Theories of Surplus Value, Marx 1861-3
[Chapter II] The Physiocrats
[1. Transfer of the Inquiry into the Origin of
Surplus-Value from the Sphere of Circulation into the Sphere
of Direct Production. Conception of Rent as the Sole
Form of Surplus-Value]
The analysis of capital, within the bourgeois
horizon, is essentially the work of the Physiocrats.
It is this service that makes them the true fathers of
modern political economy. In the first place, the
analysis of the various material components in which
capital exists and into which it resolves itself in the
course of the labour-process. It is not a reproach to
the Physiocrats that, like all their successors, they
thought of these material forms of existence — such as
tools, raw materials, etc. — as capital, in isolation
from the social conditions in which they appear in
capitalist production; in a word, in the form in which they
are elements of the labour-process in general, independently
of its social form — and thereby made of the
capitalist form of production an eternal, natural form of
production. For them the bourgeois forms of production
necessarily appeared as natural forms. It was their
great merit that they conceived these forms as physiological
forms of society: as forms arising from the natural
necessity of production itself, forms that are independent
of anyone’s will or of politics, etc. They are
material laws, the error is only that the material law of a
definite historical social stage is conceived as an abstract
law governing equally all forms of society.
In addition to this analysis of the material elements of
which capital consists within the labour-process, the
Physiocrats established the forms which capital assumes in
circulation (fixed capital, circulating capital, even though
as yet they give them other names), and in general the
connection between the process of circulation and the
reproduction process of capital. We shall come back to
this in the chapter on circulation.
In these two principal points Adam Smith inherited the
legacy of the Physiocrats. His service — in this
connection — is limited to fixing the
abstract categories, to the greater consistency of the
baptismal names which he gave to the distinctions made by
the Physiocrats in their analysis.
||223| As we have seen, the
basis for the development of capitalist production is, in
general, that labour-power, as the commodity
belonging to the workers, confronts the conditions of
labour as commodities maintained in the form of capital and
existing independently of the workers. The
determination of the value of labour-power, as a
commodity, is of vital importance. This value is
equal to the labour-time required to produce the means of
subsistence necessary for the reproduction of labour-power,
or to the price of the means of subsistence necessary for
the existence of the worker as a worker. It is only
on this basis that the difference arises between the
value of labour-power and the value which
that labour-power creates — a difference
which exists with no other commodity, since there is no
other commodity whose use-value, and therefore also the use
of it, can increase its exchange-value or the
exchange-values resulting from it.
Therefore the foundation of modern political economy,
whose business is the analysis of capitalist production, is
the conception of the value of labour-power as
something fixed, as a given magnitude — as indeed it
is in practice in each particular case. The minimum
of wages therefore correctly forms the pivotal point of
Physiocratic theory. They were able to establish this
although they had not yet recognised the nature of value
itself, because this value of labour-power is
manifested in the price of the necessary means of
subsistence, hence in a sum of definite use-values.
Consequently, without being in any way clear as to the
nature of value, they could conceive the value of
labour-power, so far as it was necessary to their inquiry,
as a definite magnitude. If moreover they made the
mistake of conceiving this minimum as an unchangeable
magnitude — which in their view is determined entirely
by nature and not by the stage of historical development,
which is itself a magnitude subject to fluctuations —
this in no way affects the abstract correctness of their
conclusions, since the difference between the value of
labour-power and the value it creates does not at all depend
on whether the value is assumed to be great or small.
The Physiocrats transferred the inquiry into the origin
of surplus-value from the sphere of circulation into the
sphere of direct production, and thereby laid the foundation
for the analysis of capitalist production.
Quite correctly they lay down the fundamental
principle that only that labour is productive which
creates a surplus-value, in whose product therefore a
higher value is contained than the sum of the values
consumed during the production of this product. Since
the value of raw and other materials is given, while the
value of the labour-power is equal to the minimum of wages,
this surplus-value can clearly only consist in the excess of
labour which the labourer returns to the capitalist over and
above the quantity of labour that he receives in his
wage. But it does not appear in this form with the
Physiocrats, because they have not yet reduced value in
general to its simple substance — the quantity of
labour or labour-time.
||224| Their method of
exposition is, of course, necessarily governed by their
general view of the nature of value, which to them is not a
definite social mode of existence of human activity
(labour), but consists of material things — land,
nature, and the various modifications of these material
things.
The difference between the value of labour-power
and the value created by it — that is, the
surplus-value which the purchase of labour-power secures
for the user of labour-power — appears most palpably,
most incontrovertibly, of all branches of
production, in agriculture, the primary branch
of production. The sum total of the means of
subsistence which the labourer consumes from one year to
another, or the mass of material substance which he
consumes, is smaller than the sum total of the means of
subsistence which he produces. In manufacture the
workman is not generally seen directly
producing either his means of subsistence or the surplus in
excess of his means of subsistence. The process is
mediated through purchase and sale, through the various
acts of circulation, and the analysis of value in general
is necessary for it to be understood. In agriculture
it shows itself directly in the surplus of use-values
produced over use-values consumed by the labourer, and can
therefore be grasped without an analysis of value in
general, without a clear understanding of the nature of
value. Therefore also when value is reduced to
use-value, and the latter to material substance in
general. Hence for the Physiocrats agricultural
labour is the only productive labour, because it is
the only labour that produces a surplus-value, and
rent is the only form of surplus-value which
they know. The workman in industry does not increase
the material substance; he only alters its form. The
material — the mass of material substance — is
given to him by agriculture. It is true
that he adds value to the substance, not through his
labour, but through the costs of production of his labour:
through the total means of subsistence which he consumes
during his labour, equivalent to the minimum of wages,
which he receives from agriculture. Because
agricultural labour is conceived as the only productive
labour, the form of surplus-value which distinguishes
agricultural labour from industrial labour, rent, is
conceived as the only form of surplus-value.
Profit on capital in the true sense, of which rent
itself is only an offshoot, therefore does not exist for the
Physiocrats. Profit is seen by them as only a kind of
higher wages paid by the landowners, which the capitalists
consume as revenue (and which therefore enters into their
costs of production in the same way as the minimum wages of
the ordinary workmen); this increases the value of the raw
material, because it enters into the consumption costs which
the capitalist, [the] industrialist, consumes while he is
producing the product, transforming the raw material into a
new product.
