9(^280) KARL MARX: A BIOGRAPHY
accompanied by it, as a legitimate antithesis, right up to its blessed
end.^23
The ideas produced by capitalism were as transitory as capitalism
itself: here Marx formulated his most succinct critique of 'classical' liberal
principles. Pointing out that free competition was bound eventually to
hamper the development of capitalism - however necessary it might have
been at the outset, Marx alluded to
the absurdity of considering free competition as being the final develop-
ment of human liberty.... The development of what free competition
is, is the only rational answer to the deification of it by the middle-
class prophets, or its bedevilment by the socialists. If it is said that,
within the limits of free competition, individuals by following their
pure self-interest realise their social or rather their general interest, this
means merely that they exert pressure upon one another under the
conditions of capitalist production and that collision between them can
only again give rise to the conditions under which their interaction
took place. Moreover, once the illusion that competition is the osten-
sible absolute form of free individuality disappears, this proves that the
conditions of competition, i.e. production founded on capital, are
already felt and thought of as a barrier, as indeed they already are and
will increasingly become so. The assertion that free competition is the
final form of the development of productive forces, and thus of human
freedom, means only that the domination of the middle class is the end
of the world's history - of course quite a pleasant thought for yesterday's
parvenus!^24
The key to the understanding of this ambivalent nature of capitalism
- and the possibilities it contained for an unalienated society - was the
notion of time. 'All economics', said Marx, 'can be reduced in the last
analysis to the economics of time.'" The profits of capitalism were built
on the creation of surplus work-time, yet on the other hand the wealth
of capitalism emancipated man from manual labour and gave him increas-
ing access to free time. Capital was itself a 'permanent revolution':
Pursuing this tendency, capital has pushed beyond national boundaries
and prejudices, beyond deification of nature and the inherited, self-
sufficient satisfaction of existing needs confined within well-defined
bounds, and the reproduction of the traditional way of life.
It is destructive of all this, and permanendy revolutionary, tearing
down all obstacles that impede the development of productive forces,
the expansion of needs, the diversity of production and the exploitation
and exchange of natural and intellectual forces.^26
But in Marx's eyes, these very characteristics of capitalism entailed its
dissolution. Its wealth was based on the introduction of machinery fol-