path: root/content/marx/economic-and-philosophic-manuscripts/_index.md

---
title: "Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844"
date: 1844
draft: true

author: Karl Marx
written: Between April and August 1844
firstPublished: 1932
source: Marx. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Progress Publishers, Moscow 1959
translated: Martin Milligan
transcription: marxists.org by Andy Blunden in 2000
proofed: Matthew Carmody 2009
copyleft: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 2.0
originalWebpage: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/preface.htm
---

# Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 [^preface1]

## Preface

*||XXXIX|* I have already announced in the [Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher](https://marxists.org/glossary/periodicals/d/e.htm#dfj) the critique of jurisprudence and political science in the form of a [critique of the Hegelian philosophy of law](https://marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/index.htm). While preparing it for publication, the intermingling of criticism directed only against speculation with criticism of the various subjects themselves proved utterly unsuitable, hampering the development of the argument and rendering comprehension difficult.  Moreover, the wealth and diversity of the subjects to be treated could have been compressed into one work only in a purely aphoristic style; whilst an aphoristic presentation of this kind, for its part, would have given the *impression* of arbitrary systematism.  I shall therefore publish the critique of law, ethics, politics, etc., in a series of distinct, independent pamphlets, and afterwards try in a special work to present them again as a connected whole showing the interrelationship of the separate parts, and lastly attempt a critique of the speculative elaboration of that material.  For this reason it will be found that the interconnection between political economy and the state, law, ethics, civil life, etc., is touched upon in the present work only to the extent to which political economy itself expressly touches upon these subjects.

It is hardly necessary to assure the reader conversant with political economy that my results have been attained by means of a wholly empirical analysis based on a conscientious critical study of political economy.

(Whereas the uninformed reviewer who tries to hide his complete ignorance and intellectual poverty by hurling the “*utopian phrase*” at the positive critic’s head, or again such phrases as “quite pure, quite resolute, quite critical criticism,” the “not merely legal but social – utterly social – society,” the “compact, massy mass,” the “outspoken spokesmen of the massy mass,” [^preface2] this reviewer has yet to furnish the first proof that besides his theological family affairs he has anything to contribute to a discussion of *worldly* matters.)

It goes without saying that besides the French and English socialists I have also used German socialist works.  The only original German works of substance in this science, however – other than [Weitling’s](https://marxists.org/glossary/people/w/e.htm#weitling-wilhelm) writings – are the essays by *Hess* published in *Einundzwanzig Bogen* [^preface3] *and Umrisse zu einer Kritik der Nationalökonomie* by Engels in the *Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher,* where also the basic elements of this work have been indicated by me in a very general way.

(Besides being indebted to these authors who have given critical attention to political economy, positive criticism as a whole – and therefore also German positive criticism of political economy – owes its true foundation to the discoveries of *[Feuerbach](https://marxists.org/glossary/people/f/e.htm#feuerbach-ludwig)*, against whose *Philosophie der Zukunft* and *Thesen zur Reform der Philosophie* in the *Anekdota,* despite the tacit use that is made of them, the petty envy of some and the veritable wrath of others seem to have instigated a regular conspiracy of *silence.*

It is only with *Feuerbach* that *positive,* humanistic and naturalistic criticism begins.  The less noise they make, the more certain, profound, extensive, and enduring is the effect of *Feuerbach’s* writings, the only writings since [Hegel’s](https://marxists.org/glossary/people/h/e.htm#hegel) *Phänomenologie* and *Logik* to contain a real theoretical revolution.

In contrast to the *critical theologians* of our day, I have deemed the concluding chapter of this work – a critical discussion of *Hegelian dialectic* and philosophy as a whole to be absolutely necessary, a task not yet performed.  This *lack of thoroughness* is not accidental, since even the *critical* theologian remains a *theologian.* Hence, either he has to start from certain presuppositions of philosophy accepted as authoritative; or, if in the process of criticism and as a result of other people’s discoveries doubts about these philosophical presuppositions have arisen in him, he abandons them in a cowardly and unwarrantable fashion, *abstracts* from them, thus showing his servile dependence on these presuppositions and his resentment at this servility merely in a negative, unconscious and sophistical manner.

(He does this either by constantly repeating assurances concerning the *purity* of his own criticism, or by trying to make it seem as though all that was left for criticism to deal with now was some other limited form of criticism outside itself – say eighteenth-century criticism – and also the limitations of the *masses,* in order to divert the observer’s attention as well as his own from the *necessary* task of settling accounts between *criticism* and its point of origin – Hegelian *dialectic* and German philosophy as a whole – that is, from this necessary raising of modern criticism above its own limitation and crudity.  Eventually, however, whenever discoveries (such as *Feuerbach’s*) are made regarding the nature of his own philosophic presuppositions, the critical theologian partly makes it appear as if *he* were the one who had accomplished this, producing that appearance by taking the results of these discoveries and, without being able to develop them, hurling them in the form of *catch-phrases* at writers still caught in the confines of philosophy.  He partly even manages to acquire a sense of his own superiority to such discoveries by asserting in a mysterious way and in a veiled, malicious and skeptical fashion elements of the Hegelian *dialectic* which he still finds lacking in the criticism of that dialectic (which have not yet been critically served up to him for his use) against such criticism – not having tried to bring such elements into their proper relation or having been capable of doing so, asserting, say, the category of mediating proof against the category of positive, self-originating truth, (...) in a way *peculiar* to Hegelian dialectic.  For to the theological critic it seems quite natural that everything has to be *done* by philosophy, so that he can *chatter away* about purity, resoluteness, and quite critical criticism; and he fancies himself the true *conqueror of philosophy* whenever he happens to *feel* some element [^preface4] in Hegel to be lacking in Feuerbach – for however much he practises the spiritual idolatry of “*self-consciousness*” and “mind” the theological critic does not get beyond feeling to consciousness.)

On close inspection *theological* criticism – genuinely progressive though it was at the inception of the movement – is seen in the final analysis to be nothing but the culmination and consequence of the old *philosophical,* and especially the *Hegelian, transcendentalism,* twisted into a *theological caricature.* This interesting example of historical justice, which now assigns to theology, ever philosophy’s spot of infection, the further role of portraying in itself the negative dissolution of philosophy, i.e., the process of its decay – this historical nemesis I shall demonstrate on another occasion. [^preface5]

(How far, on the other hand, *Feuerbach’s* discoveries about the nature of philosophy still, for their *proof* at least, called for a critical discussion of philosophical dialectic will be seen from my exposition itself.) *||LX|*

## First Manuscript

### Wages of Labour

***Wages*** are determined through the antagonistic struggle between capitalist and worker. Victory goes necessarily to the capitalist. The capitalist can live longer without the worker than can the worker without the capitalist. Combination among the capitalists is customary and effective; workers’ combination is prohibited and painful in its consequences for them. Besides, the landowner and the capitalist can make use of industrial advantages to augment their revenues; the worker has neither rent nor interest on capital to supplement his industrial income. Hence the intensity of the competition among the workers. Thus only for the workers is the separation of capital, landed property, and labour an inevitable, essential and detrimental separation. Capital and landed property need not remain fixed in this abstraction, as must the labour of the workers.

***The separation of capital, rent, and labour is thus fatal for the worker***.

The lowest and the only necessary wage rate is that providing for the subsistence of the worker for the duration of his work and as much more as is necessary for him to support a family and for the race of labourers not to die out. The ordinary wage, according to Smith, is the lowest compatible with common humanity [^wagesfn06], that is, with cattle-like existence.


***The demand for men necessarily governs the production of men, as of every other commodity***. Should supply greatly exceed demand, a section of the workers sinks into beggary or starvation. The worker’s existence is thus brought under the same condition as the existence of every other commodity. The worker has become a commodity, and it is a bit of luck for him if he can find a buyer. And the demand on which the life of the worker depends, depends on the whim of the rich and the capitalists. Should supply exceed demand, then one of the constituent parts of the price – profit, rent or wages – is paid below its *rate*, [a part of these] factors is therefore withdrawn from this application, and thus the market price gravitates [towards the] natural price as the centre-point. But **(1)** where there is considerable division of labour it is most difficult for the worker to direct his labour into other channels; **(2)** because of his subordinate relation to the capitalist, he is the first to suffer.

***Thus in the gravitation of market price to natural price it is the worker who loses most of all and necessarily***. And it is just the capacity of the capitalist to direct his capital into another channel which either renders the worker, who is restricted to some particular branch of labour, destitute, or forces him to submit to every demand of this capitalist.

The accidental and sudden fluctuations in market price hit rent less than they do that part of the price which is resolved into profit and wages; but they hit profit less than they do wages. In most cases, for every wage that rises, one remains *stationary* and one *falls*.

***The worker need not necessarily gain when the capitalist does, but he necessarily loses when the latter loses.*** Thus, the worker does not gain if the capitalist keeps the market price above the natural price by virtue of some manufacturing or trading secret, or by virtue of monopoly or the favorable situation of his land.

Furthermore, *the prices of labour are much more constant than the prices of provisions. Often they stand in inverse proportion*. In a dear year wages fall on account of the decrease in demand, but rise on account of the increase in the prices of provisions – and thus balance. In any case, a number of workers are left without bread. In cheap years wages rise on account of the rise in demand, but decrease on account of the fall in the prices of provisions – and thus balance.

Another respect in which the worker is at a disadvantage:

***The labour prices of the various kinds of workers show much wider differences than the profits in the various branches in which capital is applied***. In labour all the natural, spiritual, and social variety of individual activity is manifested and is variously rewarded, whilst dead capital always keeps the same pace and is indifferent to real individual activity.

In general we should observe that in those cases where worker and capitalist equally suffer, the worker suffers in his very existence, the capitalist in the profit on his dead mammon.

The worker has to struggle not only for his physical means of subsistence; he has to struggle to get work, i.e., the possibility, the means, to perform his activity.

Let us take the three chief conditions in which society can find itself and consider the situation of the worker in them:

1. If the wealth of society declines the worker suffers most of all, and for the following reason: although the working class cannot gain so much as can the class of property owners in a prosperous state of society, *no one suffers so cruelly from its decline as the working class.*

2. 
   Let us now take a society in which wealth is increasing. This condition is the only one favorable to the worker. Here competition between the capitalists sets in. The demand for workers exceeds their supply. But:

    *In the first place,* the raising of wages gives rise to overwork among the workers. The more they wish to earn, the more must they sacrifice their time and carry out slave-labour, completely losing all their freedom, in the service of greed. Thereby they shorten their lives. This shortening of their life-span is a favourable circumstance for the working class as a whole, for as a result of it an ever-fresh supply of labour becomes necessary. This class has always to sacrifice a part of itself in order not to be wholly destroyed.

    ***Furthermore***: When does a society find itself in a condition of advancing wealth? When the capitals and the revenues of a country are growing. But this is only possible:

    1. As the result of the accumulation of much labour, capital being accumulated labour; as the result, therefore, of the fact that more and more of his products are being taken away from the worker, that to an increasing extent his own labour confronts him as another man’s property and that the means of his existence and his activity are increasingly concentrated in the hands of the capitalist.

    2. The accumulation of capital increases the division of labour, and the division of labour increases the number of workers. Conversely, the number of workers increases the division of labour, just as the division of labour increases the accumulation of capital. With this division of labour on the one hand and the accumulation of capital on the other, the worker becomes ever more exclusively dependent on labour, and on a particular, very one-sided, machine-like labour at that. Just as he is thus depressed spiritually and physically to the condition of a machine and from being a man becomes an abstract activity and a belly, so he also becomes ever more dependent on every fluctuation in market price, on the application of capital, and on the whim of the rich. Equally, the increase in the class of people wholly dependent on work intensifies competition among the workers, thus lowering their price. In the factory system this situation of the worker reaches its climax.

    3. In an increasingly prosperous society only the richest of the rich can continue to live on money interest. Everyone else has to carry on a business with his capital, or venture it in trade. As a result, the competition between the capitalists becomes more intense. The concentration of capital increases, the big capitalists ruin the small, and a section of the erstwhile capitalists sinks into the working class, which as a result of this supply again suffers to some extent a depression of wages and passes into a still greater dependence on the few big capitalists. The number of capitalists having been diminished, their competition with respect to the workers scarcely exists any longer; and the number of workers having been increased, their competition among themselves has become all the more intense, unnatural, and violent. Consequently, a section of the working class falls into beggary or starvation just as necessarily as a section of the middle capitalists falls into the working class.

    Hence even in the condition of society most favorable to the worker, the inevitable result for the worker is overwork and premature death, decline to a mere machine, a bond servant of capital, which piles up dangerously over and against him, more competition, and starvation or beggary for a section of the workers.

    The raising of wages excites in the worker the capitalist’s mania to get rich, which he, however, can only satisfy by the sacrifice of his mind and body. The raising of wages presupposes and entails the accumulation of capital, and thus sets the product of labour against the worker as something ever more alien to him. Similarly, the division of labour renders him ever more one-sided and dependent, bringing with it the competition not only of men but also of machines. Since the worker has sunk to the level of a machine, he can be confronted by the machine as a competitor. Finally, as the amassing of capital increases the amount of industry and therefore the number of workers, it causes the same amount of industry to manufacture *a larger amount of products*, which leads to over-production and thus either ends by throwing a large section of workers out of work or by reducing their wages to the most miserable minimum.

    Such are the consequences of a state of society most favourable to the worker – namely, of a state of *growing, advancing* wealth.

    Eventually, however, this state of growth must sooner or later reach its peak. What is the worker’s position now?

3. “In a country which had acquired that full complement of riches both the wages of labour and the profits of stock would probably be very low [...] the competition for employment would necessarily be so great as to reduce the wages of labour to what was barely sufficient to keep up the number of labourers, and, the country being already fully peopled, that number could never be augmented.” [[Adam Smith](https://marxists.org/glossary/people/s/m.htm#smith-adam), *[Wealth of Nations, Vol. I, p. 84](https://marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-adam/works/wealth-of-nations/book01/ch09.htm).*]

The surplus would have to die.

Thus in a declining state of society – increasing misery of the worker; in an advancing state – misery with complications; and in a fully developed state of society – static misery.

Since, however, according to Smith, a society is not happy, of which the greater part suffers – yet even the wealthiest state of society leads to this suffering of the majority – and since the *economic system* [^wagesfn07] (and in general a society based on private interest) leads to this wealthiest condition, it follows that the goal of the economic system is the *unhappiness* of society.

Concerning the relationship between worker and capitalist we should add that the capitalist is more than compensated for rising wages by the reduction in the amount of labour time, and that rising wages and rising interest on capital operate on the price of commodities like simple and compound interest respectively.

Let us put ourselves now wholly at the standpoint of the political economist, and follow him in comparing the theoretical and practical claims of the workers.

He tells us that originally and in theory the *whole product* of labour belongs to the worker. But at the same time he tells us that in actual fact what the worker gets is the smallest and utterly indispensable part of the product – as much, only, as is necessary for his existence, not as a human being, but as a worker, and for the propagation, not of humanity, but of the slave class of workers.

The political economist tells us that everything is bought with labour and that capital is nothing but accumulated labour; but at the same time he tells us that the worker, far from being able to buy everything, must sell himself and his humanity.

Whilst the rent of the idle landowner usually amounts to a third of the product of the soil, and the profit of the busy capitalist to as much as twice the interest on money, the “something more” which the worker himself earns at the best of times amounts to so little that of four children of his, two must starve and die.

Whilst according to the political economists it is solely through labour that man enhances the value of the products of nature, whilst labour is man’s active possession, according to this same political economy the landowner and the capitalist, who *qua* landowner and capitalist are merely privileged and idle gods, are everywhere superior to the worker and lay down the law to him.

Whilst according to the political economists labour is the sole unchanging price of things, there is nothing more fortuitous than the price of labour, nothing exposed to greater fluctuations.

Whilst the division of labour raises the productive power of labour and increases the wealth and refinement of society, it impoverishes the worker and reduces him to a machine. Whilst labour brings about the accumulation of capital and with this the increasing prosperity of society, it renders the worker ever more dependent on the capitalist, leads him into competition of a new intensity, and drives him into the headlong rush of overproduction, with its subsequent corresponding slump.

Whilst the interest of the worker, according to the political economists, never stands opposed to the interest of society, society always and necessarily stands opposed to the interest of the worker.

According to the political economists, the interest of the worker is never opposed to that of society: (1) because the rising wages are more than compensated by the reduction in the amount of labour time, together with the other consequences set forth above; and (2) because in relation to society the whole gross product is the net product, and only in relation to the private individual has the net product any significance.

But that labour itself, not merely in present conditions but insofar as its purpose in general is the mere increase of wealth – that labour itself, I say, is harmful and pernicious – follows from the political economist’s line of argument, without his being aware of it.

In theory, rent of land and profit on capital are *deductions* suffered by wages. In actual fact, however, wages are a deduction which land and capital allow to go to the worker, a concession from the product of labour to the workers, to labour.

When society is in a state of decline, the worker suffers most severely. The specific severity of his burden he owes to his position as a worker, but the burden as such to the position of society.

But when society is in a state of progress, the ruin and impoverishment of the worker is the product of his labour and of the wealth produced by him. The misery results, therefore, from the *essence* of present-day labour itself.

Society in a state of maximum wealth – an ideal, but one which is approximately attained, and which at least is the aim of political economy as of civil society – means for the workers *static misery.*

It goes without saying that the *proletarian*, i.e., the man who, being without capital and rent, lives purely by labour, and by a one-sided, abstract labour, is considered by political economy only as a *worker*. Political economy can therefore advance the proposition that the proletarian, the same as any horse, must get as much as will enable him to work. It does not consider him when he is not working, as a human being; but leaves such consideration to criminal law, to doctors, to religion, to the statistical tables, to politics and to the poor-house overseer.

Let us now rise above the level of political economy and try to answer two questions on the basis of the above exposition, which has been presented almost in the words of the political economists:

1. What in the evolution of mankind is the meaning of this reduction of the greater part of mankind to abstract labour?

2. What are the mistakes committed by the piecemeal reformers, who either want to raise wages and in this way to improve the situation of the working class, or regard equality of wages (as [Proudhon](https://marxists.org/glossary/people/p/r.htm#proudhon) does) as the goal of social revolution?

In political economy labour occurs only in the form of *activity as a source of livelihood.*

> *||VIII, 1|* “It can be asserted that those occupations which presuppose specific talents or longer training have become on the whole more lucrative; whilst the proportionate reward for mechanically monotonous activity in which one person can be trained as easily and quickly as another has fallen with growing competition, and was inevitably bound to fall. And it is just *this* sort of work which in the present state of the organization of labour is still by far the commonest. If therefore a worker in the first category now earns seven times as much as he did, say, fifty years ago, whilst the earnings of another in the second category have remained unchanged, then of course both are earning *on the average* four times as much. But if the first category comprises only a thousand workers in a particular country, and the second a million, then 999,000 are no better off than fifty years ago – and they are *worse off* if at the same time the prices of the necessaries of life have risen. With such superficial *calculation of averages* people try to deceive themselves about the most numerous class of the population. Moreover, the size of the *wage* is only one factor in the estimation of the *worker’s* income, because it is essential for the measurement of the latter to take into account the certainty of its *duration* – which is obviously out of the question in the anarchy of so-called free competition, with its ever-recurring fluctuations and periods of stagnation. Finally, the *hours of work* customary formerly and now have to be considered. And for the English cotton-workers these have been increased, as a result of the entrepreneurs’ mania for profit. 
>
> *||IX, 1|* to between twelve and sixteen hours a day during the past twenty-five years or so – that is to say, precisely during the period of the introduction of labour-saving machines; and this increase in one country and in one branch of industry inevitably asserted itself elsewhere to a greater or lesser degree, for the right of the unlimited exploitation of the poor by the rich is still universally recognized.” (Wilhelm Schulz, *Die Bewegung der Production.*)

> “But even if it were as true as it is false that the average income of *every* class of society has increased, the income-differences and *relative* income-distances may nevertheless have become greater and the contrasts between wealth and poverty accordingly stand out more sharply. For just because total production rises – and in the same measure as it rises – needs, desires and claims also multiply and thus *relative* poverty can increase whilst *absolute* poverty diminishes. The Samoyed living on fish oil and rancid fish is not poor because in his secluded society all have the same needs. But in a state *that is forging ahead*, which in the course of a decade, say, increased by a third its total production in proportion to the population, the worker who is getting as much at the end of ten years as at the beginning has not remained as well off, but has become poorer by a third.” (*op. cit.*, pp. 65-66)

But political economy knows the worker only as a working animal – as a beast reduced to the strictest bodily needs.

> “To develop in greater spiritual freedom, a people must break their bondage to their bodily needs – they must cease to be the slaves of the body. They must, above all, have *time* at their disposal for spiritual creative activity and spiritual enjoyment. The developments in the labour organism gain this time. Indeed, with new motive forces and improved machinery, a single worker in the cotton mills now often performs the work formerly requiring a hundred, or even 250 to 350 workers. Similar results can be observed in all branches of production, because external natural forces are being compelled to participate to an ever-greater degree in human labour. If the satisfaction of a given amount of material needs formerly required a certain expenditure of time and human effort which has later been reduced by half, then without any loss of material comfort the scope for spiritual activity and enjoyment has been simultaneously extended by as much.... But again the way in which the booty, that we win from old Cronus *[Greek God associated with time.]* himself in his most private domain, is shared out is still decided by the dice-throw of blind, unjust Chance. In France it has been calculated that at the present stage in the development of production an average working period of five hours a day by every person capable of work could suffice for the satisfaction of all the material interests of society.... Notwithstanding the time saved by the perfecting of machinery. the duration of the slave-labour performed by a large population in the factories has only increased.” (Schulz, *op. cit.*, pp. 67, 68.)