Surplus-value in the form of interest on money
— another branch of profit — is consequently
declared by one section of the Physiocrats, such as
Mirabeau the elder, to be usury and contrary to
nature. Turgot on the other hand derives his
justification of it from the fact that the money capitalist
could buy land, that is, rent, and that therefore his money
capital must bring him in as much surplus-value as he would
receive if he converted it into landed property. This
means therefore that interest too is not newly created
value, not surplus-value; it only explains why a part of
the surplus-value gained by the landowners finds its way to
the money capitalists in the form of interest, just as it
is explained on other grounds ||225| why a part of this
surplus-value finds its way to the industrial capitalist in
the form of profit. Because agricultural
labour is the only productive labour, the only labour
that creates surplus-value, the form of
surplus-value which distinguishes agricultural labour
from all other branches of labour, rent, is the
general form of surplus-value. Industrial
profit and interest are merely different categories into
which rent is divided and, in certain portions, passes from
the hands of the landowners into the hands of other
classes. This is the direct opposite to the view held
by later economists beginning with Adam Smith, because they
rightly consider industrial profit to be the
form in which surplus-value is originally
appropriated by capital, hence as the original general form
of surplus-value — they present interest
and rent as mere offshoots of industrial profit, which is
distributed by the industrial capitalists to various
classes, who are co-owners of surplus-value.
In addition to the reason already stated — that
agricultural labour is the labour in which the creation of
surplus-value appears in material and tangible form, and
apart from the process of circulation — there were a
number of other considerations which explain the standpoint
of the Physiocrats.
First, because in agriculture rent appears as a
third element, as a form of surplus-value which is not found
in industry or merely has a transient existence. It
was surplus-value over and above surplus-value (profit), and
so the most palpable and most conspicuous form of
surplus-value, surplus-value raised to the second power.
“By means of agriculture,” as
Karl Arnd, the home-bred economist, says in Die
naturgemässe Volkswirtschaft, etc. (Hanau,
1845, pp. 461-62), “a value is created — in the
rent of land — which is not to be met with in industry
and trade; a value which remains over when the labour and
capital employed have been completely replaced.”
Secondly: leaving foreign trade out of account
— as the Physiocrats rightly did and had to do in an
abstract study of bourgeois society — it is clear that
the number of workmen engaged in manufacture, etc., and
completely detached from agriculture — the “free
hands”, as Steuart calls them — is determined by
the mass of agricultural products which the farm labourers
produce in excess of their own consumption.
“It is obvious, that the relative
numbers of those persons who can be maintained without
agricultural labour, must he measured wholly by the
productive powers of the cultivators” (Richard Jones,
On the Distribution of Wealth, London, 1831,
pp. 159-60).
As agricultural labour thus forms the natural basis (on
this, see an earlier notebook) not only for surplus-labour
in its own sphere, but also for the independent existence of
all other branches of labour, and therefore also for the
surplus-value created in them, it is clear that it was bound
to be considered the creator of surplus-value, so long as
the substance of value was regarded as definite, concrete
labour, and not abstract labour with its measure,
labour-time.
||226|
Thirdly. All surplus-value, not only relative
but absolute, depends on a given productivity of
labour. If the productivity of labour had reached
only such a stage of development that a man’s labour-time
no more than sufficed to keep him alive, to
produce and reproduce his own means of subsistence, then
there would be no surplus-labour and no surplus-value, and
there would be no difference at all between the value of
labour-power and the value which it creates. The
possibility of surplus-labour and of surplus-value
therefore arises from a given productivity of labour, a
productivity which enables labour-power to create more than
its own value, to produce more than the needs dictated by
its life process. And indeed this productivity, this
level of productivity which is presupposed as the
starting-point, must first — as we saw in the
second point above — make its appearance in
agricultural labour. It appears therefore as a
gift of nature, a productive power of nature.
Here, in agriculture, from the very beginning there is a
large measure of co-operation of the forces of nature
— the increase of human labour-power through the use
and exploitation of the forces of nature working
automatically. This utilisation of the forces of
nature on a large scale appears in manufacture only with
the development of large-scale industry. A definite
stage in the development of agriculture, whether in the
country concerned or in other countries, forms the basis
for the development of capital. Up to this point
absolute surplus-value coincides with relative.
(Buchanan — a great adversary of the
Physiocrats — makes this point even against Adam
Smith, when he tries to show that agricultural development
preceded the emergence of modern town industry).
Fourthly. Since it is the great and specific
contribution of the Physiocrats that they derive value and
surplus-value not from circulation but from production, they
necessarily begin, in contrast to the Monetary and
Mercantile system, with that branch of production which can
be thought of in complete separation from and independently
of circulation, of exchange; and which presupposes exchange
not between man and man but only between man and nature.
[2. Contradictions in the System of the
Physiocrats: the Feudal Shell of the System and Its
Bourgeois Essence; the Twofold Treatment of
Surplus-Value]
Hence the contradictions in the Physiocratic system.
It is in fact the first system which analyses capitalist
production, and presents the conditions within which
capital is produced, and within which capital produces, as
eternal natural laws of production. On the other
hand, it has rather the character of a bourgeois
reproduction of the feudal system, of the dominion of
landed property; and the industrial spheres within which
capital first develops independently are presented as
“unproductive” branches of labour, mere
appendages of agriculture. The first condition for
the development of capital is the separation of landed
property from labour — the emergence of land, the
primary condition of labour, as an independent force, a
force in the hands of a separate class, confronting the
free labourer. The Physiocrats therefore present the
landowner as the true capitalist, that is, the appropriator
of surplus-labour. Feudalism is thus portrayed and
explained from the viewpoint of bourgeois production;
agriculture is treated as the branch of production in which
capitalist production — that is, the production of
surplus-value — exclusively appears. While
feudalism is thus made bourgeois, bourgeois society is
given a feudal semblance.
This semblance deceived Dr. Quesnay’s adherents among
the nobility, such as the crotchety and patriarchal
Mirabeau the elder. Among the later
representatives ||227| of the
Physiocrats, especially Turgot, this illusion
disappears completely, and the Physiocratic system is
presented as the new capitalist society prevailing within
the framework of feudal society. This therefore
corresponds to bourgeois society in the epoch when the
latter breaks its way out of the feudal order.
Consequently, the starting-point is in France, in a
predominantly agricultural country, and not in England, a
predominantly industrial, commercial and seafaring
country. In the latter country attention was
naturally concentrated on circulation, on the fact that the
product acquires value, becomes a commodity only when it
becomes the expression of general social labour,
money. In so far, therefore, as the question
concerned not the form of value, but the amount of value
and the increase of value, profit upon expropriation
— that is, relative profit as Steuart describes it
— is what catches the eye. But if the creation
of surplus-value in the sphere of production itself is what
has to be established, it is necessary first of all to go
back to that branch of production in which surplus-value is
found independently of circulation — that is,
agriculture. The initiative was therefore taken in a
predominantly agricultural country. Ideas related to
those of the Physiocrats are to be found in fragmentary
form in older writers who preceded them, partly in France
herself, for example, Boisguillebert. But it is only
with the Physiocrats that those ideas develop into an
epoch-making system.
