Theories of Surplus Value, Marx 1861-3
Addenda
[1. Hobbes on Labour, on Value and on the Economic
Role of Science]
||XX-1291a| According to
Hobbes science, not operative labour, is the
mother of the arts.
“Arts of public use, as
fortification, making of engines, and other instruments of
war; because they confer to defence, and victory, are power;
and though the true mother of them, he science, namely
the mathematics; yet, because they are brought into the
light, by the hand of the artificer, they he esteemed, the
midwife passing with the vulgar for the mother, as his
issue” (Leviathan, in English Works of
Thomas Hobbes, edit. by Molesworth, London, 1839-44, t. III,
p. 75).
The product of mental labour—science—always
stands far below its value, because the labour-time needed
to reproduce it has no relation at all to the labour-time
required for its original production. For example, a
schoolboy can learn the binominal theorem in an hour.
Labour power:
“The value, or worth of a
man, is as of all other things, his price; that is to
say, so much as would be given for the use of his
power” (l.c., p. 76). “A man’s
labour” (that is, the use of his labouring power)
“also, is a commodity exchangeable for benefit,
as well as any other thing” (l.c., p. 233).
Productive and unproductive labour:
“It is not enough, for a man to
labour for the maintenance of his life; but also to
fight, if need be, for the securing of his
labour. They must either do as the Jews did after
their return from captivity, in re-edifying the temple,
build with one hand, and hold the sword in the other; or
else they must hire others to fight for them” (l.c.,
p. 333). |XX-1291a||
[2.] Historical: Petty
[Negative Attitude to Unproductive Occupations.
Germs of the Labour Theory of Value. Attempt to
Explain Wages, Rent of Land, the Price of Land and Interest
on the Basis of the Theory of Value]
||XXII-1346| Petty, A
Treatise of Taxes, and Contributions, London, 1667.
Our friend Petty has quite a different “population
theory” from Malthus. According to him a check
ought to be put upon the “breeding” faculties of
parsons, and the “Celibacy” again put upon
them.
All this belongs to the [sectional] productive and
unproductive labour.
a) Parsons:
“For as much as there he more Males
than Females in England….it were good for the
Ministers to return to their Coelibat; or that none
should be Ministers, whilst they were* married… And then our
unmarried Parson might live as well with half,
as now with the whole of his Benefice” (pp. 7-8).
b) Merchants and Retailers:
“A large proportion of these also
might be retrenched, who properly and originally earn
nothing from the Publick; being only a kind of
Gamesters, that play With one another ||1347| for the labours of the
poor; yielding of themselves no fruit at all, otherwise
than as Veins and Arteries, to distribute forth and
back the blood and nutritive juyces of the Body Politick,
namely, the product of Husbandry and Manufacture”
(p.10).
c)Lawyers, physicians, officials, etc.:
“If the numerous Offices and Fees
relating to the Government, Law, and Church;
and if the number of Divines, Lawyers, Physicians,
Merchants, and Retailers were also lessened, all which do
receive great Wages for little work done to the
Publick, with how much greater ease would common expenses he
defrayed?” (p.11).
d) Paupers (supernumeraries):
“Who shall pay these men? I
answer, every body… I think ‘t is plain,
they ought neither to be starved, nor hanged, nor given
away” [to another nation] etc. (p. 12). Either
they are given “the superfluity”, or if there is
none, “in case there be no overplus…;
‘t is fit to retrench a little from the
delicacy of others feeding in quantity or quality”
(pp. 12-13). The labour imposed on them (the
supernumeraries) may be of any kind; only it must be
“without expense of Foreign Commodities”; the
important thing is to “keep their minds to discipline
and obedience, and their bodies to a patience of more
profitable labours when need shall require it” (p.
13). The best “Imployments be” [for them]
“The making of Bridges and Cawseys. The working
in Mines”, etc.*
(p. 12).
Population—wealth:
“Fewness of people, is real
poverty; and a nation wherein are eight Millions of
people, are more than twice as rich as the same scope of
Land wherein are but four” (p. 16).
On (a) above (Parsons). Petty handles the
priests with exquisite irony:
“Religion best flourisheth when the
Priests are most mortified, as…the Law…best
flourisheth when Lawyers have least to do”
(p. 57). He advises the parsons in any case
“not to breed more Church-men that the
Benefices as they now stand shared out will
receive”. For example, with 12,000 benefices in
England and Wales, “it will not be safe to breed up
24,000 Ministers”. For then the 12,000
unprovided for will enter into competition, “which
they cannot do more easily, than by persuading the people,
that the twelve thousand Incumbents do poyson or starve
their Souls” (an allusion to the English religious
war) “and misguide them in their way to Heaven”
(p. 57).
Origin of surplus-value and how to compute
it. His treatment is somewhat confused, but in all
the grappling with ideas striking passages can be found here
and there.
Petty distinguishes between natural price, political
price, true price currant (p. 67). By natural
price he means in fact value, and it is only this
that concerns us here, since ||1348| the determination of
surplus-value depends on the determination of
value. In this treatise he in fact determines the
value of commodities by the comparative quantity
of labour they contain.
“But before we talk too much of
Rents, we should endeavour to explain the misterious
nature of them, with reference as well to Money, the Rent
of which we call Usury; as to that of Lands and
Houses” (p. 23).
a) The first question is, what is the value of a
commodity, or more particularly, of corn?
“If a man can bring to London an
ounce of Silver out of the Earth in Peru, in the same
time that he can produce a Bushel of Corn, then one is
the natural price of the other; now if by reason of new and
more easie Mines a man can get two ounces of Silver as
easily as formerly he did one, then Corn will be as cheap as
ten shillings the Bushel, as it was before at five shillings
caeteris paribus” (p. 31). “Let the
production of a Bushel of […] Corn he supposed of
equel labour to that of producing an ounce of
Silver” (p. 66). This is, in the first
place, the “real and not an imaginary way of computing
the prices of Commodities” (p. 66).
ß) The second point, which has now to be examined,
is the value of labour.
“The Law… should allow the
Labourer but just wherewithal to live; for if you allow
double, then he works but half so much as he could have
done, and otherwise would; which is a loss to the Publick
of the fruit of so much labour” (p. 64).
The value of labour is therefore determined by the
necessary means of subsistence. The labourer is
impelled to surplus production and surplus-labour only by
being forced to use the whole of the labour-power within his
capacity in order to get even as much as be just needs to
live. However, the cheapness or dearness of his
labour is determined by two factors: natural fertility and
the standard of expenditure (needs) conditioned by the
climate.
“Natural dearness and
cheapness depends upon the few or more hands
requisite to necessaries of Nature: As Corn is cheaper
where one man produces Corn for ten, than where he
can do the like but for six; and withal, according as the
Climate disposes men to a necessity of spending more or
less” (p. 67).
g) For Petty the surplus exists only in two forms:
rent of land or rent of money (usury).
The latter he derives from the former. For him, as
later for the Physiocrats, the first is the true form
of surplus-value (but at the same time he explains that corn
is intended to cover all necessaries of life, as in the
“Lord’s Prayer” <Our Father> the word
“Bread doth”).
In developing his ideas he presents rent (the
surplus-value) not only as the excess drawn by the employer
beyond the necessary time of labour, but also as the excess
of surplus-labour of the producer himself over his wages and
the replacement of his own capital.
“Suppose a man could with his own
hands plant a certain scope of Land with Corn, that is,
could Digg, or Plough; Harrow, Weed, Reap, Carry home,
Thresh, and Winnow so much as the Husbandry of this Land
requires; and had withal Seed wherewith to sow the
same. I say, that when this man hath subducted his
seed out of the proceed of His Harvest” (that is,
in the first place deducted from the product an amount
equivalent to the constant capital), ||1349| “and also what himself
bath both eaten and given to others in exchange for Clothes,
and other Natural necessaries; that the Remainder of
Corn, is the natural and true Rant of the Land for
that year; and the medium of seven years, or
rather of so many years as makes up the Cycle, within
which Dearth and Plenties make their revolution, doth
give the ordinary Rent of the Land in Corn”
(pp. 23-24).
In fact for Petty, therefore, since the value of corn is
determined by the labour-time contained in it, and the rent
is equal to the total product minus wages and seed, rent is
equal to the surplus-produce in which the surplus-labour is
materialised. Rent here includes profit; the latter is
not yet separated from rent.
In the same ingenious way Petty goes on to ask:
“But a further, though collateral
question may be, how much English money this Corn
or Rent is worth; I answer, so much as the money
which another single man can save within the same
time, over and above his expence, if he employed himself
wholly to produce and make it; viz. Let another man go
travel into a Countrey where is Silver there Dig it, Refine
it, bring it to the same place where the other man planted
his Corn; Coyn it, etc., the same person, all the while of
his working for Silver, gathering also food for his
necessary livelihood, and procuring himself covering,
etc. I say, the Silver of the one must be esteemed
of equal value with the Corn of the other: the one,
being perhaps twenty Ounces and the other twenty
Bushels. From whence it follows that the price of a
Bushel of this Corn to he an Ounce of Silver”
(p. 24).
The difference in the kind of labour, Petty expressly
notes, is here quite immaterial; all that matters is the
labour-time.
“And forasmuch as possible there may
be more Art and Hazard in working about the Silver, then
about the* Corn, yet
all comes to the same pass; for let a hundred men work
ten years upon Corn, and the same number of men the
same time, upon Silver; I say, that the neat
proceed of the Silver is the price of the whole neat
proceed of the Corn, and like parts of the one, the
price of like parts of the other” (p. 24).
After thus explaining rent—which here is equivalent
to the total surplus-value, profit included—and
its expression in money, he then sets out, again in a very
brilliant way, to determine the money value of
land.
“Wherefore we would he glad to find
the natural value of the Fee-simple of Land, though
but no better than we have done that of the usus
fructus above mentioned… Having found the
Rent or value of the usus fructus per annum, the
question is, how many years purchase (as we usually
say) is the Fee-simple naturally worth? If we
say an infinite number, then an acre of Land would be equal
in value to a thousand acres of the same Land; which is
absurd, and infinity of Units being equal to an infinity of
Thousands: wherefore we must pitch upon some limited
number, and that I apprrehend […] the number of
years, which I conceive one man of fifty years old, another
of twenty-eight, and another of seven years old, all being g
alive together may be thought to live; that is to say, of a
Grandfather, Father and Child; few men having reason to take
care of more remote Posterity… Wherefore I
pitch the number of years purchase, that any Land is
naturally worth, to be the ordinary ||1350| extent of three such persons
their lives. Now in England we esteem three lives
equal to one and twenty years, and consequently the value
of Land, to be about the same number of years
purchase” (pp. 25-26).
After resolving rent into surplus-labour and
consequently surplus-value, Petty explains that land
is nothing but the capitalised rent, that is to say, a
definite number of years’ rent or the total amount of
the rents for a definite number of years.
In fact, rent is capitalised or reckoned as the
value of land in this way:
Let one acre yield an annual rent of £10. If
the rate of interest is 5 per cent, then £10
represents the interest on a capital of £200, and, as
the interest at 5 per cent replaces the capital in 20 years,
the value of the acre would be £200
(2O´£10). Capitalisation of rent therefore
depends on the rate of interest. If the rate of
interest were 10 per cent, it would represent the interest
on a capital of £100 or ten years’ purchase.
But as Petty starts from the rent of land as the
general form of surplus-value, which includes profit, he
cannot take the rate of interest on capital as something
given; on the contrary, he has to deduce it from rent as a
special form (as Turgot also does-quite consistently
from his own standpoint). In what way then is he to
determine the number of years—the number of years’
rent —which forms the value of land? A man is
only interested in buying as many yearly rentals as the
years during which lie has “to take care” of
himself and his immediate posterity; that is, as long as an
average man, grandfather, father and child, lives,
and on the “English” reckoning this is
twenty-one years. Therefore what lies beyond the
twenty-one years “usus fructus” has no
value for him. Consequently he pays for the usus
fructus for twenty-one years, and this constitutes the
value of the land.
In his ingenious way he gets himself out of the
difficulty; but the important thing here is,
firstly, that rent, as the expression of the total
agricultural surplus-value, is derived not from the
land but from Labour, [and is presented as] the surplus of
labour in excess of what is necessary for the subsistence of
the labourer;
secondly, that the value of land is nothing but
the rent purchased in advance for a certain number of
years—a transmuted form of rent itself, in
which for example twenty-one years surplus-value (or labour)
appears as the value of the land; in a word, the
value of land is nothing but capitalised
rent.
Such is Petty’s deep insight into the matter. From
the standpoint of the buyer of rent (i.e., of land)
rent thus appears merely as interest on his
capital used to buy it; and in this form rent has become
completely unrecognisable and appears as interest on
capital.
After Petty has thus determined the value of land
and the value of the annual rental, he is able to
derive the rent of money or usury as a secondary form.
“As for Usury, the least that
can be, is the Rent of so much Land as the Money
lent will buy, where the Security is undoubted”
(p. 28).
Here interest is presented as determined by the price
of rent, whereas on the contrary the price of
rent or the purchase value of land is determined
by interest. But this is quite consistent, as
rent is presented as the general form of
surplus-value and therefore interest on money must be
derived from it as a secondary form.
Differential rent. Of this too the first
notion is to be found in Petty. He derives it not from
the different fertility of pieces of land of the same
size, but from the different position, [the
different] distance from the market of pieces of land of
equal fertility, which as we know is one element in
differential rent. He says:
||1351| “As great need
of Money heightens Exchange, so doth great need of Corn
raise the price of that likewise, and
consequently of the Rent of the Land that bears
Corn” (here therefore he says explicitly that the
price of corn determines rent, it being implicit in
the earlier analysis that rent does not determine the
value of corn) “and lastly of the Land
itself; as for example, if the Corn which feedeth
London, or an Army, be brought forty miles together,* then the Corn growing
within a mile of London, or the quarters of such Army,
shall have added unto its natural price, so much as
the charge of bringing it thirty nine miles doth amount
unto… Hence it comes to pass, that Lands
intrinsically alike near populous places, such as where
the Perimeter of the Area that feeds them is great, will not
only yield more Rent for these Reasons, but also more
years purchase than in remote places”,
etc. (p. 29).