> “The transition from compound manual labour rests on a break-down of the latter into its simple operations. At first, however, only *some* of the uniformly-recurring operations will devolve on machines, while some will devolve on men. From the nature of things, and from confirmatory experience, it is clear that unendingly monotonous activity of this kind is as harmful to the mind as to the body; thus this *combination* of machinery with mere division of labour among a greater number of hands must inevitably show all the disadvantages of the latter. These disadvantages appear, among other things, in the greater mortality of factory workers.... Consideration has not been given ... to this big distinction as to how far men work *through* machines or how far *as* machines.” (*op. cit.*, p. 69.)

> “In the future life of the peoples, however, the inanimate forces of nature working in machines will be our slaves and serfs.” (*op. cit.*, p. 74.)

> “The English spinning mills employ 196,818 women and only 158,818 men. For every 100 male workers in the cotton mills of Lancashire there are 103 female workers, and in Scotland as many as 209. In the English flax mills of Leeds, for every 100 male workers there were found to be 147 female workers. In Dundee and on the east coast of Scotland as many as 280. In the English silk mills ... many female workers; male workers predominate in the woollen mills where the work requires greater physical strength. In 1833, no fewer than 38,927 women were employed alongside 18,593 men in the North American cotton mills. As a result of the changes in the labour organism, a wider sphere of gainful employment has thus fallen to the share of the female sex.... Women now occupying an economically more independent position ... the two sexes are drawn closer together in their social conditions.” (*op. cit.*, pp. 71-72.)

> “Working in the English steam- and water-driven spinning mills in 1835 were: 20,558 children between the ages of eight and twelve; 35,867 between the ages of twelve and thirteen; and, lastly, 108,208 children between the ages of thirteen and eighteen.... Admittedly, further advances in mechanisation, by more and more removing all monotonous work from human hands, are operating in the direction of a gradual *||XII, 1|* elimination of this evil. But standing in the way of these more rapid advances is the very circumstance that the capitalists can, in the easiest and cheapest fashion, appropriate the energies of the lower classes down to the children, to be used *instead* of mechanical devices.” (*op. cit.*, pp. 70-71.)

> “Lord Brougham’s call to the workers – ‘Become capitalists’. ... This is the evil that millions are able to earn a bare subsistence for themselves only by strenuous labour which shatters the body and cripples them morally and intellectually; that they are even obliged to consider the misfortune of finding *such* work a piece of good fortune.” (*op. cit.*, p. 60.)

> “In order to live, then, the non-owners are obliged to place themselves, directly or indirectly, *at the service* of the owners – to put themselves, that is to say, into a position of dependence upon them.” (Pecqueur, *Théorie nouvelle d’économie soc., etc.*)

> *Servants – pay: workers – wages; employees – salary* or *emoluments*. (*loc. cit*., pp. 409, 410.)

> “To hire out one’s labour,” “to lend one’s labour at interest,” “to work in another’s place.”

> “To hire out the materials of labour”, “to lend the materials of labour at interest”, “to make others work in one’s place”. (*op. cit.*, p. 411.)

> “Such an economic order condemns men to occupations so mean, to a degradation so devastating and bitter, that by comparison savagery seems like a kingly condition.... (*op. cit.*, pp. 417, 418.) 

> “Prostitution of the non-owning class in all its forms.” (*op. cit.*, p. 421 f.) “Ragmen.”

*Charles Loudon* in the book *Solution du probleme de la population, etc*., Paris, 1842 [^wagesfn08], declares the number of prostitutes in England to be between sixty and seventy thousand. The number of women of doubtful virtue is said to be equally large (p. 228).

> “The average life of these unfortunate creatures on the streets, after they have embarked on their career of vice, is about six or seven years. To maintain the number of sixty to seventy thousand prostitutes, there must be in the three kingdoms at least eight to nine thousand women who commit themselves to this abject profession each year, or about twenty-four new victims each day – an average of *one* per hour; and it follows that if the same proportion holds good over the whole surface of the globe, there must constantly be in existence one and a half million unfortunate women of this kind.” (*op. cit.*, p. 229.)

> “The numbers of the poverty-stricken grow with their poverty, and at the extreme limit of destitution human beings are crowded together in the greatest numbers contending with each other for the right to suffer.... In 1821 the population of Ireland was 6,801,827. In 1831 it had risen to 7,764,010 – an increase of 14 per cent in ten years. In Leinster, the wealthiest province, the population increased by only 8 per cent; whilst in Connaught, the most poverty-stricken province, the increase reached 21 per cent. (Extract from the *Enquiries Published in England on Ireland*, Vienna, 1840.)” (Buret, *De la misère*, etc., t. 1, pp. 36, 37.)

Political economy considers labour in the abstract as a thing; labour is a commodity. If the price is high, then the commodity is in great demand; if the price is low, then the commodity is in great supply: the price of labour as a commodity must fall lower and lower. (Buret, *op. cit.*) This is made inevitable partly by the competition between capitalist and worker, partly by the competition amongst the workers.

> “The working population, the seller of labour, is necessarily reduced to accepting the most meagre part of the product.... Is the theory of labour as a commodity anything other than a theory of disguised bondage?” (*op. cit.*, p. 43.)

> “Why then has nothing but an exchange-value been seen in labour?” (*op. cit.*, p. 44.)

The large workshops prefer to buy the labour of women and children, because this costs less than that of men. (*op. cit.*)

> “The worker is not at all in the position of a free seller vis-à-vis the one who employs him.... The capitalist is always free to employ labour, and the worker is always forced to sell it. The value of labour is completely destroyed if it is not sold every instant. Labour can neither be accumulated nor even be saved, unlike true [commodities].

> “Labour is life, and if life is not each day exchanged for food, it suffers and soon perishes. To claim that human life is a commodity, one must, therefore, admit slavery.” (*op. cit.*, p. 49, 50.)

If then labour is a commodity it is a commodity with the most unfortunate attributes. But even by the principles of political economy it is no commodity, for it is not the “*free result of a free transaction*.” [*op. cit.*] The present economic regime

> “simultaneously lowers the price and the remuneration of labour; it perfects the worker and degrades the man.” (*op. cit.*, pp. 52-53.) 

> “Industry has become a war, and commerce a gamble.” (*op. cit.*, p. 62.)

> “The cotton-working machines” (in England) alone represent 84,000,000 manual workers. (*op. cit.*, p. 193.)

Up to the present, industry has been in a state of war, a war of conquest:

> “It has squandered the lives of the men who made up its army with the same indifference as the great conquerors. Its aim was the possession of wealth, not the happiness of men.” (Buret, *op. cit*.) “These interests” (that is, economic interests), “freely left to themselves ... must necessarily come into conflict; they have no other arbiter but war, and the decisions of war assign defeat and death to some, in order to give victory to the others.... It is in the conflict of opposed forces that science seeks order and equilibrium: *perpetual war*, according to it, is the sole means of obtaining peace; that war is called competition.” (*op. cit.*, p. 23.)

> “The industrial war, to be conducted with success, demands large armies which it can amass on one spot and profusely decimate. And it is neither from devotion nor from duty that the soldiers of this army bear the exertions imposed on them, but only to escape the hard necessity of hunger. They feel neither attachment nor gratitude towards their bosses, nor are these bound to their subordinates by any feeling of benevolence. They do not know them as men, but only as instruments of production which have to yield as much as possible with as little cost as possible. These populations of workers, ever more crowded together, have not even the assurance of always being employed. Industry, which has called them together, only lets them live while it needs them, and as soon as it can get rid of them it abandons them without the slightest scruple; and the workers are compelled to offer their persons and their powers for whatever price they can get. The longer, more painful and more disgusting the work they are given, the less they are paid. There are those who, with sixteen hours’ work a day and unremitting exertion, scarcely buy the right not to die.” (*op. cit.*, pp. 68-69.)

> “We are convinced ... as are the commissioners charged with the inquiry into the condition of the hand-loom weavers, that the large industrial towns would in a short time lose their population of workers if they were not all the time receiving from the neighbouring rural areas constant recruitments of healthy men, a constant flow of fresh blood.” (*op. cit.*, p. 362.)

### Profit of Capital

#### 1. Capital

*||I, 2|*  What is the basis of *capital*, that is, of private property in the products of other men's labour?

> “Even if capital itself does not merely amount to theft or fraud, it still requires the cooperation of legislation to sanctify inheritance.” (Say, *Traité d'économie politique*.) [^capital9]

How does one become a proprietor of productive stock? How does one become owner of the products created by means of this stock?

By virtue of *positive law*. (Say, t. II, p. 4.)

What does one acquire with capital, with the inheritance of a large fortune, for instance?

> “The person who [either acquires, or] succeeds to a great fortune, does not necessarily [acquire or] succeed to any political power [.... ] The power which that possession immediately and directly conveys to him, is the *power of purchasing*; a certain command over all the labour, or over all the produce of labour, which is then in the market.” ([Wealth of Nations, by Adam Smith, Vol. I, pp. 26-27](https://marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-adam/works/wealth-of-nations/book01/ch05.htm).) [^capital10]

Capital is thus the *governing power* over labour and its products. The capitalist possesses this power, not on account of his personal or human qualities, but inasmuch as he is an *owner* of capital. His power is the *purchasing* power of his capital, which nothing can withstand.

Later we shall see first how the capitalist, by means of capital, exercises his governing power over labour, then, however, we shall see the governing power of capital over the capitalist himself.

What is capital?

> “A certain quantity of *labour stocked* and stored up to be employed.” (Adam Smith, *op. cit.*, Vol. I, p. 295.)

Capital is *stored-up labour*.

> (2) *Fonds*, or stock, is any accumulation of products of the soil or of manufacture. Stock is called *capital* only when it yields to its owner a revenue or profit. (Adam Smith, *op. cit.*, p. 243)

#### 2. The Profit of Capital

> The *profit* or *gain of capital* is altogether different from the *wages of labour*. This difference is manifested in two ways: in the first place, the profits of capital are regulated altogether by the value of the capital employed, although the labour of inspection and direction associated with different capitals may be the same. Moreover in large works the whole of this labour is committed to some principal clerk, whose salary bears no regular proportion to the *||II, 2|* capital of which he oversees the management. And although the labour of the proprietor is here reduced almost to nothing, he still demands profits in proportion to his capital. (Adam Smith, [op. cit., Vol. I, p. 43](https://marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-adam/works/wealth-of-nations/book01/ch06.htm)) [^capital11]

Why does the capitalist demand this proportion between profit and capital?

> He would have no *interest* in employing the workers, unless he expected from the sale of their work something more than is necessary to replace the stock advanced by him as wages and he would have no *interest* to employ a great stock rather than a small one, unless his profits were to bear some proportion to the extent of his stock. (Adam Smith, [op. cit., Vol. I, p. 42](https://marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-adam/works/wealth-of-nations/book01/ch06.htm))

The capitalist thus makes a profit, first, on the wages, and secondly on the raw materials advanced by him.

What proportion, then, does profit bear to capital?

> If it is already difficult to determine the usual average level of wages at a particular place and at a particular time, it is even more difficult to determine the profit on capitals. A change in the price of the commodities in which the capitalist deals, the good or bad fortune of his rivals and customers, a thousand other accidents to which commodities are exposed both in transit and in the warehouses – all produce a daily, almost hourly variation in profit. (Adam Smith, [op. cit., Vol. I, pp. 78-79](https://marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-adam/works/wealth-of-nations/book01/ch09.htm).)

But though it is impossible to determine with precision what are the profits on capitals, some notion may be formed of them from the *interest of money*. Wherever a great deal can be made by the use of money, a great deal will be given for the use of it; wherever little can be made by it, little will be given. (Adam Smith, [op. cit., Vol. I, p. 79](https://marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-adam/works/wealth-of-nations/book01/ch09.htm).)

The proportion which the usual market rate of interest ought to bear to the rate of clear profit, necessarily varies as profit rises or falls. Double interest is in Great Britain reckoned what the merchants call a good, moderate, reasonable profit, terms which mean no more than a *common and usual profit*. (Adam Smith, [op. cit., Vol. I, p. 87](https://marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-adam/works/wealth-of-nations/book01/ch09.htm).)

What is the *lowest* rate of profit? And what the *highest?*

> The *lowest* rate of ordinary profit on capital must always be *something more* than what is sufficient to compensate the occasional losses to which every employment of stock is exposed. It is this surplus only which is neat or clear profit. The same holds for the lowest rate of interest. (Adam Smith, [op. cit., Vol. I, p. 86](https://marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-adam/works/wealth-of-nations/book01/ch09.htm))

*||III, 2|*  The *highest* rate to which ordinary profits can rise is that which in the price of the greater part of commodities eats *up the whole of the* rent *of the* land, and reduces the wages of labour contained in the commodity supplied to the *lowest rate,* the bare subsistence of the labourer during his work. The worker must always be fed in some way or other while he is required to work; rent can disappear entirely. For example: the servants of the East India Company in Bengal. (Adam Smith, [op. cit., Vol. I, pp. 86-87](https://marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-adam/works/wealth-of-nations/book01/ch09.htm))

Besides all the advantages of limited competition which the capitalist may *exploit* in this case, he can keep the market price above the natural price by quite decorous means.

> *For one thing*, by keeping *secrets in trade* if the market is at a great distance from those who supply it, that is, by concealing a price change, its rise above the natural level. This concealment has the effect that other capitalists do not follow him in investing their capital in this branch of industry or trade.

*Then* again by keeping *secrets in manufacture*, which enable the capitalist to reduce the costs of production and supply his commodity at the same or even at lower prices than his competitors while obtaining a higher profit. (Deceiving by keeping secrets is not immoral? Dealings on the Stock Exchange.) *Furthermore*, where production is restricted to a particular locality (as in the case of a rare wine), and where the *effective demand* can never be satisfied. *Finally*, through *monopolies* exercised by individuals or companies. Monopoly price is the highest possible. (Adam Smith, [op. cit., Vol. I, pp. 53-54](https://marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-adam/works/wealth-of-nations/book01/ch07.htm))

Other fortuitous causes which can raise the profit on capital:

> The acquisition of new territories, or of new branches of trade, often increases the profit on capital even in a wealthy country, because they withdraw some capital from the old branches of trade, reduce competition, and cause the market to be supplied with fewer commodities, the prices of which then rise: those who deal in these commodities can then afford to borrow at a higher rate of interest. (Adam Smith, [op. cit., Vol. I, p. 83](https://marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-adam/works/wealth-of-nations/book01/ch09.htm))

The more a commodity comes to be manufactured – the more it becomes an object of manufacture – the greater becomes that part of the price which resolves itself into wages and profit in proportion to that which resolves itself into rent. In the progress of the manufacture of a commodity, not only the number of profits increases, but every subsequent profit is greater than the foregoing; because the capital from which *||IV, 2|* it is derived must always be greater. The capital which employs the weavers, for example, must always be greater than that which employs the spinners; because it not only replaces that capital with its profits, but pays, besides, the wages of weavers; and the profits must always bear some proportion to the capital. ([op. cit., Vol. I, p. 45](https://marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-adam/works/wealth-of-nations/book01/ch06.htm))

Thus the advance made by human labour in converting the product of nature into the manufactured product of nature increases, not the wages of labour, but in part the number of profitable capital investments, and in part the size of every subsequent capital in comparison with the foregoing.

More about the advantages which the capitalist derives from the division of labour, later.

He profits doubly – first, by the division of labour; and secondly, in general, by the advance which human labour makes on the natural product. The greater the human share in a commodity, the greater the profit of dead capital.

> In one and the same society the average rates of profit on capital are much more nearly on the same level than the wages of the different sorts of labour. (*op. cit.*, Vol. I, p. 100.) In the different employments of capital, the ordinary rate of profit varies with the certainty or uncertainty of the returns.

The ordinary profit of stock, though it rises with the risk, does not always seem to rise in proportion to it. (*op. cit.*, Vol. I, pp. 99-100.)

It goes without saying that profits also rise if the means of circulation become less expensive or easier available (e.g., paper money).

#### 3. The Rule of Capital over Labour and the Motives of the Capitalist

> The consideration of his own private profit is the sole motive which determines the owner of any capital to employ it either in agriculture, in manufactures, or in some particular branch of the wholesale or retail trade. The different quantities of *productive labour* which it may put into motion, *||V, 2|* and the different values which it may add to the annual produce of the land and labour of his country, according as it is employed in one or other of those different ways, never enter into his thoughts. (Adam Smith, [op. cit., Vol. I, p. 335](https://marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-adam/works/wealth-of-nations/book02/ch05.htm).)

The most useful employment of capital for the capitalist is that which, risks being equal, yields him the greatest profit. This employment is not always the most useful for society; the most useful employment is that which utilises the productive powers of nature. (Say, t. II, pp. 130-31.)

The plans and speculations of the employers of capitals regulate and direct all the most important operations of labour, and *profit* is the end proposed by all those plans and projects. But the rate of profit does not, like rent and wages, rise with the prosperity and fall with the decline of the society. On the contrary, it is naturally low in rich and high in poor countries, and it is always highest in the countries which are going fastest to ruin. The interest of this class, therefore, has not the same connection with the general interest of the society as that of the other two.... The particular interest of the dealers in any particular branch of trade or manufactures is always in some respects different from, and frequently even in sharp opposition to, that of the public. To widen the market and to narrow the sellers' competition is always the interest of the dealer.... This is a class of people whose interest is never exactly the same as that of society, a class of people who have generally an interest to deceive and to oppress the public. (Adam Smith, [op. cit., Vol. I, pp. 231-32](https://marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-adam/works/wealth-of-nations/book01/ch11c-3.htm))

#### 4. The Accumulation of Capitals and the Competition among the Capitalists

> The *increase of stock,* which raises wages, tends to lower the capitalists' profit, because of the competition amongst the capitalists. (Adam Smith, [op. cit., Vol. I, p. 78](https://marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-adam/works/wealth-of-nations/book01/ch09.htm).)

If, for example, the capital which is necessary for the grocery trade of a particular town “is divided between two different grocers, their competition will tend to make both of them sell cheaper than if it were in the hands of one only; and if it were divided among twenty, *||VI, 2|* their competition would be just so much the greater, and the chance of their combining together, in order to raise the price, just so much the less.” (Adam Smith, [op. cit., Vol. I, p. 322](https://marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-adam/works/wealth-of-nations/book02/ch05.htm).)

Since we already know that monopoly prices are as high as possible, since the interest of the capitalists, even from the point of view commonly held by political economists, stands in hostile opposition to society, and since a rise of profit operates like compound interest on the price of the commodity (Adam Smith, [op. cit., Vol. I, pp. 87-88](https://marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-adam/works/wealth-of-nations/book01/ch09.htm)), it follows that the sole defence against the capitalists is *competition*, which according to the evidence of political economy acts beneficently by both raising wages and lowering the prices of commodities to the advantage of the consuming public.

But competition is only possible if capital multiplies, and is held in many hands. The formation of many capital investments is only possible as a result of multilateral accumulation, since capital comes into being only by accumulation; and multilateral accumulation necessarily turns into unilateral accumulation. Competition among capitalists increases the accumulation of capital. Accumulation, where private property prevails, is the *concentration* of capital in the hands of a few, it is in general an inevitable consequence if capital is left to follow its natural course, and it is precisely through competition that the way is cleared for this natural disposition of capital.

We have been told that the profit on capital is in proportion to the size of the capital. A large capital therefore accumulates more quickly than a small capital in proportion to its size, even if we disregard for the time being deliberate competition. *|VI||*

*||VIII, 2|*  [^capital12] Accordingly, the accumulation of large capital proceeds much more rapidly than that of smaller capital, quite irrespective of competition. But let us follow this process further.

With the increase of capital the profit on capital diminishes, because of competition. The first to suffer, therefore, is the small capitalist.

The increase of capitals and a large number of capital investments presuppose, further, a condition of advancing wealth in the country.

> “In a country which had acquired its full complement of riches [ ... ]the ordinary rate of clear profit would be very small, so the usual [market] rate of interest which could be afforded out of it would be so low as to render it impossible for any but the very wealthiest people to live upon the interest of their money. All people of [...] middling fortunes would be obliged to superintend themselves the employment of their own stocks. It would be necessary that almost every man should be a man of business, or engage in some sort of trade.” (Adam Smith, [op. cit., Vol. I, p. 86](https://marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-adam/works/wealth-of-nations/book01/ch09.htm))

This is the situation most dear to the heart of political economy.

> “The proportion between capital and revenue, therefore, seems everywhere to regulate the proportion between industry and idleness; wherever capital predominates, industry prevails; wherever revenue, idleness.” (Adam Smith, *op. cit.*, Vol. I, p. 301.)

What about the employment of capital, then, in this condition of increased competition?

> “As stock increases, the quantity of stock to be lent at interest grows gradually greater and greater. As the quantity of stock to be lent at interest increases, the interest ... diminishes (i) because the market price of things commonly diminishes as their quantity increases. ... and (ii) because with *the increase of capitals* in any country, “it becomes gradually more and more difficult to find within the country a profitable method of employing any new capital. There arises in consequence a competition between different capitals, the owner of one endeavouring to get possession of that employment which is occupied by another. But upon most occasions he can hope to jostle that other out of this employment by no other means but by dealing upon more reasonable terms. He must not only sell what he deals in somewhat cheaper, but in order to get it to sell, he must sometimes, too, buy it dearer. The demand for productive labour, by the increase of the funds which are destined for maintaining it, grows every day greater and greater. Labourers easily find employment, *|IX, 2|* but the owners of capitals find it difficult to get labourers to employ. Their competition raises the wages of labour and sinks the profits of stock.” (Adam Smith, [op. cit., Vol. I, p. 316](https://marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-adam/works/wealth-of-nations/book02/ch04.htm).)

