Karl Marx
(part 2)

III. Marx on Socialism/Communism

A.    The Communist Manifesto, 1848
(Reader, 490
http://csf.colorado.edu/mirrors/marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1840/com-man/ch02.htm)

We have seen above that the first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class to win the battle of democracy.

  The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the state, i.e., of the proletariat organized as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible.

  Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production; by means of measures, therefore, which appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionizing the mode of production. 

These measures will, of course, be different in different countries.

Nevertheless, in most advanced countries, the following will be pretty generally applicable.

1.     Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.

2.     A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.

3.     Abolition of all rights of inheritance.

4.     Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.

5.     Centralization of credit in the banks of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly.

6.     Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the state.

7.     Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the state; the bringing into cultivation of waste lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.

8.     Equal obligation of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.

9.     Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country.

10.Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children's factory labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, etc.

When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character.

B.    Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, 1875
(Reader, 529-531
http://csf.colorado.edu/mirrors/marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1870/gotha/ch01.htm)

What we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges. Accordingly, the individual producer receives back from society -- after the deductions have been made -- exactly what he gives to it. . . He receives a certificate from society that he has furnished such-and-such an amount of labor . . .; and with this certificate, he draws from the social stock of means of consumption as much as the same amount of labor cost. The same amount of labor which he has given to society in one form, he receives back in another. . .

  In a higher phase of communist society, . . . after labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly -- only then then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!

(Reader, 538
http://csf.colorado.edu/mirrors/marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1870/gotha/ch04.htm)

The question then arises: What transformation will the state undergo in communist society? In other words, what social functions will remain in existence there that are analogous to present state functions? . . .

   Between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.

C.    Engels, Anti-Dühring, 1876 - June 1878

(Reader, 722-723
http://csf.colorado.edu/mirrors/marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877-ad/p3.htm#c4)

Modern industry, which has taught us to convert the movement of molecules, something more or less universally feasible, into the movement of masses for technical purposes, has thereby to a considerable extent freed production from restrictions of locality. Water-power was local; steam-power is free. While water-power is necessarily rural, steam-power is by no means necessarily urban. It is capitalist utilisation which concentrates it mainly in the towns and changes factory villages into factory towns. But in so doing it at the same time undermines the conditions under which it operates. The first requirement of the steam-engine, and a main requirement of almost all branches of production in modern industry, is relatively pure water. But the factory town transforms all water into stinking manure. However much therefore urban concentration is a basic condition of capitalist production, each individual industrial capitalist is constantly striving to get away from the large towns necessarily created by this production, and to transfer his plant to the countryside. This process can be studied in detail in the textile industry districts of Lancashire and Yorkshire; modern capitalist industry is constantly bringing new large towns into being there by constant flight from the towns into the country. The situation is similar in the metal-working districts where, in part, other causes produce the same effects.

Once more, only the abolition of the capitalist character of modern industry can bring us out of this new vicious circle, can resolve this contradiction in modern industry, which is constantly reproducing itself. Only a society which makes it possible for its productive forces to dovetail harmoniously into each other on the basis of one single vast plan can allow industry to be distributed over the whole country in the way best adapted to its own development, and to the maintenance and development of the other elements of production.

IV. Criticisms of Marx

A.    The "Great Contradiction"

 (Eugen Böhm-Bawerk, Geschichte und Kritik der Kapitalzinstheorieen, 1884
http://csf.colorado.edu/mirrors/marxists.org/subject/economy/authors/bohm/ch03.htm)

Either products do actually exchange in the long run in proportion to the labour attaching to them—in which case an equalisation of the gains of capital is impossible; or there is an equalisation of the gains of capital—in which case it is impossible that products should continue to exchange in proportion to the labour attaching to them.

(Marx, Capital, Volume 3, 1894
http://csf.colorado.edu/mirrors/marxists.org/subject/economy/authors/bohm/ch03.htm)

Let us take five different spheres of production, and let the capital in each have a different organic composition as follows:

Here, in different spheres of production with the same degree of exploitation, we find considerably different rates of profit corresponding to the different organic composition of these capitals. . .

We let different portions of constant capital go into the value of the product of the same five capitals in the following table:

If we now again consider capitals I to V as a single total capital, we shall see that, in this case as well, the composition of the sums of these five capitals=500=390c+110v, so that we get the same average composition=78c+22v, and, similarly, the average surplus-value remains 22. If we divide this surplus-value uniformly among capitals I to V, we get the following commodity-prices:

Taken together, the commodities are sold at 2+7+17=26 above, and 8+18=26 below their value, so that the deviations of price from value balance out one another through the uniform distribution of surplus-value, or through addition of the average profit of 22 per 100 units of advanced capital to the respective cost-prices of the commodities I to V. One portion of the commodities is sold above its value in the same proportion in which the other is sold below it.

 (Eugen Böhm-Bawerk, Karl Marx and the Close of His System, 1896
http://csf.colorado.edu/mirrors/marxists.org/subject/economy/authors/bohm/ch03.htm)

In what relation does this doctrine of the third volume stand to the celebrated law of value of the first volume? Does it contain the solution of the seeming contradiction looked for with so much anxiety? . . .

In the first volume it was maintained, with the greatest emphasis, that all value is based on labour and labour alone, and that values of commodities were in proportion to the working time necessary for their production. . . . And now in the third volume we are told briefly and drily that what, according to the teaching of the first volume must be, is not and never can be; that individual commodities do and must exchange with each other in a proportion different from that of the labour incorporated in them, and this not accidentally and temporarily, but of necessity and permanently.

I cannot help myself; I see here no explanation and reconciliation of a contradiction, but the bare contradiction itself. Marx's third volume contradicts the first.