Theories of Surplus Value, Marx 1861-3
[Chapter XXI] Opposition to the Economists (Based on the Ricardian
Theory)
||852| During the Ricardian period of political economy its
antithesis, communism (Owen) and socialism (Fourier, St. Simon, the latter only
in his first beginnings), [comes] also [into being]. According to our plan
we are here concerned only with that opposition, which takes as its
starting-point the premises of the economists.
It will be seen from the works which we quote that in fact they all derive
from the Ricardian form.
1. [The Pamphlet] “The Source and Remedy of the National Difficulties”
[a) Profit, Rent and Interest Regarded as Surplus Labour of the Workers.
The Interrelation Between the Accumulation of Capital and the so-called “Labour
Fund”]
The Source and Remedy of the National Difficulties, [deduced from
Principles of Political Economy, in] a Letter to Lord John Russell, London,
1821. (anonymous).
This scarcely known pamphlet (about 40 pages) [which appeared] at a time when
McCulloch, “this incredible cobbler”, began to make a stir, contains an
important advance on Ricardo. It bluntly describes surplus-value—or
“profit”, as Ricardo calls it (often also “surplus produce”), or “interest”,
as the author of the pamphlet terms it—as “surplus labour”, the labour
which the worker performs gratis, the labour he performs over and above the
quantity of labour by which the value of his labour-power is replaced, i.e., by
which he produces an equivalent for his wages. Important as it was to
reduce value to labour, it was equally important [to present]
surplus-value, which manifests
itself in surplus product, as surplus labour.
This was in fact already stated by Adam Smith and constitutes one of the main
elements in Ricardo’s argumentation. But nowhere did he clearly express it
and record it in an absolute form.
Whereas the only concern of Ricardo and others is to understand the
conditions of capitalist production, and to assert them as the absolute forms of
production, the pamphlet and the other works of this kind to be mentioned seize
on the mysteries of capitalist production which have been brought to light in
order to combat the latter from the standpoint of the industrial proletariat.
[We read in the pamphlet:]
“… whatever may be due
to the capitalist” (from the viewpoint of the capitalist) “he can only
receive the surplus labour of the labourer; for the labourer must
live…” (The Source and Remedy of the National Difficulties, p. 23).
To be sure, these conditions of life, the minimum on which the worker can
live, and consequently also the quantity of surplus labour which can be squeezed
out of him, are relative magnitudes.
“… if capital does not decrease in value as it increases in
amount, the capitalists will exact from the labourers the produce of every
hour’s labour beyond what it is possible for the labourer to subsist
on: and however horrid and disgusting it may seem, the capitalist may eventually
speculate on the food that requires the least labour to produce it, and
eventually say to the labourers, ‘You sha’n’t eat bread, because barley meal is
cheaper; you sha’n’t eat meat, because it is possible to subsist on beet root
and potatoes’. And to this point have we come!” (loc. cit., pp. 23-24).
“… if the labourer can be brought to feed on potatoes instead
of bread, it is indisputably true that more can be exacted from his labour; that
is to say,[a] if when he fed on bread he was obliged to retain for
the maintenance of himself and family the labour of Monday and Tuesday, he
will, on potatoes, require only the half of Monday; and
the remaining half of Monday and the whale of Tuesday
are available either for the service of the state or the capitalist”
(loc. cit., p. 26).
Here profit, etc., is reduced directly to appropriation of the labour-time
for which the worker receives no equivalent.
“It is admitted that the interest paid to the capitalists,
whether in the nature of rents, interests of money, or profits of trade, is paid
out of
the labour of others” (loc. cit., p. 23).
Rent, money interest, industrial profit, are thus merely different forms of “interest
of capital”, which again is reduced
to the “surplus labour of the labourer”.
This surplus labour takes the form of surplus produce. The capitalist is
the owner of the surplus labour or of the surplus produce. The surplus
produce is capital.
“Suppose … there is no
surplus labour, consequently, nothing that can be allowed to accumulate
as capital” (op. cit., p. 4).
And, immediately after this he says:
“… the possessors of the surplus produce, or capital…”
(loc. cit., p. 4).
The author says, in a quite different sense from the whining Ricardians:
“… the natural and necessary consequence of an increased
capital, [is] its decreasing value…” (op. cit., pp. 21-22).
And in reference to Ricardo:
“Why set out by telling us that no accumulation of capital will
lower profits, because nothing will lower profits but increased wages, when it
appears that if population does not increase with capital, wages would increase
from the disproportion between capital and labour; and if population does
increase, wages would increase from the difficulty of producing food” (loc.
cit., p. 23, note).
||853| If the value of capital, that is, the
interest of capital, i.e., the surplus labour which it commands, which it
appropriates, did not decrease when the amount of capital increases, the
[accumulation of] interest from interest would follow in geometrical
progression, and just as, calculated in money (see Price), this
presupposes an impossible
accumulation (rate of accumulation), so, reduced to its real element—labour, it
would swallow up not only the surplus labour, but also the necessary labour as
“being due” to capital. (We shall return to Price’s fantasy in the section
on Revenue and its Sources.)
“… if it were possible to continue to increase capital and keep
up the value of capital, which is proved by the interest of money continuing the
same, the interest to be paid for capital would soon exceed the whole produce of
labour… capital tends in more than arithmetical progression to increase
capital. It is admitted that the interest paid to the
capitalists, whether in the nature of rents,
interests of money, or profits of trade, is paid out of the
labour of others. If then[b] capital go on accumulating […] the labour
to be given for the use of capital must go on increasing, interest paid for
capital continuing the same, till all the labour of all the labourers of the
society is engrossed by the capitalist. […] that it is[c]b […] impossible to happen;
for whatever may be due to the capitalist, he
can
only receive the surplus labour of the labourer; for the labourer must
live…” (loc. cit., p. 23).
But it is not clear to him how the value of capital decreases. He
himself says, when dealing with Ricardo, that this recurs because wages rise
when capital accumulates more rapidly than the population grows, or because the
value of wages (not the quantity) increases when the population grows
more rapidly than capital accumulates (or even if population increases
simultaneously) as a result of decreasing productivity of agriculture.
But how does he explain it? He does not accept the latter alternative; he
assumes that wages are reduced more and more to the minimum possible. [A
reduction of “interest” on capital] can only take place, he says, because the
portion of capital which is exchanged for living labour declines relatively,
although the worker is exploited more than, or just as much as, before.
In any case, it is a step forward that the nonsense about the geometrical
progression of interest is reduced to its true sense, that is, nonsense.*
There are, by the way, according to the pamphleteer, two methods which, in
spite of the growth of surplus product or surplus labour, prevent capital from
being forced to give a greater share of its plunder back to the workers.
The first is the conversion of surplus product into fixed capital, which
prevents the labour fund—or the part of the product consumed by the worker—from
necessarily increasing with the accumulation of capital.
The second is foreign trade, which enables the capitalist to exchange the
surplus product for foreign luxury articles and thus to consume it himself, In
this way, even that part of the product which exists as necessaries may
quite well increase without the need for it to be returned to the worker in the
form of a proportionate increase in wages.
It should be noted that the first method—which is only
effective for a time and then neutralises its own effect (at least as regards
the fixed capital consisting of machinery, etc., which itself is used in the
production of necessaries)—implies the transformation of surplus product into
capital, whereas the second method implies consumption of an ever-increasing
portion of the surplus product by the capitalists—increasing consumption on the
part of the capitalists and not the reconversion
of surplus product into capital. If the same surplus product were to
remain in the form in which it immediately exists, a greater part of it would
have to be exchanged with the workers as variable capital. The result
would be an increase in wages and a reduction in the amount of absolute or
relative surplus-value. Here is the real secret of the necessity for
increasing consumption by “the rich”, advocated by Malthus, in order that
the part of the product which is exchanged for labour and converted into
capital, should have great value, yield large profits, absorb a large amount of
surplus labour. He does not however propose that the industrial
capitalists themselves should increase their consumption, but [allots] this
function to
landlords, sinecurists, etc., because the urge for accumulation and the
urge for expenditure, if united in the same person, would play tricks on each
other. It is here also that the erroneousness of the view of Barton,
Ricardo, and others stands out. Wages are not determined by that portion
of the total product that is either consumed as, or can be converted into,
variable capital, but by that part of it which is actually converted
into variable capital. A part can be consumed by retainers even in its
natural form, another can be consumed in the shape of luxury products by means
of foreign trade, etc.
Our pamphleteer overlooks two things:
As a result of the introduction of machinery, a mass of workers is constantly
being thrown out of employment, a section of the population is thus made
redundant; the surplus product therefore finds fresh labour for which it can be
exchanged without any increase in population and without any need to extend the
absolute working-time. Let us assume that 500 workers were employed
previously, whereas now there are 300 workers, who perform relatively more
surplus labour. The other 200 can be employed by the surplus product as
soon as it has increased sufficiently. One portion of the old [variable]
capital is converted into fixed capital, the other gives employment to fewer
workers but extracts from them more surplus-value in relation to their number
and
in particular also more surplus product. The
remaining 200 are material created for the purpose of capitalising additional
surplus product.
||853a| The transformation of necessaries
into luxuries by means of foreign trade, as interpreted in the
pamphlet, is important in itself:
1) because it puts an end to the nonsensical idea that wages depend on the
amount of necessaries produced, as if these necessaries had to be consumed in
this form by the producers or even by the whole body of people engaged in
production, in other words that they must be transformed again into variable
capital or “circulating capital”, as it is termed by Barton and Ricardo;
2) because it determines the whole social pattern of backward nations—for
example, the slave-holding states in the United States of North America (see
Cairnes) or Poland, etc. (as was already understood by old
Büsch, unless he stole the idea from Steuart)—which are associated with a
world market based on capitalist production. No matter how large the
surplus product they extract from the surplus labour of their slaves in the
simple form of cotton or corn, they can adhere to this simple, undifferentiated
labour because foreign trade enables them [to convert] these simple products
into any kind of use-value.
The assertion that the portion of the annual product which must be expended
as wages depends on the size of the circulating capital, is equal to the
assertion that, when a large part of the product consists of “buildings”, houses
for workers are built in large numbers relative to the size of the working
population, and that consequently the workers must live in cheap and well-built
houses because the supply of houses increases more quickly than the demand for
them.
It is correct, on the other hand, that, if the surplus product is large and
the greater part of it is to be employed as capital, then there must be an
increase in the demand for labour and therefore also in that part of the surplus
product which is exchanged for wages (provided large numbers of workers did not
have to be thrown out of work in order to obtain a surplus product of this
size). At all events, it is not the absolute size of the surplus
product (in whatever form it may exist, even that of necessaries) which
necessarily requires it to be expended as variable capital and which
consequently causes an increase in wages, but it is the desire to capitalise
which results in a large part of the surplus product being laid out in variable
capital and this would consequently
make wages grow with the accumulation of capital if
machinery did not constantly make [a section of] the population redundant and if
an ever greater portion of capital (in particular as a result of foreign trade)
were not exchanged for capital, not for labour. The portion of surplus
product which is already produced directly in a form in which it can only serve
as capital, and that portion of it which acquires this form as a result of
foreign trade, grow more rapidly than the portion which must be exchanged
against immediate labour.
The proposition that wages depend on existing capital and that therefore a
rapid accumulation of capital is the sole means by which wages are made to rise,
amounts to this:
On the one hand, to a tautology, if we disregard the form in which
the conditions of labour exist as capital. How rapidly the number of
workers can be increased without worsening their living conditions depends on
the productivity of labour which a given number of workers perform.
The more raw materials, tools and means of subsistence they produce, the greater
the means at their disposal not only to bring up their children so long as these
cannot work themselves, but to realise the labour of the new, growing
generation, and consequently to make the growth of production keep up with, and
even outdo, the growth of population, since with the growth of the population,
the [workers’] skill increases, division of labour grows, the possibility [for
using] machinery grows, constant capital grows, in short, the productivity of
labour grows.
While the growth of population depends on the productivity of labour, the
productivity of labour depends on the growth of population. It is a case
of reciprocity. But this, expressed in capitalist terms, signifies that
the means of subsistence of the working population depend on the productivity of
capital, on the largest possible portion of their product confronting them as a
force which commands their labour. Ricardo himself expresses the matter
correctly—I mean the tautology—when he makes wages depend on the
productivity of capital, and the latter de-pendent on the productivity of
labour.[d]
That labour depends on the growth of capital signifies nothing more than, on
the one hand, the tautology ||854| that the increase in the means of subsistence and
the means of employment of the
population depends on the productivity of the
population’s own labour and, secondly, expressed in capitalist terms, that
it depends on the fact that the population’s own product confronts them as
alien property and that as a consequence their own productivity confronts
them as the productivity of the things which they create.
In practice this means that the worker must appropriate the smallest possible
part of his product in order that the largest possible part of it may confront
him as
capital; he must surrender as much as possible to the capitalist
gratis, in order that the latter s means for purchasing his labour—with
what has been taken away from the worker without compensation—may increase as
much as possible. In this case it can happen that, if the capitalist has
made the worker work a great deal for nothing, he may then, in exchange for what
he has received for nothing, allow the worker to do a little less work for
nothing. However, since this prevents the achievement of what is aimed at,
namely, accumulation of capital as rapidly as possible, the worker must
live in such circumstances that this reduction in the amount of labour he
performs for nothing is in turn counteracted by a growth of the working
population, either relatively as a result of the use of machinery, or absolutely
as a result of early marriage. (It is the same relationship which is
derided by the Ricardians when the Malthusians preach it between landlords and
capitalists.) The workers must relinquish the largest possible part of
their product to the capitalist without receiving anything in return, so as,
when conditions are more favourable, to buy back with new labour a part
of the product so relinquished. However, since the conditions for the
favourable change are at the same time counteracted by this favourable change,
it can only be temporary and must turn again into its own opposite.
3) What applies to the transformation of necessaries into luxuries by means
of foreign trade, applies in general to luxury production, whose unlimited
diversification and expansion depends, however, on foreign trade. Although
the workers engaged in luxury production produce capital for their employers,
their product, in the form in which it exists, cannot be transformed into
capital, either constant or variable capital.
Luxury products, apart from those which are sent abroad to be exchanged for
necessaries which enter into variable capital either in whole or in part, simply
constitute
surplus labour and [moreover] surplus labour which is immediately
in the shape
of surplus products which the rich consume as
revenue. But they do not represent only the surplus labour of the workers
who produce them. On the average, these perform the same surplus labour as
the workers in other branches of industry. But in the same way as
one-third of the product, which contains a third of the surplus labour, can be
considered as the embodiment of this surplus labour, and the remaining
two-thirds as reproduction of the capital advanced, so the surplus labour of the
producers of those necessaries which constitute the wages of the producers of
luxuries can also be considered as the necessary labour of the work-in g class
as a whole. Their surplus labour consists 1) of that part of the
necessaries which is consumed by the capitalists and their retainers; and 2) of
the total amount of luxuries. With regard to the individual capitalist or
a particular branch of industry the matter appears quite different. For
the capitalist, one part of the luxuries created by him represents merely an
equivalent for the capital laid out.