Thus the small capitalist has the choice: (1) either to consume his capital, since he can no longer live on the interest – and thus cease to be a capitalist; or (2) to set up a business himself, sell his commodity cheaper, buy dearer than the wealthier capitalist, and pay higher wages – thus ruining himself, the market price being already very low as a result of the intense competition presupposed. If, however, the big capitalist wants to squeeze out the smaller capitalist, he has all the advantages over him which the capitalist has as a capitalist over the worker. The larger size of his capital compensates him for the smaller profits, and he can even bear temporary losses until the smaller capitalist is ruined and he finds himself freed from this competition. In this way, he accumulates the small capitalist's profits.

Furthermore: the big capitalist always buys cheaper than the small one, because he buys bigger quantities. He can therefore well afford to sell cheaper.

But if a fall in the rate of interest turns the middle capitalists from rentiers into businessmen, the increase in business capital and the resulting smaller profit produce conversely a fall in the rate of interest.

> “When the profits which can be made by the use of a capital are diminished the price which can be paid for the use of it [...] must necessarily be diminished with them.” (Adam Smith, [loc. cit., Vol. I, p. 316](https://marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-adam/works/wealth-of-nations/book02/ch04.htm))

> “As riches, improvement, and population have increased, interest has declined,” and consequently the profits of capitalists, “after these [profits] are diminished, stock may not only continue to increase, but to increase much faster than before. [...] A great stock though with small profits, generally increases faster than a small stock with great profits. Money, says the proverb, makes money.” ([op. cit., Vol. I, p. 83](https://marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-adam/works/wealth-of-nations/book01/ch09.htm).)

When, therefore, this large capital is opposed by small capitals with small profits, as it is under the presupposed condition of intense competition, it crushes them completely.

The necessary result of this competition is a general deterioration of commodities, adulteration, fake production and universal poisoning, evident in large towns.

*||X, 2|*  An important circumstance in the competition of large and small capital is, furthermore, the relation between *fixed capital* and *circulating capital*.

> *Circulating capital* is a capital which is “employed in raising” provisions, “manufacturing, or purchasing goods, and selling them again. [... ] The capital employed in this manner yields no revenue or profit to its employer, while it either remains in his possession, or continues in the same shape. [...] His capital is continually going from him in one shape, and returning to him in another, and it is only by means of such circulation, or successive exchanges” and transformations “that it can yield him any profit.” Fixed capital consists of capital invested “in the improvement of land, in the purchase of useful machines and instruments of trade, or in such-like things.” (Adam Smith, [op. cit., Vol. I, pp. 243-44](https://marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-adam/works/wealth-of-nations/book02/ch01.htm))

> “Every saving in the expense of supporting the fixed capital is an improvement of the net revenue of the society. The whole capital of the undertaker of every work is necessarily divided between his fixed and his circulating capital. While his whole capital remains the same, the smaller the one part, the greater must necessarily be the other. It is the circulating capital  *[Marx uses the French terms *capital fixé* and *capital circulant*. - Ed.]* which furnishes the materials and wages of labour, and puts industry into motion. Every saving, therefore, in the expense of maintaining the fixed capital, which does not diminish the productive powers of labour, must increase the fund which puts industry into motion.” (Adam Smith, [op. cit., Vol. I, p. 257](https://marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-adam/works/wealth-of-nations/book02/ch02.htm).)

It is clear from the outset that the relation of fixed capital and circulating capital is much more favourable to the big capitalist than to the smaller capitalist. The extra fixed capital required by a very big banker as against a very small one is insignificant. Their fixed capital amounts to nothing more than the office. The equipment of the bigger landowner does not increase in proportion to the size of his estate. Similarly, the credit which a big capitalist enjoys compared with a smaller one means for him all the greater saving in fixed capital – that is, in the amount of ready money he must always have at hand. Finally, it is obvious that where industrial labour has reached a high level, and where therefore almost all manual labour has become factory labour, the entire capital of a small capitalist does not suffice to provide him even with the necessary fixed capital. *As is well known, large-scale cultivation usually provides employment only for a small number of hands*. *[Note by Marx in French]*

It is generally true that the accumulation of large capital is also *accompanied* by a proportional concentration and simplification of fixed capital, as compared to the smaller capitalists. The big capitalist introduces for himself some kind of organisation of the instruments of labour. *||XI, 2|*

> “Similarly, in the sphere of industry every manufactory and mill is already a comprehensive combination of a large material fortune with numerous and varied intellectual capacities and technical skills serving the common purpose of production.... Where legislation preserves landed property in large units, the surplus of a growing population flocks into trades, and it is therefore as in Great Britain in the field of industry, principally, that proletarians aggregate in great numbers. Where, however, the law permits the continuous division of the land, the number of small. debt-encumbered proprietors increases, as in France; and the continuing process of fragmentation throws them into the class of the needy and the discontented. When eventually this fragmentation and indebtedness reaches a higher degree still, big landed property once more swallows up small property, just as large-scale industry destroys small industry. And as larger estates are formed again, large numbers of  propertyless workers not required for the cultivation of the soil are again driven into industry.” (Schulz, *Bewegung der Production*, pp. 58, 59.)

> “Commodities of the same kind change in character as a result of changes in the method of production, and especially as a result of the use of machinery. Only by the exclusion of human power has it become possible to spin from a pound of cotton worth 3 shillings and 8 pence 350 hanks of a total length of 167 English miles (i.e., 36 German miles), and of a commercial value of 25 guineas.” (*op. cit.*, p. 62.)

> “On the average the prices of cotton-goods have decreased in England during the past 45 years by eleven-twelfths, and according to Marshall's calculations the same amount of manufactured goods for which 16 shillings was still paid in 1814 is now supplied at 1 shilling and 10 pence. The greater cheapness of industrial products expands both consumption at home and the market abroad, and because of this the number of workers in cotton has not only not fallen in Great Britain after the introduction of machines but has risen from forty thousand to one and a half million. *|XII, 2|* As to the earnings of industrial entrepreneurs and workers; the growing competition between the factory owners has resulted in their profits necessarily falling relative to the amount of products supplied by them. In the years 1820-33 the Manchester manufacturer's gross profit on a piece of calico fell from four shillings 1 1/3 pence to one shilling 9 pence. But to make up for this loss, the volume of manufacture has been correspondingly increased. The consequence of this is that separate branches of industry experience over-production to some extent, that frequent bankruptcies occur causing property to fluctuate and vacillate unstably within the class of capitalists and masters of labour, thus throwing into the proletariat some of those who have been ruined economically; and that, frequently and suddenly, close-downs or cuts in employment become necessary, the painful effects of which are always bitterly felt by the class of wage-labourers.” (*op. cit.*, p. 63.)

> “To hire out one's labour is to begin one's enslavement. To hire out the materials of labour is to establish one's freedom.... Labour is man; the materials, on the other hand, contain nothing human.” (Pecqueur, *Théorie sociale, etc*.)

> “The material element, which is quite incapable of creating wealth without the other element. labour, acquires the magical virtue of being fertile for them [who own this material element] as if by their own action they had placed there this indispensable element.” (*op. cit.*)

> “Supposing that the daily labour of a worker brings him on the average 400 francs a year and that this sum suffices for every adult to live some sort of crude life, then any proprietor receiving 2,000 francs in interest or rent, from a farm, a house, etc., compels indirectly five men to work for him; an income of 100,000 francs represents the labour of 250 men, and that of 1,000,000 francs the labour of 2,500 individuals (hence, 300 million [Louis Philippe] therefore the labour of 750,000 workers).” (*op. cit.*, pp. 412-13.)

“The human law has given owners the right to use and to abuse – that is to say, the right to do what they will with the materials of labour.... They are in no way obliged by law to provide work for the propertyless when required and at all times, or to pay them always an adequate wage, etc. (*loc. cit.*, p. 413.) “Complete freedom concerning the nature, the quantity, the quality and the expediency of production; concerning the use and the disposal of wealth; and full command over the materials of all labour. Everyone is free to exchange what belongs to him as he thinks fit, without considering anything other than his own interest as an individual” (*op. cit.* p. 413.)

> “Competition is merely the expression of the freedom to exchange, which itself is the immediate and logical consequence of the individual’s right to use and abuse all the instruments of production. The right to use and abuse, freedom of exchange, and arbitrary competition – these three economic moments, which form one unit, entail the following consequences; each produces what he wishes, as he wishes, when he wishes, where he wishes, produces well or produces badly, produces too much or not enough, too soon or too late, at too high a price or too low a price; none knows whether he will sell, to whom he will sell, how he will sell, when he will sell, where he will sell. And it is the same with regard to purchases. *||XIII, 2|* The producer is ignorant of needs and resources, of demand and supply. He sells when he wishes, when he can, where he wishes, to whom he wishes, at the price he wishes. And he buys in the same way. In all this he is ever the plaything of chance, the slave of the law of the strongest, of the least harassed, of the richest.... Whilst at one place there is scarcity, at another there is glut and waste. Whilst one producer sells a lot or at a very high price, and at an enormous profit, the other sells nothing or sells at a loss.... The supply does not know the demand, and the demand does not know the supply. You produce, trusting to a taste, a fashion, which prevails amongst the consuming public. But by the time you are ready to deliver the commodity, the whim has already passed and has settled on some other kind of product.... The inevitable consequences: bankruptcies occurring constantly and universally; miscalculations, sudden ruin and unexpected fortunes, commercial crises, stoppages, periodic gluts or shortages; instability and depreciation of wages and profits, the loss or enormous waste of wealth, time and effort in the arena of fierce competition.” (*op. cit.*, pp. 414-16.)

*[Ricardo](https://marxists.org/glossary/people/r/i.htm#ricardo-david)* in his book [**On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation**] (rent of land): Nations are merely production-shops; man is a machine for consuming and producing; human life is a kind of capital; economic laws blindly rule the world. For Ricardo men are nothing, the product everything. In the 26th chapter of the French translation it says:

> “To an individual with a capital of £20,000 whose profits were £2,000 per annum, it would be a matter quite indifferent whether his capital would employ a hundred or a thousand men.... Is not the real interest of the nation similar? Provided its net real income, its rent and profits be the same, it is of no importance whether the nation consists of ten or twelve millions of inhabitants.” – [t. II, pp. 194, 195.] “In fact, says M. Sismondi ([*Nouveaux principes diconomie politique*,] t. II, p. 331), nothing remains to be desired but that the King, living quite alone on the island, should by continuously turning a crank cause automatons to do all the work of England.” [^capital13]

> “The master who buys the worker's labour at such a low price that it scarcely suffices for the worker's most pressing needs is responsible neither for the inadequacy of the wage nor for the excessive duration of the labour: he himself has to submit to the law which he imposes.... Poverty is not so much caused by men as by the power of things.” (Buret, *op. cit.*, p. 82.)

> “The inhabitants of many different parts of Great Britain have not capital sufficient to improve and cultivate all their lands. The wool of the southern counties of Scotland is, a great part of it, after a long land carriage through very bad roads, manufactured in Yorkshire, for want of capital to manufacture it at home. There are many little manufacturing towns in Great Britain, of which the inhabitants have not capital sufficient to transport the produce of their own industry to those distant markets where there is demand and consumption for it. If there are any merchants among them, *||XIV, 2|* they are properly only the agents of wealthier merchants who reside in some of the greater commercial cities.” (Adam Smith, [Wealth of Nations, Vol. I, pp. 326-27](https://marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-adam/works/wealth-of-nations/book02/ch05.htm).)

> “The annual produce of the land and labour of any nation can be increased in its value by no other means but by increasing either *the number of its productive labourers*, or the *productive power of those labourers* who had before been employed.... In either case an additional capital is almost always required.”  (Adam Smith, [op. cit., Vol. I, pp. 306-07](https://marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-adam/works/wealth-of-nations/book02/ch03.htm).)

> “As the *accumulation* of stock must, in the nature of things, be previous to the division of labour, so labour can be more and more subdivided in proportion only as stock is previously more and more accumulated. The quantity of materials which the same number of people can work up, increases in a great proportion as labour comes to be more and more subdivided; and as the operations of each workman are gradually reduced to a greater degree of simplicity, a variety of new machines come to be invented for facilitating and abridging those operations. As the division of labour advances, therefore, in order to give constant employment to an equal number of workmen, an equal stock of provisions, and a greater stock of materials and tools than what would have been necessary in a ruder state of things, must be accumulated beforehand. But the number of workmen in every branch of business generally increases with the division of labour in that branch, or rather it is the increase of their number which enables them to class and subdivide themselves in this manner.” (Adam Smith, [op. cit., Vol. I, pp. 241-42](https://marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-adam/works/wealth-of-nations/book02/intro.htm).)

> “As the accumulation of stock is previously necessary for carrying on this great improvement in the productive powers of labour, so that accumulation naturally leads to this improvement. The person who employs his stock in maintaining labour, necessarily wishes to employ it in such a manner as to produce as great a quantity of work as possible. He endeavours, therefore, both to make among his workmen the most proper distribution of employment, and to furnish them with the best machines which he can either invent or afford to purchase [...]. His abilities in both these respects *|XV, 2|* are generally in proportion to the extent of his stock, or to the number of people whom it can employ. The quantity of industry, therefore, not only increases in every country with the increase *of the stock* which employs it, but, in consequence of that increase, the same quantity of industry produces a much greater quantity of work.” (Adam Smith, [op. cit., Vol. I, p. 242](https://marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-adam/works/wealth-of-nations/book02/intro.htm).)

Hence *over-production*.

> “More comprehensive combinations of productive forces ... in industry and trade by uniting more numerous and more diverse human and natural powers in larger-scale enterprises. Already here and there, closer association of the chief branches of production. Thus, big manufacturers will try to acquire also large estates in order to become independent of others for at least a part of the raw materials required for their industry; or they will go into trade in conjunction with their industrial enterprises, not only to sell their own manufactures, but also to purchase other kinds of products and to sell these to their workers. In England, where a single factory owner sometimes employs ten to twelve thousand workers ... it is already not uncommon to find such combinations of various branches of production controlled by one brain, such smaller states or provinces within the state. Thus, the mine owners in the Birmingham area have recently taken over the *whole* process of iron production, which was previously distributed among various entrepreneurs and owners, (See “*Der bergmännische Distrikt bei Birmingham*,” *Deutsche Vierteljahr-Schrift* No. 3, 1838.) Finally in the large joint-stock enterprises which have become so numerous, we see far-reaching combinations of the financial resources of many participants with the scientific and technical knowledge and skills of others to whom the carrying-out of the work is handed over. The capitalists are thereby enabled to apply their savings in more diverse ways and perhaps even to employ them simultaneously in agriculture, industry and commerce. As a consequence their interest becomes more comprehensive, *||XVI, 2|* and the contradictions between agricultural, industrial, and commercial interests are reduced and disappear. But this increased possibility of applying capital profitably in the most diverse ways cannot but intensify the antagonism between the propertied and the non-propertied classes.” (Schulz, *op. cit.*, pp. 40-4l.)

The enormous profit which the landlords of houses make out of poverty. House rent stands in inverse proportion to industrial poverty.

So does the interest obtained from the vices of the ruined proletarians. (Prostitution, drunkenness, pawnbroking.)

The accumulation of capital increases and the competition between capitalists decreases, when capital and landed property are united in the same hand, also when capital is enabled by its size to combine different branches of production.

Indifference towards men. Smith's twenty lottery-tickets. [^capital14]

Say's net and gross revenue. *|XVI||*

### Rent of Land

> *||I, 3|*  *Landlords’ right* has its origin in robbery. (Say, t. 1, p. 136, footnote.) The landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for the natural produce of the earth. (Adam Smith, *op. cit.*, Vol. I, p. 44.)

> “The rent of land, it may be thought, is frequently no more than a reasonable profit or interest for the stock laid out by the landlord upon its improvement. This, no doubt, may be partly the case upon some occasions.... The landlord demands” (1) “a rent even for unimproved land, and the supposed interest or profit upon the expense of improvement is generally an addition to this original rent.” (2) “Those improvements, besides, are not always made by the stock of the landlord, but sometimes by that of the tenant. When the lease comes to be renewed, however, the landlord commonly demands the same augmentation of rent as if they had been all made by his own.” (3) “He sometimes demands rent for what is altogether incapable of human improvement.” (Adam Smith, [op. cit., Vol. I, p. 131](https://marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-adam/works/wealth-of-nations/book01/ch11.htm))

Smith cites as an instance of the last case kelp,

> “a species of seaweed, which, when burnt, yields an alkaline salt, useful for making glass, soap, etc. It grows in several parts of Great Britain, particularly in Scotland, upon such rocks only as lie within the high-water mark, which are twice every day covered with the sea, and of which the produce, therefore, was never augmented by human industry. The landlord, however, whose estate is bounded by a kelp shore of this kind, demands a rent for it as much as for his corn fields. The sea in the neighborhood of the Islands of Shetland is more than commonly abundant in fish, which make a great part of the subsistence of their inhabitants. *||II, 3|* But in order to profit by the produce of the water they must have a habitation upon the neighboring land. The rent of the landlord is in proportion, not to what the farmer can make by the land, but to what he can make both by the land and by the water.” (Adam Smith, [op. cit., Vol. I, p. 131](https://marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-adam/works/wealth-of-nations/book01/ch11.htm))

> “This rent may be considered as the produce of those *powers of nature*, the use of which the landlord lends to the farmer. It is greater or smaller according to the supposed extent of those powers, or in other words, according to the supposed natural or improved fertility of the land. It is the work of nature which remains after deducting or compensating everything which can be regarded as the work of man.” (Adam Smith, [op. cit., Vol. I, pp. 324-25](https://marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-adam/works/wealth-of-nations/book02/ch05.htm))

> “The *rent of land*, therefore, considered as the price paid for the use of the land, is naturally a *monopoly price*. It is not at all proportioned to what the landlord may have laid out upon the improvement of the land, or to what he can afford to take; but to what the farmer can afford to give.” (Adam Smith, [op. cit., p. 131](https://marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-adam/works/wealth-of-nations/book01/ch11.htm))

Of the three original classes, that of the landlords is the one “whose revenue costs them neither labour nor care, but comes to them, as it were, of its own accord, and independent of any plan or project of their own.” (Adam Smith, [op. cit., Vol. I, p. 230](https://marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-adam/works/wealth-of-nations/book01/ch11c-3.htm))

We have already learnt that the size of the rent depends on the degree of *fertility* of the land.

Another factor in its determination is *situation*.

> “The rent of land not only varies with its *fertility*, whatever be its produce, but with its *situation* whatever be its fertility.” (Adam Smith, [op. cit., Vol. I, p. 133](https://marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-adam/works/wealth-of-nations/book01/ch11.htm).)

> “The produce of land, mines, and fisheries, when their natural fertility is equal, is in proportion to the extent and proper *||III, 3|* application of the capitals employed about them. When the capitals are equal and equally well applied, it is in proportion to their natural fertility.” ([op. cit., Vol. I, p. 249](https://marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-adam/works/wealth-of-nations/book01/ch11c-3.htm).)

These propositions of Smith are important, because, given equal costs of production and capital of equal size, they reduce the rent of land to the greater or lesser fertility of the soil. Thereby showing clearly the perversion of concepts in political economy, which turns the fertility of the land into an attribute of the landlord.

Now, however, let us consider the rent of land as it is formed in real life.

The rent of land is established as a result of *the struggle between tenant and landlord*. We find that the hostile antagonism of interests, the struggle, the war is recognized throughout political economy as the basis of social organization.

Let us see now what the relations are between landlord and tenant.

> “In adjusting the terms of the lease, the landlord endeavors to leave him no greater share of the produce than what is sufficient to keep up the stock from which he furnishes the seed, pays the labour, and purchases and maintains the cattle and other instruments of husbandry, together with the ordinary profits of farming stock in the neighbourhood. This is evidently the smallest share with which the tenant can content himself without being a loser, and the landlord seldom means to leave him any more. Whatever part of the produce, or, what is the same thing, whatever part of its price is over and above this share, he naturally endeavors to reserve to himself as the rent of his land, which is evidently the highest the tenant can afford to pay in the actual circumstances of the land. *||IV, 3|* [...] This portion, however, may still be considered as the natural rent of land, or the rent for which it is naturally meant that land should for the most part be let.” (Adam Smith, [op. cit., Vol. I, pp. 130-31](https://marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-adam/works/wealth-of-nations/book01/ch11.htm).)

> “The landlords,” says Say, “operate a certain kind of monopoly against the tenants. The demand for their commodity, site and soil, can go on expanding indefinitely; but there is only a given, limited amount of their commodity.... The bargain struck between landlord and tenant is always advantageous to the former in the greatest possible degree.... Besides the advantage he derives from the nature of the case, he derives a further advantage from his position, his larger fortune and greater credit and standing. But the first by itself suffices to enable him and him *alone* to profit from the favorable circumstances of the land. The opening of a canal, or a road; the increase of population and of the prosperity of a district, always raises the rent.... Indeed, the tenant himself may improve the ground at his own expense; but he only derives the profit from this capital for the duration of his lease, with the expiry of which it remains with the proprietor of the land; henceforth it is the latter who reaps the interest thereon, without having made the outlay, for there is now a proportionate increase in the rent.” (Say, t. II., pp. 142-43.)

