Engels compares Duhring's statements, in relation to value, to the paternalistic apologism for the exploitation of the masses contained in Rochow's“Children's Friend”, circulated by the authorities a century earlier. That tract, which, like many others, was based on the old ideas about everyone in society knowing their station and status, including the routine acceptance of floggings and rape by their “betters”, also presented this as being really beneficial for those that suffered it.
“To this end the youth of the towns and of the countryside was admonished how wisely nature had ordained that man must win his livelihood and his pleasures by labour, and how happy therefore the peasant or artisan should feel that it was granted to him to season his meal with bitter labour, instead of suffering the pangs of indigestion or constipation, and having to gulp down the choicest tidbits with repugnance, like the rich glutton. These same commonplaces, which old Rochow thought good enough for the peasant youth of the Electorate of Saxony of his time, are served up to us by Herr Dühring on page 14 and the following pages of his Cursus as the "absolutely fundamental" teaching of the most up-to-date political economy.” (p 237)
In fact, bourgeois political economy, as presented by Ricardo, started from the diametrically opposite perspective, as Marx notes in Theories of Surplus Value. For Ricardo, the position of the labourer was abysmal, and to be avoided if possible. He thought that any civilised society would seek to minimise the proportion of the population that were placed in that position. Indeed, Adam Smith had a similar opinion, believing that labourers did not obtain the value of their “labour”, as wages, because labour was plentiful and capital scarce, a condition he believed would be reversed as capital expanded faster than the supply of labour. Indeed, as Marx explains in Theories of Surplus Value, Chapter 17, this was Smith's explanation of a long-term, falling rate of profit, leading to an eventual collapse of capitalism itself, a view that Marx showed was completely false, both in relation to this catastrophism, and as an explanation of the long-term tendency for the rate of profit to fall.
Bourgeois liberals continue this view about the lack of desirability of being a labourer, but do so from the opposite, petty-bourgeois perspective, of the desirability of everyone being an employer, without recognising the fundamental flaw in that idea, i.e. for anyone to be an employer there must be someone to employ, and so, if everyone is an employer, rather than an employee, only self-employment is possible! That is the perspective, of course, of the peasant, or small-scale, independent commodity producer. It was the perspective put forward by Sismondi and Proudhon, and those like William Morris, and the Arts and Crafts Movement, as well as the Narodniks. Indeed, Morris himself is much like the Narodnik Engelhardt discussed by Lenin, whose literary works advocated Narodnik utopian socialist ideas, but who ran his own farm along strictly capitalistic lines.
It is utopian, because it implies a huge reduction in the productive capacity of society, and so, of the average standard of living. That is countered, today, by the argument of such petty-bourgeois reactionaries, that economic growth is really bad, rather than good. In other words, a version of the arguments of Rochow or Malthus, but wrapped in a radical verbiage of “anti-capitalism”, or environmentalism etc. But, it is reactionary for the same reasons, because it is that growth of capital, and its concomitant, of the industrial proletariat, the growth in productive potential that is the fundamental basis of Socialism, of humanity liberating itself from the compulsion to produce solely to live.
In 1997, one of the first actions of the New Labour government, was to make the Bank of England independent. Until then, the Bank of England carried out monetary policy under the direction of the government of the day. The argument for making the Bank of England independent, as with other central banks, such as the ECB, or Federal Reserve, has been that, precisely because government's take short-term decisions, designed to enhance their popularity with voters, particularly prior to elections, it leads to bad and damaging monetary policy. Central bank independence, gives greater confidence to global financial markets that governments can't play ducks and drakes with monetary policy, and so lowers the borrowing costs of the government.
The matter has become current, again, with the second Trump Presidency, because Trump argues that he knows best about monetary policy, as with everything else, including, as he proposed in his first Presidency, injecting people with bleach to kill COVID, and so on. He has repeatedly attacked Federal Reserve Chair, Jerome Powell, who he appointed, in his first term, for not cutting its policy rates. He wants to sack Powell, which, currently, he can't do, due to the Fed's independence, and will certainly ensure someone more to his taste when Powell's term ends next year. In the meantime, as with his approach to The Supreme Court, he is using every opportunity to remove members of the Federal Reserve Open Market Committee (FOMC), and replace them with people more likely to do his bidding. The attempts to sack Fed Governor Lisa Cook, are the latest manifestation.
So, isn't the idea of central bank independence vindicated by the actions of Trump, and his supporters? No. Just because Bonapartists like Trump, or Farage, or Starmer seek to impose their bad policies and find that, to do so, they have to overcome resistance from the capitalist state, is no reason why socialists, or even consistent democrats, should defend the right of that state, and its unelected officials to frustrate the policies of elected governments. After all, at some point, a socialist government might be elected, and the resistance to its policies would be even greater than that being presented to the reactionary, petty-bourgeois policies of Trump or as seen with Brexit, the ephemeral Truss government, or, today, that of Starmer.
If the Federal Reserve was not independent, then Trump would not have any excuse, as he does now, for the disaster that is unfolding for the US economy, as a result of his economic policies. He would have to bear direct responsibility for them, and the main, and most immediate victims of those policies would be, precisely, that constituency of MAGA that voted for him, the immiserated petty-bourgeois, and its periphery of poorly educated, precariously employed sections of society, just as Brexit has most adversely affected those same elements in Britain who, likewise, were conned into being its main backers prior to the referendum.
Illustrating the point, as soon as the disastrous reality of Brexit became rapidly apparent, even many of those that voted for it quickly realised they had made a mistake. The large majority in Britain now seek to rejoin the EU, and, in the US, even in just a few short months, as the reality and idiocy of Trump's economic policies are revealed, his support, even among those that voted for him, is plummeting, even faster than during his first term. Yes, the consequence of these reactionary, idiotic policies is not only to hit the living standards of tens of millions of people, mostly those that voted for them, but that is no reason to argue against removing democratic control over those institutions, or indeed to argue against the right of voters to make bad decisions at the ballot box.
If people vote for reactionary, moronic politicians, and end up wishing they hadn't done so, that is a consequence of the sham nature bourgeois-democracy, and what socialists should do is not to advocate even less democracy, but more of it. They should expose the sham nature of the bourgeois-democracy that results in such conditions, and argue the right of voters to quickly remedy the bad decisions they made, by having the right to have a recall of politicians, and new elections. Indeed, as the Chartists argued, there should be annual elections to parliaments, so that, voters can kick out the bums at the first opportunity, when they see they were conned. That would mean both Trump and Starmer being removed, and Brexit being reversed, preventing further damage.
Indeed, Marxists argue for replacing the sham bourgeois-democracy that infantilises the electorate, reducing them to ciphers whose only role is to place a cross on a ballot every few years. We argue for a direct, participatory democracy, in which everyone participates, every day, actively, not only making decisions, but implementing them, and so, testing them in practice, changing them immediately when required. The most obvious starting point for that is in the workplace itself. Every worker should take part in exercising democratic control of the workplace. They are, after all the ones doing the work, the best place to understand what is required, and it is their company, and their future livelihood at stake!
