Monday, 14 July 2025

Anti-Duhring, Part II, Political Economy, I - Subject Matter and Method - Part 11 of 20

As Marx noted in The Poverty of Philosophy, without slavery in the US, the industrial revolution would not have happened. But, by the time of the US Civil War, slavery was already no longer required, and its existence was a fetter on further development. The Northern states were already industrialising rapidly, and required additional labour-power, as wage labour, not slave labour. The South was a source of such labour-power, and fulfilled a similar function as that of the agricultural districts of England, in that respect.

As Marx and Engels described, in relation to Russia, it was Russia's defeat in The Crimean War, at the hands of the already capitalistically developed economies, that meant that Tsarism was forced to accept the need for such capitalist development. Contact with the outside world had a similar impact on Japan. It was that which led to the Emancipation of The Serfs, in 1861.

In Britain, the development of the bourgeoisie and its swelling profits was a source of increasing taxes for the state, and, when Civil War breaks out, one of the initial sparks is the crisis caused by a refusal to pay additional taxes levied by the King. Once again, this is manifest in moral terms, in a sense of injustice, and the difference between the asceticism and Protestant work ethic of the bourgeoisie, as against the frivolousness of the catholic aristocracy.

Finally, when the working-class begins to develop, it too presents its ideas in similar moral terms, such as the demand for “A Fair's Pay, For A Fair Day's Work”, As Marx sets out, in “Value, Price and Profit”, “Wage-Labour and Capital”, and elsewhere, this demand, in itself, still leaves labour exploited by capital, and only leaves it bargaining over the degree of its exploitation. It reflects the fact that, with each new mode of production, the revolutionary class drags along behind it other subordinate layers of society. Although these subordinate layers are the ones who suffer most from the new distribution relations that follow from the new productive and social relations, they not only accept, but are even enthusiastic about them, as they see the potential, and eventually, reality of a higher living standard they entail.

As Lenin noted, in Russia, the poorest peasant households, which became wage-labourers, on average, had higher net incomes than those of the middle-peasant households that continued to operate as independent producers. That was because the latter's production was inefficient compared to the capitalistic production of the larger producers, and after, they had paid their costs of production, rents, interest payments and so on, this greatly reduced their net income. The wage labourers had no such level of costs, and the greater efficiency of larger-scale, capitalist production enabled the payment of higher wages, whilst, at the same time, meaning an increased exploitation of that labour.

The same applied with the Industrial Revolution, in Britain, and, as the bourgeoisie, also, confronted the old aristocratic ruling class with its demands for political liberty and equality, so too the proletariat saw its own interests advanced by such demands. It is when this new mode of production has already significantly developed, by the start of the 19th century, and has moved to large-scale machine industry, power by steam engines, that its contradictions begin to become manifest as this production expands faster than the market, leading to the first generalised crisis of overproduction in 1825 that, then, results in workers being laid off, rising unemployment and misery.

“So long as a mode of production is still in its rising phase of development, it is enthusiastically welcomed even by those who come off badly from its corresponding mode of distribution. This was the case with the English workers during the emergence of large-scale industry. So long as this mode of production remains the social norm, on the whole there is contentment with distribution, and if objections begin to be raised, they come from within the ruling class itself (Saint-Simon, Fourier, Owen) and find no response at all among the exploited masses.” (p 190)


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