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Wage-Labor and Capital 
 
 BY 
 
 KARL MARX 
 
 Author of "Capital," "Poverty of Philosophy," 
 
 "Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte," 
 
 "Value, Price, and Profit," etc. 
 
 WITH PREFACE BY 
 
 FREDERICK ENGELS 
 
 TRANSLATED BY 
 
 HARRIET E. LOTHROP, M.D. 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 NEW YORK LABOR NEWS COMPANY 
 
 1902 
 
LIBRARY of CONGRESS 
 Tw© Copies Raeeived 
 
 FEB 12 1904 
 
 \ Copyright Entry 
 bo^ / C - M c V 
 CLASS CL XXc. No, 
 
 dOPY'S 
 
 Hft'6 
 
 Copyright, 1902 
 By new YORK LABOR NEWS COMPANY 
 
PUBLISHER'S NOTE 
 
 In this volume are presented two of the earlier writ- 
 ings of Karl Marx, with a special " Introduction " to 
 each by Frederick Engels. 
 
 The first, entitled Wage-Labor and Capital, was trans- 
 lated for us by Dr. Harriet E. Lothrop, of Boston, 
 from the standard German edition prepared by Engels 
 in 1 89 1. This is the only complete English edition of 
 it that has yet appeared, and its accuracy was doubly se- 
 cured by a critical comparison of its every sentence with 
 the German text, made at the request of the translator 
 by Herman Simpson, of New York, who also added foot- . 
 notes wherever comment seemed needful. In the perform- 
 ance of their respective task, both kept in mind the all- 
 important consideration, that in the works of Marx, as 
 in all works, truly scientific, the exact expression is an 
 essential factor and should not, therefore, be sacrificed 
 to " literary style " in its transfer from one language to 
 another. 
 
 To those who are already acquainted with Marx's 
 later essay on Value, Price, and Profit, this much earlier 
 one on Wage-Labor and Capital will no doubt seem 
 somewhat familiar. Still more familiar will both appear 
 to the industrious reader of Capital. And for obvious 
 reasons. In both are already promulgated, briefly yet 
 comprehensively, the fundamental economic truths de- 
 
4 PUBLISHERS' NOTE 
 
 veloped exhaustively, together with their many corol- 
 laries and sequences, in the magistral work by which 
 Marx is now better known than by any of his previous 
 writings. It will be observed, however, that each of 
 these two essays has its particular merits, and that both 
 may be perused with benefit, even by the advanced 
 student of Capital. For instance in Value, Price, and 
 Profit, which was written in 1865 — or only four years 
 before Capital appeared in print — the subject more 
 specially considered is the " law of value," which Marx 
 had by that time worked out to the utmost limit of per- 
 fection ; whereas in Wage-Labor and Capital, which was 
 written in the early part of 1849, the general proposi- 
 tions are rather formulated than demonstrated, but are 
 in greater number and variety, thus showing already the 
 powerful framework of a vast structure, fully planned 
 out, but requiring twenty years of patient labor for its 
 completion. 
 
 Of the discourse on Free Trade, which forms the sec- 
 ond part of the present volume, the history is given by 
 Engels in the " Introduction " that precedes it. The 
 excellent translation of it that is presented here was 
 first published some years ago by Lee and Shepard, of 
 Boston. It is the work of Florence Kelley, who not only 
 authorized us to use it, together with the introduction 
 that Engels had written at her own request, but, most 
 kindly also, revised our proofs. 
 
 New York Labor News Company. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 rXGB 
 
 Publishers* Note 3 
 
 Introduction by Frederick Engels - - - - - 7 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 I. Preliminary 19 
 
 11. What Are Wages? 22 
 
 III. By What is the Price of a Commodity Deter- 
 
 mined? 27 
 
 IV. By What are Wages Determined? - - - - 33 
 V. The Nature and Growth of Capital . - - 36 
 
 VI Relation of Wage-Labor to Capital - " - 39 
 
 VII. The General Law that Determines the Rise and 
 
 Fall of Wages and Profits - " - - - - 45 
 
 VIII. The Interests of Capital and Wage-Labor are 
 Diametrically Opposed — Effect of Growth 
 of Productive Capital on Wages - - -49 
 
 IX. Effect of Capitalist Competition on the Capi- 
 talist Class, the Middle Class, and the 
 Working Class - - - .- - - -54 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 This pamphlet first "appeared in the form of a series of 
 leading articles in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, begin- 
 ning April 4, 1849. The text is made up from lectures 
 delivered by Marx before the German Workingmen's 
 Club of Brussels in 1847. The series was never com- 
 pleted. The promise " to be continued/' at the end of 
 the editorial in Number 269 of the newspaper, remained 
 unfulfilled in consequence of the precipitous events of 
 that time : the invasion of Hungary by the Russians, and 
 the uprisings in Dresden, Iserlohn, Elberfeld, the Palati- 
 nate, and in Baden, which led to the suppression of the 
 paper on the nineteenth of May, 1849. And among the 
 papers left by Marx no manuscript of any continuation of 
 these articles has been found. 
 
 Wage-Labor and Capital has appeared as an inde- 
 pendent publication in several editions, the last of which 
 was issued by the Swiss Cooperative Printing Associa- 
 tion, in Hottingen-Zurich, in 1884. Hitherto, the several 
 editions have contained the exact wording of the original 
 articles. But since at least ten thousand copies of the 
 present edition are to be circulated as a propaganda tract, 
 the question necessarily forced itself upon me. Would 
 Marx himself, under these circumstances, have approved 
 of an unaltered literal reproduction of the original? 
 
 Marx, in the forties, had not yet completed his criticism 
 of political economy. This was not done until toward 
 
8 INTRODUCTION 
 
 the end of the fifties. Consequently, such of his writings 
 as were pubHshed before the first instalment of his Critique 
 of Political Economy was finished, deviate in some points 
 from those written after 1859, and contain expressions 
 and whole sentences which, viewed from the standpoint 
 of his later writings, appear inexact, and even incorrect. 
 Now, it goes without saying, that in ordinary edi- 
 tions, intended for the public in general, this earlier 
 standpoint, as a part of the intellectual development of 
 the author, has its place; that the author, as well as the 
 public, has an indisputable right to an unaltered reprint 
 of these older writings. In such a case, I would not 
 have dreamed of changing a single word in it. But it is 
 otherwise when the edition is destined almost exclusively 
 for the purpose of propaganda. In such a case, Marx 
 himself would unquestionably have brought the old work, 
 dating from 1849, i^^^o harmony with his new point of 
 view, and I feel sure that I am acting in his spirit when I 
 insert in this edition the few changes and additions which 
 are necessary in order to attain this object in all essential 
 points. Therefore I say to the reader at once : this 
 pamphlet is not as Marx wrote it in 1849, ^^^ approxi- 
 mately as Marx would have written it in 1891. More- 
 over, so many copies of the original text are in circula- 
 tion, that these will suffice until I can publish it again 
 unaltered in a complete edition of Marx's works, to ap- 
 pear at some future time. 
 
 My alterations center about one point. According 
 to the original reading, the worker sells his labor for 
 wages, which he receives from the capitalist; according 
 to the present text, he sells his labor-power. And for this 
 change, I must render an explanation : to the workers, 
 in order that they may understand that we are not dealing 
 here with a quibble and word- juggling, but with one of 
 
INTRODUCTION 9 
 
 the most important points in the whole range of political 
 economy; to the bourgeois, in order that they may con- 
 vince themselves how greatly the uneducated workers, 
 who can be easily made to grasp the most difficult 
 economic analyses, excel our supercilious " cultured " 
 folk, for whom such ticklish problems remain insoluble 
 their whole life long. 
 
 Classical political economy* borrowed from the indus- 
 trial practice the current notion of the manufacturer, that 
 he buys and pays for the labor of his employees. This 
 conception had been quite serviceable for the business 
 purposes of the manufacturer, his bookkeeping and price 
 calculation. But naively carried over into political 
 economy, it there produced truly wonderful errors and 
 confusions. 
 
 Political economy finds it an established fact that the 
 prices of all commodities, among them the price of the 
 commodity which it calls " labor," continually change ; 
 that they rise and fall in consequence of the most diverse 
 circumstances, which often have no connection whatso- 
 ever with the production of the commodities themselves, 
 so that prices appear to be determined, as a rule, by pure 
 chance. As soon, therefore, as political economy stepped 
 forth as a science, it was one of its first tasks to search 
 for the law that hid itself behind this chance, which ap- 
 parently determined the prices of commodities, and which 
 in reality controlled this very chance. Among the prices 
 
 1 " By classical political economy I understand that economy which, since the time 
 of W. Petty, has investigated the real relations of production in bourgeois society, in 
 contradistinction to vulgar economy, which deals with appearances only, ruminates 
 without ceasing on the materials long since provided by scientific economy, and there 
 seeks plausible explanations of the most obtrusive phenomena for bourgeois daily use, 
 but for the rest confines itself to systematizing in a pedantic way, and proclaiming for 
 everlasting truths, trite ideas held by the self-complacent bourgeoisie with regard to 
 their own world, to them the best of all possible worlds." (Karl Marx, Capital, p. 53.) 
 Classical bourgeois economy closes with David Ricardo, its greatest representative. — 
 Tr(i,n$l(^tor, 
 
lo INTRODUCTION 
 
 of commodities, fluctuating and oscillating, now upward, 
 now downward, the fixed central point was searched for 
 around which these fluctuations and oscillations were 
 taking place. In short : starting from the prices of com- 
 modities, political economy sought for the value of com- 
 modities as the regulating law, by means of which all 
 price fluctuations could be explained, and to which they 
 could all be reduced in the last resort. 
 
 And so classical political economy found that the value 
 of a commodity was determined by the labor incorporated 
 in it and requisite to its production. With this explana- 
 tion it was satisfied. And we too may for the present 
 stop at this point. But to avoid misconceptions, I will 
 remind the reader that to-day this explanation has be- 
 come wholly inadequate. Marx was the first to investi- 
 gate thoroughly into the value-forming quality of labor 
 and to discover that not all labor which is apparently, 
 or even really, necessary to the production of a com- 
 modity, imparts under all circumstances to this com- 
 modity a magnitude of value corresponding to the quan- 
 tity of labor used up. If, therefore, we say to-day in 
 short, with economists like Ricardo, that the value of a 
 commodity is determined by the labor necessary to its 
 production, we always imply the reservations and restric- 
 tions made by Marx. Thus much for our present pur- 
 pose ; further information can be found in Marx's Cri- 
 tique of Political Economy, which appeared in 1859, ^^id 
 in the first volume of Capital. 
 
 But so soon as the economists applied this determina- 
 tion of value by labor to the commodity *' labor," they 
 fell from one contradiction into another. How is the 
 value of 'Mabor " determined? By the necessary labor 
 embodied in it. But how much labor is embodied in the 
 labor of a laborer for a day, a week, a month, a year? 
 
INTRODUCTION n 
 
 The labor of a day, a week, a month, a year. If labor is 
 the measure of all values, we can express the " value 
 of labor " only in labor. But we know absolutely noth- 
 ing about the value of an hour's labor, if all that we 
 know about it is that it is equal to one hour's labor. So 
 thereby we have not advanced one hair's breadth nearer 
 our goal ; we are constantly turning about in a circle. 
 
 Classical economy, therefore, essayed another turn. It 
 said : the value of a commodity is equal to its cost of pro- 
 duction. But what is the cost of production of " labor " ? 
 In order to answer this question, the economists are 
 forced to strain logic just a little. Instead of investi- 
 gating the cost of production of labor itself, which un- 
 fortunately cannot be ascertained, they now investigate 
 the cost of production of the laborer. And this latter 
 can be ascertained. It changes according to time and cir- 
 cumstances, but for a given condition of society, in a 
 given locality, and in a given branch of production, it, 
 too, is given, at least within quite narrow limits. We live 
 to-day under the regime of capitalist production, under 
 which a large and steadily growing class of the popula- 
 tion can live only on the condition that it work for the 
 owners of the means of production — tools, machines, raw 
 materials, and means of subsistence — in return for wages. 
 On the basis of this mode of production, the laborer's 
 cost of production consists of the sum of the means of 
 subsistence (or their price in money) which on the aver- 
 age are requisite to enable him to work, to maintain in 
 him this capacity for work, and to replace him at his de- 
 parture, by reason of age, sickness, or death, with an- 
 other laborer — that is to say, to propagate the working 
 class in required numbers. 
 
 Let us assume that the money-price of these means 
 of subsistence averages 3 dollars a day. Our laborer 
 
12 INTRODUCTION 
 
 gets therefore a daily wage of 3 dollars from his em- 
 ployer. For this, the capitalist lets him work, say twelve 
 hours a day. Our capitalist, moreover, calculates some- 
 what in the following fashion: Let us assume that our 
 laborer (a machinist) has to make a part of a machine 
 which he finishes in one day. The raw material (iron 
 and brass in the necessary prepared form) costs 20 
 dollars. The consumption of coal by the steam-engine, 
 the wear and tear of this engine itself, of the turning- 
 lathe, and of the other tools with which our laborer 
 works, represent for one day and one laborer a value of 
 I dollar. The wages for one day are, according to our 
 assumption, 3 dollars. This makes a total of 24 dollars for 
 our piece of a machine. 
 
 But the capitalist calculates that on an average he will 
 receive for it a price of 2^ dollars from his customers, 
 or 3 dollars over and above his outlay. 
 
 Whence do the 3 dollars pocketed by the capitalist 
 come? According to the assertion of classical political 
 economy,, commodities are in the long run sold at their 
 values, that is, they are sold at prices which correspond 
 to the necessary quantities of labor contained in them. 
 The average price of our part of a machine — 2J dollars 
 — would therefore equal its value, i. e., equal the amount 
 of labor embodied in it. But of these 2y dollars, 21 
 dollars were values already existing before the machin- 
 ist began to work; 20 dollars were contained in the 
 raw material, i dollar in the fuel consumed during the 
 work and in the machines and tools used in the process 
 and reduced in their efficiency to the value of this 
 amount. There remain 6 dollars, which have been 
 added to the value of the raw material. But according 
 to the supposition of our economists themselves, these 6 
 dollars can arise only from the labor added to the raw 
 
INTRODUCTION 13 
 
 material by the laborer. His twelve hours' labor has 
 created, according to this, a new value of 6 dollars. 
 Therefore, the value of his twelve hours' labor would be 
 equivalent to 6 dollars. So we have at last discovered 
 what the " value of labor " is. 
 
 " Hold on there ! " cries our machinist. " Six dollars ? 
 But I have received only 3 dollars! My capitalist 
 swears high and dry that the value of my twelve hours' 
 labor is no more than 3 dollars, and if I were to demand 
 six, he'd laugh at me. What kind of a story is that ? " 
 
 If before this we got with our value of labor into a 
 vicious circle, we now surely have driven straight into 
 an insoluble contradiction. We searched for the value 
 of labor, and we found more than we can use. For the 
 laborer the value of the twelve hours' labor is 3 dollars ; 
 for the capitalist it is 6 dollars, of which he pays the 
 workingman 3 dollars as wages, and pockets the remaining 
 3 dollars himself. According to this, labor has not one, 
 but two values, and, moreover, two very different values ! 
 
 As soon as we reduce the values, now expressed in 
 money, to labor-time, the contradiction becomes even 
 more absurd. By the twelve hours' labor a new value 
 of 6 dollars is created. Therefore in six hours the new 
 value created equals 3 dollars — the amount which the 
 laborer receives for twelve hours' labor. For twelve 
 hours' labor the workingman receives, as an equivalent, 
 the product of six hours' labor. We are thus forced to 
 one of two conclusions : either labor has two values, one 
 of which is twice as large as the other, or twelve equals 
 six! In both cases we get pure absurdities. Turn and 
 twist as we may, we will not get out of this contradiction 
 as long as we speak of the buying and selling of " labor '* 
 and of the " value of labor." And just so it happened to 
 the political economists. The last offshoot of classical 
 
14 INTRODUCTION 
 
 political economy — the Ricardian school — was largely 
 wrecked on the insolubility of this contradiction. Classic 
 political economy had run itself into a blind alley. The 
 man who discovered the way out of this blind alley was 
 Karl Marx. 
 
 What the economists had considered as the cost of pro- 
 duction of " labor " was really the cost of production, 
 not of " labor/' but of the living laborer himself. And 
 what this laborer sold to the capitalist was not his labor. 
 " So soon as his labor really begins/' says Marx, " it 
 ceases to belong to him, and therefore can no longer be 
 sold by him." At the most, he could sell his future labor, 
 i. ^./assume the obligation of executing a certain piece of 
 work at a certain time. But in this way he does not sell 
 labor (which would first have to be performed), but for 
 a stipulated payment he places his labor-power at the 
 disposal of the capitalist for a certain time (in case of 
 time- wages), or for the performance of a certain task 
 (in case of piece-wages). He hires out or sells his 
 labor-power. But this labor-power has grown up with 
 his person and is inseparable from it. Its cost of pro- 
 duction therefore coincides with his own cost of produc- 
 tion ; what the economists called the cost of production of 
 labor is really the cost of production of the laborer, and 
 therewith of his labor-power. And thus we can also go 
 back from the cost of production of labor-power to the 
 value of labor-power, and determine the quantity of social 
 labor that is required for the production of a labor-power 
 of a given quality, as Marx has done in the chapter on 
 the " Buying and Selling of Labor-Power."^ 
 
 Now what takes place after the worker has sold his 
 labor-power, i. e., after he has placed his labor-power at 
 the disposal of the capitalist for stipulated wages — 
 
 1 Capital, vol. I, chapter vi. 
 
INTRODUCTION iS 
 
 whether time-wages or piece-wages ? The capitalist takes 
 the laborer into his workshop or factory, where all the 
 articles required for the work can be found — raw mate- 
 rials, auxiliary materials (coal, dyestuffs, etc.), tools and 
 machines. Here the worker begins to toil. His daily 
 wages are, as above, 3 dollars, and it makes no differ- 
 ence whether he earns them as day-wages or piece-wages. 
 We again assume that in twelve hours the worker adds 
 by his labor a new value of 6 dollars to the value of 
 the raw materials consumed, which new value the cap- 
 italist realizes by the sale of the finished piece of work. 
 Out of this new value he pays the worker his 3 dollars, 
 and the remaining 3 dollars he keeps himself. If, now, 
 the laborer creates in twelve hours a value of 6 dollars, 
 in six hours he creates a value of 3 dollars. Conse- 
 quently, after working six hours for the capitalist the 
 laborer has returned to him the equivalent of the 3 dol- 
 lars received as wages. After six hours' work both are 
 quits, neither one owing a penny to the other. 
 
 " Hold on there ! " now cries out the capitalist. *' I 
 have hired the laborer for a whole day, for twelve hours. 
 But six hours are only half a day. So work along lively 
 there until the other six hours are at an end — only then 
 will we be even." And, in fact, the laborer has to sub- 
 mit to the conditions of the contract upon which he en- 
 tered of " his own free will," and according to which he 
 bound himself to work twelve whole hours for a product 
 of labor which costs only six hours' labor. 
 
 Similarly with piece-wages. Let us suppose that in 
 twelve hours our worker makes twelve commodities. 
 Each of these costs 2 dollars in raw material and wear 
 and tear, and is sold for 2}^ dollars. On our former 
 assumption, the capitalist gives the laborer one-fourth of 
 a dollar for each piece, which makes a total of 3 dol- 
 
l6 INTRODUCTION 
 
 lars for the twelve pieces. To earn this, the worker re- 
 quires twelve hours. The capitalist receives 30 dollars 
 for the twelve pieces; deducting 24 dollars for raw ma- 
 terial and wear and tear, there remain 6 dollars, of 
 which he pays 3 dollars in wages and pockets the re- 
 maining 3. Just as before ! Here also the worker labors 
 six hours for himself, i. e., to replace his wages (half an 
 hour in each of the twelve hours), and six hours for the 
 capitalist. 
 