If too large a part of surplus labour is embodied directly in luxuries, then
clearly, accumulation and the rate of reproduction will stagnate, because too
small a part is reconverted into capital. If too small a part [of surplus
labour] is embodied in luxuries, then the accumulation of capital (that is, of
that part of the surplus product which can in kind serve as capital again) will
proceed more rapidly than increase in population, and the rate of profit will
fall, unless a foreign market for necessaries exists.
[b) On the Exchange Between Capital and Revenue in the Case of Simple
Reproduction and of the Accumulation of Capital]
In the exchange between capital and revenue I have regarded wages, too, as
revenue and have merely examined the relationship of constant capital to
revenue. The fact that the revenue of the worker is at the same time
variable capital is important only insofar as in the accumulation of capital—the
formation of new capital—the surplus consisting of means of subsistence
(necessaries) in the possession of the capitalist producing them can be
exchanged directly for the surplus consisting of raw materials or machinery in
the possession of the capitalist producing constant capital. Here one form
of revenue is exchanged for the other, ||855|
and, once the exchange is effected, the revenue of A is converted into the
constant capital of B and the revenue of B into the variable capital of A.
In considering this circulation, reproduction and
manner of replacement of the different capitals, etc., one must first of all
disregard foreign trade.
Secondly, it is necessary to distinguish between the two aspects of the
phenomenon:
1) Reproduction on the existing scale,
2) Reproduction on an extended scale, or accumulation; transformation of
revenue into capital.
With regard to 1.
I have shown:
That what the producers of necessaries have to replace is 1) their
constant capital, 2) their variable capital. The part of their product in
excess of these two constitutes the surplus product, the material
existence of surplus-value, which in its turn only represents
surplus labour.
Variable capital, that part of their product which represents it, is made up
of wages, the revenue of the workers. This part already exists here in the
natural form in which it serves as variable capital once again.
With this part, the equivalent reproduced by the worker, the labour of the
worker is bought once again. This is the exchange of capital for immediate
labour. The worker receives this part in the form of money with which he
buys back his own product, or other products of the same category. This is
the exchange of
the different portions of the variable part of capital for one another
after the worker has in the form of money received an assignment to his quota.
This is exchange of one part of newly added labour for another part within the
same category (necessaries).
The part of the surplus product (newly added labour) consumed by the
capitalists (who produce necessaries) themselves, is either consumed by them in
kind or they exchange one type of surplus product existing in consumable form
against another type. This is exchange of revenue for revenue, both of
them consisting of newly added labour.
We cannot really speak of exchange between revenue and capital in the above
transaction. Capital (necessaries) is exchanged against labour
(labour-power). This is therefore not an exchange of revenue for capital.
It is true that as soon as the worker receives his wages, he consumes them.
But what he exchanges for capital is not his revenue, but his labour.
The third part [of the product of the producer of necessaries which
constitutes] constant capital is exchanged for a part of the
product of those manufacturers who produce constant
capital; namely, for that part which represents newly added labour. This
consists of an equivalent for the wages (that is, of variable capital) and of
the surplus product, the surplus-value, the revenue of the capitalists which
exists in a form in which it can only be consumed industrially and not
individually. On the one hand, this is therefore exchange of the
variable capital of these producers for a part of the necessaries which
constitute the constant capital [of the producers of necessaries]. In fact
they exchange a part of their product which constitutes variable capital but
exists in the form of constant capital, for a part of the product of those
manufacturers who produce necessaries, a part which constitutes constant capital
but exists in the form of variable capital. Here newly added labour is
exchanged for constant capital.
On the other hand, that part of the product which represents surplus product
but exists in the form of constant capital is exchanged for a portion of
necessaries which represents constant capital for its producers. Here
revenue is exchanged for capital. The revenue of the capitalists who
produce constant capital is exchanged for necessaries and replaces the constant
capital of the capitalists who produce necessaries.
Finally, a part of the product of the capitalists who produce constant
capital, namely, that part which itself represents constant capital, is replaced
partly in kind, partly through barter (concealed by money) between the producers
of constant capital.
It is assumed in all this that the scale of reproduction is the same as the
original scale of production.
If we enquire what part of the total annual product is made up of newly added
labour, then the calculation is quite simple.
A. Consumable articles [for individual consumption.
These] consist of three parts. [Firstly,] the revenue of the capitalist
which equals the surplus labour added during the year.
Secondly, wages, i.e., variable capital, which is equal to the newly added
labour by which the workers have reproduced their wages.
Finally, the third part, raw materials, machinery, etc. This is
constant capital, that part of the value of the product which is only retained,
not produced. That is, it is not labour newly added during the course of
the year.
||856| If we call constant capital [in this
category] c', variable capital
v', and surplus product, the revenue r', then this category
consists of [c' and v'+r']:
c' (which constitutes a part of the product)
is merely retained value and does not consist of newly added labour; on the
other hand,
v'+r' consist of labour newly added during the course of the year.
The total product [of the category A] (or its value)
Pa after deduction of c', therefore,
consists of newly added labour.
Thus the product of category A, namely:
Pa–c', is equal to the labour newly added
during the course of the year.
B. Articles for industrial consumption.
Here also v''+r'' are made up of newly added labour. But not
c'', the constant capital which operates in this sphere.
But v''+r''=c' for which they are exchanged.
c' is transformed into variable capital and revenue for B. On the
other hand, v'' and r'' are transformed into c', into
constant capital for A.
The product of the category [B, that is]
Pb. Pb–c''
is equal to the labour newly added during the course of the year.
But Pb-c''=c', for the whole product of
Pb after deduction of c'', the constant
capital employed in this category, is exchanged for c'.
After v''+r'' have been exchanged for
c', the matter can be presented as follows:
Pa consists solely of newly added labour,
the product of which is divided between profits and wages, that is, it
constitutes the equivalent of necessary labour and the equivalent of surplus
labour. For the
v''+r'' which now replace c' are equal to the newly added
labour in category B.
Thus the whole product Pa—not only its
surplus product, but also its variable capital and its constant capital—consists
of the products of labour newly added during the course of the year.
On the other hand, Pb can be regarded in
such a way that it does not represent any part of the newly added labour, but
merely old labour which is retained, For its part c'' does not
represent newly added labour. Neither does the part c' which it
has received in exchange for v''+r'', for this
c' represents the constant capital laid out in A, and not newly added
labour.
The whole part of the annual product which, as variable capital, constitutes
the revenue of the workers and as surplus product constitutes the consumption
fund of the capitalist, therefore consists of newly added labour, whereas the
remaining part of the product, which represents constant capital, consists
merely of old labour which has been retained and simply replaces constant
capital.
Consequently, just as it is correct to say that the
whole portion of the annual product which is consumed as revenue, wages and
profits (together with the branches of profit, rent, interest, etc., as well as
the wages of the unproductive labourers) consists of newly added labour, so it
is false to assert that the total annual product resolves itself into revenue,
wages and profits and thus merely into portions of newly added labour. A
part of the annual product resolves itself into constant capital, which regarded
as value does not comprise newly added labour and, as regards use does
not form part of either wages or profits. Its value represents accumulated
labour in the real sense of the word, and its use-value, the utilisation of this
accumulated past labour.
On the other hand, it is equally correct that the
labour added during the year is not represented entirely by that part
of the product which constitutes wages and profits. For these wages and
profits also buy services, that is, labour which does not enter into the product
of which wages and profit form [a part]. These services are labour which
is used up in the consumption of the product and does not enter into its
immediate production.
||857| With regard to 2.
It is a different matter with regard to accumulation, transformation of
revenue into capital, reproduction on an extended scale, insofar as
this latter does not simply result from more productive employment of
the old capital. Here the whole new capital consists of newly added
labour, that is, of surplus labour in the form of profit, etc. But
although it is correct that here the entire element in new production arises
from and consists of newly added labour—which is a part of the surplus labour of
the labourers—it is wrong to assume, as the economists do, that, when it is
converted into capital, it constitutes only variable capital, that is, wages.
Let us suppose for example that a part of the surplus product of the farmer is
exchanged for a part of the surplus product of the machine manufacturer.
It is then possible that the latter will convert the corn into variable capital
and employ more workers, directly or indirectly. On the other hand, the
farmer has converted a part of his surplus product into constant capital, and it
is possible that, as a result of this conversion, he will discharge some of his
old workers instead of taking on new ones. The farmer may cultivate more
land. In this case, a part of his corn will be converted not into wages,
but into constant capital, etc.
It is precisely accumulation which reveals clearly
that everything—i.e., revenue, variable capital and constant capital—is nothing
but appropriated alien labour; and that both the means of labour with
which the worker works, and the equivalent he receives for his labour, consist
of labour performed by the worker and appropriated by the capitalist, who has
not given any equivalent for it.
[The same applies] even to original accumulation. Let us assume that I
have saved £500 from my
wages. In fact, therefore, this Sum represents not only
accumulated labour but, in contrast to the “accumulated labour” of the
capitalist,
my own labour accumulated by me and for me. I convert the £500
into capital, buy raw material, etc., and take on workers. Profit is, say,
20 per cent, that is, £100 a year. In five years I shall have “eaten up”
my capital in the form of revenue (provided new accumulation does not
continuously take place and the £100 [profit] is consumed). In the sixth
year, my capital of £500 itself consists of other people’s labour appropriated
without any equivalent. If, on the other hand, I had always accumulated
half of the profit made, the process [of eating up my original capital] would
have been slower, for I would not have consumed so much, and [the process of
appropriating other people’s labour] more rapid.
|
|
capital
|
Profit
|
Consumed
|
|
First year
|
500
|
100
|
50
|
|
|
Second year
|
550
|
110
|
55
|
|
|
Third year
|
605
|
121
|
60
|
|
|
Fourth year
|
665
|
133
|
66
|
|
|
Fifth year
|
731
|
146
|
73
|
|
|
Sixth year
|
804
|
160
|
So
|
|
|
Seventh year
|
884
|
176
|
88
|
|
|
Eighth year
|
972
|
194
|
97
|
|
| | | 569 |
My capital will have been almost doubled in eight years although I have
consumed more than my original capital. The capital of £972 does not
contain a single farthing of paid labour or of labour for which I have returned
any kind of equivalent. I have consumed my entire original capital in the
form of revenue, that is, I have received an equivalent for it, which I have
consumed. The new capital consists solely of the appropriated labour of
other people.
In considering surplus-value as such, the original form of the product, hence
of the surplus product, is of no consequence. It
becomes important when considering the actual process of
reproduction, partly in order to understand its forms, and partly in order to
grasp the influence of luxury production, etc., on reproduction. Here is
another example of how
use-value as such acquires economic significance.
[c) The Merits of the Author of the pamphlet and the Theoretical Confusion
of His Views. The Importance of the Questions He Raises about the Role of
Foreign Trade in Capitalist society and of “Free Time” as Real Wealth]
||858|| Now to return to our pamphlet.
“Suppose the whole labour of the country to raise just
sufficient for the support of the whole population; it is evident there is no
surplus labour, consequently, nothing that can be allowed to accumulate as
capital. Suppose the whole labour of the country to raise as much in
one year as would maintain it two years, it is evident one year’s
consumption must perish, or for one year men must cease from productive labour.
But the possessors of the surplus produce, or capital, will neither
maintain the population the following year in idleness, nor allow the produce to
perish; they will employ them upon something not directly and immediately
productive, for instance, in the erection of machinery, etc., etc., etc.
But the third year, the whole population may again return to productive labour,
and the machinery erected in the last year coming now into operation, it is
evident the produce […] will be greater than the first year’s produce [… ] and[e]
the produce of the machinery in addition. […] this surplus labour must[f]
perish, or be put to use as before; and this usance again adds to the productive
power […] of the society […] till men must cease from productive labour
for a time, or the produce of their labour must perish, This is the palpable
consequence in the simplest state of society” (op. cit., pp. 4-5).
“The demand of other countries is limited, not only by our
power to produce, but by
their power to produce… ”
<This is the answer to Say’s assertion that we do not produce too much, but
they produce too little. Their power to produce is not necessarily equal
to our power to produce.>
“For do what you will, in a series of years the whole world can
take little more of us, than we take of the world […] so that all your foreign
trade, of which there is so much talking, never did, never could, nor ever can,
add one shilling, or one doit to the wealth of the country, as for every bale of
silk, chest of tea, pipe of wine that ever was imported, something of equal
value was exported; and even the profits made by our merchants in their foreign
trade are paid by the consumer of the return goods here” (op. cit., pp. 17-18).
“…foreign trade is mere barter and
exchange for the convenience and enjoyment of the capitalist: he has not a
hundred bodies, nor a hundred legs: he cannot consume, in cloth and cotton
stockings, all the cloth and cotton stockings that are manufactured; therefore
they are exchanged for wines and silks; but those wines and silks represent
the surplus labour of our own population, as much as the cloths and
cottons, and in this way the destructive power of the capitalist list is
increased beyond all bounds:—by foreign trade the capitalists contrive to
outwit nature, who had put a thousand natural limits to their exactions, and to
their wishes to exact; there is no limit now, either to their power, or […]
desires…” (loc. cit., p. 18).
One sees that he accepts Ricardo’s teaching on foreign trade. In
Ricardo’s work its only purpose is to support his theory of value or to
demonstrate that his views on foreign trade are not at variance with it.
But the pamphlet stresses that it is not only national labour, but also
national surplus labour which is embodied in the outcome of foreign trade.
If surplus labour or surplus-value were represented only in the national
surplus product, then the increase of value for the sake of value and therefore
the exaction of surplus labour would be restricted by the limited, narrow circle
of use-values in which the value of the [national] labour would be represented.
But it is foreign trade which develops its [the surplus product’s] real nature
as value by developing the labour embodied in it as social labour which
manifests itself in an unlimited range of different use-values, and this in fact
gives meaning to abstract wealth.
“… It is the infinite variety of wants, and of the
kinds of commodities” <and therefore also the infinite variety of real
labour, which produces those different kinds of commodities> “necessary to
their gratification, which alone renders the passion for wealth” (and hence
the passion for appropriating other people’s labour) “indefinite and insatiable”
(Wakefield’s edition of Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Source of
the Wealth of Nations, Vol. 1, London, 1835, p. 64, note).
But it is only foreign trade, the development of the market to a world
market, which causes money to develop into world money and abstract labour
into social labour. Abstract wealth, value, money, hence
abstract labour, develop in the measure that concrete labour becomes a
totality of different modes of labour embracing the world market.
Capitalist production rests on the value or the transformation of the
labour embodied in the product into social labour. But this is only
[possible] on the basis of foreign trade and of the world market. This is
at once the pre-condition and the result of capitalist production.
||859| The pamphlet is no
theoretical treatise. [It is a] protest against the false reasons given by
the economists for the distress and the “national difficulties” of the times.
It does not, consequently, make the claim that its conception of surplus-value
as surplus labour carries with it a general criticism of the entire
system of economic categories, nor can this be expected of it. The author
stands rather on Ricardian ground and is only consistent in stating one of the
consequences inherent in the system itself and he advances it in the interests
of the working class against capital.