Petty also mentions the second cause of differential
rent—the differing fertility of land and
therefore the differing productivity of labour on
equal areas of land:
“The goodness or badness, or
the value of Land depends upon the greater or lesser
share of the product given for it in proportion to the
simple labour bestowed to raise the said Product “
(p. 67).
Petty’s exposition of differential rent is therefore
better than that of Adam Smith. |XXII-1351||
***
||XXII-1397| [Petty,] A
Treatise of Taxes, and Contributions, London,
1667. Supplementary points.
1. On the quantity of circulating money
which a nation needs, pp. 16-17.
His view of total production is shown by the
following passage:
“If there he 1,000 men in a
Territory, and if 100 of these can raise necessary food and
rayment for the whole 1,000; if 200 more make as much
Commodities, as other Nations will give either their
Commodities or Money for, and if 400 more be imployed in the
Ornaments, pleasure, and magnificence of the whole? if
there be 200 Governours, Divines, Lawyers, Physicians,
Merchants, and Retailers, making in all 900, the question
is”, etc.—what happens to the paupers
(“supernumeraries”) (p. 12).
In his analysis of rent and of its valuation in money,
for which he takes as the basis equal labours
(quantities), Petty remarks:
“This, I say to he the
Foundation of equalising and balancing of
values; yet in the superstructures and practices
hereupon, I confess there is much variety and
intricacy” (p. 25).
||1398| 2. What he was
much preoccupied with is the “natural Par between
Land and Labour”:
“Our Silver and Gold we call
by several names, as in England by Pounds, Shillings, and
Pence; all which may he called and understood by either of
the three. But that which I would say upon this matter
is, that all things ought to he valued by two natural
Denominations, which is Land and Labour; that is, we
ought to say, a Ship or Garment is worth such a measure of
Land, with such another measure of Labour; forasmuch as both
Ships and Garments were the Creatures of Lands and
mens Labours thereupon: This being true, we should be
glad to find out a natural Par between Land and
Labour, so as we might express the value by either of
them alone, as well or better than by both, and reduce one
into the other, as easily and certainly, as we reduce Pence
into Pounds” (p. 25).
For this reason Petty seeks the “natural
values of the Fee-Simple of Land”, after he
has found the monetary expression of rent.
Running alongside of each other through his work there
are three ways of determining value:
a) The magnitude of value, determined by equal
labour-time, labour being here considered as the
source of value.
b) Value as the form of social labour. Hence
money is the true form of value, although in other
passages he knocks down all the illusions of the Monetary
system. He is therefore defining the
concept.
c) Labour as the source of exchange-value is confused
with labour as the source of use-value; which presupposes
material provided by nature (land). In fact, he
“cuts” the “Par” between labour and
land by describing the Fee-simple of the latter as
capitalised rent—therefore not treating land as
material provided by nature for concrete labour.
3. With reference to the rate of interest he
says:
“Of the vanity and fruitlessness of
making Civil Positive Laws against the Laws of
Nature” (i.e., the laws arising from the nature of
bourgeois production) “I have spoken elsewhere”
(l.c., p. 29).
4. In regard to rent: surplus-value
consequent on the greater productivity of labour:
“If the said Shires by greater labour
than now is used, (as by Digging instead of Ploughing,
Setting instead of Sowing, picking of choice Seed instead of
taking it promiscuously, steeping it instead of using it
wholly unprepared, and manuring the ground with Salt instead
of rotten Straw, etc.) could be fertilised, then will the
Rent be as much more advanced, as the excess of
increase exceeds that of the labour” (p. 32).
([By increase of labour] he means here the price
or wages of labour.)
5. Raising [the value] of money (Chapter
XIV).
6. The passage quoted earlier “if you allow
double, then he works but half so much, etc.” must be
taken to mean: If the labourer received for six hours the
value of six hours, then he would receive double what
he now receives —the value of six for twelve. He
would then work only six, “which is a loss to the
Publick”, etc .
***
Petty, An Essay Concerning the Multiplication of
Mankind (1682). Division of labour
(pp. 35-36).
***
[Petty, The] Political Anatomy of Ireland
(1672) and Verbum Sapienti (London edition
1691).
1. “This brings me to the most important
Consideration in Political Oeconomies, viz, how to
make a Par and Equation between Lands and Labour, so
as to express the Value of any thing by either alone”
(pp. 63-64).
In fact, the task in this connection is only to resolve
the value of land itself into labour.
||1399| 2. This work
was written later than the one examined earlier.
“The days food of an adult
Man, at a Medium, and not the days labour, is the
common measure of Value, and seems to be as regular and
constant as the value of fine Silver… Wherefore I
valued an Irish Gabbin at the number of days food,
which the Maker spent in building of it” (p.
65).
This later statement is quite Physiocratic.
“That some Men will eat more than
others, is not material, since by a days food we understand
1/100 part” [of the food that
100 men ] “of all Sorts and Sizes will eat, so as to
Live, Labour, and Generate” (p. 64).
But what Petty is searching for here in the
statistics of Ireland is not the common
measure of value, but the measure of value in the
sense that money is the measure of value.
3. Quantity of money and wealth of the nation
(Verbum Sapienti, p. 13).
4. Capital.
“What we call the Wealth, Stock, or
Provision of the Nation, being the effect of the former or
past labour, should not be conceived to differ from
efficiencies in being” (p. 9).
5. Productive power of labour
“We said, That half the People by a
very gentle labour, might much enrich the
Kingdom…upon what shall they employ themselves.
To which I answer in general, Upon producing Food and
Necessaries for the whole People of the Land, by few
hands; whether by labouring harder, or by the
introducing the Compendium, and Facilitations of Art,
which is equivalent to what men vainly hoped from
Polygamy. For as much as he that can do the
Work of five men by one, effects the same as the begetting
four adult Workmen” (p. 22). “Cheapest
food…will be when Food also is raised, by fewer
hands than elsewhere” (p. 23).
6. Purpose of men and goal (p. 24).
7. On money, see also the
Quantulumcunque (1682). |XXII-1399||
[3.] Petty, Sir Dudley North, Locke
||XXII-1397| By comparing
North’s and Locke’s writings with Petty’s
Quantulumcunque (1682), A Treatise of Taxes, and
Contributions (1662), [and The Political] Anatomy of
Ireland (1672), their indebtedness to Petty can be seen
in connection with (1) lowering of interest: (2)
raising and abasing of money;
(3) North’s calling interest the rent of money,
etc.
North and Locke wrote their works at the same time and on
the same occasion: Lowering of Interest and
Raising of money. But [they have] opposite
views. With Locke it is the “want of
money” that is responsible for the high rate of
interest and in general for the fact that things do not
fetch their real prices, and the revenues to be paid out of
them. North shows the opposite, that it is not want of
money but of capital or revenue. We find in his works
the first definite concept of stock or
capital, or rather of money as a mere form
of capital, in so far as it is not means of
circulation. In Sir Dudley North’s writings we find
the first correct conception of interest as opposed to
Locke’s idea. |XXII-1397||
[4.] Locke
[Treatment of Rent and Interest from the Standpoint of
the Bourgeois Theory of Natural Law]
||XX-1291a| Taking Locke’s
general doctrine of labour together with his doctrine of the
origin of interest and rent—for he
considers surplus-value only in these specific
forms—surplus-value is nothing but another person’s
labour, surplus-labour, which land and capital—the
conditions of labour—enable their owners to
appropriate. And ownership of a greater quantity of
conditions of labour than one person can himself put to use
with his own labour is, according to Locke, a
political invention that contradicts the law of
nature on which private property is founded. ||1292a|
<For Hobbes too labour is the sole source of
all wealth, apart from those gifts of nature which are to be
found already in a consumable state. God (nature)
“either freely giveth, or for labour
selleth to mankind” (Leviathan) [In: The
English Works of Thomas Hobbes… , now first
collected and edited by…Molesworth, Vol. III, London,
1839, p. 232]. But for Hobbes it is the sovereign who
distributes property in land at his pleasure.>
The relevant passages [in Locke] are as follows:
“Though the earth, and all
inferior creatures, he common to all men, yet every man has
a property in his own person: this nobody has any right to
but himself. The labour of his body, and the work of
his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever
then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided,
and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with, and joined to
it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his
property”(Of [Civil] Government,
Book II, Chapter V; Works, 7th edit., 1768, Vol. II,
p. 229).
“His labour hath taken it out of the
hands of nature, where it was common, and belonged equally
to all her children, and hath thereby appropriated it to
himself” (l.c., p. 230).
“The same law of nature, that does by
this means give us property, does also bound that property
too… As much as any one can make use of to any
advantage of life before it spoils, so much he may by his
labour fix a property in: whatever is beyond this, is more
than his share, and belongs to others” (l.c.).
“But the chief matter of property
being now not the fruits of the earth”, etc.,
“but the earth itself… As much
land as a man tills, plants, improves, cultivates, and can
use the product of, so much is his property. He by his
labour does, as it were, enclose it from the common”
(l.c.).
“Subduing or cultivating the earth,
and having dominion, we see are joined together. The
one gave title to the other” (l.c., p. 231).
“The measure of property nature has
well set by the extent of men’s labour, and the
conveniences of life: no man’s labour could subdue, or
appropriate all; nor could his enjoyment consume more than a
small part; so that it was impossible for any man, this way,
to intrench upon the right of another, or acquire to himself
a property, to the prejudice of his neighbour.
… This measure did confine every man’s possession to
a very moderate proportion, and such as he might appropriate
to himself, without injury to any body, in the first ages of
the world… And the same measure may be allowed
still without prejudice to any body, as full as the
world seems” (pp. 231-32).
Labour gives things almost all their value
<value here is equivalent to use-value, and labour
is taken as concrete labour, not as a quantum; but the
measuring of exchange-value by labour is in reality based on
the fact that the labourer creates use-value>. The
remainder of use-value which cannot be resolved into labour
is the gift of nature, and hence in its essence common
property. What Locke therefore tries to show is
not the contradiction—that property can nevertheless
be acquired by other procedures than labour—but how,
in spite of the common property in nature, individual
property could be created by individual labour.
“It is labour indeed that
put* the
difference of value on every thing…
Of the products of the earth useful to the life of
man…ninety-nine hundredths are wholly to be put on
the account of labour” (p. 234).
“It is labour then which puts the
greatest part of the value upon land” (p. 235).
“Though the things of nature are
given in common, yet man, by being master of himself,
and proprietor of his own person, and the actions or
labour of it, had still in himself the great foundation of
property” (p. 235).
One limit to property is therefore the limit of
personal labour; the other, that a man should not amass
more things than he can use. The latter limit however
is extended by exchange of perishable products for
money (apart from other exchanges):
“He might heap as much of these
durable things as he pleased; the exceeding of the
bounds of his just property” <apart from the
limit of his personal labour> “not lying in
the largeness of his possession, but the perishing of any
thing uselessly in it. And thus came in the use of
money, some lasting thing that men might* keep without spoiling, and that by
mutual consent men would take in exchange ||1293a| for the truly useful, but
perishable supports of life” (p. 236).
Thus arises the inequality of individual property, though
the limit of personal labour remains.
“This partage of things in an
inequality of private possessions, men have made practicable
out of the bound s of society, and without compact; only by
putting a value on gold and silver, and tacitly agreeing in
the use of money” (p. 237).
We must now compare with this the following passage from
Locke’s work on interest, not forgetting that according to
him natural law makes personal labour the limit of
property:
“Let us next see how it”
(money) “comes to be of the same Nature with Land, by
yielding a certain yearly Income, which we call Use or
Interest. For Land produces naturally something new
and profitable, and of value to Mankind; but money is a
barren Thing, and produces nothing, but by Compact,
transfers that Profit, that was the Reward of one Man’s
Labour, into another Man’s Pocket. That which
occasions this, is the unequal Distribution of Money; which
Inequality has the same Effect too upon Land, that it
has upon Money. … For as the unequal
Distribution of Land (you have more than you can, or will
manure, and another less) brings you a Tenant for your Land;
and the same unequal Distribution of Money… brings me
a Tenant for my Money: So my Money is apt in Trade, by
the Industry of the Borrower, to produce more than 6 per
cent, to the Borrower, as well as your Land, by the
Labour of the Tenant, is apt to produce more Fruits,
than his Rent comes to” (Folio edition of Locke’s
Works, 1740, Vol. II [p. 19].)
In this passage Locke has in part the polemical interest
of showing landed property that its rent is in no way
different from usury. Both “transfer that
Profit, that** was the
Reward of one Man’s Labour, into another Man’s Pocket”
through the unequal distribution of the conditions of
production.
Locke’s view is all the more important because it was the
classical expression of bourgeois society’s ideas of right
as against feudal society, and moreover his philosophy
served as the basis for all the ideas of the whole of
subsequent English political economy. |XX-1293a||
[5.] North [Money as Capital. The Growth of
Trade as the Cause of the Fall in the Rate of Interest]
||XXIII-1418| Sir Dudley
North: Discourses upon Trade, etc., London,
1691. (Supplementary notebook C).
This work, like Locke’s economic writings, is in direct
connection with and directly based on Petty’s works.
The work is mainly concerned with commercial
capital, and so it is not relevant here, though it shows
masterly skill in the field with which it deals.
It is particularly remarkable that from the time of the
Restoration of Charles II up to the middle of the
eighteenth century there were continual complaints from the
landlords about the fall in rents (just as the price of
wheat continually declined especially from?
onwards). Although the industrial capitalist class
played a considerable part in the compulsory reduction of
the rate of interest (from the time of Culpeper and Sir
Josiah Child), the real protogonist of this measure was the
landed interest. The “value of
land” and the “raising of it” were
proclaimed to be in the national interest. (Just as on
the other hand from about 1760 the rise in rents, in the
value of land and in the price of corn and provisions, and
the complaints of the manufacturers on this score, form the
basis of the economic investigations on this subject).