The agricultural labourer, depending on the minimum of
wages, the strict nécessaire,[1]
reproduces more than this strict nécessaire,
and this more is rent, surplus-value, which is
appropriated by the owners of the fundamental condition of
labour — nature. So what they say is not: the
labourer works more than the labour-time required for the
reproduction of his labour-power; the value which he
creates is therefore greater than the value of his
labour-power; or the labour which he gives in return is
greater than the quantity of labour which he receives in
the form of wages. But what they say is: the amount
of use-values which he consumes during the period of
production is smaller than the amount of use-values which
he creates, and so a surplus of use-values is left
over. Were he to work only for the time required to
reproduce his own labour-power, there would be nothing
over. But the Physiocrats only stuck to the point
that the productivity of the earth enables the labourer, in
his day’s labour, which is assumed to be a fixed quantity,
to produce more than he needs to consume in order to
continue to exist. The surplus-value appears
therefore as a gift of nature, through whose
co-operation a definite quantity of organic matter —
plant seeds, a number of animals — enables labour to
transform more inorganic matter into organic.
On the other hand, it is taken for granted that the
landowner confronts the labourer as a capitalist. He
pays for the labour-power, which the labourer offers to him
as a commodity, and he receives in return not only an
equivalent, but appropriates for himself the enlarged value
arising from the use of this labour-power. The
alienation of the material condition of labour from
labour-power itself is presupposed in this exchange.
The starting-point is the feudal landowner, but he comes on
to the stage as a capitalist, as a mere owner of
commodities, who makes profitable use of the goods
exchanged by him for labour, and gets back not only their
equivalent, but a surplus over this equivalent, because he
pays for the labour-power only as a commodity. He
confronts the free labourer as an owner of
commodities. In other words, this landowner is in
essence a capitalist. In this respect too the
Physiocratic system hits the mark, inasmuch as the
separation of the labourer from the soil and from the
ownership of land is a fundamental condition ||228| for capitalist production and
the production of capital.
Hence the contradictions in this system: it was the
first to explain surplus-value by the appropriation
of the labour of others, and in fact to explain
this appropriation on the basis of the exchange of
commodities; but it did not see that value in general is a
form of social labour and that surplus-value is
surplus-labour. On the contrary, it conceived value
merely as use-value, merely as material substance, and
surplus-value as a mere gift of nature, which returns to
labour, in place of a given quantity of organic material, a
greater quantity. On the one hand, it stripped rent
— that is, the true economic form of landed property
— of its feudal wrapping, and reduced it to mere
surplus-value in excess of the labourer’s wage. On
the other hand, this surplus-value is explained again in a
feudal way, as derived from nature and not from society;
from man’s relation to the soil, not from his social
relations. Value itself is resolved into mere
use-value, and therefore into material substance. But
again what interests [the Physiocrats] in this material
substance is its quantity — the excess of the
use-values produced over those consumed; that is, the
purely quantitative relation of the use-values to each
other, their mere exchange-value, which in the last resort
comes down to labour-time.
All these are contradictions of capitalist production as
it works its way out of feudal society, and interprets
feudal society itself only in a bourgeois way, but has not
yet discovered its own peculiar form — somewhat as
philosophy first builds itself up within the religious form
of consciousness, and in so doing on the one hand destroys
religion as such, while on the other hand, in its positive
content, it still moves only within this religious sphere,
idealised and reduced to terms of thought.
Hence also, in the conclusions which the Physiocrats
themselves draw, the ostensible veneration of landed
property becomes transformed into the economic negation of
it and the affirmation of capitalist production. On
the one hand, all taxes are put on rent, or in other words,
landed property is in part confiscated, which is what the
legislation of the French Revolution sought to carry
through and which is the final conclusion of the fully
developed Ricardian modern political economy. By
placing the burden of tax entirely on rent, because it
alone is surplus-value — and consequently any
taxation of other forms of income ultimately falls on
landed property, but in a roundabout way, and therefore in
an economically harmful way, that hinders production
— taxation and along with it all forms of State
intervention, are removed from industry itself, and the
latter is thus freed from all intervention by the
State. This is ostensibly done for the benefit of
landed property, not in the interests of industry but in
the interests of landed property.
Connected with this is laissez faire, laissez
aller[2]; unhampered free competition, the
removal from industry of all interference by the State,
monopolies, etc. Since industry [as the Physiocrats
see it] creates nothing, but only transforms values given
it by agriculture into another form; since it adds no new
value to them, but returns the values supplied to it,
though in altered form, as an equivalent; it is naturally
desirable that this process of transformation should
proceed without interruptions and in the cheapest way; and
this is only realised through free competition, by leaving
capitalist production to its own devices. The
emancipation of bourgeois society from the absolute
monarchy set up on the ruins of feudal society thus takes
place only in the interests of the feudal landowner
transformed into a capitalist ||229| and bent solely on
enrichment. The capitalists are only capitalists in
the interests of the landowner, just as political economy
in its later development would have them be capitalists
only in the interests of the working class.
It can be seen therefore how little the modern
economists, [such as] Herr Eugéne Daire (who published
the works of the Physiocrats together with his prize essay
on them), have understood the Physiocrats when they treat
their specific theories — of the exclusive
productivity of agricultural labour, of rent as the only
surplus-value, and of the landowners’ pre-eminent status in
the system of production — as if they had no
connection and were only fortuitously associated with their
proclamation of free competition, the principle of
large-scale industry, of capitalist production. At
the same time it is understandable how the feudal semblance
of this system, in the same way as the aristocratic tone of
the Enlightenment, was bound to win a number of feudal
lords as enthusiastic supporters and propagandists of a
system which, in its essence, proclaimed the rise of the
bourgeois system of production on the ruins of the
feudal.
[3. Quesnay on the Three Classes in
Society. Further Development of Physiocratic Theory
with Turgot: Elements of a Deeper Analysis of Capitalist
Relations]
We will now examine a number of passages,
partly to elucidate and partly in support of the theses
advanced above.
With Quesnay himself, in the Analyse du
Tableau économique the nation consists of three
classes of citizens:
“the productive
class” (agricultural labourers), “the
class of landowners and the sterile class”
(“all the citizens occupied with other services and
with other labours than those of agriculture”)
(Physiocrates, etc., édition Eugéne Daire,
Paris, 1846, 1 partie, p. 58).