 The rock upon which the best economists were stranded 
 as long as they started out from the value of labor, van- 
 ishes as soon as we make our starting-point the value of 
 lahor-power. Labor-power is, in our present-day capi- 
 talist society, a commodity like every other commodity, 
 but yet a very peculiar commodity. It has, namely, the 
 peculiarity of being a value-creating force, the source of 
 value, and, moreover, when properly treated, the source 
 of more value than it possesses itself. In the present state 
 of production, human labor-power not only produces in a 
 day a greater value than it itself possesses and costs; 
 but with each new scientific discovery, with each new 
 technical invention, there also rises the surplus of its 
 daily production over its daily cost, while as a consequence 
 there diminishes that part of the working day in which the 
 laborer produces the equivalent of his day's wages, and, on 
 the other hand, lengthens that part of the working day in 
 which he must present labor gratis to the capitalist. 
 
 And this is the economic constitution of our entire 
 modern society: the working class alone produces all 
 values. For value is only another expression for labor, 
 that expression, namely, by which is designated, in our 
 capitalist society of to-day, the amount of socially neces- 
 sary labor embodied in a particular commodity. But these 
 values produced by the workers do not belong to the 
 
INTRODUCTION 17 
 
 workers. They belong to the owners of the raw mate- 
 rials, machines, tools, and money, which enable them to 
 buy the labor-power of the working class. Hence, the 
 working class gets back only a part of the entire mass 
 of products produced by it. And as we have just seen, 
 the other portion, which the capitalist class retains, and 
 which it has to share, at most, only with the landlord 
 class, is increasing with every new discovery and inven- 
 tion, while the share which falls to the working class (per 
 capita) rises but little and very slowly, or not at all, and 
 under certain conditions it may even fall. 
 
 But these discoveries and inventions which supplant one 
 another with ever-increasing speed, this productiveness 
 of human labor which increases from day to day to un- 
 heard-of proportions, at last gives rise to a conflict, in 
 which present capitalistic economy must go to ruin. On 
 the one hand, immeasurable wealth and a superfluity of 
 products with which the buyers cannot cope. On the 
 other hand, the great mass of society proletarized, trans- 
 formed into wage-laborers, and thereby disabled from ap- 
 propriating to themselves that superfluity of products. 
 The splitting up of society into a small class, immoder- 
 ately rich, and a large class of wage-laborers devoid of 
 all property, brings it about that this society smothers in 
 its own superfluity, while the great majority of its mem- 
 bers are scarcely, or not at all, protected from extreme 
 want. This condition becomes every day more absurd 
 and more unnecessary. It must be got rid of; it can be 
 got rid of. A new social order is possible, in which the 
 class differences of to-day will have disappeared, and in 
 which — perhaps after a short transition period, which, 
 though somewhat deficient in other respects, will in any 
 case be very useful morally — there will be the means of 
 life, of the enjoyment of life, and of the development and 
 
i8 INTRODUCTION 
 
 activity of all bodily and mental faculties, through the 
 systematic use and further development of the enormous 
 productive powers of society, which exists with us even 
 now, with equal obligation upon all to work. And that 
 the workers are growing ever more determined to achieve 
 this new social order will be proven on both sides of the 
 ocean on this dawning May Day, and on Sunday, the third 
 of May. 
 
 Frederick Engels. 
 London, April 30, 1891. 
 
WAGE-LABOR AND CAPITAL 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 PRELIMINARY 
 
 From various quarters we have been reproached for 
 neglecting to portray the economic conditions which form 
 the material basis of the present struggles between classes 
 and nations. With set purpose we have hitherto touched 
 upon these conditions only when they forced themselves 
 upon the surface of the political conflicts. 
 
 It was necessary, beyond everything else, to follow the 
 development of the class struggle in the history of our 
 own day, and to prove empirically, by the actual and 
 daily new-created historical material, that with the sub- 
 jugation of the working class, accomplished in the days 
 of February and March, the opponents of that class — the 
 bourgeois republicans in France, and the bourgeois and 
 peasant classes, who were fighting feudal absolutism 
 throughout the whole continent of Europe — were simul- 
 taneously conquered ; that the victory of the " moderate re- 
 public " in France sounded, at the same time, the fall of the 
 nations which had responded to the February revolution 
 with heroic wars of independence; and finally, that by 
 the victory over the revolutionary workingmen, Europe 
 fell back into its old double slavery, into the English- 
 Russian slavery. The June conflict in Paris, the fall of 
 Vienna; the tragi-comedy in Berlin in November, 1848, 
 
20 WAGE LABOR AND CAPITAL 
 
 the desperate efforts of Poland, Italy, and Hungary, the 
 starvation of Ireland into submission — these were the 
 chief events in which the European class struggle between 
 bourgeoisie and working class was summed up, and from 
 which we proved that every revolutionary uprising, how- 
 ever remote from the class struggle its object might ap- 
 pear, must of necessity fail until the revolutionary work- 
 ing class will have conquered, that every social reform 
 must remain a Utopia until the proletarian revolution and 
 the feudalistic counter-revolution will have been pitted 
 against each other in a world-wide war. In our presenta- 
 tion, as in reality, Belgium and Switzerland were tragi- 
 comic caricaturish genre pictures in the great historic 
 tableau, the one the model State of the bourgeois mon- 
 archy, the other the model State of the bourgeois republic ; 
 both of them States that flatter themselves to be just as 
 free from the class struggle as from the European revo- 
 lution.^ 
 
 But now, after our readers have seen the class struggle 
 of the year 1848 develop into colossal political propor- 
 tions, it is time to examine more closely the economic 
 conditions themselves upon which is founded the exist- 
 ence of the capitalist class and its class rule, as well 
 as the slavery of the workers. 
 
 We shall present in three great divisions : 
 
 I. The relation of wage-labor to capital, the slavery of 
 the worker, the sway of the capitalist, 
 
 II. The inevitable ruin of the middle classes and the 
 so-called commons^ under the present system. 
 
 1 It must be remembered that this was written over fifty years ago. To-day, the 
 class struggle in Switzerland, and especially in Belgium, has reached that degree of 
 development where it compels recognition from even the most superficial observers of 
 political and industrial life. — Translator. 
 
 2 Peculiar to Europe, and originating in the rank of the freeman or burgher of 
 feudal times ; citoyen, common, and Burger are equivalent terms. — Translator, 
 
PRELIMINARY 21 
 
 III. The commercial subjugation and exploitation of 
 the bourgeois classes of the various European nations by 
 the despot of the world market — England.'^ 
 
 We shall seek to portray this as simply and popularly 
 as possible, and shall not presuppose a knowledge of even 
 the most elementary notions of political economy. We 
 wish to be understood by the workers. And, moreover, 
 there prevails in Germany the most remarkable ignorance 
 and confusion of ideas in regard to the simplest economic 
 relations, from the patented defenders of existing con- 
 ditions, down to the socialistic wonder-zvorkers and the 
 unrecognized political geniuses, in which divided Ger- 
 many is even richer than in duodecimo princelings. We 
 therefore proceed first to the consideration of the first 
 problem. 
 
 1 As stated by Engels in the Introduction, the series of articles on Wage-Labor and 
 Capital remained incomplete ; the pamphlet is confined almost exclusively to a con- 
 sideration of the first "great division": the relation of wage-labor to capital.— 
 Translator, 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 [WHAT ARE WAGES? 
 
 If several workmen were to be asked : " How much 
 wages do you get ? " one would reply, " I get a dollar a 
 day from my employer " ; another, " I get two dollars a 
 day," and so on. According to the different branches of 
 industry in which they are employed, they would mention 
 different sums of money that they receive from their 
 respective employers for the completion of a certain task ; 
 for example, for weaving a yard of linen, or for setting 
 a page of type. Despite the variety of their statements, 
 they would all agree upon one point: that wages are the 
 amount of money which the capitalist pays for a cer- 
 tain period of work or for a certain amount of work. 
 
 Consequently it appears that the capitalist buys their 
 labor with money, and that for money they sell him their 
 labor. But this is merely an illusion. What they ac- 
 tually sell to the capitalist for money is their labor-power. 
 This labor-power the capitalist buys for a day, a week, 
 a month, etc. And after he has bought it, he uses it up 
 by letting the worker labor during the stipulated time. 
 With the same amount of money with which the capital- 
 ist has bought their labor-power, for example, with two 
 dollars, he could have bought a certain amount of sugar 
 or of any other commodity. The two dollars with which 
 he bought twenty pounds of sugar is the price of the 
 twenty pounds of sugar. The two dollars with which 
 he bought twelve hours' use of the labor-power, is the 
 price of twelve hours' labor. Labor-power, then, is a 
 
WHAT ARE WAGES? 23 
 
 commodity, no more, no less so than is the sugar. The 
 first is measured by the clock, the other by the scales. 
 
 Their commodity, labor-power, the workers exchange 
 for the commodity of the capitalist, for money, and, more- 
 over, this exchange takes place at a certain ratio. So much 
 money for so long a use of labor-power. For twelve hours* 
 weaving, two dollars. And these two dollars, do they 
 not represent all the other commodities which I can buy 
 for two dollars ? Therefore, actually, the worker has ex- 
 changed his commodity, labor-power, for commodities 
 of all kinds, and moreover at a certain ratio. By giving 
 him two dollars, the capitalist has given him so much 
 meat, so much clothing, so much wood, light, etc., in ex- 
 change for his day's work. The two dollars therefore 
 expresses the relation in which labor-power is exchanged 
 for other commodities, the exchange value of labor- 
 power. The exchange value of a commodity estimated in 
 money is called its price. Wages therefore are only a 
 special name for the price of labor-power, and are usually 
 called the price of work; it is the special name for the 
 price of this peculiar commodity, which has no other re- 
 pository than human flesh and blood. 
 
 Let us take any worker, for example, a weaver. The 
 capitalist supplies him with the loom and the yarn. The 
 weaver applies himself to work, and the yarn is turned 
 into cloth. The capitalist takes possession of the cloth 
 and sells it for twenty dollars, for example. Now are 
 the wages of the weaver a share of the cloth, of the twenty 
 dollars, of the product of his work? By no means. 
 Long before the cloth is sold, perhaps long before it is 
 fully woven, the weaver has received his wages. The 
 capitalist, then, does not pay his wages out of the money 
 which he will obtain from the cloth, but out of money 
 already on hand. Just as little as loom and yarn are the 
 
24 WAGE-LABOR AND CAPITAL 
 
 product of the weaver to whom they are supplied by the 
 employer, just so little are the commodities which he re- 
 ceives in exchange for his commodity — labor-power — 
 his product. It is possible that the employer found no pur- 
 chasers at all for his cloth. It is possible that he did not 
 get even the amount of the wages by its sale. It is pos- 
 sible that he sells it very profitably in proportion to the 
 weaver's wages. But all that does not concern the 
 weaver. With a part of his existing wealth, of his cap- 
 ital, the capitalist buys the labor-power of the weaver in 
 exactly the same manner as, with another part of his 
 wealth, he has bought the raw material — the yarn — and 
 the instrument of work — the loom. After he has made 
 these purchases, and among them belongs the labor-power 
 necessary to the production of the cloth, he produces only 
 with raw materials and instruments of labor belonging 
 to him. For our good weaver, too, is one of the instru- 
 ments of labor, and being in this respect on a par with 
 the loom, he has no more share in the product (the cloth), 
 or in the price of the product, than the loom itself has. 
 
 Wages, therefore, are not a share of the worker in the 
 commodities produced by himself. Wages are that part 
 of already existing commodities with which the capital- 
 ist buys a certain amount of productive labor-power. 
 
 Consequently, labor-power is a commodity which its 
 possessor, the wage-worker, sells to the capitalist. Why 
 does he sell it? In order to Hve. 
 
 But the putting of labor-power into action, i. e., the 
 work, is the active expression of the laborer's own life. 
 And this life activity he sells to another person in order 
 to secure the necessary means of life. His life-activity, 
 therefore, is but a means of securing his own existence. 
 He works that he may keep alive. He does not count 
 the labor itself as a part of his life ; it is rather a sacri- 
 
WHAT ARE WAGES? 25 
 
 fice of his life. It is a commodity that he has auctioned 
 off to another. The product of his activity, therefore, 
 is not the aim of his activity. What he produces for him- 
 self is not the silk that he weaves, not the gold that he 
 draws up the mining shaft, not the palace that he builds. 
 What he produces for himself is the wages, and silk, gold, 
 and palace are resolved for him into a certain quantity 
 of necessaries of life, perhaps into a cotton jacket, into 
 copper coins, and into a basement dwelling. And the 
 laborer who for twelve hours long, weaves, spins, bores, 
 turns, builds, shovels, breaks stone, carries hods, and so 
 on — is this twelve hours' weaving, spinning, boring, turn- 
 ing, building, shoveling, stone-breaking, regarded by him 
 as a manifestation of his life, as life ? Quite the contrary. 
 Life for him begins where this activity ceases, at the 
 table, at the tavern seat, in bed. The twelve hours' work, 
 on the other hand, has no meaning for him as weaving, 
 spinning, boring, and so on, but only as earnings, which 
 enable him to sit down at a table, to take his seat in the 
 tavern, and to lie down in a bed. 
 
 If the silkworm's object in spinning were to prolong 
 its existence as caterpillar, it would be a perfect example 
 of a wage-worker. Labor-power was not always a 
 commodity (merchandise). Labor was not always wage- 
 labor, i. e., free labor. The slave did not sell his labor- 
 power to the slave-owner, any more than the ox sells his 
 laboring force to the farmer. The slave, together with his 
 labor-power, was sold to his owner once for all. He is 
 a commodity that can pass from the hand of one owner 
 to that of another. He himself is a commodity, but his 
 labor-power is not his commodity. The serf sells^ only a 
 
 1 " Sells " is not a" very exact expression, for serfdom in its purity did not involve any 
 relations of buying and selling between the serf and the lord of the manor, the tributes 
 of the former to the latter consisting in labor and in kind. It is evident that Marx 
 uses here the word " sells " in the general sense of alienation.— Translator, 
 
2 WAGE-LABOR AND CAPITAL 
 
 portion of his labor-power. It is not he who receives 
 wages from the owner of the land ; it is rather the owner 
 of the land who receives a tribute from him. The serf 
 belongs to the soil, and to the lord of the soil he brings 
 its fruit. The free laborer, on the other hand, sells his 
 very self, and that by fractions. He auctions off eight, 
 ten, twelve, fifteen hours of his life, one day like the 
 next, to the highest bidder, to the owner of raw mate- 
 rials, tools, and means of life, i. e., to the capitalist. The 
 laborer belongs neither to an owner nor to the soil, but 
 eight, ten, twelve, fifteen hours of his daily life belong 
 to whomsoever buys them. The worker leaves the cap- 
 italist, to whom he has sold himself, as often as he chooses, 
 and the capitalist discharges him as often as he sees fit, 
 as soon as he no longer gets any use, or not the required 
 use, out of him. But the worker, whose only source of 
 income is the sale of his labor-power, cannot leave the 
 zvhole class of buyers, i e., the capitalist class, unless he 
 gives up his own existence. He does not belong to this 
 or to that capitalist, but to the capitalist class; and it is for 
 him to find his man, i. e., to find a buyer in this capital- 
 ist class. 
 
 Before entering more closely upon the relation of cap- 
 ital to wage-labor, we shall present briefly the most gen- 
 eral conditions which come into consideration in the de- 
 termination of wages. 
 
 Wages, as we have seen, are the price of a certain com- 
 modity, labor-power. Wages, therefore, are determined 
 by the same laws that determine the price of every other 
 commodity. The question then is, How is the price of a 
 commodity determined f 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 BY WHAT IS THE PRICE OF A COMMODITY DETERMINED? 
 
 By what is the price of a commodity determined? 
 
 By the competition between buyers and sellers, by the 
 relation of the demand to the supply, of the call to the 
 offer. The competition by which the price of a commod- 
 ity is determined is three-fold. 
 
 The same commodity is offered for sale by various sell- 
 ers. Whoever sells commodities of the same quality most 
 cheaply, is sure to drive the other sellers from the field 
 and to secure the greatest market for himself. The sell- 
 ers therefore fight among themselves for the sales, for 
 tjie market. Each one of them wishes to sell, and to 
 sell as much as possible, and if possible to sell alone, to 
 the exclusion of all other sellers. Each one sells cheaper 
 than the other. Thus there takes place a competition 
 among the sellers which forces down the price of the 
 commodities offered by them. 
 
 But there is also a competition among the buyers; this 
 upon its side causes the price of the proffered commod- 
 ities to rise. 
 
 Finally, there is competition between the buyers and the 
 sellers; the ones wish to purchase as cheaply as possible, 
 the others to sell as dearly as possible. The result of 
 this competition between buyers and sellers will depend 
 upon the relation between the two above-mentioned camps 
 of competitors, i. e., upon whether the competition in the 
 army of buyers or the competition in the army of sellers is 
 
28 WAGE-LABOR AND CAPITAL 
 
 stronger. Industry leads two great armies into the field 
 against each other, and each of these again is engaged in 
 a battle among its own troops in its own ranks. The 
 army among whose troops there is less fighting carries 
 off the victory over the opposing host. 
 
 Let us suppose that there are one hundred bales of 
 cotton in the market and at the same time purchasers for 
 one thousand bales of cotton. In this case the demand is 
 ten times greater than the supply. Competition among 
 the buyers, then, will be very strong; each of them tries 
 to get hold of one bale, if possible of the whole hundred 
 bales. This example is no arbitrary supposition. In the 
 history of commerce we have experienced periods of 
 scarcity of cotton, when some capitalists united together 
 and sought to buy up not one hundred bales, but the whole 
 cotton supply of the world. In the given case, then, one 
 buyer seeks to drive the others from the field by offering 
 a relatively higher price for the bales of cotton. The cot- 
 ton sellers, who perceive the troops of the enemy in the 
 most violent contention amiong themselves, and are there- 
 fore fully assured of the sale of their w^hole one hun- 
 dred bales, will beware of falling into one another's hair 
 in order to force down the price of cotton at the very 
 moment in which their opponents race with one another 
 to screw it up high. So, all of a sudden, peace reigns 
 in the army of sellers. They stand opposed to the buy- 
 ers like one man, fold their arms in philosophic content, 
 and their claims would find no Hmit, did not the offers of 
 even the most importunate of the buyers have their very 
 definite limit. 
 
 If, then, the supply of a commodity is less than the 
 demand for it, competition among the sellers is very slight, 
 or there may be none at all among them. In the same 
 proportion in which this competition decreases, the com- 
 
ARM AND HAMMER SERIES 
 
 Edited by Lucien Sanial 
 
 WAGE-LABOR AND CAPITAL 
 
In every historical epoch, the prevailing 
 mode of economic production and exchange, 
 and the social organization necessarily fol- 
 lowing from it, form the basis upon which 
 is built up, and from which alone can be 
 explained, the political and intellectual his- 
 tory of that epoch, — Karl Marx. 
 
THE PRICE OF A COMMODITY 29 
 
 petition among the buyers increases. Result : a more or 
 less considerable rise in the prices of commodities. 
 
 It is well known that the opposite case, with opposite 
 result, happens more frequently. Great excess of supply 
 over demand; desperate competition among the sellers, 
 and a lack of buyers; forced sales of commodities at 
 ridiculously low prices. 
 
 But what is a rise, and what a fall of prices ? What is 
 a high, and what a low price? A grain of sand is high 
 when examined through the microscope, and a tower is 
 low when compared with a mountain. And if the price 
 is determined by the relation of supply and demand, 
 by what is the relation of supply and demand deter- 
 mined ? 
 
