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It was shown that the appropriation of unpaid labor is the basis of the capitalistic mode of production and the robbery of the worker is carried out by its means; that the capitalist, although he buys the labor-force of the worker at the full value which it possesses in the market as a commodity, yet derives more from it than he has paid for it, and that in the last instance this surplus creates the total amount of value from which the capital steadily increasing in the hands of the capitalistic class is amassed.
The thing which Marx states here is a simple fact which happens every day before our eyes in the present capitalistic society. Let us examine with regard to equality of value a little more closely. All labor time is of equal value, that of the barrow pusher and that of the architect. Therefore labor time and consequently labor itself has a value. But labor is the creator of all values.
I mean that side of art which is, or ought to be, done by the ordinary workman while he is about his ordinary work, and which has got to be called, very properly, Popular Art. This art, I repeat, no longer exists now, having been killed by commercialism. But from the beginning of man's contest with Nature till the rise of the present capitalistic system, it was alive, and generally flourished.
That that society had come to an end instead of evolving to its natural conclusion a developed capitalistic individualism such as exists to-day was due to the weakness of its economic basis, owing to the limitation at that time of man's power over Nature, which deprived it of recuperative and defensive force, thereby leaving it a prey not only to internal influences of decay but also to violent destructive forces from without.
But the Altrurians keep young very much longer than capitalistic peoples do, and the life of work keeps down their weight.
Herr Duehring's most astonishing observation is that from the Marxian standpoint, "in the last analysis everything is identical," that therefore in the eyes of Marx, for example, capitalists and wage workers, feudal, capitalistic and social methods of production are "all one."
In China there was only a weak middle class, vegetating under the dominance of the gentry; the middle class had still to gain the strength to liberate itself before it could become the support for a capitalistic state.
While Socialists have not always conceded that the capitalists will themselves undertake, without compulsion, large measures of political democracy and social reform, even of the capitalistic variety, nearly all of the most influential are now coming to base their whole policy on this now very evident tendency, and some have done so for many years past.
Both kinds of federation, capitalistic and labor, can do much good, and as a necessary corollary they can both do evil.
It is extremely dangerous for any society, whether it be an International League, a State, either Communistic or Capitalistic, a Trade Union, or a Church, to suppress individual liberty in the interests of greater social efficiency or of increased production or rigid uniformity of doctrine.
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