For the rest, the author remains a captive of the economic categories as he
finds them. Just as in the case of Ricardo the confusion of surplus-value
with profit leads to undesirable contradictions, so in his case the fact that he
christens surplus-value the interest of capital.
To be sure, he is in advance of Ricardo in that he first of all reduces all
surplus-value to surplus labour, and when he calls surplus-value interest of
capital, he at the same time emphasises that by this he understands the
general form of surplus labour in contrast to its special forms—rent, interest
of money and industrial profit.
“…interest paid to the capitalists, whether in the
nature” (it should be shape, form) “of rents, interests of money,
or profits of trade” ([The Source and Remedy of the National Difficulties,
London, 1821,] p. 23).
He thus distinguishes the general form of surplus labour or surplus-value
from their particular forms, something which neither Ricardo nor Adam Smith
[does], at least not consciously or consistently. But on the other hand,
he applies the name of one of these particular forms—interest—to the general
form. And this suffices to make him relapse into economic slang.
“The progress of […] increasing capital would, in established
societies, he marked by the decreasing interest of money, or, which is the same
thing,[g] the decreasing quantity of the
labour of others that would be given for its use…” (op. cit., p. 6).
This passage reminds one of Carey. But with him it is not the labourer
who uses capital, but capital which uses the labourer. Since by
interest he understands surplus labour in any form, the matter of the
remedy of our “national difficulties” amounts to an increase in wages;
for the reduction of interest means a reduction of
surplus labour. However, what he really means is that in the exchange of
capital for labour the appropriation of alien labour should be reduced or that
the worker should appropriate more of his own labour and capital less.
Reduction of surplus labour can mean two things:
Less work should be performed over and above the time which is necessary to
reproduce the labour-power, that is, to create an equivalent for wages;
or, less of the total quantity of labour should assume the form
of surplus labour, that is, the form of time worked gratis for the
capitalist; therefore less of the product in which labour manifests itself
should take the form of surplus product; in other words, the worker
should receive more of his own product and less of it should go to the
capitalist.
The author is not quite clear about this himself, as can be seen from the
following passage which is really the last word in this matter as far as the
pamphlet is concerned:
A[h] nation is really rich only if no
interest is paid for the use of capital; when only six hours instead of twelve
hours are worked… “Wealth […] is
disposable time, and nothing more” (loc. cit., p. 6).
Since what is understood by interest here is profit, rent, interest—in short,
all the forms of surplus-value—and since, according to the author himself,
capital is nothing but the produce of labour, i.e., accumulated labour which is
able to exact in exchange for itself not only an equal quantity of labour, but
surplus labour, according to him the phrase: capital bears no interest,
therefore means that capital ||860| does not exist. The product is not
transformed into capital. No surplus product and no surplus
labour exist. Only then is a nation really rich.
This can mean however: There is no product and no labour
over and above the product and the labour required for the reproduction
of the workers. Or, they [the workers] themselves appropriate
this surplus either of the product or of the labour.
That the author does not simply mean the latter is, however, clear
from the fact that the words “no interest is paid for the use of capital” are
juxtaposed to the proposition that a nation is really rich when only six hours
not twelve hours are worked[i]; “wealth […] is disposable
time, and nothing more”.
This can now mean:
If everybody has to work, if the contradiction between those who have to work
too much and those who are idlers disappears—and this would in any case be the
result of capital ceasing to exist, of the product ceasing to provide a title to
alien surplus labour—and if, in addition, the development of the
productive forces brought about by capitalism is taken into account, society
will produce the necessary abundance in six hours, [producing] more than it does
now in twelve, and, moreover, all will have six hours of “disposable time”, that
is, real wealth; time which will not be absorbed in direct productive labour,
but will be available for enjoyment, for leisure, thus giving scope for free
activity and development, Time is scope for the development of man’s
faculties, etc. The economists themselves justify the slave-labour of the
wage-labourers by saying that it creates leisure, free time for others,
for another section of society—and thereby also for the society of
wage-labourers.
Or it can also mean:
The workers now work six hours more than the time (now) required for
their own reproduction. (This can hardly be the author’s view, since he
describes what they use now as an in human minimum.) If capital
ceases to exist, then the workers will work for six hours only and the idlers
will have to work the same amount of time. The material wealth of all
would thus be depressed to the level of the workers. But all would have
disposable time, that is, free time for their development.
The author himself is obviously not clear about this. Nevertheless,
there remains the fine statement:
A nation is really rich when six hours instead of twelve hours are worked.
“Wealth […]
is disposable time, and nothing more.”
Ricardo himself, in the chapter entitled “Value and Riches, Their
Distinctive Properties”, also says that real wealth consists in producing
the greatest possible amount of values in use having the least possible
[exchange-] value. This means, in other words, that the greatest possible
abundance of material wealth is created in the shortest possible labour-time.
Here also, the “disposable time” and the enjoyment of that which is produced in
the labour-time of others, appear as the real wealth, but like everything in
capitalist production—and consequently in its interpreters—it appears in the
form of a contradiction. In Ricardo’s work the contradiction between
riches and value later
appears in the form that the net product should be as
large as possible in relation to the gross product, which again, in this
contradictory form, amounts to saying that those classes in society whose time
is only partly or not at all absorbed in material production although they enjoy
its fruits, should be as numerous as possible in comparison with those classes
whose time is totally absorbed in material production and whose consumption is,
as a consequence, a mere item in production costs, a mere condition for their
existence as beasts of burden. There is always the wish that the smallest
possible portion of society should be doomed to the slavery of labour, to forced
labour. This is the utmost that can be accomplished from the capitalist
standpoint.
The author puts an end to this. Labour-time, even if
exchange-value is eliminated, always remains the creative substance of wealth
and the measure of the
cost of its production. But free time,
disposable time, is wealth itself, partly for the enjoyment of the
product, partly for free activity which—unlike labour—is not dominated by the
pressure of an extraneous purpose which must be fulfilled, and the fulfilment of
which is regarded as a natural necessity or a social duty, according to one’s
inclination.
It is self-evident that if labour-time is reduced to a normal length and,
furthermore, labour is no longer performed for someone else, but for myself,
and, at the same time, the social contradictions between master and men, etc.,
being abolished, it acquires a quite different, a free character, it becomes
real social labour, and finally the basis of disposable time—the
labour of a man who has also disposable time, must be of a much higher
quality than that of the beast of burden.
2. Ravenstone. [The View of Capital as the Surplus Product of
the Worker. Confusion of the Antagonistic Form of Capitalist Development
with Its Content. This Leads to a Negative Attitude Towards the Results of
the Capitalist Development of the Productive Forces]
||861| Piercy Ravenstone, M. A., Thoughts on
the Funding System, and its Effects, London, 1824.
A most remarkable work.
The author of The Source and Remedy of the National Difficulties
discussed above understands surplus-value in its original form, i.e., that of
Surplus labour. Consequently his attention
is mainly centred on the extent of labour-time. In
particular, the conception of surplus labour or [surplus-] value in its
absolute form; the extension of labour-time beyond that required for the
reproduction of the labourer himself, not the reduction of necessary labour as a
result of the development of the productive power of labour.
The reduction of this necessary labour is the principal aspect examined by
Ricardo, but in the way it is carried out in capitalist production, namely, as a
means for extending the amount of labour-time accruing to capital. This
pamphlet, on the contrary, declares that the final aim is the reduction of
the producers’ labour-time
and the cessation of labour for the possessor of surplus produce.
Ravenstone seems to assume the working-day as given. Hence, what he is
particularly interested in—just as was also the author of the pamphlet
previously discussed, so that the theoretical questions only crop up
incidentally—is relative surplus-value or the surplus product (which accrues to
capital) as a result of the development of the productive power of labour.
As is usual with those who adopt this standpoint, surplus labour is conceived
here more in the form of surplus product, whereas in the previous [pamphlet],
surplus product is conceived more in the form of surplus labour.
“To teach that the wealth and power of a nation depend on its
capital is to make industry ancillary to riches, to make men subservient to
property” ([Ravenstone, Thoughts on the Funding System, and its Effects,
London, 1824,] p. 7).
The opposition evoked by the Ricardian theory—on the basis of its own
assumptions—has the following characteristic feature.
To the same extent as political economy developed—and this development finds
its most trenchant expression in Ricardo, as far as fundamental principles are
concerned—it presented labour as the sole element of value and the only creator
of use-values, and the development of the productive forces as the only real
means for increasing wealth; the greatest possible development of the productive
power of labour as the economic basis of society. This is, in fact, the
foundation of capitalist production. Ricardo’s work, in
particular, which demonstrates that the law of value is not invalidated either
by landed property or by capitalist accumulation, etc., is, in reality, only
concerned with eliminating all contradictions or phenomena which appear to run
counter to this conception. But in the same measure
as it is understood that labour is the sole source of exchange-value
and the active source of use-value, “capital” is likewise conceived by
the same economists, in particular by Ricardo (and even more by Torrens,
Malthus, Bailey, and others after him), as the regulator of production, the
source of wealth and the aim of production, whereas labour is regarded as
wage-labour, whose representative and real instrument is inevitably a pauper (to
which Malthus’s theory of population contributed), a mere production cost and
instrument of production dependent on a minimum wage and forced to drop even
below this minimum as soon as the existing quantity of labour is “superfluous”
for capital. In this contradiction, political economy merely expressed the
essence of capitalist production or, if you like, of wage-labour, of labour
alienated from itself, which stands confronted by the wealth it has created as
alien wealth, by its own productive power as the productive power of its
product, by its enrichment as its own impoverishment and by its social power as
the power of society. But this definite, specific, historical
form of social labour which is exemplified in capitalist production is
proclaimed by these economists as the general, eternal form, as a natural
phenomenon, and these relations of production as the absolutely (not
historically) necessary, natural and reasonable relations of social labour.
Their thoughts being entirely confined within the bounds of capitalist
production, they assert that the contradictory form in which social
labour manifests itself there, is just as necessary as labour itself freed from
this contradiction. Since in the self-same breath they proclaim on the one
hand, labour as such (for them, labour is synonymous with wage-labour)
and on the other,
capital as such—that is the poverty of the workers and the wealth of
the idlers—to be the sole source of wealth, they are perpetually involved in
absolute contradictions without being in the slightest degree aware of them.
(Sismondi was epoch-making in political economy because he had an
inkling of this contradiction.) Ricardo’s phrase “labour
or capital” reveals in a most striking fashion both the contradiction
inherent in the terms and the naïvety with which they are stated to be
identical.
Since the same real development which provided bourgeois political economy
with this striking theoretical expression, unfolded the real contradictions
contained in it, especially the contradiction between the growing wealth of the
English “nation” and the growing misery of the workers, and since moreover these
contradictions are given a theoretically
compelling if unconscious expression in the Ricardian theory, etc., it was
natural for those thinkers ||XV-862| who rallied to the side of the proletariat to
seize on this contradiction, for which they found the theoretical ground already
prepared. Labour is the sole source of exchange-value and the only active
creator of use-value. This is what you say. On the other hand, you
say that capital is everything, and the worker is nothing or a mere
production cost of capital. You have refuted yourselves. Capital is
nothing but defrauding of the worker. Labour is
everything.
This, in fact, is the ultimate meaning of all the writings which defend the
interests of the proletariat from the Ricardian standpoint basing themselves on
his assumptions. Just as little as he [Ricardo] understands the identity
of capital and labour
in his own system, do they understand the contradiction they describe.
That is why the most important among them—Hodgskin, for example—accept all the
economic pre-conditions of capitalist production as eternal forms and only
desire to eliminate capital, which is both the basis and necessary consequence
[of these preconditions].
Ravenstone’s main idea is as follows:
The development of the productive power of labour creates
capital or property, in other words a surplus product for
“idlers”, non-workers; and indeed the more the productive power of labour
develops, the more it produces this, its parasitical excrescence which sucks it
dry. Whether the title to this surplus product, or the power to
appropriate the product of other people’s labour, accrues to the non-worker
because he already possesses wealth, or because he possesses land, landed
property, does not affect the case. Both are capital, that is,
mastery over the product of other people’s labour. For Ravenstone property
is merely appropriation of the products of other people’s labour and
this is only possible insofar as and in the degree that productive industry
develops. By productive industry Ravenstone understands industry which
produces necessaries. Unproductive industry, the industry of
consumption, is a consequence of the development of capital, or property.
Ravenstone appears ascetic like the author of the pamphlet discussed above.[j] In this respect he himself remains a captive of the
notions set forth by the economists.
Without capital, without property, the
necessaries of the workers would be produced in abundance, but there would be no
luxury industry. Or it can also be said that Ravenstone, like the author
of the pamphlet discussed above, understands or at least in fact admits the
historical necessity of capital; since capital, according to the author
of the pamphlet, produces surplus labour over and above the labour
strictly necessary for the maintenance [of the worker] and at the same time
leads to the creation of machinery (what he calls fixed capital) and gives rise
to foreign trade, the world market, in order to utilise the surplus product
filched from the workers partly to increase productive power, partly to give
this surplus product the most diverse forms of use-value far removed from those
required by necessity. Similarly, according to Ravenstone, no
conveniences, no machinery, no luxury products would be produced without
capital and property, neither would the development of the natural sciences
have taken place, nor the literary and artistic productions which owe their
existence to leisure, nor the urge of the wealthy to receive an equivalent for
their “surplus product” from the non-workers. Ravenstone and the
pamphleteer do not say this in justification of capital, but simply seize on it
as a point of attack because all this is done in opposition to [the
interest of] the workers and not for
them. But in fact they thus admit that this is a result of capitalist
production, which is therefore a historical form of social development, even
though it stands in contradiction to that part of the population which
constitutes the basis of that whole development, In this respect they share the
narrow-mindedness of the economists (although from a diametrically opposite
position) for they confuse the contradictory form of this development
with its content. The latter wish to perpetuate the contradiction on
account of its results. The former are determined to sacrifice the fruits
which have developed within the antagonistic form, in order to get rid of the
contradiction. This distinguishes their opposition to [bourgeois]
political economy from that of contemporary people like Owen; likewise from that
of Sismondi, who harks back to antiquated forms of the contradiction in order to
be rid of it in its acute form.
[Ravenstone writes:]
It is the “wants” of the poor which “constitute his” (the rich man’s)
“wealth… When all were equal, none would labour for another. The
necessaries of life would be overabundant whilst its comforts were entirely
wanting” (op. cit., p. 10).
“The industry which produces is the
parent of property; that which aids consumption is its child” (loc. cit., p.
12).
“It is this[k] growth of property, this greater ability to maintain
idle men, and unproductive industry, that in political economy is called
capital” (loc. cit., p. 13).
“As the destination of property is expense, as without that it
is wholly useless to its owner, its existence is intimately connected with that ||863| of the industry of consumption” (loc. cit.).
“If each man’s labour were but enough to procure his own
food, there could be no property, and no part of a people’s
industry could be turned away to work for the wants of the imagination” (loc.
cit., pp. 14-15).
