Page:Landmarks of Scientific Socialism-Anti-Duehring-Engels-Lewis-1907.djvu/225



("Marx does not have the usual economic idea of capital that it is means of production already produced, but he seeks to endow it with a special dialectic history in the metamorphosis of a historical idea. Capital is expressed in gold, it creates an historical period which has its beginning in the sixteenth century and the establishment of a world-market. Any keen economic analysis is impossible with such a notion. Such barren conceptions which are half historical and half logical destroys the possibility of any proper discrimination with respect to the matter." These remarks of Duehring are answered as follows by Engels:)

According to Marx, then, capital manifested itself as gold at the beginning of the sixteenth century. It is just as if anybody were to say that specie had expressed itself as cattle for three thousand years, because formerly cattle had performed the gold functions along with others. Only Herr Duehring could be guilty of such a crude and distorted expression. Marx in his analysis of the economic forms in which the process of the circulation of commodities takes places simply declares gold to be the last form. "This last product of the circulation of commodities is the form in which capital first appears. Historically capital comes with the possession of property in the form of money, as hoards of money, merchant-capital, and usury-capital. … This history is going on every day before our eyes. New capital comes on the scene, that is the market, the market for commodities, the labor market or the money market, simply as money, money which is transformed into capital by a definite process." Again Marx states the fact. It is useless for you to struggle against