Only the agricultural labourers, not the landowners,
appear as a productive class, as a class which creates
surplus-value. The importance of this class of
landowners, which is not “sterile”, because it
is the representative of “surplus-value”, does
not rest on its being the creator of surplus-value, but
exclusively on the fact that it appropriates
surplus-value.
[With] Turgot [the Physiocratic system is] most
fully developed. In some passages in his writings the
pure gift of nature is presented as surplus-labour,
and on the other hand the necessity for the labourer to
yield up what there is in excess of his necessary wage [is
explained] by the separation of the labourer from the
conditions of labour, and their confronting him as the
property of a class which uses them to trade with.
The first reason why agricultural labour alone is
productive is that it is the natural basis and
pre-condition for the independent pursuit of all other
forms of labour.
“His” (the husbandman’s)
“labour, in the sequence of the labours divided among
the different members of the society, retains the same
primacy … as the labour which provided his own food
had among the different kinds of labour which, when he
worked alone, he was obliged to devote to his different
kinds of wants. We have here neither a primacy of
honour nor of dignity; it is one of physical
necessity … What his labour causes the
land to produce beyond his personal wants is the only fund
for the wages which all the other members of the society
receive in exchange for their labour. The latter, in
making use of the price of this exchange to buy in their
turn the products of the husbandman, only return to
him” (as matter) “exactly what they have
received from him. We have here a very essential
difference ||230| between
these two kinds of labour” (Réflexions sur la
formation et la distribution des richesses
(1766). Turgot, Oeuvres, édition Daire,
t. I, Paris, 1844, pp. 9-10).
How then does surplus-value arise? It does not
arise from circulation, but it is realised in
circulation. The product is sold at its value, not
above its value. There is no excess of price
over value. But because it is sold at its value, the
seller realises a surplus-value. This is only
possible because he has not himself paid in full for the
value which he sells, that is, because the product contains
a portion of value which has not been paid for by the
seller, which he has not offset by an equivalent. And
this is the case with agricultural labour. The seller
sells what he has not bought. Turgot at first
presents this unbought element as a pure gift of
nature. We shall see, however, that in his
writings this pure gift of nature becomes imperceptibly
transformed into the surplus-labour of the labourer which
the landowner has not bought, but which he sells in the
products of agriculture.
“As soon as the labour of the
husbandman produces more than his wants, he can with
this superfluity that nature accords him as a pure
gift over and above the wages of his toil, buy the
labour of the other members of the society. The
latter, in selling it to him gain only their livelihood;
but the husbandman gathers, beyond his subsistence, a
wealth which is independent and disposable, which he has
not bought and which he sells. He is, therefore,
the sole source of the riches, which, by their circulation,
animate all the labours of the society, because he is
the only one whose labour produces over and above the wages
of labour” (l.c., p. 11).
In this first conception we have, to begin with, the
essence of surplus-value — that it is value realised
in sale, without the seller having given an equivalent for
it, without his having bought it. Unpaid
value. But in the second place this is conceived
as a pure gift of nature, this excess over the wage of
labour; because after all it is a gift of nature, it
depends on the productivity of nature that the labourer is
able to produce in his day’s labour more than is necessary
for the reproduction of his labour-power, more than the
amount of his wages. In this first conception the
total product is still appropriated by the labourer
himself … And this total product is divided into
two parts. The first forms his wages; he is presented
as his own wage-labourer, who pays himself the part of the
product that is necessary for the reproduction of his
labour-power, for his subsistence. The second part,
which is the excess over the first, is a gift of
nature and forms surplus-value. The nature of this
surplus-value, of this pure gift of nature, will however
take clearer shape, when the premise of the proprietor who
cultivates his land is abandoned and the two parts of the
product, wages and surplus-value, accrue to different
classes, the one to the wage-worker, the other to the
landowner.
The formation of a class of wage-labourers, whether in
manufacture or in agriculture itself — at
first all manufacturiers[3] appear only as
stipendiés,[4] wage-labourers of the cultivating
proprietor — requires the separation of the conditions
of labour from labour-power, and the basis for this
separation is that the land itself becomes the private
property of one part of society, so that the other part is
cut off from this objective condition for making use of its
labour.
“In the early stages there was no
need to distinguish the proprietor from the cultivator
… In this early time, as every industrious man
would find as much land as he ||231| wished, he could not be
tempted to work for others … But in the
end all land found its master, and those who could not have
properties had at first no other resource than that of
exchanging the labour of their arms, in the
employment of tbe stipendiary class” (i.e., the
class of artisans, of all non-agricultural labourers)
“for the superfluous portion of the produce of the
cultivating proprietor” (l.c., p. 12).
The cultivating proprietor with the
considerable surplus which the land gave to his labour,
could “pay men to cultivate his land; and for men who
live on wages, it was as good to earn them in this business
as in any other. Thus ownership of land had to be
separated from the labour of cultivation, and soon it
was … The landowners began to shift the
labour of cultivating the soil on to the
wage-labourers” (l.c., p. 13).
In this, way, therefore, the relation between capital and
wage-labour arises in agriculture itself. It first
arises when a number of people find themselves cut off from
ownership of the conditions of labour — above all from
the land — and have nothing to sell but their labour
itself.
For the wage-labourer, however, who can no longer produce
commodities, but must sell his labour itself, the
minimum of wages, the equivalent of the necessary
means of subsistence, necessarily becomes the law which
governs his exchange with the owner of the conditions of
labour.
“The mere workman who has only his
arms and his industry, has nothing unless he succeeds in
selling his labour to others … In every kind
of work it cannot fail to happen, and as a matter of fact it
does happen, that the wages of the workman are limited to
what is necessary to procure him his subsistence”
(l.c., p. 10).
Then as soon as wage-labour has arisen, “the
produce of land is divided into two parts: the one includes
the subsistence and the profits of the husbandman, which are
the reward of his labour and the condition upon which be
undertakes to cultivate the field of the proprietor.
What remains is that independent and disposable part which
the land gives as pure gifts to him who cultivates
it, over and above his advances and the wages of his
trouble; and this is the portion of the proprietor, or the
revenue with which the latter can live without labour and
which he uses as he will” (l.c., p. 14).
