Lighthouse Books for Translation and Publishing: Karl Marx (ePub)

It has been said that the professional and professorial exponents of economic science confine themselves to variants of a single theme. Usually belonging to the master class by birth and education, and at any rate attached to that class by the ties of economic interest, they are ever guided by the conscious or subconscious aim of providing a theoretical justification for the capitalist system, and their lives are devoted to inculcating the art of extracting honey from the hive without alarming the bees. Achille Loria is an exception to this generalisation. Professor of political economy at Turin, and one of the most learned economists of the day, he is anything but an apologist for the bourgeois economy. With[Pg 10] the exception of the first volume of Marx's Capital, no more telling indictment of capitalism has ever been penned than Loria's Analysis of Capitalist Property (1889).

This gigantic work has not been translated, but a number of Loria's books are available to English readers: The Economic Foundations of Society, 1902; Contemporary Social Problems, 1911; The Economic Synthesis, 1914. A biographical and critical study of Malthus, in the Italian, was rendered into English in 1917 and published in the United States as the opening chapter of a symposium on Population and Birth Control edited by the writers of this foreword. The Economic Foundations of Society has run through five editions in Swan Sonnenschein's (now Allen & Unwin's) "Social Science Series." But on the whole Loria's works are less widely known in England and America than on the continent, far less widely known than they deserve to be.

An exposition of his outlook and a study of his relationship to Marx will not only be of interest in themselves, but will help readers to surmount certain terminological difficulties in the Karl Marx. All original thinkers write perforce in a language of their own minting. Those of us to whom "surplus value," the "class struggle," the "materialist conception," "economic determinism," have been familiar concepts from childhood upwards, are apt to forget that Marx's contemporaries were repelled by what they regarded as superfluous jargon. The first students of Kant, the first students of Darwin, the first students of all great innovators in philosophy, science, and the arts, have had to master a new vocabulary before they could understand what these writers were driving at; for new ideas must be conveyed in a new speech or by the use of old words refashioned. We cannot understand Loria, we cannot appreciate Loria's criticism of Marx, we cannot grasp the nature of Loria's[Pg 12] own affiliation to Marx, unless we realise precisely what the Italian economist means by the speciously familiar terms "income," "subsistence," "unproductive labourers," "recipients of income," and the like. The familiarity of the words makes them all the more misleading to those who do not hold the Lorian clue to guide them through the economic labyrinth. Does this sound alarming? Yet Loria's doctrines, like those of Marx, like those of Darwin, like those of-but we must not say "like those of Kant"-are simplicity itself to anyone who is able to survive the first shock of the encounter, to surmount the first agony of a new idea.