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Despite
the discouraging web page written in French I hope this message can be
read. I am curious as to how Adam Smith influenced Marx regarding views
on labor. I recognize that many of Marx's ideas differ greatly from
Adam Smith yet there are points that Adam Smith recognized regarding
the problems with industrial work and Marx takes one step farther. Any
help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you
What is the status of the e-mail I
wrote on the 16th of March? I understand that Mr. Marx is busy but I
hope he did not forget about my question regarding marxian and smithian
views on labor. Have a wonderful nite or morning depending on when this
email is received. Now I am going to bed. Good nite
Mister,
Mister Engels is working on a response to you. That involves litterally
cleaning Karl's office and re-organising the scattered materials of
volume 2 and 3 of his political economy. Mister Engels needs at least
another week. Karl refuses to answer to your problem, claiming that the
part of Das Capital titled "the Division of Labour in Manufactures"
provides already the core of the answer to your question. Mister
Engels, and I tend to agree with him, considers that we should not
begin to answer to the correspondants of Dialogue with pedantic
references to our published works. But since Karl refuses to
collaborate, we need a little more time to organise an answer that will
suit you. Thank you for your admirable patience vis a vis our small
difficulties. Mister Dumontais is aware that some questions are longer
to answer than others and, I dare imagine, supports us in that
regrettable delaying. You will hear from us very soon.
Sincerely yours,
Jenny Marx, born von Westphalen
Dear Mister Campbell
Mister Engels is still struggling to produce an answer to your delicate
problem. Father is not exactly cooperative, and we think we owe you an
explanation on the delicacy of the situation. Father is very reluctant
to acknowledge any scientificity to the Physiocrats and to Smith. He,
as you certainly know, attributes to Ricardo the introduction of some
scientific accuracy in political economy, with the definition of the
notion of value for example. But Smith, to him, is mainly
pre-scientific. When Father observes that you address the notion of the
influence of Adam Smith on his works as if it was business as usual, he
gets very upset, and he gives us statements like: "To entertain the
hypothesis on which that intervention is grounded slides me on the
slope leading back to vulgar economy". Rejecting the postulate of a
direct influence of Smith on his works, Father considers your
intervention as one of these 20th century manifestations of the
minimisation of the originality of his critical vision of political
economy, symptomatic of the powerful bourgeois reflux in your epoch.
Mister Engels shares that analysis, but considers that your
intervention is worth an answer. He said to Father that a brief
description of the influence of Smith on Marx on labor could be done as
a sort of mirror effect of the description he (Mister Engels) made in
1875 of the influence of Marx on Eugen Duhring. Father was not even
amused by the idea. Consequently, Mister Engels has to "elaborate" and
"negociate" his text at the same time. That is a slow process. We are
all very sorry for keeping you waiting like that.
Thank you immensely for your remarquable patience. You will hear from
Mister Engels as soon as possible. Accept the expression of my most
respectful salutations.
Laura Lafargue, born Marx
Mister Campbell,
I believe the history of economical ideas will owe you something
because of that question you raised about the influence of Adam Smith
on Marx on the notion of labour. After finally cooling off on the
matter, Marx has rediscussed the whole question with me. These new
discussions lead him to the following important decision: he will
include somewhere in the second volume of his political economy a
chapter to be titled something like FORMER PRESENTATIONS OF THE
SUBJECT, where he will review the conceptions on the reproduction and
circulation of the Total Social Capital of the main economists of the
classical tradition: Quesnay, Smith & Company. I finally
surrendered to his argument. It is not acceptable to speak of an
"influence" of Smith on the critical synthesis made by Marx. Since I
surrendered, Marx surrendered too, and decided to write himself to you,
explaining in what way Smith's theory of labour is not compatible with
his vision of the question.
Thank you for that highly fruitful and influential intervention, and for your superb patience.
Friedrich Engels
Mister,
Thank you for your question. The idea of an influence I would owe to
Adam Smith on the theory of labour is not acceptable. The matter stands
as follows:
1) Adam Smith defines the value of a commodity by the amount of labour
that the wage-labourer 'adds' to the object of labour. He says in fact
'to the materials', as he is dealing with manufacture, which works up
what are already products of labour; but this in no way affects the
matter in hand. The value that the worker adds to a thing (and this
'adds' is our Adam's own expression) is quite independent of whether
the object to which the value is added already has value before this
addition, or whether it does not. The worker therefore creates a value
in the commodity form. According to Adam Smith this is on the one hand
an equivalent for his wage; this part being therefore determined by the
value of the wage; depending on whether this is higher or lower, the
value he has added here by his labour is in this respect that needed to
produce or reproduce his wage. Another part, however, is added by the
worker by further labour above this limit, and forms surplus-value for
his capitalist employer. Whether this surplus-value remains entirely in
the hands of the capitalist, or is partially taken off him by third
parties, does not in the least affect either the qualitative
determination of the surplus-value added by the wage-labourer (that it
is all surplus-value), or its quantitative determination (the amount).