 Let us turn to the first worthy citizen we meet. He 
 will not hesitate one moment, but, like another Alexander 
 the Great, will cut this metaphysical knot with his mul- 
 tiplication table. He will say to us : " If the production 
 of the commodities which I sell has cost me one hundred 
 dollars, and out of the sale of these goods I make one 
 hundred and ten dollars — within the year, you under- 
 stand — that's an honest, sound, reasonable profit. But if 
 in the exchange I receive one hundred and twenty or 
 one hundred and thirty dollars, that's a higher profit; 
 and if I should get as much as two hundred dollars, that 
 would be an extraordinary, an enormous profit." What 
 is it, then, that serves this citizen as the standard of his 
 profit ? The cost of the production of his commodities. If 
 in exchange for these goods he receives a quantity of other 
 goods whose production has cost less, he has lost. If 
 he receives in exchange for his goods a quantity of other 
 goods whose production has cost more, he has gained. 
 And he reckons the falling or rising of the profit ac- 
 cording to the degree at which the exchange value of his 
 
30 WAGE-LABOR AND CAPITAL 
 
 goods stands, whether above or below his zero — the cost 
 of production. 
 
 We have seen how the changing relation of supply and 
 demand causes now a rise, now a fall of prices ; now high, 
 now low prices. If the price of a commodity rises con- 
 siderably owing to a failing supply or a disproportionately 
 growing demand, then the price of some other commodity 
 must have fallen in proportion ; for of course the price of 
 a commodity only expresses in money the proportion in 
 which other commodities will be given in exchange for it. 
 If, for example, the price of a yard of silk rises from two 
 to three dollars, the price of silver has fallen in relation to 
 the silk, and in the same way the prices of all other com- 
 modities whose prices have remained stationary have fal- 
 len in relation to the price of silk. A larger quantity of 
 them must be given in exchange in order to obtain the 
 same amount of silk. Now, what will be the consequence 
 of a rise in the price of a particular commodity? A 
 mass of capital will be thrown into the prosperous branch 
 of industry, and this immigration of capital into the prov- 
 inces of the favored industry will continue until it yields 
 no more than the customary profits, or, rather, until the 
 price of its products, owing to overproduction, sinks 
 below the cost of production. 
 
 Conversely: if the price of a commodity falls below 
 its cost of production, then capital will be withdrawn 
 from the production of this commodity. Except in the 
 case of a branch of industry which has become obsolete 
 and is therefore doomed to disappear, the production of 
 such a commodity (that is, its supply), will, owing to 
 this flight of capital, continue to decrease until it cor- 
 responds to the demand, and the price of the commodity 
 rises again to the level of its cost of production ; or, 
 rather, until the supply has fallen below the demand and 
 
THE PRICE OF A COMMODITY 3^ 
 
 its price has again risen above its cost of production, for 
 the current price of a commodity is always either above 
 or below its cost of production. 
 
 We see how capital continually emigrates out of the 
 province of one industry and immigrates into that of an- 
 other. The high price produces an excessive immigra- 
 tion, and the low price an excessive emigration. 
 
 We could show, from another point of view, how not 
 only the supply, but also the demand, is determined by 
 the cost of production. But this would lead us too far 
 away from our subject. 
 
 We have just seen how the fluctuations of supply and 
 demand always bring the price of a commodity back to 
 its cost of production. The actual price of a commodity, 
 indeed, stands always above or below the cost of pro- 
 duction; but the rise and fall reciprocally balance each 
 other, so that, within a certain period of time, if the ebbs 
 and flows of the industry are reckoned up together, the 
 commodities will be exchanged for one another in ac- 
 cordance with their cost of production. Their price is 
 thus determined by their cost of production. 
 
 The determination of price by the cost of production 
 is not to be understood in the sense of the bourgeois 
 economists. The economists say that the average price 
 of commodities equals the cost of production: that this is 
 the law. The anarchic movement, in which the rise is 
 compensated for by a fall and the fall by a rise, they 
 regard as an accident. We might just as well consider 
 the fluctuations as the law, and the determination of the 
 price by cost of production as an accident — as is, 
 in fact, done by certain other economists. But it is 
 precisely these fluctuations which, viewed more closely, 
 carry the most frightful devastation in their train, and, 
 like an earthquake, cause bourgeois society to shake to 
 
32 WAGE-LABOR AND CAPITAL 
 
 its very foundations — it is precisely these fluctuations that 
 force the price to conform to the cost of production. 
 In the totality of this disorderly movement is to be 
 found its order. In the total course of this industrial 
 anarchy, in this circular movement, competition balances, 
 as it were, the one extravagance by the other. 
 
 We thus see that the price of a commodity is indeed 
 determined by its cost of production, but in such wise 
 that the periods in which the price of these commodities 
 rises above the cost of production are balanced by the 
 periods in which it sinks below the cost of production, 
 and vice versa. Of course this does not hold good for a 
 single given product of an industry, but only for that 
 branch of industry. So also it does not hold good for an 
 individual manufacturer, but only for the whole class 
 of manufacturers. 
 
 The determination of price by cost of production is 
 tantamount to the determination of price by the labor- 
 time requisite to the production of a commodity, for 
 the cost of production consists, first, of raw materials 
 and wear and tear of tools, etc., i. e., of industrial 
 products whose production has cost a certain number 
 of work-days, which therefore represent a certain amount 
 of labor-time, and, secondly, of direct labor, which is 
 also measured by its duration. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 BY WHAT ARE WAGES DETERMINED? 
 
 Now, the same general laws which regulate the price 
 of commodities in general, naturally regulate wages, or 
 the price of labor-power. Wages will now rise, now 
 fall, according to the relation of supply and demand, 
 according as competition shapes itself between the buyers 
 of labor-power, the capitalists, and the sellers of labor- 
 power, the workers. The fluctuations of wages corre- 
 spond to the fluctuations in the price of commodities 
 in general. But within the limits of these fluctuations 
 the price of labor-power zvill be determined by the cost 
 of its production, by the labor-time necessary for the 
 production of this commodity: labor-power. 
 
 What, then, is the cost of production of labor-power? 
 
 It is the cost required for the maintenance of the 
 laborer as a laborer, and for his education and training 
 as a laborer. 
 
 Therefore, the shorter the time required for training 
 up to a particular sort of work, the smaller is the cost 
 of production of the worker, the lower is the price of 
 his labor-power, his wages. In those branches of 
 industry in which hardly any period of apprenticeship 
 is necessary and the mere bodily existence of the 
 worker is sufficient, the cost of his production is 
 limited almost exclusively to the commodities necessary 
 for keeping him in working condition. The price of his 
 work will therefore be determined by the price of the 
 necessary means of subsistence. 
 
34 WAGE-LABOR AND CAPITAL 
 
 Here, however, there enters another consideration. 
 The manufacturer who calculates his cost of production 
 and, in accordance with it, the price of the product, 
 takes into account the wear and tear of the instruments 
 of labor. If a machine costs him, for example, one 
 thousand dollars, and this machine is used up in ten 
 years, he adds one hundred dollars annually to the 
 price of the commodities, in order to be able after ten 
 years to replace the worn-out machine with a new one. 
 In the same manner, the cost of production of simple 
 labor-power must include the cost of propagation, by 
 means of which the race of workers is enabled to 
 multiply itself and to replace v/orn-out workers with 
 new ones. The wear and tear of the worker, therefore, 
 is calculated in the same manner as the wear and tear 
 of the machine. 
 
 Thus, the cost of production of simple labor-power 
 amounts to the cost of the existence and propagation 
 of the worker. The price of this cost of existence and 
 propagation constitutes wages. The wages thus deter- 
 mined are called the minimum of wages. This minimum 
 wage, like the determination of the price of commodities 
 in general by cost of production, does not hold good 
 for the single individual, but only for the race. Indi- 
 vidual workers, indeed, millions of workers, do not 
 receive enough to be able to exist and to propagate 
 themselves; but the wages of the whole working class 
 adjust themselves, within the limits of their fluctuations, 
 to this minimum. 
 
 Now that we have come to an understanding in regard 
 to the most general laws which govern wages, as well 
 as the price of every other commodity, we can examine 
 our subject more particularly. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 THE NATURE AND GROWTH OF CAPITAL. 
 
 Capital consists of raw materials, instruments of 
 labor, and means of subsistence of all kinds, which are 
 employed in producing new raw materials, new instru- 
 ments, and new means of subsistence. All these com- 
 ponents of capital are created by labor, products of 
 labor, accumulated labor. Accumulated labor that serves 
 as a means to new production is capital. So say the 
 economists. What is a negro slave? A man of the 
 black race. The one explanation is worthy of the 
 other. 
 
 A negro is a negro. Only under certain conditions 
 does he become a slave. A cotton-spinning machine is 
 a machine for spinning cotton. Only under certain 
 conditions does it become capital. Torn away from 
 these conditions, it is as little capital as gold by itself 
 is money, or as sugar is the price of sugar. 
 
 In the process of production, human beings work not 
 only upon nature, but also upon one another. They 
 produce only by working together in a specified manner 
 and reciprocally exchanging their activities. In order 
 to produce, they enter into definite connections and 
 relations to one another, and only within these social 
 connections and relations does their influence upon 
 nature operate, i e., does production take place. 
 
 These social relations between the producers, and the 
 conditions under which they exchange their activities, 
 and share in the total act of production, will naturally 
 
36 WAGE-LABOR AND CAPITAL 
 
 vary according to the character of the means of pro- 
 duction. With the discovery of a new instrument of 
 warfare, the firearm, the whole internal organization 
 of the army was necessarily altered, the relations within 
 which individuals compose an army and can work as 
 an army were transformed, and the relation of different 
 armies to one another was likewise changed. 
 
 We thus see that the social relations within which 
 individuals produce, the social relations of production, 
 are altered, transformed, with the change and develop- 
 ment of the material means of production, of the forces 
 of production. The relations of production in their 
 totality constitute zvhat is called the social relations, 
 society, and, moreover, a society at a definite stage of 
 historic development, a society with peculiar, distinctive 
 character. Ancient society, feudal society, bourgeois (or 
 capitalist) society, are such totalities of relations of 
 production, each of which denotes a particular stage of 
 development in the history of mankind. 
 
 Capital also is a social relation of production. It is 
 a bourgeois relation of production, 3. relation of pro- 
 duction of bourgeois society. The means of subsistence, 
 the instruments of labor, the raw materials, of which 
 capital consists — have they not been produced and 
 accumulated under given social conditions, within defi- 
 nite social relations? Are they not employed for new 
 production, under given social conditions, within definite 
 social relations? And does not just this definite social 
 character stamp the products which serve for new pro- 
 duction as capital f 
 
 Capital consists not only of means of subsistence, 
 instruments of labor, and raw materials, not only of 
 material products: it consists just as much of exchange 
 values. All products of which it consists are com- 
 
THE NATURE AND GROWTH OF CAPITAL 37 
 
 modities. Capital, consequently, is not only a sum of 
 material products, it is a sum of commodities, of 
 exchange values, of social magnitudes. Capital remains 
 the same whether we put cotton in the place of wool, 
 rice in the place of wheat, steamships in the place of 
 railroads, provided only that the cotton, the rice, the 
 steamships — the body of capital — have the same ex- 
 change value, the same price, as the wool, the wheat, the 
 railroads, in which it was previously embodied. The 
 bodily form of capital may transform itself continually, 
 while capital does not suffer the least alteration. 
 
 But though every capital is a sum of commodities, 
 i. e., of exchange values, it does not follow that every 
 sum of commodities, of exchange values, is capital. 
 
 Every sum of exchange values is an exchange value. 
 Each particular exchange value is a sum of exchange 
 values. For example: a house worth one thousand 
 dollars is an exchange value of one thousand dollars; 
 a piece of paper worth one cent is a sum of exchange 
 values of one hundred one-hundredths of a cent. 
 Products which are exchangeable for others are com- 
 modities. The definite proportion in which they are 
 exchangeable forms their exchange value, or, expressed 
 in money, their price. The quantity of these products 
 can have no effect on their character as commodities, 
 as representing an exchange value, as having a certain 
 price. Whether a tree be large or small, it remains a 
 tree. Whether we exchange iron in pennyweights or 
 in hundred-weights for other products, does this alter 
 its character: its being a commodity, an exchange value? 
 According to the quantity, it is a commodity of greater 
 or of lesser value, of higher or of lower price. 
 
 How, then, does a sum of commodities, of exchange 
 values, become capital? 
 
3^ WAGE-LABOR AND CAPITAL 
 
 Thereby, that as an independent social power, i. e., as 
 the power of a part of society, it preserves itself and 
 multiplies by exchange with direct, living labor-power. 
 
 The existence of a class which possesses nothing but 
 the ability to work is a necessary presupposition of 
 capital. 
 
 It is only the dominion of past, accumulated, mate- 
 rialized labor over immediate living labor that stamps 
 the accumulated labor with the character of capital. 
 
 Capital does not consist in the fact that accumulated 
 labor serves living labor as a means for new production. 
 It consists in the fact that living labor serves accumulated 
 labor as the means of preserving and multiplying its 
 exchange value. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 RELATION OF WAGE-LABOR TO CAPITAL 
 
 What is it that takes place in the exchange between 
 capitaHst and wage-laborer? 
 
 The laborer receives means of subsistence in exchange 
 for his labor-power; but the capitalist receives, in 
 exchange for his means of subsistence, labor, the pro- 
 ductive activity of the laborer, the creative force by 
 which the worker not only replaces what he consumes, 
 but also gives to the accumulated labor a greater value 
 than it previously possessed. The laborer gets from 
 the capitalist a portion of the existing means of sub- 
 sistence. For vv^hat purpose do these means of subsist- 
 ence serve him? For immediate consumption. But as 
 soon as I consume means of subsistence, they are irrev- 
 ocably lost to me, unless I employ the time during 
 which these means sustain my life in producing new 
 means of subsistence, in creating by my labor new values 
 in place of the values lost in consumption. But it is 
 just this noble reproductive power that the laborer sur- 
 renders to the capitalist in exchange for means of 
 subsistence received. Consequently, he has lost it for 
 himself. 
 
 Let us take an example. For one dollar a laborer works 
 all day long in the fields of a farmer, to whom he thus 
 secures a return of two dollars. The farmer not only 
 receives the replaced value which he has given to the 
 day-laborer; he has doubled it. Therefore he has con- 
 
40 WAGE-LABOR AND CAPITAL 
 
 sumed the one dollar that he gave to the day-laborer 
 in a fruitful, productive manner. For the one dollar 
 he has bought the labor-power of the day-laborer, which 
 creates products of the soil of twice the value, and out 
 of one dollar makes two. The day-laborer, on the con- 
 trary, receives in the place of his productive force, whose 
 results he has just surrendered to the farmer, one dollar, 
 which he exchanges for means of subsistence, which 
 means of subsistence he consumes more or less quickly. 
 The one dollar has therefore been consumed in a double 
 manner — re productively for the capitalist, for it has been 
 exchanged for labor-power, which brought forth two 
 dollars; unproductively for the worker, for it has been 
 exchanged for means of subsistence which are lost for- 
 ever, and whose value he can obtain again only by 
 repeating the same exchange with the farmer. Capital 
 therefore presupposes wage-labor; wage-labor presup- 
 poses capital. They condition each other; each brings 
 the other into existence. 
 
 Does a worker in a cotton factory produce only cotton 
 goods? No. He produces capital. He produces values 
 which serve anew to command his work and to create 
 by means of it new values. 
 
 Capital can multiply itself only by exchanging itself 
 for labor-power, by calling wage-labor into life. The 
 labor-power of the wage-laborer can exchange itself for 
 capital only by increasing capital, by strengthening that 
 very power whose slave it is. Increase of capital, there- 
 fore, is increase of the proletariat, i. e., of the working 
 class. 
 
 And so, the bourgeoisie and its economists maintain 
 that the interest of the capitalist and of the laborer is 
 the same. And in fact, so they are! The worker 
 perishes if capital does not keep him busy. Capital 
 
RELATION OF WAGE-LABOR TO CAPITAL 41 
 
 perishes if it does not exploit labor-power, which, in 
 order to exploit, it must buy. The more quickly the 
 capital destined for production — the productive capital 
 — increases, the more prosperous industry is, the more 
 the bourgeoisie enriches itself, the better business gets, 
 so many more workers does the capitalist need, so much 
 the dearer does the worker sell himself. 
 
 The fastest possible grozvth of productive capital is, 
 therefore, the indispensable condition for a tolerable life 
 to the laborer. 
 
 But what is growth of productive capital? Growth 
 of the power of accumulated labor over living labor; 
 growth of the rule of the bourgeoisie over the working 
 class. When wage-labor produces the alien wealth 
 dominating it, the power hostile to it, capital, there 
 flow back to it its means of employment, i. e., its 
 means of subsistence, under the condition that it again 
 become a part of capital, that it become again the lever 
 whereby capital is to be forced into an accelerated 
 expansive movement. 
 
 To say that the interests of capital and the interests 
 of the workers are identical, signifies only this, that 
 capital and wage-labor are two sides of one and the 
 same relation. The one conditions the other in the same 
 way that the usurer and the borrower condition each 
 other. 
 
 As long as the wage-laborer remains a wage-laborer, 
 his lot is dependent upon capital. That is what the 
 boasted community of interests between worker and 
 capitalists amounts to. 
 
 If capital grows, the mass of wage-labor grows, the 
 number of wage- workers increases ; in a word, the sway 
 of capital extends over a greater mass of individuals. 
 
 Let us suppose the most favorable case : if productive 
 
42 WAGE-LABOR AND CAPITAL 
 
 capital grows, the demand for labor grows. It there- 
 fore increases the price of labor-power, wages. 
 
 A house may be large or small ; as long as the neigh- 
 boring houses are likewise small, it satisfies all social 
 requirements for a residence. But let there arise next 
 to the little house a palace, and the little house shrinks 
 into a hut. The little house now makes it clear that 
 its inmate has no social position at all to maintain, or 
 but a very insignificant one; and however high it may 
 shoot up in the course of civilization, if the neighboring 
 palace rises in equal or even in greater measure, the 
 occupant of the relatively little house will always find 
 himself more uncomfortable, more dissatisfied, more 
 cramped within his four walls. 
 
 An appreciable rise in wages presupposes a rapid 
 growth of productive capital. Rapid growth of produc- 
 tive capital calls forth just as rapid a growth of wealth, of 
 luxury, of social needs and social pleasures. Therefore, 
 although the pleasures of the laborer have increased, the 
 social gratification which they afford has fallen in com- 
 parison with the increased pleasures of the capitalist, 
 which are inaccessible to the worker, in comparison with 
 the stage of development of society in general. Our 
 wants and pleasures have their origin in society; we 
 therefore measure them in relation to society; we do not 
 measure them in relation to the objects which serve for 
 their gratification. Since they are of a social nature, they 
 are of a relative nature. 
 
 But wages are not at all determined merely by the sum 
 of commodities for which they may be exchanged. Other 
 factors enter into the problem. What the workers di- 
 rectly receive for their labor-power is a certain sum of 
 money. Are wages determined merely by this money 
 price ? 
 
RELATION OF WAGE-LABOR TO CAPITAL 43 
 
 In the sixteenth century the gold and silver circulation 
 in Europe increased in consequence of the discovery of 
 richer and more easily worked mines in America. The 
 value of gold and silver, therefore, fell in relation to other 
 commodities. The workers received the same amount of 
 coined silver for their labor-power as before. The money 
 price of their work remained the same, and yet their 
 wages had fallen, for in exchange for the same amount 
 of silver they obtained a smaller amount of other com- 
 modities. This was one of the circumstances which fur- 
 thered the growth of capital, the rise of the bourgeoisie, 
 in the eighteenth century. 
 
 Let us take another case. In the winter of 1847, i^ con- 
 sequence of bad harvests, the most indispensable means of 
 subsistence — grains, meat, butter, cheese, etc. — rose 
 greatly in price. Let us suppose that the workers still re- 
 ceived the same sum of money for their labor-power as 
 before. Did not their wages fall ? To be sure. For the 
 same money they received in exchange less bread, meat, 
 etc. Their wages fell, not because the value of silver 
 was less, but because the value of the means of subsistence 
 had increased. 
 
 Finally, let us suppose that the money price of labor- 
 power remained the same, while all agricultural and man- 
 ufactured commodities had fallen in price because of the 
 employment of new machines, of favorable seasons, etc. 
 For the same money the workers could now buy more 
 commodities of all kinds. Their wages have therefore 
 risen, just because their money value has not changed. 
 