> “Rent, considered as the price paid for the use of land, is naturally the highest which the tenant can afford to pay in the actual circumstances of the land.” (Adam Smith, [op. cit., Vol. I, p. 130](https://marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-adam/works/wealth-of-nations/book01/ch11.htm))

> “The rent of an estate above ground commonly amounts to what is supposed to be a third of the gross produce; and it is generally a rent certain and independent of the occasional variations *||V, 3|* in the crop.” (Adam Smith, *op. cit.*, Vol. I, p. 153.) This rent “is seldom less than a fourth ... of the whole produce.” ([op. cit., Vol. I, p. 325](https://marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-adam/works/wealth-of-nations/book02/ch05.htm).)

*Rent* cannot be paid on all commodities. For instance, in many districts no rent is paid for stones.

> “Such parts only of the produce of land can commonly be brought to market of which the ordinary price is sufficient to replace the stock which must be employed in bringing them thither, together with its ordinary profits. If the ordinary price is more than this, the surplus part of it will naturally go to the rent of the land. If it is not more, though the commodity may be brought to market, it can afford no rent to the landlord. Whether the price is or is not more depends upon the demand.” (Adam Smith, *op. cit.*, Vol. I, p. 132.)

> “Rent, it is to be observed, therefore, enters into the composition of the *price of commodities* in a *different way* from wages and profit. *High or low wages and profit* are the *causes* of high or low price; high or low rent is the *effect* of it.” (Adam Smith, [loc. cit., Vol. I, p. 132](https://marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-adam/works/wealth-of-nations/book01/ch11.htm))

*Food* belongs to the *products* which always yield a *rent*.

> “As men, like all other animals, naturally multiply in proportion to the means of their subsistence, food is always., more or less, in demand. It can always purchase or command a greater or smaller *||VI, 3|* quantity of labour, and somebody can always be found who is willing to do something in order to obtain it. The quantity of labour, indeed, which it can purchase is not always *equal* to what it could maintain, if managed in the most economical manner, on account of the high wages which are sometimes given to labour. But it can always purchase such a quantity of labour as it can maintain, according to the rate at which the sort of labour is commonly maintained in the neighborhood.

> “But land, in almost any situation, produces a greater quantity of food than what is sufficient to maintain all the labour necessary for bringing it to market in the most liberal way in which that labour is ever maintained. [...] The surplus, too, is always more than sufficient to replace the stock which employed that labour, together with its profits. Something, therefore, always remains for a rent to the landlord.” (Adam Smith, [op. cit., Vol. I, pp. 132-33](https://marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-adam/works/wealth-of-nations/book01/ch11.htm).)

> “Food is in this manner not only the original source of rent, but every other part of the produce of land which afterwards affords rent derives that part of its value from the improvement of the powers of labour in producing food by means of the improvement and cultivation of land.” (Adam Smith, [op. cit., Vol. I, p. 150](https://marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-adam/works/wealth-of-nations/book01/ch11b.htm).)

> “Human food seems to be the only produce of land which always and necessarily affords some rent to the landlord.” ([op. cit., Vol. I, p. 147](https://marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-adam/works/wealth-of-nations/book01/ch11b.htm).)

> “Countries are populous not in proportion to the number of people whom their produce can clothe and lodge, but in proportion to that of those whom it can feed.” (Adam Smith, [op. cit., Vol. I, p. 149](https://marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-adam/works/wealth-of-nations/book01/ch11b.htm).)*|VI||*

> “After food, clothing and lodging are the two great wants of mankind.” They usually yield a rent, but not inevitably. ([op. cit., Vol. I, p. 147](https://marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-adam/works/wealth-of-nations/book01/ch11b.htm).)

*||VIII, 3|* [^rent15] Let us now see how the landlord exploits everything from which society benefits.

1. The rent of land increases with population. (Adam Smith, [op. cit., Vol. I, p. 146](https://marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-adam/works/wealth-of-nations/book01/ch11b.htm).)

2. We have already learnt from Say how the rent of land increases with railways, etc., with the improvement, safety, and multiplication of the means of communication.

3. 
   > “Every improvement in the circumstances of the society tends either *directly or indirectly* to raise the real rent of land, to increase the real wealth of the landlord, his power of purchasing the labour, or the produce of the labour of other people.

    > “The extension of improvement and cultivation tends to raise it directly. The landlord’s share of the produce necessarily increases with the increase of the produce.

    > “That rise in the real price of those parts of the rude produce of land [...] the rise in the price of cattle, for example, tends too to raise the rent of land directly, and in a still greater proportion. The real value of the landlord’s share, his real command of the labour of other people, not only rises with the real value of the produce, but the proportion of his share to the whole produce rises with it. That produce, after the rise in its real price, requires no more labour to collect it than before. A smaller proportion of it will, therefore, be sufficient to replace, with the ordinary profit, the stock which employs that labour. A greater proportion of it must, consequently, belong to the landlord.” (Adam Smith, [op. cit., Vol. I, pp. 228-29](https://marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-adam/works/wealth-of-nations/book01/ch11c-3.htm).)

    *||IX, 3|*  The greater demand for raw produce, and therefore the rise in value, may in part result from the increase of population and from the increase of their needs. But every new invention, every new application in manufacture of a previously unused or little-used raw material, augments rent. Thus, for example, there was a tremendous rise in the rent of coal mines with the advent of the railways, steamships, etc.

    Besides this advantage which the landlord derives from manufacture, discoveries, and labour, there is yet another, as we shall presently see.

4. > “All those improvements in the productive powers of labour, which tend directly to reduce the real price of manufactures, tend indirectly to raise the real rent of land. The landlord exchanges that part of his rude produce, which is over and above his own consumption, or what comes to the same thing, the price of that part of it, for manufactured produce. Whatever reduces the real price of the latter, raises that of the former. An equal quantity of the former becomes thereby equivalent to a greater quantity of the latter; and the landlord is enabled to purchase a greater quantity of the conveniences, ornaments, or luxuries, which he has occasion for.” (Adam Smith, [op. cit., Vol. I, p. 229](https://marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-adam/works/wealth-of-nations/book01/ch11c-3.htm).)

But it is silly to conclude, as Smith does, that since the landlord exploits every benefit which comes to society *||X, 3|* the interest of the landlord is always identical with that of society. (*op. cit.*, Vol. I, p. 230.) In the economic system, under the rule of private property, the interest which an individual has in society is in precisely inverse proportion to the interest society has in him – just as the interest of the usurer in the spendthrift is by no means identical with the interest of the spendthrift.

We shall mention only in passing the landlord’s obsession with monopoly directed against the landed property of foreign countries, from which the Corn Laws [^rent16], for instance, originate. Likewise, we shall here pass over medieval serfdom, the slavery in the colonies, and the miserable condition of the country folk, the day-labourers, in Great Britain. Let us confine ourselves to the propositions of political economy itself.

1. The landlord being interested in the welfare of society means, according to the principles of political economy, that he is interested in the growth of its population and manufacture, in the expansion of its needs – in short, in the increase of wealth; and this increase of wealth is, as we have already seen, identical with the increase of poverty and slavery. The relation between increasing house rent and increasing poverty is an example of the landlord’s interest in society, for the ground rent, the interest obtained from the land on which the house stands, goes up with the rent of the house.

2. According to the political economists themselves, the landlord’s interest is inimically opposed to the interest of the tenant farmer – and thus already to a significant section of society.

3. *||XI, 3|* As the landlord can demand all the more rent from the tenant farmer the less wages the farmer pays, and as the farmer forces down wages all the lower the more rent the landlord demands, it follows that the interest of the landlord is just as hostile to that of the farm workers as is that of the manufacturers to their workers. He likewise forces down wages to the minimum.

4. Since a real reduction in the price of manufactured products raises the rent of land, the landowner has a direct interest in lowering the wages of industrial workers, in competition amongst the capitalists, in over-production, in all the misery associated with industrial production.

5. While, thus, the landlord’s interest, far from being identical with the interest of society, stands inimically opposed to the interest of tenant farmers, farm labourers, factory workers and capitalists, on the other hand, the interest of one landlord is not even identical with that of another, on account of the competition which we will now consider.

In general the relationship of large and small landed property is like that of big and small capital. But in addition, there are special circumstances which lead inevitably to the accumulation of large landed property and to the absorption of small property by it.

1. *||XII, 3|* Nowhere does the relative number of workers and implements decrease more with increases in the size of the stock than in landed property. Likewise, the possibility of all-round exploitation, of economizing production costs, and of effective division of labour, increases nowhere more with the size of the stock than in landed property. However small a field may be, it requires for its working a certain irreducible minimum of implements (plough, saw, etc.), whilst the size of a piece of landed property can be reduced far below this minimum.

2. Big landed property accumulates to itself the interest on the capital which the tenant farmer has employed to improve the land. Small landed property has to employ its own capital, and therefore does not get this profit at all.

3. While every social improvement benefits the big estate, it harms small property, because it increases its need for ready cash.

4. Two important laws concerning this competition remain to be considered:

    1. 
       > The rent of the cultivated land, of which the produce is human food, regulates the rent of the greater part of other cultivated land. (Adam Smith, *op. cit.*, Vol. I, p. 144.)

       Ultimately, only the big estate can produce such food as cattle, etc. Therefore it regulates the rent of other land and can force it down to a minimum.

       The small landed proprietor working on his own land stands then to the big landowner in the same relation as an artisan possessing his *own* tool to the factory owner. Small property in land has become a mere instrument of labour. *||XVI, 1|* [^rent17] Rent entirely disappears for the small proprietor; there remains to him at the most the interest on his capital, and his wages. For rent can be driven down by competition till it is nothing more than the interest on capital not invested by the proprietor.

    2. In addition, we have already learnt that with equal fertility and equally efficient exploitation of lands, mines and fisheries, the produce is proportionate to the size of the capital. Hence the victory of the big landowner. Similarly, where equal capitals are employed the product is proportionate to the fertility. Hence, where capitals are equal, victory goes to the proprietor of the more fertile soil.

        1. 
           “A mine of any kind may be said to be either fertile or barren, according as the quantity of mineral which can be brought from it by a certain quantity of labour is greater or less than what can be brought by an equal quantity from the greater part of other mines of the same kind.” (Adam Smith, [op. cit., Vol. I, p. 151](https://marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-adam/works/wealth-of-nations/book01/ch11b.htm).)

           > “The most fertile coal-mine, too, regulates the price of coal at all the other mines in its neighborhood. Both the proprietor and the undertaker of the work find, the one that he can get a greater rent, the other that he can get a greater profit, by somewhat underselling all their neighbors. Their neighbors are soon obliged to sell at the same price, though they cannot so well afford it, and though it always diminishes, and sometimes takes away altogether both their rent and their profit. Some works are abandoned altogether; others can afford no rent, and can be wrought only by the proprietor.” (Adam Smith, [op. cit., Vol. I, pp. 152-53](https://marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-adam/works/wealth-of-nations/book01/ch11b.htm).)

           “After the discovery of the mines of Peru, the silver mines of Europe were, the greater part of them, abandoned.... This was the case, too, with the mines of Cuba and St. Domingo, and even with the ancient mines of Peru, after the discovery of those of Potosi.” (*op. cit.*, Vol. I, p. 154.)

           What Smith here says of mines applies more or less to landed property generally:

        2. “The ordinary market price of land, it is to be observed, depends everywhere upon the ordinary market rate of interest.... If the rent of land should fall short of the interest of money by a greater difference, nobody would buy land, which would soon reduce its ordinary price. On the contrary, if the advantages should much more than compensate the difference, everybody would buy land, which again would soon raise its ordinary price.” ([op. cit., Vol. I, p. 320](https://marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-adam/works/wealth-of-nations/book02/ch04.htm).)

From this relation of rent of land to interest on money it follows that rent must fall more and more, so that eventually only the wealthiest people can live on rent. Hence the ever greater competition between landowners who do not lease their land to tenants. Ruin of some of these; further accumulation of large landed property.

*||XVII, 2|*  This competition has the further consequence that a large part of landed property falls into the hands of the capitalists and that capitalists thus become simultaneously landowners, just as the smaller landowners are on the whole already nothing more than capitalists. Similarly, a section of large landowners become at the same time industrialists.

The final consequence is thus the abolition of the distinction between capitalist and landowner, so that there remain altogether only two classes of the population – the working class and the class of capitalists. This huckstering with landed property, the transformation of landed property into a commodity, constitutes the final overthrow of the old and the final establishment of the money aristocracy.

1.
    We will not join in the sentimental tears wept over this by romanticism. Romanticism always confuses the shamefulness of *huckstering the land* with the perfectly rational consequence, inevitable and desirable within the realm of private property, of the *huckstering of private property* in land. In the first place, feudal landed property is already by its very nature huckstered land – the earth which is estranged from man and hence confronts him in the shape of a few great lords.

    The domination of the land as an alien power over men is already inherent in feudal landed property. The serf is the adjunct of the land. Likewise, the lord of an entailed estate, the first-born son, belongs to the land. It inherits him. Indeed, the dominion of private property begins with property in land – that is its basis. But in feudal landed property the lord at least *appears* as the king of the estate. Similarly, there still exists the semblance of a more intimate connection between the proprietor and the land than that of mere *material* wealth. The estate is individualized with its lord: it has his rank, is baronial or ducal with him, has his privileges, his jurisdiction, his political position, etc. It appears as the inorganic body of its lord. Hence the proverb *nulle terre sans maître* *[There is no land without its master. - Ed]*, which expresses the fusion of nobility and landed property. Similarly, the rule of landed property does not appear directly as the rule of mere capital. For those belonging to it, the estate is more like their fatherland. It is a constricted sort of nationality.

    *||XVIII, 2|*  In the same way, feudal landed property gives its name to its lord, as does a kingdom to its king. His family history, the history of his house, etc. – all this individualizes the estate for him and makes it literally his house, personifies it. Similarly those working on the estate have not the position *of day-labourers*; but they are in part themselves his property, as are serfs; and in part they are bound to him by ties of respect, allegiance, and duty. His relation to them is therefore directly political, and has likewise a human, intimate side. Customs, character, etc., vary from one estate to another and seem to be one with the land to which they belong; whereas later, it is only his purse and not his character, his individuality, which connects a man with an estate. Finally, the feudal lord does not try to extract the utmost advantage from his land. Rather, he consumes what is there and calmly leaves the worry of producing to the serfs and the tenants. Such is *nobility’s* relationship to landed property, which casts a romantic glory on its lords.

    It is necessary that this appearance be abolished – that landed property, the root of private property, be dragged completely into the movement of private property and that it become a commodity; that the rule of the proprietor appear as the undisguised rule of private property, of capital, freed of all political tincture; that the relationship between proprietor and worker be reduced to the economic relationship of exploiter and exploited; that all *[...]* personal relationship between the proprietor and his property cease, property becoming merely *objective*, material wealth; that the marriage of convenience should take the place of the marriage of honor with the land; and that the land should likewise sink to the status of a commercial value, like man. It is essential that that which is the root of landed property – filthy self-interest – make its appearance, too, in its cynical form. It is essential that the immovable monopoly turn into the mobile and restless monopoly, into competition; and that the idle enjoyment of the products of other people’s blood and sweat turn into a bustling commerce in the same commodity. Lastly, it is essential that in this competition landed property, in the form of capital, manifest its dominion over both the working class and the proprietors themselves who are either being ruined or raised by the laws governing the movement of capital. The medieval proverb *nulle terre sans seigneur* *[There is no land without its lord. - Ed]* is thereby replaced by that other proverb, *l’argent n’a pas de maître*, *[Money knows no master. - Ed]* wherein is expressed the complete domination of dead matter over man.

2. 
   *||XIX, 2|* Concerning the argument of division or non-division of landed property, the following is to be observed.

    The *division of landed property* negates the *large-scale monopoly* of property in land – abolishes it; but only by *generalizing* this monopoly. It does not abolish the source of monopoly, private property. It attacks the existing form, but not the essence, of monopoly. The consequence is that it falls victim to the laws of private property. For the division of landed property corresponds to the movement of competition in the sphere of industry. In addition to the economic disadvantages of such a dividing-up of the instruments of labour, and the dispersal of labour (to be clearly distinguished from the division of labour: in separated labour the work is not shared out amongst many, but each carries on the same work by himself, it is a multiplication of the same work), this division [of land], like that competition [in industry], necessarily turns again into accumulation.

    Therefore, where the division of landed property takes place, there remains nothing for it but to return to monopoly in a still more malignant form, or to negate, to abolish the division of landed property itself. To do that, however, is not to return to feudal ownership, but to abolish private property in the soil altogether. The first abolition of monopoly is always its generalization, the broadening of its existence. The abolition of monopoly, once it has come to exist in its utmost breadth and inclusiveness, is its total annihilation. Association, applied to land, shares the economic advantage of large-scale landed property, and first brings to realization the original tendency inherent in [land] division, namely, equality. In the same way association also re-establishes, now on a rational basis, no longer mediated by serfdom, overlordship and the silly mysticism of property, the intimate ties of man with the earth, since the earth ceases to be an object of huckstering, and through free labour and free enjoyment becomes once more a true personal property of man. A great advantage of the division of landed property is that the masses, which can no longer resign themselves to servitude, perish through property in a different way than in industry.

As for large landed property, its defenders have always, sophistically, identified the economic advantages offered by large-scale agriculture with large-scale landed property, as if it were not precisely as a result of the abolition of property that this advantage, for one thing, would receive its *||XX, 2|* greatest possible extension, and, for another, only then would be of social benefit. In the same way, they have attacked the huckstering spirit of small landed property, as if large landed property did not contain huckstering latent within it, even in its feudal form – not to speak of the modern English form, which combines the landlord’s feudalism with the tenant farmer’s huckstering and industry.

Just as large landed property can return the reproach of monopoly leveled against it by partitioned land, since partitioned land is also based on the monopoly of private property, so can partitioned landed property likewise return to large landed property the reproach of partition, since partition also prevails there, though in a rigid and frozen form. Indeed, private property rests altogether on partitioning. Moreover, just as division of the land leads back to large landed property as a form of capital wealth, so must feudal landed property necessarily lead to partitioning or at least fall into the hands of the capitalists, turn and twist as it may.

For large landed property, as in England, drives the overwhelming majority of the population into the arms of industry and reduces its own workers to utter wretchedness. Thus, it engenders and enlarges the power of its enemy, capital, industry, by throwing poor people and an entire activity of the country on to the other side. It makes the majority of the people of the country industrial and thus opponents of large landed property. Where industry has attained to great power, as in England at the present time, it progressively forces from large landed property its monopoly against foreign countries and throws it into competition with landed property abroad. For under the sway of industry landed property could keep its feudal grandeur secure only by means of monopolies against foreign countries, thereby protecting itself against the general laws of trade, which are incompatible with its feudal character. Once thrown into competition, landed property obeys the laws of competition, like every other commodity subjected to competition. It begins thus to fluctuate, to decrease and to increase, to fly from one hand to another; and no law can keep it any longer in a few predestined hands. *||XXI, 2|* The immediate consequence is the splitting up of the land amongst many hands, and in any case subjection to the power of industrial capitals.

Finally, large landed property which has been forcibly preserved in this way and which has begotten by its side a tremendous industry leads to crisis even more quickly than the partitioning of land, in comparison with which the power of industry remains constantly of second rank.

Large landed property, as we see in England, has already cast off its feudal character and adopted an industrial character insofar as it is aiming to make as much money as possible. To the owner it yields the utmost possible rent, to the tenant farmer the utmost possible profit on his capital. The workers on the land, in consequence, have already been reduced to the minimum, and the class of tenant farmers already represents within landed property the power of industry and capital. As a result of foreign competition, rent in most cases can no longer form an independent income. A large number of landowners are forced to displace tenant farmers, some of whom in this way [...] sink into the proletariat. On the other hand, many tenant farmers will take over landed property; for the big proprietors, who with their comfortable incomes have mostly given themselves over to extravagance and for the most part are not competent to conduct large-scale agriculture, often possess neither the capital nor the ability for the exploitation of the land. Hence a section of this class, too, is completely ruined. Eventually wages, which have already been reduced to a minimum, must be reduced yet further, to meet the new competition. This then necessarily leads to revolution.

Landed property had to develop in each of these two ways so as to experience in both its necessary downfall, just as industry both in the form of monopoly and in that of competition had to ruin itself so as to learn to believe in man. *|XXI||*

### Estranged Labour

*||XXII|* We have proceeded from the premises of political economy. We have accepted its language and its laws. We presupposed private property, the separation of labor, capital and land, and of wages, profit of capital and rent of land – likewise division of labor, competition, the concept of exchange value, etc. On the basis of political economy itself, in its own words, we have shown that the worker sinks to the level of a commodity and becomes indeed the most wretched of commodities; that the wretchedness of the worker is in inverse proportion to the power and magnitude of his production; that the necessary result of competition is the accumulation of capital in a few hands, and thus the restoration of monopoly in a more terrible form; and that finally the distinction between capitalist and land rentier, like that between the tiller of the soil and the factory worker, disappears and that the whole of society must fall apart into the two classes – *property owners* and propertyless *workers*.

Political economy starts with the fact of private property; it does not explain it to us. It expresses in general, abstract formulas the *material* process through which private property actually passes, and these formulas it then takes for *laws*. It does not *comprehend* these laws – i.e., it does not demonstrate how they arise from the very nature of private property. Political economy throws no light on the cause of the division between labor and capital, and between capital and land. When, for example, it defines the relationship of wages to profit, it takes the interest of the capitalists to be the ultimate cause, i.e., it takes for granted what it is supposed to explain. Similarly, competition comes in everywhere. It is explained from external circumstances. As to how far these external and apparently accidental circumstances are but the expression of a necessary course of development, political economy teaches us nothing. We have seen how exchange itself appears to it as an accidental fact. The only wheels which political economy sets in motion are *greed*, and the *war amongst the greedy* – *competition*.