“In every [subsequent] stage of society, as increased numbers
and better contrivances add to each man’s power of production, the number of
those who labour is gradually diminished… Property grows from the
improvement of the means of production; its sole business is the encouragement
of idleness. When each man’s labour is barely sufficient for his own
subsistence, as there can be no property, there will be no idle man. When
one man’s labour can maintain five, there will be four idle men for one employed
in production: in no other way can the produce be consumed… the object of
society is to magnify the idle at the expense of the industrious, to create
power out of plenty” (loc. cit., p. 11).
<With regard to rent he says (not quite correctly, for it is precisely here
that it is necessary to explain why rent accrues to the landlord and not to the
farmer, the industrial capitalist) what applies to surplus-value in general,
insofar as it develops as a result of the increase in the productivity of
labour.
“In the early stages of society, when men have no artificial
assistance to their powers of industry, the proportion of their earnings which
can be afforded to rent is exceedingly small: for land […] has no natural value,
it owes all its produce to industry. But every increase of skill adds to
the proportion which can be reserved for rent. Where the labour of nine is
required for the maintenance of ten, only one-tenth of the gross produce can be
given to rent. Where one man’s labour is sufficient for the maintenance of
five, four—fifths will go to rent, or the other charges of the state, which can
only be provided for out of the surplus produce of industry. The first
proportion seems to have prevailed in England at the time of the Conquest, the
last is that which actually takes place” now since “only one-fifth part of the
people are […] employed in the cultivation of the land”… (op. cit., pp. 45-46).
“… so true it is that society turns every improvement but to
the increase of idleness”… (loc. cit., p. 48).>
Note. An original piece of work. Its real subject is the
modern system of national debt, as its title indicates.
Amongst other things he says:
“…the history of the last thirty years[l]
[…] has achieved no higher adventure than the turning of a few Jews into
gentlemen, and a few blockheads into political economists” (op. cit., pp.
66-67).
The funding system has one beneficial consequence although “the
ancient gentry of the land” are robbed “of a large portion of their property” in
order “to transfer it to these new fangled hidalgos as a reward for their skill
in the arts of fraud and peculation… If it encourage fraud and meanness;
if it clothe quackery and pretension in the garb of wisdom; if it turn a whole
people into a nation of jobbers … if it break down all the prejudices of rank
and birth to render money the only distinction among men … it destroys the
perpetuity of property…” (op. cit., pp. 51-52).
[See
Labour Defended against the Claims of Capital, Hodgskin 1825.]
3. Hodgskin
Labour Defended against the Claims of Capital; or, the Unproductiveness
of Capital Proved, By a Labourer, London, 1825. (With reference
to the Present Combinations amongst Journeymen.)
Thomas Hodgskin, Popular Political Economy. Four Lectures delivered
at the London Mechanics’ Institution, London, 1827.
The anonymous first work is also by Hodgskin. Whereas the pamphlets
mentioned previously and a series of similar ones have disappeared without
trace, these writings, especially the first one, made a considerable stir and
are still regarded as belonging to the most important works of English political
economy (see John Lalor, Money and Morals, London, 1852). We
shall consider each of these works in turn.
[a) The Thesis of the Unproductiveness of Capital as a Necessary Conclusion
from Ricardo’s Theory]
Labour Defended etc. As the title indicates, the author wishes
to prove the “unproductiveness of capital”.
Ricardo does not assert that capital is productive of value.
It only adds its own value to the product, and its own value depends on the
labour-time required for its reproduction. It only has value as
accumulated labour (or rather ||864|, materialised
labour) and it only adds this—its value—to the product in which it is embodied.
It is true that he is inconsistent when discussing
the general rate of profit. But this is precisely
the contradiction which his opponents attacked.
As far as the productivity of capital in relation to
use-value is concerned, this is construed by Smith, Ricardo and others,
and by political economists in general, as meaning nothing else than that
products of previous useful work serve anew as means of production, as objects
of labour, instruments of labour and means of subsistence for the workers.
The objective conditions of labour do not face the worker, as in the primitive
stages, as mere natural objects (as such, they are never capital), but as
natural objects already transformed by human activity. But in this sense
the word “capital” is quite superfluous and meaningless. Wheat is
nourishing not because it is capital but because it is wheat. The
use-value of wool derives from the fact that it is wool, not capital. In
the same way, the action of steam-powered machinery has nothing in common with
its existence as capital. It would do the same work if it were not
“capital” and if it belonged, not to the factory owner, but to the workers.
All these things serve in the real labour process because of the relationship
which exists between them as use-values—not as exchange-values and
still less as capital—and the labour which sets them in motion. Their
productivity in the real labour process, or rather the productivity of the
labour materialised in them, is due to their nature as objective conditions of
real labour and not to their
social existence as alienated, independent conditions which
confront the worker and are embodied in the capitalist, the master
over living labour. It is as wealth, as Hopkins (not our
Hodgskin) rightly says, and not as “net” wealth, as product and not as
“net” product, that they are here consumed and used. It is true that the
particular social form of these things in relation to labour and their real
determinateness as factors of the labour process are as confused and inseparably
interwoven with one another in the minds of the economists as they are in the
mind of the capitalist. Nevertheless, as soon as they analyse the labour
process, they are compelled to abandon the term capital completely and to speak
of material of labour, means of labour, and means of subsistence.
But the determinate form of the product as material, instrument and means of
subsistence of the worker expresses nothing but the relationship of these
objective conditions to labour; labour itself appears as the activity which
dominates them. It says however nothing at all about [the relationship of]
labour and capital, only about the relationship
of the purposeful activity of men to their own products
in the process of reproduction. They neither cease to be products of
labour nor mere objects which are at the disposal of labour. They merely
express the relationship in which labour appropriates the objective world which
it has created itself, at any rate in this form; but they do not by any means
express any other domination of these things over labour, apart from
the fact that activity must be appropriate to the material, otherwise it would
not be purposeful activity, labour.
One can only speak of the productivity of capital if one regards it
as the embodiment of definite social relations of production. But if it is
conceived in this way, then the historically transitory character of this
relationship becomes at once evident, and the general recognition of this fact
is incompatible with the continued existence of this relationship, which itself
creates the means for its abolition.
But the economists do not regard it [capital] as such a relationship because
they cannot admit its relative
character, and do not understand it either. They simply express in
theoretical terms the notions of the practical men who are engrossed in
capitalist production, dominated by it and interested in it.
In his polemic [with the bourgeois economists], Hodgskin himself starts out
from a standpoint which is economically narrow-minded. Insofar as they
[the economists] define capital as an eternal production relation, they reduce
it to the general relations of labour to its material conditions, relations
which are common to all modes of production and do not express the specific
nature of capital. Insofar as they hold that capital produces “value”, the
best of them and [especially] Ricardo, admit that it does not produce any value
which it has not received and constantly continues to receive from labour, since
the value of a product is determined by the labour-time necessary to reproduce
it, that is, its value is the result of living, present labour and not of past
labour. And as Ricardo emphasises, increase in the productivity of labour
is marked by the continuous devaluation of the products of past labour. On
the other hand, the economists continually mix up the definite, specific form in
which these things constitute capital with their nature as things and as simple
elements of every labour process. The mystification contained in
capital—as employer of labour—is not explained by them, but it is
constantly expressed by them unconsciously, for it is inseparable from the
material aspect of capital.
||867| The first pamphlet[m] draws the correct conclusions from Ricardo and reduces
surplus-value to surplus labour. This is in contrast to Ricardo’s
opponents and followers who continue to adhere to his confusion of surplus-value
with profit.
In opposition to them, the second pamphlet[n] defines relative surplus-value more
exactly as being dependent on the level of development of the productive power
of labour. Ricardo says the same thing, but he avoids the conclusion drawn
by the second pamphlet [that by Ravenstone], namely, that the increase in the
productive power of labour only increases capital, the wealth of others which
dominates labour.
Finally, the third pamphlet[o] bursts forth with the general statement, which is the
inevitable consequence of Ricardo’s presentation—that capital is
unproductive. This is in contrast to Torrens, Malthus and others,
who, taking one aspect of the Ricardian theory as their point of departure, turn
Ricardo’s statement that labour is the creator of value into the opposite—that
capital is the creator of value. The pamphlet, moreover, disputes the
statement—which recurs in all of them, from Smith to Malthus, especially in the
latter where it is elevated into an absolute dogma (ditto in the case of James
Mill)—that labour is absolutely dependent on the amount of capital available,
as this is the condition of its existence.
Pamphlet No. 1 ends with the statement:
“Wealth is disposable time, and nothing more”.[p]
[b) Polemic against the Ricardian Definition of Capital as Accumulated
Labour. The Concept of Coexisting Labour. Underestimation of the
Importance of Materialised Past Labour. Available Wealth in Relation to
the Movement of Production]
According to Hodgskin, circulating capital is nothing but the
juxtaposition of the different kinds of social labour (coexisting labour)
and accumulation is nothing but the amassing of the productive powers of social
labour, so that the accumulation of the skill and knowledge (scientific power)
of the workers themselves is the chief form of accumulation, and infinitely more
important than the accumulation—which goes hand in hand
with it and merely represents it—of the
existing objective conditions of this accumulated activity. These
objective conditions are only nominally accumulated and must be constantly
produced anew and consumed anew.
“… productive capital and skilled labour are […] one.” “Capital
and a labouring population are precisely synonymous” ( [Hodgskin, Labour
Defended against the Claims of Capital, London, 1825,] p. 33).
These are simply further elaborations of Galiani’s thesis:
“… The real wealth … is man” (Della Moneta, Custodi.
Parte Moderna, t. III, p. 229).
The whole objective world, the “world of commodities”, vanishes here as a
mere aspect, as the merely passing activity, constantly performed anew, of
socially producing men. Compare this “idealism” with the crude, material
fetishism into which the Ricardian theory develops in the writings “of this
incredible cobbler”, McCulloch, where not only the difference between man and
animal disappears but even the difference between a living organism and an
inanimate object. And then let them say that as against the lofty idealism
of bourgeois political economy, the proletarian opposition has been preaching a
crude materialism directed exclusively towards the satisfaction of coarse
appetites.
In his investigations into the productivity of capital, Hodgskin is remiss in
that he does not distinguish between how far it is a question of producing
use-values or exchange-values.
Further—but this has historical justification—he takes capital as it is
defined by the economists. On the one hand (insofar as it operates in the
real process of production) as a merely physical condition of labour, and
therefore of importance only as a material element of labour, and (in the
process of the production of value) nothing more than the quantity of labour
measured by time, that is, nothing different from this quantity of labour
itself. On the other hand, although in fact, insofar as it appears in the
real process of production, it is a mere name for, and re-christening of,
labour itself, it is represented as the power dominating and engendering labour,
as the basis of the productivity of labour and as wealth alien to labour.
And this without any intermediate links. This is how he found it.
And he counterposes the real aspect of economic development to this bourgeois
humbug.
“…capital is a sort of
cabalistic word, like church or state, or any other of those
general terms which are invented by those who fleece the rest of mankind to
conceal the hand that shears them” (Labour Defended etc., p.17).
In accordance with the tradition he found prevailing among the economists, he
distinguishes between circulating and fixed capital; circulating capital
moreover is described as that part which mainly consists of, or is used as,
means of subsistence for the workers.
It is maintained “that division of labour is a consequence of
previous accumulation of
capital”. But “the effects attributed to a stock of
commodities, under the name of circulating capital, are caused by
coexisting labour”(op. cit., pp. 8, 9).
Faced with the crude conception of the economists, it is quite correct to say
that “circulating capital” is only “the name” for “a stock of” certain
“commodities”. Since the economists have not analysed the specific social
relationship which is represented in the metamorphosis of commodities,
they can understand only the material aspect of circulating capital.
All the differentiations in capital arising from the circulation process
||868|—in fact the circulation process itself—are actually nothing but
the metamorphosis of commodities (determined by their relationship to
wage-labour as capital) as an aspect of the reproduction process.
Division of labour is, in one sense, nothing but
coexisting labour, that is, the coexistence of
different kinds of labour which are represented in
different kinds of products or rather commodities. The
division of labour in the capitalist sense, as the breaking down of the
particular labour which produces a definite commodity into a series of simple
and coordinated operations divided up amongst different workers, presupposes the
division of labour within society outside the workshop, as separation of
occupations. On the other hand, it [division of labour] increases it
[separation of occupations]. The product is increasingly produced as a
commodity in the strict sense of the word, its exchange-value becomes the more
independent of its immediate existence as use-value—in other words its
production becomes more and more independent of its consumption by the producers
and of its existence as use-value for the producers—the more one-sided it itself
becomes, and the greater the variety of commodities
for which it is exchanged, the greater the kinds of
use-values in which its exchange-value is expressed, and the larger the market
for it becomes. The more this happens, the more the product can be
produced as a commodity; therefore also on an increasingly large scale.
The producer’s indifference to the use-value of his product is expressed
quantitatively
in the amounts in which he produces it, which bear no relation to his own
consumption needs, even when he is at the same time a consumer of his own
product. The
division of labour within the workshop is one of the methods used in
this mass production and consequently in the production of the product
[as a commodity]. Thus the division of labour within the workshop is based
on the division of occupations in society.
The size of the market has two aspects. First, the mass of consumers,
their numbers. But secondly, also, the number of occupations which are
independent of one another. The latter is possible without the former.
For example, when spinning and weaving become divorced from “domestic” industry
and agriculture, all those engaged in agriculture become a market for spinners
and weavers. They likewise [form markets] for one another as a consequence
of the separation of their occupations. What the division of labour in
society presupposes above all, is that the different kinds of labour have become
independent of one another in such a way that their products confront one
another as commodities and must be exchanged, that is, undergo the metamorphosis
of commodities and stand in relation to one another as
commodities. (This is why in the Middle Ages, the towns
prohibited the spread of as many professions as possible to the countryside, not
merely for the purpose of preventing competition—the only aspect seen by Adam
Smith—but in order to create markets for themselves.) On the other hand,
the proper development of the division of labour presupposes a certain density
of population. The development of the division of labour in the workshop
depends even more on this density of population. This latter division is,
to a certain extent, a pre-condition for the former and in turn intensifies it
still further. It does this by splitting formerly correlated occupations
into separate and independent ones, also by differentiating and increasing the
indirect preliminary work they require; and as a result of the increase in both
production and the population and the freeing of capital and labour it creates
new wants and new modes of satisfying them.
Therefore when Hodgskin says “division of labour” is
the effect not of a stock of Commodities called circulating capital but
of “coexisting labour”, it would be tautologous if in this context he
understood by division of labour the separation of trades. It would only
mean that division of labour is the cause or the effect of the division of
labour. He can therefore only mean that division of labour within the
workshop depends on the separation of occupations, the social division of
labour, and is, in a certain sense, its effect.