 The money price of labor-power, the nominal wages, do 
 not therefore coincide with the actual or real wages, i e., 
 with the amount of commodities which are actually given 
 in exchange for the wages. If then we speak of a rise or 
 fall of wages, we have to keep in mind not only the money 
 
44 WAGE-LABOR AND CAPITAL 
 
 price of labor-power, the nominal wages, but also the real 
 wages. 
 
 But neither the nominal wages, i. e., the amount of 
 money for which the laborer sells himself to the capitalist, 
 nor the real wages, i. e., the amount of commodities which 
 he can buy for this money, exhausts the relations which 
 are comprehended in the term wages. 
 
 Wages are determined above all by their relation to the 
 gain, the profit, of the capitalist. In other words, wages 
 are a proportionate, relative quantity. 
 
 Real wages express the price of labor-power in relation 
 to the price of other commodities ; relative wages, on the 
 other hand, express the share of immediate labor in the 
 value newly created by it, in relation to the share of it 
 which falls to accumulated labor, to capital. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE GENERAL LAW THAT DETERMINES THE RISE AND FALL 
 OF WAGES AND PROFITS 
 
 We have said : " Wages are not a share of the worker 
 in the commodities produced by him. Wages are that 
 part of already existing commodities with which the cap- 
 itaHst buys a certain amount of productive labor-power." 
 But the capitalist must replace these wages out of the 
 price for which he sells the product made by the worker ; 
 he must so replace it that, as a rule, there remains to him 
 a surplus above the cost of production expended by him, 
 that is, he must get a profit. The selling price of the 
 commodities produced by the worker is divided, from the 
 point of view of the capitalist, into three parts : First, the 
 replacement of the price of the raw materials advanced by 
 him, in addition to the replacement of the wear and tear 
 of the tools, machines, and other instruments of labor 
 likewise advanced by him ; second, the replacement of the 
 wages advanced; and third, the surplus left over, i. e., 
 the profit of the capitalist. While the first part merely 
 replaces previously existing values, it is evident that 
 the replacement of the wages and the surplus (the 
 profit of capital) are as a whole taken out of the new 
 value, which is produced by the labor of the worker and 
 added to the raw materials. And in this sense we can 
 view wages as well as profit, for the purpose of compar- 
 ing them with each other, as shares in the product of the 
 worker. 
 
46 WAGE-LABOR AND CAPITAL 
 
 Real wages may remain the same, they may even rise, 
 nevertheless the relative wages may fall. Let us suppose, 
 for instance, that all means of subsistence have fallen two- 
 thirds in price, while the day's wages have fallen but one- 
 third ; for example, from three to two dollars. Although 
 the worker can now get a greater amount of commodi- 
 ties with these two dollars than he formerly did with 
 three dollars, yet his wages have decreased in proportion 
 to the gain of the capitalist. The profit of the capitalist 
 — the manufacturer's, for instance — has increased by 
 one dollar, which means that for a smaller amount of ex- 
 change values, which he pays to the worker, the latter 
 must produce a greater amount of exchange values 
 than before. The share of capital in proportion to the 
 share of labor has risen. The distribution of social 
 wealth between capital and labor has become still more 
 unequal. The capitalist commands a greater amount of 
 labor with the same capital. The power of the capital- 
 ist class over the working class has grown, the social posi- 
 tion of the worker has become worse, has been forced 
 down still another degree below that of the capitalist. 
 
 What, then, is the general law that determines the rise 
 and fall of zvages and profit in their reciprocal relation? 
 
 They stand in inverse proportion to each other. The 
 share of capital {profit) increases in the same proportion 
 in zvhich the share of labor {zvages) falls, and vice versa. 
 Profit rises in the same degree in which wages fall; it 
 falls in the same degree in zvhich wages rise. 
 
 It might perhaps be argued that the capitalist can gain 
 by an advantageous exchange of his products with other 
 capitalists, by a rise in the demand for his commodities, 
 v/hether in consequence of the opening up of new markets, 
 or in consequence of temporarily increased demands in 
 the old markets, and so on ; that the profit of the capital- 
 
GENERAL LAW OF WAGES AND PROFITS 47 
 
 ist, therefore, may be multiplied by taking advantage of 
 other capitalists, independently of the rise and fall of 
 wages, of the exchange value of labor-power ; or that the 
 profit of the capitalist may also rise through improve- 
 ments in the instruments of labor, new applications of the 
 forces of nature, and so on. 
 
 But in the first place it must be admitted that the result 
 remains the same, although brought about in an opposite 
 manner. Profit, indeed, has not risen because wages 
 have fallen, but wages have fallen because profit has 
 risen. With the same amount of another man's labor the 
 capitalist has bought a larger amount of exchange values 
 without having paid more for the labor on that account, 
 i. e.j the work is paid for less in proportion to the net 
 gain which it yields to the capitalist. 
 
 In the second place, it must be borne in mind that, de- 
 spite the fluctuations in the prices of commodities, the 
 average price of every commodity, the proportion in 
 which it exchanges for other commodities, is determined 
 by its cost of production. The acts of overreaching and 
 taking advantage of one another within the capitalist 
 ranks necessarily equalize themselves. The improve- 
 ments of machinery, the new applications of the forces 
 of nature in the service of production, make it possible to 
 produce in a given period of time, with the same amount 
 of labor and capital, a larger amount of products, but in 
 no wise a larger amount of exchange values. If by the 
 use of the spinning-machine I can furnish twice as much 
 yarn in an hour as before its invention — for instance, one 
 hundred pounds instead of fifty pounds — in the long run 
 I receive back, in exchange for this one hundred pounds, 
 no more commodities than I did before for fifty ; because 
 the cost of production has fallen by one-half, or because I 
 can furnish double the product at the same cost. 
 
48 WAGE-LABOR AND CAPITAL 
 
 Finally, in whatsoever proportion the capitalist class, 
 whether of one country or of the entire world-market, 
 distribute the net revenue of production among them- 
 selves, the total amount of this net revenue always con- 
 sists exclusively of the amount by which accumulated 
 labor has been increased from the proceeds of direct labor. 
 This whole amount, therefore, grows in the same pro- 
 portion in which labor augments capital, i. e., in the same 
 proportion in which profit rises as compared with wages. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 THE INTERESTS OF CAPITAL AND WAGE-LABOR ARE DIAMET- 
 RICALLY OPPOSED — EFFECT OF GROWTH OF PRO- 
 DUCTIVE CAPITAL ON WAGES 
 
 We thus see that, even if zve keep ourselves within the 
 relation of capital and wage-labor, the interests of capital 
 and the interests of zvage-labor are diametrically opposed 
 to each other. 
 
 A rapid growth of capital is synonymous with a rapid 
 growth of profits. Profits can grow rapidly only when 
 the price of labor — the relative wages — decrease just 
 as rapidly. Relative wages may fall, although the real 
 wages rise simultaneously with the nominal wages, with 
 the money value of labor, provided only that the real 
 wage does not rise in the same proportion as the profit. 
 If, for instance, in good business years wages rise five per 
 cent, while profits rise thirty per cent., the proportional, 
 the relative wage has not increased, but decreased. 
 
 If, therefore, the income of the worker increases with 
 the rapid growth of capital, there is at the same time a 
 widening of the social chasm that divides the worker from 
 the capitalist, an increase in the power of capital over 
 labor, a greater dependence of labor upon capital. 
 
 To say that " the worker has an interest in the rapid 
 growth of capital," means only this : that the more speed- 
 ily the worker augments the wealth of the capitalist, the 
 larger will be the crumbs which fall to him, the greater 
 
wag 
 
 50 WAGE-LABOR AND CAPITAL 
 
 will be the number of workers that can be called into 
 existence, the more can the mass of slaves dependent upon 
 capital be increased. 
 
 We have thus seen that even the most favorable situa- 
 tion for the working class, namely, the most rapid growth 
 of capital, however much it may improve the material life 
 of the worker, does not abolish the antagonism between 
 his interests and the interests of the capitalist. Profit and 
 wages remain as before, in inverse proportion. 
 
 f capital grows rapidly, wages may rise, but the profit 
 of capital rises disproportionately faster. The material 
 position of the worker has improved, but at the cost of 
 his social position. The social chasm that separates him 
 from the capitalist has widened. 
 
 Finally, to say that " the most favorable condition for 
 wage-labor is the fastest possible growth of produc- 
 tive capital," is the same as to say : the quicker the work- 
 ing class multiplies and augments the power inimical to it 
 — the wealth of another which lords it over that class — 
 the more favorable will be the conditions under which it 
 will be permitted to toil anew at the multiplication of 
 bourgeois wealth, at the enlargement of the power of 
 capital, content thus to forge for itself the golden chains 
 by which the bourgeoisie drags it in its train. 
 
 Growth of productive capital and rise of wages, are 
 they really so indissolubly united as the bourgeois econo- 
 mists maintain? We must not beHeve their mere words. 
 We dare not believe them even when they claim that the 
 fatter capital is the more will its slave be pampered. The 
 bourgeoisie is too much enlightened, it keeps its accounts 
 much too carefully, to share the prejudices of the feudal 
 lord, who makes an ostentatious display of the magnifi- 
 cence of his retinue. The conditions of existence of the 
 bourgeoisie compel it to attend carefully to its bookkeep- 
 
CAPITAL VERSUS WAGE-LABOR 5^ 
 
 ing. We must therefore examine more closely into the 
 following question : — 
 
 In what manner, does the growth of productive capital 
 affect wages? 
 
 If, as a whole, the productive capital of bourgeois so- 
 ciety grows, there takes place a more many-sided accu- 
 mulation of labor. The individual capitals increase in num- 
 ber and in magnitude. The multiplication of individual 
 capitals increases the competition among capitalists. The 
 increasing magnitude of individual capitals provides the 
 means for leading more powerful armies of workers with 
 more gigantic instruments of war upon the industrial 
 battlefield. 
 
 The one capitalist can drive the other from the field 
 and carry off his capital only by selling more cheaply. 
 In order to sell more cheaply without ruining himself, 
 he must produce more cheaply, i. e., increase the produc- 
 tive force of labor as much as possible. But the pro- 
 ductive force of labor is increased above all by a greater 
 division of labor and by a more general introduction and 
 constant improvement of machinery. The larger the 
 army of workers among whom the labor is subdivided, 
 the more gigantic the scale upon which machinery is in- 
 troduced, the more in proportion does the cost of produc- 
 tion decrease, the more fruitful is the labor. And so there 
 arises among the capitalists a universal rivalry for the 
 increase of the division of labor and of machinery and for 
 their exploitation upon the greatest possible scale. If, 
 now, by a greater division of labor, by the application and 
 improvement of new machines, by a more advantageous 
 exploitation of the forces of nature on a larger scale, a 
 capitalist has found the means of producing with the 
 same amount of labor (whether it be direct or accumu- 
 lated labor) a larger amount of products, of commodities, 
 
52 WAGE-LABOR AND CAPITAL 
 
 than his competitors — if, for instance, he can produce a 
 whole yard of linen in the same labor-time in which his 
 competitors weave half a yard — how will this capitalist 
 act? 
 
 He could keep on selling half a yard of linen at the 
 old market price; but this would not have the effect of 
 driving his opponents from the field and enlarging his 
 own market. But his need of a market has increased in 
 the same measure in which his productive power has ex- 
 tended. The more powerful and costly means of produc- 
 tion that he has called into existence enable him, it is true, 
 to sell his wares more cheaply, but they compel him at 
 the same time to sell more wares, to get control of a very 
 much greater market for his commodities ; consequently, 
 this capitalist will sell his half yard of linen more cheaply 
 than his competitors. 
 
 But the capitalist will not sell the whole yard so cheaply 
 as his competitors sell the half yard, although the produc- 
 tion of the whole yard costs no more to him than does that 
 of the half yard to the others. Otherwise he would make 
 no extra profit, and would get back in exchange only the 
 cost of production. He might obtain a greater income 
 from having set in motion a larger capital, but not from 
 having made a greater profit on his capital than the others. 
 Moreover, he attains the object he is aiming at if he prices 
 his goods only a small percentage lower than his com- 
 petitors. He drives them off the field, he wrests from 
 them at least a part of their market, by underselling them. 
 
 And finally, let us remember that the current price al- 
 ways stands either above or below the cost of production, 
 according as the sale of a commodity takes place in the 
 favorable or unfavorable period of the industry. Accord- 
 ing as the market price of the yard of linen stands above 
 or below its former cost of production, will the percentage 
 
CAPITAL VERSUS WAGE-LABOR 53 
 
 vary at which the capitalist who has made use of the new 
 and more fruitful means of production sells above his real 
 cost of production. 
 
 But the privilege of our capitalist is not of long dura- 
 tion. Other competing capitalists introduce the same 
 machines, the same division of labor, and introduce them 
 upon the same or even upon a greater scale. And finally 
 this introduction becomes so universal that the price of the 
 linen is lowered not only below its old, but even below its 
 new cost of production. 
 
 The capitalists therefore find themselves, in their mu- 
 tual relations, in the same situation in which they were 
 before the introduction of the new means of production ; 
 and if they are by these means enabled to offer double the 
 product at the old price, they are now forced to furnish 
 double the product for less than the old price. Havmg 
 arrived at the new point, the new cost of production, the 
 battle for supremacy in the market has to be fought out 
 anew. Given more division of labor and more machinery, 
 and there results a greater scale upon which division of 
 labor and machinery are exploited. And competition 
 again brings the same reaction against this result. 
 
CHAPTER IX' 
 
 EFFECT OF CAPITALIST COMPETITION ON THE CAPITALIST 
 CLASS^ THE MIDDLE CLASS^ AND THE WORKING CLASS. 
 
 We thus see how the method of production and the 
 means of production are constantly enlarged, revolution- 
 ized, how division of labor necessarily draws after it 
 greater division of labor, the employment of machinery 
 greater employment of machinery, work upon a large 
 scale work upon a still greater scale. This is the law that 
 continually throws capitalist production out of its old 
 ruts and compels capital to strain ever more the productive 
 forces of labor for the very reason that it has already 
 strained them — the law that grants it no respite, and 
 constantly shouts in its ear : March ! march ! 
 
 This is no other law than that which, within the period- 
 ical fluctuations of commerce, necessarily adjusts the 
 price of a commodity to its cost of production. 
 
 No matter how powerful the means of production 
 which a capitalist may bring into the field, competition 
 will make their adoption general; and from the moment 
 that they have been generally adopted, the sole result of 
 the greater productiveness of his capital will be that he 
 must furnish at the same price, ten, twenty, one hundred 
 times as much as before. But since he must find a mar- 
 ket for, perhaps, a thousand times as much, in order to 
 outweigh the lower selling price by the greater quantity 
 of the sales ; since now a more extensive sale is necessary 
 not only to gain a greater profit, but also in order to re- 
 place the cost of production (the instrument of produc- 
 
EFFECT OF CAPITALIST COMPETITION 55 
 
 tion itself grows always more costly, as we have seen), 
 and since this more extensive sale has become a question 
 of life and death not only for him, but also for his rivals, 
 the old struggle must begin again, and it is all the more 
 violent the more powerful the means of production al- 
 ready invented are. The division of labor and the appli- 
 cation of machinery zvill therefore take a fresh start, and 
 upon an even greater scale. 
 
 Whatever be the power of the means of production 
 which are employed, competition seeks to rob capital of 
 the golden fruits of this power by reducing the price of 
 commodities to the cost of production ; in the same meas- 
 ure in which production is cheapened, i. e., in the same 
 measure in which more can be produced with the same 
 amount of labor, it compels by a law which is irresistible 
 a still greater cheapening of production, the sale of ever 
 greater masses of product for smaller prices. Thus the 
 capitalist will have gained nothing more by his efforts 
 than the obligation to furnish a greater product in the 
 same labor-time ; in a word, more difficult conditions for 
 the profitable employment of his capital. While com- 
 petition, therefore, constantly pursues him with its law of 
 the cost of production and turns against himself every 
 weapon that he forges against his rivals, the capitalist 
 continually seeks to get the best of competition by rest- 
 lessly introducing further subdivision of labor and new 
 machines, which, though more expensive, enable him to 
 produce more cheaply, instead of waiting until the new 
 machines shall have been rendered obsolete by compe- 
 tition. 
 
 If we now conceive this feverish agitation as it operates 
 in the market of the whole world, we shall be in a position 
 to comprehend how the growth, accumulation, and con- 
 centration of capital bring in their train an evermore de- 
 
 LofC. 
 
$6 WAGE-LABOR AND CAPITAL 
 
 tailed subdivision of labor, an ever greater improvement 
 of old machines, and a constant application of new ma- 
 chines • — a process which goes on uninterruptedly, with 
 feverish haste, and upon an evermore gigantic scale. 
 
 But what effect do these conditions, which are insepar- 
 able from the growth of productive capital, have upon the 
 determination of wages? 
 
 The greater division of labor enables one laborer to ac- 
 complish the work of five, ten, or twenty laborers; it 
 therefore increases competition among the laborers five- 
 fold, tenfold, or twentyfold. The laborers compete not 
 only by selling themselves one cheaper than the other, 
 but also by one doing the work of five, then ten, or 
 twenty ; and they are forced to compete in this manner by 
 the division of labor, which is introduced and steadily 
 improved by capital. 
 
 Furthermore, to the same degree in which the division 
 of labor increases, is the labor simplified. The special 
 skill of the laborer becomes worthless. He becomes trans- 
 formed into a simple monotonous force of production, 
 with neither physical nor mental elasticity. His work 
 becomes accessible to all; therefore competitors press 
 upon him from all sides. Moreover, it must be re- 
 membered that the more simple, the more easily learned 
 the work is, so much the less is its cost of production, the 
 expense of its acquisition, and so much the lower must the 
 wages sink — for, like the price of any other commodity, 
 they are determined by the cost of production. Therefore, 
 in the same measure in which labor becomes more unsatis- 
 factory, more repulsive, does competition increase and 
 wages decrease. The laborer seeks to maintain the total 
 of his wages for a given time by performing more labor, 
 either by working a greater number of hours, or by ac- 
 complishing more in the same number of hours. Thus, 
 
EFFECT OF CAPITALIST COMPETITION 57 
 
 urged on by want, he himself muUipUes the disastrous 
 effects of division of labor. The result is: the more he 
 works, the less wages he receives. And for this simple 
 reason : the more he works, the more he competes against 
 his fellow workmen, the more he compels them to compete 
 against him, and to offer themselves on the same wretched 
 conditions as he does; so that, in the last analysis, he 
 competes against himself as a member of the working class. 
 
 Machinery produces the same effects, but upon a much 
 larger scale. It supplants skilled laborers by unskilled, 
 men by women, adults by children; where newly intro- 
 duced, it throws the workers upon the streets in great 
 masses; and as it becomes more highly developed and 
 more productive it discards them in additional though 
 smaller numbers. 
 
 We have hastily sketched in broad outlines the indus- 
 trial war of capitalists among themselves. This war has 
 the peculiarity that the battles in it are won less by recruit- 
 ing than by discharging the army of zvorkers. The gen- 
 erals {the capitalists) vie with one another as to zvho 
 can discharge the greatest number of industrial soldiers. 
 
 The economists tell us, to be sure, that those laborers 
 who have been rendered superfluous by machinery find 
 new avenues of employment. They dare not assert di- 
 rectly that the same laborers that have been discharged 
 find situations in new branches of labor. Facts cry out 
 too loudly against this lie. Strictly speaking, they only 
 maintain that new means of employment will be found 
 for other sections of the zvorking class; for example, for 
 that portion of the young generation of laborers who were 
 about to enter upon that branch of industry which had 
 just been abolished. Of course, this is a great satisfac- 
 tion to the disabled laborers. There will be no lack of 
 fresh exploitable blood and muscle for the Messrs. Capi- 
 
SS WAGE-LABOR AND CAPITAL 
 
 talists — the dead may bury their dead. This consola- 
 tion seems to be intended more for the comfort of the 
 capitalists themselves than of their laborers. If the whole 
 class of the wage-laborers were to be annihilated by ma- 
 chinery, how terrible that would be for capital, which, 
 without wage-labor, ceases to be capital! 
 