Precisely because political economy does not grasp the way the movement is connected, it was possible to oppose, for instance, the doctrine of competition to the doctrine of monopoly, the doctrine of craft freedom to the doctrine of the guild, the doctrine of the division of landed property to the doctrine of the big estate – for competition, freedom of the crafts and the division of landed property were explained and comprehended only as accidental, premeditated and violent consequences of monopoly, of the guild system, and of feudal property, not as their necessary, inevitable and natural consequences.

Now, therefore, we have to grasp the intrinsic connection between private property, greed, the separation of labor, capital and landed property; the connection of exchange and competition, of value and the devaluation of man, of monopoly and competition, etc. – the connection between this whole estrangement and the *money* system.

Do not let us go back to a fictitious primordial condition as the political economist does, when he tries to explain. Such a primordial condition explains nothing; it merely pushes the question away into a grey nebulous distance. The economist assumes in the form of a fact, of an event, what he is supposed to deduce – namely, the necessary relationship between two things – between, for example, division of labor and exchange. Thus the theologian explains the origin of evil by the fall of Man – that is, he assumes as a fact, in historical form, what has to be explained.

We proceed from an *actual* economic fact.

The worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production increases in power and size. The worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more commodities he creates. The *devaluation* of the world of men is in direct proportion to the *increasing value* of the world of things. Labor produces not only commodities; it produces itself and the worker as a *commodity* – and this at the same rate at which it produces commodities in general.

This fact expresses merely that the object which labor produces – labor’s product – confronts it as *something alien*, as a *power independent* of the producer. The product of labor is labor which has been embodied in an object, which has become material: it is the *objectification* of labor. Labor’s realization is its objectification. Under these economic conditions this realization of labor appears as *loss of realization* for the workers[^labour18]; objectification as *loss of the object and bondage to it;* appropriation as *estrangement*, as *alienation*.[^labour19]

So much does the labor’s realization appear as loss of realization that the worker loses realization to the point of starving to death. So much does objectification appear as loss of the object that the worker is robbed of the objects most necessary not only for his life but for his work. Indeed, labor itself becomes an object which he can obtain only with the greatest effort and with the most irregular interruptions. So much does the appropriation of the object appear as estrangement that the more objects the worker produces the less he can possess and the more he falls under the sway of his product, capital.

All these consequences are implied in the statement that the worker is related to the *product of labor* as to an *alien* object. For on this premise it is clear that the more the worker spends himself, the more powerful becomes the alien world of objects which he creates over and against himself, the poorer he himself – his inner world – becomes, the less belongs to him as his own. It is the same in religion. The more man puts into God, the less he retains in himself. The worker puts his life into the object; but now his life no longer belongs to him but to the object. Hence, the greater this activity, the more the worker lacks objects. Whatever the product of his labor is, he is not. Therefore, the greater this product, the less is he himself. The *alienation* of the worker in his product means not only that his labor becomes an object, an *external* existence, but that it exists *outside him*, independently, as something alien to him, and that it becomes a power on its own confronting him. It means that the life which he has conferred on the object confronts him as something hostile and alien.

*||XXIII/* Let us now look more closely at the *objectification*, at the production of the worker; and in it at the *estrangement,* the loss of the object, of his product.

The worker can create nothing without *nature,* without the *sensuous external world*. It is the material on which his labor is realized, in which it is active, from which, and by means of which it produces.

But just as nature provides labor with [the] *means of life* in the sense that labor cannot *live* without objects on which to operate, on the other hand, it also provides the *means of life* in the more restricted sense, i.e., the means for the physical subsistence of the *worker* himself.

Thus the more the worker by his labor *appropriates* the external world, sensuous nature, the more he deprives himself of the *means of life* in two respects: first, in that the sensuous external world more and more ceases to be an object belonging to his labor – to be his labor’s *means of life*; and, second, in that it more and more ceases to be a *means of life* in the immediate sense, means for the physical subsistence of the worker.

In both respects, therefore, the worker becomes a servant of his object, first, in that he receives an *object of labor*, i.e., in that he receives *work*, and, secondly, in that he receives *means of subsistence*. This enables him to exist, first as a worker; and second, as a *physical subject*. The height of this servitude is that it is only as a *worker* that he can maintain himself as a *physical subject* and that it is only as a *physical subject* that he is a worker.

(According to the economic laws the estrangement of the worker in his object is expressed thus: the more the worker produces, the less he has to consume; the more values he creates, the more valueless, the more unworthy he becomes; the better formed his product, the more deformed becomes the worker; the more civilized his object, the more barbarous becomes the worker; the more powerful labor becomes, the more powerless becomes the worker; the more ingenious labor becomes, the less ingenious becomes the worker and the more he becomes nature’s slave.)

*Political economy conceals the estrangement inherent in the nature of labor by not considering the* **direct** *relationship between the* **worker** (labor) *and production*. It is true that labor produces for the rich wonderful things – but for the worker it produces privation. It produces palaces – but for the worker, hovels. It produces beauty – but for the worker, deformity. It replaces labor by machines, but it throws one section of the workers back into barbarous types of labor and it turns the other section into a machine. It produces intelligence – but for the worker, stupidity, cretinism.

*The direct relationship of labor to its products is the relationship of the worker to the objects of his production*. The relationship of the man of means to the objects of production and to production itself is only a *consequence* of this first relationship – and confirms it. We shall consider this other aspect later. When we ask, then, what is the essential relationship of labor we are asking about the relationship of the *worker* to production.

Till now we have been considering the estrangement, the alienation of the worker only in one of its aspects , i.e., *the* worker’s *relationship to the products of his labor*. But the estrangement is manifested not only in the result but in the *act of production*, within the *producing activity,* itself. How could the worker come to face the product of his activity as a stranger, were it not that in the very act of production he was estranging himself from himself? The product is after all but the summary of the activity, of production. If then the product of labor is alienation, production itself must be active alienation, the alienation of activity, the activity of alienation. In the estrangement of the object of labor is merely summarized the estrangement, the alienation, in the activity of labor itself.

What, then, constitutes the alienation of labor?

First, the fact that labor is *external* to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his intrinsic nature; that in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. He feels at home when he is not working, and when he is working he does not feel at home. His labor is therefore not voluntary, but coerced; it is *forced labor*. It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need; it is merely a *means* to satisfy needs external to it. Its alien character emerges clearly in the fact that as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists, labor is shunned like the plague. External labor, labor in which man alienates himself, is a labor of self-sacrifice, of mortification. Lastly, the external character of labor for the worker appears in the fact that it is not his own, but someone else’s, that it does not belong to him, that in it he belongs, not to himself, but to another. Just as in religion the spontaneous activity of the human imagination, of the human brain and the human heart, operates on the individual independently of him – that is, operates as an alien, divine or diabolical activity – so is the worker’s activity not his spontaneous activity. It belongs to another; it is the loss of his self.

As a result, therefore, man (the worker) only feels himself freely active in his animal functions – eating, drinking, procreating, or at most in his dwelling and in dressing-up, etc.; and in his human functions he no longer feels himself to be anything but an animal. What is animal becomes human and what is human becomes animal.

Certainly eating, drinking, procreating, etc., are also genuinely human functions. But taken abstractly, separated from the sphere of all other human activity and turned into sole and ultimate ends, they are animal functions.

We have considered the act of estranging practical human activity, labor, in two of its aspects. (1) The relation of the worker to the *product of labor* as an alien object exercising power over him. This relation is at the same time the relation to the sensuous external world, to the objects of nature, as an alien world inimically opposed to him. (2) The relation of labor to the *act of production* within the *labor* process. This relation is the relation of the worker to his own activity as an alien activity not belonging to him; it is activity as suffering, strength as weakness, begetting as emasculating, the worker’s *own* physical and mental energy, his personal life – for what is life but activity? – as an activity which is turned against him, independent of him and not belonging to him. Here we have *self-estrangement,* as previously we had the estrangement of the *thing.*

*||XXIV|* We have still a third aspect of *estranged labor* to deduce from the two already considered.

Man is a species-being [^labour20], not only because in practice and in theory he adopts the species (his own as well as those of other things) as his object, but – and this is only another way of expressing it – also because he treats himself as the actual, living species; because he treats himself as a *universal* and therefore a free being.

The life of the species, both in man and in animals, consists physically in the fact that man (like the animal) lives on organic nature; and the more universal man (or the animal) is, the more universal is the sphere of inorganic nature on which he lives. Just as plants, animals, stones, air, light, etc., constitute theoretically a part of human consciousness, partly as objects of natural science, partly as objects of art – his spiritual inorganic nature, spiritual nourishment which he must first prepare to make palatable and digestible – so also in the realm of practice they constitute a part of human life and human activity. Physically man lives only on these products of nature, whether they appear in the form of food, heating, clothes, a dwelling, etc. The universality of man appears in practice precisely in the universality which makes all nature his *inorganic* body – both inasmuch as nature is (1) his direct means of life, and (2) the material, the object, and the instrument of his life activity. Nature is man’s *inorganic* body – nature, that is, insofar as it is not itself human body. Man *lives* on nature – means that nature is his body, with which he must remain in continuous interchange if he is not to die. That man’s physical and spiritual life is linked to nature means simply that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature.

In estranging from man (1) nature, and (2) himself, his own active functions, his life activity, estranged labor estranges the *species* from man. It changes for him the *life of the species* into a means of individual life. First it estranges the life of the species and individual life, and secondly it makes individual life in its abstract form the purpose of the life of the species, likewise in its abstract and estranged form.

For labor, *life activity*, *productive life* itself, appears to man in the first place merely as a means of satisfying a need – the need to maintain physical existence. Yet the productive life is the life of the species. It is life-engendering life. The whole character of a species, its species-character, is contained in the character of its life activity; and free, conscious activity is man’s species-character. Life itself appears only as a *means to life*.

The animal is immediately one with its life activity. It does not distinguish itself from it. It is *its life activity*. Man makes his life activity itself the object of his will and of his consciousness. He has conscious life activity. It is not a determination with which he directly merges. Conscious life activity distinguishes man immediately from animal life activity. It is just because of this that he is a species-being. Or it is only because he is a species-being that he is a conscious being, i.e., that his own life is an object for him. Only because of that is his activity free activity. Estranged labor reverses the relationship, so that it is just because man is a conscious being that he makes his life activity, his *essential being,* a mere means to his *existence*.

In creating a *world of objects* by his personal activity, in his *work upon* inorganic nature, man proves himself a conscious species-being, i.e., as a being that treats the species as his own essential being, or that treats itself as a species-being. Admittedly animals also produce. They build themselves nests, dwellings, like the bees, beavers, ants, etc. But an animal only produces what it immediately needs for itself or its young. It produces one-sidedly, whilst man produces universally. It produces only under the dominion of immediate physical need, whilst man produces even when he is free from physical need and only truly produces in freedom therefrom. An animal produces only itself, whilst man reproduces the whole of nature. An animal’s product belongs immediately to its physical body, whilst man freely confronts his product. An animal forms only in accordance with the standard and the need of the species to which it belongs, whilst man knows how to produce in accordance with the standard of every species, and knows how to apply everywhere the inherent standard to the object. Man therefore also forms objects in accordance with the laws of beauty.

It is just in his work upon the objective world, therefore, that man really proves himself to be a *species-being*. This production is his active species-life. Through this production, nature appears as *his* work and his reality. The object of labor is, therefore, the *objectification of man’s species-life*: for he duplicates himself not only, as in consciousness, intellectually, but also actively, in reality, and therefore he sees himself in a world that he has created. In tearing away from man the object of his production, therefore, estranged labor tears from him his *species-life*, his real objectivity as a member of the species and transforms his advantage over animals into the disadvantage that his inorganic body, nature, is taken from him.

Similarly, in degrading spontaneous, free activity to a means, estranged labor makes man’s species-life a means to his physical existence.

The consciousness which man has of his species is thus transformed by estrangement in such a way that species[-life] becomes for him a means.

Estranged labor turns thus:

**(3)** *Man’s species-being,* both nature and his spiritual species-property, into a being *alien* to him, into a *means* of his *individual existence*. It estranges from man his own body, as well as external nature and his spiritual aspect, his *human* aspect.

**(4)** An immediate consequence of the fact that man is estranged from the product of his labor, from his life activity, from his species-being, is the *estrangement of man* from *man*. When man confronts himself, he confronts the *other* man. What applies to a man’s relation to his work, to the product of his labor and to himself, also holds of a man’s relation to the other man, and to the other man’s labor and object of labor.

In fact, the proposition that man’s species-nature is estranged from him means that one man is estranged from the other, as each of them is from man’s essential nature.

The estrangement of man, and in fact every relationship in which man [stands] to himself, is realized and expressed only in the relationship in which a man stands to other men.

Hence within the relationship of estranged labor each man views the other in accordance with the standard and the relationship in which he finds himself as a worker.

*||XXV|* We took our departure from a fact of political economy – the estrangement of the worker and his production. We have formulated this fact in conceptual terms as *estranged, alienated* labor. We have analyzed this concept – hence analyzing merely a fact of political economy.

Let us now see, further, how the concept of estranged, alienated labor must express and present itself in real life.

If the product of labor is alien to me, if it confronts me as an alien power, to whom, then, does it belong?

To a being *other* than myself.

Who is this being?

The *gods*? To be sure, in the earliest times the principal production (for example, the building of temples, etc., in Egypt, India and Mexico) appears to be in the service of the gods, and the product belongs to the gods. However, the gods on their own were never the lords of labor. No more was *nature.* And what a contradiction it would be if, the more man subjugated nature by his labor and the more the miracles of the gods were rendered superfluous by the miracles of industry, the more man were to renounce the joy of production and the enjoyment of the product to please these powers.

The *alien* being, to whom labor and the product of labor belongs, in whose service labor is done and for whose benefit the product of labor is provided, can only be *man* himself.

If the product of labor does not belong to the worker, if it confronts him as an alien power, then this can only be because it belongs to some *other man than the worker*. If the worker’s activity is a torment to him, to another it must give *satisfaction* and pleasure. Not the gods, not nature, but only man himself can be this alien power over man.

We must bear in mind the previous proposition that man’s relation to himself becomes for him *objective* and *actual* through his relation to the other man. Thus, if the product of his labor, his labor objectified, is for him an *alien*, *hostile*, powerful object independent of him, then his position towards it is such that someone else is master of this object, someone who is alien, hostile, powerful, and independent of him. If he treats his own activity as an unfree activity, then he treats it as an activity performed in the service, under the dominion, the coercion, and the yoke of another man.

Every self-estrangement of man, from himself and from nature, appears in the relation in which he places himself and nature to men other than and differentiated from himself. For this reason religious self-estrangement necessarily appears in the relationship of the layman to the priest, or again to a mediator, etc., since we are here dealing with the intellectual world. In the real practical world self-estrangement can only become manifest through the real practical relationship to other men. The medium through which estrangement takes place is itself *practical.* Thus through estranged labor man not only creates his relationship to the object and to the act of production as to powers *[in the manuscript Menschen (men) instead of Mächte (powers). – Ed.]* that are alien and hostile to him; he also creates the relationship in which other men stand to his production and to his product, and the relationship in which he stands to these other men. Just as he creates his own production as the loss of his reality, as his punishment; his own product as a loss, as a product not belonging to him; so he creates the domination of the person who does not produce over production and over the product. Just as he estranges his own activity from himself, so he confers upon the stranger an activity which is not his own.

We have until now considered this relationship only from the standpoint of the worker and later on we shall be considering it also from the standpoint of the non-worker.

Through *estranged, alienated labor*, then, the worker produces the relationship to this labor of a man alien to labor and standing outside it. The relationship of the worker to labor creates the relation to it of the capitalist (or whatever one chooses to call the master of labor). *Private property* is thus the product, the result, the necessary consequence, of *alienated labor*, of the external relation of the worker to nature and to himself.

*Private property* thus results by analysis from the concept of *alienated labor,* i.e., of *alienated man*, of estranged labor, of estranged life, of *estranged* man.

True, it is as a result of the *movement of private property* that we have obtained the concept of *alienated labor* (*of alienated life*) in political economy. But on analysis of this concept it becomes clear that though private property appears to be the reason, the cause of alienated labor, it is rather its consequence, just as the gods are *originally* not the cause but the effect of man’s intellectual confusion. Later this relationship becomes reciprocal.

Only at the culmination of the development of private property does this, its secret, appear again, namely, that on the one hand it is the *product* of alienated labor, and that on the other it is the *means* by which labor alienates itself, *the realization of this alienation*.

This exposition immediately sheds light on various hitherto unsolved conflicts.

1.
    Political economy starts from labor as the real soul of production; yet to labor it gives nothing, and to private property everything. Confronting this contradiction, Proudhon has decided in favor of labor against private property[^labour21]. We understand, however, that this apparent contradiction is the contradiction of *estranged labor* with itself, and that political economy has merely formulated the laws of estranged labor.

    We also understand, therefore, that *wages* and *private property* are identical. Indeed, where the product, as the object of labor, pays for labor itself, there the wage is but a necessary consequence of labor’s estrangement. Likewise, in the wage of labor, labor does not appear as an end in itself but as the servant of the wage. We shall develop this point later, and meanwhile will only draw some conclusions. *||XXVI|* [^labour22]

    An enforced *increase of wages* (disregarding all other difficulties, including the fact that it would only be by force, too, that such an increase, being an anomaly, could be maintained) would therefore be nothing but better *payment for the slave*, and would not win either for the worker or for labor their human status and dignity.

    Indeed, even the *equality of wages*, as demanded by Proudhon, only transforms the relationship of the present-day worker to his labor into the relationship of all men to labor. Society would then be conceived as an abstract capitalist.

    Wages are a direct consequence of estranged labor, and estranged labor is the direct cause of private property. The downfall of the one must therefore involve the downfall of the other.

2. From the relationship of estranged labor to private property it follows further that the emancipation of society from private property, etc., from servitude, is expressed in the *political* form of the *emancipation of the workers*; not that *their* emancipation alone is at stake, but because the emancipation of the workers contains universal human emancipation – and it contains this because the whole of human servitude is involved in the relation of the worker to production, and all relations of servitude are but modifications and consequences of this relation.

Just as we have derived the concept of *private property* from the concept of *estranged, alienated labor* by *analysis*, so we can develop every *category* of political economy with the help of these two factors; and we shall find again in each category, e.g., trade, competition, capital, money only a *particular* and *developed* expression of these first elements.

But before considering this phenomenon, however, let us try to solve two other problems.

1. To define the general *nature of private property*, as it has arisen as a result of estranged labor, in its relation to *truly human* and *social property*.

2. We have accepted the *estrangement of labor*, its *alienation*, as a fact, and we have analyzed this fact. How, we now ask, does *man* come to *alienate,* to estrange, his *labor*? How is this estrangement rooted in the nature of human development? We have already gone a long way to the solution of this problem by *transforming* the question of the *origin of private property* into the question of the relation of *alienated labor* to the course of humanity’s development. For when one speaks of *private property,* one thinks of dealing with something external to man. When one speaks of labor, one is directly dealing with man himself. This new formulation of the question already contains its solution.

As to (1): *The general nature of private property and its relation to truly human property*.

Alienated labor has resolved itself for us into two components which depend on one another, or which are but different expressions of one and the same relationship. *Appropriation* appears as *estrangement*, as *alienation*; and *alienation* appears as *appropriation*, *estrangement* as truly *becoming a citizen*.[^labour23]

We have considered the one side – *alienated* labor in relation to the *worker* himself, i.e., the *relation of alienated labor to itself*. The product, the necessary outcome of this relationship, as we have seen, is the *property relation of the non-worker to the worker and to labor. Private property,* as the material, summary expression of alienated labor, embraces both relations – the *relation of the worker to work and to the product of his labor and to the non-worker*, and the relation of the *non-worker to the worker and to the product of his labor*.

Having seen that in relation to the worker who *appropriates* nature by means of his labor, this appropriation appears as estrangement, his own spontaneous activity as activity for another and as activity of another, vitality as a sacrifice of life, production of the object as loss of the object to an alien power, to an *alien* person – we shall now consider the relation to the worker, to labor and its object of this person who is *alien* to labor and the worker.

First it has to be noted that everything which appears in the worker as an *activity of alienation*, *of estrangement*, appears in the non-worker as a *state of alienation*, *of estrangement.*

Secondly, that the worker’s *real*, *practical attitude* in production and to the product (as a state of mind) appears in the non-worker who confronting him as a *theoretical* attitude.

*||XXVII|* *Thirdly*, the non-worker does everything against the worker which the worker does against himself; but he does not do against himself what he does against the worker.

Let us look more closely at these three relations. *|XXVII||*

*[First Manuscript breaks off here.]*

## Second Manuscript

### Antithesis of Capital and Labour. Landed Property and Capital

... forms the interest on his capital. The worker is the subjective manifestation of the fact that capital is man wholly lost to himself, just as capital is the objective manifestation of the fact that labour is man lost to himself.  But the *worker* has the misfortune to be a *living* capital, and therefore an *indigent* capital, one which loses its interest, and hence its livelihood, every moment it is not working.  The *value* of the worker as capital rises according to demand and supply, and *physically* too his *existence*, his *life*, was and is looked upon as a supply of a *commodity* like any other.  The worker produces capital, capital produces him – hence he produces himself, and man as *worker*, as a *commodity*, is the product of this entire cycle.  To the man who is nothing more than a *worker* – and to him as a worker – his human qualities only exist insofar as they exist for capital *alien* to him.  Because man and capital are alien, foreign to each other, however, and thus stand in an indifferent, external and accidental relationship to each other, it is inevitable that this foreignness should also appear as something *real*.  As soon, therefore, as it occurs to capital (whether from necessity or caprice) no longer to be for the worker, he himself is no longer for himself: he has no work, hence no wages, and since he has no *existence as a human being* but only *as a worker*, he can go and bury himself, starve to death, etc.  The worker exists as a worker only when he exists *for himself* as capital; and he exists as capital only when some *capital* exists *for him*.  The existence of capital is *his* existence, his *life*; as it determines the tenor of his life in a manner indifferent to him.

