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[XLI.]
English
political economy that, whilst elevating labour to the position
of its sole principle, it should at the same time expound with
complete clarity the inverse relation between wages and interest
on capital, and the fact that the capitalist could normally only gain
by pressing down wages, and vice versa. Not the defrauding of the consumer,
but the capitalist and the worker taking advantage of each other, is shown
to be the normal relationship.
....The relations of private property contain
latent within them the relation of private property as labour, the
relation of private property as capital, and the mutual relation
of these two to one another. There is the production of human activity
as labour--that is, as an activity quite alien to itself, to man
and to nature, and therefore to consciousness and the expression of life
the abstract existence of man as a mere workman who may
therefore daily fall from his filled void into the absolute void--into
his social, and therefore actual, non-existence. On the other hand, there
is the production of the object of human activity as capital--in which
all the natural and social characteristic of the object is extinguished;
in which private property has lost its natural and social quality
(and therefore every political and social illusion, and is not associated
with any apparently human relations); in which the selfsame
capital remains the same in the most diverse natural and social
manifestations, totally indifferent to its real content. This contradiction,
driven to the limit, is of necessity the limit, the culmination, and the
downfall of the whole private-property relationship.
....It is therefore another great achievement
of modern English political economy to have declared rent of land to be
the difference in the interest yielded by the worst and the best land
under cultivation; to have [exposed] the landowner's romantic illusion--his
alleged social importance and the identity of his interest with the interest
of society, a view still propounded by Adam Smith after the Physiocrats;
and to [have] anticipated and prepared the movement of the real world
which will transform the landowner into an ordinary, prosaic capitalist,
and thus simplify and sharpen the contradiction [between capital
and labour] and hasten its resolution. Land as land,
and rent as rent, have lost their distinction of
rank and become insignificant capital and interest--or
rather, capital and interest that signify only money.
....The distinction between capital
and land, between profit and ground rent, and between both and wages,
and industry, agriculture, and immovable and movable
private property--this distinction is therefore not rooted in the
nature of things, but is a historical distinction, a fixed historical
moment in the formation and development of the contradiction between capital
and labour. In industry, etc., as opposed to immovable landed property,
only the manner in which industry first arose and the opposition to agriculture
within which industry developed, are expressed. This distinction only
continues to exist as a special sort of work--as an essential,
important and life-embracing distinction--so long as industry
(town life) develops over and against landed property (aristocratic
feudal life) and itself continues to bear the feudal character of its
opposite in the form of monopoly, craft, guild, corporation, etc., within
which labour still has a seemingly social significance, still the
significance of the real community, and has not yet reached the
stage of indifference to its content, of complete being-for-self,
i.e., of abstraction from all other being, and hence has not yet become
liberated capital.
[XLII.]
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