Again, why should central banks be given a privileged position in that regard? Monetary policy is only one leg of economic policy, the other being fiscal policy. Trump in his first term, much as with Reagan, continued the path of bankrupting the US, just by their control of fiscal policy. Reagan slashed taxes, which blew out the US budget deficit and sucked in huge amounts of imports without creating any of the promised explosion of US capital investment from a large US petty-bourgeoisie, liberated from a supposed crushing burden of taxation. The same arguments have continued across the globe, based on the small business myth, that confuses the large numerical size of the petty-bourgeoisie, with its economic significance, compared to the dominance of large-scale, socialised capital, on which the former depends, and is subordinated to.
If monetary policy should be controlled by an independent central bank to avoid politicians taking bad decision to bolster their immediate popularity, then why not apply the same to fiscal policy? Why not have an independent Treasury department controlling fiscal policy? After all, its not unknown to have politicians make big tax handouts, or spending proposals, just prior to elections, for that purpose, or, as with Truss, Reagan and Trump, even just in pursuit of an idiotic, ideological conviction of the dynamic role of the unbridled petty-bourgeoisie, and free competition. The same is true, in relation to borrowing. Why not an independent Debt Management Office, to avoid politicians from getting around constraints on monetary and fiscal policy, by simply borrowing more? Come to that, politicians often make idiotic decisions on many other areas of policy, driven by a desire to boost their popularity.
Had, the response to COVID been in the hands of expert virologists and epidemiologists, for example, its unlikely that the “year the world went mad”, as Professor Woolhouse described it would have happened. Indeed, the government's scientific advisors had initially, recognised as Woolhouse and others did that, absent a vaccine, the best way of dealing with COVID was via the rapid development of a natural “herd immunity”, given that the vast majority of the population, at least 80%, were at no serious risk from it, and most of them would have it without even knowing. That would enable resources to be focused on isolating and protecting the 20% of the population, nearly all of whom were elderly or chronically sick people, who were at risk. But, the fact that politicians were the ones making decisions, and who were placed under the glare of sensationalist media, and opportunist opposition politicians, meant that they caved in to what was a badly informed, and idiotic moral panic that claimed that everyone was equally at risk, and required a crazy lockdown of the economy! So, why not take those decisions out of the hands of politicians, too?
In the end, the logic of central bank independence, as with the independence of other bodies and institutions, such as the judiciary, the police, the armed forces and so on, is to deny democracy itself, and to just have the state, comprised of its permanent bureaucracy of professionals left to get on with it free from the inconvenience of democratically elected politicians.
A ruling-class has the advantage of inertia that the way things are is the way they always seem to have been, and so appear natural and eternal, until the divergence of that with reality becomes inescapable. The feudal aristocracy clung to power, as ruling-class, long after its social function had ended, and it had become a fetter on further development, but its hold on power did come to an end, as the revolutionary bourgeoisie supplanted it. Every ruling-class forms a minority of society, and, once the mass of society moves against it, its time is up. The bourgeoisie, and petty-bourgeoisie, as a revolutionary class, was also a minority, but it was supported by the masses of the proletariat and peasantry. The bourgeoisie, as ruling-class, has also lost its social function, which has been taken over by professional managers, technicians, administrators etc., drawn from the working-class. The working-class is not only, now, objectively, the collective owner of socialised capital, but, it acts as the collective, “functioning-capitalist”, but, still continues to do so, not in its own interests, but the interests of the ruling-class!
The feudal aristocracy used their position to continue to drain large amounts of rent, which acted as a fetter on economic development, leading to bourgeois ideologists recommending the nationalisation of land. The bourgeoisie has used its position to continue to drain large amounts in interest/dividends, which acts as a fetter on economic development.
Generally speaking, the new, revolutionary forms of property and production must prevail, in the end, and that applies not only within societies, but between societies too. The defeat of Tsarist Russia, in the Crimean War, at the hands of capitalist Britain and France, led Russia to embark on the same transformation of its mode of production. However, what is true, in general, and, as an end result, is not, necessarily true, in any specific case. As Trotsky noted, every new mode of production comes into existence in a weak condition, and risks being strangled at birth by other established states.
Engels notes examples from earlier history.
“... in which the more barbarian conquerors exterminated or drove out the population of a country and laid waste or allowed to go to ruin productive forces which they did not know how to use. This was what the Christians in Moorish Spain did with the major part of the irrigation works on which the Moors highly developed agriculture and horticulture depended. Of course, every conquest by a more barbarian people disturbs economic development and extensively destroys productive forces. But in the immense majority of cases where the conquest is permanent, the more barbarian conqueror has to adapt himself to the higher “economic order” as it emerges from the conquest; he is assimilated by the vanquished and in most cases he has even to adopt their language. But where — apart from cases of conquest—the internal state power of a country becomes antagonistic to its economic development as occurred at a certain stage with almost every political power in the past, the contest always ended with the downfall of the political power. Inexorably and without exception the economic development has forced its way through—we have already mentioned the latest and most striking example of this: the great French Revolution.” (p 234-5)
The point, however, made by Trotsky, that a new revolutionary mode of production, no matter how dynamic, comes into existence in an immature and weakened condition, is precisely why socialism can only arise on an international basis, as opposed to the utopian and reactionary theory of Socialism In One Country. That is all the more true, in the era of imperialism, when even capitalism has grown to the point where the nation state has become an absolute fetter that it has had to burst asunder, with the creation of larger, multinational states, either on the basis of voluntary agreement, or via wars and annexation.
Every new mode of production faces the prospect of the weight of the old society sitting on its chest. The more the new society conflicts with the old society, the more the existing ruling-class must try to suppress it by force. It is not the revolutionary class that desires, itself, to use force, to establish its own rule, but that reality dictates that it must do so.
“... in the words of Marx, it is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one, that it is the instrument by means of which social movement forces its way through and shatters the dead, fossilized political forms—of this there is not a word in Herr Dühring. It is only with sighs and groans that he admits the possibility that force will perhaps be necessary for the overthrow of the economy based on exploitation—alas!, because all use of force, forsooth, demoralises the person who uses it. And this in spite of the immense moral and spiritual advance which has been the result of every victorious revolution!” (p 235-6)
Without the level of productivity that comes from the possession of steam engines, or even that created by the technologies of the feudal era, a large part of the available social labour-time of society goes on simply the subsistence and reproduction of society itself. So, only a small proportion of society can escape that requirement to work, and be able to engage in these other activities. As Marx put it,
“... although at first the development of the capacities of the human species takes place at the cost of the majority of human individuals and even classes, in the end it breaks through this contradiction and coincides with the development of the individual; the higher development of individuality is thus only achieved by a historical process during which individuals are sacrificed for the interests of the species in the human kingdom, as in the animal and plant kingdoms, always assert themselves at the cost of the interests of individuals, because these interests of the species coincide only with the interests of certain individuals, and it is this coincidence which constitutes the strength of these privileged individuals.”
It is the available technologies in each age that both determine the level of productivity and also determine the methods of production, and productive and social relations that develop upon them. Without the technologies of modern capitalism, only feudal production or the AMP is possible; without the technology of the feudal era, only slavery is possible.
“... when he asserts that our modern wage bondage can only be explained as a somewhat transformed and mitigated heritage of slavery, and not by its own nature (that is, by the economic laws of modern society), either this means only that both wage-labour and slavery are forms of bondage and class domination, as every child knows, or it is false. For we might as well say that wage-labour can only be explained as a mitigated form of cannibalism, which, it is now universally established, was the primitive form of using defeated enemies.” (p 233-4)
A ruling class, because its power is based upon ownership of property, and the distribution that flows from that is more easily established and maintained than a ruling caste. But, as Engels notes, in both cases, this still relies on the performance of a social function.