Political economy, therefore, does not recognise the unemployed worker, the workingman, insofar as he happens to be outside this labour relationship.  The rascal, swindler, beggar, the unemployed, the starving, wretched and criminal workingman – these are *figures* who do not exist for *political economy* but only for other eyes, those of the doctor, the judge, the grave-digger, and bum-bailiff, etc.; such figures are spectres outside its domain.  For it, therefore, the worker's needs are but the one *need* – to maintain *him whilst he is working* and insofar as may be necessary to prevent the *race of labourers* from [dying] out.  The wages of labour have thus exactly the same significance as the *maintenance* and *servicing* of any other productive instrument, or as the *consumption of capital* in general, required for its reproduction with interest, like the oil which is applied to wheels to keep them turning.  Wages, therefore, belong to capital's and the capitalist's necessary *costs*, and must not exceed the bounds of this necessity.  It was therefore quite logical for the English factory owners, before the Amendment Bill of 1834 to deduct from the wages of the worker the public charity which he was receiving out of the Poor Rate and to consider this to be an integral part of wages. [^second24]

Production does not simply produce man as a *commodity*, the *human commodity*, man in the role of *commodity*; it produces him in keeping with this role as a *mentally* and physically dehumanised being. – Immorality, deformity, and dulling of the workers and the capitalists. – Its product is *the self-conscious and self-acting commodity* ... the *human* commodity.... Great advance of Ricardo, Mill, etc., on Smith and Say, to declare the *existence* of the human being – the greater or lesser human productivity of the commodity – to be *indifferent* and even *harmful*.  Not how many workers are maintained by a given capital, but rather how much interest it brings in, the sum-total of the annual *savings*, is said to be the true purpose of production.

It was likewise a great and consistent advance of modern English political economy, that, whilst elevating *labour* to the position of its *sole* principle, it should at the same time expound with complete clarity the *inverse* relation between wages and interest on capital, and the fact that the capitalist could normally *only* gain by pressing down wages, and vice versa.  Not the defrauding of the consumer, but the capitalist and the worker taking advantage of each other, is shown to be the *normal* relationship.

The relations of private property contain latent within them the relation of private property as *labour*, the relation of private property as *capital*, and the *mutual relation* of these two to one another.  There is the production of human activity as *labour* – that is, as an activity quite alien to itself, to man and to nature, and therefore to consciousness and the expression of life – the *abstract* existence of man as a mere *workman* who may therefore daily fall from his filled void into the absolute void – into his social, and therefore actual, non-existence.  On the other hand, there is the production of the object of human activity as *capital* – in which all the natural and social characteristic of the object is *extinguished*; in which private property has lost its natural and social quality (and therefore every political and social illusion, and is not associated with any *apparently* human relations); in which the *selfsame* capital remains the *same* in the most diverse natural and social manifestations, totally indifferent to its *real* content.  This contradiction, driven to the limit, is of necessity the limit, the culmination, and the downfall of the whole private-property relationship.

It is therefore another great achievement of modern English political economy to have declared rent of land to be the difference in the interest yielded by the worst and the best land under cultivation; to have [exposed] the landowner's romantic illusions – his alleged social importance and the identity of his interest with the interest of society, a view still maintained by *Adam Smith* after the Physiocrats; and to [have] anticipated and prepared the movement of the real world which will transform the landowner into an ordinary, prosaic capitalist, and thus simplify and sharpen the contradiction [between capital and labour] and. hasten its resolution.  *Land* as *land*, and *rent* as *rent*, have lost their *distinction of rank* and become insignificant *capital* and *interest* – or rather, *capital* and *interest* that signify only money.

The *distinction* between capital and land, between profit and rent, and between both and wages, and *industry*, and *agriculture*, and *immovable* and *movable* private property – this distinction is not rooted in the nature of things, but is a *historical* distinction, a *fixed* historical moment in the formation and development of the contradiction between capital and labour.  In industry, etc., as opposed to immovable landed property, is only expressed the way in which [industry] came into being and the contradiction to agriculture in which industry developed.  This distinction only continues to exist as a *special* sort of work – as an *essential*, *important* and *life-embracing* distinction – so long as industry (town life) develops *over* and *against* landed property (aristocratic feudal life) and itself continues to bear the feudal character of its opposite in the form of monopoly, craft, guild, corporation, etc., within which labour still has a *seemingly social* significance, still the significance of the *real* community, and has not yet reached the stage of *indifference* to its content, of complete being-for-self[^second25], i. e., of abstraction from all other being, and hence has not yet become *liberated* capital.

But liberated *industry*, industry constituted for itself as such, and *liberated capital*, are the necessary *development* of labour.  The power of industry over its opposite is at once revealed in the emergence of *agriculture* as a real industry, while previously it left most of the work to the soil and to the slave of the soil, through whom the land cultivated itself.  With the transformation of the slave into a *free* worker – i.e., into a *hireling* – the landlord himself is transformed into a captain of industry, into a capitalist – a transformation which takes place at first through the intermediacy of the *tenant farmer*.  *The tenant farmer*, however, is the landowner's representative – the landowner's revealed *secret:* it is only through him that the landowner has his *economic* existence – his existence as a private proprietor – for the rent of his land only exists due to the competition between the farmers.

Thus, in the person of the *tenant farmer* the landlord *has* already become in essence a *common* capitalist.  And this must come to pass, too, in actual fact: the capitalist engaged in agriculture – the tenant – must become a landlord, or vice versa.  The tenant's *industrial hucksterism* is the *landowner's* industrial hucksterism, for the being of the former postulates the being of the latter.

But mindful of their contrasting origin, of their line of descent, the landowner knows the capitalist as his insolent, liberated, enriched slave of yesterday and sees himself as a *capitalist* who is threatened by him.  The capitalist knows the landowner as the idle, cruel, egotistical master of yesterday; he knows that he injures him as a capitalist, but that it is to industry that he owes all his present social significance, his possessions and his pleasures; he sees in him a contradiction to *free* industry and to *free* capital – to capital independent of every natural limitation.  This contradiction is extremely bitter, and each side tells the truth about the other.  One need only read the attacks of immovable on movable property and vice versa to obtain a clear picture of their respective worthlessness.  The landowner lays stress on the noble lineage of his property, on feudal souvenirs or reminiscences, the poetry of recollection, on his romantic disposition, on his political importance, etc.; and when he talks economics, it is *only* agriculture that he holds to be productive.  At the same time he depicts his adversary as a sly, hawking, carping, deceitful, greedy, mercenary, rebellious, heartless and spiritless person who is estranged from the community and freely trades it away, who breeds, nourishes and cherishes competition, and with it pauperism, crime, and the dissolution of all social bonds, an extorting, pimping, servile, smooth, flattering, fleecing, dried-up rogue without honour, principles, poetry, substance, or anything else. (Amongst others see the Physiocrat *Bergasse*, whom Camille Desmoulins flays in his journal, *Révolutions de France et de Brabant* [^second26]; see von Vincke, Lancizolle, Haller, Leo, Kosegarten and also *Sismondi*.)

[See on the other hand the garrulous, old-Hegelian theologian Funke who tells, after Herr Leo, with tears in his eyes how a slave had refused, when serfdom was abolished, to cease being the *property of the gentry* [^second27]. See also the patriotic visions *of* *Justus Möser*, which distinguish themselves by the fact that they never for a moment ... abandon the respectable, petty-bourgeois "*home-baked*", *ordinary*, narrow horizon of the philistine, and which nevertheless remain pure fancy.  This contradiction has given them such an appeal to the German heart.- *Note* by Marx.]

Movable property, for its part, points to the miracles of industry and progress.  It is the child of modern times, whose legitimate, native-born son it is.  It pities its adversary as a simpleton, *unenlightened* about his own nature (and in this it is completely right), who wants to replace moral capital and free labour by brute, immoral violence and serfdom.  It depicts him as a Don Quixote, who under the guise of *bluntness*, *respectability,* the *general interest*, and *stability*, conceals incapacity for progress, greedy self-indulgence, selfishness, sectional interest, and evil intent.  It declares him an artful *monopolist*; it pours cold water on his reminiscences, his poetry, and his romanticism by a historical and sarcastic enumeration of the baseness, cruelty, degradation, prostitution, infamy, anarchy and rebellion, of which romantic castles were the workshops.

It claims to have obtained political freedom for everybody; to have loosed the chains which fettered civil society; to have linked together different worlds; to have created trade promoting friendship between the peoples; to have created pure morality and a pleasant culture; to have given the people civilised needs in place of their crude wants, and the means of satisfying them.  Meanwhile, it claims, the landowner – this idle, parasitic grain-profiteer – raises the price of the people's basic necessities and so forces the capitalist to raise wages without being able to increase productivity, thus impeding [the growth of] the nation's annual income, the accumulation of capital, and therefore the possibility of providing work for the people and wealth for the country, eventually cancelling it, thus producing a general decline – whilst he parasitically exploits every advantage of modern civilisation without doing the least thing for it, and without even abating in the slightest his feudal prejudices.  Finally, let him – for whom the cultivation of the land and the land itself exist only as a source of money, which comes to him as a present - let him just take a look at his tenant farmer and say whether he himself is not a *downright, fantastic, sly* scoundrel who in his heart and in actual fact has for a long time belonged to *free* industry and to *lovely* trade, however much he may protest and prattle about historical memories and ethical or political goals.  Everything which he can really advance to justify himself is true only of the *cultivator of the land* (the capitalist and the labourers), of whom the *landowner* is rather the *enemy*.  Thus he gives evidence against himself. [Movable property claims that] *without* capital landed property is dead, worthless matter; that its civilised victory has discovered and made human labour the source of wealth in place of the dead thing. (See Paul Louis Courier, Saint-Simon, Ganilh, Ricardo, Mill, McCulloch and Destutt de Tracy and Michel Chevalier.)

The *real* course of development (to be inserted at this point) results in the necessary victory of the *capitalist* over the *landowner* – that is to say, of developed over undeveloped, immature private property – just as in general, movement must triumph over immobility; open, self-conscious baseness over hidden, unconscious baseness; *cupidity* over *self-indulgence*; the avowedly restless, adroit self-interest of *enlightenment* over the parochial, worldly-wise, respectable, idle and fantastic *self-interest of superstition*; and *money* over the other forms of private property.

Those states which sense something of the danger attaching to fully developed free industry, to fully developed pure morality and to fully developed philanthropic trade, try, but in vain, to hold in check the capitalisation of landed property.

*Landed property* in its distinction from capital is private property – capital – still afflicted with *local* and political prejudices; it is capital which has not yet extricated itself from its entanglement with the world and found the form proper to itself – capital *not* yet *fully developed.*  It must achieve its abstract, that is, its *pure*, expression in the course of its *cosmogony*.

The character of *private property* is expressed by labour, capital, and the relations between these two.  The movement through which these constituents have to pass is:

*First.  Unmediated* or *mediated unity of the two.*

Capital and labour are at first still united.  Then, though separated and estranged, they reciprocally develop and promote each other as *positive* conditions.

[*Second.*] *The two in opposition*, mutually excluding each other.  The worker knows the capitalist as his own non-existence, and vice versa: each tries to rob the other of his existence.

[*Third*.] *Opposition* of each *to* itself.  Capital = stored-up labour = labour.  As such it splits into *capital itself* and its *interest*, and this latter again into *interest and profit*.  The capitalist is completely sacrificed.  He falls into the working class, whilst the worker (but only exceptionally) becomes a capitalist.  Labour as a moment of capital – its costs.  Thus the wages of labour - a sacrifice of capital.

Splitting of labour into *labour itself* and the *wages of labour*.  The worker himself a capital, a commodity.

*Clash of mutual contradictions*.

## Third Manuscript [^third28]

### Private Property and Labour. Political Economy as a Product of the Movement of Private Property

*||I2|* Re. p. XXXVI *[This refers to the missing part of the second manuscript. - Ed.]*  The *subjective essence* of private property – *private property* as activity for itself [^third29], as *subject,* as *person* – is *labour*.  It is therefore evident that only the political economy which acknowledged *labour* as its principle – *Adam Smith* – and which therefore no longer looked upon private property as a mere *condition* external to man – that it is this political economy which has to be regarded on the one hand as a product of the real *energy* and the real *movement* of private property (it is a movement of private property become independent for itself in consciousness – the modern industry as Self) – as a product of modern *industry* – and on the other hand, as a force which has quickened and glorified the energy and development of modern industry and made it a power in the realm of *consciousness.*

To this enlightened political economy, which has discovered – within private property – the *subjective essence* of wealth, the adherents of the monetary and mercantile system, who look upon private property *only as an objective* substance confronting men, seem therefore to be *fetishists, Catholics.  Engels* was therefore right to call *Adam Smith* the *Luther of Political Economy* [See [Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy](https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/df-jahrbucher/outlines.htm)]. Just as Luther recognised *religion* – *faith* – as the substance of the external *world* and in consequence stood opposed to Catholic paganism – just as he superseded *external* religiosity by making religiosity the *inner* substance of man – just as he negated the priests outside the layman because he transplanted the priest into laymen's hearts, just so with wealth: wealth as something outside man and independent of him, and therefore as something to be maintained and asserted only in an external fashion, is done away with; that is, this *external, mindless objectivity* of wealth is done away with, with private property being incorporated in man himself and with man himself being recognised as its essence.  But as a result man is brought within the orbit of private property, just as with Luther he is brought within the orbit of religion.  Under the semblance of recognising man, the political economy whose principle is labour rather carries to its logical conclusion the denial of man, since man himself no longer stands in an external relation of tension to the external substance of private property, but has himself become this tense essence of private property.  What was previously *being external to oneself* – man's actual externalisation – has merely become the act of externalising – the process of alienating.  This political economy begins by seeming to acknowledge man (his independence, spontaneity, etc.); then, locating private property in man's own being, it can no longer be conditioned by the local, national or other *characteristics of private property* as of *something existing outside itself*.  This political economy, consequently, displays a *cosmopolitan*, universal energy which overthrows every restriction and bond so as to establish itself instead as the *sole* politics, the sole universality, the sole limit and sole bond.  Hence it must throw aside this *hypocrisy* in the course of its further development and come *out in its complete cynicism*.  And this it does – untroubled by all the apparent contradictions in which it becomes involved as a result of this theory – by developing the idea of *labour* much *more one-sidedly*, and therefore *more sharply* and *more consistently*, as the sole *essence of wealth;* by proving the implications of this theory to be *anti-human* in character, in contrast to the other, original approach.  Finally, by dealing the death-blow to *rent* – that last, *individual, natural* mode of private property and source of wealth existing independently of the movement of labour, that expression of feudal property, an expression which has already become wholly economic in character and therefore incapable of resisting political economy. (The *Ricardo* school.) There is not merely a relative growth in the *cynicism* of political economy from Smith through Say to Ricardo, Mill, etc., inasmuch as the implications of *industry* appear more developed and more contradictory in the eyes of the last-named; these later economists also advance in a positive sense constantly and consciously further than their predecessors in their estrangement from man.  They do so, however, *only* because their science develops more consistently and truthfully.  Because they make private property in its active form the subject, thus simultaneously turning man into the essence – and at the same time turning man as non-essentiality into the essence – the contradiction of *||II|* reality corresponds completely to the contradictory being which they accept as their principle.  Far from refuting it, the ruptured *world of industry* confirms their *self-ruptured* principle.  Their principle is, after all, the principle of this rupture.

The physiocratic doctrine of *Dr. Quesnay* forms the transition from the mercantile system to Adam Smith.  *Physiocracy* represents directly the decomposition of feudal property in *economic* terms, but it therefore just as directly represents its *economic metamorphosis* and restoration, save that now its language is no longer feudal but economic.  All wealth is resolved into *land* and *cultivation* (agriculture).  Land is not yet *capital*: it is still a *special* mode of its existence, the validity of which is supposed to lie in, and to *derive from*, its natural peculiarity. Yet land is a general natural *element*, whilst the mercantile system admits the existence of wealth only in the form of *precious metal*.  Thus the *object* of wealth – its matter – has straightway obtained the highest degree of universality within the *bounds of nature*, insofar as even as *nature*, it is immediate objective wealth.  And land only exists for *man* through labour, through agriculture.

Thus the subjective essence of wealth has already been transferred to labour.  But at the same time agriculture is the *only productive* labour.  Hence, labour is not yet grasped in its generality and abstraction: it is still bound to a particular *natural element as its matter*, and it is therefore only recognised in a *particular mode of existence determined by nature*.  It is therefore still only a *specific, particular* alienation of man, just as its product is likewise conceived nearly [as] a specific form of wealth – due more to nature than to labour itself.  The land is here still recognised as a phenomenon of nature independent of man – not yet as capital, i.e., as an aspect of labour itself.  Labour appears, rather, as an aspect of the *land*.  But since the fetishism of the old external wealth, of wealth existing only as an object, has been reduced to a very simple natural element, and since its essence – even if only partially and in a particular form – has been recognised within its subjective existence, the necessary step forward has been made in revealing the *general nature* of wealth and hence in the raising up of *labour* in its total absoluteness (i.e., its abstraction) as the *principle*. It is argued against physiocracy that *agriculture*, from the economic point of view – that is to say, from the only valid point of view – does not differ from any other industry; and that the *essence* of wealth, therefore, is not a *specific* form of labour bound to a particular element – a particular expression of labour – but *labour in general*.

Physiocracy denies *particular*, external, merely objective wealth by declaring labour to be the *essence* of wealth.  But for physiocracy labour is at first only the *subjective essence* of landed property. (It takes its departure from the type of property which historically appears as the dominant and acknowledged type.) It turns only landed property into *alienated man*.  It annuls its feudal character by declaring *industry* (agriculture) as its *essence.*  But it disavows the world of industry and acknowledges the feudal system by declaring *agriculture* to be the *only* industry.

It is clear that if the *subjective essence* of industry is now grasped (of industry in opposition to landed property, i.e., of industry constituting itself as industry), this essence includes within itself its opposite.  For just as industry incorporates annulled landed property, the *subjective* essence of industry at the same time incorporates the subjective essence of *landed property*.

Just as landed property is the first form of private property, with industry at first confronting it historically merely as a special kind of property – or, rather, as landed property's liberated slave – so this process repeats itself in the scientific analysis of the *subjective* essence of private property, *labour*.  Labour appears at first only as *agricultural labour*, but then asserts itself as *labour* in general.

*||III|* All wealth has become *industrial* wealth, the *wealth* of *labour*, and *industry* is accomplished labour, just as the *factory system* is the perfected essence of *industry*, that is of labour, and just as *industrial capital* is the accomplished objective form of private property.

We can now see how it is only at this point that private property can complete its dominion over man and become, in its most general form, a world-historical power.

### Private Property and Communism

Re. p. XXXIX. *[This refers to the missing part of the second manuscript. - Ed.]*  The antithesis between *lack of property* and *property,* so long as it is not comprehended as the antithesis of *labour and capital,* still remains an indifferent antithesis, not grasped in its *active connection,* in its *internal* relation, not yet grasped as a *contradiction.* It can find expression in this *first* form even without the advanced development of private property (as in ancient Rome, Turkey, etc.). It does not yet *appear* as having been established by private property itself. But labour, the subjective essence of private property as exclusion of property, and capital, objective labour as exclusion of labour, constitute *private property* as its developed state of contradiction – hence a dynamic relationship driving towards resolution.

*Re the same page*.  The transcendence of self-estrangement follows the same course as self-estrangement. *Private property* is first considered only in its objective aspect – but nevertheless with labour as its essence. Its form of existence is therefore *capital,* which is to be annulled “as such” (Proudhon). Or a *particular form* of labour – labour levelled down, fragmented, and therefore unfree – is conceived as the source of private property’s *perniciousness* and of its existence in estrangement from men. For instance, *Fourier,* who, like the Physiocrats, also conceives *agricultural labour* to be at least the *exemplary* type, whereas *Saint-Simon* declares in contrast that *industrial labour* as such is the essence, and accordingly aspires to the *exclusive* rule of the industrialists and the improvement of the workers’ condition. Finally, *communism* is the *positive* expression of annulled private property – at first as *universal* private property.

By embracing this relation as a *whole*, communism is:

1. 
   In its first form only a *generalisation* and *consummation* of it [of this relation]. As such it appears in a two-fold form: on the one hand, the dominion of *material* property bulks so large that it wants to destroy *everything* which is not capable of being possessed by all as *private property*. It wants to disregard talent, etc., in an *arbitrary* manner. For it the sole purpose of life and existence is direct, physical *possession.* The category of the *worker* is not done away with, but extended to all men. The relationship of private property persists as the relationship of the community to the world of things. Finally, this movement of opposing universal private property to private property finds expression in the brutish form of opposing to *marriage* (certainly a *form of exclusive private property*) the *community of women,* in which a woman becomes a piece of *communal* and *common* property. It may be said that this idea of the *community of women gives away the secret* of this as yet completely crude and thoughtless communism.[^comm30] Just as woman passes from marriage to general prostitution, [Prostitution is only a *specific* expression of the *general* prostitution of the *labourer*, and since it is a relationship in which falls not the prostitute alone, but also the one who prostitutes – and the latter’s abomination is still greater – the capitalist, etc., also comes under this head. – *Note by Marx* [^comm31] so the entire world of wealth (that is, of man’s objective substance) passes from the relationship of exclusive marriage with the owner of private property to a state of universal prostitution with the community. This type of communism – since it negates the *personality* of man in every sphere – is but the logical expression of private property, which is this negation. General *envy* constituting itself as a power is the disguise in which *greed* re-establishes itself and satisfies itself, only in *another* way. The thought of every piece of private property as such is *at least* turned against *wealthier* private property in the form of envy and the urge to reduce things to a common level, so that this envy and urge even constitute the essence of competition. Crude communism *[the manuscript has: Kommunist. – Ed.]* is only the culmination of this envy and of this levelling-down proceeding from the *preconceived* minimum. It has a *definite, limited* standard.  How little this annulment of private property is really an appropriation is in fact proved by the abstract negation of the entire world of culture and civilisation, the regression to the *unnatural*  *||IV|* simplicity of the *poor* and crude man who has few needs and who has not only failed to go beyond private property, but has not yet even reached it.

