Following the Forest Passage

This kind of ethics informs his economic thinking. It is the Manchester school all over again. It is exactly like the thinking of Cobden, who at the very same time was leading the Whig free-trade theory to victory. Marx opposed the form of capitalism that derived its justification from Bentham and Shaftesbury and was formulated by Adam Smith. But since he was a critic only, negative and uncreative, he took over his principles from the very thing he was fighting. Work was for him a commodity, not an obligation. That is the core of his political economics. His ethics were the ethics of big business. Not that business is unethical; but we can read between the lines his opinion that the laborer is a fool not to engage in it. And laborers have understood him. The battle for higher wages became a kind of investment speculation: the worker was now a merchant selling his product, work. The trick about Marx’s famous ‘‘surplus value’’ thesis is that it was considered as spoils to be carried off by the successful merchant from the opponent’s stores. It was not to be presented to him for nothing. Class egoism thus became a universal principle. The laborers not only wanted to do business, he wanted the corner the whole market. The true Marxist is hostile to the state, and for the very same reason as the Whig: it hinders him in the ruthless exercise of his private business interests. Marxism is the capitalism of the working class. Consider Darwin, who was just as important to Marx as Malthus and Cobden. Business is conceived of throughout as a struggle for existence. In industry the employer engages in commerce with the commodity ‘‘money,’’ while the worker does likewise with the commodity ‘‘work.’’ Marx wished to deprive capital of the right to private profit, but the only thing he could think of as a substitute was the worker’s right to private profit. That is unsocialistic, but it is typically English.»