It is value just the same as any value component of the product, simply
distinguished by the fact that the worker has not received any
equivalent for it, and does not receive one subsequently, for this
value is instead appropriated by the capitalist without an equivalent.
The overall value of the commodity is determined by the amount of
labour that the worker has spent in his production. One part of this
total value is characterized as being equal to the value of the wage,
i.e. an equivalent for wages. The second part, therefore, the
surplus-value, is necessarily characterized, by the same token, as
being equal to the total value of the product minus the value component
that is the equivalent for the wage; i.e. equal to the excess value
created in the production of the commodity over the value component
contained in it that is the equivalent for wages.
2) What holds for a commodity produced in a single capitalist business
by some individual worker holds also for the annual product of all
branches of industry taken together. What applies to the day's labour
of an individual productive worker applies also to the annual labour
performed by the entire class of productive workers. This class 'fixes'
(Smith's expression) in the annual product a total value determined by
the amount of labour annually expended, and this total value breaks
down into one part determined by that portion of the annual labour in
which the working class creates an equivalent for its annual wage, in
point of fact this wage itself, and another part determined by the
additional annual labour in which the workers create a surplus-value
for the capitalist class. The annual value product contained in the
annual product thus consists of only two elements, the equivalent for
the annual wage received by the working class and the surplus value
annually supplied to the capitalist class. But the wage forms the
revenue of the working class, and the annual sum of surplus-value the
revenue of the capitalist class; the two therefore represent (and this
viewpoint is correct where it is a matter of depicting simple
reproduction) the relative share in the annual consumption fund, and
are realized in it. There is therefore no room left for the constant
capital value, for the reproduction of the capital functioning in the
form of means of production. However, Adam Smith expressly says in the
Introduction to his Inquiry into the Nature and Cause of the Wealth of
Nations that the parts of the commodity value that function together as
revenue coincide with the annual product destined for the social
consumption fund:
To explain in what has consisted the revenue of the great body of the
people, or what has been the nature of those funds which... have
supplied their annual consumption, is the object of these Four first
Books (p. 106).
And in the very first sentence of this introduction, he states:
The annual labour of every nation is the fund which originally supplies
it with all the necessaries and conveniences of life which it annually
consumes, and which consists always either in the immediate produce of
that labour, or in what is purchased with that produce from other
nations (p. 104).
Smith's first error, then, is to equate the value of the annual product
with the annual value product. The latter is simply the product of the
current year's labour; the former includes, on top of this, all those
elements of value that were used in the production of this annual
product, but which were produced in the previous year and partly in
still earlier years; means of production whose value only re-appears -
and which, as far as their value is concerned, have been neither
produced nor reproduced by the labour spent during the current year.
This confusion enables Adam Smith to juggle away the constant component
in the value of the annual product. The confusion is itself based on a
further error in his fundamental conception. He does not distinguish
the two-fold character of labour itself: labour that creates value, by
the expenditure of labour-power, and labour that creates objects of use
(use-values) as concrete useful labour. The total sum of commodities
annually produced, i.e. the total annual product, is the product of the
useful labour operating in the current year; it is only by the social
application of labour in an intricate system of varieties of useful
labour that all these commodities have come into being; it is only in
this way that the value of the means of production used up in their
production is retained in their total value, and reappears in a new
natural form. The total annual product is thus the result of the useful
labour expanded during the year; but only one part of the value of this
product has been created during the year; this part of the annual value
product, which represents the amount of labour actually performed
during the year itself.
When therefore, Smith says in the passage just quoted: The annual
labour of every nation is the fund which originally supplies it with
all the necessaries and conveniences of life which it annually
consumes, etc., he one-sidedly adopts the standpoint of useful labour,
It is this, to be sure, that has brought all these means of subsistence
into their consumable form. He forgets, here, however, that this would
have been impossible without the collaboration of means of labour and
objects of labour handed down from earlier years, and that the 'annual
labour' therefore, in as much as it forms value, has in no way created
the entire value of the products prepared by it; that the value
produced is smaller than the value of the product. I cannot share that
position, or even be "influenced" by it...
From several points of view, as my daughter Laura previously mentioned
it to you, Adam Smith is far more pre-scientific than the Physiocrats.
The case for labour is just one small example. I hope this is of help
to you.
All yours,
Karl Heinrich Marx
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