[414]Charles Moravitz, Die Türkei im Spiegel ihrer Finanzen (1903), p. 84.
[415]‘Incidentally, in this country everything is difficult and complicated. If the government wishes to create a monopoly in cigarette paper or playing cards, France and Austro-Hungary immediately are on the spot to veto the project in the interest of their trade. If the issue is oil, Russia will raise objections, and even the Powers who are least concerned will make their agreement dependent on some other agreement. Turkey’s fate is that of Sancho Panza and his dinner: as soon as the minister of finance wishes to do anything, some diplomat gets up, interrupts him and throws a veto in his teeth’ (Moravitz, op. cit., p. 70).
[416]And not only in England. ‘Even in 1859, a pamphlet, ascribed to Diergardt of Viersen, a factory owner, was disseminated all over Germany, urging that country to make sure of the East-Asiatic markets in good time. It advocated the display of military force as the only means for getting commercial advantages from the Japanese and the Eastern Asiatic nations in general. A German fleet, built with the people’s small savings, had been a youthful dream, long since brought under the hammer by Hannibal Fischer. Though Prussia had a few ships, her naval power was not impressive. But in order to enter into commercial negotiations with Eastern Asia, it was decided to equip a ship. Graf zu Eulenburg, one of the ablest and most prudent Prussian statesmen, was appointed chief of this mission which also had scientific objects. Under most difficult conditions he carried out his commission with great skill, and though the plan for simultaneous negotiations with the Hawaiian islands had to be given up, the mission was otherwise successful. Though the Berlin press of that time knew better, declaring whenever a new difficulty was reported, that it was only to be expected, and denouncing all expenditure on naval demonstrations as a waste of the taxpayers’ money, the ministry of the new era remained steadfast, and the harvest of success was reaped by the ministry that followed’ (W. Lotz, Die Ideen der deutschen Handelspolitik, p. 80).
[417]Following on the preliminary discussion between Michel Chevalier and Richard Cobden on behalf of the French and English governments, ‘official negotiations were shortly entered upon and were conducted with the greatest secrecy. On January 1, 1860, Napoleon III announced his intentions in a memorandum addressed to M. Fould, the Minister of State. This declaration came like a bolt from the blue. After the events of the past year, the general belief was that no attempt would be made to modify the tariff system before 1861. Feelings ran high, but all the same the treaty was signed on January 23’ (Auguste Devers, La politique commerciale de la France depuis 1860. Schriften des Vereins für Sozialpolitik, vol. 51, p. 136).
[418]Between 1857 and 1868, the revision along liberal lines of the Russian tariffs and the ultimate writing-off of the insane system of kantrin with regard to protective tariffs were a manifestation and corollary of the progressive reforms which the disastrous Crimean wars had made inevitable. But the reduction of customs duties reflected the concern of the landowning gentry who, both as consumers of foreign goods and as producers of grain for export, were interested in unrestricted commerce between Russia and Western Europe. The champion of agrarian interests, the ‘Free Economic Association’ stated: ‘During the last sixty years, between 1822 and 1882, agriculture, Russia’s largest producer, was brought to a precarious position owing to four great setbacks. These could in every case be directly attributed to excessive tariffs. On the other hand, the thirty-two years between 1845 and 1877 when tariffs were moderate went by without any such emergency, in spite of three foreign wars and one civil war [meaning the Polish insurrection of 1863—R. L.], every one of which proved a greater or less strain on the financial resources of the state’ (Memorandum of the Imperial Free Economic Association on Revising Russian Tariffs (St. Petersburg, 1890), p. 148). As late as the nineties, then, the scientific spokesman of the Free Trade Movement, the said ‘Free Economic Association’, had to agitate against protective tariffs as a ‘contrivance to transplant’ capitalist industry to Russia. In a reactionary ‘populist’ spirit, it denounced capitalism as a breeding ground for the modern proletariat, ‘those masses of shiftless people without home or property who have nothing to lose and have long been in ill repute’ (p. 191). This is proof enough that until most recent times the Russian champions of Free Trade, or at least of moderate tariffs, did not to any appreciable extent represent the interests of industrial capital. Cf. also K. Lodyshenski: The History of the Russian Tariffs (St. Petersburg, 1886), pp. 239-58.