It is not a stock of commodities which gives rise to this separation of
occupations and with it the division of labour in the workshop, but it is the
separation of occupations (and division of labour) that is manifested in
the stock of commodities, or rather in the fact that a
stock of products becomes a stock of commodities. (The
properties, the characteristic features of the capitalist mode of production
and therefore of capital itself insofar as it expresses a definite relation of
the producers to one another and to their products, are inevitably always
described by the economists as the properties of the objects.)
||869| If, however, “previous accumulation of
capital” is being discussed from an economic standpoint (see Turgot, Smith,
etc.) as a condition for the division of labour, then what is understood
by this is the previous concentration of a stock of commodities as
capital in the possession of the buyer of labour, since the kind of
co-operation characteristic of the division of labour presupposes a
conglomeration of
workers—consequently, accumulation of the means of subsistence necessary for
them while they are working—increased productivity of labour—consequently,
increase in the amount of raw materials, tools and auxiliary materials which
must be available in order that labour proceeds continuously, since it
constantly requires large amounts of these things—in short, of the objective
conditions of production on a large scale.
Here, accumulation of capital cannot mean increase in the amount of
means of subsistence, raw materials and instruments of labour as a condition
for the division of labour, for insofar as the accumulation of capital is
taken to mean this, it is a consequence of the division of labour, not its
pre-condition.
Similarly, accumulation of capital cannot here mean that means of
subsistence for the workers must be available in general before new necessaries
are reproduced, or that products of their labour must constitute the raw
material and means of
labour for the new production which they carry out.
For this is the pre-condition of labour in general and was just as true
before the development of the division of labour as it is after it.
On the one hand: if we consider the material element of
accumulation, it means nothing more than that the division of labour
requires the concentration of means of subsistence and means of labour at
particular points, whereas formerly these were scattered and dispersed as long
as the workers in individual trades—which could not have been very numerous
under these conditions—themselves carried out all the manifold and consecutive
operations required for the production of one or more products. Not an
increase in absolute
terms is presupposed, but concentration, the gathering together of more
at a given point, and of
relatively more [means of labour] compared with the numbers of workers
brought together there. More flax, for example, [is used] by the workers
in manufacture (in proportion to their numbers) than the relative amount of flax
required in proportion to all the peasants—both men and women—who used to spin
flax as a sideline. Hence, conglomeration of workers,
concentration of raw materials, instruments, and means of subsistence.
On the other hand: if we consider the historical foundation on which
this process develops, from which manufacture arises, the industrial mode of
production whose characteristic feature is the division of labour, then this
concentration can only take place in the form that these workers are assembled
together as wage-workers, that is, as workers who must sell their labour-power
because their conditions of labour confront them as alien property, as an
independent, alien force. This implies that these conditions of labour
confront them as capital; in other words, these means of subsistence
and means of labour (or, what amounts to the same thing, the disposal of them
through the intermediary of money) are in the hands of individual owners of
money or of commodities, who, as a result, become capitalists.
The loss of the conditions of labour by the workers is expressed in the fact
that these conditions become independent as capital or as things at the disposal
of the capitalists.
Thus primitive accumulation, as I have already shown, means nothing but the
separation of labour and the worker from the conditions of labour, which
confront him as independent forces. The course of history shows that this
separation is a factor in social development. Once capital exists, the
capitalist mode of
production itself evolves in such a way that it maintains
and reproduces this separation on a constantly increasing scale until the
historical reversal takes place.
It is not the ownership of money which makes the capitalist a capitalist.
For money to be transformed into capital, the prerequisites for capitalist
production must exist, whose first historical presupposition is that separation.
The separation, and therefore the existence of the means of labour as capital,
is given in capitalist production; this separation which constantly reproduces
itself and expands, is the foundation of production.
Accumulation by means of the reconversion of profit, or surplus
product, into capital now becomes a continuous process as a result of which the
increased products of labour which are at the same time its objective
conditions, conditions of reproduction, continuously confront labour as
capital, i.e., as forces—personified in the capitalist—which are alienated
from Labour and dominate it. Consequently, it becomes a specific function
of the capitalist to accumulate, that is, to reconvert a part of the surplus
product into conditions of labour. And the stupid economist concludes from
this that if this operation did not proceed in this contradictory, specific way,
it could not take place at all. Reproduction on an extended scale is
inseparably connected in his mind with accumulation, the capitalist
form of this reproduction.
||870| Accumulation merely presents as a
continuous process what in primitive accumulation appears as a
distinct historical process, as the process of the emergence of capital and as a
transition from one mode of production to another.
The economists, caught as they are in the toils of the notions proper to the
agents of the capitalist mode of production, advance a double quid pro quo,
each side of which depends on the other.
On the one hand, they transform capital from a relationship into a thing, a
stock of commodities (already forgetting that commodities themselves are not
things) which, insofar as they serve as conditions of production for new labour,
are called capital and, with regard to their mode of reproduction, are called
circulating capital.
On the other hand, they transform things into capital, that is, they consider
the social relationship which is represented in them and through them as an
attribute which belongs to the thing as such as soon as it enters as an element
into the labour process or the technological process.
[On the one hand,] the concentration
in the hands of non-workers of raw materials and of the disposition over the
means of subsistence, i.e., the powers dominating labour, the
preliminary condition for the division of labour (later on, the
division of labour increases not only concentration, but also the amount
[available for] concentration by increasing the productivity of labour), in
other words the preliminary accumulation of capital
as the condition for the division of labour therefore means for them the
augmentation or concentration (they do not differentiate between the two) of
means of subsistence and means of labour.
On the other hand, these necessaries and means of labour would not
operate as objective conditions of production if these things did not possess
the attribute of being capital, if the product of labour, the condition of
labour, did not absorb labour itself; [if] past labour did not absorb living
labour, and if these things did not belong to them selves or by proxy to the
capitalist instead of to the worker.
As if the division of labour was not just as possible if its conditions
belonged to the associated workers (although historically it could not at first
appear in this form, but can only achieve it as a result of capitalist
production) and were regarded by the latter as their own products and the
material elements of their own activity, which they are by their very nature.
Furthermore, because in the capitalist mode of production capital
appropriates the surplus product of the worker, consequently, because it has
appropriated the products of labour and these now confront the worker in
the form of capital, it is clear that the conversion of the surplus product into
conditions of labour can only be initiated by the capitalist and only in the
form that he turns the products of labour—which he has appropriated without any
equivalent—into means of production of new labour performed without receiving an
equivalent. Consequently, the extension of reproduction appears as the
transformation of profit into capital and as a saving
by the capitalist who, instead of consuming the surplus product which he has
acquired gratis, converts it anew into a means of exploitation, but is able to
do this only insofar as he converts the surplus product again into productive
capital; this entails the conversion of surplus product into means of labour.
As a result, the economists conclude that the surplus product cannot serve as an
element of new production if it has not been transformed previously
from the product of the worker into the property of his
employer in order to serve as capital once again and to repeat the old process
of exploitation. The more inferior economists add to this the idea of
hoarding and the accumulation of treasure. Even the better ones—Ricardo,
for example—transfer the notion of renunciation from the hoarder to the
capitalist.
The economists do not conceive capital as a relation. They cannot do so
without at the same time conceiving it as a historically transitory, i.e., a
relative—not an absolute—form of production. Hodgskin himself does not
share this concept. Insofar as it justifies capital it does not justify
its justification by the economists, but on the contrary refutes it. Thus
Hodgskin is not concerned in all this.
As far as matters stood between him and the economists, the kind of polemic
he had to wage seemed to be mapped out beforehand and quite simple. To put
it simply, he had to vindicate the one aspect which the economists elaborate
“scientifically” against the fetishistic conception they accept without
thinking, naïvely and unconsciously from the capitalist way of looking at
things.
The utilisation of the products of previous labour, of labour in general, as
materials, tools, means of subsistence, is necessary if the worker wants to use
his products for new production. This particular mode of consumption of
his products is productive. But what on earth has this kind of
utilisation, this mode of consumption of his product, to do with the domination
of his product over him, with its existence as capital, with the concentration
||870a| in the hands of individual capitalists of the right to dispose of
raw materials and means of subsistence and the exclusion of the workers from
ownership of their products? What has it to do with the fact that first of
all they have to hand over their product gratis to a third party in order to buy
it back again with their own labour and, what is more, they have to give him
more labour in exchange than is contained in the product and thus have to create
more surplus product for him?
Past labour exists here in two forms. [In one] as product,
use-value. The process of production requires that the workers
consume one portion of this product [as means of subsistence, and use] another
portion as raw materials and instruments of labour. This applies also to
the technological process and merely demonstrates the relations that have to
exist in industrial production between the workers and the products of
their own labour,
their own products, in order to turn them into means of
production.
Or, [past labour exists as] value. This only shows that the
value of their new product represents not only their present, but also their
past labour, and that by increasing it they retain the old value, because they
increase it.
The claim put forward by the capitalist has nothing to do with this process
as such. It is true that he has appropriated the products of labour, of
past labour, and that he therefore possesses a means for acquiring new products
and living labour. This, however, is precisely the kind of procedure
against which protests are made. The preliminary concentration and
accumulation necessary for the “division of labour” must not take the form of
accumulation of capital. It does not follow that because this
[concentration] is necessary, the capitalist must inevitably have the disposal
of the conditions of labour of today created by the labour of yesterday.
If accumulation of capital is supposed to be nothing but accumulated labour, it
by no means implies that accumulation of other people’s labour has to take
place.
Hodgskin however does not follow this simple path, and at first this seems
strange. In his polemic against the productivity of capital, to begin
with, against circulating and then even more, against fixed capital, he seems to
oppose or to reject the importance of past labour, or of its
product for the reproduction process as a condition of new labour.
From this follows the importance of past labour embodied in products for labour
as present έύέργεια[q] Why this change?
Since the economists identify past labour with
capital—past labour being understood in this case not only in the sense
of concrete labour embodied in the product, but also in the sense of social
labour, materialised labour-time—it is understandable that they, the Pindars of
capital, emphasise the objective
elements of production and overestimate their importance as against the
subjective element, living, immediate labour. For them, labour only
becomes efficacious when it becomes capital and confronts itself, the
passive element confronting its active counterpart. The producer is
therefore controlled by the product, the subject by the object, labour which is
being embodied by labour embodied in an object, etc. In all these
conceptions, past labour appears not merely as an objective factor of living
labour, subsumed
by it, but vice versa; not as an element of the power of
living labour, but as a power over this labour. The economists ascribe a
false importance to the material factors of labour compared with labour itself
in order to have also a technological justification for the
specific social form, i.e., the capitalist form, in which the
relationship of labour to the conditions of labour is turned upside-down, so
that it is not the worker who makes use of the conditions of labour, but the
conditions of labour which make use of the worker. It is for this
reason that Hodgskin asserts on the contrary that this physical factor,
that is, the entire material wealth, is quite unimportant compared with the
living process of production and that, in fact, this wealth has no value in
itself, but only insofar as it is a factor in the living production process.
In doing so, he underestimates somewhat the value which the labour of the past
has for the labour of the present, but in opposing economic fetishism this is
quite all right.
If in capitalist production—hence in political economy, its theoretical
expression—past labour were met with only as a pedestal etc. created by labour
itself, then such a controversial issue would not have arisen. It only
exists because in the real life of capitalist production, as well as in its
theory, materialised labour appears as a contradiction to itself, to
living labour. In exactly the same way in religious reasoning,
the product of thought not only claims but exercises domination over thought
itself. |870a|| .
||865| The proposition
“… the effects attributed to a
stock of commodities, under the name of circulating capital, are caused
by coexisting labour” (op. cit., p. 9),
means first of all:
the simultaneous coexistence of living labour brings about a large part of
the effects which are attributed to the product of previous labour called
circulating capital.
For example, a part of circulating capital consists of the stock of means of
subsistence which the capitalist is supposed to have stored up to support the
labourer while working.
The formation of a reserve stock is by no means a feature
peculiar to capitalist production although, since under it production and
consumption are greater than ever before, the amount of commodities on the
market—the amount of commodities in the sphere of circulation—is likewise
greater than ever before. Here memories of hoarding, of accumulation
of treasure by hoarders are still discernible.
The consumption fund must be disregarded first of all
because we are speaking here of capital and of industrial production. What
has reached the sphere of individual consumption, whether it is consumed more
quickly or more slowly, has ceased to be capital. (Although it can be
partly reconverted into capital, for instance, houses, parks, crockery.)
“Do all the capitalists of Europe possess at this moment one
week’s food and clothing for all the labourers they employ? Let us first
examine the question as to food. One portion of the food of the people is
bread, which is never prepared till within a few hours of the time when it
is eaten… The produce […] of the baker, cannot be stored up. In no
case can the material of bread, whether it exist as corn or flour, be
preserved without continual labour. […] His conviction[r] that he will obtain bread when he requires it, and his
master’s conviction that the money he pays him will enable him to obtain it,
arise simply from the fact that the bread has always been obtained when
required” (loc. cit., p. 10).
“Another article of the labourer’s food is milk, and milk is
manufactured … twice a day. If it be said that the cattle to supply it are
already there;—why the answer is, they require
constant attention and constant labour, and their food, through the greater
part of the year, is of daily growth. The fields in which they
pasture, require the hand of man. […] The meat, also […] it cannot be
stored up, for it begins instantly to deteriorate after it is brought to market”
(loc. cit., p. 10).
Because of moths, even of clothing “… only a
very small stock is ever prepared, compared to the general consumption”
(loc. cit., p. 11).
“Mr. Mill says, and says justly, ‘what is annually produced is
annually consumed’, so that, in fact, to enable men to carry on all those
operations which extend beyond a year, there cannot be any stock of
commodities stored up. Those who undertake them must rely, therefore,
not on any commodities already created, but that other men will labour
and produce what they are to subsist on till their own products are completed.
Thus, should the labourer admit that some accumulation of circulating capital is
necessary for operations terminated within the year […] it is plain, that in all
operations which extend beyond a year, the labourer does not, and he cannot,
rely on accumulated capital” (loc. cit., p. 12).
“If we duly consider the number and importance of those
wealth-producing operations which are not completed within the year, and the
numberless products of daily labour, necessary to subsistence, which are
consumed as soon as produced, we shall […] be sensible that the success and
productive power of every different species of labour is at all
times more dependent on the coexisting productive
labour of other men than on any
accumulation of circulating capital” (loc. cit., p. 13).
“… it is by the command
the capitalist possesses over the labour of some men, not by his
possessing a stock of commodities, that he is enabled to
support and consequently employ
other labourers” (loc. cit., p. 14).
“… the only thing which can be said to be stored up or
previously prepared, is the skill of the labourer” (loc. cit., p. 12).
“ …all the effects usually attributed to
accumulation of circulating capital are derived from the accumulation and
storing up of skilled labour; and […] this most important operation is
performed, as far as the great mass of the labourers is concerned without any
circulating capital whatever” (loc. cit., p. 13).
“… the number of labourers must at all times depend on the
quantity of circulating capital; or, as I should say, on the quantity of
the
products of coexisting labour, which labourers are allowed to consume…”
(op. cit., p. 20).
||866| “Circulating capital […] is created only
for consumption; while fixed capital […] is made, not to be consumed, but to aid
the labourer in producing those things which are to be consumed” (loc. cit., p.
19).