This pure gift of the land, however, is now
already defined as a gift which it gives to him “who
cultivates it”, and thus as a gift which it makes to
labour; as the productive power of labour applied to the
land, a productive power which labour possesses through
using the productive power of nature and which it thus
derives from the land — but it derives it from the
land only as labour. In the hands of the landowner,
therefore, the surplus appears no longer as a “gift of
nature”, but as the appropriation — without an
equivalent — of another’s labour, which through the
productivity of nature is enabled to produce means of
subsistence in excess of its own needs, but which, because
it is wage-labour, is restricted to appropriating for
itself, out of the product of the labour, only “what
is necessary to procure him” [i. e., the worker]
“his subsistence”.
“The cultivator produces
his own wages, and, in addition, the revenue which
serves to pay the who]e class of artisans and other
stipendiaries… The proprietor has nothing
except through the labour of the cultivator”
(therefore not through a pure gift of nature); “he
receives from him his ||232|
subsistence and that wherewith he pays the labours of other
stipendiarlies … the cultivator has need of the
proprietor only by virtue of conventions and laws
…” (l.c., p. 15).
Thus in this passage surplus-value is explicitly stated
to be the part of the cultivator’s labour which the
proprietor appropriates to himself without giving any
equivalent, and he sells the product of his labour,
therefore, without having bought it. Only what Turgot
has in mind is not exchange-value as such, the labour-time
itself, but the surplus of products which the cultivator’s
labour supplies to the proprietor over and above his own
wages; which surplus of products, however, is only the
embodiment of the amount of time which he works gratis for
the proprietor in addition to the time which he works for
the reproduction of his wages.
We see thus how, within the limits of agricultural
labour, the Physiocrats have a correct grasp of
surplus-value; they see it as a product of the
wage-labourer’s labour, although they in turn conceive this
labour in the concrete forms in which it appears in
use-values.
The capitalist exploitation of agriculture —
“leasing or letting of land” — is, it may
be noted in passing, described by Turgot as “the most
advantageous method of all, but it presupposes a land that
is already rich” (l.c., p. 21).
<In considering surplus-value it is necessary to turn
from the sphere of circulation to the sphere of
production. That is to say, to deduce
surplus-value not simply from the exchange of commodity for
commodity, but from exchange as it occurs within production,
between the owners of the conditions of labour and the
labourers themselves. These too confront each other as
owners of commodities, and consequently there is no
assumption here of production independent of
exchange.>
<In the Physiocratic system the proprietors
[landowners] are the salariants,[5] labourers and
manufacturers in all other branches of industry being
wage-labourers or stipendiaries. Consequently also the
governing and the governed.>
Turgot analyses the conditions of labour as follows:
“In every craft, it is necessary that
the workman should have tools in advance, that he should
have a sufficient quantity of the materials upon which he
has to labour; it is necessary that he should subsist while
waiting for the sale of his finished goods” (l.c.,
p. 34).
All these advances, these conditions on which alone
labour can be performed, which are therefore
preconditions of the labour-process, are originally
provided gratis by the land:
It is the land which “has provided
the first fund of advances prior to all cultivation”,
in fruits, fish, game, etc., in tools such as tree branches,
stones, in domestic animals, which multiply through the
process of procreation, and moreover each year yield
products in “milk, fleeces, hides and other materials,
which, with the wood obtained in the forests, have formed
the first fund for the works of industry” (l.c.,
p. 34).
Now these conditions of labour, these advances to labour
become capital as soon as they have to be advanced to
the labourer by a third person, and this is the case from
the moment when the labourer owns nothing but his
labour-power itself.
“When a large part of the
society had only their arms to maintain them, it was
necessary that those who thus lived on wages should begin by
having something in advance, either to procure the
materials upon which to labour or to maintain them while
waiting for the payment of their wages” (l.c.,
pp. 37-38).
||233| Turgot defines
“capitals” as “accumulated movable
values” (l.c., p. 38). Originally the proprietor
or cultivator pays wages directly each day and supplies the
material, for example, to the spinner of flax. As
industry develops, larger advances and continuity of the
process of production are necessary. This is then
undertaken by the possessor of capital. In the price
of his products he must recover all his advances and
a profit equal to
“what his money would have been worth
to him if he had employed it in the purchase of an
estate”, besides his wages, “for doubtless, if
the profit. were the same, he would have preferred to live
without any exertion on the revenue of the land he could
have acquired with the same capital” (l.c.,
pp. 38-39).
The “stipendiary industrial class” is itself
subdivided “into capitalists, entrepreneurs and simple
workers”, etc. (p. 39). Agricultural
entrepreneurs are in the same position as these [industrial]
entrepreneurs. They must similarly get all their
advances replaced, along with the profit as shown above.
“All this must first be deducted from
the price of the products of the earth; the surplus
serves the cultivator for payment the proprietor for the
permission he has given him to make use of his field for
setting his enterprise on foot. This is the price of
the lease, the revenue of the proprietor, the net
produce; for all the land produces, up to the amount
that replaces the advances of every kind and the profits of
the person who has made the advances, cannot be regarded as
a revenue, but only as the return of the expenses of
cultivation; when one considers that, if the cultivator
did not get them back, he would take care not to employ his
resources and his toil in cultivating the field of
another” (l.c., p. 40).
Finally:
“Although capitals are partly formed
by saving from the profits of the working classes, yet, as
these profits always come from the earth — inasmuch as
they are all paid either from the revenue, or as part of the
expenditure which serves to produce the revenue — it
is evident the capitals come from the land just as much as
the revenue does; or, rather, that they are nothing but the
accumulation of the part of the values produced by the land
that the proprietors of the revenue, or those who share it
with them, can lay by every year without using it, for the
satisfaction of their wants” (l.c., p. 66).
It is quite right, that if rent is the only
surplus-value, accumulation takes place only from
rent. What the capitalists accumulate apart from rent,
they pinch from their wages (their revenue, destined for
their consumption — since this is how profit is
defined).
As profit, like wages, is reckoned in with the costs of
cultivation, and only the surplus forms the revenue of the
proprietor, the latter — in spite of the honourable
status given him — is in fact excluded from the costs
of cultivation (and thereby from being an agent of
production), just as with the Ricardians.
The emergence of the Physiocrats was connected both with
the opposition to Colbertism and, in particular, with the
hullabaloo over the John Law system.
[4. Confusion of Value with Material Substance
(Paoletti)]
||234| The confusion of
value with material substance, or rather the equating of
value with it, and the connection between this view and the
whole outlook of the Physiocrats, comes clearly to light in
the following extracts from Ferdinando Paoletti: I veri
mezzi di render felici le societá (in part directed
against Verri, who in his Meditazioni sulla Economia
politica (1771), had attacked the Physiocrats).