With few exceptions it is the struggle between moneyed
interest and landed interest that fills the century from
1650 to 1750, as the nobility, who lived in the grand style,
saw with disgust how the usurers had got their hands on them
and, with the building up of the modern credit system and
the national debt at the end of the seventeenth century,
faced them with overwhelming power in the sphere of
legislation, etc.
Already Petty speaks of the landlords’ complaints
about the fall in rents and their opposition to the
improvements (look up the passage). He defends the
usurer as against the landlord and puts rent of money and
rent of land on the same footing.
Locke reduces both to exploitation of
labour. He takes the same standpoint as Petty.
Both oppose the compulsory regulation of interest. The
landed interest had noted that the value of land rose
when interest fell. At a given level of rent, its
capitalised expression, i.e., the value of land,
falls or rises in inverse relation to the rate of
interest.
The third writer to follow this line of Petty’s is Sir
Dudley North, in the work referred to above.
This is the first form in which capital starts its
revolt against landed property, as in fact
usury was one of the principal agents in the
accumulation of capital—i.e., through its
co-proprietorship in the landlord’s revenues. But
industrial and commercial capital go more or less hand in
hand with the landlords against this outmoded form of
capital.
“As the Landed Man letts his Land, so
these” (who have “Stock for Trade
[…] who* either
have not the skill, or care not for the trouble of managing
it in Trade”) “lett their Stock; this
latter is call’d Interest, but is only Rent
for Stock” <here, as also in Petty’s writings, it
can be seen how rent, to those just emerging from the Middle
Ages, ||1419| appears as the
primary form of surplus-value)> “as the other is
for Land, And in several Languages, hiring of Money, and
Lands, are Terms of common use; and it is so also in some
Countries in England. Thus to be a Landlord, or
a Stock-lord is the same thing, the Landlord hath the
advantage only in this: That his Tenant cannot carry away
the Land, as the Tenant of the other may the Stock; and
therefore Land ought to yield less profit than Stock;
which is let out at the greater hazard “ (p.4).
Interest. North seems to have been the first
to have a correct conception of interest, for by
stock, as will be seen from the passages next quoted,
he means not only money, but capital (as indeed even Petty
distinguishes between stock and money. Locke
considered that interest was determined exclusively by the
quantity of money; so did Petty. See the passages
in Massie on this.).
“If there be more Lenders than
Borrowers, Interest will…fall; …it is not low
Interest makes Trade, but Trade increasing, the Stock of
the Nation makes Interest Low” (p.4).
“Gold and Silver, and, out of them,
Money are nothing but the Weights and Measures, by which
Traffick is more conveniently carried on, than could be done
without them: and also a proper Fund fur a surplusage of
Stock to be deposited in” (p.16).
Price and money. As the price is nothing but
the equivalent of the commodity expressed in
money, and, when we are dealing with a sale,
the commodity realised in money—that is, it represents
the commodity as exchange-value in order to
change it subsequently into a use-value again—it is
one of the earliest recognitions of the fact that in this
transaction we are dealing with gold and silver only as a
form of existence of the exchange-value of
commodities, as a phase in their metamorphosis, not
with gold and silver as such. North puts this very
felicitously for his time.
“Money being…the Common Measure
of Buying and Selling, every body who hath any thing to
sell, and cannot procure Chapmen for it, is presently apt to
think, that Want of Money in the Kingdom, or Country
is the cause why his Goods do not go off; and so, want of
Money, is the common Cry; which is a great mistake…
“What do these People want, who cry
out for Money? I will begin with the
Beggar…it is not Money, but Bread, and other
Necessaries for Life that he wants…the Farmer
complains, for the want of Money…he thinks that were
more Money in the Country, he should have a Price for his
Goods. Then it seems Money is not his want, but a Price for
his Corn, and Cattel, which he would sell, but
cannot…why he cannot get a price? …1.
Either there is too much Corn and Cattel in the Country, so
that most who come to Market have need of selling, as he
hath, and few of buying; Or 2. There wants the usual vent
abroad, by Transportation, as in time of War, when Trade is
unsafe, or not permitted; Or 3. The Consumption fails, as
when men by reason of Poverty, do not spend so much in their
Houses as formerly they did; wherefore it is not the
increase of specifick Money, which would at all advance the
Farmers Goods, but the removal of nay of these three Causes,
which do truly keep down the Market.
“The Merchant and Shop-keeper want
Money in the same manner, that is, they want a Vent for the
Goods they deal in, by reason that the Markets fail”
(pp 11-12).
Further: Capital is value which produces
surplus-value, whereas in the building up of a hoard the
crystallised form of exchange-value as such is the
aim. One of the earliest discoveries of the classical
economists is therefore the antithesis between the
formation of a hoard and using money to make
profit, that is to say, the presentation of money as
capital.
“No Man is richer for having his
Estate all in Money, Plate, etc., lying by him, but on the
contrary, he is for that reason the poorer. That Man
is richest, whose Estate in a growing condition,
either in Land at Farm, Money at Interest, or Goods in
Trade” (p. 11).
<Similarly, John Bellers, Essays about the Poor,
Manufactures, Trade, Plantations, and Immorality, etc.,
London, 1699, says:
“Money neither increaseth, nor
is useful, but when it’s parted with, and as Money is
unprofitable to a private Person but as he disposeth of it,
for something more valuable, so what Money is more than of
absolute necessity for a home Trade, is dead Stock to a
Kingdom or Nation and brings no profit to that Country it’s
kept in” (p. 13).>
“Altho’ every one desires to have
it” (money) “yet none, or very few care for
keeping it, but they are forthwith contriving to dispose it;
knowing that from all the Money that lies dead, no benefit
is to be expected, but it is a certain loss” ([North,
l.c.], p. 21).
||1420| Money as
world-money:
“A Nation in the World, as to Trade,
is in all respects like a City in a Kingdom, or Family in a
City” (p. 14). “In this course of Trade,
Gold and Silver are in no sort different from other
Commodities, but are taken from them who have Plenty, and
carried to them who want, or desire them” (p.13).
The quantity of money that can circulate is determined
by the exchange of commodities.
“If never so much be brought from
abroad, or never so much coyned at home, all that is more
than what the Commerce of the Nation requires, is but
Bullion, and will be treated as such; and coyned Money,
like wroughs Plate at Second hand, shall sell but for the
Intrinsick” (pp.17-18).
Conversion of money into bullion, and vice versa (p.18)
(Supplementary notebook C, p. 13). Valuation and
weighing of money. Oscillatory movement
(Supplementary notebook C, p.14).
The usurer and landed interest and
trade:
“The Moneys imployed at Interest in
this Nation, are not near the Tenth part, disposed to
Trading People, wherewith to manage their Trades; but
are for the most part lent for the supplying of Luxury, and
to support the Expense of Persons, who though great Owners
of Lands, yet spend faster than their Lands bring in; and
being loath to sell, choose rather to mortgage their
Estates” (North, l.c., pp.6-7). |XXIII-1420||
[6. Berkeley on Industry as the Source of
Wealth]
||XIII-670a| “Whether
it were not wrong to suppose land itself to be
wealth? And whether the industry of the people is not
first to be considered, as that which constitutes wealth,
which makes even land and silver to be wealth, neither of
which would have any value, but as means and motives
to industry?” (The Querist, by Dr. George
Berkeley, London, 1750, Query 38). |XIII-670a||
[7.] Hume and Massie
[(A) Massie and Hume on Interest]
||XX-1293a| Massie’s
anonymous work An Essay on the Governing Causes of the
Natural Rate of Interest appeared in 1750. The
second part of Hume’s Essays, which contains the
[essay] “Of Interest” published 1752, that is,
two years later. Massie therefore has priority.
Hume attacks Locke, Massie attacks both Petty and Locke,
both of whom still held the view that the level of interest
depends on the quantity of money, and that in fact the real
object of the loan is money (not capital).
Massie laid down more categorically than did Hume, that
interest is merely a part of profit. Hume is
mainly concerned to show that the value of money makes no
difference to the rate of interest, since, given the
proportion between interest and money-capital—6 per
cent for example, that is, £6, rises or falls in value
at the same time as the value of the £100 (and.
therefore, of one pound sterling) rises or falls, but the
proportion 6 is not affected by this.
[(B) Hume. Fall of Profit and Interest Dependent on
the Growth of Trade and Industry]
Let us start with Hume.
“Every thing in the world is
purchased by labour” ([David Hume, “Of
Commerce”. In:] Essays, [and Treatises on
several Subjects,] Vol. I, Part II, London, 1764,
p. 289).
The rate of interest depends on the demand from borrowers
and the supply by lenders, that is, on demand and supply,
but after that essentially on the level of “profits
arising from commerce” (l.c., p. 329).
“The greater or less stock of labour
and commodities must have a great influence” (upon
interest); “since we really and in effect borrow
these, when we take money upon interest” (l.c.,
p. 337). “No man will accept of low profits,
where he can have high interest; and no man will accept of
low interest, where he can have high profits” (l.c.,
p. 335).
High interest and high profit are both the expression
“of the small advance of commerce and industry, not of
the scarcity of gold and silver” (l.c., p.329).
And “low interest” of the opposite.
||1294a| “In a state,
therefore, where there is nothing but a landed
interest” (or as he says later, “landed gentry
and peasants”) “the borrowers must be numerous,
and interest high” (p. 330), because wealth which is
only for enjoyment is driven by boredom to seek pleasures,
while on the other hand production, except for agriculture,
is very limited. The opposite is the case, when
commerce has developed. The passion for gain entirely
[dominates the] merchant. He “knows no such
pleasure as that of seeing the daily increase of his
fortune”. (The passion for exchange-value,
abstract wealth, weighs with him far more than that for
use-values.)
“And this is the reason why trade
encreases frugality, and why, among merchants, there is the
same overplus of misers above prodigals, as, among the
possessors of laud, there is the contrary”
(p. 333).
<Unproductive labour:
“Lawyers and physicians beget no
industry; and it is even at the expense of others they
acquire their riches; so that they are sure to diminish the
possessions of some of their fellow-citizens, as fast as
they encrease their own” (pp. 333-34).>
“Thus an encrease of commerce
[…] raises a great number of lenders, and by that
means produces lowness of interest”
(p. 334).
“Low interest and low
profits of merchandise are two events, that mutually
forward each other, and are both originally derived
from that extensive commerce, which produces opulent
merchants, and renders the monied interest
considerable. Where merchants possess great stocks,
whether represented by few or many pieces of metal, it must
frequently happen, that, when they either become tired of
business, or leave heirs unwilling or unfit to engage in
commerce, a great proportion* of these riches naturally seeks an
annual and secure revenue. The plenty diminishes the
price, and makes the lenders accept of a low interest.
This consideration obliges many to keep their stock in
trade, and rather be content with low profits than dispose
of their money at an under value. On the other hand,
when commerce has become** extensive, and employs*** large stocks, there
must arise rivalships among the merchants, which
diminish the profits of trade, at the same time that
they encrease the trade itself. The low profits of
merchandise induce the merchants to accept more willingly of
a low interest, when they leave off business, and begin to
indulge themselves in ease and indolence. It is
needless, therefore, to enquire which of these
circumstances, to wit,* low interest or low profits,
is the cause, and which the effect. They
both arise from an extensive commerce, and mutually forward
each other… An extensive commerce, by producing
large stocks, diminishes both interest and profits; and is
always assisted, in its diminution of the one, by the
proportional sinking of the other. I may add, that, as
low profits arise from the encrease of commerce and
industry, they serve in their turn to its farther
encrease,** by
rendering the commodities cheaper, encouraging the
consumption, and heightening the industry. And
thus… interest is the*** barometer of the State, and
its lowness is a sign almost infallible of the
flourishing of a people” (l.c., pp. 334-36).
[(C) Massie. Interest as Part of Profit. The
Level of Interest Explained by the Rate of Profit]
[Joseph Massie,] An Essay on the Governing Causes of
the Natural Rate of Interest; wherein the Sentiments of
Sir William Petty and Mr. Locke, on that Head, are
considered, London, 1750.
“It appears from these several
Extracts, that Mr. Locke attributes the Government of the
natural Rate of interest to the Proportion which the
Quantity of Money in a Country bears to the Debts of its
Inhabitants one amongst another, and to the Trade of it; and
that Sir William Petty makes it depend on the Quantity of
Money alone; so they only differ in regard to Debts”
(pp. 14-15). |XX-1294a||
||XXI-1300| Rich people,
“instead of employing their Money themselves, [..,]
let it out to other People for them to make Profit of,
reserving for the Owners a Proportion of the Profits
so****
made: But when the Riches of n Country are dispersed
into so many Hands, and so equally divided, as not to leave
many People enough to maintain two Families, by employing it
in Trade, there can be little borrowing; for 20,000
l.***** when
it belongs to one Man, may be lent, because the Interest of
it will keep a Family, but if it belongs to ten Men, it
cannot he lent, because the Interest […] will not
keep ten Families” (pp. 23-24).
“All Reasoning about natural Interest
from the Rate which the Government pays for Money,
is, and unavoidably must be fallacious; Experience has shown
us, they neither have a agreed nor preserved a
Correspondence with each other; and Reason tells us never
can; for the one has its Fouadation in Profit, and
the other in Necessity; the former of which has
Bounds, but the latter none: The Gentleman who borrows Money
to improve his Land, and the Merchant or Tradesman who
borrow to carry on Trade, have Limits, beyond which they
will not go; if they can get 10 per cent by Money, they may
give 5 per cent for it; but they will not give 10; whereas
he who borrows through Necessity, has nothing else to
determine by, and this admits of no Rule at all”
(pp. 31-32).
“The Equitableness of taking
Interest, depends not upon a Man’s making or not making
Profit by what be borrows, but upon its” (the
money borrowed) “being capable of producing Profit if
right y employed” (p. 49). “If that
which Men pay as Interest for what they borrow, be
apart of the profits it is capable of producing, this
Interest must always be govern’d by those
Profits” (p. 49).
“What Proportion of these Profits do
of Right belong to the Borrower, and what to the Lender; and
this there is no other Method of determining, than by the
Opinions in Borrowers and Lenders in general; for Right and
Wrong in this Respect, are only what common Consent
makes” (p. 49).