Thus first of all:
“… the success and productive power of every different species
of labour is at all times more dependent on the coexisting productive
labour of other men than on any accumulation of circulating capital” [op. cit.,
p. 13], that is, of “commodities already created”. These “already created
commodities” confront “the products of coexisting labour”.
{The part of capital which consists of instruments and materials of labour is
as “commodities already created” always a pre-condition in each
particular branch of production. It is impossible to spin cotton
which has not yet been produced, to operate spindles which have yet to be
manufactured, or to burn coal which has not yet been brought up from the mine.
These always enter the [production] process as forms of existence of
previous labour. Existing labour thus depends on antecedent labour
and not only on coexisting labour, although this antecedent labour, whether in
the form of means of labour or materials of labour, can only be of any use
(productive use) when it is in contact with living labour as a material element
of it. Only as an element of industrial consumption, i.e., consumption by
labour.
But when considering circulation and the reproduction process, we have seen
that it is only possible to reproduce the commodity after it is finished and
converted into money, because simultaneously all its elements have been
produced and reproduced by means of coexisting labour.
A twofold progression takes place in production. Cotton, for example,
advances from one phase of production to another. It is produced first of
all as raw material, then it is subjected to a number of operations until it is
fit to be exported or, if it is further worked up in the same country, it is
handed over to a spinner. It then goes on from the spinner to the weaver
and from the weaver to the bleacher, dyer, finisher, and thence to
various workshops where it is worked up for definite
uses, i.e., articles of clothing, bed-linen, etc. Finally it leaves the
last producer for the consumer and enters into individual consumption if it does
not enter into industrial consumption as means (not material) of labour.
But whether it is to be consumed industrially or individually, it has acquired
its final form as use-value. What emerges from one sphere of production as
a product enters another as a condition of production, and in this way, goes
through many successive phases until it receives its last finish as use-value.
Here previous labour appears continually as the condition for existing labour.
Simultaneously, however, while the product is advancing in this way
from one phase to another, while it is undergoing this real metamorphosis,
production is being carried on at every stage. While the weaver spins the
yarn, the spinner is simultaneously spinning cotton, and fresh quantities of raw
cotton are in the process of production.
Since the continuous, constantly repeated process of production is, at the
same time, a process of reproduction, it is therefore equally dependent on the
coexisting labour which produces the various phases of the product
simultaneously, while the product is passing through metamorphosis from one
phase to another. [Raw] cotton, yarn, fabric, are not only produced one
after the other and from one another, but they are produced and reproduced
simultaneously, alongside one another. What appears as the effect
of antecedent labour, if one considers the production process of the individual
commodity, presents itself at the same time as the effect of coexisting labour,
if one considers the reproduction process of the commodity, that is, if
one considers this production process in its continuous motion and in the
entirety of its conditions, and not merely an isolated action or a limited part
of it. There exists not only a cycle comprising various phases, but all
the phases of the commodity are simultaneously produced in the various spheres
and branches of production. If the same peasant just plants flax, then
spins it, then weaves it, these operations are performed in succession, but not
simultaneously as the mode of production based on the division of labour within
society presupposes.
No matter what phase of the production process of an individual commodity is
considered, the antecedent labour only acquires significance as a result of the
living labour which it provides with the necessary conditions of production.
On the other
hand, however, these conditions of production without
which living labour cannot realise itself always appear as the result of
antecedent labour. Thus the co-operating labour of the contributing
branches of labour always appears as a passive factor and, as such a passive
factor, it is a pre-condition. The economists emphasise this aspect.
In production and circulation, on the other hand, the mediating social labour on
which the [production] process of the commodity in each particular phase depends
and by which it is determined, appears as present, coexisting, contemporaneous
labour. The early forms of the commodity and its successive or completed
forms are produced simultaneously. Unless this happened it would not be
possible, after it has undergone its real metamorphosis, to reconvert it from
money into its conditions of existence. ||870b| A commodity is thus the product of antecedent
labour only insofar as it is the product of contemporaneous living labour.
From the capitalist point of view, therefore, all material wealth appears only
as a fleeting aspect of the flow of production as a whole, which includes the
process of circulation.}
[c)] So-called Accumulation as a Mere Phenomenon of Circulation.
(Stock, etc.—Circulation Reservoirs)
Hodgskin examines only one of the constituent parts of circulating capital.
One part of circulating capital is however continuously converted into fixed
capital and auxiliary materials and only the other part is converted into
articles of consumption. Moreover, even that part of circulating capital
which is ultimately transformed into commodities intended for individual
consumption always exists, alongside the final form in which it emerges from the
finishing phase as end product, simultaneously in the earlier phases of
production in its rudimentary forms—as raw material or semi-manufactured goods,
removed in various degrees from the final form of the product—in which it cannot
as yet enter into consumption.
The problem Hodgskin is concerned with is: what is the relation of the
present labour performed by the worker for the capitalist to the labour embodied
in his articles of consumption, the labour contained in those articles on which
his wages are spent, which, in actual fact, are the use-values of which variable
capital consists? It is admitted that the worker cannot labour without
finding these articles ready for consumption. And that is why the
economists say that circulating capital—the previous
labour, commodities already created which the capitalist has stored up—is the
condition for labour and, amongst other things, also the condition for the
division of labour.
When the conditions of production, and especially circulating capital in
Hodgskin’s sense of the term, are being discussed, it is usual to declare that
the capitalist must have accumulated the food which the worker has to consume
before his new commodity is finished, that is, while he works, while the
commodity he produces is only in statu nascendi.[s] This is shot through with the notion that the
capitalist either gathers things like a hoarder or that he stores up a
supply of food like the bees their honey.
This however is merely a modus loquendi.[t]
First of all, we are not speaking here of the shopkeepers who sell means of
subsistence. These must naturally have a full stock in trade. Their
stores, shops, etc. are simply reservoirs in which the various commodities are
stored once they are ready for circulation. This kind of storing is merely
an interim period in which the commodity remains until it leaves the
sphere of circulation and enters that of consumption. It is its mode of
existence as a commodity on the market. Strictly speaking, as a
commodity it exists only in this form. It does not affect the matter
whether, instead of being in the possession of the first seller (the producer),
the commodity is in the possession of the third or fourth and finally passes
into the possession of the seller who sells it to the real consumer. It
merely means that, in the intermediate stage, exchange of capital (really of
capital plus profit, for the producer sells not only the capital in the
commodity but also the profit made on the capital) for capital is taking place,
and in the last stage exchange of capital for revenue (provided the commodity is
intended not for industrial but for individual consumption, as is assumed here).
The commodity which is a finished use-value and marketable, enters the market
as a commodity, in the phase of circulation; all commodities enter this phase
when they undergo their first metamorphosis, the transformation into money.
If this is called “storing up” then it means nothing more than “circulation” or
the existence of commodities as commodities. This kind of “storing” is
exactly the opposite of treasure-hoarding, the aim of
which is to retain commodities permanently in the form in
which they are capable of entering into circulation, and it achieves this only
by withdrawing commodities in the form of money from circulation. If
production, and therefore also consumption, is varied and on a mass scale, then
a greater quantity of the most diverse commodities will be found continually at
this stopping place, at this
intermediate station, in a word, in circulation or on the market.
Regarded from the standpoint of
quantity, storing on a large scale in this context means nothing more
than production and consumption on a large scale.
The stop made by the commodities, their sojourn at this
stage of the process, their presence on the market instead of in the mill or in
a private house (as articles of consumption) or in the shop or the store of the
shopkeeper, is only ||871| a tiny fraction of time
in their life-process. The immobile, independent existence of this world
of commodities, of things, is only illusory. The station is always full,
but always full of different travellers. The same commodities (commodities
of the same kind) are constantly produced anew in the sphere of production,
available on the market and absorbed in consumption. Not the identical
commodities, but commodities of the same type, can always be found in these
three stages simultaneously. If the intermediate stage is
prolonged so that the commodities which emerge anew from the sphere of
production find the market still occupied by the old ones, then it becomes
overcrowded, a stoppage occurs, the market is glutted, the commodities decline
in value, there is
over-production. Where, therefore, the intermediate stage of
circulation acquires independent existence so that the flow of the stream is not
merely slowed down, where the existence of the commodities in the circulation
phase appears as storing up, then this is not brought about by a free
act on the part of the producer, it is not an aim or an immanent aspect of
production, any more than the flow of blood to the head leading to apoplexy is
an immanent aspect of the circulation of the blood. Capital as
commodity capital (and this is the form in which it appears in the
circulation phase, on the market) must not become stationary, it must only
constitute a pause in the movement. Otherwise the reproduction process is
interrupted and the whole mechanism is thrown into confusion. This
materialised wealth which is concentrated at a few points is—and can only
be—very small in comparison to the continuous stream of production and
consumption. Wealth, therefore, according to Smith, is “the annual”
reproduction. It is not, that is to say, something
out of the dim past. It is always something which emerges from yesterday.
lf, on the other hand, reproduction were to stagnate due to some disturbances or
others, then the stores etc. would soon empty, there would be shortages and it
would soon be evident that the permanency which the existing wealth appears to
possess, is only the permanency of its being replaced, of its reproduction, that
it is a continuous materialisation of social labour.
The movement C—M—C also takes place in the transactions of the shopkeeper.
Insofar as he makes a “profit”, it is a matter which does not concern us here.
He sells goods and buys the same goods (the same type of goods) over again.
He sells them to the consumer and buys them again from the producer. Here
the same (type of) commodity is converted perpetually into money and money back
again continuously into the same commodity. This movement, however, simply
represents continuous reproduction, continuous production and consumption, for
reproduction includes consumption. (The commodity must be sold, must reach
the sphere of consumption in order that it can be reproduced.) It must be
accepted as a use-value. (For C—M for the seller is M—C for the buyer,
that is, the conversion of money into a commodity as use-value.) The
reproduction process, since it is a unity of circulation and production,
includes consumption, which is itself an aspect of circulation.
Consumption is itself both an aspect and a condition of the reproduction
process. If one considers the process in its entirety, the shopkeeper, in
fact, pays the producer of the commodities with the same sum of money as the
consumer pays him when he buys from him. He represents the consumer in his
dealings with the producer and the producer in his dealings with the consumer.
He is both seller and buyer of the same commodity. The money with which he
pays is, in fact, considered from a purely formal standpoint, the final
metamorphosis of the consumer’s commodity. The latter transforms his money
into the commodity as a use-value. The passing of the money into the
shopkeeper’s hands thus signifies the consumption of the commodity or,
considered formally, the transition of the commodity from circulation into
consumption. Insofar as he buys again from the producer with the money,
this constitutes the first metamorphosis of the producer’s commodity and
signifies the transition of the commodity into the intermediate stage,
where it remains as a
commodity in the sphere of circulation. C—M—C, insofar as it
concerns the transformation of
the commodity into the consumer’s money and the
transformation back again of the money, whose owner is now the shopkeeper, into
the same commodity (a commodity of the same kind), expresses merely the
constant passing over of commodities into consumption, for the vacuum left
by the commodity reaching the sphere of consumption must be filled by the
commodity emerging from the production process and now entering this stage.
||872| The period during which the commodity
stays in circulation and is replaced by new commodities naturally depends
also on the length of time in which the commodities remain in the production
sphere, that is, on the duration of their reproduction time, and varies in
accordance with their different length. For example, the reproduction of
corn requires a year. The corn harvested in the autumn, for example, of
1862 (insofar as it is not used again for seed) must suffice for the whole
coming year—until autumn 1863. It is thrown all at once into circulation
(it is already in circulation when it is placed in the farmers’ granaries) and
absorbed in the various reservoirs of circulation—storehouses, corn merchants,
millers, etc. These reservoirs serve as channels both for the commodities
issuing from production and those going to the consumer. As long as the
commodities remain in one of them, they are commodities and are
therefore on the market, in circulation. They are withdrawn only
piecemeal, in small quantities, by the annual consumption. The
replacement, the stream of new commodities which are to displace them, arrives
only in the following year. Thus these reservoirs are only
depleted gradually, in the measure that their replacements move forward.
If there is a surplus and if the new harvest is above the average, then a
stoppage takes place. The space which these particular commodities were to
have occupied in the market is overstocked. In order to permit the whole
quantity to find a place on the market, the price of the commodities is reduced,
and this causes them to move again. If the total quantity of use-values is
too large, they accommodate themselves to the space they have to occupy by a
reduction of their
prices. If the quantity is too small, it is expanded by an
increase of their prices.
On the other hand, commodities which quickly deteriorate as use-values remain
only for a very short time in the reservoirs of circulation. The period of
time during which they have to be converted into money and reproduced, is
prescribed by the nature of their use-value which, if it is not consumed daily
or almost daily, is spoilt and consequently ceases to be a commodity.
For exchange-value along with its basis, use-value,
disappears provided the disappearance of use-value is not
itself an act of production.
In general, it is clear that although in absolute terms the
quantity of the commodities which have been stored up in the reservoirs of
circulation increases as a result of the development of industry, because
production and consumption increase, this same quantity represents a decrease in
comparison with the total annual production and consumption. The
transition of commodities from circulation to consumption takes place more
rapidly. And for the following reasons. The speed of reproduction
increases:
1) When the commodity passes rapidly through its various production phases,
that is, when each production phase of the production process is reduced in
length; this is due to the fact that the labour-time necessary to produce the
commodity in each one of its forms is reduced, this is a result, therefore, of
the development of the division of labour, use of machinery, application of
chemical processes, etc. <The development of chemistry makes it possible
to speed up the transition of commodities from one state of aggregation to
another, their combination with other material which, for instance, occurs in
dyeing, their separation from [other] substances as in bleaching; in short, both
[modifications in] the form of the same substance (its state of aggregation) as
well as changes to be brought about in the substance, are artificially
accelerated quite apart from the fact, that for vegetative and organic
reproduction, plants, animals, etc., are supplied with cheaper substances, that
is, substances which cost less labour-time.>
2) Partly as a result of the combination of various branches of industry,
that is, the establishment of centres of production for particular industrial
branches, [partly] through the development of means of communication,
the commodity proceeds rapidly from one phase to another; in other words, the
interim period, the interval during which the commodity remains in the
intermediate station between one production phase and another is reduced, that
is, the
transition from one phase of production to another is shortened.
3) This whole development—the shortening both of the various phases of the
production process and of the transition from one phase to another—presupposes
production on a large scale, mass production and, at the same time, production
based on
a large amount of constant capital, especially fixed
capital; [it requires] therefore a continuous flow of production. But not
in the sense in which we have earlier considered the flow, that is, not as the
closing of and overlapping of the separate production phases, but in the sense
that there are no deliberate breaks in production. These occur as
long as work is done to order, as in ||873| the
handicrafts, and continue even in manufacture properly so-called (insofar as
this has not been reshaped by large-scale industry). In modern industry,
however, work is carried out on the scale allowed by the capital. This
process does not wait on demand, but is a function of capital. Capital
works on the same scale continuously (if one disregards accumulation or
expansion) and constantly develops and extends the productive forces.
Production is therefore not only rapid, so that the commodity quickly
acquires the form in which it is suitable for circulation, but it is continuous.