“The role played in history by force as contrasted with economic development is therefore clear. Firstly, all political power is organically based on an economic and social function, and increases in proportion as the members of society become transformed into private producers through the dissolution of the primitive community, and thus become more and more alienated from the administrators of the common functions of society.” (p 234)
The slave owners had a social function to perform, in organising slave society, even if, at a certain point, this function became devolved to the slave masters. The feudal landlords had a social function to perform prior to the arrival of the capitalist farmer. And, the private industrial capitalist had a social function to perform prior to the development of socialised capital, and of the professional managers, drawn from the working-class, who take over the role of functioning-capitalist.
In each case, once the social function ends, those that continue to occupy the position of ruling-class, do so only on borrowed time, and by an increasing resort to the use of their control of the state, and, thereby, force, to justify what, now, amounts only to their parasitic existence. Engels also sets out the basis for Bonapartism, but, also, its limitations, as I have described, elsewhere.
“... after the political force has made itself independent as against society, and has transformed itself from its servant into its master, it can work in two different directions. Either it works in the sense and in the direction of the normal economic development. In this case no conflict arises between them, and economic development is accelerated. Or it works against economic development, in which case, with but few exceptions, force succumbs to it.” (p 234)
In other words, the state, even a Bonapartist state, resting upon force, must choose to act in the interests of one form of property or another. In the era of imperialism, it must act in the interests of large-scale, socialised industrial capital, whose dynamic leads it forward to becoming large-scale, socialised means of production, i.e. socialist property. Else, it must seek to resist that development, and to revert to some form of era of free competition, by a myriad of small, independent producers, and autarky. But, this latter is untenable. That rampant competition, once again leads to monopoly, and large-scale capital. In the meantime, the lack of efficiency of the economy itself, simply leads to the subordination of the state to other states. No amount of force, by the state can change that reality, and so the force succumbs to the historical reality of the economic development.
As Engels notes, if we look at those examples of the AMP, they remained stagnant for millennia, including in Russia, China, India and Japan, whilst the rest of the world progressed to capitalism. But, a look at the various groups of primitive humans that were still being discovered in the 20th century, in rainforests and elsewhere, shows they had barely changed from the condition where humans separated from the rest of the animal kingdom, with all of the brutality that involves.
“Given the historical antecedents of the ancient world, and particularly of Greece, the advance to a society based on class antagonisms could only be accomplished in the form of slavery. This was an advance even for the slaves; the prisoners of war, from whom the mass of the slaves was recruited, now at least saved their lives, instead of being killed as they had been before, or even roasted, as at a still earlier period.” (p 232)
In fact, this is seen in every such new mode of production that the rise in social productivity it brings results in an overall rise in conditions for society as a whole, alongside the increased exploitation. The peasants that paid rent to feudal landlords were more exploited than were the slaves in the period of slave society. In other words, a greater proportion of what the peasant produced was appropriated by the landlord than that appropriated by the slave owner, of what the slave produced. That is because the low level of productivity of slave society meant most of what the slave produced was required for their own reproduction. Yet, the condition of the peasant is much better than that of the slave.
Similarly, the industrial worker is far more exploited than is the peasant. Whee a peasant may have required half of what they produced to sustain themselves, the other half going in rent, even in Marx's time, he calculated the rate of surplus value as over 1,000%, meaning that the worker was paid only a tenth of what they produced. Yet, the condition of the wage-labourer was far better than that of the peasant.
“So long as the effective working population were so much occupied with their necessary labour that they had no time left for looking after the common affairs of society—the direction of labour, affairs of state, legal matters, art, science, etc.— the concomitant existence of a special class, freed from actual labour, to manage these affairs was always necessary; by this means it never failed to saddle the working masses with a greater and greater burden of labour to its own advantage.” (p 233)
This is the same point made by Marx in Theories of Surplus Value, Chapter 9 against the moralism of Sismondi et al.
Indeed, the working-class, when it assumes power, will need to “exploit itself”, i.e. raise the rate of surplus value, massively, by raising social productivity, if it is to accumulate the means of production rapidly, so as to raise output significantly, to provide the standards of living for all, required for World Socialism.
“Only the immense increase of the productive forces attained by large-scale industry has made it possible to distribute labour among all members of society without exception, and thus to limit the labour-time of each individual member to such an extent that all have enough free time left to take part in the general affairs of society, whether theoretical or practical. It is only now, therefore, that every ruling and exploiting class has become superfluous and indeed a hindrance to social development, and it is only now, too, that it will be inexorably abolished, however much it may be in possession of “direct force”.” (p 233)
Elsewhere, the rise in productivity meant that the old primitive communes began to dissolve, because a division of labour, also, meant that some families found a benefit of cultivating their own plot of land, and engaging in their own domestic production. They could add to their own family labour by taking in other labourers. A look at some of the old houses, preserved as museums, in Britain, shows the tables at which all these individuals would eat communally. As Lenin noted, in his analysis of this process, taking place in Russia in the 19th century, it was not even necessary for these additional workers to be exploited as wage-labourers, i.e. only paid the value of their labour-power, because the greater productivity of these households was enough to increase the surplus production.
“Production had developed so far that human labour-power could now produce more than was necessary for its maintenance; the means of maintaining additional units of labour-power were present; likewise the means of employing them; labour-power acquired a value. But the community itself and the association to which it belonged yielded no available, superfluous labour-power. On the other hand, the latter was furnished by war, and war was as old as the coexistence of several groups of juxtaposed communities. Hitherto, they had not known what to do with prisoners of war, and had therefore simply killed them; at a still earlier period, eaten them. But at the stage of the “economic order” which had now been attained, the prisoners acquired a value; they were therefore allowed to live and their labour made use of.” (p 230-1)
So, contrary to Duhring's argument that it is force, the domination of Man by Man, that leads to the creation of a surplus product, appropriated by the oppressor, the opposite is the case. No amount of force can produce a surplus. It was economic development and the creation, thereby, of surplus, as productivity rose, that enabled some in society to separate into a ruling class or caste. That they might, then, subsequently utilise that position, to also mobilise force, to maintain their position, is a different matter.
“Slavery had been invented. It soon became the dominant form of production among all peoples who were developing beyond the old community, but in the end it also became one of the chief causes of their decay. It was slavery that first made possible the division of labour between agriculture and industry on a larger scale, and with it the glory of the ancient world, Hellenism. Without slavery, no Greek state, no Greek art and science, without slavery, no Roman Empire. But without the basis laid by Hellenism and the Roman Empire, no modern Europe either. We should never forget that our whole economic, political and intellectual development presupposes a state of things in which slavery was as necessary as it was universally recognised. In this sense we are entitled to say: Without the slavery of antiquity no modern socialism.” (p 231)
Without slavery, the cultural development in Greece and Rome would not have happened, and so no development of the art and science upon which the modern world is built, including the concept of democracy. It was, of course, only the free citizens that took part in that ancient democracy, and they were able to do so, only because they were freed from the task of spending all day in labour to sustain themselves. Similarly, with liberal bourgeois democracy, it was only those that owned property that were given the vote, and even with social-democracy, it is only those with sufficient time and resources that can really engage fully in it, leaving the great mass with a superficial involvement every few years of going through the motions of putting a cross in a box against the names of parties all sharing a set of bourgeois or petit-bourgeois ideas.