 But even if we assume that all who are directly forced 
 out of employment by machinery, as well as all of the ris- 
 ing generation who were waiting for a chance of employ- 
 ment in the same branch of industry, do actually find 
 some new employment : — are we to believe that this new 
 employment would pay as high wages as the one they 
 have lost? If it did, it would be in contradiction to all the 
 laws of political economy. We have seen how modern 
 industry always tends to the substitution of the simpler 
 and more subordinate employments for the higher and 
 more complex ones. How, then, could a mass of workers 
 thrown out of one branch of industry by machinery find 
 refuge in another branch, unless they were to be paid 
 more poorly? 
 
 An exception to the law has been adduced, namely, the 
 workers who are employed in the manufacture of machin- 
 ery itself. As soon as there is in industry a greater de- 
 mand for and a greater consumption of machinery, it is 
 said that the number of machines must necessarily in- 
 crease ; consequently, also, the manufacture of machines ; 
 consequently, also, the employment of workers in machine 
 manufacture ; — and the workers employed in this branch 
 of industry are skilled, even educated, workers. 
 
 Since the year 1840 this assertion, which even before 
 that date was only half true, has lost all semblance of 
 truth; for the most diverse machines are now applied to 
 the manufacture of the machines themselves on quite as 
 extensive a scale as in the manufacture of cotton yarn, 
 
EFFECT OF CAPITALIST COMPETITION 59 
 
 and the laborers employed in machine factories can but 
 play the role of very stupid machines alongside of the 
 highly ingenious machines. 
 
 But in place of the man who has been dismissed by the 
 machine, the factory may employ, perhaps, three children 
 and one woman! And must not the wages of the man 
 have previously sufficed for the three children and one 
 woman ? Must not the minimum wages have sufficed for 
 the preservation and propagation of the race? What, 
 then, do these beloved bourgeois phrases prove? Noth- 
 ing more than that now four times as many workers' 
 lives are used up as there were previously, in order to 
 obtain the livelihood of one working family. 
 
 To sum up: the more productive capital grows, tlw 
 more it extends the division of labor and the application of 
 machinery; the more the division of labor and the applica- 
 tion of machinery extend, the more does competition ex- 
 tend among the workers, the more do their wages shrink 
 together. ^ 
 
 In addition, the working class is also recruited from 
 the higher strata of society; a mass of small business 
 men and of people living upon the interest of their cap- 
 itals is precipitated into the ranks of the working class, 
 and they will have nothing else to do than to stretch out 
 their arms alongside of the arms of the workers. Thus 
 the forest of outstretched arms, begging for work, grows 
 ever thicker, while the arms themselves grow ever leaner. 
 
 It is evident that the small manufacturer cannot sur- 
 vive in a struggle in which the first condition of success 
 is production upon an ever greater scale. It is evident 
 that the small manufacturer cannot at the same time be 
 a big manufacturer. 
 
 That the interest on capital decreases in the same ratio 
 in which the mass and number of capitals increase, that 
 
6o WAGE-LABOR AND CAPITAL 
 
 it diminishes with the growth of capital, that therefore 
 the small capitalist can no longer live on his interest, 
 but must consequently throw himself upon industry by 
 joining the ranks of the small manufacturers and thereby 
 increasing the number of candidates for the proletariat — 
 all this requires no further elucidation. 
 
 Finally, in the same measure in which the capitalists are 
 compelled, by the movement described above, to exploit 
 the already existing gigantic means of production on an 
 ever-increasing scale, and for this purpose to set in mo- 
 tion all the mainsprings of credit, in the same measure do 
 they increase the industrial earthquakes, in the midst of 
 which the commercial world can preserve itself only by 
 sacrificing a portion of its wealth, its products, and even 
 its forces of production, to the gods of the lower world 
 — in short, the crises increase. They become more fre- 
 quent and more violent, if for no other reason, then for 
 this alone, that in the same measure in which the mass of 
 products grows, and therefore the needs for extensive 
 markets, in the same measure does the world market 
 shrink evermore, and ever fewer markets remain to be 
 exploited, since every previous crisis has subjected to the 
 commerce of the world a hitherto unconquered or but 
 superficially exploited market. But capital not alone lives 
 upon labor. Like a master, at once distinguished and bar- 
 barous, it drags with it into its grave the corpses of its 
 slaves, whole hecatombs of workers, who perish in the 
 crises. We thus see that if capital grows rapidly, competi- 
 tion among the zvorkers grows with even greater rapidity, 
 i. e., the means of employment and subsistence for the 
 working class decrease in proportion even more rapidly; 
 hut this notwithstanding, the rapid growth of capital is 
 the most favorable condition for wage-labor. 
 
FREE TRADE 
 
 AN ADDRESS DELIVERED BEFORE THE DEMOCRATIC 
 
 ASSOCIATION OF BRUSSELS, BELGIUM, 
 
 JANUARY 9, 1848. 
 
 BY 
 
 KARL MARX ' 
 
 TRANSLATED BY 
 
 FLORENCE KELLEY 
 
 WITH PREFACE BY 
 
 FREDERICK ENGELS 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 Towards the end of 1847, a Free Trade Congress was 
 held at Brussels. It was a strategic move in the free 
 trade campaign then carried on by the English manu- 
 facturers. Victorious at home by the repeal of the Com 
 Laws in 1846, they now invaded the Continent in order 
 to demand, in return for the free admission of continental 
 corn into England, the free admission of English manu- 
 factured goods to the continental markets. At this Con- 
 gress, Marx inscribed himself on the list of speakers ; but, 
 as might have been expected, things were so managed 
 that before his turn came on, the Congress was closed. 
 Thus, what Marx had to say on the free trade ques- 
 tion, he was compelled to say before the Democratic 
 Association of Brussels, an international body of which 
 he was one of the vice-presidents. 
 
 The question of free trade or protection being at 
 present on the order of the day in America, it has been 
 thought useful to publish an English translation of 
 Marx's speech, to which I have been asked to write an 
 introductory preface. 
 
 "The system of protection," says Marx,^ "was an 
 artificial means of manufacturing manufacturers, of ex- 
 propriating independent laborers, of capitalizing the na- 
 tional means of production and subsistence, and of forci- 
 
 * Karl Marx, Capital. London : Swan Sonnenschein Co,, 1886 ; p. 78*. 
 
4 INTRODUCTION 
 
 bly abbreviating the transition from the medieval to the 
 modern mode of production." Such was protection at 
 its origin in the seventeenth century, such it remained 
 well into the nineteenth century. It was then held to be 
 the normal policy of every civilized state in western Eu- 
 rope. The only exceptions were the smaller states of 
 Germany and Switzerland — not from dislike of the sys- 
 tem, but from the impossibility of applying it to such 
 small territories. 
 
 It was under the fostering wing of protection that 
 the system of modern industry — production by steam- 
 moved machinery — was hatched and developed in Eng- 
 land during the last third of the eighteenth century. 
 And, as if tariff-protection were not sufficient, the wars 
 against the French Revolution helped to secure to Eng- 
 land the monopoly of the new industrial methods. For 
 more than twenty years English men-of-war cut off the 
 industrial rivals of England from their respective colonial 
 markets, while they forcibly opened these markets to 
 English commerce. The secession of the South Ameri- 
 can colonies from the rule of their European mother- 
 countries, the conquest by England of all French and 
 Dutch colonies worth having, the progressive subjuga- 
 tion of India, turned the people of all these immense ter- 
 ritories into customers for English goods. England thus 
 supplemented the protection she practised at home, by the 
 free trade she forced upon her possible customers 
 abroad; and, thanks to this happy mixture of both sys- 
 tems, at the end of the wars, in 1815, she found herself, 
 with regard to all important branches of industry in pos- 
 session of the virtual monopoly of the trade of the world. 
 
 This monopoly was further extended and strengthened 
 during the ensuing years of peace. The start which Eng- 
 land had obtained during the war, was increased from 
 
INTRODUCTION 5 
 
 year to year; she seemed to distance more and more all 
 her possible rivals. The exports of manufactured goods 
 in ever growing quantities became indeed a question of 
 life and death to that country. And there seemed but 
 two obstacles in the way: the prohibitive or protective 
 legislation of other countries, and the taxes upon the 
 import of raw materials and articles of food in England. 
 
 Then the free trade doctrines of classical political 
 economy — of the French physiocrats and their English 
 successors, Adam Smith and Ricardo — ^became popular 
 in the land of John Bull. Protection at home was need- 
 less to manufacturers who beat all their foreign rivals, 
 and whose very existence was staked on the expansion of 
 their exports. Protection at home was of advantage to 
 none but the producers of articles of food and other raw 
 materials, to the agricultural interest, which, under then 
 existing circumstances in England, meant the receivers 
 of rent, the landed aristocracy. And this kind of pro- 
 tection was hurtful to the manufacturers. By taxing 
 raw materials it raised the price of the articles manu- 
 factured from them ; by taxing food, it raised the price of 
 labor; in both ways, it placed the British manufacturer 
 at a disadvantage as compared with his foreign compet- 
 itor. And, as all other countries sent to England chiefly 
 agricultural products, and drew from England chiefly 
 manufactured goods, repeal of the English protective 
 duties on corn and raw materials generally was at the 
 same time an appeal to foreign countries, to do away 
 with, or at least, to reduce, in return, the import duties 
 levied by them on English manufacturers. 
 
 After a long and violent struggle, the English indus- 
 trial capitalists, already in reality the leading class of 
 the nation, that class whose interests were then the chief 
 national interests, were victorious. The landed aris- 
 
6 INTRODUCTION 
 
 tocracy had to give in. The duties on corn and other 
 raw materials were repealed. Free trade became the 
 watchword of the day. To convert all other countries 
 to the gospel of free trade, and thus to create a world 
 in which England was the great manufacturing center, 
 with all other countries for its dependent agricultural dis- 
 tricts, that was the next task before the English manu- 
 facturers and their mouthpieces, the political economists. 
 That was the time of the Brussels Congress, the time 
 when Marx prepared the speech in question. While 
 recognizing that protection may still, under certain cir- 
 stances, for instance, in the Germany of 1847, be of 
 advantage to the manufacturing capitalists ; while proving 
 that free trade was not the panacea for all the evils 
 under which the working class suffered, and might even 
 aggravate them; he pronounces, ultimately and on prin- 
 ciple, in favor of free trade. To him, free trade is 
 the normal condition of modern capitalist production. 
 Only under free trade can the immense productive 
 powers of steam, of electricity, of machinery, be fully 
 developed ; and the quicker the pace of this development, 
 the sooner and the more fully will be realized its inevitable 
 results ; society splits up into two classes, capitalists here, 
 wage-laborers there; hereditary wealth on one side, he- 
 reditary poverty on the other; supply outstripping de- 
 mand, the markets being unable to absorb the ever grow- 
 ing mass of the productions of industry ; an ever recurring 
 cycle of prosperity, glut, crisis, panic, chronic depression 
 and gradual revival of trade, the harbinger not of perma- 
 nent improvement but of renewed over-production and 
 crisis; in short, productive forces expanding to such a 
 degree that they rebel, as against unbearable fetters, 
 against the social institutions under which they are put 
 in motion ; the only possible solution : a social revolution, 
 
INTRODUCTION 7 
 
 freeing the social productive forces from the fetters of 
 an antiquated social order, and the actual producers, the 
 great mass of the people, from wage-slavery. And because 
 free trade is the natural, the normal atmosphere for this 
 historical evolution, the economic medium in which the 
 conditions for the inevitable social revolution will be the 
 soonest created — for this reason, and for this alone, did 
 Marx declare in favor of free trade. 
 
 Anyhow, the years immediately following the victory 
 of free trade in England seemed to verify the most ex- 
 travagant expectations of prosperity founded upon that 
 event. British commerce rose to a fabulous amount; 
 the industrial monopoly of England on the market of 
 the world seemed more firmly established than ever ; new 
 iron works, new textile factories, arose by wholesale ; new 
 branches of industry grew up on every side. There 
 was, indeed, a severe crisis in 1857, but that was over- 
 come, and the onward movement in trade and manufac- 
 tures was soon again in full swing, until in 1866 a fresh 
 panic occurred, a panic, this time, which seems to mark 
 a new departure in the economic history of the world. 
 
 The unparalleled expansion of British manufactures 
 and commerce between 1848 and 1866 was no doubt 
 due, to a great extent, to the removal of the protective 
 duties on food and raw materials. But not entirely. 
 Other important changes took place simultaneously and 
 helped it on. The above years comprise the discovery 
 and working of the Californian and Australian gold fields 
 which increased so immensely the circulating medium of 
 the world ; they mark the final victory of steam over all 
 other means of transport; on the ocean, steamers now 
 superseded sailing vessels ; on land in all civilized coun- 
 tries, the railroad took the first place, the macadamized 
 road the second ; transport now became four times quicker 
 
8 INTRODUCTION 
 
 and four times cheaper. No wonder that under such fa- 
 vorable circumstances British manufactures worked by 
 steam should extend their sway at the expense of foreign 
 domestic industries based upon manual labor. But were 
 the other countries to sit still and to submit in humility 
 to this change, which degraded them to be mere agricul- 
 tural appendages of England, the "workshop of the 
 world"? 
 
 The foreign countries did nothing of the kind. 
 France, for nearly two hundred years, had screened her 
 manufactures behind a perfect Chinese wall of protec- 
 tion and prohibition, and had attained in all articles of 
 luxury and of taste a supremacy which England did not 
 even pretend to dispute. Switzerland, under perfect free 
 trade, possessed relatively important manufactures which 
 English competition could not touch. Germany, with a 
 tariff far more liberal than that of any other large con- 
 tinental country, was developing its manufactures at a rate 
 relatively more rapid than even England. And America, 
 who was, by the civil war of 1861, all at once thrown 
 upon her own resources, had to find means to meet a sud- 
 den demand for manufactured goods of all sorts, and 
 could only do so by creating manufactures of her own at 
 home. The war demand ceased with the war; but the 
 new manufactures were there, and had to meet British 
 competition. And the war had ripened, in America, the 
 insight that a nation of thirty-five millions doubling its 
 numbers in forty years at most, with such immense re- 
 sources, and surrounded by neighbors that must be for 
 years to come chiefly agriculturalists, that such a nation 
 had the "manifest destiny" to be independent of foreign 
 manufactures for its chief articles of consumption, and 
 to be so in time of peace as well as in time of war. And 
 then America turned protectionist, 
 
INTRODUCTION 9 
 
 It may now be fifteen years ago, I traveled in a rail- 
 way carriage with an intelligent Glasgow merchant, in- 
 terested, probably, in the iron trade. Talking about 
 America, he treated me to the old free trade lucubra- 
 tions: ''Was it not inconceivable that a nation of sharp 
 business men like the Americans should pay tribute to 
 indigenous iron masters and manufacturers, when they 
 could buy the same, if not a better article, ever so much 
 cheaper in this country?" And then he gave me ex- 
 amples as to how much the Americans taxed themselves 
 in order to enrich a few greedy iron masters. "Well," 
 I replied, "I think there is another side to the question. 
 You know that in coal, water-power, iron and other ores, 
 cheap food, home-grown cotton and other raw materials, 
 America has resources and advantages unequaled by any 
 European country; and that these resources cannot be 
 fully developed except by America becoming a manufac- 
 turing country. You will admit, too, that nowadays a 
 great nation like the Americans cannot exist on agricul- 
 ture alone ; that that would be tantamount to a condem- 
 nation to permanent barbarism and inferiority ; no great 
 nation can live, in our age, without manufactures of her 
 own. Well, then, if America must become a manufac- 
 turing country, and if she has every chance of not only 
 succeeding, but even outstripping her rivals, there are 
 two ways open to her : either to carry on, for, let us say, 
 fifty years, under free trade an extremely expensive 
 competitive war against English manufacturers that have 
 got nearly a hundred years' start ; or else to shut out, by 
 protective duties, English manufacturers for, say, twen- 
 ty-five years, with the almost absolute certainty that at 
 the end of the twenty-five years she will be able to hold 
 her own in the open market of the world. Which of the 
 two will be the cheapest and the shortest ? That is the ques- 
 
lo INTRODUCTION 
 
 tion. If you want to go from Glasgow to London, you 
 can take the parliamentary train at a penny a mile and 
 travel at the rate of twelve miles an hour. But you do 
 not ; your time is too valuable, you take the express, pay 
 twopence a mile and do forty miles an hour. Very well, 
 the Americans prefer to pay express fare and to go ex- 
 press speed." My Scotch free trader had not a word 
 in reply. 
 
 Protection, being a means of artificially manufacturing 
 manufacturers, may, therefore, appear useful not only 
 to an incompletely developed capitalist class still strug- 
 gling with feudalism; it may also give a lift to the ris- 
 ing capitalist class of a country which, like America, has 
 never known feudalism, but which has arrived at that 
 stage of development where the passage from agricul- 
 ture to manufactures becomes a necessity. America, 
 placed in that situation, decided in favor of protection. 
 Since that decision was carried out, the five and twenty 
 years of which I spoke to my fellow-traveler have about 
 passed, and, if I was not wrong, protection ought to have 
 done its task for America, and ought to be now becom- 
 ing a nuisance. 
 
 That has been my opinion for some time. Nearly two 
 years ago, I said to an American protectionist : "I am con- 
 vinced that if America goes in for free trade she will 
 in ten years have beaten England in the market of the 
 world." 
 
 Protection is at best an endless screw, and you never 
 know when you have done with it. By protecting one 
 industry, you directly or indirectly hurt all others, and 
 have therefore to protect them, too. By so doing you 
 again damage the industry that you first protected, and 
 have to compensate it; but this compensation reacts, as 
 before, on all other trades, and entitles them to redress, 
 
INTRODUCTION " 
 
 and so on ad infinitum. America, in this respect, offers us 
 a striking example of the best way to kill an important 
 industry by protection. In 1856, the total imports and 
 exports by sea of the United States amounted to $641,- 
 604,850. Of this amount, 75.2 per cent, were carried in 
 American, and only 24.8 per cent, in foreign vessels. 
 British ocean-steamers were already then encroaching 
 upon American sailing vessels; yet, in i860, of a total 
 sea-going trade of $762,288,550, American vessels still 
 carried 66.5 per cent. The civil war came on, and pro- 
 tection to American shipbuilding; and the latter plan 
 was so successful that it has nearly completely driven the 
 American flag from the high seas. In 1887 the total sea- 
 going trade of the United States amounted to $1,408,502,- 
 979; but of this total only 13.80 per cent, were carried in 
 American, and 86.20 per cent, in foreign bottoms. The 
 goods carried by American ships amounted, in 1856, to 
 $482,268,275 ; in i860 to $507,274,757. In 1887 they had 
 sunk to $194,356,746.^ Forty years ago, the American 
 flag was the most dangerous rival of the British flag, 
 and bade fair to outstrip it on the ocean ; now it is no- 
 where. Protection to shipbuilding has killed both ship- 
 ping and shipbuilding. 
 