    The community is only a community of *labour,* and equality of *wages* paid out by communal capital – by the *community* as the universal capitalist. Both sides of the relationship are raised to an *imagined* universality – *labour* as the category in which every person is placed, and *capital* as the acknowledged universality and power of the community.

    In the approach to *woman* as the *spoil* and hand-maid of communal lust is expressed the infinite degradation in which man exists for himself, for the secret of this approach has its *unambiguous*, decisive, *plain* and undisguised expression in the relation of *man* to *woman* and in the manner in which the *direct* and *natural* species-relationship is conceived. The direct, natural, and necessary relation of person to person is the *relation of man* to *woman.* In this *natural* species-relationship man’s relation to nature is immediately his relation to man, just as his relation to man is immediately his relation to nature – his own *natural* destination. In this relationship, therefore, is *sensuously manifested,* reduced to an observable *fact*, the extent to which the human essence has become nature to man, or to which nature to him has become the human essence of man. From this relationship one can therefore judge man’s whole level of development. From the character of this relationship follows how much *man* as a *species-being*, as *man*, has come to be himself and to comprehend himself; the relation of man to woman is the *most natural* relation of human being to human being. It therefore reveals the extent to which man’s *natural* behaviour has become *human,* or the extent to which the human essence in him has become a *natural* essence – the extent to which his *human nature* has come to be *natural* to him. This relationship also reveals the extent to which man’s *need* has become a *human* need; the extent to which, therefore, the *other* person as a person has become for him a need – the extent to which he in his individual existence is at the same time a social being.

    The first positive annulment of private property – *crude* communism – is thus merely a *manifestation* of the vileness of private property, which wants to set itself up as the *positive community system.*

2. Communism (α) still political in nature – democratic or despotic; (β) with the abolition of the state, yet still incomplete, and being still affected by private property, i.e., by the estrangement of man. In both forms communism already is aware of being reintegration or return of man to himself, the transcendence of human self-estrangement; but since it has not yet grasped the positive essence of private property, and just as little the *human* nature of need, it remains captive to it and infected by it. It has, indeed, grasped its concept, but not its essence.

3.
    *Communism* as the *positive* transcendence of *private property* as *human self-estrangement,* and therefore as the real *appropriation* of the *human* essence by and for man; communism therefore as the complete return of man to himself as a *social* (i.e., human) being – a return accomplished consciously and embracing the entire wealth of previous development. This communism, as fully developed naturalism, equals humanism, and as fully developed humanism equals naturalism; it is the *genuine* resolution of the conflict between man and nature and between man and man – the true resolution of the strife between existence and essence, between objectification and self-confirmation, between freedom and necessity, between the individual and the species. Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution.

    *||V|* The entire movement of history, just as its *[communism’s]* *actual* act of genesis – the birth act of its empirical existence – is, therefore, for its thinking consciousness the *comprehended* and *known* process of its *becoming*. Whereas the still immature communism seeks an *historical* proof for itself – a proof in the realm of what already exists – among disconnected historical phenomena opposed to private property, tearing single phases from the historical process and focusing attention on them as proofs of its historical pedigree (a hobby-horse ridden hard especially by Cabet, Villegardelle, etc.). By so doing it simply makes clear that by far the greater part of this process contradicts its own claim, and that, if it has ever existed, precisely its being in the *past* refutes its pretension to *reality.*

    It is easy to see that the entire revolutionary movement necessarily finds both its empirical and its theoretical basis in the movement of *private property* – more precisely, in that of the economy.

    This *material*, immediately *perceptible* private property is the material perceptible expression of *estranged human* life. Its movement – production and consumption – is the *perceptible* revelation of the movement of all production until now, i.e., the realisation or the reality of man. Religion, family, state, law, morality, science, art, etc., are only *particular* modes of production, and fall under its general law. The positive transcendence of *private property* as the appropriation of *human* life, is therefore the positive transcendence of all estrangement – that is to say, the return of man from religion, family, state, etc., to his *human*, i.e., *social,* existence. Religious estrangement as such occurs only in the realm of *consciousness,* of man’s inner life, but economic estrangement is that of *real life;* its transcendence therefore embraces both aspects. It is evident that the *initial* stage of the movement amongst the various peoples depends on whether the true *recognised* life of the people manifests itself more in consciousness or in the external world – is more ideal or real. Communism begins from the outset (*[Owen](https://marxists.org/glossary/people/o/w.htm#owen-robert)*) with atheism; but atheism is at first far from being *communism*; indeed, that atheism is still mostly an abstraction.

    The philanthropy of atheism is therefore at first only *philosophical,* abstract philanthropy, and that of communism is at once *real* and directly bent on *action.*

    We have seen how on the assumption of positively annulled private property man produces man – himself and the other man; how the object, being the direct manifestation of his individuality, is simultaneously his own existence for the other man, the existence of the other man, and that existence for him. Likewise, however, both the material of labour and man as the subject, are the point of departure as well as the result of the movement (and precisely in this fact, that they must constitute the *point of departure,* lies the historical *necessity* of private property). Thus the *social* character is the general character of the whole movement: *just as* society itself produces *man as man,* so is society *produced* by him. Activity and enjoyment, both in their content and in their *mode of existence*, are *social*: *social* activity and *social* enjoyment. The *human* aspect of nature exists only for *social* man; for only then does nature exist for him as a *bond* with man – as his existence for the other and the other’s existence for him – and as the life-element of human reality. Only then does nature exist as the *foundation* of his own *human* existence. Only here has what is to him his *natural* existence become his *human* existence, and nature become man for him. Thus *society* is the complete unity of man with nature – the true resurrection of nature – the consistent naturalism of man and the consistent humanism of nature.

    *||VI|* Social activity and social enjoyment exist by no means *only* in the form of some *directly* communal activity and directly *communal* enjoyment, although *communal* activity and *communal* enjoyment – i.e., activity and enjoyment which are manifested and affirmed in *actual direct association* with other men – will occur wherever such a *direct* expression of sociability stems from the true character of the activity’s content and is appropriate to the nature of the enjoyment.

    But also when I am active *scientifically,* etc. – an activity which I can seldom perform in direct community with others – then my activity is *social,* because I perform it as a *man*. Not only is the material of my activity given to me as a social product (as is even the language in which the thinker is active): my *own* existence *is* social activity, and therefore that which I make of myself, I make of myself for society and with the consciousness of myself as a social being.

    My *general* consciousness is only the *theoretical* shape of that of which the *living* shape is the *real* community, the social fabric, although at the present day *general* consciousness is an abstraction from real life and as such confronts it with hostility. The *activity* of my general consciousness, as an activity, is therefore also my *theoretical* existence as a social being.

    Above all we must avoid postulating “society” again as an abstraction vis-à-vis the individual. The individual *is the social being.* His manifestations of life – even if they may not appear in the direct form of *communal* manifestations of life carried out in association with others – are therefore an expression and confirmation of *social life.* Man’s individual and species-life are not *different,* however much – and this is inevitable – the mode of existence of the individual is a more *particular* or more *general* mode of the life of the species, or the life of the species is a more *particular* or more *general* individual life.

    In his *consciousness of species* man confirms his real *social life* and simply repeats his real existence in thought, just as conversely the being of the species confirms itself in species consciousness and exists for itself in its generality as a thinking being.

    Man, much as he may therefore be a *particular* individual (and it is precisely his particularity which makes him an individual, and a real *individual* social being), is just as much the *totality* – the ideal totality – the subjective existence of imagined and experienced society for itself; just as he exists also in the real world both as awareness and real enjoyment of social existence, and as a totality of human manifestation of life.

    Thinking and being are thus certainly *distinct,* but at the same time they are in unity with each other.

    *Death* seems to be a harsh victory of the species over the *particular* individual and to contradict their unity. But the particular individual is only a *particular species-being*, and as such mortal.

4.
    *[In the manuscript: "5". – Ed.]* Just as *private property* is only the perceptible expression of the fact that man becomes *objective* for himself and at the same time becomes to himself a strange and inhuman object; just as it expresses the fact that the manifestation of his life is the alienation of his life, that his realisation is his loss of reality, is an *alien* reality: so, the positive transcendence of private property – i.e., the *perceptible* appropriation for and by man of the human essence and of human life, of objective man, of human *achievements* should not be conceived merely in the sense of *immediate,* one-sided *enjoyment*, merely in the sense of *possessing*, of *having*. Man appropriates his comprehensive essence in a comprehensive manner, that is to say, as a whole man. Each of his *human* relations to the world – seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, thinking, observing, experiencing, wanting, acting, loving – in short, all the organs of his individual being, like those organs which are directly social in their form, *||VII|* are in their *objective* orientation, or in their *orientation to the object,* the appropriation of the object, the appropriation of *human* reality. Their orientation to the object is the *manifestation of the human reality,* [For this reason it is just as highly varied as the *determinations* of human *essence* and *activities*. – *Note by Marx*] it is human *activity* and human *suffering*, for suffering, humanly considered, is a kind of self-enjoyment of man.

    Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only *ours* when we have it – when it exists for us as capital, or when it is directly possessed, eaten, drunk, worn, inhabited, etc., – in short, when it is *used* by us. Although private property itself again conceives all these direct realisations of possession only as *means of life,* and the life which they serve as means is the *life of private property* – labour and conversion into capital.

    In the place of *all* physical and mental senses there has therefore come the sheer estrangement of *all* these senses, the sense of *having.* The human being had to be reduced to this absolute poverty in order that he might yield his inner wealth to the outer world. [On the category of  “*having*”, see *Hess* in the *Philosophy of the Deed*].

    The abolition *[Aufhebung]* of private property is therefore the complete *emancipation* of all human senses and qualities, but it is this emancipation precisely because these senses and attributes have become, subjectively and objectively, *human*. The eye has become a *human* eye, just as its *object* has become a social, *human* object – an object made by man for man. The *senses* have therefore become directly in their practice *theoreticians.* They relate themselves to the thing for the sake of the thing, but the thing itself is an *objective human* relation to itself and to man, [In practice I can relate myself to a thing humanly only if the thing relates itself humanly to the human being. – *Note by Marx*] and vice versa. Need or enjoyment have consequently lost its *egotistical* nature, and nature has lost its mere *utility* by use becoming *human* use.

    In the same way, the senses and enjoyment of other men have become my *own* appropriation. Besides these direct organs, therefore, *social* organs develop in the *form* of society; thus, for instance, activity in direct association with others, etc., has become an organ for *expressing* my own *life,* and a mode of appropriating *human* life.

    It is obvious that the *human* eye enjoys things in a way different from the crude, non-human eye; the human *ear* different from the crude ear, etc.

    We have seen that man does not lose himself in his object only when the object becomes for him a *human* object or objective man. This is possible only when the object becomes for him a *social* object, he himself for himself a social being, just as society becomes a being for him in this object.

    On the one hand, therefore, it is only when the objective world becomes everywhere for man in society the world of man’s essential powers – human reality, and for that reason the reality of his *own* essential powers – that all *objects be*come for him the *objectification* of himself, become objects which confirm and realise *his* individuality, become his objects: that is, *man himself* becomes the object. The *manner* in which they become *his* depends on the *nature of the objects* and on the nature of the *essential power* corresponding to *it*; for it is precisely the *determinate nature* of this relationship which shapes the particular, *real* mode of affirmation. To the *eye* an object comes to be other than it is to the *ear,* and the object of the eye *is* another object than the object of the *ear.* The specific character of each essential power is precisely its *specific essence,* and therefore also the specific mode of its objectification, of its *objectively actual,* living *being*. Thus man is affirmed in the objective world not only in the act of thinking, *||VIII|* but with *all* his senses.

    On the other hand, let us look at this in its subjective aspect. Just as only music awakens in man the sense of music, and just as the most beautiful music has *no* sense for the unmusical ear – is [no] object for it, because my object can only be the confirmation of one of my essential powers – it can therefore only exist for me insofar as my essential power exists for itself as a subjective capacity; because the meaning of an object for me goes only so far as *my* sense goes (has only a meaning for a sense corresponding to that object) – for this reason the *senses* of the social man *differ* from those of the non-social man. Only through the objectively unfolded richness of man’s essential being is the richness of subjective *human* sensibility (a musical ear, an eye for beauty of form – in short, *senses* capable of human gratification, senses affirming themselves as essential powers of *man*) either cultivated or brought into being. For not only the five senses but also the so-called mental senses, the practical senses (will, love, etc.), in a word, *human* sense, the human nature of the senses, comes to be by virtue of *its* object, by virtue of *humanised* nature. The *forming* of the five senses is a labour of the entire history of the world down to the present. The *sense* caught up in crude practical need has only a *restricted* sense. For the starving man, it is not the human form of food that exists, but only its abstract existence as food. It could just as well be there in its crudest form, and it would be impossible to say wherein this feeding activity differs from that of *animals.* The care-burdened, poverty-stricken man has no *sense* for the finest play; the dealer in minerals sees only the commercial value but not the beauty and the specific character of the mineral: he has no mineralogical sense. Thus, the objectification of the human essence, both in its theoretical and practical aspects, is required to make man’s *sense human,* as well as to create the *human sense* corresponding to the entire wealth of human and natural substance.

    Just as through the movement of *private property*, of its wealth as well as its poverty – of its material and spiritual wealth and poverty – the budding society finds at hand all the material for this *development*, so *established* society produces man in this entire richness of his being produces the *rich* man *profoundly endowed with all the senses* – as its enduring reality.

    We see how subjectivity and objectivity, spirituality and materiality, activity  *[Tätigkeit]* and suffering, lose their antithetical character, and – thus their existence as such antitheses only within the framework of society; <we see how the resolution of></we>*theoretical* antitheses is *only* possible in a *practical* way, by virtue of the practical energy of man. Their resolution is therefore by no means merely a problem of understanding, but a *real* problem of life, which *philosophy* could not solve precisely because it conceived this problem as *merely* a theoretical one.

    We see how the history of *industry* and the established *objective* existence of industry are the *open* book of *man’s essential powers,* the perceptibly existing human *psychology.* Hitherto this was not conceived in its connection with man’s *essential being,* but only in an external relation of utility, because, moving in the realm of estrangement, people could only think of man’s general mode of being – religion or history in its abstract-general character as politics, art, literature, etc. – *||IX|* as the reality of man’s essential powers and *man’s species-activity.* We have before us the *objectified essential powers* of man in the form of *sensuous, alien, useful objects,* in the form of estrangement, displayed in *ordinary material industry* (which can be conceived either as a part of that general movement, or that movement can be conceived as a *particular* part of industry, since all human activity hitherto has been labour – that is, industry – activity estranged from itself).

    A *psychology* for which this book, the part of history existing in the most perceptible and accessible form, remains a closed book, cannot become a genuine, comprehensive and *real* science. What indeed are we to think of a science which *airily* abstracts from this large part of human labour and which fails to feel its own incompleteness, while such a wealth of human endeavour, unfolded before it, means nothing more to it than, perhaps, what can be expressed in one word – “need”, “*vulgar need*”?

    The *natural sciences* have developed an enormous activity and have accumulated an ever-growing mass of material. Philosophy, however, has remained just as alien to them as they remain to philosophy. Their momentary unity was only a *chimerical illusion.* The will was there, but the power was lacking. Historiography itself pays regard to natural science only occasionally, as a factor of enlightenment, utility, and of some special great discoveries. But natural science has invaded and transformed human life all the more *practically* through the medium of industry; and has prepared human emancipation, although its immediate effect had to be the furthering of the dehumanisation of man. *Industry* is the *actual*, historical relationship of nature, and therefore of natural science, to man. If, therefore, industry is conceived as the *exoteric* revelation of man’s *essential powers,* we also gain an understanding of the human essence of nature or the natural essence of man. In consequence, natural science will lose its abstractly material – or rather, its idealistic – tendency, and will become the basis of *human* science, as it has already become – albeit in an estranged form – the basis of actual human life, and to assume *one* basis for life and a different basis for *science* is as a matter of course a lie. The nature which develops in human history the genesis of society is man's *real* nature; hence nature as it develops through industry, even though in an *estranged* form, is true *anthropological* nature.

    *Sense-perception* (see Feuerbach) must be the basis of all science. Only when it proceeds from sense-perception in the two-fold form of *sensuous* consciousness and *sensuous* need – is it *true* science. All history is the history of preparing and developing “man” to become the object of *sensuous* consciousness, and turning the requirements of “man as man” into his needs. History itself is a *real* part of *natural history* – of nature developing into man. Natural science will in time incorporate into itself the science of man, just as the science of man will incorporate into itself natural science: there will be *one* science.

    *||X|* *Man* is the immediate object of natural science; for immediate, *sensuous nature* for man is, immediately, human sensuousness (the expressions are identical) – presented immediately in the form of the *other* man sensuously present for him. Indeed, his own sense-perception first exists as human sensuousness for himself through the *other* man. But *nature* is the immediate object of the *science of man:* the first object of man – man – is nature, sensuousness; and the particular human sensuous essential powers can only find their self-understanding in the science of the natural world in general, just as they can find their objective realisation only in *natural* objects. The element of thought itself – the element of thought’s living expression – *language* – is of a sensuous nature. The *social* reality of nature, and *human* natural science, or the *natural science of man,* are identical terms.

    It will be seen how in place of the *wealth and poverty* of political economy come the *rich human being* and the rich *human* need. The *rich* human being is simultaneously the human being *in need of* a totality of human manifestations of life – the man in whom his own realisation exists as an inner necessity, as *need.* Not only *wealth,* but likewise the *poverty* of man – under the assumption of socialism[^comm32] – receives in equal measure a human and therefore social significance. Poverty is the passive bond which causes the human being to experience the need of the greatest wealth – the *other* human being. The dominion of the objective being in me, the sensuous outburst of my life activity, is *passion,* which thus becomes here the *activity* of my being.

5.
    A *being* only considers himself independent when he stands on his own feet; and he only stands on his own feet when he owes his *existence* to himself. A man who lives by the grace of another regards himself as a dependent being. But I live completely by the grace of another if I owe him not only the maintenance of my life, but if he has, moreover, *created* my *life* – if he is the *source* of my life. When it is not of my own creation, my life has necessarily a source of this kind outside of it. The *Creation* is therefore an idea very difficult to dislodge from popular consciousness. The fact that nature and man exist on their own account is in*comprehensible* to it, because it contradicts everything *tangible* in practical life.

    The creation of the *earth* has received a mighty blow from *geognosy* – i.e., from the science which presents the formation of the earth, the development of the earth, as a process, as a self-generation. *Generatio aequivoca* is the only practical refutation of the theory of creation.[^comm33]

    Now it is certainly easy to say to the single individual what Aristotle has already said: You have been begotten by your father and your mother; therefore in you the mating of two human beings – a species-act of human beings – has produced the human being. You see, therefore, that even physically man owes his existence to man. Therefore you must not only keep sight of the *one* aspect – the *infinite* progression which leads you further to inquire: Who begot my father? Who his grandfather? etc. You must also hold on to the *circular movement* sensuously perceptible in that progress by which man repeats himself in procreation, *man* thus always remaining the subject. You will reply, however: I grant you this circular movement; now grant me the progress which drives me ever further until I ask: Who begot the first man, and nature as a whole? I can only answer you: Your question is itself a product of abstraction. Ask yourself how you arrived at that question. Ask yourself whether your question is not posed from a standpoint to which I cannot reply, because it is wrongly put. Ask yourself whether that progress as such exists for a reasonable mind. When you ask about the creation of nature and man, you are abstracting, in so doing, from man and nature. You postulate them as *non-existent,* and yet you want me to prove them to you as *existing.* Now I say to you: Give up your abstraction and you will also give up your question. Or if you want to hold on to your abstraction, then be consistent, and if you think of man and nature as *non-existent,* *||XI|* then think of yourself as non-existent, for you too are surely nature and man. Don’t think, don’t ask me, for as soon as you think and ask, your *abstraction* from the existence of nature and man has no meaning. Or are you such an egotist that you conceive everything as nothing, and yet want yourself to exist?

    You can reply: I do not want to postulate the nothingness of nature, etc. I ask you about its *genesis,* just as I ask the anatomist about the formation of bones, etc.