[419]This is also the opinion of F. Engels. In one of his letters to Nikolayon, on June 18, 1892, he writes: ‘English authors, blinded by their patriotic interests, completely fail to grasp why the whole world so stubbornly rejects England’s example of free trade and adopts in its place the principle of protective tariffs. Of course, they simply dare not admit even to themselves that the system of protective tariffs, by now almost universal, is merely a defensive measure against English free trade which was instrumental in perfecting England’s industrial monopoly. Such a defence policy may be more or less reasonable—in some cases it is downright stupid, as for instance in Germany who under the system of free trade had become a great industrial power and now imposes protective tariffs on agricultural products and raw materials, thus increasing the cost of her industrial production. In my view this universal reversion to protective tariffs is not a mere accident but the reaction against England’s intolerable industrial monopoly. The form which this reaction takes, as I said before, may be wrong, inadequate and even worse, but its historical necessity seems to me quite clear and obvious’ (Letters of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels to Nikolayon (St. Petersburg, 1908), p. 71).
[420]Dr. Renner indeed makes this assumption the basis of his treatise on taxation. ‘Every particle of value created in the course of one year is made up of these four parts: profit, interest, rent, and wages; and annual taxation, then, can only be levied upon these’ (Das arbeitende Volk und die Steuern, Vienna, 1909). Though Renner immediately goes on to mention peasants, he cursorily dismisses them in a single sentence: ‘A peasant e.g. is simultaneously entrepreneur, worker, and landowner, his agricultural proceeds yield him wage, profit, and rent, all in one.’ Obviously, it is an empty abstraction to apply simultaneously all the categories of capitalist production to the peasantry, to conceive of the peasant as entrepreneur, wage labourer and landlord all in one person. If, like Renner, we want to put the peasant into a single category, his peculiarity for economics lies in the very fact that he belongs neither to the class of capitalist entrepreneurs nor to that of the wage proletariat, that he is not a representative of capitalism at all but of simple commodity production.
[421]It would go beyond the scope of the present treatise to deal with cartels and trusts as specific phenomena of the imperialist phase. They are due to the internal competitive struggle between individual capitalist groups for a monopoly of the existing spheres for accumulation and for the distribution of profits.
[422]In a reply to Vorontsov, Professor Manuilov, for example, wrote what was then greatly praised by the Russian Marxists: ‘In this context, we must distinguish strictly between a group of entrepreneurs producing weapons of war and the capitalist class as a whole. For the manufacturers of guns, rifles and other war materials, the existence of militarism is no doubt profitable and indispensable. It is indeed quite possible that the abolition of the system of armed peace would spell ruin for Krupp. The point at issue, however, is not a special group of entrepreneurs but the capitalists as a class, capitalist production as a whole.’ In this connection, however, it should be noted that ‘if the burden of taxation falls chiefly on the working population, every increase of this burden diminishes the purchasing power of the population and hence the demand for commodities’. This fact is taken as proof that militarism, under the aspect of armament production, does indeed ‘enrich one group of capitalists, but at the same time it injures all others, spelling gain on the one hand but loss on the other’ (Vesnik Prava, Journal of the Law Society (St. Petersburg, 1890), no. 1, ‘Militarism and Capitalism’).
[423]Ultimately, the deterioration of the normal conditions under which labour power is renewed will bring about a deterioration of labour itself, it will diminish the average efficiency and productivity of labour, and thus jeopardise the conditions for the production of surplus value. But capital will not feel these results for a long time, and so they do not immediately enter into its economic calculations, except in so far as they bring about more drastic defensive measures of the wage labourers in general.