“This Rule of dividing Profits
is not however to be apply’d particularly to every Lender
and Borrower, but to Lenders and Borrowers in
general… remarkably great and small Gains are the
Rewards of Skill, and the Want of Understanding, which
Lenders have nothing at all to do with; for as they
will not suffer by the one, they ought not to benefit by the
other. What has been said of particular Men in the
same Business is applicable to particular Sorts of
Business” (p. 50).
“The natural Rate of Interest
is governed by the Profits of Trade to
Particulars” (p. 51).
Why then was interest 4 per cent instead of 8 as it had
been earlier in England?
Because English merchants at that time “get* double the Profits
they now make” [p. 51].
Why 3 per cent in Holland, 5 and 6 in France, Germany,
Portugal, 9 per cent in the West and East Indies, 12 in
Turkey?
“One general Answer will do for the
whole, which is, that the Profits of Trade in these several
Countries differ from the Profits of Trade here, and so much
as to produce all those different Bates of Interest”
(p. 51).
But what is the fall in profit due to?
To competition, foreign and internal,
“a Decrease of Trade”** (through foreign competition)
“or to People in Trade lowering the Prices of their
Commodities upon each other…through Necessity to
get some Trade, or through Avarice to get most”
(pp. 52-53).
“The Profits of Trade in general, are
governed by the Proportion which the Number of
Traders bears to the Quantity of Trade”*** (p. 55).
“In Holland where the Number of People employ’d in
Trade, bears the greatest proportion to the whole number of
Inhabitants … Interest is […]
lowest […] in Turkey, where the Disproportion
is still greater, Interest is higher”* (pp. 55-56).
||1301|
“What governs the Proportion between Trade and
Traders?” (p. 57). The “Motive** to
Trade”. “[I.] Natural
necessity. [II.] Liberty. [III. The]
Preservation of Men’s private Rights. [IV.]
Publick Safety” (pp. 57-58)
“There are no two Countries which
furnish an equal Number of the Necessaries of Life in equal
Plenty, and with the same Quantity of Labour;
[…] Men’s Wants increase or diminish with the
Severity or Temperateness of the Climate they live in;
[…] consequently, the Proportion of Trade
which the Inhabitants of different Countries are obliged to
carry on through Necessity, cannot be the same, nor is it
practicable to ascertain the Degree of Variation further
than by the Degrees of Heat and Cold; from whence one may
make this general Conclusion, that the Quantity of
Labour required for [the Maintenance of ] a certain
Number of People is greatest in cold Climates, and least in
hot ones; for in the former, Men not only want more Cloaths,
but the Earth more cultivating, than in the latter”
(p. 59). “One kind of Necessity which is
peculiar to Holland…arises from the Country being
over-peopled; which, with the great Labour required to
fence and drain their*** Land, makes their
Necessity to trade greater than it is in any other Part of
the habitable World” (p. 60).
[(D) Conclusion]
Massie, even more definitely than Hume, presents interest
as a mere part of profit; both attribute the fall in
interest to the accumulation of capitals (Massie [speaks]
especially of competition) and the fall in profits resulting
from this. Both [say] equally little about the
origin of the Profit of trade itself. |XXI-1301||
[8. Addendum to the Chapters on the
Physiocrats]
[(A) Supplementary Note on the Tableau
Économique. Quesnay’s False Assumptions]
||XXIII-1433|
|
Productive class
|
Landlords
|
Sterile class
|
|
2 milliards
|
2 milliards
|
1 milliard
|
|
1 milliard
|
|
|
|
1 milliard
|
|
1 milliard
|
|
1 milliard
|
|
1 milliard
|
|
Annual advances 2 milliards
Total 5 milliards
|
|
Total 2 milliards
|
This is the simplest form of the Tableau
économique.
1. Money circulation (assuming payment is
made only annually). The money circulation starts out
from the spending class, the landlords who have no
commodities to sell, who buy without selling.
They buy to the amount of 1 milliard from the productive
class, to whom they send back the milliard in money received
in payment for rent. (This disposes of one-fifth of
the agricultural produce.) They buy to the amount of 1
milliard from the sterile class, who in this way get 1
milliard in money. (This disposes of half the product
of manufacture.) With the 1 milliard, the sterile
class buy means of subsistence from the productive class; so
that 1 milliard in money thus flows back to the
latter. (This disposes of a second fifth of the
agricultural produce.) With the same milliard in money
the productive class buy l milliard in manufactured
products; this replaces for them one-half of their
advances. (This disposes of the second half of the
produce of manufacture). The sterile class buy ||1434| raw materials with the same
milliard in money. (This disposes of another one-fifth
of the agricultural produce.) In this way the [2]
milliards in money have flowed back to the productive
class.
So what remains is two-fifths of the agricultural
produce. One-fifth is consumed in kind, but in what
form is the second one-fifth accumulated? That is to
be shown later.
2. Even from Quesnay’s point of view, according to
which the whole sterile class in fact consist only of
wage-labourers, the falsity of the assumptions made is
evident from the Tableau itself.
The original advances (fixed capital) made by the
productive class are assumed to be five times the size of
the annual advances. In the case of the sterile class
this item is not mentioned at all—which naturally does
not prevent it from existing.
Moreover, it is wrong to say that the reproduction is
equal to 5 milliards; the Tableau itself shows it to be 7
milliards; 5 in the case of the productive class and 2 in
the case of the sterile class.
[(B) Partial Reversion of Individual Physiocrats to
Mercantilist Ideas. Demand of the Physiocrats for
Freedom of Competition]
The product of the sterile class is equal to 2
milliards. This product consists of 1 milliard in raw
materials (which therefore partly enter into the product,
and partly replace the wear and tear of the machinery which
has entered into the value of the product) and 1 milliard in
means of subsistence, which have been consumed in working
them up.
They sell this entire product to the landlords and the
productive class, in order firstly to replace the
advance (in raw materials), secondly to obtain
agricultural means of subsistence. Therefore not a
farthing’s worth of the manufactured products is left
for their own consumption, still less for interest or
profit. This in fact was noticed by Baudeau (or Le
Trosne); he explains it by the sterile class selling their
product above its value, so that what they
sell for 2 milliards is equivalent to 2 milliards minus
x. Their profit, and even what they consume in
manufactured goods as necessary means of subsistence, is
therefore explained only by the raising of the price of
the commodities above their value. And here the
Physiocrats necessarily fall back on the Mercantile
system’s profit upon alienation.
This is why free competition between the manufacturers is
so very essential, so that they do not take too great
advantage of the productive class, the agriculturists.
On the other hand this free competition is necessary in
order that agricultural produce may be sold at a
“good price”, that is, that it may rise
above its native price by sale abroad—the
assumption being a country which exports wheat, etc.
[(C) Original Formulation of why it is Impossible to
Increase Value in Exchange]
“Every purchase is a sale, and every
sale a purchase” (Quesnay, Dialogues sur le
commerce et sur les travaux des artisans, etc.,
éd. Daire, p. 170). “To buy is to sell, and
to sell is to buy” (Quesnay in Dupont de
Nemours, Origine, etc., 1767, p. 392).
“Price always precedes purchases
and sales. If the competition of sellers and
buyers brings about no change in it, it exists as it is
through other causes independent of trade”
(l.c., p. 148).
“It is always to he presumed that
it” (exchange) “is profitable to both”
(contracting parties), “since they mutually procure
for themselves the enjoyment of wealth which they could only
obtain through exchange. But always there is only
exchange of wealth of a certain value for other
wealth of equal value, and consequently no real
increase of wealth” (this should he: no real
increase of value) (l.c., p. 197).
Advances and capital are explicitly stated
to be identical. Accumulation of capitals as
the principal condition.
“The increase of capitals is then the
principal means of augmenting labour, and of the greatest
benefit to society”, etc. (Quesnay in Dupont de
Nemours, l.c., p. 391). |XXIII-1434||
[9. Glorification of the Landed Aristocracy by
Buat, an Epigone of the Physiocrats]
||XXII-1399| Buat (Comte
du), Éléments de la politique, ou
Recherche des vrais principes de l’économie sociale,
(6 volumes), London, 1773.
This feeble and diffuse writer, who takes the outward
form of Physiocracy for its essence and glorifies the landed
aristocracy— and in fact accepts it [Physiocracy] only
in so far as it serves this purpose—would not have to
be mentioned at all, but for the fact that the brutal
characteristics of the bourgeois emerge so sharply in his
work; quite as sharply, perhaps, as in Ricardo’s writings
later. His error in restricting the net product to
rent makes no difference to this.
What Buat says is repeated by Ricardo in relation to the
net product in general. The labourers belong to the
incidental expenses and exist only in order that the owners
of the net product may “form society”.
(See the relevant passages.) The free labourer’s lot
is conceived as only a changed form of slavery; but this is
necessary so that the higher strata may form
“society”.
< Arthur Young too sees the net product,
surplus-value, as the purpose of production.>
||1400| In this connection
we may recall the passage in Ricardo, directed against Adam
Smith, for whom that capital is the most productive which
employs the greatest number of labourers. On this,
compare Buat—t. VI, pp. 51-52, 68-70. Also on
the labouring class and slavery—t. II, pp. 288, 297,
309; t. III, pp. 74, 95-96, 103; t. VI, pp. 43, 51; on the
necessity for these labourers to work surplus-time, and on
the meaning of the strict
nécessaire—t. VI, pp. 52-53.
The one passage to be quoted here—because it deals
well with the prattle about the risk that the
capitalist always runs:
“They have risked much to gain
much? But they have risked men, and goods or
money. As for the men, […] if they have exposed
them to manifest peril for the sake of gain, they have done
a very wicked act, As for the goods, if there is any merit
in producing them, there should be no merit in risking them
for the profit of one individual”, etc. (t, II,
p. 297). |XXII-1400||
[10. Polemics Against the Landed Aristocracy from
the Standpoint of the Physiocrats (An Anonymous English
Author)]
||XXIII-1449| The
Essential Principles of the Wealth of Nations, illustrated,
in Opposition to some False Doctrines of Dr. Adam Smith, and
others, London, 1797.
This man knew of Anderson, for he prints in his appendix
an extract from Anderson’s Agricultural Report for the
County of Aberdeen.
This is the only important English work directly
supporting the Physiocratic teaching. William Spence,
Britain Independent of Commerce, 1807, is a mere
caricature. This same fellow in 1814-15 was one of the
most fanatic defenders of the landed interest on the basis
of Physiocracy—which teaches free trade. The
fellow is not to be confused with Thomas Spence, the
deadly enemy of Private Property in Land.
The work [The Essential Principles] contains
firstly a very excellent and compressed resumé of the
Physiocratic doctrine.
He is right in tracing the origin of this view to
Locke and Vanderlint, and he describes the
Physiocrats as those who “very systematically,
though not correctly, illustrated” the doctrine
(p. 4). (See also on this p. 6; notebook H,
pp. 32-33.)
The summary quoted there brings out very nicely how the
privation theory—which the later apologists,
and partly even Smith, made the basis for the formation of
capital—arose precisely from the Physiocratic view
that no surplus-value is created in industry,
etc.:
“ The expence laid out in employing
and maintaining them” [handicraftsmen, manufacturers
and merchants] “does no more than continue the
existence of its own value, and is therefore
unproductive” (because unproductive of surplus-value)
“The wealth of society can never in the smallest
degree he augmented by artificers, manufacturers, or
merchants, otherwise than by their saving and
accumulating part of what is intended for their daily
subsistence; consequently it is by privation or
parsimony alone, that they can add any thing to the
general stock” (Senior’s theory of abstinence, Adam
Smith’s theory of savings). “Cultivators, on the
contrary, may live up to the whole of their income, and yet
at the same time […] enrich the State; for their
industry affords a surplus-produce called rent”
(p. 6).
“A class of men whose labour though
(it produces something) produces no more than what was
bestowed, in order to effect that labour, may with the
greatest propriety be called an unproductive
class” (p. 10).
Production of surplus-value to be clearly
distinguished from its transfer.
“The augmentation of
revenue” (this is accumulation) “is not,
but indirectly, the object of the Economists…
Their object is the production and reproduction of
[…] revenue” (p. 18).
And this is the great merit of Physiocracy. The
Physiocrats put themselves the question: how is
surplus-value (for him [the anonymous writer] it is
revenue) produced and reproduced? The question how it
is reproduced on an enlarged scale, that is,
increased, comes up only in the second place. Its
category, the secret of its production, ||1450| must first be revealed.
Surplus- value and commercial capital.
“When the question is about the
production of revenue, it is altogether illogical to
substitute for that the transfer of […]
revenue, which all commercial dealings are
[…] resolvable into” (p. 22). “What
does the word commerce imply but commutatio
mercium*… sometimes more
beneficial to the one than the other; but still what the one
gains the other loses, and their traffic really produces
no increase” (p. 23). “Should a Jew
sell a crown-piece for ten shillings, or a Queen Anne’s
farthing for a guinea, he would augment his own income, no
doubt, but he would not thereby augment the quantity of
the precious metals; and the nature of the traffic would
be the same, whether his virtuoso customer resided in the
same street with himself, or in France, or in China”
(p. 23).
The Physiocrats explain the profit of industry as
profit upon alienation (that is, in the Mercantilist
way). This Englishman therefore draws the right
conclusion that this profit is only a gain when industrial
commodities are sold abroad. From the Mercantilist
premise he draws the right Mercantilist conclusion.
“No man, as a manufacturer, however
he may gain himself, adds any thing to the national revenue,
if his commodity is sold and consumed at home; for the
buyer precisely loses…what the manufacturer
gains… There is an interchange
between the seller and the buyer, but no increase”
(p. 26). “To supply the want of a
surplus…the master-employer takes a profit of 50
per cent upon what he expends in wages, or sixpence in the
shilling on each manufacturer’s pay; … and if the
manufacture is sold ahroad … [this] would be the
national profit” (p. 27) of so and so many
“artificers ”.
Very good presentation of the reasons for Holland’s
wealth. Fisheries. (He should also have
mentioned stock-raising.) Monopoly of the spices of
the East. Carrying trade. Lending money
abroad. (Supplementary notebook H,
pp. 36-37).
