[Recent
Literature on Interest (1903)]
During this entire period the exploitation
theory has occupied much space in literary discussions. These have been
especially excited and animated on account of a peculiar personal turn that
they have taken and sometimes also on account of a kind of dramatic tension.
Of all socialistic writers Karl Marx — not perhaps without an unjust
depreciation of others, and especially of Rodbertus, whose scientific rank
was high — had gained the greatest influence over his partisans. His work
represented, so to speak, the official doctrine of contemporary socialism. It
therefore occupied the center of attack and defense. The polemical literature
of the time became a literature on Marx. The circumstances also were of
unusual interest. Marx had died before he had brought his work on capital to
an end. The unfinished parts were found in manuscript among his belongings in
an almost complete form. These were expected to furnish the explanation of a
problem that had been the chief cause of the attack against the exploitation
theory and that, according to the expectations of both the contending
parties, would furnish the deciding test of the tenableness or untenableness
of the Marxian system, the problem, namely, of harmonizing and connecting the
rate of profits, which experience shows tends toward equality in all forms of
investment, with the law of value and the theory of exploitation that Marx
had developed in his first volume.
The publication of the third volume, in
which this theme was treated, was delayed until 1894, 11 years after the
death of Marx. The interest in the question regarding what Marx himself might
have had to say on this most delicate point of his theory showed itself in a
sort of prophetic literature that had for its object the development of Marx's
probable opinion on the subject of the average rate of profit from the
premises given in his first volume. This prophetic literature fills the
decade from 1885–1894, and presents a stately array of more or less extensive
publications. The second act and at the same time the
climax of the dramatic development was reached in 1894 by Engels's
publication of the posthumous third volume. And then follows as a third act
an exceedingly animated literary discussion on the critical estimate of this
third volume, its relation to the point of departure taken by Marx in the
systematic development of his theories, and the future prospects of Marxism,
a discussion that is not likely soon to reach a conclusion.
I can content myself here with a mere
registration of these events, because in an earlier part of this work I have
described their scientific content and subjected them to a critical analysis.
Nor have I withheld my opinion that the great test has been decidedly against
Marx and his theories of value and surplus value, and that for these the
beginning of the end seems to be at hand.
But the period under discussion presents us with
another very peculiar theoretical development that must be mentioned in this
connection, and which I have called in another place the vulgär-ökonomischen
branch of the socialistic theory of exploitation. This peculiar phenomenon may be described as
follows: Various eminent theorists of a nonsocialistic tendency, who do not
even recognize the theoretical value-premises of the socialistic exploitation
theory, have yet adopted a general view of interest that in its essence is
identical with the exploitation theory and differs from it only in its more
moderate, more reserved, or less consistent form.
The most characteristic expressions of this kind
come from Dietzel and Lexis. Dietzel confesses it to be his opinion that in
its essence the exploitation theory is undeniable, and maintains that he is
obliged to accept the view that the interest phenomenon is a historical
product that is rooted in the commercial law of the present time, and that it
is one of those kinds of income that in a form of society like the present
are justly blamed as necessarily opposed to the maxim suum cuique. Lexis expresses the opinion that the normal
profit on capital is connected with the relations of power brought about by
the possession or nonpossession of capital. The source of the slave-holder's
profits is unmistakable, and the same may be said of the profits of the
"sweater." In the normal relation of the employer to the workman
there exists no exploitation of this kind, but an economic dependence of the
workman that undoubtedly influences the division of the product of labor. The
share of the workman in the yield of production is conditioned by the
circumstance, unfavorable to him, that he cannot utilize his working power
independently, but is compelled to sell it, resigning his claim to the
product for a more or less adequate means of subsistence.On another occasion Lexis still more clearly
explains this opinion of his on the origin of interest by saying that the
capitalistic seller, the producer of raw material, the manufacturer, the
wholesale dealer, the retailer, make profits in their business by selling at
a higher price than they buy, thereby raising the cost price of their goods
by a certain percent. The laborer alone is unable to get a similar advance of
price. On account of his unfavorable situation with reference to the
capitalist he is compelled to sell his labor at the price that it costs
himself, namely, the necessary means of subsistence. Thus, even if
capitalists by buying goods at a higher price lose again a part of what they
win as sellers, these advanced prices retain their full significance for the
wage-earner who buys, and effects the transfer of part of the value of the
total product to the capitalist class.
In all these statements the idea is unmistakably
expressed that profits — and not merely some excessive portion acquired under
especially burdensome circumstances, but ordinary, normal profits as such —
arise from the pressure the possessing classes exert on the nonpossessing by
availing themselves of the stronger position that they hold in the struggle
for price, an idea that is essentially the same as that which forms the
essence of the socialistic theory of exploitation.
In order to characterize these statements,
attention should be called to two circumstances that may bear some relation
to each other. The first is that up to the present time they have been
presented as occasional statements only, and have been made on occasions that
prompted the authors to a confession of their own opinions on the interest
problem, but did not force them to a systematic defense and explanation of
their views, namely, on the occasion of a critical review of other people's
theories (Marx's and my own). The second circumstance is that these
statements have presented themselves hitherto only as simple expressions of
opinion, as confessions of faith of the authors, for which a connected,
theoretically tenable foundation has neither been given nor attempted.
Dietzel does not add a word in support of his statements, and the brief
remarks with which Lexis accompanies the expression
of his opinion are so vague and leave the problem so plainly unexplained that
the author himself will hardly claim that they contain, even in general
outlines, a really adequate explanation.
In view of the fact that the theoretical grounds
on which the views of the exploitation theorists are usually based, namely,
the socialistic theories of value and surplus value, are not laid down by
these authors as a basis for their allied theory of interest, and in view of
the fact that until now no other tenable foundation has been laid for it, as
a historian of doctrines I have merely to register the fact that these
opinions exist, and that for the present, at least, they exist merely as
unproved nontheoretical statements. We must wait to see whether an earnest
attempt will be made to elevate these confessions of faith to real theories
based on some kind of a foundation, or whether they will die out as mere
expressions of feeling to which the tendency of the time inclines without any
attempt to bring them into connection with tenable scientific premises.