(Paoletti of Toscana, op. cit., t. XX, [published by]
Custodi, Parte moderna.)
“Such a multiplication of
matter” as are the products of the earth
“has certainly never taken place through industry, nor
is it possible. This gives matter only form, it only
modifies it; consequently nothing is created by
industry. But, the objection may be raised, industry
gives matter form, and consequently it is productive; even
if this is not a production of matter, it is nevertheless
one of form. Very well, then, I won’t contest
this. But that is not creation of wealth; on the
contrary, it is nothing but an expense …
Political economy presupposes, and takes as the object of
its investigation, material and real production, which is
found only in agriculture, since this alone multiplies the
substances and products which form wealth …
Industry buys raw materials from agriculture, in order to
work them up; its labour — as we have already said
— gives these raw materials only a form, but it adds
nothing to them and does not multiply them”
(pp. 196-97). “Give the cook a measure of peas, with
which he is to prepare your dinner; he will put them on the
table for you well cooked and well dished up, but in the
same quantity as he was given, but on the other band give
the same quantity to the gardener for him to put into the
ground; he will return to you, when the right time has come,
at least fourfold the quantity that he had been given.
This is the true and only production” (p. 197).
“Things receive value through the needs of men.
Therefore the value or the increase of value of commodities
is not the result of industrial labour, but of the
labourers’ outlays” (p. 198). “Hardly has
a new manufacture of any kind made its appearance, but it
immediately spreads within and outside the country; and see!
very soon competition from other industrialists and
merchants brings the price down to its correct level, which
… is determined by the value of the raw material and
the costs of the labourers’ maintenance”
(pp. 204-05).
[5. Elements of Physiocratic Theory in Adam
Smith]
Agriculture is the first of all branches of industry to
use the forces of nature on a considerable scale.
Their use in manufacturing industry becomes apparent only at
a higher stage of industrial development. The
following quotation shows how, in this connection, Adam
Smith still reflects the prehistory of large-scale industry
and for this reason upholds the Physiocratic point of view,
and how Ricardo answers him from the standpoint of modern
industry.
||235| In Book II, Ch. V [of
his An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth
of Nations], Adam Smith says with reference to the rent
of land:
“It is the work of nature which
remains after deducting or compensating every thing which
can be regarded as the work of man. It is seldom less
than a fourth, and frequently more than a third of the whole
produce. No equal quantity of productive labour
employed in manufactures can ever occasion so great a
reproduction. in them nature does nothing; man does
all; and the reproduction must always be in proportion
to the strength of the agents that occasion it” [Adam
Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the
Wealth of Nations … By I. R. McCulloch, Vol. II,
Edinburgh, 1828, p. 147.]
On which Ricardo comments [in his On the Principles of
Political Economy, and Taxation], 2nd edition, 1819,
note to pp. 61-62:
“Does nature nothing for man in
manufactures? Are the powers of wind and water, which
move our machinery, and assist navigation, nothing?
The pressure of the atmosphere and the elasticity of steam,
which enable us to work the most stupendous engines —
are they not the gifts of nature? to say nothing of the
effects of the matter of heat in softening and melting
metals, of the decomposition of the atmosphere in the
process of dyeing and fermentation. There is not a
manufacture which can he mentioned, in which nature does not
give her assistance to man, and give it too, generously and
gratuitously.”
[An anonymous author emphasises] that the Physiocrats
regarded profit as only a deduction from rent:
For instance, “say they,[6] of the
price of a piece of lace, one part merely replaces what the
labourer consumed, and the other part is only transferred
from one man’s pocket <i.e., that of the landlord>
to another’s” (An Inquiry into those Principles,
respecting the Nature of Demand and the Necessity of
Consumption, lately advocated by Mr. Malthus, etc.,
London, 1821, p. 96).
The view of Adam Smith and his followers that the
accumulation of capital is due to personal stinting and
saving and self-denial of the capitalists also originates
from the view of the Physiocrats that profit (including
interest) is merely revenue for the consumption of the
capitalists. They could say this because they only
regarded land rent as the true economic, so to speak
legitimate, source of accumulation.
“He,” says Turgot, i.e., the
husbandman, “is the only one whose labour produces
over and above the wages of labour” (Turgot,
l.c., p. 11).
Here the entire profit is thus reckoned in with the
wages of labour.
||236|
“The cultivator creates over and above that
restitution” (of his own wages) “the revenue of
the proprietor; and the artisan creates no revenue, either
for himself or for others” (l.c., p. 16).
“All the land produces up to the amount that replaces
the advances of every kind and the profits of the person who
has nade the advances, cannot be regarded as a
revenue, but only as the return of the expenses of
cultivation” (l.c., p. 40).
Adolphe Blanqui, Histoire de l’économie
politique, Brussels, 1839, says [of the Physiocrats] on
p. 139:
[They were of the opinion that]
“Labour applied to the cultivation of the soil
produced not only the wherewithal to maintain the labourer
throughout the entire duration of the task, but also on
excess of value” (surplus-value) “which
could he added to the mass of already existing wealth.
They called this excess the net product”.
(Thus they conceive surplus-value in the form of the
use-values in which it appears.) “The net
product had necessarily to belong to the owner of the land
and constituted in his hands a revenue fully at his
disposal. What then was the net product of the other
industries? … Manufacturers, merchants,
workmen, all were the employees, the stipendiaries of
agriculture, sovereign creator and dispenser of all
wealth. The products of the labour of these latter
represented in the system of the Economists only the
equivalent of what they had consumed during the task, so
that after their work was completed, the sum total of wealth
was absolutely the same as before, unless the workmen or
the masters had placed in reserve, that is to say s a
v e d, what they had the right to consume. Thus,
then, labour applied to the soil was the only labour
productive of wealth, and labour in other industries was
regarded as s t e r i l e, because no increase in
the general capital resulted from it.”
<Thus the Physiocrats saw the production of
surplus-value as the essence of capitalist production.
It was this phenomenon that they had to explain. And
it remained the problem, after they had eliminated the
profit upon alienation of the Mercantile system.
“In order to acquire money,”
says Mercier de la Riviére, “one must buy
it, and, after this purchase, one is no richer than one was
before; one has simply received in money the same value that
one has given in commodities” (Mercier de la
Riviére, L’Ordre naturel et essentiel des
sociétés politiques, t. II, p. 338).