“Manufacturers are […] a
necessary class” but not a “productive
class” (p. 35). They “occasion a
commutation or transfer of the revenue previously
provided by the cultivator, by giving a permanency to
that revenue under a new form” (p. 38).
There are only four essential classes. Productive
class or cultivators. Manufacturers.
Defenders. The class of instructors, which he
substitutes for the Physiocratic tithe owners or priests,
“for every civil society must be fed, […]
clothed, defended and instructed” (pp. 50-51).
The mistake of the Economists is that they
“deemed Receivers of land rents,
as mere Receivers of rents, a productive class in
society…they have in some degree compensated for
their error by intimating that the Church and King are to be
served out of those rents. Dr. Smith…suffering
it” (this error of the Economists) “to pervade
the whole of his own* enquiry,” (this is
correct) “directs his refutation to the sound part of
the Economical system” (p. 8).
||1451| The landlords as
such are not only not productive, but not even an
essential class of society.
“The proprietors of land as
mere receivers of land rents are not an essential class of
society… By separating the rents of lands from
the constitutional purpose of the defence of the State, the
receivers of those rents instead of being an essential
class, render themselves one of the most unessential and
burdensome classes in society” (p. 51).
See his further treatment of this, which is very good,
[in] Supplementary notebook H, pp. 38-39—and
this polemic against the receivers of land rent from the
standpoint of the Physiocrats, as the final conclusion
from their doctrine, is very important.
[The author] shows that the real tax on land is
Turkish (l.c., p. 59).
The landlord taxes not only improvements of land,
but often the presumption of future improvement
(pp. 63-64). Tax on rents (p. 65).
The Physiocratic doctrine anciently established in
England, Ireland, feudal Europe, Empire of the Mogul
(pp. 93-94).
The landlord as tax-imposer (p. 118).
The limitations of Physiocracy break through in the
following (lack of understanding of the division of
labour): Let it be assumed that a clockmaker or calico
manufacturer cannot sell his clock or calico. [Then he
would be in difficult position. That however shows]
“that a manufacturer only enriches himself by being a
seller” (it shows only that he produces his
product as a commodity “and that when he ceases
to be a seller, his profits” (and what
of the profits of the farmer who is not a seller?)
“are immediately at a stand, because they are not
natural profits, but artificial. The
cultivator…may exist, and thrive, and
multiply, without selling any thing” (pp.
38-39). (But then he must also be a manufacturer.)
[Why does the author speak only of a clockmaker or a
calico manufacturer? It can equally well be] assumed
that a producer of coal, iron, flax, indigo, etc., cannot
sell these products, or even that a producer of corn cannot
sell his corn. Béardé de
l’Abbaye, cited above, is very good on this. He
[the anonymous author] has to stress production [for]
immediate consumption as against the production of
commodities—very much in contradiction with the
Physiocratic view that exchange-value was the
principal thing. But that runs right through the work
of this fellow. It is the bourgeois view within
the pre-bourgeois way of looking at things.
[He comes out] against Arthur Young’s high price,
[which the latter regards] as important for the
prosperity of agriculture; but this is at the same time
polemics against the Physiocrats (l.c., pp. 65-78 and
118).
Surplus-value cannot be derived from the nominal
raising of the price on the part of the seller.
Through “this* augmentation of the nominal value
of the produce…nor are sellers […]
enriched**
…since what they gain as sellers, they precisely
expend in quality of buyers” (p. 66).
This is similar to Vanderlint’s arguments:
“While a field admitting cultivation
can be found for every idler, let no idler be without a
field. Houses of industry are good things; but fields
of industry are much better” (p. 47).
[He is] against the farm system, and for long leases,
because landownership will otherwise only hinder production
and improvements (pp. 118-23). (Irish Right of
Tenantry.) |XXIII-1451||
[11. Apologist Conception of the Productivity of
All Professions]
||V-182| A philosopher
produces ideas, a poet poems, a clergyman sermons, a
professor compendia and so on. A criminal produces
crimes. If we look a little closer at the connection
between this latter branch of production and society as a
whole, we shall rid ourselves of many prejudices. The
criminal produces not only crimes but also criminal law, and
with this also the professor who gives lectures on criminal
law and in addition to this the inevitable compendium in
which this same professor throws his lectures onto the
general market as “commodities. This brings with
it augmentation of national wealth, quite apart from the
personal enjoyment which—as a competent Witness, Herr
Professor Roscher, [tells] us—the manuscript of the
compendium brings to its originator himself.
The criminal moreover produces the whole of the police
and of criminal justice, constables, judges, hangmen,
juries, etc.; and all these different lines of business,
which form equally many categories of the social division of
labour, develop different capacities of the human spirit,
create new needs and new ways of satisfying them.
Torture alone has given rise to the most ingenious
mechanical inventions, and employed many honourable
craftsmen in the production of its instruments.
The criminal produces an impression, partly moral and
partly tragic, as the case may be, and in this way renders a
“service” by arousing the moral and aesthetic
feelings of the public. He produces not only compendia
on Criminal Law, not only penal codes and along with them
legislators in this field, but also art, belles-lettres,
novels, and even tragedies, as not only Müllner’s
Schuld and Schiller’s Räuber show, but
also [Sophocles’] Oedipus and [Shakespeare’s]
Richard the Third. The criminal breaks the
monotony and everyday security of bourgeois life. In
this way he keeps it from stagnation, and gives rise to that
uneasy tension and agility without which even the spur of
competition would get blunted. Thus he gives a
stimulus to the productive forces. While crime takes a
part of the superfluous population off the labour market and
thus reduces competition among the labourers—up to a
certain point preventing wages from falling below the
minimum—the struggle against crime absorbs another
part of this population. Thus the criminal comes in as
one of those natural “counterweights” which
bring about a correct balance and open up a whole
perspective of “useful” occupations.
The effects of the criminal on the development of
productive power can be shown in detail. Would locks
ever have reached their present degree of excellence had
there been no thieves? Would the making of bank-notes
have reached its present perfection had there been no ||183| forgers? Would the
microscope have found its way into the sphere of ordinary
commerce (see Babbage) but for trading frauds? Doesn’t
practical chemistry owe just as much to adulteration of
commodities and the efforts to show it up as to the honest
zeal for production? Crime, through its constantly new
methods of attack on property, constantly calls into being
new methods of defence, and so is as productive as strikes
for the invention of machines. And if one leaves the
sphere of private crime: would the world-market ever have
come into being but for national crime? Indeed, would
even the nations have arisen? And hasn’t the Tree of
Sin been at the same time the Tree of Knowledge ever since
the time of Adam?
In his Fable of the Bees (1705) Mandeville had
already shown that every possible kind of occupation is
productive, and had given expression to the line of this
whole argument:
“That what we call Evil in this
World, Moral as well as Natural, is the grand Principle that
makes us Sociable Creatures, the solid Basis, the Life
and Support of all Trades and Employments without
exception […] there we must look for the true origin
of all Arts and Sciences; and […] the moment, Evil
ceases, the Society must he spoil’d if not totally
dissolve’d*”
[2nd edition, London, 1723, p. 428].
Only Mandeville was of course infinitely bolder and more
honest than the philistine apologists of bourgeois
society. |V-183||
[12.] Productivity of Capital. Productive
and Unproductive Labour
[(A) Productivity of Capital as the Capitalist Expression
of the Productive Power of Social Labour]
||XXI-1317| We have seen not
only how capital produces, but how it itself is produced,
and how, as an essentially altered relation, it emerges from
the process of production and how it is developed in
it. On the one hand capital transforms the mode of
production; on the other hand this changed form of the mode
of production and a particular stage in the development of
the material forces of production are the basis and
precondition—the premise for its own formation.
Since living labour—through the exchange between
capital and labourer—is incorporated in capital, and
appears as an activity belonging to capital from the moment
that the labour-process begins, all the productive powers of
social labour appear as the productive powers of capital,
just as the general social form of labour appears in money
as the property of a thing. Thus the productive power
of social labour and its special forms now appear as
productive powers and forms of capital, of
materialised labour, of the material conditions of
labour—which, having assumed this independent form,
are personified by the capitalist in relation to living
labour. Here we have once more the perversion of the
relationship, which we have already, in dealing with money,
called fetishism.
The capitalist himself only holds power as the
personification of capital. (In Italian
book-keeping this role of his as a capitalist, as
personified capital, is even always contrasted with him as a
mere person, in which capacity he appears only as a personal
consumer and debtor of his own capital.)
The productivity of capital consists in the first
instance—even if one only considers the formal
subsumption of labour under capital—in the
compulsion to perform surplus-labour, labour beyond
the immediate need; a compulsion which the capitalist mode
of production shares with earlier modes of production, but
which it exercises and carries into effect in a manner more
favourable to production.
Even from the standpoint of this purely formal
relation—the general form of capitalist
production, which is common both to its less developed stage
and to its more developed stage—the means of
production, the material conditions of
labour—material of labour, instruments of labour (and
means of subsistence)—do not appear as subsumed to the
labourer, but the labourer appears as subsumed to
them. He does not make use of them, but they make use
of him. And it is this that makes them capital.
Capital employs labour. They are not means for
him to produce products whether in the form of direct means
of subsistence, or of means of exchange, commodities.
But he is a means for them—partly to maintain their
value, partly to create surplus-value, that is, to increase
it, absorb surplus-labour.
Already in its simple form this relation is an
inversion— personification of the thing and
materialisation of the person; for what distinguishes this
form from all previous forms is that the capitalist does not
rule over the labourer through any personal qualities he may
have, but only in so far as he is “capital”; his
domination is only that of materialised labour over living
labour, of the labourer’s product over the labourer
himself.
The relation grows still more complicated and apparently
more mysterious because, with the development of the
specifically capitalist mode of production, it is not only
these directly material things <all products of labour;
considered as use-values, they are both material conditions
of labour and products of labour; considered as
exchange-values, they are materialised general labour-time
or money> that get up on their hind legs to the labourer
and confront him as “capital”, but [also] the
forms of socially developed labour—co-operation,
manufacture (as a form of division of labour), the factory
(as a form of social labour organised on machinery as its
material basis)—all these appear as forms of the
development of capital, and therefore the productive
powers of labour built up on these forms of social
labour—consequently also science and the forces of
nature—appear as productive powers of
capital. In fact, the unity [of labour] in
co-operation, the combination [of labour ] through the
division of labour, the use for productive purposes in
machine industry of the forces of nature and science
alongside the products of labour—all this confronts
the individual labourers themselves as something
extraneous and objective, as a mere form of
existence of the means of labour that are independent of
them and control them, just as the means of labour
themselves [confront them,] in their simple visible form as
materials, instruments, etc., as functions of capital
and consequently of the capitalist.
The social forms of their own labour or the forms of
their own ||1318| social labour
are relations that have been formed quite independently of
the individual labourers; the labourers, as subsumed under
capital, become elements of these social formations
—but these social formations do not belong to
them. They therefore confront them as forms of
capital itself, as combinations belonging to capital, as
distinct from their individual labour-power, arising from
capital and incorporated in it. And this takes on a
form that is all the more real the more on the one hand
their labour-power itself becomes so modified by these forms
that it is powerless as an independent force, that is to
say, outside this capitalist relationship, and that
its independent capacity to produce is destroyed. And
on the other hand, with the development of machinery the
conditions of labour seem to dominate Labour also
technologically while at the same time they replace labour,
oppress it, and make it superfluous in its independent
forms.
In this process, in which the social character of
their labour confronts them to a certain degree as
capitalised (as for example in machinery the visible
products of labour appear as dominating labour), the same
naturally takes place with the forces of nature and science,
the product of general historical development in its
abstract quintessence—they confront the labourers as
powers of capital. They are separate in fact
from the skill and knowledge of the individual
labourer—and although, in their origin, they
too are the product of labour—wherever they
enter into the labour-process they appear as embodied in
capital. The capitalist who makes use of a machine
need not understand it. (See Ure.) But science
realised in the machine appears as capital in
relation to the labourers. And in fact all these
applications of science, natural forces and products of
labour on a large scale, these applications founded on
social labour, themselves appear only as means for
the exploitation of labour, as means of appropriating
surplus-labour, and hence confront labour as powers
belonging to capital. Capital naturally uses all these
means only to exploit labour; but in order to exploit it, it
must apply them in production. And so the development
of the social productive powers of labour and the
conditions for this development appear as acts of
capital, towards which the individual labourer not only
maintains a passive attitude, but which take place in
opposition to him.
Capital itself has a double character, since it consists
of commodities:
1. Exchange-value (money); but [it is]
self-expanding value, value which—because it is
value—creates value, grows as value, receives
an increment. This [growth] resolves itself into the
exchange of a given quantity of materialised labour for a
greater quantity of living labour,
2. Use-value; and here it shows itself
through its specific relations in the labour-process.
But precisely here it is no longer merely material of labour
and means of labour to which belongs labour, which
have absorbed labour, but along with labour [capital
includes] also the social combinations [of labour]
and the development of the means of labour corresponding to
these social combinations. Capitalist production first
develops on a large scale—tearing them away from the
individual independent labourer—both the objective and
subjective conditions of the labour-process, but it develops
them as powers dominating the individual labourer and
extraneous to him.
Thus capital becomes a very mysterious being. |1318||
||1320| Capital is therefore
productive: (1) as a force compelling surplus-labour,
(2) as the absorber and appropriator (personification) of
the productive powers of social labour and of the general
social productive forces, such as science.
The question arises, how or for what reason does labour
as opposed to capital appear productive or as productive
labour, since the productive powers of labour are
transposed into capital, and the same productive power
cannot be counted twice, once as the productive power of
labour and the second time as the productive power of
capital? <Productive power of labour—
productive power of capital. But labour-power
is productive through the difference between its
value and the value which it creates.>
[(B) Productive Labour in the System of Capitalist
Production]
Only bourgeois narrow-mindedness, which regards the
capitalist forms of production as absolute forms—hence
as eternal, natural forms of production—can confuse
the question of what is productive labour from the
standpoint of capital with the question of what labour is
productive in general, or what is productive labour in
general; and consequently fancy itself very wise in giving
the answer that all labour which produces anything at all,
which has any kind of result, is by that very fact
productive labour.
