[...]
To the present moment Political Economy, in Germany, is a foreign science.
Gustav von Gulich in his "Historical description of Commerce, Industry,"
&c., especially in the two first volumes published in 1830, has examined
at length the historical circumstances that prevented, in Germany, the
development of the capitalist mode of production, and consequently the
development, in that country, of modern bourgeois society. Thus the soil
whence Political Economy springs was wanting. This "science" had to be
imported from England and France as a ready-made article; its German
professors remained schoolboys. The theoretical expression of a foreign
reality was turned, in their hands, into a collection of dogmas,
interpreted by them in terms of the petty trading world around them, and
therefore misinterpreted. The feeling of scientific impotence, a feeling
not wholly to be repressed, and the uneasy consciousness of having to touch
a subject in reality foreign to them, was but imperfectly concealed, either
under a parade of literary and historical erudition, or by an admixture of
extraneous material, borrowed from the so-called "Kameral" sciences, a
medley of smatterings, through whose purgatory the hopeful candidate for
the German bureaucracy has to pass.
Since 1848 capitalist production has developed rapidly in Germany, and at
the present time it is in the full bloom of speculation and swindling. But
fate is still unpropitious to our professional economists. At the time when
they were able to deal with Political Economy in a straightforward fashion,
modern economic conditions did not actually exist in Germany. And as soon
as these conditions did come into existence, they did so under
circumstances that no longer allowed of their being really and impartially
investigated within the bounds of the bourgeois horizon. In so far as
Political Economy remains within that horizon, in so far, i.e., as the
capitalist regime is looked upon as the absolutely final form of social
production, instead of as a passing historical phase of its evolution,
Political Economy can remain a science only so long as the class-struggle
is latent or manifests itself only in isolated and sporadic phenomena.
Let us take England. Its Political Economy belongs to the period in which
the class-struggle was as yet undeveloped. Its last great representative,
Ricardo, in the end, consciously makes the antagonism of class interests,
of wages and profits, of profits and rent, the starting-point of his
investigations, naively taking this antagonism for a social law of Nature.
But by this start the science of bourgeois economy had reached the limits
beyond which it could not pass. Already in the lifetime of Ricardo, and in
opposition to him, it was met by criticism, in the person of Sismondi.
The succeeding period, from 1820 to 1830, was notable in England for
scientific activity in the domain of Political Economy. It was the time as
well of the vulgarising and extending of Ricardo's theory, as of the
contest of that theory with the old school. Splendid tournaments were held.
What was done then, is little known to the Continent generally, because the
polemic is for the most part scattered through articles in reviews,
occasional literature and pamphlets. The unprejudiced character of this
polemic although the theory of Ricardo already serves, in exceptional
cases, as a weapon of attack upon bourgeois economy is explained by the
circumstances of the time. On the one hand, modern industry itself was only
just emerging from the age of childhood, as is shown by the fact that with
the crisis of 1825 it for the first time opens the periodic cycle of its
modern life. On the other hand, the class-struggle between capital and
labour is forced into the background, politically by the discord between
the governments and the feudal aristocracy gathered around the Holy
Alliance on the one hand, and the popular masses, led by the bourgeoisie,
on the other; economically by the quarrel between industrial capital and
aristocratic landed property- -a quarrel that in France was concealed by
the opposition between small and large landed property, and that in England
broke out openly after the Corn Laws. The literature of Political Economy
in England at this time calls to mind the stormy forward movement in France
after Dr. Quesnay's death, but only as a Saint Martin's summer reminds us
of spring. With the year 1830 came the decisive crisis.
In France and in England the bourgeoisie had conquered political power.
Thenceforth, the class-struggle, practically as well as theoretically, took
on more and more outspoken and threatening forms. It sounded the knell of
scientific bourgeois economy. It was thenceforth no longer a question,
whether this theorem or that was true, but whether it was useful to capital
or harmful, expedient or inexpedient, politically dangerous or not. In
place of disinterested inquirers, there were hired prize fighters; in place
of genuine scientific research, the bad conscience and the evil intent of
apologetic. Still, even the obtrusive pamphlets with which the Anti-Corn
Law League, led by the manufacturers Cobden and Bright, deluged the world,
have a historic interest, if no scientific one, on account of their polemic
against the landed aristocracy. But since then the Free-trade legislation,
inaugurated by Sir Robert Peel, has deprived vulgar economy of this its
last sting.
The Continental revolution of 1848-9 also had its reaction in England. Men
who still claimed some scientific standing and aspired to be something more
than mere sophists and sycophants of the ruling-classes tried to harmonise
the Political Economy of capital with the claims, no longer to be ignored,
of the proletariat. Hence a shallow syncretism of which John Stuart Mill is
the best representative. It is a declaration of bankruptcy by bourgeois
economy, an event on which the great Russian scholar and critic, N.
Tschernyschewsky, has thrown the light of a master mind in his "Outlines of
Political Economy according to Mill."
In Germany, therefore, the capitalist mode of production came to a head,
after its antagonistic character had already, in France and England, shown
itself in a fierce strife of classes. And meanwhile, moreover, the German
proletariat had attained a much more clear class-consciousness than the
German bourgeoisie. Thus, at the very moment when a bourgeois science of
Political Economy seemed at last possible in Germany, it had in reality
again become impossible.
Under these circumstances its professors fell into two groups. The one set,
prudent, practical business folk, flocked to the banner of Bastiat, the
most superficial and therefore the most adequate representative of the
apologetic of vulgar economy; the other, proud of the professorial dignity
of their science, followed John Stuart Mill in his attempt to reconcile
irreconcilables. Just as in the classical time of bourgeois economy, so
also in the time of its decline, the Germans remained mere schoolboys,
imitators and followers, petty retailers and hawkers in the service of the
great foreign wholesale concern.
The peculiar historical development of German society therefore forbids, in
that country, all original work in bourgeois economy; but not the criticism
of that economy. So far as such criticism represents a class, it can only
represent the class whose vocation in history is the overthrow of the
capitalist mode of production and the final abolition of all classes the
proletariat.
[...]
Karl Marx
London
January 24, 1873
http://csf.colorado.edu/mirrors/marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/p3.h
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