Theories of Surplus Value, Part III, Addenda - Part 79

Marx gives another long quote from Luther from “An die Pfarrherrn wider den Wucher zu predigen” dealing with a justification for interest on the basis of compensation for loss, i.e. where the lender agrees to provide a loan for a given period, but the borrower does not repay it on time, causing the lender to suffer a loss, because they do not have the funds to pay their own bills, or misses out on being able to make some advantageous purchase or investment. Luther says, 

“Therefore thou art a usurer, who makes good thine own imagined losses with your neighbour’s money, losses which no one has caused thee and which thou canst neither prove nor calculate. The lawyers call such losses non verum, sed phantasticum interesse. A loss which each man dreams up for himself… 

It will not do to say I might incur a loss because I might not have been able to pay or buy. That would mean ex contingente necessarium, making something that must be out of something which is not, to turn a thing which is uncertain into a thing which is absolutely sure. Would such usury not eat up the world in a few years…” (p 535) 

Luther quotes Aristotle, who, in his “Politics”, says that usury is against nature, because it always takes more than it gives. Luther continues, 

“But such does a usurer, and sits the while, safe on his chair, when he ought rather to be hanging on the gallows and eaten by as many ravens as he has stolen guilders, if only there was so much flesh on him that so many ravens could stick their beaks in and share it…” (p 536) 

Luther continues his lurid description of the money-grubber, as a werewolf or other monster draining the lifeblood from humanity. 

“And they write of the great deeds of Hercules, how he overcame so many monsters and frightful horrors in order to save his country and his people. For usury is a great horrible monster, like the werewolf, who lays everything waste, more than any Cacus, Geryon or Antaeus, etc. And yet he decks himself out and wants to appear pious so that people may not see where the oxen have gone (that he drags backwards into his den).” (p 536) 

Marx notes, 

“An excellent picture, it fits the capitalist in general, who pretends that what he has taken from others and brought into his den, emanates from him, and by causing it to go backwards he gives it the semblance of having come from his den.” (p 536) 

Luther writes, 

“Thus the usurer wants to deceive the world, as though he were of use and gave the world oxen, whereas, in reality, he seizes them for himself and consumes them…” (p 537) 

This is not just a detailed description of usury in Luther's time, but also of capitalism in general. The capitalists and their apologists present things as though it is the capitalist that provides capital, whereas it is the worker who produces commodities that comprises the material elements of capital, which the capitalist merely seizes from the worker, dragging them back to his den. It is the worker who produces the surplus value which forms the profit seized by the capitalist, which is used to accumulate capital, which then confronts the worker not as the product of their own hand, but as alien property, which oppresses them. 

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