[Firstly:] Only labour which is directly
transformed into capital is productive; that is, only
labour which makes variable capital a variable magnitude and
consequently [makes the total capital C] equal to
C+Δ. If the variable capital before its exchange with
labour is equal to x, so that we have the equation y=x, then
the labour which transforms x into x+h, and consequently out
of y=x makes y’=x+h, is productive labour. This is the
first point to be elucidated. [That is,] labour
which produces surplus-value or serves capital as agency for
the creation of surplus-value, and hence for manifesting
itself as capital, as self-expanding value.
Secondly:The social and general productive powers
of labour are productive powers of capital; but these
productive powers relate only to the labour-process, or
affect only the use-value. They represent properties
inherent in capital as a thing, as its use-value. They
do not directly affect exchange-value. Whether
a hundred work together, or each one of the hundred works by
himself, the value of their product is equal to a hundred
days’ labour, whether represented in a large or small
quantity of products; that is to say, the productivity of
the labour does not affect the value.
||1321| The varying
productivity of labour affects exchange-value only in one
way.
If the productivity of labour is increased for example in
a single branch of labour—for instance, if weaving
with power-looms instead of hand-looms becomes no longer
exceptional, and if the weaving of a yard with the
power-loom requires only half the labour-time required with
the hand-loom, then twelve hours’ labour of a hand-loom
weaver is no longer represented in a value of twelve hours,
but in one of six, since the necessary labour-time
has now become six hours. The hand-loom weaver’s
twelve hours now only [represent ] six hours of social
labour-time, although he still works twelve hours as he did
before.
But this is not what we are dealing with here. As
against this, take another branch of production, for example
type-setting, in which up to now no machinery is used.
Twelve hours in this branch produce just as much
value as twelve hours in branches of production in
which machinery, etc., is developed to the utmost.
Hence labour as producing value always remains the
labour of the individual, but expressed in the form
of general labour. Consequently productive
labour—as labour producing value—always
confronts capital as labour of the individual labour-power,
as labour of the isolated labourer, whatever social
combinations these labourers may enter into in the process
of production. While therefore capital, in relation to
the labourer, represents the social productive power of
labour, the productive labour of the workmen, in relation to
capital, always represents only the labour of the
isolated labourer.
Thirdly: Whereas the extortion of surplus-labour
and the appropriation to itself of the social productive
powers of labour seem to be a natural property of
capital—hence a property springing from its
use-value—it seems on the contrary to be a natural
property of labour to manifest its own social productive
powers as productive powers of capital and its own
surplus[-product] as surplus-value, as the self-expansion of
capital.
These three points must now be examined, and from them we
must deduce the distinction between productive and
unproductive labour.
[On (1).] The productivity of capital consists in
the fact that it confronts labour as wage-labour, and the
productivity of labour consists in the fact that it
confronts the means of labour as capital.
We have seen that money is transformed into
capital—that is , a certain exchange-value is
transformed into self-expanding exchange-value, into value
plus surplus-value—through one part of it being
converted into commodities which serve labour as means of
labour (raw materials, instruments, in short, the material
conditions of labour), and another part being used for the
purchase of labour-power. However, it is not
this first exchange between money and labour-power, or the
mere purchase of the latter, which transforms money into
capita]. This purchase incorporates in the capital the
use of the labour-power for a certain time, or makes a
certain quantity of living labour one of the modes of
existence of capital, so to speak, the entelechy of
the capital itself.
In the actual production process the living labour is
transformed into capital through the fact that on the one
hand it reproduces the wages —that is, the value of
the variable capital —and on the other hand it creates
surplus-value; and through this process of transformation
the whole sum of money is transformed into capital, although
the part of it which varies directly is only the part
expended in wages. If the value was previously equal
to c+v, now it is equal to c+(v+x), which is the same thing
as (c+v)+x; or in other words: the original sum of money or
magnitude of value has expanded, has shown itself to be
value which at the same time maintains itself and also
increases.
<This has to be noted: the circumstance that only the
variable part of the capital produces its increment
in no way alters the fact that through this process the
whole original value has expanded, has grown greater by a
surplus-value, and that therefore the whole original sum of
money has been transformed into capital. For the
original value was equal to c+v (constant and variable
capital). In the process it becomes c+(v+x); the
latter is the reproduced part, which has come into existence
through the transformation of the living labour into
materialised labour —a transformation which is
conditioned and initiated through the exchange of v for
labour-power, or its transformation into wages. But
c+(v+x)=c+v (the original capital)+x. Moreover the
transformation of v into v+x, and therefore of (c+v) into
(c+v)+x, could only take place through the transformation of
a part of the money into c, The one part can only be
transformed into variable capital through the other
part being transformed into constant capital.>
In the actual process of production the labour is in
reality transformed into capital, but this
transformation is conditioned by the original
exchange between money and labour-power. It is through
this direct transformation of labour into
materialised labour, belonging not to the labourer
but to the capitalist, that money is first transformed into
capital—including that part of it which has received
the form of means of production, or conditions of
labour. Up to that point, the money—whether it
exists in its own form or in the form of commodities
(products) of a kind that can serve as means of production
of new commodities —is only an sich* capital.
||1322| Only this definite
relation to labour transforms money or commodities into
capital, and that labour is productive labour which through
this its relation to the conditions of production—to
which corresponds a definite conduct in the actual process
of production—transforms money or commodities into
capital; that is to say, which maintains and increases the
value of materialised labour rendered independent in
relation to labour-power. Productive labour is only a
concise term for the whole relationship and the form and
manner in which labour-power figures in the capitalist
production process. The distinction from other kinds
of labour is however of the greatest importance, since this
distinction expresses precisely the specific form of the
labour on which the whole capitalist mode of production and
capital itself is based.
Productive labour is therefore—in the system of
capitalist production—labour which produces
surplus-value for its employer, or which transforms the
objective conditions of labour into capital and their owner
into a capitalist: that is to say, labour which produces its
own product as capital.
So when we speak of productive labour, we speak of
socially determined labour, labour which implies a quite
specific relation between the buyer and the seller of the
labour.
Now although the money which is in the hands of the buyer
of labour-power (or the commodities in his possession: [the
supply] of means of production and means of subsistence for
the labourer) only becomes capital through this process, is
only transformed into capital in this process—and
therefore these things are not capital before they enter
into the process, but are only destined to be
capital—they are nevertheless an sich capital.
They are in their essence capital because of the independent
form in which they confront labour-power and labour-power
confronts them—a relationship which conditions and
ensures the exchange with labour-power and the subsequent
process of the actual transformation of labour into
capital. They have from the outset the specific social
character in relation to the labourers which makes them into
capital and gives them command over labour. They are
therefore pre-conditions confronting labour as capital.
Productive labour, therefore, can be so described when it
is directly exchanged for money as capital, or, which is
only a more concise way of putting it, is exchanged directly
for capital, that is, for money which in its essence is
capital, which is destined to function as capital, or
confronts labour-power as capital. The phrase: labour
which is directly exchanged for capital, implies that labour
is exchanged for money as capital and actually transforms it
into capital. The significance of the direct nature of
the exchange will be seen more clearly in a moment.
Productive labour is therefore labour which reproduces
for the labourer only the previously determined value of his
labour-power, but as an activity creating value increases
the value of capital; in other words, which confronts the
labourer himself with the values it has created in the form
of capital.
[(C) Two Essentially Different Phases in the Exchange
Between Capital and Labour]
In the exchange between capital and labour, as we saw in
examining the production process, two essentially different
though interdependent phases have to be distinguished.
First: The first exchange between capital and labour is a
formal process, in which capital figures as money and labour
power as commodity. From a conceptual or legal
standpoint the sale of labour-power takes place in this
first process, although the labour is paid for only after it
has been performed—at the end of the day, of the week,
etc. This in no way alters this transaction, in which
the labour-power is sold. What in this transaction is
directly sold is not a commodity in which labour has already
realised itself, but the use of the labour-power itself, and
therefore in fact the labour itself, since the use of the
labour-power is its activity—labour. It is
therefore not an exchange of labour mediated through an
exchange of commodities. When A sells boots to B, both
exchange labour, the first, labour realised in boots, the
second, labour realised in money. But in this first
exchange, on one side materialised labour in its general
social form, that is, money, is exchanged for labour which
as yet exists only as a power; and what is brought and sold
is the use of this power, that is, the labour itself,
although the value of the commodity sold is not the value of
the labour (a meaningless phrase) but the value of the
labour-power. What takes place therefore is a direct
exchange between materialised labour and labour power, which
in fact resolves itself into living labour; that is, between
materialised labour and living labour. The
wage—the value of the labour-power—appears, as
explained earlier as the direct purchase price, the price of
labour.
In this first phase the relation between Labourer and
capitalist is that of seller and buyer of a commodity.
The capitalist pays the value of the labour-power,
that is, the value of the commodity which he
buys.
At the same time, however, the labour-power is only
bought because the labour which it can perform, and
undertakes to perform, is more than the labour required for
the reproduction of its labour-power; therefore the labour
performed by it represents a greater value than the value of
the labour-power.
||1323| Secondly:
The second phase of the exchange between capital and
labour in fact has nothing to do with the first, and
strictly speaking is not an exchange at all.
In the first phase there is exchange of money for
commodity—exchange of equivalents—and labourer
and capitalist confront each other only as owners of
commodities. Equivalents are exchanged. (That is
to say, it makes no difference to the relation when
they are exchanged; and whether the price of the labour is
above or below the valve of the
labour-power or is equal to it alters nothing in the
transaction. It can therefore take place in
accordance with the general law of commodity exchange.)
In the second phase there is no exchange at all.
The owner of money has ceased to be a buyer of commodities
and the labourer has ceased to be a seller of
commodities. The owner of money now functions as
capitalist. He consumes the commodity which he has
bought, and the worker supplies it, since the use of his
labour-power is his labour itself. Through the earlier
transaction the labour itself has become part of
materialised wealth. The labourer performs it, but it
belongs to capital and is now only a function of the
latter. It is performed therefore directly under the
control and direction of capital; and the product in which
it is materialised is the new form in which the capital
appears, or in which rather it actually realises
itself as capital. In this process, therefore, labour
is directly materialised, is transformed
directly into capital, after it has been
formally incorporated in capital through the first
transaction. And indeed more labour is here
transformed into capital than the capital which had earlier
been expended on the purchase of labour-power. In this
process a part of unpaid labour is appropriated, and only
thereby does the money transform itself into capital.
But although in this phase no exchange in fact takes
place, the result, abstracting from the means that brought
it about, is that in the process —taking both phases
together—a certain quantity of materialised labour has
exchanged for a greater quantity of living labour.
This is expressed in the result of the process by the fact
that the labour which has materialised itself in its product
is greater in quantity than the labour materialised in the
labour-power, and hence greater than the materialised labour
paid to the labourer; or in other words by the fact that in
the actual process the capitalist gets back not only
the part of the capital which he laid out in wages, but a
surplus-value which costs him nothing. The
direct exchange of labour for capital here signifies:
(1) the direct transformation of the Labour into capital,
into a material component part of capital in the production
process; (2) the exchange of a certain quantity of
materialised labour for the same quantity of living labour
[plus] a surplus quantity of living labour which is
appropriated without exchange.
The statement that productive labour is labour
which is directly exchanged with capital
embraces all these phases, and is only a derivative formula
expressing the fact that it is labour which
transforms money into capital, which is exchanged with the
conditions of production as capital, that therefore
in its relationship with these conditions of production
labour is not faced by them as simple conditions of
production, nor does it face the conditions of production as
labour in general that has no specific social
character.
This statement covers: (1) the relation of money and
labour-power to each other as commodities, purchase and sale
as between the owner of money and the owner of labour-power;
(2) the direct subsumption of labour under capital; (3) the
real transformation of labour into capital in the production
process, or what is the same thing, the creation of
surplus-value for capital. Two kinds of
exchange take place between labour and
capital. The first expresses merely the purchase
of labour-power and therefore in reality of labour and
therefore of its product; the second, the direct
transformation of living labour into capital, in
other words the materialisation of living labour as the
realisation of capital.
[(D) The Specific Use-value of Productive Labour for
Capital]
The result of the capitalist production process is
neither a mere product (use-value) nor a commodity,
that is, a use-value which has a certain
exchange-value. Its result, its product, is the
creation of surplus-value for capital, and
consequently the actual transformation of money or
commodity into capital— which before the production
process they were only in intention, in their essence, in
what they were destined to be. In the production
process more labour is absorbed than has been bought.
This absorption, ||1324| this
appropriation of another’s unpaid labour, which is
consummated in the production process, is the direct
aim of the capitalist production process; for what
capital as capital (hence the capitalist as capitalist)
wants to produce is neither an immediate use-value for
individual consumption nor a commodity to be turned first
into money and then into a use-value. Its aim is the
accumulation of wealth, the self-expansion of
value, its increase; that is to say, the maintenance of
the old value and the creation of surplus-value. And
it achieves this specific product of the capitalist
production process only in exchange with labour, which for
that reason is called productive labour.
Labour which is to produce commodities must be
useful labour; it must produce a use-value, it must
manifest itself in a use-value. And
consequently only labour which manifests itself in
commodities, that is, in use-values, is labour for
which capital is exchanged. This is a self-evident
premise. But it is not this concrete character of
labour, its use-value as such—that it is for example
tailoring labour, cobbling, spinning, weaving,
etc.—which forms its specific use-value for capital
and consequently stamps it as productive labour in
the system of capitalist production. What forms its
specific use-value for capital is not its specific
useful character, any more than it is the particular useful
properties of the product in which it is materialised.
But what forms its specific use-value for capital is its
character as the element which creates exchange-value,
abstract labour; and in fact not that it represents some
particular quantity of this general labour, but that it
represents a greater quantity than is
contained in its price, that is to say, in the
value of the labour-power.
