Anti-Duhring, Part II, Political Economy, VII – Capital and Surplus Value - Part 5 of 7

So, by working backwards from the developed form of capital – industrial capital – we uncover the source of surplus-value in surplus labour. Under capitalist production, this surplus value first takes the form of profit, and it is, then, the industrial capitalist that pays out of it the other deductions that go in rent, interest and taxes. But, working back, we see that the same surplus labour of the independent commodity producer is the source, also, of the rent of the landlord, interest of the usurer, of commercial profit, and of taxes. It is just that, in these cases, it is the independent commodity producer that must hand over this surplus value directly to the landlord, commercial capitalist and usurer.

“this relation between the owners of money or of commodities on the one hand, and those who possess nothing beyond their own labour-power on the other, is not a relation arising from natural history, nor is it one that is common to all historical periods: “It is itself clearly the result of a past historical development, the product ... of the extinction of a whole series of older forms of social production.” In fact we first encounter this free labourer on a mass scale in history at the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century, as a result of the dissolution of the feudal mode of production. With this, however, and with the creation of world trade and the world market dating from the same epoch, the basis was laid on which the mass of the existing movable wealth was of necessity increasingly converted into capital, and the capitalist mode of production, which is directed towards the production of surplus-value, of necessity increasingly the exclusively prevailing one.” (p 263)

Capital did not then arise simply out of money, as Duhring claims Marx said, but arises out of a historical process, and requires a series of material conditions created by that process. Duhring himself has no explanation for that development based on either history or logic. He is left once more to simply assert that it arises as a result of force.

“... he explains its origin by means of the old familiar adventures of the two men, one of whom at the dawn of history converted his means of production into capital by the use of violence against the other.” (p 265)

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