| |
|
|
[XLIII.]
It claims to
have obtained political freedom for everybody; to have loosed the chains
which fettered civil society; to have linked together different worlds;
to have created trade promoting friendship between the peoples; to have
created pure morality and a pleasant culture; to have given the people
civilised needs in place of their crude wants, and the means of satisfying
them. Meanwhile, it claims, the landowner--this idle, parasitic grain-profiteer--raises
the price of the people's basic necessities and so forces the capitalist
to raise wages without being able to increase productivity, thus impeding
[the growth of] the nation's annual income, the accumulation of capital,
and therefore the possibility of providing work for the people and wealth
for the country, eventually cancelling it, thus producing a general decline--whilst
he parasitically exploits every advantage of modern civilisation
without doing the least thing for it, and without even abating in the
slightest his feudal prejudices. Finally, let him--for whom the cultivation
of the land and the land itself exist only as a source of money, which
comes to him as a present--let him just take a look at his tenant farmer
and say whether he himself is not a downright, fantastic, sly scoundrel
who in his heart, and in actual fact, has for a long time belonged to
free industry and to lovely trade, however much he may protest
and prattle about historical memories and ethical or political goals.
Everything which he can really advance to justify himself is true only
of the cultivator of the land (the capitalist and the labourers),
of whom the landowner is rather the enemy. Thus he gives
evidence against himself. [Movable property claims that] without capital
landed property is dead, worthless matter; that its civilised victory
has discovered and made human labour the source of wealth in place of
the dead thing. (See Paul Louis Courier, Saint-Simon, Ganilh, Ricardo,
Mill, McCulloch and Destutt de Tracy and Michel Chevalier.)
....The real course of development
(to
be inserted at this point)
necessarily results in the victory of the capitalist over the landowner--that
is to say, of developed over undeveloped, immature private property--just
as in general, movement must triumph over immobility; open, self-conscious
baseness over hidden, unconscious baseness; cupidity over self-indulgence;
the avowedly restless, adroit self-interest of enlightenment over
the parochial, worldly-wise, artless, idle and fantastic self-interest
of superstition; and money over the other forms of private
property.
....Those states which sense something of
the danger attaching to fully developed free industry, to fully developed
pure morality and to fully developed philanthropic trade, try, but in
vain, to hold in check the capitalisation of landed property.
....Landed property in its distinction
from capital is private property--capital--still afflicted with local
and political prejudices; it is capital which has not yet extricated
itself from its entanglement with the world and found the form proper
to itself--capital not yet fully developed. It must achieve
its abstract, that is, its pure, expression in the course of its
cosmogony.
....The character of private property
is expressed by labour, capital, and the relations between these two.
The movement through which these constituents have to pass is:
....First. Unmediated or mediated
unity of the two.
....Capital and labour are at first still
united. Then, though separated and estranged, they reciprocally develop
and further each other as positive conditions.
....[Second.] The two in opposition, mutually
excluding each other. The worker knows the capitalist as his own non-existence,
and vice versa: each tries to wrench from the other his existence.
....[Third.] Opposition of each to
itself. Capital = stored-up labour = labour. As such it splits into
capital itself and its interest, and this latter again divides
into interest and profit. The capitalist is completely sacrificed.
He falls into the working class, whilst the worker (but only exceptionally)
becomes a capitalist. Labour as a moment of capital--its costs, i.e.
wages of labour--a sacrifice of capital.
....Splitting of labour into labour itself
and the wages of labour. The worker himself a capital, a commodity.
....Clash of mutual contradictions.
[XLIV.]
|
|