“It is very easy to inveigh against slavery and the like in general terms and pour out the vials of one's lofty moral wrath on such infamies. Unfortunately all this conveys is merely what everyone knows, namely, that these institutions of antiquity are no longer in accord with our present conditions and our sentiments, which these conditions determine. But it does not tell us one word as to how these institutions arose, why they existed, and what role they played in history. When we examine these questions, we are compelled to say—however contradictory and heretical it may sound—that the introduction of slavery under the then prevailing conditions was a great step forward.” (p 231-2)
Again, this process of separation, in each case, varies, as a result of different material conditions, and historical development. What can be seen, here, is a parallel with what is seen in the natural world, in which, although the same natural laws, such as gravity, apply throughout the Universe, the effects do not simply produce a series of identical consequences. The most obvious variation is that which leads to various forms of ruling-class, as against those of the AMP, which results in the development of a ruling caste, which, itself comes into existence as a consequence of the overarching role and importance of the administrative body itself, in the production of the society.
The importance of being able to mobilise resources for the civil engineering projects associated with the AMP, ensured the central role of that administrative body, and its functionaries. As Barrington Moore Junior describes, the members of such bodies could not always ensure that their children had the required intelligence, particularly as the bodies introduced examines for admission, and so they often adopted the clever children of others to ensure a continuation of the family dynasty. The separation arises on the basis of this increasing inequality in distribution, as production in the society increases. The unequal distribution is not based on ownership of property, but on this control of the administrative body.
In contrast, in other societies, it is the ownership of property that forms the basis of the unequal distribution, and separation from society. That maybe from the ownership of servants and slaves or the ownership of land and other means of production that are handed down within families and accumulated. This simple inheritance of property requires none of the comprehensive system of laws, customs and taboos, developed over very long time periods for a caste system.
Everywhere, the basis of political domination was the performance of a social function – the warrior chief who obtains tribute, the administrator who is kept at the expense of the community,
“and further that political domination has existed for any length of time only when it discharged this its social function. However many the despotisms which rose and fell in Persia and India, each was fully aware that it was above all the general entrepreneur for the maintenance of irrigation throughout the river valleys, without which no agriculture was possible.” (p 230)
British colonialism, precisely because it could not answer the question “who owns this land?”, in India, failed to understand this, and so, as it broke up the village communities, failed to understand that no one, therefore, had the responsibility for maintaining the irrigation systems, and other civil engineering works that were the basis of the AMP. So, the maintenance was not done, the systems collapsed, and the agricultural production collapsed with it. A similar thing is seen with the privatisation programmes carried out in Britain, since the 1980's, and with the fiscal austerity measures implemented by governments across the globe, today, that lead to the collapse of infrastructure with no one stepping in to replace the role of the state, as shareholders, and other owners of fictitious capital, simply suck the firms dry that are assigned those tasks, as they undertake widespread asset stripping, and revenue extraction. The consequence has also been a continual erosion of social productivity.
If all that Duhring wanted to show is that human history has proceeded as a result of class struggle, of exploiter and exploited, he would have been saying nothing new that was not already outlined in The Communist Manifesto. But, the whole point is to analyse and explain the material basis of these relations, and to explain how they are transformed into new relations.
“... if Herr Dühring's only answer is always the single word “force”, we are left exactly where we were at the start. The mere fact that the ruled and exploited have at all times been far more numerous than the rulers and the exploiters, and that therefore the real force has reposed in the hands of the former, is enough to demonstrate the absurdity of the whole force theory. The relations of domination and subjection have therefore still to be explained.” (p 228)
Engels, therefore, sets out a summary of this process, starting from the separation of humans from the animal kingdom, as the first modern humans evolved “still half animal, brutish, still impotent in face of the forces of nature, still ignorant of their own; and consequently as poor as the animals and hardly more productive than they.” (p 228)
Amongst these early humans, a certain equality prevailed, in their condition of existence, “and also a kind of equality of social position for the heads of families— at least an absence of social classes — which continued among the primitive agricultural communities of the civilised peoples of a later period.” (p 228-9)
Even with herds, and packs of animals, they protect themselves as a whole, by chasing off predators. Regularly, I watch murders of crows, for example, chasing off buzzards that fly overhead. Within early human communities, this requirement continues, and, with humans not having the same physical capabilities of other animals, it is their intelligence, the ability to produce weapons and tools, as well as, later, fire, that becomes significant, as well as the ability to communicate via language.
“In each such community there were from the beginning certain common interests the safeguarding of which had to be handed over to individuals, true, under the control of the community as a whole: adjudication of disputes; repression of encroachments by individuals beyond their rights; control of water supplies, especially in hot countries; and finally when conditions were still very primitive, religious functions.” (p 229)
Every anthropological study shows this. So, we see certain individuals arise who have prowess in fighting, in knowledge of herbs, and so on, also often related to a supposed ability to communicate with the spirits.
“It goes without saying that they are endowed with a certain measure of authority and constitute the beginnings of state power.” (p 229)
The actual extent to which that state power develops is conditioned by material conditions, and historical development. For a state to develop, there must first be a ruling class or caste, which itself requires that this class or caste has been able to qualitatively separate itself from the other classes or castes in society, to have appropriated to itself a significant proportion of society's production, and that it is able to perpetuate itself. For a ruling-class, the means by which this is achieved, is via its ownership of property, whereas, for a ruling caste, it is achieved by the creation of a panoply of taboos, and rules that solidify and prescribe the membership of each caste, and prevent any movement from one to another.
But, this, in itself, requires a minimum level of development of productivity, and of society. A tribe of hunter-gatherers is not going to have a sufficient level of production to enable any qualitative difference in the proportion of its distribution to enable the formation of a ruling class or caste. They may have chiefs and Medicine Men, and various councils, but these are functional roles, and forms of division of labour and administration, not the existence of a state separated from society, representing the interests of a ruling class or caste. Indeed, a communist society, with no classes, in the future, will also require administration, and administrative bodies without that constituting a state.
“The productive forces gradually increase; the greater density of the population creates common interests at one point, and conflicting interests at another, between the separate communities, whose grouping into larger units again brings about a new division of labour, the setting up of organs to defend common interests and guard against conflicting interests. These organs which, as representatives of the common interests of the whole group, already occupy a special position in relation to each individual community—in certain circumstances even one of opposition—soon make themselves still more independent, partly through heredity of functions, which comes about almost as a matter of course in a world where everything occurs spontaneously, and partly through their growing indispensability with the increase in conflicts with other groups.” (p 229)
In Capital III, and Theories of Surplus Value, Marx, also, explains the economic basis of this latter. The landowner is only able to obtain Absolute Rent, because the average rate of profit in agriculture/primary production, is greater than the average industrial rate of profit. It is this surplus profit that is the basis of rent – I referred to this recently in relation to house prices. Capitalists will only produce on the land if they can make, at least the average industrial rate of profit, otherwise, they employ their capital, elsewhere. So, given that landowners will always seek to obtain rent, it requires that market prices for the commodities produced on it – be they vegetables, coal, or houses – be high enough to ensure that the capitalist makes the average profit, plus the rent. Supply of these commodities is always constrained, therefore, compared to what it would otherwise be.
