>>187977 [excerpt] Marx’s Dishonesty in his Quotation of Gladstone
First, one should note that at this time the British income tax only taxed people with incomes of £150 pounds and above, and that those earning less than this did not pay income tax. It is clear what Gladstone is saying here: the incomes of the rich have increased, as have the tax revenues from them, but at the same time there has been an “extraordinary” improvement in the “condition of the British labourer” over the past twenty years which, Gladstone maintained, was “unexampled in the history of any country in any age.” Marx selectively quoted Gladstone and suppressed parts of the passages in yellow highlighting, because they showed that Gladstone did think that the working classes had seen their real wages substantially improve. So the proper sense of what Gladstone said is different from the sense of the brief quotation Marx provides in Capital. All the data we have now shows that Gladstone was correct in his belief that real wages were rising for the workers. The data from Wood (1909: 102–103, Appendix) on UK real wages from 1850 to 1902, constructed from the wage data for working people in a whole range of industries, which can be seen in the graph below. As we see, there was a soaring real wage and living standards for working people in England. The rising real wage trend began in the 1840s and even in 1863 was visible, and can also be seen here. But Marx could have none of this, because it discredited his tendentious communist propaganda that real wages in capitalism have a tendency to be held down to the subsistence level. All Marx could do was to attack the idea that relative inequality had fallen, and ignore the evidence of the rising real wage, which badly contradicted his theory. Marx was attacked by Lujo Brentano (1844–1931) in the German publication Concordia (Brentano 1872) for his dishonesty and a debate ensued with Marx (Marx 1872a; Brentano 1872b; Marx 1872b; Brentano 1872c), and Engels in 1890 even attempted a defence of Marx in the preface to the 4th edition of Capital (Marx 1990: 115–119) on this very issue, but Engels simply evaded the most serious charge: that Marx deliberatively omitted Gladstone’s actual opinion of the improvement in the living standards of the working class.