What is Engels unique contribution to historical materialism and the labor theory of value. Critical elements of Marx’s work have been called into question because it is said that these elements are actually to product of Engels not Marx. Although the two men worked very closely all of their adult lives, today there is a growing chorus of Marxists who assert that their reading of Marx differs fundamentally from Engels’s reading. This has forced them to assert Engels’ reading is fundamentally wrong.

I want to examine one example of the idea Engels misread Marx.

One such argument is made by Christopher Arthur, who has published prolifically on Marx’s theory of money. Arthur opposes Marx labor theory of value and has tried to prove that Marx’s approach to the problem was fundamentally wrong. It is not the exchange of commodities that gives rise to money, but money that makes the exchange of commodities possible. Money makes it possible for us to equate apples and oranges, even though, as use values, the first cannot be equated to the second.

One the key concepts of labor theory of value that Arthur has attacked is the notion that commodity production existed prior to the capitalist epoch. Some, following Engels, have called this stage of human history, “simple commodity production”. In an essay, The Myth of ‘Simple Commodity Production’, Arthur takes on the term. He argues the term was actually coined by Engels and cannot be found in Marx’s original works, notes etc.

But the simple truth is that Marx never called anything ‘einfache Warenproduktion’ [roughly translated as ‘simple goods production’]; the term cannot be found in his writings.

The term was first coined by Engels, Marx’s close collaborator and inserted into the text of volume III of Capital by him. According to Arthur, Engels also is the one who introduced the idea that Capital, volume I begins initially with a description of “simple commodity production” and only later discusses capitalism proper. Arthur calls this a misreading of Marx, since Marx never employed the term himself. The only use of the term, “simple commodity production”, in Capital is Engels’ own use of the term in volume III of the book, which he produced using Marx’s scattered notes for the volume.

To explain why Engels might introduce this term that cannot be found in Marx’s own writing, Arthur argues that Engels took a primarily historical approach in discussing capitalism. It wasn’t until volume III, however, that Engels explicitly made use of the term. This, says Arthur, provides context:

“It is not very usual for an editor to impose his own reading on the text. Why, then, did Engels do it? The reason can be established with some precision. However, first let us note that Engels’s cast of mind was primarily historical. In his review of Marx’s 1859 Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy he put forward what came to be known as the ‘logical-historical’ method (another term Marx never used, by the way). When he responded to the first proofs of Capital, he reacted to the proposal to add a special appendix on the value-form by urging that this take the shape of a proof from history.[11] (Marx ignored this advice.) However, when Engels came to write Prefaces to Capital I in 1883, 1886, and 1890 he did not suggest that the first part was historical. Nor did he refer to ‘simple commodity production’ in his Preface to Volume II. It was only in 1894 in the Preface to Volume III that he came up with the idea in the context of judging what has been called ‘the prize-essay competition’ (in which people had been challenged by Engels, in his Preface to Volume II, to solve the problem of generating a uniform rate of profit on the basis of the law of value). This gives us the requisite context for understanding Engels’s intervention.”

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According to Arthur, Engels introduced the term to answer the charge that Marx had abandoned labor theory of value in order to explain how prices formed in the capitalist mode of production. Some people argued that labor values were a mere fiction invented by Marx to explain prices; a fiction he had to abandon once he began to discuss capitalistic prices of production.

“Engels reacted to this possibility by interpreting the stages of Marx’s presentation historically in order to ensure that the values were indeed empirically visible, but, of course, in the past, before capitalism ‘modified’ the relationships involved.”

In other words, Engels was forced to come up with the idea of “simple commodity production” in order to counter criticisms of Marx’s theory.

Arthur admits that Engels cited Marx’s manuscript as the basis for coining the new term, which basically described the same thing, but did not use the specific term. But Arthur suggests there is no basis for referring to these notes, since,

“[It] is just as possible he would have decided it was a false trail and eliminated it! Certainly, odd references in Capital to pre-capitalist production are not used with any systematic intent.”

On Arthur’s reading of Marx, Engels was wrong to use the text in question as the basis for coining the term, “simple commodity production”, because it is possible Marx might have later changed his mind. Marx was dead, of course. And could not change his mind about anything. The only person in the room was Engels, his lifetime collaborator and the person charged to collecting, editing and publishing the posthumous work.