For it [capital], the use-value of labour-power is
precisely the excess of the quantity of labour which it
performs over the quantity of labour which is materialised
in the labour-power itself and hence is required to
reproduce it. Naturally, it supplies this quantity of
labour in the determinate form inherent in it as
labour which has a particular utility, such as spinning
labour; weaving labour, etc. But this concrete
character, which is what enables it to take the form of a
commodity, is not its specific use-value for
capital. Its specific use-value for capital consists
in its quantity as labour in general, and in the difference,
the excess, of the quantity of labour which it performs
over the quantity of labour which it costs.
A certain sum of money x becomes capital in that it
appears in its product as x+h; that is to say, in that the
quantity of labour contained in it as product is greater
than the quantity of labour which it originally
contained. And this is the result of the exchange
between money and productive labour; in other words,
only that labour is productive which, exchanged with
materialised labour, enables the latter to take the form of
an increased quantity of materialised labour.
The capitalist production process, therefore, is
not merely the production of commodities. It is
a process which absorbs unpaid labour, which makes raw
materials and means of labour—the means of production
—into means for the absorption of unpaid labour.
It follows from what has been said that the
designation of labour as productive labour has
absolutely nothing to do with the determinate content
of the labour, its special utility, or the particular
use-value in which it manifests itself.
The same kind of labour may be productive
or unproductive.
For example Milton, who wrote Paradise Lost for
five pounds, was an unproductive labourer. On
the other hand, the writer who turns out stuff for his
publisher in factory style, is a productive
labourer. Milton produced Paradise Lost for
the same reason that a silk worm produces silk. It was
an activity of his nature. Later he sold the
product for £5. But the literary proletarian of
Leipzig, who fabricates books (for example, Compendia of
Economics) under the direction of his publisher, is a
productive labourer; for his product is from the
outset subsumed under capital, and comes into being only for
the purpose of increasing that capital. A singer who
sells her song for her own account is an unproductive
labourer. But the same singer commissioned by an
entrepreneur to sing in order to make money for him is a
productive labourer; for she produces capital.
[(E) Unproductive Labour. As Labour which Performs
Services; Purchase of Services under Conditions of
Capitalism. Vulgar Conception of the Relation Between
Capital and Labour as an Exchange of Services]
||1325| Here different
questions must be distinguished.
Whether I buy a pair of trousers or whether I buy cloth
and get a tailor to come to my house and pay him for this
service (that is, his tailoring labour) in converting
this cloth into trousers, is a matter of complete
indifference to me, if all I am interested in is the
trousers. I buy the trousers from the merchant-tailor
instead of taking the latter course, because this latter
course is more expensive, and the trousers cost less labour
and are therefore cheaper when the capitalist tailor
produces them than when I get them made by a jobbing
tailor. But in both cases I transform the money with
which I buy the trousers not into capital but into trousers;
and in both cases it is for me only a matter of using the
money as mere means of circulation, that is, of transforming
it into this particular use-value. Here therefore the
money does not function as capital, although in one
case it exchanges for a commodity and in the other
case it buys labour itself as a
commodity. It functions only as money, and more
precisely, as means of circulation.
On the other hand the jobbing tailor [who works for me at
my home] is not a productive labourer, although his
labour provides me with the product, the trousers, and him
with the price of his labour, the money. It may be
that the quantity of labour performed by the jobbing tailor
is greater than that contained in the price which he gets
from me. And this is even probable, since the price of
his labour is determined by the price which the
productive tailor gets. This however is all the
same so far as I am concerned. Once the price has been
fixed, it is a matter of complete indifference to me whether
he works eight or ten hours. What I am concerned with
is only the use-valve, the trousers; and naturally,
whether I buy them one way or the other, I am interested in
paying as little as possible for them, but in one case
neither less nor more than in the other; in other words, I
am interested in paying only the normal price for
them. This is an outlay for my consumption;
not an increase but a diminution of my money. It is in
no way a means to my enrichment, any more than any other way
of spending money for my personal consumption is a
means to enrichment for me.
One of the savants of Paul de Kock may tell me that
without buying trousers, just as without buying bread, I
cannot live, and therefore also I cannot enrich
myself; that the purchase of the trousers is therefore an
indirect means, or at least a condition, for my enrichment
—in the same way as the circulation of my blood or the
process of breathing are conditions for my enrichment.
But neither the circulation of my blood nor my breathing in
themselves make me any the richer; on the contrary, they
both presuppose a costly assimilation of food; if that were
not necessary, there would be no poor devils
about. The mere direct exchange of money for
labour therefore does not transform money into
capital or labour into productive labour.
What then is the special character of this
exchange? How is it different from the exchange of
money for productive labour? On the one hand, in that
the money is spent as money, as the
independent form of exchange-value, which is to be
transformed into a use-value, into means of
subsistence, into an object for personal consumption.
The money therefore does not become capital, but on the
contrary, it loses its existence as exchange-value in order
to be consumed and expended as use-value. On the other
hand, the labour only has any interest for me as a
use-value, as a service which converts cloth into
trousers, as the service which its particular useful
character provides for me.
In contrast to this, the service which the same tailor
employed by a merchant-tailor renders to this capitalist
does not consist at all in the fact that he converts
cloth into trousers, but that the necessary labour-time
materialised in a pair of trousers is say twelve hours,
while the wage that the journeyman tailor gets is equivalent
to six hours. The service which he renders the
capitalist is therefore that he works six hours for
nothing. That this takes place in the form of making
trousers only conceals the real relationship.
As soon as the merchant-tailor can, he therefore tries to
transform the trousers again into money, that is, into a
form in which the determinate character of tailoring labour
has entirely disappeared and in which the service rendered
is consequently expressed in the fact that instead of a
labour-time of six hours, ||1326| expressed in a certain sum of
money, there is now a labour-time of twelve hours, expressed
in double that sum of money.
I buy the tailoring labour for the service it renders me
as tailoring labour, in order to satisfy my need for
clothing and consequently to serve one of my
needs. The merchant-tailor buys it as a means
to making two talers out of one. I buy it
because it produces a particular use-value, renders me a
particular service. He buys it because it produces
more exchange-value than it costs, as a mere means for
exchanging less labour for more labour.
Where the direct exchange of money for labour takes place
without the latter producing capital, where it is therefore
not productive labour, it is bought as
service, which in general is nothing but a term for
the particular use-value which the labour provides, like any
other commodity; it is however a specific term for the
particular use-value of labour in so far as it does not
render service in the form of a thing, but in the
form of an activity, which however in no way
distinguishes it for example from a machine, for instance a
clock. Do ut facias, facio ut facias, facio ut des,
do ut des are here forms that can be used quite
indifferently to describe the same relation, while in
capitalist production the do ut facias expresses a
quite specific relation between the material value which is
given and the living activity which is appropriated.
Because therefore in the purchase of services the
specific relation between labour and capital is in no way
involved, being either completely obliterated or altogether
absent, it is naturally the favourite form used by Say,
Bastiat and their consorts to express the relation
between capital and labour.
The question how the value of these services is
regulated and how this value itself is determined by
the laws governing wages has nothing to do with the
examination of the relation we are considering, and belongs
to the chapter on wages.
It follows that the mere exchange of money for labour
does not make the latter productive labour, and that
on the other hand the content of this labour at first
makes no difference.
The labourer himself can buy labour, that is,
commodities, which are provided in the form of services; and
the expenditure of his wages on such services is an
expenditure which in no way differs from the expenditure of
his wages on any other commodities. The service which
he buys may be more or less necessary —for example,
the service of a physician or of a priest, just as he may
buy either bread or gin. As buyer—that is, as
representative of money confronting commodity—the
labourer is in absolutely the same category as the
capitalist where the latter appears only as buyer, that is
to say, where there is no more in the transaction than the
conversion of money into the form of commodity. How
the price of these services is determined, and what relation
it has to wages proper, how far it is regulated by the laws
of the latter and how far it is not, are questions to be
considered in the treatment of wages, and are quite
irrelevant for our present inquiry.
If thus the mere exchange of money for labour does not
transform the latter into productive labour, or, what
is the same thing, does not transform the former into
capital, so also the content, the concrete character,
the particular utility of the labour, seems at first to make
no difference—as we have just seen, the same labour of
the same journeyman tailor is in one case productive, in the
other not.
Certain services, or the use-values,
resulting from certain forms of activity or labour are
embodied in commodities; others on the contrary leave
no tangible result existing apart from the persons
themselves who perform them; in other words, their result is
not a vendible commodity. For example, the
service a singer renders to me satisfies my aesthetic need;
but what I enjoy exists only in an activity inseparable from
the singer himself, and as soon as his labour, the singing,
is at an end, my enjoyment too is at an end. I enjoy
the activity itself—its reverberation on my ear.
These services themselves, like the commodities which I buy,
may be necessary or may only seem necessary—for
example, the service of a soldier or physician or lawyer; or
they may be services which give me pleasure. But this
makes no difference to their economic character. If I
am healthy and do not need a doctor or am lucky enough not
to have to be involved in a lawsuit, then I avoid paying out
money for medical or legal services as I do the plague.
||1328| Services may
also be forced on me—the services of officials,
etc.
If I buy the service of a teacher not to develop my
faculties but to acquire some skill with which I can earn
money—or if others buy this teacher for me—and
if I really learn something (which in itself is quite
independent of the payment for the service), then these
costs of education, just as the costs of my maintenance,
belong to the costs of production of my labour-power.
But the particular utility of this service alters nothing
in the economic relation; it is not a relation in which
I transform money into capital, or by which the supplier of
this service, the teacher, transforms me into his
capitalist, his master. Consequently it also does
not affect the economic character of this relation
whether the physician cures me, the teacher is successful in
teaching me, or the lawyer wins my lawsuit. What is
paid for is the performance of the service as such, and by
its very nature the result cannot be guaranteed by those
rendering the service. A large proportion of
services belongs to the costs of consumption
of commodities, as in the case of’ a cook, a maid,
etc.
It is characteristic of all unproductive labours
that they are at my command—as in the case of the
purchase of all other commodities for consumption—only
to the same extent as I exploit productive
labourers. Of all persons, therefore, the
productive labourer has the least command over the
services of unproductive labourers. On the
other hand, however, my power to employ productive
labourers by no means grows in the same proportion as I
employ unproductive labourers, but on the contrary
diminishes in the same proportion, although [one has ] most
to pay for the compulsory services (State,
taxes).
Productive labourers may themselves in relation to
me be unproductive labourers. For example, if I
have my house re-papered and the paper-hangers are
wage-workers of a master who sells me the job, it is just
the same for me as if I had bought a house already papered;
as if I had expended money for a commodity for my
consumption, But for the master who gets these labourers to
hang the paper, they are productive labourers, for they
produce surplus-value for him. |1328||
***
||1333| How very
unproductive, from the standpoint of capitalist
production, the labourer is who indeed produces vendible
commodities, but only to the amount equivalent to his own
labour-power, and therefore produces no surplus-value for
capital—can be seen from the passages in Ricardo
saying that the very existence of such people is a
nuisance. This is the theory and practice of
capital.
“Both the theory relative to capita],
and the practice of stopping labour at that point
where it can produce, in addition to the subsistence of the
labourer, a profit for* the capitalist, seem opposed to the
natural laws which regulate production “ (Thomas
Hodgskin, Popular Political Economy, London, 1827,
p. 238). |1333||
***
||1336| We have seen: This
process of production is not only a process of the
production of commodities, but a process of the
production of surplus-value, the absorption of
surplus-labour and hence a process of production of
capital. The first formal act of exchange between
money and labour or capital and labour is only
potentially the appropriation of someone else’s
living labour by materialised labour. The actual
process of appropriation takes place only in the actual
production process, behind which lies as a past stage that
first formal transaction—in which capitalist and
labourer confront each other as mere owners of
commodities, as buyer and seller. For which reason
all vulgar economists—like Bastiat —go no
further than that first formal transaction, precisely in
order by this trick to get rid of the specific capitalist
relation. The distinction is shown in a striking way
by the exchange of money for unproductive labour. Here
money and labour exchange with each other only as
commodities. So that instead of this exchange forming
capital, it is expenditure of revenue. |1336||
[(F) The Labour of Handicraftsmen and Peasants in
Capitalist Society]
||1328| What then is the
position of independent handicraftsmen or peasants who
employ no labourers and therefore do not produce as
capitalists? Either, as always in the case of peasants
<but for example not in the case of a gardener whom I get
to come to my house>, they are producers of
commodities, and I buy the commodity from
them—in which case for example it makes no difference
that the handicraftsman produces it to order while the
peasant produces his supply according to his means. In
this capacity they confront me as sellers of commodities,
not as sellers of labour, and this relation therefore has
nothing to do with the exchange of capital for labour;
therefore also it has nothing to do with the distinction
between productive and unproductive labour, which
depends entirely on whether the labour is exchanged for
money or for money as money as capital. They therefore
belong neither to the category of productive nor of
unproductive labourers, although they are producers
of commodities. But their production does not fall
under the capitalist mode of production.
It is possible that these producers, working with their
own means of production, not only reproduce their
labour-power but create surplus-value, while their position
enables them to appropriate for themselves their own
surplus-labour or a part of it (since a part of it is taken
away from them in the form of taxes, etc.). And here
we come up against a peculiarity that is characteristic of a
society in which one definite mode of production
predominates, even though not all productive relations have
been subordinated to it. In feudal society, for
example (as we can best observe in England because the
system of feudalism was introduced here from Normandy ready
made and its form was impressed on what was in many respects
a different social foundation), relations which were far
removed from the nature of feudalism were given a feudal
form; for example, simple money relations in which there was
no trace of mutual personal service as between lord and
vassal, It is for instance a fiction that the small peasant
held his land in fief.
It is exactly the same in the capitalist mode of
production. The independent peasant or handicraftsman
is cut up into two persons*. As owner of the means of
production he is capitalist; as labourer he is his own
wage-labourer. As capitalist he therefore pays himself
his wages and draws his profit on his capital; that is to
say, he exploits himself as wage-labourer, and pays himself,
in the surplus-value, the tribute that labour owes to
capital. Perhaps he also pays himself a third portion
as landowner (rent), in exactly the same way, as we shall
see later, that the industrial capitalist, when he works
with his own ||1329| capital,
pays himself interest, regarding this as something which he
owes to himself not as industrial capitalist but qua
capitalist pure and simple.
