of its deputies were returned. In comparison with the last election but one it has developed considerably greater strength and it can therefore be assumed that, for the present at least it is still growing. It would be folly to wish to continue to pass over in splendid silence the existence, activity and doctrines of such a party in a country in which universal suffrage has laid the final decision in the hands of the most numerous and poorest class.

However divided and unsettled the few Social-Democratic deputies may be among themselves, it can be assumed with assurance that all groups of that party will welcome the present book as their theoretical bible, the arsenal from which they will draw their most substantial arguments. On these grounds alone the book already deserves particular attention. Rut its contents too are such as will arouse interest. Whereas Lassalle's main argumentation — and in political economy Lasalle was but a disciple of Marx — is confined to continual repetition of Ricardo's so-called wages law, we have before us a work which treats the whole relation of capital and labour in its connection with the whole of economic science with indisputably rare erudition and which sets as its ultimate aim "to lay hare the economic law of motion of modern society”, and thereby, after obviously sincere investigations carried out with unmistakable knowledge of the subject, comes to the conclusion that the whole “capitalist mode of production” must be abolished. We should, however, like further to draw attention to the fact that, apart from the conclusions, the author in the course of his work presents quite a number of the major points of economics in a completely new light and in purely scientific questions arrives at results which are greatly at variance with current economics and wInch orthodox economists must seriously criticise and scientifically refute if they do not wish to see the doctrine they have so far professed founder. In the interest of science it is desirable that a polemic should develop very soon in specialised journals precisely on these points.

Marx begins by expounding the relation between commodity and money, the most essential of which was already published some time ago in a special work. Then he goes on to capital and here we have the cardinal point of the whole work. What is capital? Money which is changed into a commodity in order to be changed back from a commodity into more money than the original sum. When I buy cotton for 100 talers and sell it for 110 talers I preserve my 100 talers as capital, value which expands itself. Now the question arises: where do the 10 talers which I gain in this process come from? How does it happen that as a result of two simple exchanges 100 talers becomes 110. For economics presupposes that in all exchanges equal values are exchanged. Marx then considers all possible cases (fluctuation in prices of commodities, etc.) in order to prove that in the conditions assumed by economics the creation of 10 talers surplus-value out of the original 100 talers is impossible. Yet this process takes place daily and the economists have not yet given us an explanation for it. Marx provides the following explanation: the puzzle can be solved only if we find on the market a commodity of a quite peculiar kind, a commodity whose use-value consists in producing exchange-value. This commodity exists — it is labour-power. The capitalist buys labour-power on the market and makes it work for him in order in turn to sell its product. So we must first of all investigate labour-power.

What is the value of labour-power? According to the generally known law, it is the value of the means of subsistence necessary to maintain and procreate the labourer in the way established in a given country and a given historical epoch. We assume that the labourer is paid the entire value of his labour-power. Further we assume that this value is represented by six hours’ work daily, or half a working-day. But the capitalist asserts that he has bought labour-power for a whole working-day and he makes the labourer work twelve hours or more. With a twelve-hour working-day he therefore acquires the product of six hours' work without paying for it. From this Marx concludes: all surplus-value, no matter how it is divided, as profit of the capitalist, ground-rent, taxes, etc. is unpaid labour.

From the manufacturer's interest to extract as much unpaid labour as possible every day and the contrary interest of the labourer arises the struggle over the length of the working-day. In an illustration which is very much worth reading and which takes up about a hundred pages, Marx describes the origin of this struggle in English modern industry which, in spite of the protests of the free-trade manufacturers, ended last spring in not only factory industry but all small establishments and even ail domestic industry being subjected to the restrictions of the Factory Act, according to which the maximum working-day for women and children under eighteen — and thereby indirectly for men too in the most important branches of industry — was fixed at 10½ hours. At the same time he explains why English industry did not suffer, but on the contrary gained thereby, as the work of each individual won more in intensity than it lost in duration.

But there is another way of increasing surplus-value besides lengthening the working-day beyond the time required for the production of the necessary means of subsistence or their value. A given working-day. let us say of twelve hours, includes, according to our previous assumption, six hours of necessary work and six hours used for the production of surplus-value. If a means is found to cut the necessary working-time down to five hours, seven hours remain during which surplus-value will be produced. This can be achieved by a reduction in the working-time required to produce the necessary means of subsistence, in other words by cheapening the means of subsistence, and this in turn only by improving production. On this point Marx again gives a detailed illustration by investigating or describing the three main levers by which these improvements are brought about: 1) co-operation, or multiplication of power, which results from the simultaneous and systematic joint work of a number of workers; 2) division of labour, as it took shape in the period of manufacture proper (i.e. up to about 1770); finally. 3) machinery by the help of which modern industry has since developed. These descriptions are also of great interest and show astonishing knowledge of the subject even down to technological details.