    But since for the socialist man the *entire so-called history of the world* is nothing but the creation of man through human labour, nothing but the emergence of nature for man, so he has the visible, irrefutable proof of his *birth* through himself, of his *genesis.* Since the *real existence* of man and nature has become evident in practice, through sense experience, because man has thus become evident for man as the being of nature, and nature for man as the being of man, the question about an *alien* being, about a being above nature and man – a question which implies the admission of the unreality of nature and of man – has become impossible in practice. *[Atheism](https://marxists.org/glossary/terms/a/t.htm#atheism)*, as the denial of this unreality, has no longer any meaning, for atheism is a *negation of God,* and postulates *the existence of man* through this negation; but socialism as socialism no longer stands in any need of such a mediation. It proceeds from the *theoretically and practically sensuous consciousness* of man and of nature as the *essence.* Socialism is man’s *positive self-consciousness,* no longer mediated through the abolition of religion, just as *real life* is man’s positive reality, no longer mediated through the abolition of private property, through *communism*. Communism is the position as the negation of the negation, and is hence the *actual* phase necessary for the next stage of historical development in the process of human emancipation and rehabilitation. *Communism* is the necessary form and the dynamic principle of the immediate future, but communism as such is not the goal of human development, the form of human society. *|XI||*[^comm34]



[^preface1]:
    The *Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844* is the first work in which Marx tried to systematically elaborate problems of political economy from the standpoint of his maturing dialectical-materialist and communist views and also to synthesise the results of his critical review of prevailing philosophic and economic theories. Apparently, Marx began to write it in order to clarify the problems for himself. But in the process of working on it he conceived the idea of publishing a work analysing the economic system of bourgeois society in his time and its ideological trends. Towards the end of his stay in Paris, on February 1, 1845, Marx signed a contract with Carl Leske, a Darmstadt publisher, concerning the publication of his work entitled *A Critique of Politics and of Political Economy.* It was to be based on his *Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844* and perhaps also on his earlier manuscript *Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law.* This plan did not materialise in the 1840s because Marx was busy writing other works and, to some extent, because the contract with the publisher was cancelled in September 1846, the latter being afraid to have transactions with such a revolutionary-minded author. However, in the early 1850s Marx returned to the idea of writing a book on economics. Thus, the manuscripts of 1844 are connected with the conception of a plan which led many years later to the writing of *Capital*.

    The *Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts* is an unfinished work and in part a rough draft. A considerable part of the text has not been preserved. What remains comprises three manuscripts, each of which has its own pagination (in Roman figures). The first manuscript contains 27 pages, of which pages I-XII and XVII-XXVII are divided by two vertical lines into three columns supplied with headings written in beforehand: “Wages of Labour,” “Profit of Capital” (this section has also subheadings supplied by the author) and “Rent of Land.” It is difficult to tell the order in which Marx filled these columns. All the three columns on p. VII contain the text relating to the section “Wages of Labour.” Pages XIII to XVI are divided into two columns and contain texts of the sections “Wages of Labour” (pp. XIII-XV), “Profit of Capital” (pp. XIII-XVI) and “Rent of Land” (p. XVI). On pages XVII to XXI, only the column headed “Rent of Land” is filled in. From page XXII to page XXVII, on which the first manuscript breaks off, Marx wrote across the three columns disregarding the headings. The text of these pages is published as a separate section entitled by the editors according to its content “Estranged Labour.”

    Of the second manuscript only the last four pages have survived (pp. XL-XLIII).

    The third manuscript contains 41 pages (not counting blank ones) divided into two columns and numbered by Marx himself from I to XLIII (in doing so he omitted two numbers, XXII and XXV). Like the extant part of the second manuscript, the third manuscript has no author’s headings; the text has been arranged and supplied with the headings by the editors.

    Sometimes Marx departed from the subject-matter and interrupted his elucidation of one question to analyse another. Pages XXXIX-XL contain the Preface to the whole work which is given before the text of the first manuscript. The text of the section dealing with the critical analysis of Hegel’s dialectic, to which Marx referred in the Preface as the concluding chapter and which was scattered on various pages, is arranged in one section and put at the end in accordance with Marx’s indications.

    In order to give the reader a better visual idea of the structure of the work, the text reproduces in vertical lines the Roman numbers of the sheets of the manuscripts, and the Arabic numbers of the columns in the first manuscript. The notes indicate where the text has been rearranged. Passages crossed out by Marx with a vertical line are enclosed in pointed brackets; separate words or phrases crossed out by the author are given in footnotes only when they supplement the text. The general title and the headings of the various parts of the manuscripts enclosed in square brackets are supplied by the editors on the basis of the author’s formulations. In some places the text has been broken up into paragraphs by the editors. Quotations from the French sources cited by Marx in French or in his own translation into German, are given in English in both cases and the French texts as quoted by Marx are given in the footnotes. Here and elsewhere Marx’s rendering of the quotations or free translation is given in small type but without quotation marks. Emphasis in quotations, belonging, as a rule, to Marx, as well as that of the quoted authors, is indicated everywhere by italics.

    The *Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844* was first published by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism in Moscow in the language of the original: Marx/Engels, *Gesamtausgabe, Abt.* 1, Bd. 3, 1932.

    In English this work was first published in 1959 by the Foreign Languages Publishing House (now Progress Publishers), Moscow, translated by Martin Milligan.

[^preface2]: This refers to Bruno Bauer’s reviews of books, articles and pamphlets on the Jewish question, including Marx’s article on the subject in the *Deutsch-Französche Jahrbücher,* which were published in the monthly *Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung* (issue No. 1, December 1843, and issue No. IV, March 1844) under the title “*Von den neuesten Schriften über die Judenfrage*.” Most of the expressions quoted are taken from these reviews. The expressions “utopian phrase” and “compact mass” can he found in Bruno Bauer’s unsigned article, “*Was ist jetzt der Gegenstand der Kritik?*,” published in the *Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung,* issue No. VIII, July 1844. A detailed critical appraisal of this monthly was later on given by Marx and Engels in the book *Die heilige Familie, oder Kritik der kritischen Kritik* (see this edition, Vol. 4, *The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Criticism).*

[^preface3]: 
    Marx apparently refers to Weitling’s works: *Die Menschheit, wie sie ist und wie sie sein sollte,* 1838, and *Garantien der Harmonic und Freiheit,* Vivis, 1842.

    Moses Hess published three articles in the collection *Ein-und-zwanzig Bogen aus der Schweiz* (Twenty-One Sheets from Switzerland), *Erster Teil* (*Zürich und Winterthur*, 1843), issued by Georg Herwegh. These articles, entitled “*Sozialismus und Kommunismus*,” “*Philosophie der Tat*” *and “Die Eine und die ganze Freiheit*,” were published anonymously. The first two of them had a note - “Written by the author of ’Europäische Triarchie’.”

[^preface4]: The term “element” in the Hegelian philosophy means a vital element of thought. It is used to stress that thought is a process, and that therefore elements in a system of thought are also phases in a movement. The term “feeling” (*Empfindung*) denotes relatively low forms of mental life in which no distinction is made between the subjective and objective.

[^preface5]: Shortly after writing this Preface Marx fulfilled his intention in *The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Criticism,* written in collaboration with Engels (see Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, *Collected Works,* Vol. 4).

[^wagesfn06]: The expression “common humanity” (in the manuscript in French, “simple humanity”) was borrowed by Marx from the first volume (Chapter VIII) of Adam Smith’s *Wealth of Nations,* which he used in Garnier’s French translation *(Recherches sur la nature et les causes de la richesse des nations,* Paris, 1802, t. I, p. 138). All the subsequent references were given by Marx to this publication, the synopsis of which is contained in his Paris Notebooks with excerpts on political economy. This edition is reproduced on the MIA and Marx’s citations are linked to the text.

[^wagesfn07]: Marx uses the German term “Nationalökonomie” to denote both the economic system in the sense of science or theory, and the economic system itself.

[^wagesfn08]: Loudon’s work was a translation into French of an English manuscript apparently never published in the original. The author did publish in English a short pamphlet - *The Equilibrium of Population and Sustenance Demonstrated,* Leamington, 1836.

[^capital9]: Unlike the quotations from a number of other French writers such as Constantin Pecqueur and Eugéne Buret, which Marx gives in French in this work, the excerpts from J. B. Say’s book are given in his German translation.

[^capital10]: From this page of the manuscript quotations from Adam Smith’s book (in the French translation), which Marx cited so far sometimes in French and sometimes in German, are, as a rule, given in German. In this book the corresponding pages of the English edition are substituted for the French by the editors and Marx’s references are given in square brackets (see Note 6).

[^capital11]: The text published in small type here and below is not an exact quotation from Smith but a summary of the corresponding passages from his work. Such passages are subsequently given in small type but without quotation marks.

[^capital12]:  The preceding page (VII) of the first manuscript does not contain any text relating to the sections “Profit of Capital” and “Rent of Land” (see Note 1).

[^capital13]: The whole paragraph, including the quotation from Ricardo’s book in the French translation by Francisco Solano Constancio: *Des principes de l’economie politique, et de 1’impôt,* 2-e éd., Paris, 1835, T. II, pp. 194-95 (see the corresponding English edition *On the Principles of Political Economy, and Taxation,* London, 1817), and from Sismondi’s *Nouveaux principes d’économie politique...*, Paris, 1819, T. II., p. 331, is an excerpt from Eugéne Buret’s book *De la misère des classes laborieuses en Angleterre et en France*.... Paris, 1840, T. I, pp. 6-7, note.

[^capital14]: The allusion is to the following passage: “In a perfectly fair lottery, those who draw the prizes ought to gain all that is lost by those who draw the blanks. In a profession where twenty fail for one that succeeds, that one ought to gain all that should have been gained by the unsuccessful twenty.” (Smith, *Wealth of Nations,* Vol. 1, Bk. 1, p. 94.)

[^rent15]: See Note 12.

[^rent16]:
    *The Corn Laws* - a series of laws in England (the first of which dated back to the 15th century) which imposed high duties on imported corn with the aim of maintaining high prices on it on the home market. In the first third of the 19th century several laws were passed (in 1815, 1822 and so on) changing the conditions of corn imports, and in 1828 a sliding scale was introduced, which raised import duties on corn while lowering prices on the home market and, on the contrary, lowered import duties while raising prices.

    In 1838 the Manchester factory owners Cobden and Bright founded the Anti-Corn Law League, which widely exploited the popular discontent at rising corn prices. While agitating for the abolition of the corn duties and demanding complete freedom of trade, the League strove to weaken the economic and political positions of the landed aristocracy and to lower workers’ wages.

    The struggle between the industrial bourgeoisie and the landed aristocracy over the Corn Laws ended in their repeal in 1846.

[^rent17]: Pages XIII to XV are divided into two columns and not three like the other pages of the first manuscript; they contain no text relating to the section “Rent of Land.” On page XVI, which also has two columns, this text is in the first column, while on the following pages it is in the second.

[^labour18]: Marx, still using Hegel’s terminology and his approach to the unity of the opposites, counterposes the term “Verwirklichung” (realisation) to “Entwirklichung” (loss of realisation).

[^labour19]: In this manuscript Marx frequently uses two similar German terms, “*Entäusserung*” and “*Entfremdung*,” to express the notion of “alienation.” In the present edition the former is generally translated as “alienation,” the latter as “estrangement,” because in the later economic works (*Theories of Surplus-Value*) Marx himself used the word “alienation” as the English equivalent of the term “*Entäusserung*.”

[^labour20]: The term “species-being” (*Gattungswesen*) is derived from Ludwig Feuerbach’s philosophy where it is applied to man and mankind as a whole.

[^labour21]: Apparently Marx refers to Proudhon’s book *Qu’est-ce que la propri’eté*?, Paris, 1841.

[^labour22]: This passage shows that Marx here uses the category of wages in a broad sense, as an expression of antagonistic relations between the classes of capitalists and of wage-workers. Under “the wages” he understands “the wage-labour,” the capitalist system as such. This idea was apparently elaborated in detail in that part of the manuscript which is now extant.

[^labour23]: This apparently refers to the conversion of individuals into members of civil society which is considered as the sphere of property, of material relations that determine all other relations. In this case Marx refers to the material relations of society based on private property and the antagonism of different classes.

[^second24]: The Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 deprived poor people considered able to work (including children) of any public relief except a place in the workhouse, where they were compelled to work.

[^second25]: In the manuscript “sein für sich selbst,” which is an expression of Hegel’s term “für sich’ (for itself) as opposed to “an sich” (in itself). In the Hegelian philosophy the former means roughly explicit, conscious or defined in contrast to “an sich,” a synonym for immature, implicit or unconscious.

[^second26]: This refers to *Revolutions de France et de Brabant, par Camille Desmoulins. Second Trimestre, contenant mars, avril et mai, Paris, l’an 1ier*, 1790, N. 16, p. 139 sq.; N. 23, p. 425 sqq.; N. 26, p. 580 sqq.

[^second27]: This refers to Georg Ludwig Wilhelm Funke, *Die aus der unbeschrdnklen Theilbarkeit des Grundeigenthums hervorgehenden Nachtheile, Hamburg und Gotha*, 1839, p. 56, in which there is a reference to Heinrich Leo, *Studien und Skizzen zu einer Vaturlehre des Slaates,* Halle, 1833, p. 102.

[^third28]: The third manuscript is a thick notebook the last few pages of which are blank. The pages are divided into two columns by a vertical line, not for the purpose of dividing the text according to the headings but for purely technical reasons. The text of the first three sections comprises pp. I-XI, XIV-XXI, XXXIV-XXXVIII and was written as a supplement to the missing pages of the second manuscript. Pages XI-XIII, XVII, XVIII, XXIII, XXIV, XXVI, XXXIV contain the text of the concluding chapter dealing with the criticism of Hegel’s dialectic (on some pages it is written alongside the text of other sections). In some places the manuscript contains the author’s remarks testifying to his intention to unite into a single whole various passages of this section separated from each other by the text of other sections. Pages XXIX-XL comprise the draft Preface. Finally, the text on the last pages (XLI-XLIII) is a self-contained essay on the power of money in bourgeois society.

[^third29]: The manuscript has “als für sich seiende Tätigkeit.” For the meaning of the terms “für sich” and “an sich” in Hegel’s philosophy see Note 25.

[^comm30]: Marx refers to the rise of the primitive, crude equalitarian tendencies among the representatives of utopian communism at the early stages of its development. Among the medieval religious communistic communities, in particular, there was current a notion of the common possession of women as a feature of the future society depicted in the spirit of consumer communism ideals. In 1534-35 the German Anabaptists, who seized power in Münster, tried to introduce polygamy in accordance with this view. Tommaso Campanella, the author of *Civitas Solis* (early 17th century), rejected monogamy in his ideal society. The primitive communistic communities were also characterised by asceticism and a hostile attitude to science and works of art. Some of these primitive equalitarian features, the negative attitude to the arts in particular, were inherited by the communist trends of the first half of the 19th century, for example, by the members of the French secret societies of the 1830s and 1840s (“worker-egalitarians,” “humanitarians,” and so on) comprising the followers of Babeuf (for a characterisation of these see Engels, “Progress of Social Reform on the Continent” (Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, *Collected Works,* Volume 3, pp. 396-97)).

[^comm31]: This note is given by Marx on page V of the manuscript where it is separated by a horizontal line from the main text, but according to its meaning it refers to this sentence.

[^comm32]: This part of the manuscript shows clearly the peculiarity of the terminology used by Marx in his works. At the time he had not worked out terms adequately expressing the conceptions of scientific communism he was then evolving and was still under the influence of Feuerbach in that respect. Hence the difference in the use of words in his early and subsequent, mature writings. In the *Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844* the word “socialism” is used to denote the stage of society at which it has carried out a revolutionary transformation, abolished private property, class antagonisms, alienation and so on. In the same sense Marx used the expression “communism equals humanism.” At that time he understood the term “communism as such” not as the final goal of revolutionary transformation but as the process of this transformation, development leading up to that goal, a lower stage of the process.

[^comm33]: This expression apparently refers to the theory of the English geologist Sir Charles Lyell who, in his three-volume work *The Principles of Geology* (1830-33), proved the evolution of the earth’s crust and refuted the popular theory of cataclysms. Lyell used the term “historical geology” for his theory. The term “geognosy” was introduced by the 18th-century German scientist Abraham Werner, a specialist in mineralogy, and it was used also by Alexander Humboldt.

[^comm34]: This statement is interpreted differently by researchers. Many of them maintain that Marx here meant crude equalitarian communism, such as that propounded by Babeuf and his followers. While recognising the historic role of that communism, he thought it impossible to ignore its weak points. It seems more justifiable, however, to interpret this passage proceeding from the peculiarity of terms used in the manuscript (see Note 32). Marx here used the term “communism” to mean not the higher phase of classless society (which he at the time denoted as “socialism” or “communism equalling humanism”) but movement (in various forms, including primitive forms of equalitarian communism at the early stage) directed at its achievement, a revolutionary transformation process of transition to it. Marx emphasised that this process should not be considered as an end in itself, but that it is a necessary, though a transitional, stage in attaining the future social system, which will be characterised by new features distinct from those proper to this stage.

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<span class="term">35.</span> Page XI (in part) and pages XII and XIII are taken up by a text relating to the concluding chapter (see Note 28).

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<span class="term">36.</span> The greater part of this page as well as part of the preceding page (XVII) comprises a text relating to the concluding chapter (see Note 28).

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<span class="term">37.</span> Apparently Marx refers to a formula of the German philosopher [Fichte](https://marxists.org/glossary/people/f/i.htm#fichte-johann), an adherent of subjective idealism.

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<span class="term">38.</span> The preceding pages starting from p. XXI, which is partly taken up by a text relating to this section, contain the text of the concluding chapter.

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<span class="term">39.</span> In some of his early writings Marx already uses the term “*bürgerliche Gesellschaft*” to mean two things: (1) in a broader sense, the economic system of society regardless of the historical stage of its development, the sum total of material relations which determine political institutions and ideology, and (2) in the narrow sense, the material relations of bourgeois society (later on, that society as a whole), of capitalism. Hence, the term has been translated according to its concrete meaning in the context as “civil society” in the first case and “bourgeois society” in the second.

<!-- class: fst -->
<span class="term">40.</span> The two previous pages of the manuscript contain the draft Preface to the whole work, which is published on pages 17-20.

<!-- class: fst -->
<span class="term">41.</span> Ontology – in some philosophic systems a theory about being, about the nature of things.

<!-- class: fst -->
<span class="term">42.</span> Originally the section on the Hegelian dialectic was apparently conceived by Marx as a philosophical digression in the section of the third manuscript which is published under the heading “Private Property and Communism” and was written together with other sections as an addition to separate pages of the second manuscript (see pp. 93-108 of this book). Therefore Marx marked the beginning of this section (p. XI in the manuscript) as point 6, considering it to be the continuation of the five points of the preceding section. He marked as point 7 the beginning of the following section, headed “Human Requirements and Division of Labour Under the Rule of Private Property,” on page XIV of the manuscript. However, when dealing with this subject on subsequent pages of his manuscript, Marx decided to collect the whole material into a separate, concluding chapter and mentioned this in his draft Preface. The chapter, like a number of other sections of the manuscript, was not finished. While writing it, Marx made special excerpts from the last chapter (“Absolute Knowledge”) of Hegel’s *Phänomenologie des Geistes,* which are in the same notebook as the third manuscript (these excerpts are not reproduced in this edition).

<!-- class: fst -->
<span class="term">43.</span> The reference is not quite accurate. On page 193 of the work mentioned, Bruno Bauer polemises not against the anti-Hegelian Herr Gruppe but against the Right Hegelian Marheineke.

<!-- class: fst -->
<span class="term">44.</span> Marx here refers to Feurbach’s critical observations on Hegel in §§ 29-30 of his *Grundsätze der Philosophie der Zukunft.*

This note is given at the bottom of page XIII of the third manuscript without any indication what it refers to. The asterisk after the sentence to which it seems to refer is given by the editors.

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<span class="term">45.</span> Here on page XVII of the third manuscript (part of which comprises a text relating to the section “Human Requirements and Division of Labour Under the Rule of Private Property”) Marx gave the note: “see p. XIII,” which proves that this text is the continuation of the section dealing with the critical analysis of the Hegelian dialectic begun on pp. XI-XII.

<!-- class: fst -->
<span class="term">46.</span> At the end of page XVIII of the third manuscript there is a note by Marx: “continued on p. XXII.” However number XXII was omitted by Marx in paging. The text of the given chapter is continued on the page marked by the author as XXIII, which is also confirmed by his remark on it: “see p. XVIII.”

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<span class="term">47.</span> Marx apparently refers here not only to the identity of Hegel’s views on labour and some other categories of political economy with those of the English classical economists but also to his profound knowledge of economic writings. In lectures he delivered at Jena University in 1803-04 Hegel cited Adam Smith’s work. In his *Philosophie des Rechts* (§ 189) he mentions Smith, Say and Ricardo and notes the rapid development of economic thought.

<!-- class: fst -->
<span class="term">48.</span> Hegel uses the term “thinghood” (*Dingheit*) in his work *Phänomenologie des Geistes* to denote an abstract, universal, mediating link in the process of cognition; “thinghood” reveals the generality of the specific properties of individual things. The synonym for it is “pure essence” (*das reine Wesen*).

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<span class="term">49.</span> These eight points of the “surmounting of the object of consciousness,” expressed “in all its aspects,” are copied nearly word for word from §§ 1 and 3 of the last chapter (“Absolute Knowledge”) of Hegel’s *Phänomenologie des Geistes.*

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<span class="term">50.</span> Number XXV was omitted by Marx in paging the third manuscript.

<!-- class: fst -->
<span class="term">51.</span> Marx refers to § 30 of Feuerbach’s *Grundsätze der Philosophie der Zukunft,* which says: “Hegel is a thinker who *surpasses* himself in thinking.”

<!-- class: fst -->
<span class="term">52.</span> This enumeration gives the major categories of Hegel’s *Encyclopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften* in the order in which they are examined by Hegel. Similarly, the categories reproduced by Marx above (on p. 149), from “civil law” to “world history,” are given in the order in which they appear in Hegel’s *Philosophie des Rechts.*