This holds good both for ||237| purchase and for sale, as also
for the whole metamorphosis of the commodity, or for the
result of the exchange of different commodities at their
value, that is, the exchange of equivalents. Whence,
therefore, comes surplus-value? That is, whence comes
capital? That was the problem for the
Physiocrats. Their error was that they confused the
increase of material substance, which because of the
natural processes of vegetation and generation distinguishes
agriculture and stock-raising from manufacture, with the
increase of exchange-value. Use-value was their
starting-point. And the use-value of all commodities,
reduced, as the scholastics say, to a universal, was the
material substance of nature as such, whose increase in the
same form occurs only in agriculture.>
Germain Garnier, the translator of Adam Smith and himself
a Physiocrat, correctly expounds their theory of
savings, etc. First he says that manufacture, as
the Mercantilists maintained of all production, can
only produce surplus-value through the profit of
expropriation, by selling commodities above their value, so
that only a new distribution of values created takes place,
but no new addition to the created values.
“The labour of artisans and
manufacturers, opening no new source of wealth, can only
be profitable through advantageous exchanges, and has
only a purely relative value, a value which will not he
repeated if there is no longer the opportunity to gain on
the exchanges” (his translation Recherches sur
la nature et les causes de la richesse des nations,
t. V, Paris, 1802, p. 266). Or the savings
which they make, the values which they secure over and above
those which they expend, must be stinted from their own
consumption. “The labour of artisans and
manufacturers, though only able to add to the general amount
of the wealth of society the savings made by the
wage-labourers and the capitalists, may well tend by these
means to enrich society” (l.c., p. 266).
And in greater detail: “The labourers
in agriculture enrich the State by the very product of their
labour: labourers in manufactures and commerce, on the
contrary, cannot enrich it otherwise than through savings
on their own consumption. This assertion of the
Economists is a consequence of the distinction which they
have established, and appears to be quite
incontestable. indeed, the labour of artisans and
manufacturers cannot add anything else to the value of the
material than the value of their own labour, that is to say,
the value of the wages and profits which this labour should
have earned, at the rates actually current in the country
||238| for the one and the
other. For these wages, whether they be small or
large, are the reward of labour; they are what the labourer
has the right to consume and is presumed to consume; because
it is only in consuming them that he can enjoy the fruits of
his labour, and this enjoyment is all that in reality
constitutes his reward. Similarly profits, whether
they he high or low, are also regarded as the daily and
continuous consumption of the capitalist, who is naturally
presumed to proportion his enjoyments to the revenue that
his capital gives him. Thus unless the workman
curtails a part of the comforts to which he has the right in
accordance with the current rate of wages assigned to his
labour; unless the capitalist resigns himself to saving
a part of the revenue which his capital brings him, both the
one and the other will consume, in proportion as the piece
of work is completed, the whole value resulting from this
work. The total quantity of the wealth of society will
then be, after their labour is over, the same as it was
before, unless they have saved a part of
what they had the right to consume and what they could
consume without being charged with wasting; in which case
the total quantity of the wealth of society will have been
increased by the whole value of these savings.
Consequently it is correct to say that the agents of
manufacture and commerce can only add to the total
quantity of wealth existing in society by their privations
alone” (l.c., pp. 263-64).
Garnier is also quite correct in noting that Adam Smith’s
theory of accumulation through savings rests on this
Physiocratic foundation. (Adam Smith was strongly
infected by the Physiocrats, as he nowhere shows more
strikingly than in his critique of the Physiocrats).
Garnier says:
“Finally, if the Economists have
maintained that manufacturing and commercial industry can
only add to the national wealth by privations, Smith has
likewise said that industry would he practised in vain, and
the capital of a country would never grow larger, unless the
economy augmented it by its savings” (Book II, Ch.
3). “Smith is therefore in full agreement with
the Economists” and so on (l.c., p. 270).
[6. The Physiocrats as Partisans of Large-Scale
Capitalist Agriculture]
||239| Among the immediate
historical circumstances which facilitated the spread of
Physiocratic theory and even its emergence, Adolphe Blanqui,
in the work already mentioned, adduces:
“Of all the values which shot up in
the feverish atmosphere of the system” (Law’s),
“nothing remained except ruin, desolation and
bankruptcy. Landed property alone did not go
under in the storm.” <For this reason Herr
Proudhon, in Philosophie de la Misére, puts
landed property only after credit.> “It even
improved its position by changing hands and by being
subdivided on a large scale, perhaps for the first
time since feudalism” (l.c., p. 138). In
particular, “The innumerable changes of ownership
which were effected under the influence of the system, began
the process of parcelling out property … Landed
property arose for the first time from the condition of
torpor in which the feudal system had kept it for so
long. This was a real awakening for agriculture
… It” (the land) “passed now from
out of a condition of mortmain and came into
circulation” (l.c., pp. 137-38).
Turgot as well as Quesnay and his other adherents
also want capitalist production in agriculture.
Thus Turgot:
“The leasing or letting of land
… this latter method” (large-scale agriculture,
based on the modern system of leases) “is the most
advantageous of all, but it presupposes a country that is
already rich” (see Turgot, l.c., p. 21).
And Quesnay in his Maximes générales du
gouvernement économique d’un royaume agricole:
“The pieces of land which are
employed in growing grain should as far as possible he
joined together in large-scale farms which can be managed by
rich farmers” (i.e., capitalists) “since the
expenses for the maintenance and repair of the buildings are
smaller and therefore the costs are correspondingly much
lower and the net product much greater in the case of large
agricultural undertakings than in the case of
small.”
In the same passage Quesnay admits that the increased
productivity of agricultural labour accrues to the
“net revenue”, and therefore in the first place
to the landowner, i. e., the owner of surplus-value, and
that the relative increase of the latter arises not from the
land but from the social and other arrangements for raising
the productivity of labour. ||240| For he says in the same
place:
“Every advantageous” <i.e.,
advantageous to the net product> “economy in
labour which can he accomplished with the aid of animals,
machines, water-power and so on, will be of benefit to the
population,” etc.
At the same time Mercier de la Riviére (l.c., t. II,
p. 407) has an inkling that surplus-value at least in
manufacture has something to do with the manufacturing
workers themselves. (Turgot extended this to all
production, as already mentioned.) In the passage
cited he exclaims:
“Moderate your enthusiasm, ye blind
admirers of the false products of industry. Before ye
extol its miracles, open your eyes and see how many live in
poverty or at least, in need, among those producers who
understand the art of converting 20 sous into the value of a
thousand écus. Who then benefits by this
enormous increase in value? What do you say!
Comforts are unknown to those through whose hands it is
accomplished. Take warning then by this
contrast!”
[7. Contradictions in the Political Views of the
Physiocrats. The Physiocrats and the French
Revolution]
[There were] contradictions in the system of the
Economists, taken as a whole. Among others, Quesnay
was for the absolute monarchy.
