Page:Karl Marx - The Poverty of Philosophy - (tr. Harry Quelch) - 1913.djvu/14

 people who take no part in the direct exploitation of labor; and its representatives are naturally anxious to stop this leakage, as they consider it, and to reduce their own taxation for public purposes by appropriating rent to the service of the State. That is all very well for them."

On this point Marx says: "We can understand such economists as Mill, Cherbulliez [sic], Hilditch and others, demanding that rent should be handed over to the State to be used for the remission of taxation. That is only the frank expression of the hate which the industrial capitalist feels for the landed proprietor, who appears to him as a useless incumbrance, a superfluity in the otherwise harmonious whole of bourgeois production."

"Rent," says Marx, "results from the social relations in which exploitation is carried on. It cannot result from the nature, more or less fixed, more or less durable, of land. Rent proceeds from society and not from the soil."

The criticism of Proudhon's appreciation of gold and silver as the first manifestation of this theory of "constituted value" should be interesting reading to those admirers of the French Anarchist who yet profess their profound detestation of money and its function. So, too, should his declaration against strikes and combinations of workmen. In this we see once more how extremes meet. This declaration of Proudhon's would not be out of place in the organ of the Liberty and Property Defence League.

In this matter of trade union combination, Marx was scarcely accurate in his perception of its development. He clearly did not foresee that the great English trade unions would become fossilised [sic], as it were; and that instead of being a revolutionary force they would become a reactionary mass, opposing the progress of the mere