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.[1]
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.[2] 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.[3]
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.[4]
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.[5] 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.[6] 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.[7]
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[8] 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.[9]