 Another point. Improvements in the methods of pro- 
 duction nowadays follow each other so rapidly, and 
 change the character of entire branches of industry so 
 suddenly and so completely, that what may have been 
 yesterday a fairly balanced protective tariff is no longer 
 so to-day. Let us take another example from the Report 
 of the Secretary of the Treasury for 1887 : 
 
 ''Improvement in recent years in the machinery em- 
 ployed in combing wool has so changed the character of 
 
 1 Annual Report of the Secretary of the Treasury, etc for the year 1887. Wash- 
 ington : 1887 ; pp. xxviii, xxix. 
 
12 INTRODUCTION 
 
 what are commercially known as worsted cloths that the 
 latter have largely superseded woollen cloths for use as 
 men's wearing apparel. This change . . . has 
 operated to the serious injury of our domestic manufac- 
 turers of these (worsted) goods, because the duty on the 
 wool which they must use is the same as that upon wool 
 used in making woollen cloths, while the rates of duty 
 imposed upon the latter when valued at not ex- 
 ceeding 80 cents per pound are 35 cents per pound 
 and 35 per cent, ad valorem, whereas the duty on 
 worsted cloths valued at not exceeding 80 cents ranges 
 from 10 to 24 cents per pound and 35 per cent, ad 
 valorem. In some cases the duty on the wool used 
 in making worsted cloths exceeds the duty imposed on the 
 finished article f' Thus what was protection to the home 
 industry yesterday, turns out to-day to be a premium 
 to the foreign importer ; and well may the Secretary of the 
 Treasury say : "There is much reason to believe that the 
 manufacture of worsted cloths must soon cease in this 
 country unless the tariff law in this regard is amended" 
 (p. xix). But to amend it, you will have to fight the 
 manufacturers of woollen cloths who profit by this state 
 of things; you will have to open a regular campaign to 
 bring the majority of both Houses of Congress, and 
 eventually the public opinion of the country, round to 
 your views, and the question is, Will that pay? 
 
 But the worst of protection is, that when you once 
 have got it you cannot easily get rid of it. Difficult as 
 is the process of adjustment of an equitable tariff, the 
 return to free trade is immensely more difficult. The 
 circumstances which permitted England to accomplish 
 the change in a few years, v/ill not occur again. And 
 even there the struggle dated from 1823 (Huskisson), 
 commenced to be successful in 1842 (Peel's tariff), and 
 
INTRODUCTION 13 
 
 was continued for several years after the repeal of the 
 Corn Laws. Thus protection to the silk manufacture 
 (the only one which had still to fear foreign competition) 
 was prolonged for a series of years and then granted in 
 another, positively infamous form; while the other tex- 
 tile industries were subjected to the Factory Act, which 
 limited the hours of labor of women, young persons and 
 children, the silk trade was favored with considerable 
 exceptions to the general rule, enabling them to work 
 younger children, and to work the children and young 
 persons longer hours, than the other textile trades. The 
 monopoly that the hypocritical free traders repealed 
 with regard to the foreign competitors, that monopoly 
 they created anew at the expense of the health and lives 
 of English children. 
 
 But no country will again be able to pass from protec- 
 tion to free trade at a time when all, or nearly all 
 branches of its manufactures can defy foreign competi- 
 tion in the open market. The necessity of the change 
 will come long before such a happy state may be even 
 hoped for. That necessity will make itself evident in 
 different trades at different times; and from the con- 
 flicting interests of these trades, the most edifying 
 squabbles, lobby intrigues, and parliamentary conspiracies 
 will arise. The machinist, engineer, and shipbuilder may 
 find that the protection granted to the iron master raises 
 the price of his goods so much that his export trade is 
 thereby, and thereby alone, prevented; the cotton-cloth 
 manufacturer might see his way to driving English cloth 
 out of the Chinese and Indian markets, but for the high 
 price he has to pay for the yarn, on account of protection 
 to spinners ; and so forth. The moment a branch of na- 
 tional industry has completely conquered the home mar- 
 ket, that moment exportation becomes a necessity to it. 
 
14 INTRODUCTION 
 
 Under capitalist conditions, an industry either expands 
 or wanes. A trade cannot remain stationary; stoppage 
 of expansion is incipient ruin ; the progress of mechanical 
 and chemical invention, by constantly superseding hu- 
 man labor, and ever more rapidly increasing and concen- 
 trating capital, creates in every stagnant industry a glut 
 both of workers and of capital, a glut which finds no 
 vent anywhere, because the same process is taking place 
 in all other industries. Thus the passage from a home 
 to an export trade becomes a question of life and death 
 for the industries concerned ; but they are met by the es- 
 tablished rights, the vested interests of others who as 
 yet find protection either safer or more profitable than 
 free trade. Then ensues a long and obstinate fight be- 
 tween free traders and protectionists; a fight where, 
 on both sides, the leadership soon passes out of the hands 
 of the people directly interested into those of professional 
 politicians, the wire-pullers of the traditional political 
 parties, whose interest is, not a settlement of the ques- 
 tion, but its being kept open forever; and the result of 
 an immense loss of time, energy, and money is a series of 
 compromises, favoring now one, now the other side, and 
 drifting slowly though not majestically in the direction 
 of free trade — unless protection manages, in the mean- 
 time, to make itself utterly insupportable to the nation, 
 which is just now likely to be the case in America. 
 
 There is, however, another kind of protection, the 
 worst of all, and that is exhibited in Germany. Ger- 
 many, too, began to feel, soon after 1815, the necessity 
 of a quicker development of her manufactures. But the 
 first condition of that was the creation of a home mar- 
 ket by the removal of the innumerable customs lines and 
 varieties of fiscal legislation formed by the small Ger- 
 man states, in other words, the formation of a German 
 
INTRODUCTION iS 
 
 Customs Union or Zollverein. That could only be done 
 on the basis of a liberal tariff, calculated rather to raise 
 a common revenue than to protect home production. On 
 no other condition could the small states have been in- 
 duced to join. Thus the new German tariff, though 
 slightly protective to some trades, was at the time of its 
 introduction a model of free trade legislation; and it 
 remained so, although, ever since 1830, the majority of 
 German manufacturers kept clamoring for protection. 
 Yet, under this extremely liberal tariff, and in spite of 
 German household industries based on hand-labor being 
 mercilessly crushed out by the competition of English fac- 
 tories worked by steam, the transition from manual labor 
 to machinery was gradually accomplished in Germany too, 
 and is now nearly complete; the transformation of Ger- 
 many from an agricultural to a manufacturing country 
 went on at the same pace, and was, since 1866, assisted 
 by favorable political events: the establishment of a 
 strong central government, and federal legislature, in- 
 suring uniformity in the laws regulating trade, as well 
 as in currency, weights and measures, and, finally, the 
 flood of the French milliards. Thus, about 1874, Ger- 
 man trade on the market of the world ranked next to 
 that of Great Britain,^ and Germany employed more 
 steam power in manufactures and locomotion than any 
 European Continental country. The proof has thus been 
 furnished that even nowadays, in spite of the enormous 
 start that English industry has got, a large country can 
 work its way up to successful competition, in the open 
 market, with England. 
 
 Then, all at once, a change of front was made: Ger- 
 
 » General Trade of Exports and Imports added in 1874, in millions of dollars : Great 
 Britain — 3300 ; Germany — 2325; France — 1665; United States — 1245 millions of 
 dollars. (Kolb, Statistik, 7th edit. Leipsic : 1875 ; p. 790.) 
 
1 6 INTRODUCTION 
 
 many turned protectionist, at a moment when more than 
 ever free trade seemed a necessity for her. The change 
 was no doubt absurd; but it may be explained. While 
 Germany had been a corn-exporting country, the whole 
 agricultural interest, not less than the whole shipping 
 trade, had been ardent free traders. But in 1874, in- 
 stead of exporting, Germany required large supplies of 
 corn from abroad. About that time, America began to 
 flood Europe with enormous supplies of cheap corn; 
 wherever they went, they brought down the money reve- 
 nue yielded by the land, and consequently its rent; and 
 from that moment, the agricultural interest, all over 
 Europe, began to clamor for protection. At the same 
 time, manufacturers in Germany were suffering from the 
 effect of the reckless overtrading brought on by the 
 influx of the French milliards, while England, whose 
 trade, ever since the crisis of 1866, had been in a state 
 of chronic depression, inundated all accessible markets 
 with goods unsalable at home and offered abroad at 
 ruinously low prices. Thus it happened that German 
 manufacturers, though depending, above all, upon ex- 
 port, began to see in protection a means of securing to 
 themselves the exclusive supply of the home market. 
 And the government, entirely in the hands of the landed 
 aristocracy and squirearchy, was only too glad to profit 
 by this circumstance, in order to benefit the receivers of 
 the rent of land, by offering protective duties to both 
 landlords and manufacturers. In 1878, a highly protec- 
 tive tariff was enacted both for agricultural products and 
 for manufactured goods. 
 
 The consequence was that henceforth the exportation 
 of German manufactures was carried on at the direct 
 cost of the home consumers. Wherever possible, "rings" 
 or " trusts were formed to regulate the export trade and 
 
INTRODUCTION ^7 
 
 even production itself. The German iron trade is in 
 the hands of a few large firms, mostly joint stock com- 
 panies, who, betwixt them, can produce about four times 
 as much iron as the average consumption of the country 
 can absorb. To avoid unnecessary competition with one 
 another, these firms have formed a trust which divides 
 amongst them all foreign contracts, and determines in 
 each case the firm that is to make the real tender. This 
 ''trust," some years ago, had even come to an agreement 
 with the English iron masters, but this no longer sub- 
 sists. Similarly, the Westphalian coal mines (producing 
 about thirty million tons annually) had formed a trust 
 to regulate production, tenders for contracts, and prices. 
 And, altogether, any German manufacturer will tell you 
 that the only thing the protective duties do for him is to 
 enable him to recoup himself in the home market for 
 the ruinous prices he has to take abroad. And this is 
 not all. This absurd system of protection to manufac- 
 turers is nothing but the sop thrown to industrial capi- 
 talists to induce them to support a still more outrageous 
 monopoly given to the landed interest. Not only is all 
 agricultural produce subjected to heavy import duties 
 which are increased from year to year, but certain rural 
 industries, carried on on large estates for account of 
 the proprietor, are positively endowed out of the public 
 purse. The beet-root sugar manufacture is not only pro- 
 tected, but receives enormous sums in the shape of export 
 premiums. One who ought to know is of opinion that if 
 the exported sugar were all thrown into the sea, the man- 
 ufacturer would still clear a profit out of the govern- 
 ment premium. Similarly, the potato-spirit distilleries 
 receive, in consequence of recent legislation, a present, out 
 of the pockets of the public, of about nine million dol- 
 lars a year. And as almost every large landowner in 
 
I 8 INTRODUCTION 
 
 northeastern Germany is either a beet-root sugar man- 
 ufacturer or a potato-spirit distiller, or both, no wondei: 
 the world is literally deluged with their productions. 
 
 This policy, ruinous under any circumstances, is 
 doubly so in a country whose manufactures keep up their 
 standing in neutral markets chiefly through the cheap- 
 ness of labor. Wages in Germany, kept near starva- 
 tion point at the best of times, through redundancy of 
 population (which increases rapidly, in spite of emigra- 
 tion), must rise in consequence of the rise in all neces- 
 saries caused by protection; the German manufacturer 
 will, then, no longer be able, as he too often is now, to 
 make up for a ruinous price of his articles by a deduc- 
 tion from the normal wages of his hands, and will be 
 driven out of the market. Protection, in Germany, is 
 killing the goose that lays the golden eggs. 
 
 France, too, suffers from the consequences of protec- 
 tion. The system in that country has become, by its 
 two centuries of undisputed sway, almost part and parcel 
 of the life of the nation. Nevertheless, it is more and 
 more becoming an obstacle. Constant changes in the 
 methods of manufacture are the order of the day; but 
 protection bars the road. Silk velvets have their backs 
 nowadays made of fine cotton thread; the French manu- 
 facturer has either to pay protection price for that, or to 
 submit to such interminable official chicanery as fully 
 makes up for the difference between that price and the 
 government drawback on exportation; and so the velvet 
 trade goes from Lyons to Crefeld, where the protection 
 price for fine cotton thread is considerably lower. 
 French exports, as said before, consist chiefly of articles 
 of luxury, where French taste cannot, as yet, be beaten ; 
 but the chief consumers, all over the world, of such arti- 
 cles are our modern upstart capitalists, who have no edu- 
 
INTRODUCTION 19 
 
 cation and no taste, and who are suited quite as well by 
 cheap and clumsy German or English imitations, and 
 often have these foisted upon them for the real French 
 article at more than fancy prices. The market for those 
 specialties which cannot be made out of France is con- 
 stantly getting narrower, French exports of manufac- 
 tures are barely kept up, and must soon decline ; by what 
 new articles can France replace those whose export is 
 dying out ? If anything can help here, it is a bold meas- 
 ure of free trade, taking the French manufacturer out 
 of his accustomed hot-house atmosphere and placing him 
 once more in the open air of competition with foreign 
 rivals. Indeed, French general trade would have long 
 since begun shrinking, were it not for the slight and 
 vacillating step in the direction of free trade made by 
 the Cobden treaty of i860; but that has well-nigh ex- 
 hausted itself and a stronger dose of the same tonic is 
 wanted. 
 
 It is hardly worth while to speak of Russia. There, the 
 protective tariff — the duties having to be paid in gold, in- 
 stead of in the depreciated paper currency of the country 
 — serves above all things to supply the pauper govern- 
 ment with the hard cash indispensable for transactions 
 with foreign creditors; on the very day on which that 
 tariff fulfils its protective mission by totally excluding 
 foreign goods, on that day the Russian government is 
 bankrupt. And yet that same government amuses its 
 subjects by dangling before their eyes the prospect of 
 making Russia, by means of this tariff, an entirely self- 
 supplying country, requiring from the foreigner neither 
 food, nor raw material, nor manufactured articles, nor 
 works of art. The people who believe in this vision of a 
 Russian Empire, secluded and isolated from the rest of 
 the world, are on a level with the patriotic Prussian lieu- 
 
20 INTRODUCTION • 
 
 tenant who went into a shop and asked for a globe, not 
 a terrestrial or a celestial one, but a globe of Prussia. 
 
 To return to America. There are plenty of symp- 
 toms that protection has done all it can for the United 
 States, and that the sooner it receives notice to quit, the 
 better for all parties. One of these symptoms is the for- 
 mation of "rings" and "trusts" within the protected in- 
 dustries for the more thorough exploitation of the 
 monopoly granted to them. Now, "rings" and "trusts" 
 are truly American institutions, and, where they exploit 
 natural advantages, they are generally, though grum- 
 blingly, submitted to. The transformation of the Penn- 
 sylvanian oil supply into a monopoly by the Standard 
 Oil Company is a proceeding entirely in keeping with 
 the rules of capitalist production. But if the sugar re- 
 finers attempt to transform the protection granted them, 
 by the nation, against foreign competition, into a mo- 
 nopoly against the home consumer, that is to say, against 
 the same nation that granted the protection, that is quite 
 a different thing. Yet the large sugar refiners have 
 formed a "trust" which aims at nothing else. And the 
 sugar trust is not the only one of its kind. Now, the 
 formation of such trusts in protected industries is the 
 surest sign that protection has done its work, and is 
 changing its character; that it protects the manufacturer 
 no longer against the foreign importer, but against the 
 home consumer; that it has manufactured, at least in 
 the special branch concerned, quite enough, if not too 
 many manufacturers; that the money it puts into the 
 purse of these manufacturers is money thrown away, ex- 
 actly as in Germany. 
 
 In America, as elsewhere, protection is bolstered up 
 by the argument that free trade will only benefit Eng- 
 land. The best proof to the contrary is that in England 
 
INTRODUCTION 2i 
 
 not only the agriculturalists and landlords but even the 
 manufacturers are turning protectionists. In the home 
 of the ''Manchester school" of free traders, on Novem- 
 ber I, 1886, the Manchester chamber of commerce dis- 
 cussed a resolution *'that, having waited in vain forty 
 years for other nations to follow the free trade example 
 of England, the chamber thinks the time has arrived to 
 reconsider that position." The resolution was indeed re- 
 jected, but by 22 votes against 21 ! And that happened 
 in the centre of the cotton manufacture, i. e., the only 
 branch of English manufacture whose superiority in the 
 open market seems still undisputed! But, then, even 
 in that special branch inventive genius has passed from 
 England to America. The latest improvements in ma- 
 chinery for spinning and weaving cotton have come, al- 
 most all, from America, and Manchester has to adopt 
 them. In industrial inventions of all kinds, America has 
 distinctly taken the lead, while Germany runs England 
 very close for second place. The consciousness is gain- 
 ing ground in England that that country's industrial 
 monopoly is irretrievably lost, that she is still relatively 
 losing ground, while her rivals are making progress, and 
 that she is drifting into a position where she will have 
 to be content with being one manufacturing nation among 
 many, instead of, as she once dreamt, "the workshop of 
 the world." It is to stave off this impending fate that 
 protection, scarcely disguised under the veil of "fair 
 trade" and retaliatory tariffs, is now invoked with such 
 fervor by the sons of the very men who, forty years ago, 
 knew no salvation but in free trade. And when Eng- 
 lish manufacturers begin to find that free trade is ruin- 
 ing them, and ask the government to protect them against 
 their foreign competitors, then, surely, the moment has 
 come for these competitors to retaliate by throwing over- 
 
2 2 INTRODUCTION 
 
 board a protective system henceforth useless, to fight the 
 fading industrial monopoly of England with its own 
 weapon, free trade. 
 
 But, as I said before, you may easily introduce pro- 
 tection, but you cannot get rid of it again so easily. 
 The legislature, by adopting the protective plan, has 
 created vast interests, for which it is responsible. And 
 not every one of these interests — the various branches of 
 industry — is equally ready, at a given moment, to face 
 open competition. Some will be lagging behind, while 
 others have no longer need of protective nursing. This 
 difference of position will give rise to the usual lobby- 
 plotting, and is in itself a sure guarantee that the pro- 
 tected industries, if free trade is resolved upon, will 
 be let down very easy indeed, as was the silk manufac- 
 ture in England after 1846. That is unavoidable under 
 present circumstances, and will have to be submitted 
 to by the free trade party so long as the change is re- 
 solved upon in principle. 
 
 The question of free trade or protection moves en- 
 tirely within the bounds of the present system of capi- 
 talist production, and has, therefore, no direct interest 
 for us socialists, who want to do away with that sys- 
 tem. Indirectly, however, it interests us, inasmuch as 
 we must desire the present system of production to de- 
 velop and expand as freely and as quickly as possible; 
 because along with it will develop also those economic 
 phenomena which are its necessary consequences, and 
 which must destroy the whole system, misery of the great 
 mass of the people, in consequence of overproduction; 
 this overproduction engendering either periodical gluts 
 and revulsions, accompanied by panic, or else a chronic 
 stagnation of trade ; division of society into a small class 
 of large capitalists, and a large one of practically hered- 
 
INTRODUCTION 23 
 
 itary wage-slaves, proletarians, who, while their num- 
 bers increase constantly, are at the same time constantly 
 being superseded by new labor-saving machinery; in 
 short, society brought to a deadlock, out of which there is 
 no escaping but by a complete remodeling of the eco- 
 nomic structure which forms its basis. From this point 
 of view, forty years ago, Marx pronounced, in principle, 
 in favor of free trade as the more progressive plan, and, 
 therefore, the plan which would soonest bring capitalist 
 society to that deadlock. But if Marx declared in favor 
 of free trade on that ground, is that not a reason for 
 every supporter of the present order of society to declare 
 against free trade? If free trade is stated to be revo- 
 lutionary, must not all good citizens vote for protection 
 as a conservative plan? 
 
 If a country nowadays accept free trade, it will 
 certainly not do so to please the socialists. It will do 
 so because free trade has become a necessity for the in- 
 dustrial capitalists. But if it should reject free trade, 
 and stick to protection, in order to cheat the socialists 
 out of the expected social catastrophe, that will not hurt 
 the prospects of socialism in the least. Protection is a 
 plan for artificially manufacturing manufacturers, and 
 therefore also a plan for artificially manufacturing wage- 
 laborers. You cannot breed the one without breeding 
 the other. The wage-laborer everywhere follows in the 
 footsteps of the manufacturer; he is like the "gloomy 
 care" of Horace, that sits behind the rider, and that he 
 cannot shake off wherever he goes. You cannot escape 
 fate ; in other words, you cannot escape the necessary con- 
 sequences of your own actions. A system of production 
 based upon the exploitation of wage-labor, in which 
 wealth increases in proportion to the number of laborers 
 employed and exploited, such a system is bound to in- 
 
24 INTRODUCTION 
 
 crease the class of wage-laborers, that is to say, the class 
 which is fated one day to destroy the system itself. In 
 the meantime, there is no help for it; you must go on 
 developing the capitalist system, you must accelerate the 
 production, accumulation, and centralization of capital- 
 ist wealth, and, along with it, the production of a revolu- 
 tionary class of laborers. Whether you try the protec- 
 tionist or the free trade plan will make no difference 
 in the end, and hardly any in the length of the respite 
 left to you until the day when that end will come. For 
 long before that day will protection have become an un- 
 bearable shackle to any country aspiring, with a chance 
 of success, to hold its own in the world market. 
 