We cannot enter into further details of the investigation on surplus-value and wages: we merely note, in order to avoid misunderstandings, that, as Marx proves by a number of quotations, orthodox economics is not unaware of the fact that wages are less than the whole product of work. It is to be hoped that this book will provide Messrs, the orthodox economists with the opportunity of giving us closer explanations on this really surprising point. It will be appreciated that all the factual proofs that Marx gives are taken from the best sources, mostly official parliamentary reports. We take this opportunity of supporting the suggestion, made indirectly by the author in the Preface, that in Germany too a thorough inquiry into the condition of the workers in the various industries be made by government officials — who, however, must not be prejudiced bureaucrats — and that the reports be submitted to the Reichstag and the public.

The first volume ends with a study of the accumulation of capital. This point has often been written about, although we must admit that here too much of what is given is new and that light is shed on the old from new sides. The most original is the attempted proof that side by side with the concentration and accumulation of capital. and in step with it, the accumulation of a surplus working population is going on, and that both together will in the end make a social upheaval necessary, on the one hand, and possible on the other.

Whatever opinion the reader may have of the author's socialist views, we think that we have shown him that he is here in presence of a work which stands well above the usual Social-Democratic publications. To that we add that with the exception of the strongly dialectical things on the first 40 pages, the book, in spite of all its scientific rigour, is very easy to understand and because of the author's sarcastic manner, which spares no one, is even interestingly written.

The Materialist Conception of History. [Engels] (1907)

From the September 1907 issue of the Socialist Standard

The first of the important discoveries with which the name of Marx is associated in the history of science, is the conception of the world’s history. All conception of history previous to him is founded on the idea that the ultimate causes of all historic changes are found in the changing ideas of men, and again, that of all historic changes the political are the most important, controlling the whole of history. But whence these ideas are derived by men, and what are the moving causes of political changes, nobody had even enquired. Only in the recent school of French, and partly also of English, historians, the conviction had forced itself that at least since the Middle Ages the driving force in European history was the struggle of the developing bourgeoisie with the feudal nobility for the social and political supremacy. Marx, however, demonstrated that all history has been hitherto a history of class struggles, that all the numerous and intricate political struggles were carried on only for the sake of the social and political supremacy of different classes in society; for the maintenance of the supremacy by older, for the establishment of supremacy by newly rising classes.

Through what agency, now, do these classes rise and exist? Through the pressure of those material and physical conditions under which the society of a given time produces and exchanges its means of subsistence. The feudal reign of the Middle Ages was based on the self-sufficient and almost exchangeless management of small farming communities, producing nearly all their own necessities and receiving from the warlike nobility protection against external foes, and national, or at least political, coherence. When the towns arose and with them a separate branch of skilled industry and a trade first confined to the home market, but later on waxing international, then the civic element of the towns developed and, fighting the nobility, obtained even during the Middle Ages its admission as a likewise privileged class into the feudal order. But by the discovery of new lands outside of Europe in the middle of the fifteenth century, the bourgeoisie obtained a far more extended territory for its trade and hence a new incentive to industry; skilled labour was displaced in the most important branches by more factory-like production which, in its turn met the same fate through industrial organisation on a large scale made possible by the inventions of the 18th century, especially the steam engine. These industries reacted on trade by displacing manual labour in the more backward countries and creating in the further advanced countries the present new means of communication, steam-engines, railways, electric telegraphs. Thus the bourgeoisie united more and more the social wealth and the social power in its own hands, though for a long time it still remained excluded from the political power which still rested in the hands of the nobility, and the monarchy protected by the nobility. But at a certain stage—in France after the great revolution—it also conquered this power and now became in its turn the ruling class in opposition to the proletariat and the small farmer. Observed from this point of view, all historical transactions are very easily explained—with a sufficient knowledge of the contemporaneous economic state of society, unhappily wholly missing in our professional historians.; and in a most simple manner the conceptions and ideas of a given historical period are explained by the economic conditions of existence during that period, and by the social and political conditions dependent on those economic factors. History for the first time was placed on its real foundation ; the obvious fact hitherto totally neglected, that first of all men must eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, and therefore must work, before they can struggle for supremacy and devote themselves to politics, religion, philosophy, etc.—this obvious fact at last found historical recognition.

Engels’ biographic sketch of Marx.