But, not all land is able to produce rent, because of its lack of fertility. In some cases, the landowner uses the land themselves for production, accepting only the average industrial rate of profit. That was, often the case with landowners who established mines on their land. In other cases, landlords can continue to extract “rent” from peasant tenant farmers, who, unlike capitalist farmers, must continue to cultivate the land, in order to live. In this case, what the landlord extracts is not actually rent, in the economic sense, but is an appropriation of a part of the peasant's own surplus value, or even, their means of subsistence. But, what makes Absolute Rent possible is that landlords that have land that would not produce rent, do not, thereby, have to try to rent it to capitalists, which would undermine Absolute Rent, overall. The landlord can simply sit on the land, or, as with using it as grounds for deer-hunting, grouse shooting, and so on, they keep this land out of supply, keeping rents raised, whilst obtaining revenues from those prepared to pay to engage in these other activities. The Green Belt plays a similar role.
Duhring's assertion, therefore, was false, and yet he goes on from it to say.
“It goes without saying that all other types of distributive wealth must be explained historically in a similar way!” (p 228)
Ad Engels notes, not only was this assumption false, and its extension, thereby, false, but it removed any requirement for Duhring to provide any specifics, for example, in relation to how capital comes into existence, particularly as capital, the form of property of the bourgeoisie arises in opposition to the existing feudal relations and forms of property, i.e. in opposition to the existing feudal ruling class. As noted previously, Duhring deals with this as is also presented in the account given by Michael Roberts and others, by positing the bourgeoisie as the protégé of the feudal aristocracy. In other words, rather than a historical dynamic, driven by changing material conditions, and resulting in antagonistic property forms, we are given a morality play, in which good v evil, and the evil exploiters are really all the same actors, who just change their costumes for each act of the play.
In fact, as Marx sets out inThe Poverty of Philosophy, it is always what Proudhon called “the bad” side of any phenomenon that is the progressive element of historical development. The serfs represented “the bad” side of the master-serf relation of feudalism, but, it is the release of the serfs from the land, their consequent lack of any means of subsistence that drives them into the towns of the Middle Ages, where that condition leads them to become small-scale, independent, commodity producers and traders, which makes them into the material out of which is formed the bourgeoisie!
A lot of the environmental destruction, caused by the Industrial Revolution was reversed in the later 20th century, and made possible by the wealth produced by that revolution. The smogs and “pea-soupers” that still existed in the 1950's, disappeared in the 1960's, as Clean Air Acts were introduced. In the 1950's, as a child, every night, the sky above our street turned red, and the air was full of a choking sulphur, as the coke oven doors were opened at the nearby Birchenwood Gas and Coke Works. In other directions, a similar red glow filled the sky from the furnaces at the Goldendale and Shelton Iron and Steel Works, several miles away.
Across towns and cities in the industrial North and Midlands, buildings were a uniform black colour that we all took to be their natural state, until the soot was sand blasted from them, revealing their bright, sandstone features. A similar effect on people's lungs had no doubt taken place over all that previous time, until the Clean Air Acts reflected the fact that, now, much more efficient, and cleaner, North Sea Gas, was able to replace coal and coke.
In the following decades, rivers and canals that had died were cleaned, with fish returning to rivers they had not been seen in for a century, and canals became locations for a range of leisure activities. On the site of the previously mentioned Birchenwood Gas and Coke Works, which was, also, the site of an associated coal mine, iron works, and brickworks, had the distinction of being the most polluted land in Europe. My grandad worked at the pit in the 1920's and 30's, and, as kids, we would roam the area, walking across the fields up to Mow Cop. We would play on the various chunks of slag, dotted across the land that we called “Red Rock”. Another slag heap near the house where my mother grew up, was called “Starvation Banks”, because, during the '26 strike, and 1930's, they would go to pick any bits of coal they could find there.
In the 1960's, I saw the starvation banks reclaimed and trees planted on it. Similar transformations took place at other former colliery slag heaps throughout the city, for example, what is now Hanley Forest Park. Later, Birchenwood, itself, was reclaimed, being turned into a new housing estate, leisure and amenities facilities and so on.
A similar process is seen, now, with the Amazon, as inefficient methods of agriculture lead to extensive rather than capital intensive cultivation, to meet the demand. The result is the reckless cutting down and burning of rainforest, to quickly open up land for such agricultural production.
Duhring's claims about the large landed proprietor subjugating nature by first subjugating slaves, was a fiction.
“The very reverse is the case. Where he makes his appearance in antiquity, as in Italy, he does not bring wasteland into cultivation, but transforms arable land brought under cultivation by peasants into stock pastures, depopulating and ruining whole countries. Only in a more recent period, when the increasing density of population had raised the value of land, and particularly after the development of agricultural science had made even poorer land more cultivable—it is only from this period that large landowners began to participate on an extensive scale in bringing wasteland and grass-land under cultivation—and this mainly through the robbery of common land from the peasants, both in England and in Germany. But there was another side even to this. For every acre of common land which the large landowners brought into cultivation in England, they transformed at least three acres of arable land in Scotland into sheep-runs and eventually even into mere grounds for deer-hunting.” (p 226-7)
The racists of Reform, with their extra-parliamentary auxiliaries from the various neo-fascist organisations have targeted the hotels where the government has located asylum seekers who have escaped various hell-holes across the globe. Many of those hell-holes are the product of past British colonialism, as well as more recent British-US military adventures, such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria. Indeed, many of them are people who collaborated with British and US invading forces in those countries, and whose position was made impossible when British and US forces scuttled.
The tactic was designed to create a hostile environment, and whip up racist hysteria along the lines of what happened in 2024, and has been facilitated by the same sensationalist media that whipped up those same forces to vote for Brexit in 2016, which has also created such chaos and economic disaster that the racists of Reform try to blame on migrants.
In relation to those “migrants”, the racists always refer to them as “illegal” migrants, but there is nothing illegal about them. Those being housed in these run down hotels, many of which would have simply closed were it not for being put to this use, are refugees and asylum seekers. That is a perfectly legal status. Just look at all the old films from the Cold War era, where people escaped Eastern Europe by various means to sneak into Western Europe, and claim asylum.
The reason the government has had to resort to more of these run down hotels to put asylum seekers in is that the previous Tory government stopped processing the applications for asylum, as well as the fact that a growing austerity, since 2010, means that the state bureaucracy, in general, does not have the resources required to function. Indeed, the same austerity measures, introduced following the bailing out of the financial speculators, who lost paper wealth in the global crash of 2008, that means asylum claims do not get processed effectively is, also, the same reason that schools, hospitals, roads and other vital services have been run down, but which the racists, now, seek to blame on “migrants”.
Of course, the Tories who implemented that austerity over the last 15 years, were also the same ones that inflicted Brexit on the country, which has cost it around £40 billion a year in lost taxes as a result of the 4% reduction in GDP caused by the loss of trade with the EU as Britain's largest trading partner. That £40 billion a year would go a long way to financing many of those services that the racists that backed Brexit, now seek to blame on migrants. With the vast majority of people now seeing that they were lied to over Brexit, and now wanting to re-join the EU, the Tories in their old form have been destroyed, reduced to their central core of racists, which has emerged from its chrysalis form into the shape of Reform. They can only relate to that racist hardcore, and the more Reform grows, on that basis, the more the Tories, left in the old Conservative Party are squeezed out of existence.
