III.1. [Private Property and Labour]

[I] To page XXXVI. The subjective essence of private property, private property as activity existing for itself, as subject, as person, is labour. It goes without saying, then, that only the political economy that recognised labour as its principle (Adam Smith), and so no longer regarded private property as merely a condition outside man, is to be regarded both as a product of the real energy and movement of private property (it is the independent movement of private property become conscious of itself, modern industry as self) and as a product of modern industry; just as, on the other hand, it has accelerated and glorified the energy and development of this industry and made it a power of consciousness. To this enlightened political economy, which has discovered the subjective essence of wealth (within private property), the adherents of the money and mercantile system, who regard private property as a merely objective being for man, therefore appear as fetish-worshippers, as Catholics. Engels was therefore right to call Adam Smith the Luther of political economy. Just as Luther recognised religion, faith, as the essence of the external world, and therefore confronted Catholic paganism; just as he abolished external religiosity by making religiosity the inner essence of man; just as he negated the priests existing outside the layman because he transferred the priest into the layman’s heart: so wealth existing outside man and independent of him (and so to be gained and maintained only in an external way) is abolished, that is, this external, thoughtless objectivity of wealth is abolished, by private property being incorporated in man himself and man himself being recognised as its essence; but for that very reason man himself is placed in the role of private property, as with Luther he is placed in the role of religion. Under the appearance of recognising man, then, the political economy whose principle is labour is rather only the consistent carrying through of the denial of man, since man himself no longer stands in an external tension with the external essence of private property, but has himself become this tense essence of private property. What was formerly being external to oneself, real alienation of man, has become only the act of alienation, of selling oneself. If, then, that political economy begins under the appearance of recognising man, his independence, his spontaneous activity, etc., and, since it transfers private property into the very essence of man, can no longer be conditioned by the local, national, etc., determinations of private property as a being existing outside it, and so develops a cosmopolitan, universal energy that overturns every limit, every bond, in order to put itself in their place as the only policy, universality, limit and bond, it must, as it develops further, throw off this hypocrisy and come out in all its cynicism. And it does so by developing labour as the sole essence of wealth much more one-sidedly, and so more sharply and consistently, unconcerned by all the apparent contradictions in which this doctrine involves it; by showing the consequences of this doctrine to be rather hostile to man, in contrast to that original conception; and finally by dealing the death-blow to the last individual, natural existence of private property and source of wealth that exists independently of the movement of labour, to ground-rent, that expression of feudal property which has already become wholly economic and therefore incapable of resisting political economy. (The school of Ricardo.) Not only does the cynicism of political economy grow relatively from Smith through Say to Ricardo, Mill, etc., in so far as the consequences of industry appear before the latter’s eyes more developed and more full of contradiction; positively too they always go further, and consciously, in estrangement from man than their predecessors, but only because their science develops more consistently and more truly. Since they make private property in its active form the subject, and so at the same time make man the essence and at the same time make man as a non-essence the essence, the contradiction of reality corresponds completely to the contradictory essence they have recognised as their principle. The torn [II] reality of industry confirms their principle, torn within itself, far from refuting it. Their principle is after all the principle of this tornness.

The Physiocratic doctrine of Dr. Quesnay forms the transition from the mercantile system to Adam Smith. Physiocracy is directly the economic dissolution of feudal property, but for that very reason it is just as directly its economic transformation and restoration, except that its language now becomes economic and no longer feudal. All wealth is resolved into the land and cultivation (agriculture). The land is not yet capital; it is still a particular mode of capital’s existence, which is supposed to count in and because of its natural particularity; but the land is nevertheless a universal, natural element, while the mercantile system knows only precious metal as the existence of wealth. The object of wealth, its material, has thus at once received the highest universality within the limits of nature (in so far as it is still directly objective wealth as nature). And the land exists for man only through labour, through agriculture. So the subjective essence of wealth is already transferred into labour. But at the same time agriculture is the only productive labour. So labour is not yet grasped in its universality and abstraction; it is still bound to a particular natural element as its material, and so it is still recognised only in a particular mode of existence determined by nature. It is therefore only a determinate, particular alienation of man, as its product is still conceived as a determinate wealth, falling more to nature than to labour itself. The land is still recognised here as an existence of nature independent of man, not yet as capital, that is, as a moment of labour itself. Rather, labour appears as its moment. But since the fetishism of the old external wealth, existing only as an object, is reduced to a very simple element of nature, and its essence is already recognised, if only partly and in a particular way, in its subjective existence, the necessary step forward is that the universal essence of wealth is recognised and labour in its complete absoluteness, that is, abstraction, is therefore raised to the principle. It is proved against Physiocracy that agriculture, from the economic point of view, the only legitimate one, does not differ from any other industry; and so that not a determinate labour, bound to a particular element, a particular expression of labour, but labour in general is the essence of wealth.

Physiocracy denies particular, external, merely objective wealth by declaring labour to be its essence. But at first labour is for it only the subjective essence of landed property (it starts from the kind of property that appears historically as the dominant and recognised one); it turns only landed property into alienated man. It abolishes its feudal character by declaring industry (agriculture) to be its essence; but it takes a negative attitude to the world of industry, and recognises the feudal system, by declaring agriculture the only industry.

It is clear that as soon as the subjective essence of industry constituting itself in opposition to landed property, that is, as industry, is grasped, this essence includes its opposite within itself. For just as industry takes in landed property as superseded, so its subjective essence at the same time takes in the subjective essence of landed property.

Just as landed property is the first form of private property, and industry at first confronts it historically only as a particular kind of property (or rather is the emancipated slave of landed property), so this process repeats itself in the scientific grasp of the subjective essence of private property, labour: labour appears first only as agricultural labour, but then asserts itself as labour in general.

[III] All wealth has become industrial wealth, the wealth of labour; and industry is completed labour, just as the factory system is the developed essence of industry, that is, of labour, and industrial capital is the completed objective form of private property.

We see how only now can private property complete its rule over man and become, in its most general form, a world-historical power.