A Contribution to the Critique of Political EconomyMarx, Karl
Philosophy
A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy
Marx, Karl
Economics; Marxian economics
(“Of everything which we possess there are two uses:―one is the proper,
and the other the improper or secondary use of it. For example, a shoe
is used for wear, and is used for exchange; both are uses of the shoe.
He who gives a shoe in exchange for money or food to him who wants
one, does indeed use the shoe as a shoe, but this is not its proper
or primary purpose, for a shoe is not made to be an object of barter.
The same may be said of all possessions.” The Politics of Aristotle,
translated into English by B. Jowett, Oxford, 1885, v. I., p. 15.)
[3] That is the reason why German compilers are so fond of dwelling
on use-value, calling it a “good.” See e. g. L. Stein, “System der
Staatswissenschaften,” v. I., chapter on “goods” (Gütter). For
intelligent information on “goods” one must turn to treatises on
commodities.
[4] A ridiculous presumption has gained currency of late to the effect
that common property in its primitive form is specifically a Slavonian,
or even exclusively Russian form. It is the primitive form which we
can prove to have existed among Romans, Teutons, and Celts; and of
which numerous examples are still to be found in India, though in a
partly ruined state. A closer study of the Asiatic, especially of
Indian forms of communal ownership would show how from the different
forms of primitive communism different forms of its dissolution have
been developed. Thus e. g. the various original types of Roman and
Teutonic private property can be traced back to various forms of Indian
communism.
[5] “La Ricchezza è una ragione tra due persone.” (“Value is a relation
between two persons”) Galiani, “Della Moneta,” p. 220 in vol. II.
of Custodi’s collection of “Scrittori classici Italiani di Economia
Politica. Parte Moderna,” Milano, 1803.
[6] “In its natural state, matter ... is always destitute of value.”
McCulloch, “A Discourse on the Rise, Progress, Peculiar Objects, and
Importance of Political Economy,” 2nd edition, Edinburgh, 1825, pg. 48.
It is evident how even a McCulloch stands above the fetishism of German
“thinkers”, who declare “matter” and half a dozen other foreign things
to be elements of value. Cf. e. g. L. Stein, l. c. v. I., p. 110.
[7] Berkeley, _The Querist_, London, 1750.
[8] Thomas Cooper, Lectures on the Elements of Political Economy,
London, 1831, p. 99.
[9] F. List could never grasp the difference between labor as a source
of use-value and labor as the creator of certain social form of wealth
or exchange value, because comprehension was altogether foreign to his
practical mind; he therefore saw in the modern English economists mere
plagiarists of Moses, the Egyptian.
[10] It can be readily understood what kind of “service” is rendered
by the category “service” to economists of the type of J. B. Say and
F. Bastiat, whose pondering sagacity, as Malthus has justly remarked,
always abstracts from the specially definite forms of economic
relations.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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