Page:Karl Marx - The Poverty of Philosophy - (tr. Harry Quelch) - 1913.djvu/21

 present anything which has not already been at least as well said before, but his expositions also possess all the defects of those of his predecessors. He accepts the economic categories of labor, capital, value, in the crude form in which they had been transmitted to him by the economists, under their assumed form, without seeking their content. He thus not only closes to himself all means of developing himself more completely—contrary to Marx who, for the first time, has made something of these propositions so often reproduced during the past sixty-four years—but he takes the road which leads straight to utopia, as we will show.

The above application of the theory of Ricardo, which shows to the workers that the totality of social production, which is their product, belongs to them because they are the only real producers, leads direct to Communism. But it is also, as Marx shows, false in form, economically speaking, because it is simply an application of morality to economy. According to the laws of bourgeois economy, the greater part of the product does not belong to the workers who have created it. If, then, we say, "That is unjust, it ought not to be"; that has nothing whatever to do with economy, we are only stating that this economic fact is in contradiction to our moral sentiment. That is why Marx has never based upon this his Communist conclusions, but rather upon the necessary overthrow, which is developing itself under our eyes every day, of the capitalist system of production. He contents himself with saying that surplus-value consists of unpaid labor; it is a fact, pure and simple. But that which may be false in form from the economic point of view may yet be exact from the point of view of universal history. If the moral sentiment of the mass regards an economic fact—as, formerly,