Eduard Bernstein

“ This average rate of profits, added to the actual cost price of a given commodity, constitutes its price of production, and it is this price of production which appears to the empirical mind of the business man as the value of the commodity. The real law of value, on the contrary, disappears from the surface in a society where, as to-day, commodities are bought and sold against money and not exchanged against other commodities. ”

“ Marx himself, in placing in the third volume what he calls the law of value in the background and setting out the formation of the “price of production” as the empirical determinator of prices in modern society, justifies those who look upon the conception of labour-value as an abstract formula which does not apply to individual exchanges of commodities at all, but which only serves to show an imagined typical example of what in reality to-day is only true with regard to the production of the whole of social wealth. ”

“ If to-day the worker receives a wage which covers the bare necessaries of life, he is underpaid—he does not receive the real value of his labour-force. For the value of any commodity is determined by its socially necessary costs of production (or in this case, maintenance) . “Socially necessary” means, further, that no more labour is embodied in a commodity than is required by applying labour-force, tools, &c., of average or normal efficiency, and that the commodity is produced in such quantity as is required to meet the effective demand for it. ”

“ Nevertheless, according to Marx, it is also to-day this law of value (“labour-value”) which in the last resort rules the prices and profits.
The tendency to cheapen production by increasing the relative proportion of constant capital—the fixed capital of the classical economist plus that portion of the circulating capital which consists of raw and auxiliary materials, &c.—leads to a continuous increase in the size of private enterprises, to their growing concentration. It is the larger enterprise that beats and swallows the smaller. ”

“ The centralization of the means of production and the socialization of the mode of production reach a point where they will become incompatible with their capitalist integument. Then the knell of capitalist private property will have been rung. Those who used to expropriate will be expropriated. Individual property will again be established based upon co-operation and common ownership of the earth and the means of production produced by labour.
These are the principal outlines of Das Kapital. Its purely economic deductions are dominated throughout by the theory of surplus-value. ”

“ But the proletariate cannot free itself without freeing all other oppressed classes, and thus its victory means the end of exploitation and political repression altogether. Consequently the state as a repressive power will die out, and a free association will take its place.
Almost from the first Das Kapital and the publications of Marx and Engels connected with it have been subjected to all kinds of criticisms. The originality of its leading ideas has been disputed, the ideas themselves have been declared to be false or only partially true, and consequently leading to wrong conclusions ”

“ And as long as society is divided into classes a class war will persist, sometimes in a more latent or disguised, sometimes in a more open or acute form, according to circumstances. In advanced capitalist society the classes between whom the decisive war takes place are the capitalist owners of the means of production and the non-propertied or wage-earning workers, the “proletariate.” ”

“ But the theory of labour-value as the determining factor of the exchange or market value of commodities can with justification be disputed, and is surely not more true than those theories of value based on social demand or utility. ”

“ In Brussels Marx and Engels also wrote a number of essays, wherein they criticized the German literary representatives of that kind of socialism and philosophic radicalism which was mainly influenced by the writings of Ludwig Feuerbach, and deduced its theorems or postulates from speculations on the “nature of man.” They mockingly nicknamed this kind of socialism “German or True Socialism,” and ridiculed the idea that by disregarding historical and class distinctions a conception of society and socialism superior to that of the English and French workers and theorists could be obtained. ”

“ According to the proportion of constant to variable capital, Marx distinguishes capitals of lowest average and highest composition, the highest composition being that where proportionately the least amount of variable (wages) capital is employed. ”

“ If he has been justly compared with Darwin, it is in these respects that he ranks with that great genius, not through his value theory, ingenious though it be. With the great theorist of biological transformation he had also in common the indefatigable way in which he made painstaking studies of the minutest details connected with his researches. ”

“ Imperceptibly the dialectical movement of ideas is substituted for the dialectical movement of facts, and the real movement of facts is only considered so far as is compatible with the former. Science is violated in the service of speculation. The picture given at the end of the first volume answers to a conception arrived at by speculative socialism in the ’forties. True, Marx calls this chapter “the historical tendency of capitalist accumulation,” and “tendency” does not necessarily mean realization in every detail. ”

“ Both articles thus relegated the solution of the questions then prominent in Germany to the advent of socialism, and so far resembled in principle other socialist publications of the time. But the way of reasoning was different, and the final words of the last quoted sentence pointed to a political revolution, to begin in France as soon as the industrial evolution had created a sufficiently strong proletariate. In contradistinction to most of the socialists of the day, Marx laid stress upon the political struggle as the lever of social emancipation. ”

“ But on the whole the language used there is much too absolute to allow of the interpretation that Marx only wanted to give a speculative picture of the goal to which capitalist accumulation would lead if unhampered by socialist counteraction. ”

“ That its spirit had not passed away was shown by subsequent international congresses, and by the growth and character of socialist labour parties in different countries. They have mostly founded their programmes on the basis of its principles, but are not always in their details quite in accordance with Marx’s views. Thus the programme which the German socialist party accepted at its congress in 1875 was very severely criticized by Marx. This criticism, reprinted in 1891 in the review Die neue Zeit, is of great importance for the analysis of Marx’s conception of socialism. ”

“ But he leaves this factor, too, quite out of sight, and confuses the concentration of private enterprises with the centralization of fortunes and capitals. By these and other omissions, quite apart from developments he could not well foresee, he announces a coming evolution which is very unlikely to take place in the way described. ”

“ Besides, the complex character of modern society is greatly underestimated, so that, e.g., such important features as the influence of the changes of traffic and aggregation on modern life are scarcely considered at all ”