Production here appears only as constant reproduction and at the same time it
takes place on a mass scale.
Thus if the commodities remain in the circulation reservoirs for a long
time—if they accumulate there—then they will soon glut them as a result of the
speed with which the waves of production follow one another and the huge amount
of goods which they deposit continuously in the reservoirs. It is in this
sense that
Corbet, for example, says the market is always
overstocked. But the same circumstances which produce this speed and mass
scale of reproduction likewise reduce the necessity for the accumulation of
commodities in the reservoirs. In part—insofar as it is concerned with
industrial consumption—this is already implied by the close succession of
the production phases which the commodity itself or its ingredients have to
undergo. If coal is produced daily on a mass scale and brought to the
manufacturer’s door by railways, steamships, etc., he does not need to have a
stock of coal, or at most only a very small one; or, what amounts to the same
thing, if a merchant acts as an intermediary, he only needs to keep a small
amount of stock over and above the amount he sells daily and which is daily
delivered to him. The same applies to yarn, iron, etc. But apart
from
industrial consumption, in which the stock of commodities (that is, the
stock of the ingredients of commodities) must decline in this way, the
shopkeeper likewise enjoys the benefits of the speed of communications first of
all, and secondly, the certainty of a continuous and rapid renewal and delivery.
Although his stock of commodities
may grow in size, each element of it will remain in his
reservoir, in a state of transition, for a shorter period of time. In
relation to the total amount of commodities which he sells, that is, in relation
to the scale of both production and consumption, the stock of commodities which
he accumulates and keeps in store, will be small. It is
different in the less developed stages of production where reproduction proceeds
slowly—where therefore more commodities must remain in the circulation
reservoirs—the means of transport are slow, the communications difficult and, as
a consequence, the
renewal of stock can be interrupted and a great deal of time elapses as
a result between the emptying and the refilling of the reservoir—that is, the
renewal
of the stock in hand. The position is then similar to that of products
whose reproduction takes place yearly or half-yearly, in short in more or less
prolonged periods of time, owing to the nature of their use-values.
<For example, cotton is an illustration of how transport and communications
affect the emptying of the reservoir. Since ships continually ply between
Liverpool and the United States—speed of communications is one factor,
continuity another—all the cotton supply is not shipped at once. It comes
on to the market gradually (the producer likewise does not want to flood the
market all at once). It lies at the docks in Liverpool, that is, already
in a kind of circulation reservoir, but not in such quantities—in relation to
the total consumption of the article—as would be required if the ship from
America arrived only once or twice a year, after a journey of six months.
The cotton manufacturer in Manchester and other places stocks his warehouse
roughly in accordance with his immediate consumption needs, since the electric
telegraph and the railway make the transfer from Liverpool to Manchester
possible at a moment’s notice.>
Special filling of the reservoirs—insofar as this is not due to the
overstocking of the market, which can happen much more easily in these
circumstances than under archaically slow conditions—occurs only for speculative
reasons and merely in exceptional cases because of a real or suspected fall or
rise of prices. Regarding this relative decline in stock, that
is, the commodities which are in circulation, compared with the amount of
production and consumption, see Lalor, The Economist, Corbet (give the
corresponding quotations
||874| after Hodgskin).
Sismondi wrongly saw something lamentable in all this (his writings to
be looked up as well).
(On the other hand, there is indeed a continuous
extension of the market and in the degree that the
interval of time decreases in which the commodity remains on the
market, its flow in space increases, that is, the market expands
spatially, and the periphery in relation to the centre, the production sphere of
the commodity, is circumscribed by a constantly extending radius.)
The fact that consumption lives from hand to mouth, changes its linen and its
coat as rapidly as it does its opinions and does not wear the same coat ten
years running, etc. is connected with the speed of reproduction, or is another
expression of it. To an increasing extent consumption—even of articles
where this is not demanded by the nature of their use-value—takes place almost
simultaneously with production and becomes therefore more and more dependent on
the present, coexisting labour (since it is, in fact, exchange of coexisting
labour). This takes place in the same degree in which past labour becomes
an ever more important factor of production, even though this past itself is
after all a very recent and only relative one.
(The following example demonstrates how closely the keeping of a stock is
linked with deficiencies of production. As long as it is difficult to keep
cattle throughout the winter, there is no fresh meat in winter. As soon as
stock-farming is able to overcome this difficulty, the stock previously
made up of substitutes for fresh meat—pickled or smoked varieties—ceases of
itself.)
The product only becomes a commodity where it enters into circulation.
The production of goods as commodities, hence circulation, expands enormously as
a result of capitalist production for the following reasons:
1. Production takes place on a large scale, the quantity,
the huge amounts produced, therefore, do not stand in any kind of
quantitative relationship to the producer’s needs [of his own product]; in fact
it is pure chance whether he consumes any, even a small part of his own
product. He only consumes his own product on a mass scale where he
produces some of the ingredients of his own capital. On the other hand, in
the earlier stages [of economic development] only those products which exceed
the amount required by the producer himself become commodities or, at any rate,
this is mainly the case.
2. The narrow range of goods produced [stands] in inverse
ratio to the increased variety of needs. This is due to previously
combined branches of production becoming increasingly separated and
independent—in short, to increasing division of labour
within society—a contributing factor is the establishment
of new branches of production and the increasing variety of commodities
produced. ([To be inserted] at the end, after Hodgskin, also Wakefield
about this.) This increased variety and differentiation of commodities
arises in two ways. The different phases of one and the same product,
as well as the auxiliary operations (that is, the labour connected with various
constituent parts, etc.) are separated and become different branches of
production, independent of one another; or various phases of one product
become
different commodities. But secondly, owing to labour and capital
(or labour and surplus product) becoming free; on the other hand, to the
discovery of new practical applications of the same use-value, either because
new needs arise as a result of the modification of No. 1 (for example, the need
for more rapid and universal means of transport and communication arising with
the application of steam in industry) and therefore new means of satisfying
them, or new possibilities of utilising the same use-value are discovered, or
new substances or new methods (plastic-galvanisation, for instance) for treating
well-known substance in different ways.
All this amounts to the following: successive phases or states
of one product are converted into separate commodities. New
products or new values in use are created and become commodities.
3. Transformation of the majority of the population
who formerly consumed a mass of products in naturalibus[u] into
wage-workers.
4. Transformation of the tenant farmer into an industrial
capitalist <and with it the conversion of rent into money rent and
generally of all payments in kind (taxes, etc., rent) into money payments>.
In general—industrial exploitation of the land with the result that it is no
longer confined to its own muck-heap as previously, but that both its chemical
and mechanical conditions of production—even seeds, fertilisers, cattle, etc.
are subjected to the process of exchange.
5. Mobilisation of a mass of previously “inalienable” possessions
by conversion into commodities and the creation of forms of property which
only exist in negotiable papers. On the one hand, alienation of landed
property (the lack of property of the
masses causes them, for example, to regard the dwelling
in which they live as a commodity). [On the other hand,] railway shares,
in short, all kinds of shares.
[d) Hodgskin’s Polemic Against the conception that the Capitalists “store
Up” Means of Subsistence for the Workers. His Failure to Understand the
Real causes of the Fetishism of Capital]
||875| Back again to Hodgskin now.
It is obvious that by “storing up” [means of subsistence] for
the workers by the capitalists one cannot understand that commodities which are
passing from production into consumption are in the circulation reservoirs, in
the circulation system, on the market. This would mean that the products
circulate for the benefit of the worker and become commodities
for his sake; and that in general, the production of products as commodities is
undertaken for his sake.
The worker shares with every other [commodity owner the need] to transform
the commodity he sells—which in actual fact, though not in form, is his
labour—at first into money in order to convert the money back again into
commodities which he can consume. It is perfectly obvious that [no]
division of labour (insofar as it is based on commodity production), [no]
wage-labour and, in general, no capitalist production can take place without
commodities—whether they be means of consumption or means of
production—being available on the market; that this kind of production is
impossible
without commodity circulation, without the commodities spending a
period of time in the circulation reservoir. For the product is a
commodity in the strict sense of the word only within the framework of
circulation. It is as true for the worker as for anybody else that he must
find his means of subsistence in the form of commodities.
The worker, moreover, does not confront the shopkeeper as a worker confronts
a capitalist, but as money confronts the commodity, as a buyer faces the seller.
There is no relationship of wage-labour to capital here, except of course, where
the shopkeeper is dealing with his own
workers. But even they, insofar as they buy things from him, do not
confront him as workers. They confront him as workers only insofar as he
buys from them. Let us therefore leave this circulation agent.
But as far as the industrial capitalist is concerned, his
stock, his accumulation, consists of:
[First] his fixed capital, i.e., buildings, machinery, etc.,
which the worker does not consume or, insofar as he does
consume them, does so through labour, and thus consumes them industrially
for the capitalist, and although they are means of labour they are not
means of subsistence for him.
Secondly, his raw materials and auxiliary materials, the stock of
which, insofar as it does not enter directly into production, declines, as we
have seen. This likewise does not consist of means of subsistence for the
workers. This accumulation by the capitalist for the workers
means nothing more than that he does the worker the favour of depriving the
latter of his conditions of labour and converting the means of his labour (which
are themselves merely the transformed product of his labour) into means for the
exploitation of labour. In any case, the worker, while he uses the
machines and the raw materials, does not live on them.
Thirdly, the commodities, which he keeps in the storehouse or
warehouse before they enter into circulation. These are products of
labour, not means of subsistence stored in order to maintain labour during the
course of production.
Thus the “accumulation” of means of subsistence by the capitalist for the
worker means merely that he must possess enough money in order to pay wages with
which the worker withdraws the articles of consumption he needs from the
circulation reservoir (and, if we consider the [working] class as a whole, with
which he buys back part of his own product). This money, however, is
simply the transformed form of the commodity which the worker has sold and
handed over. In this sense, the means of subsistence are “stored up” for
him in the same way as they are stored up for his capitalist, who likewise buys
consumption goods etc. with money (the transformed form of the same commodity).
This money may be a mere token of value, it therefore does not have to be a
representation “of previous labour” but, in the hands of whoever possesses it,
simply expresses the realised price not of past labour (or previously [sold]
commodities) but of the contemporaneous labour or commodities which he sells.
[Money has] merely a formal existence. Or—since in previous modes of
production the worker also had to eat and consume during the course of
production irrespective of the period of time required for the production of his
product—“storing up” may mean that the worker must first of all transform the
product of his labour into the product of the capitalist, into capital, in order
to receive back a portion of it in the form of money, in lieu of payment.
||876| What interests Hodgskin about this whole process (with
regard to the process as such it is indeed a matter of indifference whether the
worker receives the product of contemporaneous or previous labour, just as it
does not matter whether he receives the product of his own previous labour or
the product of labour performed simultaneously in a different branch) is this:
A great part, [or] the greatest part of the products consumed daily by the
worker—which he must consume whether his own product is finished or
not—represent by no means stored up labour of bygone time. On the
contrary he uses to a large extent products of labour performed the same day or
during the same week in which the worker produces his own commodity. For
example, bread, meat, beer, milk, newspapers, etc. Hodgskin could also
have added that they are partly the products of
future labour, for the worker who buys an overcoat with what he has
saved out of six months’ wages buys one which has only been made at the end of
the six months, etc. (We have seen that the whole of production
presupposes simultaneous reproduction of the required constituent parts
and products in their different forms as raw materials, semi-manufactured goods,
etc. But all fixed capital presupposes future labour for its
reproduction and for the reproduction of its equivalent, without which it cannot
be reproduced.) Hodgskin says that during the course of the year the
worker must rely to some degree on previous labour (because of the nature of the
production of corn, vegetable raw materials, etc.). <This does not apply
to a house, for example. As regards use-values which, by their nature,
only wear out slowly, are not consumed at once, but gradually used up, it is not
due to any action specially devised for the benefit of the workers that these
products of previous labour are available on “the market”. The worker also
used to have a “dwelling” before the capitalist “piled up” deadly stink-holes
for him. (See Laing on this.)> (Apart from the enormous mass of
day-to-day needs which are of decisive importance especially to the worker.
Who at best, can only satisfy his everyday needs, we have seen that, in general,
consumption becomes more and more contemporaneous with production,
and therefore, if one considers society as a whole, consumption depends more and
more on
simultaneous production, or rather on the products of
simultaneous production.) But when operations extend over several
years, the worker must “depend” on his own production, on the simultaneous and
future producers of other commodities.
The worker always has to find his means of subsistence
in the form of commodities on the market (the “services” he buys are ipso
facto only brought into being at the moment they are bought); as far as he
is concerned they must therefore be the products of antecedent labour, that is
of labour which is antecedent to their existence as products but which is by no
means antecedent to his own labour with whose price he buys these products.
They can be—and mostly are—contemporaneous products, especially for those who
live from hand to mouth.
Taking it all in all the “storing up” of means of subsistence for the workers
by the capitalists comes to this.
1) Commodity production presupposes that articles of consumption which one
does not produce oneself are available on the market as commodities, or that
in general, commodities are produced as commodities.
2) The majority of the commodities consumed by the worker in the final form
in which they confront him as commodities, are in fact products of
simultaneous labour (they are therefore by no means stored up by the
capitalist).
3) In capitalist production, the means of labour and the means of subsistence
produced by the worker himself confront him as capital, the one as constant, the
other as variable capital; these, the worker’s conditions of production, appear
as the property of the capitalist; their transfer from the worker to the
capitalist and the partial return of the worker’s product to the worker, or of
the value of his product to the worker, is called the “storing up” of
circulating capital for the worker. These means of subsistence which the
worker must always consume before his product is finished, become “circulating
capital” because he [the worker], instead of buying them direct or
paying for them with the value either of his past or of his future product
||877|, must first of all receive a draft (money) on it; a draft
moreover which the capitalist is entitled to issue only thanks to the worker’s
past, present or future product.
Hodgskin is concerned here with demonstrating the dependence of the worker on
the coexisting labour of other workers as against his dependence on previous
labour,
1) in order to do away with the phrase about “storing up”;
2) because “present labour” confronts capital, whereas the economists always
consider previous labour as such to be capital, that is, an alienated
and independent form of labour which is hostile to labour itself.
To grasp the all-round significance of
contemporaneous labour as against previous labour is however in itself a
very important achievement.
Hodgskin thus arrives at the following:
Capital is either a mere name and pretext or it does not express a thing; the
social relation of the labour of one person to the coexisting labour of
another, and the consequences, the effects of this relationship, are
ascribed to the things which make up so-called circulating capital.
Despite the fact that the commodity exists as money, its realisation in
use-values depends on contemporaneous labour. ([The labour performed in]
the course of a year is itself contemporaneous [labour].) Only a small
portion of the commodities entering into direct consumption are the product of
more than one year’s labour and when they are—such as cattle etc., they require
renewed labour every year. All operations requiring more than a year
depend on continuous annual production.
“… it is by the command the capitalist possesses over the
labour of some men, not by his possessing a stock of commodities, that he
is enabled to support and consequently employ other
labourers” (Labour Defended etc.,p.14).
