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[I.1.]
I Re p. XXXVI
[Often
the above reference by Marx is described as a link to missing pages in
Marx's Notebook 2. However, following this link takes us quite logically
to a later page in this MS on Adam Smith. It may also be that Marx
intended this to go to one page earlier, i.e. XXXV,
the start of the quotes from Adam Smith, due to his mix up in page numbering
around page XXII-XXV
--Ed/GT].
The subjective essence of private property , private property
as activity for itself, as subject, as person, is labour.
Therefore it is evident that only the political economy which acknowledged
labour as its principle--Adam Smith--and which therefore
no longer regarded private property as a mere condition external
to man--that it is this political economy which has to be viewed on the
one hand as a product of the real energy and the real movement
of private property (it is a movement of private property become independent
for itself in consciousness--the modern industry as Self)--as a product
of modern industry--and on the other hand, as a force which
has quickened and glorified the energy and development of modern industry
and made it a power in the realm of consciousness.
To this enlightened political economy, which has discovered--within
private property--the subjective essence of wealth, the adherents
of the monetary and mercantile system, who look upon private property
only as an objective substance confronting men, appear therefore
as fetish-worshipers, as Catholics. Engels was therefore right
to call Adam Smith the Luther of Political Economy [in Engels
1843 Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy]. Just
as Luther recognised religion--faith--as the substance of
the external world and as a consequence stood opposed to Catholic
paganism--just as he superseded external religiosity by making
religiosity the inner substance of man--just as he negated the
priests outside the layman because he transplanted the priest into laymen's
hearts, just so with wealth: wealth as something outside man and independent
of him, and therefore as something to be maintained and asserted only
in an external fashion, is abolished; that is, this external, mindless
objectivity of wealth is abolished, with private property being incorporated
in man himself and with man himself being recognised as its essence. But
as a result man is brought within the orbit of private property, just
as with Luther he is brought within the orbit of religion. Under the semblance
of recognising man, the political economy whose principle is labour rather
carries to its logical conclusion the denial of man, since man himself
no longer stands in an external relation of tension to the external substance
of private property, but has himself become this tense essence of private
property. What was previously being external to oneself--man's
actual externalisation has merely become the act of externalising--the
process of alienating.
[II.1.]
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[I.2.]
This political economy therefore begins by seeming to acknowledge man,
his independence, spontaneity, etc.; since, locating private property
in man's own being, it can no longer be conditioned by the local, national
or other characteristics of private property as of something
existing outside itself. This political economy, consequently, displays
a cosmopolitan, universal energy which overthrows every limitation
and bond so as to set itself up instead as the sole politics, the
sole universality, the sole limit and sole bond. Hence it must throw aside
this hypocrisy in the course of its further development and come
out in its complete cynicism. And this it does--without troubling
its head for one moment over all the apparent contradictions in which
it becomes involved as a result of this theory--by developing the idea
of labour much more one-sidedly, and therefore more sharply
and more logically, as the sole essence of wealth; by
proving the implications of this theory to be anti-human in character,
in contrast to the other, original approach. Finally, by dealing the death-blow
to rent--that last, individual, natural mode of private property
and source of wealth existing independently of the movement of labour,
that expression of feudal property, an expression which has already become
wholly economic in character and therefore incapable of resisting political
economy. (The Ricardo school.) There is not merely a relative growth
in the cynicism of political economy from Smith through Say to
Ricardo, Mill, etc., inasmuch as the implications of industry appear
more developed and more contradictory in the eyes of the latter; these
later economists also advance in a positive sense constantly and consciously
further than their predecessors in their estrangement from man. They do
so, however; only because their science develops more logically
and more truly. Since they make private property in its active form the
subject, thereby making man as a non-being [Unwesen] the essence [Wesen],
the contradiction in reality corresponds entirely to the contradictory
essence which they have accepted as their principle. For from refuting
it, the ruptured
[II.2.]
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