 Frederick Engels. 
 
FREE TRADE 
 
 Gentlemen : The Repeal of the Corn Laws in Eng- 
 land is the greatest triumph of free trade in the nine- 
 teenth century. In every country where manufacturers 
 discuss free trade, they have in mind chiefly free trade 
 in corn or raw material generally. To burden foreign 
 corn with protective duties is infamous, it is to speculate 
 on the hunger of the people. 
 
 Cheap food, high wages, for this alone the English 
 free traders have spent millions, and their enthusiasm 
 has already infected their continental brethren. And, 
 generally speaking, all those who advocate free trade do 
 so in the interests of the working class. 
 
 But, strange to say, the people for whom cheap food is 
 to be procured at all costs are very ungrateful. Cheap 
 food is as ill reputed in England as is cheap govern- 
 ment in France. The people see in these self-sacrificing 
 gentlemen, in Bowring, Bright & Co., their worst enemies 
 and the most shameless hypocrites. 
 
 Every one knows that in England the struggle between 
 Liberals and Democrats takes the name of the struggle 
 between Free Traders and Chartists. Let us see how 
 the English free traders have proved to the people the 
 good Intentions that animate them. 
 
 This is what they said to the factory hands : 
 
 'The duty on corn is a tax upon wages; this tax 
 
26 FREE TRADE 
 
 you pay to the landlords, those medieval aristocrats; 
 if your position is a wretched one, it is only on ac- 
 count of the high price of the most indispensable 
 articles of food." 
 
 The workers in turn asked of the manufacturers : 
 
 "How is it that in the course of the last thirty years, 
 while our commerce and manufacture has immensely in- 
 creased, our wages have fallen far more rapidly, in pro- 
 portion, than the price of corn has gone up? 
 
 "The tax which you say we pay the landlords is about 
 three pence a week per worker. And yet the wages of 
 the hand-loom weaver fell, between 1815 and 1843, from 
 28s. per week to 5s., and the wages of the power-loom 
 weavers, between 1823 and 1843, from 20s. per week to 
 8s. And during the whole of the time that portion of 
 the tax which you say we pay the landlord has never ex- 
 ceeded three pence. And, then, in the year 1834, when 
 bread was very cheap and business lively, what did you 
 tell us? You said, 'If you are poor, it is only because 
 you have too many children, and your marriages are 
 more productive than your labor !' 
 
 "These are the very words you spoke to us, and you 
 set about making new Poor Laws, and building work- 
 houses, those Bastilles of the proletariat." 
 
 To this the manufacturers replied: 
 
 "You are right, worthy laborers ; it is not the price of 
 corn alone, but competition of the hands among them- 
 selves as well, which determines wages. But just bear in 
 mind the circumstance that our soil consists of rocks and 
 sandbanks only. You surely do not imagine that corn 
 can be grown in flower-pots ! If, instead of wasting our 
 labor and capital upon a thoroughly sterile soil, we were 
 to give up agriculture, and devote ourselves exclusively 
 to commerce and manufacture, all Europe would abandon 
 
FREE TRADE 27 
 
 its factories, and England would form one huge factory- 
 town, with the whole of the rest of Europe for its agri- 
 cultural districts." 
 
 While thus haranguing his own workingmen, the man- 
 ufacturer is interrogated by the small tradesmen, who 
 exclaim : 
 
 "If we repeal the Corn Laws, we shall indeed ruin 
 agriculture; but, for all that, we shall not compel other 
 nations to give up their own factories, and buy our goods. 
 What will the consequences be? I lose my customers in 
 the country, and the home market is destroyed." 
 
 The manufacturer turns his back upon the working- 
 men and replies to the shopkeeper : 
 
 "As to that, you leave it to us ! Once rid of the duty 
 on corn, we shall import cheaper corn from abroad. 
 Then we shall reduce wages at the very time when 
 they are rising in the countries where we get our corn. 
 Thus in addition to the advantages which we already 
 enjoy we shall have lower wages and, with all these 
 advantages, we shall easily force the Continent to buy 
 of us." 
 
 But now the farmers and agricultural laborers join in 
 the discussion. 
 
 "And what, pray, is to become of us ? Are we to help 
 in passing a sentence of death upon agriculture, when we 
 get our living by it ? Are we to let the soil be torn from 
 beneath our feet?" 
 
 For all answer the Anti-Corn Law League contented 
 itself with offering prizes for the three best essays upon 
 the wholesome influence of the repeal of the Corn Laws 
 on English agriculture. 
 
 These prizes were carried off by Messrs. Hope, Morse, 
 and Greg, whose essays were distributed broadcast 
 throughout the agricultural districts. One of the priz€ 
 
28 FREE TRADE 
 
 essayists devotes himself to proving that neither the ten- 
 ant farmer nor the agricultural laborer would lose by 
 the repeal of the Corn Laws, and that the landlord alone 
 would lose. 
 
 "The English tenant farmer," he exclaims, "need not 
 fear repeal, because no other country can produce such 
 good corn so cheaply as England. Thus, even if the 
 price of corn fell, it would not hurt you, because this fall 
 would only affect rent, which would go down, while the 
 profit of capital and the wages of labor would remain 
 stationary." 
 
 The second prize essayist, Mr. Morse, maintains, on 
 the contrary, that the price of corn will rise in conse- 
 quence of repeal. He is at infinite pains to prove that 
 protective duties have never been able to secure a re- 
 munerative price for corn. 
 
 In support of his assertion he quotes the fact that, 
 wherever foreign corn has been imported, the price of 
 corn in England has gone up considerably, and that 
 when no corn has been imported the price has fallen ex- 
 tremely. This prize-winner forgets that the importation 
 was not the cause of the high price, but that the high 
 price was the cause of the importation. In direct contra- 
 diction of his colleague he asserts that every rise in the 
 price of corn is profitable to both the tenant farmer and 
 laborer, but does not benefit the landlord. 
 
 The third prize essayist, Mr. Greg, who is a large manu- 
 facturer and whose work is addressed to the large tenant 
 farmers, could not afford to echo such silly stuff. His 
 language is more scientific. He admits that the Corn 
 Laws can increase rent only by increasing the price of 
 corn, and that they can raise the price of corn only by 
 inducing the investment of capital upon land of inferior 
 quality, and this is explained quite simply. 
 
FREE TRADE 29 
 
 In proportion as population increases, it inevitably fol- 
 lows, if foreign corn cannot be imported, that less fruitful 
 soil must be placed under cultivation. This involves 
 more expense and the product of this soil is consequently 
 dearer. There being a demand for all the corn thus pro- 
 duced, it will all be sold. The price for all of it will of 
 necessity be determined by the price of the product of the 
 inferior soil. The difference between this price and the 
 cost of production upon soil of better quality constitutes 
 the rent paid for the use of the better soil. If, therefore, 
 in consequence of the repeal of the Corn Laws, the price 
 of corn falls, and if, as a matter of course, rent falls along 
 with it, it is because inferior soil will no longer be culti- 
 vated. Thus the reduction of rent must inevitably ruin a 
 part of the tenant farmers. 
 
 These remarks were necessary in order to make Mr. 
 Greg's language comprehensible. 
 
 "The small farmers," he says, "who cannot support 
 themselves by agriculture must take refuge in manufac- 
 ture. As to the large tenant farmers, they cannot fail to 
 profit by the arrangement: either the landlord will be 
 obliged to sell them land very cheap, or leases will be 
 made out for very long periods. This will enable tenant 
 farmers to invest more capital in their farms, to use agri- 
 cultural machinery on a larger scale, and to save manual 
 labor, which will, moreover, be cheaper, on account of the 
 general fall in wages, the immediate consequence of the 
 repeal of the Corn Laws." 
 
 Dr. Bowring conferred upon all these arguments the 
 consecration of religion, by exclaiming at a public meet- 
 ing, "Jesus Christ is Free Trade, and Free Trade is 
 Jesus Christ." 
 
 It will be evident that all this cant was not calculated 
 to make cheap bread attractive to workingmen. 
 
30 FREE TRADE 
 
 Besides, how should the workingmen understand the 
 sudden philanthropy of the manufacturers, the very men 
 still busy fighting against the Ten-Hours Bill, which 
 was to reduce the working day of the mill hands from 
 twelve hours to ten ? 
 
 To give you an idea of the philanthropy of these man- 
 ufacturers I would remind you of the factory regulations 
 in force in all their mills. 
 
 Every manufacturer has for his own private use a regu- 
 lar penal code by means of which fines are inflicted for 
 every voluntary or involuntary offence. For instance, 
 the hand pays so much when he has the misfortune to sit 
 down on a chair, or whisper, or speak, or laugh ; if he is 
 a few moments late ; if any part of a machine breaks, or 
 he turns out work of an inferior quality, etc. The fines 
 are always greater than the damage really done by the 
 workman. And to give the workman every oppor- 
 tunity for incurring fines the factory clock is set forward, 
 and he is given bad material to make into good stuff. An 
 overseer unskilful in multiplying infractions of rules is 
 soon discharged. 
 
 You see, gentlemen, this private legislation is enacted 
 for the especial purpose of creating such infractions, and 
 infractions are manufactured for the purpose of making 
 money. Thus the manufacturer uses every means of 
 reducing the nominal wage, and even profiting by acci- 
 dents over which the workers have no control. And 
 these manufacturers are the same philanthropists who 
 have tried to persuade the workers that they were capable 
 of going to immense expense for the sole and express 
 purpose of improving the condition of these same work- 
 ingmen! On the one hand they nibble at the workers* 
 wages in the pettiest way, by means of factory regula- 
 tions, and, on the other, they are prepared to make the 
 
FREE TRADE 3^ 
 
 greatest sacrifices to raise those wages by means of the 
 Anti-Corn Law League. 
 
 They build great palaces, at immense expense, in which 
 the league takes up its official residence. They send an 
 army of missionaries to all corners of England to preach 
 the gospel of free trade; they print and distribute gratis 
 thousands of pamphlets to enlighten the workingman 
 upon his own interests. They spend enormous sums to 
 buy over the press to their side. They organize a vast 
 administrative system for the conduct of the free trade 
 movement, and bestow all the wealth of their eloquence 
 upon public meetings. It was at one of these meetings 
 that a workingman cried out: 
 
 "If the landlords were to sell our bones, you manu- 
 facturers would be the first to buy them, and to put them 
 through the mill and make flour of them." 
 
 The English workingmen have appreciated to the full- 
 est extent the significance of the struggle between the 
 lords of the land and of capital. They know very well 
 that the price of bread was to be reduced in order to re- 
 duce wages, and that the profit of capital would rise by 
 as much as rent fell. 
 
 Ricardo, the apostle of the English free traders, the 
 leading economist of our century, entirely agrees with 
 the workers upon this point. In his celebrated work 
 upon Political Economy he says : "If instead of growing 
 our own corn ... we discover a new market from 
 which we can supply ourselves ... at a cheaper 
 price, wages will fall and profits rise. The fall in the 
 price of agricultural produce reduces the wages, not only 
 of the laborer employed in cultivating the soil, but also of 
 all those employed in commerce or manufacture." 
 
 Do not believe, gentlemen, that it is a matter of indif- 
 ference to the workingman v/hether he receives only four 
 
32 FREE TRADE 
 
 francs on account of corn being cheaper, when he had 
 been receiving five francs before. 
 
 Have not his wages always fallen in comparison with 
 profit? And is it not clear that his social position has 
 grown worse as compared with that of the capitalist? 
 Beside which he loses actually. So long as the price of 
 corn was higher and wages were also higher, a small 
 saving in the consumption of bread sufficed to procure 
 him other enjoyments. But as soon as bread is cheap, 
 and wages are therefore low, he can save almost nothing 
 on bread for the purchase of other articles. 
 
 The English workingmen have shown the English free 
 traders that they are not the dupes of their illusions or 
 of their lies; and if, in spite of this, the workers have 
 made common cause with the manufacturers against the 
 landlords, it is for the purpose of destroying the last 
 remnant of feudalism, that henceforth they may have only 
 one enemy to deal with. The workers have not miscalcu- 
 lated, for the landlords, in order to revenge themselves 
 upon the manufacturers, have made common cause with 
 the workers to carry the Ten Hours Bill, which the latter 
 had been vainly demanding for thirty years, and which 
 was passed immediately after the repeal of the Corn 
 Laws. 
 
 When Dr. Bowring, at the Congress of Economists, 
 drew from his pocket a long list to show how many head 
 of cattle, how much ham, bacon, poultry, etc., is im- 
 ported into England, to be consumed — as he asserted — ^by 
 the workers, he forgot to state that at the same time the 
 workers of Manchester and other factory towns were 
 thrown out of work by the beginning of the crisis. 
 
 As a matter of principal in political economy, the fig- 
 ures of a single year must never be taken as the basis for 
 formulating general laws. We must always take the 
 
FREE TRADE 33 
 
 average of from six to seven years, a period during which 
 modern industry passes through the successive phases of 
 prosperity, overproduction, crisis, thus completing the in- 
 evitable cycle. 
 
 Doubtless, if the price of all commodities falls — and 
 this is the necessary consequence of free trade — I can 
 buy far more for a franc than before. And the work- 
 ingman's franc is as good as any other man's. There- 
 fore, free trade must be advantageous to the working- 
 man. There is only one little difficulty in this, namely 
 that the workman, before he exchanges his franc for 
 other commodities, has first exchanged his labor for the 
 money of the capitalist. If in this exchange he always 
 received the said franc while the price of all other com- 
 modities fell, he would always be the gainer by such a 
 bargain. The difficulty does not lie in proving that, the 
 price of all commodities falling, more commodities can be 
 bought for the same sum of money. 
 
 Economists always take the price of labor at the mo- 
 ment of its exchange with other commodities, and alto- 
 gether ignore the moment at which labor accomplishes 
 its own exchange with capital. When it costs less to set 
 in motion the machinery which produces commodities, 
 then the things necessary for the maintenance of this 
 machine, called workman, will also cost less. If all 
 commodities are cheaper, labor, which is a commodity too, 
 will also fall in price, and we shall see later that this 
 commodity, labor, will fall far lower in proportion than 
 all other commodities. If the workingman still pins his 
 faith to the arguments of the economists, he will find, one 
 fine morning, that the franc has dwindled in his pocket, 
 and that he has only five sous left. 
 
 Thereupon the economists will tell you : — 
 
 "We admit that competition among the workers will 
 
34 FREE TRADE 
 
 certainly not be lessened under free trade, and will very 
 soon bring wages into harmony with the low price of 
 commodities. But, on the other hand, the low price of 
 commodities will increase consumption, the larger con- 
 sumption will increase production, which will in turn 
 necessitate a larger demand for labor, and this larger de- 
 mand will be followed by a rise in wages. 
 
 "The whole line of argument amounts to this: Free 
 trade increases productive forces. When manufactures 
 keep advancing, v/hen wealth, when the productive forces, 
 when, in a word, productive capital increases, the demand 
 for labor, the price of labor, and consequently the rate 
 of wages, rises also." 
 
 The most favorable condition for the workingman is 
 the growth of capital. This must be admitted: when 
 capital remains stationary, commerce and manufacture 
 are not merely stationary but decline, and in this case the 
 workman is the first victim. He goes to the wall before 
 the capitalist. And in the case of the growth of capital, 
 under the circumstances, which, as we have said, are 
 the best for the workingman, what will be his lot? He 
 will go to the wall just the same. The growth of capital 
 implies the accumulation and the concentration of capi- 
 tal. This centralization involves a greater division of 
 labor and a greater use of machinery. The greater 
 division of labor destroys the especial skill of the laborer ; 
 and by putting in the place of this skilled work labor 
 which any one can perform, it increases competition 
 among the workers. 
 
 This competition becomes more fierce as the division 
 of labor enables a single man to do the work of three. 
 Machinery accomplishes the same result on a much larger 
 scale. The accumulation of productive capital forces the 
 industrial capitalist to work with constantly increasing 
 
FREE TRADE 35 
 
 means of production, ruins the small manufacturer, and 
 drives him into the proletariat. Then, the rate of interest 
 falling in proportion as capital accumulates, the little 
 rentiers and retired tradespeople, who can no longer live 
 upon their small incomes, are forced to look out for some 
 business again and ultimately to swell the number of 
 proletarians. Finally, the more productive capital grows, 
 the more it is compelled to produce for a market whose 
 requirements it does not know — the more supply tries to 
 force demand, and consequently crises increase in fre- 
 quency and in intensity. But every crisis in turn hastens 
 the concentration of capital, adds to the proletariat. 
 Thus, as productive capital grows, competition among 
 the workers grows too, and grows in a far greater pro- 
 portion. The reward of labor is less for all, and the bur- 
 den of labor is increased for some at least. 
 
 In 1829 there were, in Manchester, 1088 cotton spin- 
 ners employed in 36 factories. In 1841 there were but 448, 
 and they tended 53,353 more spindles than the 1088 
 spinners did in 1829. If manual labor had increased in 
 the same proportion as productive force, the number of 
 spinners ought to have risen to 1848 ; improved machinery 
 had, therefore, deprived iioo workers of employment. 
 
 We know beforehand the reply of the economists — 
 the people thus thrown out of work will find other kinds 
 of employment. Dr. Bowring did not fail to reproduce 
 this argument at the Congress of Economists. But 
 neither did he fail to contradict himself. In 1833, Dr. 
 Bowring made a speech in the House of Commons upon 
 the 50,000 hand-loom weavers of London who had been 
 starving without being able to find that new kind of 
 employment which the free traders hold out to them in 
 the distance. Let us hear the most striking portion of 
 this speech of Mr. Bowring. 
 
3^ FREE TRADE 
 
 "The misery of the hand-loom weavers," he says, "is 
 the inevitable fate of all kinds of labor which are easily 
 acquired, and which may, at any moment, be replaced 
 by less costly means. As in these cases competition 
 amongst the work-people is very great, the slightest 
 falling-off in demand brings on a crisis. The hand- 
 loom weavers are, in a certain sense, placed on the bor- 
 ders of human existence. One step further, and that ex- 
 istence becomes impossible. The slightest shock is suf- 
 ficient to throw them on to the road to ruin. By more 
 and more superseding manual labor, the progress of me- 
 chanical science must bring on, during the period of 
 transition, a deal of temporary suffering. National well- 
 being cannot be bought except at the price of some indi- 
 vidual evils. The advance of industry is achieved at 
 the expense of those who lag behind, and of all discov- 
 eries that of the power-loom weighs most heavily upon 
 the hand-loom weavers. In a great many articles for- 
 merly made by hand, the weaver has been placed hors de 
 combat; and he is sure to be beaten in a good many more 
 fabrics that are now made by hand." 
 
 Further on he says : "I hold in my hand a correspond- 
 ence of the governor-general with the East India Com- 
 pany. This correspondence is concerning the weavers of 
 the Decca district. The governor says in his letter: *A 
 few years ago the East India Company received from six 
 to eight million pieces of calico woven upon the looms of 
 the country. The demand fell off gradually and was 
 reduced to about a million pieces. At this moment it has 
 almost entirely ceased.' Moreover, in 1800, North Amer- 
 ica received from India nearly 800,000 pieces of cotton 
 goods. In 1830 it did not take even 4000. Finally, in 
 1800 a million of pieces were shipped for Portugal; in 
 1830 Portugal did not receive above 20,000. 
 