Hence the attempts of the Tories to respond by making themselves appear even more hardline racists than Reform. That, of course, simply drives the Conservative element of the Tory party further into the hands of the Liberals, where many of them had found a natural home following Brexit. The Conservative Party can no more compete with Reform on that ground than can the petty-bourgeois nationalists and racists of Starmer's Blue Labour, because the hardcore racists will not believe them, and those who are gulled by the lies of the racists will always vote for the original rather than some pale imitation of it. The only thing that trying to out Reform Reform will bring for Blue Labour and the Tories is a further collapse of their own core vote as it surges towrds the Liberals, Greens, Plaid, SNP, and Your Party.
That is already apparent. At the last local elections, it became obvious that the Tory vote had simply moved en masse to Reform, whilst much of its Conservative voter base switched to the Liberals, or Greens. The claim of Reform, put to Tory voters, that a vote for the Tories was a vote for Starmer was not only vindicated but heeded by Tory voters. In 2024, Starmer's Blue Labour only managed to sustain the meagre vote it managed, by similarly claiming that a vote for more progressive parties, such as the Liberals, Greens or various independents, would be a vote for the Tories. That clearly was not true. Not only did the Liberals win large numbers of additional seats, and would have won more had their been proportional representation, but the Greens also won more seats, and, again would have won many more had their been proportional representation. Even independent candidates, such as Corbyn, won their seats, such is the extent of the distaste for Starmer's reactionary nationalist Blue Labour, and that has intensified since then.
In a number of local by-elections, Labour has lost not to Reform, but to Green candidates standing on platforms, at least on paper, to the left of Blue Labour.
That, also, gives the lie to the Left nationalists who purvey the myth that Labour has lost support to Reform, and so needs to accommodate that reactionary agenda. If Your Party were to allow itself to be sent down that dead-end, it would quickly destroy itself. Your Party can only provide a real alternative to Blue Labour if it stands on a progressive, internationalist and socialist platform. Having nearly a million people already having signed up to it, gives it an unprecedented advantage in starting out on that basis. It must suck up all of the progressive support for the Greens, Liberals, Plaid and SNP on that basis, again, not by accommodating itself to their liberal, bourgeois agenda, but by offering a clear and principled socialist alternative.
The ideas of calling Your Party “The People's Party”, and such like, are an abysmal, popular frontist betrayal. A true alternative to Blue Labour can never be formed on the basis of such populist nonsense. The “people”, after all, also includes the 30% of the population who are petty-bourgeois, the same social forces that formed the hard core of the Tory Party, and worse, the same kinds of social layers that have always provided the foot soldiers of fascism. They are the same social forces that look to the ideas of Faragism, Trussism and so on, because their inefficient small businesses cannot function without scrapping all of the social protections that have been hard won over the last century. Nothing sustainable can come from trying to reconcile the irreconcilable, and seeking to accommodate and appease the reactionary interests and ideas of that section of society.
One suggestion that follows that same line of thinking was to call it the "New Party", with all of the Mosleyite connotations that has! Mosley himself of course created the New Party as a supposedly "Left" alternative to Labour after he resigned as a Labour Minister. All of the claims that it should appeal to reactionary elements by following the example of Blue Labour in brandishing its "Britishness" and patriotism are also disastrous. I would favour the opposite, proclaiming its internationalism, and specifically the thing that won over tens of thousands to Corbyn's Labour Party, in 2015, its opposition to Brexit and Europeanism. On that basis, I would favour either the International Labour Party, or the European Workers' Party.
In the coming months, it will become apparent that Starmer's refuge in 2024, will, now, turn against him. Everywhere, Blue Labour is losing, and it is losing because progressive voters are abandoning it to vote for other parties such as the Liberals, Greens and so on. That is even before Your Party is actually formed, and begins fighting elections. As with Blair's New Labour, which was an empty vessel, and lost all of its activists on the ground, Blue Labour, also, has no large activist base, working in local communities, campaigns, and workplaces. Your Party, especially if the trades unions give up on Starmer and affiliate to it, will have that implantation in the working-class, much as happened when the trades unions created the Labour Party itself, as they split from the Liberals. It will quickly become apparent that a vote for Blue Labour, as against a vote for Your Party, or in some seats, the Greens or Liberals, or Plaid or SNP, will be a vote for Reform. To avoid splitting the anti-Reform vote, it will be necessary for the remaining Labour voters to switch to these other progressive alternatives.
The latest polls show that Your Party is already set to overtake and replace Blue Labour as the main workers' party.
Blue Labour has been sucked down the rabbit hole of reactionary, petty-bourgeois nationalism. It may still be possible to save it, but only if the trades unions act, in the next few weeks, to oust Starmer, and set it on a different track. As a start, they should be demanding that instead of Blue Labour responding to the racist attacks on refugees and migrants, by adopting an even more reactionary and racist stance itself, that it begins to stand up to the racists. Part of the problem was the fact that the Tories stopped processing asylum claims, and its now been revealed that Jenrick had himself signed up a load of these run down hotels to house them, before the Tories lost the election in 2024. The simple answer to the tactic of taking legal action by racist councils is for the government to simply give a blanket approval of asylum to everyone currently seeking it. That would mean that all of those asylum seekers would be able to take up employment, and find their own accommodation, as well as contributing to the production of goods and services, and paying taxes etc. It would immediately remove all of the objections put forward by the racists.
The English jurists, following the colonisation of India, tried in vain to answer the question “Who is the owner of the land?”. These conditions of collective ownership persisted for millennia, and, as Marx noted, in his writings on the British in India, those relations were so stagnant and stable that they remained like that until some external intervention disturbed and disrupted them, creating the possibility of change.
“The Turks were the first to introduce a sort of feudal ownership of land in the countries conquered by them in the Orient. As far back as the heroic epoch, Greece made its entry into history with a system of social estates which was itself evidently the product of a long but unknown prehistory; even there, however, the land was mainly cultivated by independent peasants; the larger domains of the nobles and tribal chiefs were the exception, and they disappeared soon after. Italy was brought under cultivation chiefly by peasants; when, in the final period of the Roman Republic, the great complexes of estates, the latifundia, displaced the small peasants and replaced them by slaves, they also replaced tillage by stockraising, and, as Pliny already realized, brought Italy to ruin (latifundia Italiam perdidere). During the Middle Ages, peasant farming was predominant throughout Europe (especially in bringing virgin soil into cultivation)”. (p 225-6)
Whether these peasants paid feudal or other rents to landlords, Engels notes, is not relevant, because unlike a slave or serf, they did so as free peasants.
“The colonists from Friesland, Lower Saxony, Flanders and the Lower Rhine, who brought under cultivation the land east of the Elbe which had been wrested from the Slavs, did this as free peasants under very favourable rentals, and not at all under “some form of corvée”.” (p 226)
In North America, the large tracts of land were, generally, not cultivated by the Native American tribes, who remained as hunter-gatherers, because of the facility of doing so. Cultivation on a large-scale, arises only with European settlement, but, here, again, there is no support for Duhring's thesis.