“There must be only one supreme
power… The system of opposing forces in a
government is ruinous. It merely indicates discord
among the great and the suppression of the small
people” (in the above-mentioned Maximes
générales, etc.).
Mercier de la Riviére [says]:
By the very fact “that man is
intended to live in a community, he is intended to live
under a despotism” ([L’Ordre naturel et essentiel
des sociétés politiques], t. I, p. 281).
And to crown all the “Friend of the
People”, the Marquis de Mirabeau —
Mirabeau the Elder! It was precisely this school, with
its laissez faire, laissez aller, that overthrew
Colbertism and all forms of government interference in the
activities of bourgeois society. It allowed the State
to live on only in the pores of this society, as Epicurus
placed his gods in the pores of the world! The
glorification of landed property in practice turns into the
demand that taxes should be put exclusively on ground-rent,
[and this implies] the virtual confiscation of landed
property by the State, just as with the radical section of
the Ricardians. The French Revolution, in spite of the
protests of Roederer and others, accepted this taxation
theory.
Turgot himself [was] the radical bourgeois minister who
prepared the way for the French Revolution. For all
their sham feudal pretences the Physiocrats were working
hand in hand with the Encyclopaedists! 160; |240||
||241| Turgot sought to
anticipate the measures of the French Revolution. By
the edict of February 1776 he abolished the
guilds. (This edict was revoked three months after it
was promulgated.) Similarly he annulled the
road-making corvée des paysans[7] He tried
to introduce the single tax on rent of land.
||241| We shall come back
again later to the great service rendered by the Physiocrats
respecting the analysis of capital.
Meanwhile just this point: surplus-value (according to
them) is due to the productivity of a special kind of
labour, agricultural labour. And on the whole this
special productivity is due to nature itself.
In the Mercantile system, surplus-value is only relative
— what one wins, the other loses: profit upon
alienation or oscillation of wealth between different
parties. So that within a country, if we consider the
total capital, no creation of surplus-value in fact takes
place. It can only arise in the relations between one
nation and other nations. And the surplus realised by
one nation as against the other takes the form of money (the
balance of trade), because it is precisely money that is the
direct and independent form of exchange-value. In
opposition to this — for the Mercantile system in fact
denies the creation of absolute surplus-value — the
Physiocrats seek to explain absolute surplus-value: the
net product. And since the net product is fixed
in their minds as use-value, agriculture [is for them]
the sole creator of it.
[8. Vulgarisation of the Physiocratic Doctrine by
the Prussian Reactionary Schmalz]
One of the most naïve representatives of Physiocratic
theory — how far removed he is from Turgot! — is
the old smeller-out of demagogues and royal
Prussian Privy Councillor Schmalz. For instance:
“If nature pays him” (the
lessor of the land, the landowner) “even double the
legal interests, on what plausible ground could anyone
dare to deprive him of it?” (Économie
politique, traduit par Henri Jouffroy,
etc., t. I. Paris, 1826, p. 90.)
The minimum of wages is so formulated by the Physiocrats
that the consumption (or expenditure) of the labourers is
equal to the wage that they receive. Or as Herr
Schmalz puts it in a general way:
“The average wage in a trade is
equal to the average of what a man in this trade consumes
during the time of his labour” (l.c., p. 120).
“Rent of land is the one and
only element of the national revenue; ||242| and interest on capitals
employed and the wages of all kinds of labours only make the
product of this rent pass and circulate through everyone’s
hands” (l.c., pp. 309-10).
“The utilisation of the land, its
faculty, its capacity for the annual reproduction of rent,
is all that constitutes the national wealth” (l.c.,
p. 310). “If we go back to the foundations, to
the first elements of the value of all objects,
whatsoever they may be, we are forced to recognise that
this value is nothing other than that of the simple products
of nature; that is to say, although labour may have given a
new value to these objects and raised their price, this new
value, or this price, is only made up nevertheless of the
total values put together of all the natural products which,
because of the new form that labour has given them, have
been destroyed, consumed, or used by the labourer in one way
or another” (l.c., p. 313).
“This kind of labour” (agriculture proper)
“being the only labour that contributes to the
production of new b o d i e s, it is therefore the
only labour that can, up to a certain point, be considered
productive. As for labours in working up material or
in industry … they simply give a new form to bodies
which nature has produced” (l.c., pp. 15-16).
[9. An Early Critique of the Superstition of the
Physiocrats in the Question of Agriculture (Verri)]
Against the superstition of the Physiocrats.
Verri (Pietro): Meditazioni sulla Economia
politica. (First printed 1771), t. XV. [Published
by] Custodi, Parte moderna.
“All the phenomena of the universe,
whether produced by the hand of man or through the universal
laws of physics, are not actual new creations, but
merely a modification of matter. Joining
together and separating are the only elements
which the human mind always finds on analysing the concept
of reproduction; and it is just the same with the
reproduction of value and of wealth, when
earth, air and water in the fields are transformed into
corn, or when the hand of man transforms the secretions of
an insect into silk, or some pieces of metal are arranged to
make the mechanism of a watch” (pp. 21-22).
Further: The Physiocrats call “the class of
manufacturing labourers sterile, because in their
view the value of manufactured products is equal to the
raw material plus the means of subsistence which the
manufacturing labourers consume during the time of
manufacture” (l.c., p. 25).
||243| On the other hand,
Verri calls attention to the constant poverty of the
agricultural population in contrast to the progressive
enrichment of the artisans, and then goes on to say:
“This proves that the artisan, in the price which
he receives, gets not only the replacement of his outlay
on consumption, but a certain sum over and above that; and
this sum is a new quantity of value created in the
annual production” (l.c., p. 26). “The
newly-created value is therefore that part of the price of
the agricultural or industrial products which they yield
over and above the original value of the materials and
the necessary outlays on consumption while they are being
worked up. In agriculture the seed and the consumption
of the husbandman must be deducted, as in manufacture the
raw material and the consumption of the industrial workman;
and every year new value is created, to the amount
of the balance that remains” (l.c., pp. 26-27).
Editors’ Footnotes
1 The most indispensable, the absolutely
necessary. — Ed.
2 Lit.: let go, let act (let people act
as they choose); demanding that the Government should not
interfere in the economic life of the country. —
Ed
3
Manufacturers. — Ed.
4
Those who are paid (wages or a salary). — Ed.
5
The payers of wages. — Ed.
6
In the manuscript: “The Physiocrats say f.i.” — Ed.
7
Compulsory labour exacted of the peasants. — Ed.