Capital" is his scientific explanation of how Capitalism exploits the workers, and he bases his case upon a definition of value which was to be explained in three massive volumes, the third, in which he was to meet certain recondite objections, having been left at his death as a sheaf of disconnected and unfinished notes. This was completed and published by Engels, and certainly left the doctrine on anything but a stable foundation. The essential part of the theory is that labour is the creator of all value (a dictum of Adam Smith and Ricardo, as well as of Petty and other early writers on economics), but that under Capitalism labour is not paid by the value it creates but by the price of labour power as a commodity on the market, and that this price tends to be fixed by the economic laws of the market at a point which just secures a continued supply of the desired commodity. This is the "Iron Law of Wages." Thus capital possesses itself of the surplus product and so, relatively, the rich become more and more able to exploit, and labour becomes less and less able to defend itself against exploitation.* After this has gone on and Capitalism has evolved through its necessary phases, a break will come and revolution will inaugurate a new economic era. That is the economic process explained in relation to a particular theory of value, of wages and of detailed economic change, and presented by a disciple of Hegel in Hegelian dialectic used for political and economic propaganda.

The political or historical process of evolution *This was no new Socialist theory or discovery. Rodbertus had expounded it as soon as, if not earlier than, Marx, the Owenites held to it, and the early English Economic Socialists expounded it. But Marx took hold of it with master mind and turned it to account in a way that no predecessor had been capable of doing.

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was also given a law, and that was economic determinism." Marx found, as many others who are far from holding Socialist conclusions have also done, that all historical phenomena, whatever their superficial characteristics, must be ultimately assigned to economic causes. Thus, with an economic foundation of surplus value, Marx explains the historical as well as the economic evolution of the existing system. The private ownership of capital and the interests of the class that holds it have determined the creation and the evolution of States. The origin of war is Capitalism; the movements of religion, like our Reformations, are economic; to this power the life of the world and of the people thereon are in bondage; the slavery of the wage worker is different in kind but not in nature to that of the chattel. Capitalism, as a Hegelian was bound to discover, contains in itself the seeds of its own destruction. Thus, in Marx's hands, Socialism became a movement of the world spirit; an event in human society and organization, something that belonged to the order and being of things.

In the "Communist Manifesto,' written in 1847, we have really the whole gist of Marx's doctrines, and it is worth summarizing as it is not at all well known now. It is Marxism concentrated in thought and spirit. It combines that masterly width of intellectual sweep and that thrilling and stirring appeal to the common mind which I regard as the secret of the power of Marx amongst working-class movements everywhere. No narrow nationalism confines its force; it is an exposition of laws that hold as good in Japan as in Great Britain, in India as in France, in China as in America. It begins with a proud statement that every ruling class in Europe

has sought to attach infamy to its opponents by calling them Communists.* That to it is a laurel crown. Communism is thus "acknowledged by all European Powers to be itself a Power," and therefore it is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the spectre of Communism with a Manifesto of the party itself." In its opening sentences it predicates the class struggle and explains its meaning. The bourgeoisie rose in revolt against the landed aristocracy first of all, and now the proletariat were up against the bourgeoisie. The rule of the bourgeoisie has been marked by increasing production, revolutions in industrial processes which have destroyed all social relationships save those of economics, the establishment of international trade, industrial and political imperialism, concentration of population in towns. But the reign of the bourgeoisie itself tends to break down by industrial crises of increasing severity which it cannot prevent. Workmen become mere appendages to machines and industry becomes impersonal and mechanicalized, and low paid and unskilled labour (e.g. women) displaces higher paid and skilled. At this stage of development, the workers combine in self-protection, and the conflict becomes one of economic classes. The revolutionary character of the struggle will become more and more marked until at last by the inherent weakness of the one class and the growing power of the other, the final

* It is necessary to warn readers that the Communist movement of that time, which became known later on as the Social Democratic movement, was a different thing from the Communist movement of our day.

revolutionary act comes and Communism is established.

The second section defines the position of Communism. It is international and it represents the complete interests of the proletariat. Communism systematizes working-class needs, organizes the class war, and seeks political power. The Communists would abolish bourgeois forms of property, but when the collective product known as capital has been socialized, purely individual property will still remain. "In your existing society, private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population." With bourgeois property will go bourgeois culture, and proletarian culture will prevail instead. The bourgeois defence of the family is hypocritical, for the bourgeoisie are destroying the family. National feeling and patriotism are also used for exploitation purposes. As all history is the record of class expropriation, the Communist movement "involves the most radical rupture with traditional ideas." Political power must be used "to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the State." This has to be done "by degrees," and each country must pursue its own appropriate method. The items of a programme are then detailed, including abolition of property in land, a graduated income tax, abolition of all right of inheritance, a national bank, a national transport system, State factories, "equal liability of all to labour," co-ordination of manufactures and agriculture, free education.

The third section consists of criticisms of existing Socialist parties, and the Manifesto closes with an explanation of the political position of the Communists in European countries, and ends with what has become

a world-wide slogan: "Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working men of all countries, unite!"

This reverberating appeal, spoken in firm, absolute sentences of clear-cut dogma, and calling up visions of well-defined battle lines, gathered round it, as though by magic call, the scattered and wandering bands of revolted labour, and the International for which it spoke became a terror and a bogey.

When Marx changed men's conceptions of the movement of Socialism within Society from being a revolt and protest against an evil to being an expression of the prolonged working of natural laws towards a fulfilment, he, in consequence, changed the methods by which the working of the law was to be aided and speeded up. Socialist activities had to concern themselves with Society as a wholewith the complete group of relationships subject to Capitalism. Thus, the Socialist movement became part of the political movement of the workingclasses; the establishment of Socialism became the goal of working-class politics; political liberty ceased to be regarded as an end in itself, but became a means to economic liberty-or, to write more accurately (though in that cruder form of separation and subordination they were too commonly presented, and are now by the Communist movement of to-day), political and economic liberty were seen to be organically connected, neither existing without the other. Marx wrote in a revolutionary time in many respects not unlike our own, and so we find in his sentences the hope of violence alongside a trust in politics-thus both the constitutionalist and