“In North America, by far the largest portion of the land was opened for cultivation by the labour of free farmers, while the big landed proprietors of the South, with their slaves and their rapacious tilling of the land, exhausted the soil until it could grow only firs, so that the cultivation of cotton was forced further and further west.” (p 226)
Again, as Marx had set out in Capital III, it is only with the subsequent application of capitalistic methods, and its use of science and technology, that these “rapacious” methods that destroy the soil and natural environment, were ended and reversed. The two sources of real wealth, as Marx sets out in The Critique of The Gotha Programme, and A Contribution To The Critique of Political Economy, are Nature and Labour. Capitalism relies on both, and, in its contradictory process of development, is led both to destroy and to conserve them. At times, it overworks and destroys both the environment and labour-power, when they are in excess supply, but, then, is also forced to introduce its own regulation, to prevent such destruction, as bringing, also, a destruction of its own capacity to produce and realise profits. As Marx had put it in his Preface to Capital I, the Factory Acts were as much the product of industrial capitalism as the spinning machine. And Engels, in his later Prefaces to The Condition of the Working Class, makes the same point.
“The competition of manufacturer against manufacturer by means of petty thefts upon the workpeople did no longer pay. Trade had outgrown such low means of making money; they were not worth while practising for the manufacturing millionaire, and served merely to keep alive the competition of smaller traders, thankful to pick up a penny wherever they could. Thus the truck system was suppressed, the Ten Hours’ Bill was enacted, and a number of other secondary reforms introduced — much against the spirit of Free Trade and unbridled competition, but quite as much in favour of the giant-capitalist in his competition with his less favoured brother. Moreover, the larger the concern, and with it the number of hands, the greater the loss and inconvenience caused by every conflict between master and men; and thus a new spirit came over the masters, especially the large ones, which taught them to avoid unnecessary squabbles, to acquiesce in the existence and power of Trades’ Unions, and finally even to discover in strikes — at opportune times — a powerful means to serve their own ends. The largest manufacturers, formerly the leaders of the war against the working-class, were now the foremost to preach peace and harmony. And for a very good reason. The fact is that all these concessions to justice and philanthropy were nothing else but means to accelerate the concentration of capital in the hands of the few, for whom the niggardly extra extortions of former years had lost all importance and had become actual nuisances; and to crush all the quicker and all the safer their smaller competitors, who could not make both ends meet without such perquisites. Thus the development of production on the basis of the capitalistic system has of itself sufficed — at least in the leading industries, for in the more unimportant branches this is far from being the case — to do away with all those minor grievances which aggravated the workman’s fate during its earlier stages...
Again, the repeated visitations of cholera, typhus, small-pox, and other epidemics have shown the British bourgeois the urgent necessity of sanitation in his towns and cities, if he wishes to save himself and family from falling victims to such diseases. Accordingly, the most crying abuses described in this book have either disappeared or have been made less conspicuous.”
Following the surge in US Producer Prices, the UK is the latest developed economy to show that inflation persists, as central banks have continued to provide liquidity to enable firms to raise prices, to avoid cuts in their profits. UK consumer prices, as measured by the CPI, rose by 3.8%, in July, compared to the previous year. That compared to 3.6% in the previous month, and expectations of a rise of only 3.7%. The Bank of England, has never brought inflation back to its 2% target level, since the spike in inflation following the tsunami of liquidity pumped into circulation during lockdowns, and this figure stands at nearly twice that target level. Yet, in the UK, as in the US, as the speculators clamour for cuts in interest rates to boost asset prices, the central banks are complying with those demands.
Its worth summarising what prices are. They are the exchange-value of commodities as measured against the general commodity/money commodity, or, as Marx describes, in countries with fiat currencies, against the standard of prices/unit of currency. Like any other exchange-value, therefore, it depends on the value of the thing being measured, but also on the value of the unit of measurement. Just as with length, where a field may remain the same length, but can be expressed as, say, 100 or 1,000, dependent on whether its measured in metres or centimetres, so too with prices. The value of commodities, in aggregate, may be unchanged, or even be reduced, which is what happens as a result of continually rising social productivity, and yet prices, in aggregate, may rise, if the unit of measurement, for example, the Pound, is itself reduced in value. For a unit of currency, this reduction in its value is the result of an excess of it being thrown into circulation - inflation.
That is what happened with the surge in inflation following lockdowns, but the same thing was seen in the 1970's, and early 1980's, it was seen in the Weimar Republic in the 1920's, as well as in the USSR at that time, and in numerous other economies, from Argentina to Zimbabwe, where the state has simply printed money tokens in excess, and caused the value of those tokens to be shredded. But, its also worth examining why states do that. One basic reason, from the time they began issuing currency, they have debased it is that they thought they could pass off bad coin to pay for their debts. As with MMT, they confuse money with these money tokens/currency, which is like confusing a cow with the picture of a cow. They thought that they could simply “create” money, by simply printing more of the tokens, which are, in fact, only a facsimile of it. Its like thinking you can produce more cows, by simply photocopying a picture of a cow used as its representation.
As Marx describes, when economies had currencies which were redeemable in gold or silver, which acted as the money commodity, this was limited, because, if the value of the coins/tokens fell below their nominal or face value, i.e. the amount of precious metal they were supposed to represent, holders of the coins/tokens would simply redeem them for the precious metal. The excess was taken out of circulation. In practice, this is what happened in 1971, when France demanded to be able to redeem its Dollars for gold. When the US printed excess Dollars, from around 1962, to pay for its military spending on wars in Vietnam and so on, and to finance its domestic welfare programme, so causing a devaluation of the Dollar, its creditors/trading partners, eventually, decided enough was enough, and demanded to redeem their Dollars for gold at the official exchange rate of $35 an ounce. That official exchange rate was over stated the value of the Dollar, by a factor of ten at that time. Of course, the US, at that point, simply refused to honour its obligations, and ended convertibility of the Dollar for gold.
During the 1960's, the US in printing these excess money tokens, that became increasingly worthless, but which continued to pass them off, across the globe, at their nominal value, simply extracted tribute from the rest of the world, and, in the process, as these excess Dollars circulated in the world economy, created a growing inflation in global prices. It was that which became manifest in the inflation/stagflation of the 1970's and early 1980's. By 1980, the price of gold had risen from the official price of $35 in 1971, to $800 an ounce! The same happened with lockdowns, as governments printed money tokens to cover the payments they made to households and businesses to replace the revenues they lost as a result of being locked out of their workplaces.
But, of course, there is another side, as set out above. The price of a commodity may rise if its own value rises. But, that requires that productivity must fall, whereas, generally, productivity rises by an average of around 2% p.a. Having the value of commodities rise, therefore, is not something easily accomplished. The most obvious cause of a rise in value is, for example, if there is some kind of crop failure, or equivalent that causes raw material values to rise. But, even then, these raw material prices only constitute a fraction of the value of the commodities they are transformed into. If some reduction in the cotton crop causes the value of cotton to rise, it would pass through into the value of cotton thread, and, thereby, into the value of cotton cloth, and so on, into the value of all those things that cotton cloth is used to produce from shirts to sails. But, cotton may comprise only 10% of the cost of producing cotton yarn, so that, generally rising productivity will reduce the value of other inputs, as well as reducing the value of yarn itself. There may be no rise in the value of yarn, therefore, and even if there is, yarn will comprise only a fraction of the cost of cloth, which in turn comprises only a fraction of the cost of shirts, sails, etc.
