> So what's behind an outburst like: "If money, According to Augier,
> 'comes into the world with a congenital blood-stain on one cheek,'
> capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with
> blood and dirt"? Detached scientific observation?
On Marx's ontological and anthropological assumptions, it is a "scientific" observation, though the assumptions underpin an idea of "science" very different from the "materialist" idea dominant since the 17th century.
It's a characterization of the early capitalist "passions", those motivating "primitive accumulation".
As Engels points out, the idea of the "passions" and of the role they play in history derives from Hegel. Engels does this in the context of contrasting the "astonishing poverty" of Feuerbach's "materialist" treatment of "morality" with Hegel's "idealistic" treatment, specifically with Hegel's "realistic" treatment of "the historical role of moral evil".
"Feuerbach, who on every page preaches sensuousness, absorption in the concrete, in actuality, becomes thoroughly abstract as soon as he begins to talk of any other than mere sex relations between human beings.
"Of these relations, only one aspect appeals to him: morality. And here we are again struck by Feuerbach’s astonishing poverty when compared to Hegel. The latter’s ethics, or doctrine of moral conduct, is the philosophy of right, and embraces: (1) abstract right; (2) morality; (3) social ethics [Sittlichkeit], under which are comprised: the family, civil society, and the state.
"Here the content is as realistic as the form is idealistic. With Feuerbach, it is just the reverse. ...
"He appears just as shallow, in comparison with Hegel, in his treatment of the antithesis of good and evil.
"'One believes one is saying something great,' Hegel remarks, 'if one says that "man is naturally good". But one forgets that one says something far greater when one says "man is naturally evil".'
"With Hegel, evil is the form in which the motive force of historical development presents itself. This contains the twofold meaning that, on the one hand, each new advance necessarily appears as a sacrilege against things hallowed, as a rebellion against condition, though old and moribund, yet sanctified by custom; and that, on the other hand, it is precisely the wicked passions of man — greed and lust for power — which, since the emergence of class antagonisms, serve as levers of historical development — a fact of which the history of feudalism and of the bourgeoisie, for example, constitutes a single continual proof. But it does not occur to Feuerbach to investigate the historical role of moral evil. To him, history is altogether an uncanny domain in which he feels ill at ease. Even his dictum: 'Man as he sprang originally from nature was only a mere creature of nature, not a man. Man is a product of man, of culture, of history' — with him, even this dictum remains absolutely sterile." <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1886/ludwig-feuerbach/ch03>
Ted