MARX TO ENGELS IN MANCHESTER, 8 January 1868

 MARX TO ENGELS IN MANCHESTER

[London,] 8 January 1868

DEAR FRED,

Ad vocem [with regard to] Dühring. It is a great deal from this man that he gives almost positive acceptance to the section on 'primitive accumulation'. He is still young. As a follower of Carey he is in direct opposition to the FREETRADERS. Furthermore, he is a university lecturer, and therefore not displeased that Professor Roscher, who blocks the way for them all, is receiving some kicks. One thing in his description struck me very strongly. That is, as long as the determination of value by labour time is itself left 'undetermined', as it is with Ricardo, it does not make people SHAKY. But as soon as it is brought exactly into connection with the working day and its variations, a very unpleasant new light dawns upon them. I believe one reason that Dühring reviewed the book at all is malice against Roscher. Indeed it is easy to scent his anxiety that he might also be 'Roscher'ed. Curiously, the fellow has not detected the three fundamentally new elements of the book:

1. that in contrast to all previous political economy, which from the outset treated the particular fragments of surplus value with their fixed forms of rent, profit and interest as already given, I begin by dealing with the general form of surplus value, in which all these elements are still undifferentiated, in solution as it were;

2. that the economists, without exception, have missed the simple fact that, if the commodity has the double character of use value and exchange value, then the labour represented in the commodity must also have a double character; thus the bare analysis of labour sans phrase, as in Smith, Ricardo, etc., is bound to come up against the inexplicable everywhere. This is, in fact, the whole secret of the critical conception;

3. that for the first time wages are shown as the irrational outward form of a hidden relationship, and this is demonstrated exactly in both forms of wages: time wages and piece wages. (It was a help to me that similar formulae are often found in higher mathematics.)

As for Mr Dühring's modest objection to the determination of value, he will be astonished when he sees in Volume II how little the determination of value counts for 'directly' in bourgeois society. Actually, no form of society can prevent the labour time at the disposal of society from regulating production in ONE WAY OR ANOTHER. But so long as this regulation is not effected through the direct and conscious control of society over its labour time — which is only possible under common ownership — but through the movement of commodity prices, then things will remain as you so aptly described them already in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher. [Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy]

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