To cause a general fall in social productivity, leading to a rise in the value of all or most commodities, therefore, requires some big social change affecting all production. Globalisation, and the reduction in trade restrictions, created such a large change, in the opposite direction. It hugely reduced the value of all commodities, but the ending of that process, and its reversal in the form of Brexit, of Trump's trade wars, and so on has caused some values to rise. The rise in UK consumer prices is partly a consequence of a devaluation of the currency, i.e. inflation, and partly a consequence of a fall in social productivity resulting from Brexit, and all of the frictions it has brought.
In the case of the US, and its tariffs the situation is different. Tariffs, of themselves, like any other tax, do not increase values. If the government puts a 10% tax on cars, that does not increase the value of cars. It simply reallocates the revenues into which the value of the car resolves. As I described recently, exactly how that plays out depends, but, ultimately, that 10% tax is paid out of surplus value, i.e. out of profits. But, that brings us to the other reason that states devalue their currencies, and why central banks were created at the start of the 20th century, and why economies moved to fiat currencies. That is that if currency values are maintained, the consequence of the overall rise in social productivity is that commodity prices should fall. One of those commodities is, itself, labour-power, and workers resist falling money wages, even if their real wages are rising. Its easier for states to devalue the currency each year, so as to cause some inflation, with prices rising, despite falling values, so that nominal wages rise. Whether those rising nominal wages go along with rising real wages depends on the extent of the growth of productivity.
In the case of Trump's tariffs, the tariffs themselves do not result in a rise in the value of commodities. The value of commodities, in the US, may rise, indirectly, for the simple reason that if imports to the US fall, and are replaced by US produced commodities, the value of those commodities may itself be higher. In other words, it has the effect of an import quota. But, when US workers, then, have to buy these higher value US produced commodities, that raises the value of their own labour-power, resulting in higher wages, which, in turn, means lower US profits. Its to avoid that that central banks increase liquidity to enable companies to raise prices to protect their profits in the short-term, leading to inflationary spirals.
US producer prices surged last month, as a result of Trump's tariffs, which have increased the costs of US inputs to production. Producer prices rose 0.9% on the month, more than 4 times the expected figure of 0.2%. If it continued at that rate, it would mean a rise of more than 11% in the next year. Even compared to the past year, it means that producer prices rose by 3.3% as against a predicted 2.4%. The figures for core PPI were even more stark. They rose by 3.7% year on year.
The cause of this rise in prices is directly, Trump's tariffs, which are a tax on US producers and consumers. As I have set out, recently, in the end, this means, in current conditions a tax on US profits, which, inevitably, will initially be countered by a rise in all US domestic prices, leading to a price-wage spiral. The parallel is striking, as this is the largest increase in prices since the ending of lockdowns in 2022, and the surge in inflation that followed. The effect of the Trump consumption tax is seen in the fact that there was a 38.9% increase in the price of fresh fruit and vegetables. The Trump administration, of course, wants all of those food items to be produced in the US, rather than imported, but, another reason for the rise in costs and prices is that all of the labourers that work on the land to produce those crops are currently being harassed by the goons of Trump's ICE hit squads.
As I pointed out recently, this rise in costs, and consequently of producer prices, inevitably passes through into all US prices. At the moment, because many US companies bought large amounts of imports ahead of the imposition of Trump's tariffs, they are able to avoid passing some of those costs through. The producers are the first to work off that inventory, and to have to begin to raise their prices. So, its hard to know how much the difference between this surge in producer prices, as compared to the rise in retail prices is simply down to wholesale and retail inventories still being depleted or is the result of wholesalers and retailers eating some of the higher costs out of their profits.
Either way, in current conditions of tight labour markets, any rise in prices will result in a price-wage spiral, so that either firms eat some of the higher costs from their profits by not raising their prices, or they raise their prices, facilitated by central bank liquidity, and, then, face higher wage costs, as workers demand higher wages to compensate for the higher prices. The latter is more likely, which also means that one of Trump's election promises of reducing prices will go the same way as his promises about no more foreign military adventures, and his promise to have ended the Ukraine war within 24 hours. The inevitable contradictions are exploding in his face already, and his petty-bourgeois nationalist MAGA base is fragmenting.
Engels quotes, at length, a passage from Duhring in which he asserts that Man's domination over Nature, first required the domination of Man over Man. As with other premises of Duhring's theory, no evidence for this assertion is provided. Duhring justifies the claim solely by asserting that, in order to cultivate large tracts of land, this requires landed property, and the existence of slaves, because no single person, or family, could do so on their own.
Engels notes,
“In the first place "domination over nature" and the "cultivation of landed property" are by no means the same thing. In industry, domination over nature is exercised on quite another and more gigantic scale than in agriculture, which must still submit to the command of weather conditions instead of commanding them.” (p 224)
Indeed, as Marx describes, in Capital III, it is in capitalist industry that develops in the towns that command over nature is established by the use of science and technology. The consequence of this capitalistic industrial production, in the towns, is, then, to continually and rapidly increase the demand, by that industry, for raw materials and food that a still pre-capitalist agriculture cannot keep pace with. A first consequence of that is the clearing of lands to give over to sheep, to meet the demand for wool, but a second consequence is the increasing degradation of the soil. As Marx notes, its only when capital, itself, then, enters agriculture that this despoliation is ended, as it applies the same scientific methods to this primary production that it had done in the towns with industrial production.
“Secondly, if we confine ourselves to the cultivation of landed property in extensive tracts, what it boils down to is whose landed property it is. We find in the early history of all civilised peoples, not the “large landed proprietors” whom Herr Dühring interpolates here with the usual sleight of hand, he calls "natural dialectics", but tribal and village communities with common ownership of the land.” (p 224)
As Engels set out, in The Origin of The Family, Private Property and The State, and Marx details, in Capital III, and elsewhere, across the globe, from India to Ireland, it is common ownership of the land, whether by clans or village communities, that can be seen, and the cultivation of this land is then undertaken by various means, depending on the given geographical and historical conditions.
“... sometimes the arable land was tilled jointly for account of the community, and sometimes in separate parcels of land temporarily allotted to families by the community, while woodland and pastureland continued to be used in common.” (p 224)
Engels notes that, again, as in the case of Duhring's knowledge of the law, he seemed to have no knowledge of these extensive studies of land ownership, for example, even in respect of that of “Maurer’s epoch-making writings on the primitive constitution of the German Mark, the basis of all German law, and of the ever-increasing mass of literature, chiefly stimulated by Maurer, which is devoted to proving the primitive common ownership of the land among all civilised peoples of Europe and Asia, and to showing the various forms of its existence and dissolution.” (p 225)
The Asiatic Mode of Production, which writers such as Adam Smith had analysed, arose, not on the back of individual landed property, but on the basis of a requirement for a collective ownership, because of a requirement for large-scale civil engineering projects, related, usually, to hydraulics, but, also, the need for land terracing.
“... the very term landlord is not to be found in the various languages...” (p 225)