The determinate social character of the means of
production in capitalist production—expressing a
particular production relation —has so grown
together with, and in the mode of thought of bourgeois
society is so inseparable from, the material existence of
these means of production as means of production, that the
same determinateness (categorical determinateness) is
assumed even where the relation is in direct contradiction
to it. The means of production become capital only in
so far as they have become separated from labourer and
confront labour as an independent power. But in the
case referred to the producer—the labourer— is
the possessor, the owner, of his means of production.
They are therefore not capital, any more than in relation to
them he is a wage-labourer. Nevertheless they are
looked on as capital, and he himself is split in two, so
that he, as capitalist, employs himself as
wage-labourer.
In fact this way of presenting it, however irrational it
may be on first view, is nevertheless so far correct, that
in this case the producer in fact creates his own
surplus-value <on the assumption that he sells his
commodity at its value>, in other words, only his own
labour is materialised in the whole product. But that
he is able to appropriate for himself the whole
product of his own labour, and that the excess of the value
of his product over the average price for instance of his
day’s labour is not appropriated by a third person, a
master, he owes not to his labour —which does
not distinguish him from other labourers —but to his
ownership of the means of production. It is therefore
only through his ownership of these that he takes possession
of his own surplus-labour, and thus bears to himself as
wage-labourer the relation of being his own capitalist.
Separation appears as the normal relation in this
society. Where therefore it does not in fact apply, it
is presumed and, as has just been shown, so far correctly;
for (as distinct for example from conditions in Ancient Rome
or Norway or in the north-west of the United States) in this
society unity appears as accidental,
separation as normal; and consequently separation is
maintained as the relation even when one person unites the
separate functions. Here emerges in a very striking
way the fact that the capitalist as such is only a function
of capital, the labourer a function of labour-power.
For it is also a law that economic development distributes
functions among different persons; and the handicraftsman or
peasant who produces with his own means of production will
either gradually be transformed into a small capitalist who
also exploits the labour of others, or he will suffer the
loss of his means of production <in the first instance
the latter may happen although he remains their
nominal owner, as in the case of mortgages> and be
transformed into a wage-labourer. This is the tendency
in the form of society in which the capitalist mode of
production predominates.
[(G) Supplementary Definition of Productive Labour as
Labour which is Realised in Material Wealth]
In considering the essential relations of capitalist
production it can therefore be assumed that the entire world
of commodities, all spheres of material production—the
production of material wealth—are (formally or really)
subordinated to the capitalist mode of production <for
this is what is happening more and more completely; [since
it] is the principal goal, and only if it is realised will
the productive powers of labour be developed to their
highest point>. On this premise—which
expresses the limit [of the process] and which is therefore
constantly coming closer to an exact presentation of
reality—all labourers engaged in the production of
commodities are wage-labourers, and the means of production
in all these spheres confront them as capital. It can
then be said to be a characteristic of productive
labourers, that is, labourers producing capital, that
their labour realises itself in commodities, in
material wealth. And so productive labour,
along with its determining characteristic—which takes
no account whatever of the content of labour and is
entirely independent of that content—would be given a
second, different and subsidiary definition.
[(H) Manifestations of Capitalism in the Sphere of
Immaterial Production]
Non-material production, even when it is carried on
purely for exchange, that is, when it produces
commodities, may be of two kinds:
1. It results in commodities, use-values,
which have a form different from and independent of
producers and consumers; these commodities may therefore
exist during an interval between production and consumption
and may in this interval circulate as vendible
commodities, such as books, paintings, in a word, all
artistic products which are distinct from the artistic
performance of the artist performing them. Here
capitalist production is applicable only to a very
restricted extent: as for example when a writer of a joint
work—say an encyclopaedia—exploits a number of
others as hacks. ||1330 |
In this sphere for the most part a transitional form
to capitalist production remains in existence, in
which the various scientific or artistic producers,
handicraftsmen or experts work for the collective trading
capital of the book-trade—a relation that has nothing
to do with the capitalist mode of production proper and even
formally has not yet been brought under its sway. The
fact that the exploitation of labour is at its highest
precisely in these transitional forms in no way alters the
case.
2. The production cannot be separated from the act
of producing, as is the case with all performing artists,
orators, actors, teachers, physicians, priests, etc.
Here too the capitalist mode of production is met with only
to a small extent, and from the nature of the case can only
be applied in a few spheres. For example, teachers in
educational establishments may be mere wage-labourers for
the entrepreneur of the establishment; many such educational
factories exist in England. Although in relation to
the pupils these teachers are not productive
labourers, they are productive labourers in relation
to their employer. He exchanges his capital for
their labour-power, and enriches himself through this
process. It is the same with enterprises such as
theatres, places of entertainment, etc. In such cases
the actor’s relation to the public is that of an artist, but
in relation to his employer he is a productive
labourer. All these manifestations of capitalist
production in this sphere are so insignificant compared with
the totality of production that they can be left entirely
out of account.
[(I) The Problem of Productive Labour from the
Standpoint of the Total Process of Material Production]
With the development of the specifically capitalist mode
of production, in which many labourers work together in the
production of the same commodity, the direct relation which
their labour bears to the object produced naturally varies
greatly. For example the unskilled labourers in a
factory referred to earlier have nothing directly to do with
the working up of the raw material. The workmen who
function as overseers of those directly engaged in working
up the raw material are one step further away; the works
engineer has yet another relation and in the main works only
with his brain, and so on. But the totality of
these labourers, who possess labour-power of different
value (although all the employed maintain much the same
level) produce the result, which, considered as the
result of the labour-process pure and simple, is
expressed in a commodity or material product;
and all together, as a workshop, they are the living
production machine of these products—just as,
taking the production process as a whole, they exchange
their labour for capital and reproduce the capitalists’
money as capital, that is to say, as value producing
surplus-value, as self-expanding value.
It is indeed the characteristic feature of the capitalist
mode of production that it separates the various kinds of
labour from each other, therefore also mental and manual
labour—or kinds of labour in which one or the other
predominates—and distributes them among different
people. This however does not prevent the material
product from being the common product of these
persons, or their common product embodied in material
wealth; any more than on the other hand it prevents or in
any way alters the relation of each one of these persons to
capital being that of wage-labourer and in this pre-eminent
sense being that of a productive labourer. All
these persons are not only directly engaged in the
production of material wealth, but they exchange their
labour directly for money as capital, and
consequently directly reproduce, in addition to their wages,
a surplus-value for the capitalist, Their labour consists of
paid labour plus unpaid surplus-labour.
[(J) The Transport Industry as a Branch of Material
Production. Productive Labour in the Transport
Industry]
In addition to extractive industry, agriculture and
manufacture, there exists yet a fourth sphere of material
production, which also passes through the various stages of
handicraft industry, manufacture and mechanical industry;
this is the transport industry, transporting either
people or commodities. The relation of productive
labour—that is, of the wage-labourer—to
capital is here exactly the same as in the other spheres of
material production. Moreover, here a material change
is effected in the object of labour—a spatial
change, a change of place. In the case of the
transport of people this takes the form only of a
service rendered to them by the entrepreneur.
But the relation between buyer and seller of this
service has nothing to do with the relation of the
productive labourer to capital, any more than has the
relation between the buyer and seller of yarn.
If on the other hand we consider the process in relation
to commodities, ||1331| in this
case there certainly takes place, in the labour-process, a
change in the object of labour, the commodity.
Its spatial existence is altered, and along with this goes a
change in its use-value, since the location of this
use-value is changed. Its exchange-value increases in
the same measure as this change in use-value requires
labour—an amount of labour which is determined partly
by the wear and tear of the constant capital, that is, the
total materialised labour which enters into the commodity,
and partly by the quantity of living labour, as in the
process of increasing the value of all other
commodities.
When the commodity has reached its destination, this
change which has taken place in its use-value has vanished,
and is now only expressed in its higher exchange-value, in
the enhanced price of the commodity. And although in
this case the real labour has left no trace behind it in the
use-value, it is nevertheless realised in the exchange-value
of this material product; and so it is true also of this
industry as of other spheres of material production that the
labour incorporates itself in the commodity, even
though it has left no visible trace in the use-value of the
commodity.
***
Here we have been dealing only with productive
capital, that is, capital employed in the direct
process of production. We come later to capital in
the process of circulation. And only after
that, in considering the special form assumed by capital as
merchant’s capital, can the question be answered as
to how far the labourers employed by it are productive or
unproductive. |XXI-1331||
[13. Draft Plans for parts I and III of
Capital]
[(A) Plan for Part I or Section I of Capital]
||XVIII-1140| The first
section “Production Process of Capital”
to be divided in the following way:
1. Introduction. Commodity. Money.
2. Transformation of money into capital.
3. Absolute surplus-value. (a) Labour-process
and the process of producing surplus-value. (b)
Constant capital and variable capital. (c) Absolute
surplus-value. (d) Struggle for the normal
working-day. (e) Simultaneous working-days (number of
simultaneously employed labourers). Amount of
surplus-value and rate of surplus-value (magnitude and
height?).
4. Relative surplus-value. (a) Simple
co-operation. (b) Division of labour. (c)
Machinery. etc.
5. Combination of absolute and relative
surplus-value. Relation (proportion) between
wage-labour and surplus-value. Formal and real
subsumption of labour under capital. Productivity of
capital. Productive and unproductive labour.
6. Reconversion of surplus-value into
capital. Primitive accumulation. Wakefield’s
colonial theory.
7. Result of the production process.
(Either under 6 or under 7 the change in the form of the
law of appropriation can be shown.)
8. Theories of surplus-value.
9. Theories of productive and unproductive
labour. |XVIII-1140||
[(B) Plan for Part III or Section III of
Capital]
||XVIII-1139| The third
section “Capital and Profit” to be
divided in the following way:
1. Conversion of surplus-value into profit.
Rate of profit as distinguished from rate of
surplus-value.
2. Conversion of profit into average profit.
Formation of the general rate of profit.
Transformation of values into prices of production.
3. Adam Smith’s and Ricardo’s theories on profit
and prices of production.
4. Rent (illustration of the difference between
value and price of production).
5. History of the so-called Ricardian law of
rent.
6. Law of the fall of the rate of profit.
Adam Smith, Ricardo, Carey.
7. Theories of profit.
(Query: whether Sismondi and Malthus should also be
included in the Theories of Surplus-Value.)
8. Division of profit into industrial profit and
interest. Merchant’s capital. Money-capital.
9. Revenue and its sources. The question of
the relation between the processes of production and
distribution also to be included here.
10. Reflux movements of money in the process of
capitalist production as a whole.
11. Vulgar economy.
12. Conclusion. Capital and
wage-labour. |XVIII-1139||.
[(C) Plan for Chapter II of Part III of
Capital]
||XVIII-1109| In the second
chapter of Part III, on “Capital and
Profit”, where the formation of the general rate
of profit is dealt with, the following must be
considered:
1. Different organic composition of capitals,
partly conditioned by the difference between variable and
constant capital in so far as this arises from the stage
of production—the absolute quantitative
relations between machinery and raw materials on the one
hand, and the quantity of labour which sets them in
motion. These differences relate to the
labour-process. The differences between fixed and
circulating capital arising from the circulation process
have also to be considered—differences which lead to
variations in the increase of value, in a given period of
time, as between different spheres.
2. Differences in the relative value of the parts
of different capitals which do not arise from their organic
composition. These arise from the difference of value
particularly of the raw materials, even assuming that the
raw materials absorb an equal quantity of labour in two
different spheres.
3. The result of those differences is diversity of
the rates of profit in different spheres of capitalist
production. It is true only for capitals of equal
composition, etc., that the rate of profit is the same and
the quantity of profit is in proportion to the size of the
capital employed.
4. For the total capital, however, what has been
explained in Chapter I holds good. In capitalist
production each capital is assumed to be a unit, an aliquot
part of the total capital. Formation of the
general rate of profit (competition).
5. Transformation of values into prices of
production. Difference between value, cost-price, and
production price.
6. To take up also the Ricardian point: the
influence of general variations in wages on the general rate
of profit and hence on prices of production. |XVIII-1109||
* In the manuscript:
“are”.—Ed.
* In the
manuscript: “Am besten sie zum Bauen van Strassen,
Brücken, Bergwerken etc. zu
verwenden.”—Ed.
* In the manuscript:
“than upon” instead of “then about
the”.—Ed.
* In the manuscript:
“thither”.—Ed.
* In the manuscript:
“puts”.—Ed.
* In the manuscript:
“which might men”.—Ed.
** In the
manuscript: “which”.—Ed.
* In the manuscript:
“and”.—Ed.
* In the manuscript:
“deal”.—Ed.
** In the
manuscript this is followed by the word:
“very”.—Ed.
*** In the
manuscript this is followed by the word:
“very”.—Ed.
* In the
manuscript: “viz”.—Ed.
** In the
manuscript: “to the farther increase of commerce
“.—Ed.
*** In the
manuscript this is followed by the word:
“true”.—Ed.
**** In the
manuscript: “to be”.—Ed.
***** In the
manuscript: “2,000£”.—Ed.
* In the
manuscript: “got”.—Ed.
** In the
manuscript: “by a decrease of foreign
trade”.—Ed.
*** In the
manuscript: “Commerce”.—Ed.
* In the
manuscript: “…am grössten, interest am
höchsten”.—Ed.
** In the
manuscript: “motives”.—Ed.
*** In the
manuscript: “the”.—Ed.
* Commodity
exchange.—Ed.
* In the
manuscript: “this”.—Ed
* In the
manuscript: “the”.—Ed.
** In the
manuscript: “sellers not
enriched”.—Ed.
* In the
manuscript: “destroyed”.—Ed.
* In
essence.—Ed.
* In the
manuscript: “to”.—Ed.
* “In small
enterprises […] the employer is often his
own labourer” (Storch, [Cours
d’économie politique], t. I, Petersburg edition,
p. 242).