Marx might indeed have changed his mind once he actually got down to the task of preparing volume III for publication himself, but he was already long dead and the only person available to state with any degree of certainty what his mindset might have been at the time was the guy who had worked with him since they we both in their twenties.

Chris Arthur wants us to take his word about what Marx might have done over the Engels, his lifetime collaborator. That’s some cheek. In any case, a long line of labor theory scholars have accepted Engels’ reading of Marx over that of Chris Arthur and an ever growing number of Engels critics today.

This disturbs Arthur to no end.

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There is point on which I think Arthur is correct, however:

“But in future I hope such people will not refer to ‘what Marx called simple commodity production’, but to ‘what Engels called simple commodity production’.”

I think it is important to accurately trace the term to its origin with Engels. To the extent other examples like this can be found, I think it is for the best. Labor theory of value should not be identified solely with Marx’s hand. Engels (and others) made unique contributions to labor theory over the last 150 years.

But this is not where Arthur wants to take the discussion. Although Arthur attacks Engels over the term “simple commodity production”, his intent is to refute labor theory of value itself.

According to Arthur, Marx may have made a unique contribution to the critique of political economy, but he was unable to produce

“a rigorously logical ordering of concepts, employing not a historical dialectic but a systematic dialectic of the kind found in Hegel’s logic, wherewith an abstract beginning is sequentially concretised.”

Arthur is being inexplicably circumspect here. He thinks Marx was wrong to argue that money arose from commodity production and exchange. Instead, in Arthur’s “systematic dialectic of the kind found in Hegel’s logic”, commodity production, exchange, value and exchange value arise from money. Value is not the product of labor; it is the product of capital.

To make his argument against Marx, commodity production and exchange cannot be said to have existed prior to the capitalist mode of production. For this reason, Engels’ coining of the term, “simple commodity production” has to be discredited as “not-Marx”, as though Marx is the only authentic labor theorist to ever have existed. Once a wedge is driven between Engels’ and Marx’s differing approaches to historical materialism, Arthur can complete his ‘demolition’ of Marx’s argument that labor is the source of value.

As Arthur indicates, whether “simple commodity production” ever existed prior to the capitalist mode of production cannot become a matter of historical relevance. No pointing to the long history of trade in the ancient world can satisfy the problem. Rather, the existence of “simple commodity production” must be a philosophical question, a matter of the “systematic dialectic of the kind found in Hegel’s logic”.

Which is to say, in order to logically derive commodity production within the capitalist mode of production, we have to assume the prior existence of capital. Although simple commodity production, exchange, value and exchange value all exist prior to capital historically, following Hegel we are forced to explain all of these categories logically as products of capital.

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Why might this be true?

The simplest answer is that in the capitalistic mode of production all of these categories are presented to us in inverted form.

To give a relevant example of this inversion: in simple commodity production the producer who is the most efficient and productive, i.e., who expends the least amount of labor in producing her commodity, should (generally speaking) have the lowest price in the market.

In capitalistic commodity production the opposite is true. Since the aim of capitalistic commodity production is realization of surplus value, surplus labor time, unpaid labor time, the producer (capital) who can produce a commodity with the least amount of labor will not reduce her prices. Rather, she will attempt to realize extra profits.

This inversion has to occur even if we assume that both the simple commodity producer and the capitalist commodity producer seek to maximize their prices in the market. The simple commodity producer can only realize the labor she actually expended on the production of her commodity. The capital too can only realize the labor expended on production of its commodity. The difference is that, for the capital, a portion of the labor expended on the production of the commodity is unpaid.

This portion constitutes the profit of capital.

In trying to maximize this unpaid labor as profit, capital introduces an entirely new dynamic into commodity production generally. What is to be maximized is not prices of commodities per se, but the unpaid portion of commodity prices. Thus, prices no longer behave the way they are assumed to behave in simple commodity production. The aim of capitalistic commodity production is not the prices of commodities as such, but the surplus value that can be realized given definite prices of production.

This has obvious implications for the paid portion of the working day.

Generally speaking, we assume the capital can no more increase prices in the market than the simple commodity producer. However, unlike the simple producer, the capital can reduce the paid portion of labor going into the production of the commodities. The entire conflict between capital and wage labor hinges on this reality. If you throw out the distinction between capitalistic and simple commodity production, you basically lose the explanatory power of labor theory of value with regards to the class struggle.

This is what Arthur is aiming to accomplish.