"The portion that falls to rent of possession must be lost to wages, and vice versa, the portion of the general productive capacity" (!) "that reaches labour must necessarily be taken from the revenues of possession."Herr Dühring leads us from one surprise to another. In his theory of value and the following chapters up to and including the theory of competition, that is, from page 1 to page 155, the prices of commodities or values were divided, first, into natural outlays of production or the production value, i.e., the outlays on raw materials, instruments of labour and wages; and secondly, into the surcharge or distribution value {27}, that tribute levied sword in hand {23} for the benefit of the monopolist class -- a surcharge which, as we have seen, could not in reality make any change in the distribution of wealth, for what it took with one hand it would have to give back with the other, and which, besides, in so far as Herr Dühring enlightens us as to its origin and nature, arose out of nothing and therefore consists of nothing. In the two succeeding chapters, which deal with the kinds of revenue, that is, from page 156 to 217, there is no further mention of the surcharge. Instead of this, the value of every product of labour, that is, of every commodity, is now divided into the two following portions:
first, the production costs, in which the wages paid are included; and secondly, the "net proceeds obtained by the utilisation of labour-power", which constitute the master's income. And these net proceeds have a very well-known physiognomy, which no tattooing and no house-painter's art can conceal. "In order to get absolute clarity as to the relationships obtaining in this field" {158}, let the reader imagine the passages just cited from Herr Dühring printed opposite the passages previously cited from Marx, dealing with surplus-labour, surplus-product and surplus-value, and he will find that Herr Dühring is here, though in his own style, directly copying from Capital.
Surplus-labour, in any form, whether of slavery, serfdom or wage-labour, is recognised by Herr Dühring as the source of the revenues of all ruling classes up to now; this is taken from the much-quoted passage in Capital , p. 227: Capital has not invented surplus-labour, and so on. -- And the "net proceeds" which constitute "the income of the master"-- what is that but the surplus of the labour product over and above the wages, which, even in Herr Dühring, in spite of his quite superfluous disguise of it in the term "hire", must assure, generally speaking, the labourer's maintenance and possibility of procreation? How can the "appropriation of the most important part of the proceeds of labour-power" {174} be carried out except by the capitalist, as Marx shows, extorting from the labourer more labour than is necessary for the reproduction of the means of subsistence consumed by the latter; that is to say, by the capitalist making the labourer work a longer time than is necessary for the replacement of the value of the wages paid to the labourer? Thus the prolongation of the working-day beyond the time necessary for the reproduction of the labourer's means of subsistence -- Marx's surplus-labour -- this, and nothing but this, is what is concealed behind Herr Dühring's "utilisation of labour-power";and his "net proceeds" {158} falling to the master -- how can they manifest themselves otherwise than in the Marxian surplus-product and surplus-value?
And what, apart from its inexact formulation, is there to distinguish the Dühringian rent of possession from the Marxian surplus-value? For the rest, Herr Dühring has taken the name "rent of possession" [" Besitzrente "]
from Rodbertus, who included both the rent of land and the rent of capital, or earnings of capital, under the one term rent , so that Herr Dühring had only to add "possession" to it. *6 And so that no doubt may be left of his plagiarism, Herr Dühring sums up, in his own way, the laws of the changes of magnitude in the price of labour-power and in surplus-value which are developed by Marx in Chapter XV (page 539, et seqq. , of Capital ), and does it in such a manner that what falls to the rent of possession must be lost to wages, and vice versa, thereby reducing certain Marxian laws, so rich in content, to a tautology without content -- for it is self-evident that of a given magnitude falling into two parts, one part cannot increase unless the other decreases. And so Herr Dühring has succeeded in appropriating the ideas of Marx in such a way that the "definitive and most strictly scientific treatment in the sense of the exact disciplines" {D. K. G. 498} -- which is certainly present in Marx's exposition -- is completely lost.