FREE TRADE 37 
 
 "The reports on the distress of the Indian weavers are 
 terrible. And what is the origin of that distress? The 
 presence on the market of EngUsh manufactures, the pro- 
 duction of the same article by means of the power-loom. 
 A great number of the weavers died of starvation; the 
 remainder have gone over to other employment, and chiefly 
 to field labor. Not to be able to change employment 
 amounted to a sentence of death. And at this moment 
 the Decca district is crammed with English yarns and 
 calicoes. The Decca muslin, renowned all over the world 
 for its beauty and firm texture, has also been eclipsed by 
 the competition of English machinery. In the whole his- 
 tory of commerce, it would, perhaps, be difficult to find 
 suffering equal to what these whole classes in India had 
 to submit to." 
 
 Mr. Bowring's speech Is the more remarkable because 
 the facts quoted by him are correct, and the phrases with 
 which he seeks to palliate them are characterized by the 
 hypocrisy common to all free trade discourses. He 
 represents the workers as means of production which 
 must be superseded by less expensive means of produc- 
 tion, pretends to see in the labor of which he speaks a 
 wholly exceptional kind of labor, and in the machine 
 which has crushed out the weavers an equally excep- 
 tional kind of machine. He forgets that there is no kind 
 of manual labor which may not any day share the fate 
 of the hand-loom weavers. 
 
 " The constant aim and tendency of every improve- 
 ment of mechanism is indeed to do entirely without the 
 labor of men, or to reduce its price, by superseding the 
 labor of the adult males by that of women and children, 
 or the work of the skilled by that of the unskilled work- 
 man. In most of the throstle mills, spinning is now en- 
 tirely done by girls of sixteen years and less. The in- 
 
38 FREE TRADE 
 
 troduction of the self-acting mule has caused the dis- 
 charge of most of the (adult male) spinners, while the 
 children and young persons have been kept on." 
 
 The above words of the most enthusiastic of free 
 traders, Dr. Ure, are calculated to complement the con- 
 fessions of Dr. Bowring. Mr. Bowring speaks of cer- 
 tain individual evils, and, at the same time, says that 
 these individual evils destroy whole classes ; he speaks of 
 the temporary sufferings during a transition period, and 
 does not deny that these temporary evils have implied 
 for the majority the transition from life to death, and for 
 the rest a transition from a better to a worse condition. 
 When he asserts, farther on, that the sufferings of the 
 working class are inseparable from the progress of in- 
 dustry, and are necessary to the prosperity of the nation, 
 he simply says that the prosperity of the bourgeois class 
 presupposes as necessary the suffering of the laboring 
 class. 
 
 All the comfort which Mr. Bowring offers the workers 
 who perish, and, indeed, the whole doctrine of compen- 
 sation which the free traders propound, amounts to 
 this : — 
 
 You thousands of workers who are perishing, do not 
 despair! You can die with an easy conscience. Your 
 class will not perish. It will always be numerous enough 
 for the capitalist class to decimate it without fear of an- 
 nihilating it. Besides, how could capital be usefully ap- 
 plied if it did not take care to keep up its exploitable 
 material, i. e,, the workingmen, to be exploited over and 
 over again? 
 
 But, then, why propound as a problem still to be solved 
 the question: What influence will the adoption of 
 free trade have upon the condition of the working 
 class? All the laws formulated by the political econo- 
 
FREE TRADE 39 
 
 mists from Quesnay to Ricardo, have been based upon 
 the hypothesis that the trammels which still interfere 
 with commercial freedom have disappeared. These laws 
 are confirmed in proportion as free trade is adopted. 
 The first of these laws is that competition reduces the 
 price of every commodity to the minimum cost of pro- 
 duction. Thus the minimum of wages is the natural 
 price of labor. And what is the minimum of wages? 
 Just so much as is required for production of the ar- 
 ticles absolutely necessary for the maintenance of the 
 worker, for the continuation, by hook or by crook, of his 
 own existence and that of his class. 
 
 But do not imagine that the worker receives only this 
 minimum wage, and still less that he always receives it. 
 No, according to this law, the working class will some- 
 times be more fortunate, will sometimes receive some- 
 thing above the minimum, but this surplus will merely 
 make up for the deficit which they will have received 
 below the minimum in times of industrial depression. 
 That is to say that within a given time which recurs 
 periodically, in other words, in the cycle which com- 
 merce and industry describe while passing through the 
 successive phases of prosperity, overproduction, stagna- 
 tion, and crisis, when reckoning all that the working 
 class has had above and below mere necessaries, we shall 
 see that, after all, they have received neither more nor 
 less than the minimum ; i. e., the working class will have 
 maintained itself as a class after enduring any amount 
 of misery and misfortune, and after leaving many 
 corpses upon the industrial battle-field. But what of 
 that? The class will still exist; nay, more, it will have 
 increased. 
 
 But this is not all. The progress of industry creates 
 less and less expensive means of subsistence. Thus 
 
40 FREE TRADE 
 
 spirits have taken the place of beer, cotton that of wool 
 and linen, and potatoes that of bread. 
 
 Thus, as means are constantly being found for the 
 maintenance of labor on cheaper and more wretched 
 food, the minimum of wages is constantly sinking. If 
 these wages began by letting the man work to live, they 
 end by forcing him to live the life of a machine. His 
 existence has no other value than that of a simple pro- 
 ductive force, and the capitalist treats him accordingly. 
 This law of the commodity labor, of the minimum of 
 wages, will be confirmed in proportion as the supposi- 
 tion of the economists, free trade, becomes an actual 
 fact. Thus, of two things one : either we must reject all 
 political economy based upon the assumption of free 
 trade, or we must admit that under this same free 
 trade the whole severity of the economic laws will fall 
 upon the workers. 
 
 To sum up, what is free trade under the present con- 
 dition of society? Freedom of Capital. When you have 
 torn down the few national barriers which still restrict 
 the free development of capital, you will merely have 
 given it complete freedom of action. So long as you let 
 the relation of wage-labor to capital exist, no matter 
 how favorable the conditions under which you accom- 
 plish the exchange of commodities, there will always be 
 a class which exploits and a class which is exploited. It 
 is really difficult to understand the presumption of the 
 free traders who imagine that the more advantageous 
 application of capital will abolish the antagonism be- 
 tween industrial capitalists and wage-workers. On the 
 contrary. The only result will be that the antagonism of 
 these two classes will stand out more clearly. 
 
 Let us assume for a moment that there are no more 
 Corn Laws or national and municipal import duties^ 
 
FREE TRADE 41 
 
 that in a word all the accidental circumstances which 
 to-day the workingman may look upon as a cause of 
 his miserable condition have vanished, and we shall 
 have removed so many curtains that hide from his eyes 
 his true enemy. 
 
 He will see that capital released from all trammels 
 will make him no less a slave than capital trammelled 
 by import duties. 
 
 Gentlemen ! Do not be deluded by the abstract word 
 Freedom! Whose freedom? Not the freedom of one 
 individual in relation to another, but freedom of Capi- 
 tal to crush the worker. 
 
 Why should you desire farther to sanction un- 
 limited competition with this idea of freedom, when 
 the idea of freedom itself is only the product of a social 
 condition based upon free competition ? 
 
 We have shown what sort of fraternity free trade 
 begets between the different classes of one and the 
 same nation. The fraternity which free trade would 
 establish between the nations of the earth would not 
 be more real. To call cosmopolitan exploitation univer- 
 sal brotherhood is an idea that could only be engen- 
 dered in the brain of the bourgeoisie. Every one of the 
 destructive phenomena which unlimited competition 
 gives rise to within any one nation is reproduced in 
 more gigantic proportions in the market of the world. 
 We need not pause any longer upon free trade 
 sophisms on this subject, which are worth just as much 
 as the arguments of our prize essayists Messrs. Hope, 
 Morse, and Greg. 
 
 For instance, we are told that free trade would 
 create an international division of labor, and thereby 
 give to each country those branches of production most 
 in harmony with its natural advantages. 
 
42 FREE TRADE 
 
 You believe perhaps, gentlemen, that the production 
 of coffee and sugar is the natural destiny of the West 
 Indies. Two centuries ago, Nature, which does not 
 trouble herself about commerce, had planted neither 
 sugar-cane nor coffee trees there. And it may be that 
 in less than half a century you will find there neither 
 coffee nor sugar, for the East Indies, by means of cheaper 
 production, have already successfully broken down this 
 so-called natural destiny of the West Indies. And the 
 West Indies, with their natural wealth, are as heavy a 
 burden for England as the weavers of Decca, who also 
 were destined from the beginning of time to weave by 
 hand. 
 
 One other circumstance must not be forgotten, namely, 
 that, just as everything has become a monopoly, there are 
 also nowadays some branches of industry which prevail 
 over all others, and secure to the nations which espe- 
 cially foster them the command of the market of the 
 world. Thus in the commerce of the world cotton alone 
 has much greater commercial importance than all the 
 other raw materials used in the manufacture of clothing. 
 It is truly ridiculous for the free traders to refer to the 
 few specialties in each branch of industry, throwing 
 them into the balance against the product used in every- 
 day consumption, and produced most cheaply in those 
 countries in which manufacture is most highly devel- 
 oped. 
 
 If the free traders cannot understand how one nation 
 can grow rich at the expense of another, we need not 
 wonder, since these same gentlemen also refuse to under- 
 stand how in the same country one class can enrich itself 
 at the expense of another. 
 
 Do not imagine, gentlemen, that in criticizing freedom 
 of commerce we have the least intention of defining pro- 
 
FREE TRADE 43 
 
 tection. One may be opposed to constitutionalism with- 
 out being in favor of absolutism. 
 
 Moreover, the protective system is nothing but a means 
 of establishing manufacture upon a large scale in any 
 given country, that is to say, of making it dependent upon 
 the market of the world ; and from the moment that de- 
 pendence upon the market of the world is established, 
 there is more or less dependence upon free trade too. 
 Besides this, the protective system helps to develop free 
 competition within a nation. Hence we see that in coun- 
 tries where the bourgeoisie is beginning to make itself felt 
 as a class, in Germany for example, it makes great efforts 
 to obtain protective duties. They serve the bourgeoisie 
 as weapons against feudalism and absolute monarchy, as 
 a means for the concentration of its own powers for the 
 realization of free trade within the country. 
 
 But, generally speaking, the protective system in these 
 days is conservative, while the free trade system works 
 destructively. It breaks up old nationalities and carries 
 antagonism of proletariat and bourgeoisie to the utter- 
 most point. In a word, the free trade system hastens 
 the Social "Revolution. In this revolutionary sense alone, 
 gentlemen, I am in favor of free trade. 
 
VALUE, 
 PRICE, 
 
 AND 
 
 PROFIT 
 
 From a Mechanical Standpoint 
 
 It is the first one of Marx's works 
 published In America that can be 
 looljed upon as a careful piece of 
 publishing. It is to be hoped that 
 this excellent volume is the fore- 
 runner of other volumes of Marx, 
 and that America will have the 
 honor of publishing an edition 
 that is accurate as to text, thor- 
 ough in annotations, convenient 
 in size, and presentable In every 
 way. The present bootc will de- 
 light the lover of Marx, and every 
 Socialist will desire a copy of It. 
 — N. Y. Daily People. 
 
 By Karl Marx. Edited by his daughter Eleanor Marx 
 AvELiNG. With an Introduction and Annotations by Lucien 
 Sanial. 
 
 THIS book is especially timely, like everything else that Marx 
 wrote. Written a couple of years before his "Capital" 
 appeared, it is an address to workingmen, and covers in 
 popular form many of the subjects later scientifically 
 expanded in "Capital." 
 
 Lucien Sanial says of it: "It Is universally considered as the 
 best epitome we have of the first volume of 'Capital,' and as such, 
 is invaluable to the beginner in economics. It places him squarely 
 on his feet at the threshold of his inquiry ; that is, in a position 
 where his perceptive faculties cannot be deceived and his reasoning 
 power vitiated by the very use of his eyesight; whereas, by the 
 very nature of his capitalist surroundings, he now stands on his 
 bead and sees all things inverted." 
 
 Special interest attaches to what Marx says relative to strikes. 
 Were the working Class thoroughly acquainted with the subject 
 matter of this little work, we should hear no more of the "common 
 ground" on which capital and labor might meet to settle their 
 differences. 
 
 The thousand and one schemes that are daily being flaunted in 
 the faces of the working class by the lieutenants of the capitalists 
 show the necessity there is on the part of the working class for 
 a comprehensive understanding of the matter of wages, the relation 
 of the wage worker to the employer, the source of profits, and the 
 relation between profits and wages. These and other subjects are 
 here presented, and so clearly does Marx present them that all he 
 has to say can be understood by any person willing to pay close 
 attention to his words. 
 
 Cloth, 50 Cents. Paper, 15 Cents; 
 
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The . . . . 
 SOCIALIST 
 ALMANAC 
 
 The monographs on Italy and Spain 
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 to its origin the long and mortal strug- 
 gle between anarchism and social- 
 ism, the former of which, fathered by 
 the sophist Proudhon and brought 
 forth in agony by a middle class finan- 
 cially and morally bankrupt, had fas- 
 tened itself to the international pro- 
 letariat. — Introduction to "Socialist 
 Almanac." 
 
 A BOOK THAT EVERY WORKINGMAN SHOULD READ. 
 
 By LuciEN Sanial, formerly editor of "The People," the 
 official organ of the Socialist Labor Party. A handbook 
 on the history and economics of Socialism. Prepared 
 under the direction of the National Executive Committee 
 of the Socialist Labor Party. 
 
 The Science of Modern Socialism is based upon facts. To present this 
 Science, the Socialist must be equipped with the facts upon which it rests, 
 while he who would attempt to refute the Science must also be equipped with 
 those facts. With the object of making these facts easily accessible to friend 
 and foe alike, the National Convention of the Socialist Labor Party held in 
 1896 instructed the National Executive Committee to have prepared a book 
 which would contain the data necessary for the successful propaganda of 
 Socialism, and at the same time give the American people a reliable history of 
 International Socialism. Lucien Sanial, of New York City, was directed to 
 proceed with the work. It required two years of labor to collect and arrange 
 the data. Upon the completion of his task the book was issued with the title 
 "The Socialist Almanac," a stout volume of 230 pages. 
 
 The first part of "The Almanac" is historical, and gives a detailed 
 history of Socialism in the various countries of Europe from its incipiency 
 down to the present day. The second part consists of instructive theoretical 
 and statistical articles on every subject connected with capitalism and the 
 working class. This second part is truly a mine of information for the 
 workingman. It contains a vast amount of valuable information, which no 
 one could obtain but at an enormous expense of time and labor in tedious 
 research through ohicial and other documents not readily accessible. Every 
 workingman and every student should have a copy of the Socialist Almanac. 
 It is authority in all disputes, and will settle every argument. 
 
 230 Pages. Price, 50 cents. 
 
 NEW YORK LABOR NEWS COMPANY, 
 2 New Reade Street, New York, N. Y. 
 
H^toceebinQS of the « « , « 
 tientb National (Bonventton « 
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 Held in New York City June 3 to June 8, 1900. Sten- 
 ographically reported by B. F. Keinard. With an Appendix 
 containing the Platform and Constitution of the Party, and 
 numerous historic and official documents relative to the late 
 conspiracy to wreck the Party. 
 
 This book is a remarka'bly interesting and instructive contribution 
 to current literature on the Labor Movement. Realizing that the 
 Social Revolution can be brought about only by the use of political 
 power wielded by the class that seeks its own emancipation, the 
 Socialists are organized in a political party— the Socialist Labor 
 Party— in order that they may achieve the conquest of that po- 
 litical power. The national conventions of the party are held every 
 four years. The convention held in 1900 was doubly interesting 
 owing to the reactionists who happened to get intO' the party 
 having organized about a year preceding the convention, a con- 
 spiracy to sidetrack the party from the course prescribed for it by 
 the Class Struggle. The conflict was a fierce one for a while, and 
 ended In the utter rout of the "Kangaroos," as the conspirators 
 were called. The report of the National Executive Committee, 
 which makes up sixty pages of the Proceedings, details in an in- 
 teresting manner the progress of the party since the 1896 conven- 
 tion, and makes public a good deal of inside information relative to 
 tihe Kangaroo conspiracy. 
 
 For a week the representatives of the Socialist proletariat of the 
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 The debates are concise, to the point, and typify the party whose 
 emblem is the Arm and Hammer. 
 
 336 Pages. Cloth, $1 00. Paper, 50 Cents. 
 
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• THE — — • 
 
 Eighteenth Bramaire of Ims Bonaparte 
 
 BY KARL MARX. 
 Traaslated by DANIEL DB Li^N for the SecfalUt Labor Party. 
 
 "Th« Ei€rht©enth Brosaaire of Louis Bonaparte" Is one of KBri 
 Marx's moat profound and briBiant monographs. It may be cfmad- 
 ered ^e best work extant oo the philosoipby ctf history, eepw^BOly ©a 
 the history of the Movement of the ProieUviat, t«Y^^» witti ^ 
 Ixmrgeois manifesations that acowiii)aray the Mune, and tie tactics 
 that such oonditiona dictata 
 
 The recent PopuHsrt uprt^ag, the more rect»at •'B^to Mefv^aent," 
 the thousand and one Utopian and chimerical n^iiosia that are flariBS 
 up, the ca^taiiat Bmaoeuvres, the hopeiess, he^idess gra^dsir after 
 straws that cdtaracterlz^ the conduct of t^e bulk of the Working CSass 
 —all o€ these, together witb the empty-headed, ominous figures that 
 are si^faa^in^ into a^torlety for a time, and have thetr day, mark the 
 present period of the Labor Movement in the United States a o-itical 
 one. The beet informatUm acqulra.ble, and the best mental trai nin g ob- 
 tainable, are requisite to steer through the existing chaoo that the 
 death-tainted social system of to-day creates all around us. To aid In 
 this needed information and m^ital training, this iiMtructive work by 
 Marx is naade accessible to Snglish readers, and is reconameaded te 
 the serioos study of the serious. 
 
 For the assistance of those who are unfamiliar with the Ustory of 
 Prance, and who miglit therefore be confused by soane of the tenms 
 used by Marx, the fodlowing explanations may prove timely: 
 
 0« the 18th Brumalre, (November 9, 1799,) the 4evelofHnent ot af- 
 fairs in France enalded Napoleon Bonaparte to take the step that led 
 with inevitable certainty to the imperial throne. The circumstances 
 that, fifty y^urs later, aided his nephew, Louis Bonaparte, to take a 
 similar step with a similar result, gives the nanae to this work^'The 
 £}^bteenth Bnm^dre of Louis Bonaparte." . ^ 
 
 Upon the overthrow of the first Napoleon came the restoration of 
 the Bourbon throne— Louis XVIIL, succeeded by Charles X. In July, 
 1830, an t^wislng of the upper tier of the capitalist da^ (the artsto^aacy 
 <rf finance) overthrew the Bourbon throne and set up the throne of 
 Orleans, a younger branch of the House of Bourbon, with Louis 
 Philipi>e as king. From the month in which this revolution occurred, 
 Louis Philippe's monarchy is called the "July Monarchy." In Febru- 
 ary, 1848, a revolt of the lower tier of the capitalist class (the "in- 
 dustrial bourgeoisie") against the aristocracy of finance dethroned 
 Louis Philippe. This affair, also named fix>m the month in which it 
 took place, iis called the "February Revolution." And the "Eighteenth 
 Brumalre of Louis Bonaparte" starts'wlth the "February Revolution." 
 
 Despite the in<applicableness to America of the political names 
 and political leaderships described In the "Eighteenth Brunaalre," both 
 these names and leaderships are to such an extent the product of an 
 economic-social development that has taken place in the Ui^ted States 
 with even greater sharpn€a5S than In France, and have, likewise, their 
 real or threat«ied counterparts here so completely, that by this w<M-k 
 Of Marx we are best enabled to understand our own history, to know 
 whence we ooumi, whither we are going, and how to conduct ourselv«a. 
 
 78 Paqks. The Fbontisfiegs is a Pictubk or Marx. 
 Price. 25 Cents. 
 
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