Money however gives everyone “command” over “the labour of some men”, over
the labour contained in their commodities as well as over the reproduction of
this labour, and to that extent therefore over labour itself.
What is really “stored up”, not however as a dead mass but as something
living, is the skill of the worker, the level of development of labour.
<It is true, however, that the stage of the development of the productivity of
labour which exists at any particular time and serves as the starting-point,
comprises not only the skill and capacity of the worker, but likewise the
material means which this labour has created and which it daily renews.
(Hodgskin does not emphasise this because, in opposing the crude views of the
economists, it is important for him to lay the stress on the
subject—so to speak, on the subjective in the subject—in contrast to
the object.)> This is really the primary factor, the point of departure and it
is the result of a process of development.
Accumulation in this context means
assimilation, continual preservation and at the same time
transformation of what has already been handed over and realised. In this
way Darwin makes “accumulation” through inheritance the driving
principle in the formation of all organic things, of
plants and animals; thus the various organisms themselves are formed as a result
of “accumulation” and are only “inventions”, gradually accumulated inventions of
living beings. But this is not the only prerequisite of production.
Such a prerequisite in the case of animals and plants is external nature, that
is both inorganic nature and their relationship with other animals and plants.
Man, who produces in society, likewise faces an already modified nature (and in
particular natural factors which have been transformed into means of his own
activity) and definite relations existing between the producers. This
accumulation is in part the result of the historical process, in part, as far as
the individual worker is concerned, transmission of skill. Hodgskin says
that as far as the majority of the workers are concerned, circulating capital
plays no part in this accumulation.
He has demonstrated that “the stock of commodities” (means of subsistence)
“prepared” is always small in comparison with the total amount of consumption
and production. On the other hand, the degree of skill of the existing
population is always the pre-condition of production as a whole; it is therefore
the principal accumulation of wealth and the most important result of antecedent
labour; its form of existence, however, is living labour itself.
||878|
“…all the effects usually attributed to accumulation of circulating capital are
derived from the
accumulation and storing up of skilled labour; and, […] this most
important operation is performed, as far as the great mass of labourers is
concerned without any circulating capital whatever” (op. cit., p. 13).
With regard to the assertion of the economists that the number of workers
(and therefore the well-being or poverty of the existing working population)
depends on the amount of circulating capital available, Hodgskin comments
correctly, as follows:
“… the number of labourers must at all times depend on the
quantity of circulating capital; or, as I should say, on the quantity
of the products of coexisting labour, which labourers are
allowed to consume” (op. cit., p. 20).
What is attributed to circulating capital, to a stock of
commodities, is the effect of “coexisting labour”.
In other words, Hodgskin says that the effects of a certain social form of
labour are ascribed to objects, to the products of labour; the relationship
itself is imagined to exist in material form. We have already
seen that this is a characteristic of labour
based on commodity production, on exchange-value, and
this quid pro quo is revealed in the commodity, in money (Hodgskin does
not see this), and to a still higher degree in capital. The effects of
things as materialised aspects of the labour process are attributed to them in
capital, in their personification, their independence in respect of labour.
They would cease to have these effects if they were to cease to confront labour
in this alienated form. The capitalist, as capitalist,
is simply the personification of capital, that creation of labour endowed with
its own will and personality which stands in opposition to labour.
Hodgskin regards this as a pure subjective illusion which conceals the deceit
and the interests of the exploiting classes. He does not see that the way
of looking at things arises out of the actual relationship itself; the latter is
not an expression of the former, but vice versa. In the same way, English
socialists say “We need capital, but not the capitalists”. But if one
eliminates the capitalists, the means of production cease to be
capital.
***
<The “Verbal Observer”, Bailey, and others remark that “value”, “valeur”
express a property of things. In fact the terms originally express nothing
but the use-value of things for people, those qualities which make them useful
or agreeable etc. to people. It is in the nature of things that “value”,
“valeur”, “Wert” can have no other etymological origin. Use-value
expresses the natural relationship between things and men, in fact the existence
of things for men. Exchange-value, as the result of the social
development which created it, was later superimposed on the word value, which
was synonymous with use-value. It [exchange-value] is the social
existence of things.
The Sanskrit—Wer [means] cover, protect, consequently
respect, honour and love, cherish. From these the adjective Wertas
(excellent, respectable) is derived; Gothic, wairths;
Old German, Old Frankish, wert; Anglo-Saxon, weorth, vordh,
wurth; English, worth, worthy;
Dutch, waard, waardig; Alemanic, werth;
Lithuantan, wertas (respectable, precious, dear, estimable).
The Sanskrit, wertis; Latin, virtus;
Gothic, wairthi; German, Werth[v] [Chavée,
Essai d’étymologie philosophique, Brussels, 1844, p. 176].
The value of a thing is, in fact, its own virtus[w], while its exchange-value is
quite independent of its material qualities.
The Sanskrit “Wal
[means] to cover, to fortify; [Latin] vallo,[x] valeo,[y]
vallus[z]: that which protects and defends, valor is the
power itself.” Hence
valeur, value. “Compare Wal with the German walle, walte[aa] and English wall, wield” [op. cit., p.
70].)
***
Hodgskin now turns to fixed capital. It is productive power
which has been produced and, in its development in large-scale industry, it is
an instrument which social labour has created.
As far as fixed capital is concerned:
“… all instruments and machines are the produce of labour.
[…] As long as they are merely the result of previous labour, and are
not applied to their respective uses by labourers, they do not repay the expense
of making them. […] most of them diminish in value from being kept.
[…] Fixed capital does not derive its utility from previous, but present
labour; and does not bring its owner a profit because it has been
stored up, but because it is a means of obtaining command over labour”
([Thomas Hodgskin,] Labour Defended etc., pp. 14-15).
Here at last, the nature of capital is understood correctly.
||879|
“After any instruments have been made, what do
they effect? Nothing. On the contrary, they begin to rust
or decay unless used or applied by labour.” “Whether an instrument shall be
regarded as productive capital or not, depends entirely on its being used,
or not, by some productive labourer” (loc. cit., pp. 15-16).
“One easily comprehends why […] the road-maker should receive
some of the benefits, accruing only to the road-user; but I do not comprehend
why all these benefits should go to the road itself, and be
appropriated by a set of persons who neither make nor use it, under the
name of profit for their capital” (loc. cit., p. 16).
“Its vast utility does[bb] not depend on stored up iron and wood,
but on that practical and living knowledge of the powers of nature
which enables some men to construct it, and others to guide it” (loc. cit., p.
17).
“Without knowledge they” (the machines) “could not be invented,
without manual skill and dexterity they could not be made, and without skill and
labour they could not be productively used. But there is nothing more than
knowledge, skill, and labour requisite, on which the capitalist can found a
claim to any share of the produce” (loc. cit., p. 18).
“After he” (man) “has
inherited the knowledge of several generations, and when he lives
congregated in great masses, he is enabled by his mental faculties to
complete […] the work of nature…” (loc. cit., p. 18).
“… it is not […] the
quantity but the quality of the fixed capital on which the
productive industry of a country depends. […] fixed capital as a means of
nourishing and supporting men, depends for its efficiency, altogether on the
skill of the labourers, and consequently the productive industry of a country,
as far as fixed capital is concerned, is in proportion to the
knowledge and skill of the people” (loc. cit., pp. 19-20).
[e)] Compound Interest: Fall in the Rate of Profit Based on This
“A mere glance must satisfy every mind that simple profit
does not decrease but increase in the progress of society—that is, the same
quantity of labour which at any former period produced 100 quarters of wheat,
and 100 steam-engines, will now produce somewhat more [… ] In fact, also, we
find that a much greater number of persons now live in opulence on profit in
this country than formerly. It is clear, however, that no labour, no
productive power, no ingenuity, and no art can answer the overwhelming
demands of compound interest. But all saving is made from the
revenue” (that is from simple profit) “of the capitalist, so that
actually these demands are constantly made, and as constantly the productive
power of labour refuses to satisfy them. A sort of balance is, therefore,
constantly struck” (loc. cit., p. 23).
For example, if the profit were always accumulated, a capital of 100 at 10
per cent would amount to something like 673, or—since a little more or less
makes no difference here—say 700, in 20 years. Thus the capital will have
multiplied itself sevenfold over a period of 20 years. According to this
yardstick, if only simple interest were paid, it would have to be 30 per cent
per annum instead of 10 per cent, that is, three times as much profit, and the
more we increase the number of years that elapse, the more the rate of interest
or the rate of profit calculated at simple interest per annum will increase, and
this increase is the more rapid, the larger the capital becomes.
In fact, however, capitalist accumulation is nothing but the reconversion of
interest into capital (since interest and profit for our purpose, i.e., for the
purpose of our calculation, are identical). Thus it is compound interest.
First there is a capital of 100; it yields 10 per cent profit (or interest).
This is added to the capital which is now 110. This now becomes the
capital. The interest on this amount is therefore not simply interest on a
capital of 100 but interest on 100 capital plus 10 interest. That is
compound interest. Thus, at the end of the second year, we have (100
capital + 10 interest) +10 interest+1 interest=(100 capital+
10 interest)+11 interest=121. This is the
capital at the beginning of the third year. In the third year we
get (100 capital+10 interest)+11 interest+ 121/10
interest, so that at the end of it the capital is 1331/10
||880| We have:
|
Capital
|
Interest
|
Total
|
|
First year 100
|
10
|
110
|
|
Second year 100 + 10 = 110
|
10 + 1’*
|
121
|
|
Third year 100 + 20 + 1 = 121
|
10 + 2’ + 1/10’
|
1331/10
|
|
Fourth year 100 + 30 + 3 1/10
= 1331/10
|
10 + 331/100’
|
14641/100
|
|
Fifth year 100 + 40 + 641/100
=14641/100
|
10 + 4641/1,000’
|
16151/1,000
|
etc.
| In | the | second | year | the |
capital | comprises | 10 interest
(simple) |
| " | " | third | " | " | " | " |
21 interest |
| " | " | fourth | | " | " | " |
" | 311/10
interest |
| " | " | fifth | " | " | " | " |
4641/100 | interest |
| " | " | sixth | " | " | " | " |
6151/1,000 | " |
| " | " | seventh | " | " | " |
" | 771,561/10,000 |
" |
| " | " | eighth | | " | " | " |
" | 9487,171/100,000 |
" |
| [In | the | ninth | year | the |
capital | comprises | 114358,881/1,000,000 |
interest] |
*The sign ‘ indicates interest on interest.
In other words, more than half the capital is made up of interest in the
ninth year and the portion of capital consisting of interest thus increases in
geometrical progression.
We have seen that over 20 years, capital increased sevenfold, whereas, even
according to the “most extreme” assumption of Malthus, the population can only
double itself every twenty-five years. But let us assume that it doubles
itself in twenty years, and therefore the working population as well.
Taking one year with another, the interest would have to be 30 per cent—three
times greater than it is. If one assumes, however, that the rate of
exploitation remained unchanged, in 20 years the doubled population would only
be able to produce twice as much labour as it did previously (and [the new
generation] would be unfit for work during a considerable part of these 20
years, scarcely during half this period would it be able to work, in spite of
the employment of children); it would therefore produce only twice as much
surplus labour, but not three times as much.
The rate of profit (and consequently the rate of
interest) is determined:
1) If the rate of exploitation is assumed to be constant—by the number of
workers in employment, by the absolute mass of workers employed, that is, by the
growth of the population. Although this number increases, its ratio to the
total amount of capital employed declines with the accumulation of capital and
with industrial development (consequently the rate of profit declines if the
rate of exploitation remains the same). Likewise the population does not
by any means [increase] in the same geometrical progression as the computed
compound interest. The growth of the population at a given stage of
industrial development is the explanation for the increase in the amount of
surplus-value and of profit, but also for the fall in the rate of profit.
2) [By] the absolute length of the “normal” working-day, that is, by
increasing the rate of surplus-value. Thus the rate of profit can increase
as a result of the extension of labour-time beyond the normal working-day.
However, this has its physical
and—by and large—its social limits. That in the same measure as workers
set more capital in motion, the same capital commands more absolute labour-time ||881| is out of the question.
3) If the normal working-day remains the same, surplus labour can be
increased relatively by reducing the necessary labour-time and reducing the
prices of the necessaries which the worker consumes, in comparison with the
development of the productive power of labour. But this very development
of productive power reduces variable capital relative to constant. It is
physically impossible that the surplus labour-time of, say, two men who displace
twenty, can, by any conceivable increase of the absolute or relative [surplus]
labour-time, equal that of the twenty. If each of the twenty men only work
2 hours of surplus labour a day, the total will be 40 hours of surplus labour,
whereas the total life span of the two men amounts only to 48 hours in one day.
The value of labour-power does not fall in the same degree as the
productivity of labour or of capital increases. This increase in
productive power likewise increases the ratio between constant and variable
capital in all branches of industry which do not produce necessaries (either
directly or indirectly) without giving rise to any kind of alteration in the
value of labour. The development of productive power is not even. It
is in the nature of capitalist production that it develops industry more rapidly
than agriculture. This is not due to the nature of
the land, but to the fact that, in order to be exploited really in accordance
with its nature, land requires different social relations. Capitalist
production turns towards the land only after its influence has exhausted it and
after it has devastated its natural qualities. An additional factor is
that, as a consequence of landownership, agricultural products are expensive
compared with other commodities, because they are sold at their value
and are not reduced to their cost-price. They form, however, the principal
constituent of the necessaries. Furthermore, if one-tenth of the land is
dearer to exploit than the other nine-tenths, these latter are likewise hit
“artificially” by this relative barrenness, as a result of the law of
competition.
The rate of profit would in fact have to grow if it is to remain constant
while accumulation of capital is taking place. The same worker as
long as capital yields 10 of surplus labour must, as soon as interest
accumulates on interest and thus increases the capital employed, produce
threefold, fourfold, fivefold in progression of compound interest, which is
nonsense.
The amount of capital which the worker sets in motion, and whose
value is maintained and reproduced by his labour, is something quite different
from the value
which he adds, and therefore from the surplus-value. If the amount of
capital is 1,000 and the labour added equals 100, then the capital reproduced
amounts to 1,100. If the capital is 100 and the labour added is 20, then
the capital reproduced is 120. The rate of profit in the first case is 10
per cent and in the second, it is 20 per cent. Nevertheless, more can be
accumulated from 100 than from 20. Thus the flow of capital or its
“accumulation” continues (apart from the reduction in its value as a result of
the increase in productive power) in proportion to the force it already
possesses, but not in proportion to the size of the rate of profit. This
explains that accumulation—its amount—may increase in spite of a falling rate of
profit, apart from the fact that, while productivity rises, a larger portion of
the revenue can be accumulated, even when the rate of profit declines, than when
there is a higher rate of profit together with lower productivity. A high
rate of profit—insofar as it is based on a high rate of surplus-value—is
possible if very long hours are worked, although the labour is unproductive.
It is possible because the workers’ needs, and therefore the minimum
wage, are small, although the labour is unproductive. The lack of energy
with which the labour is performed will
correspond to the low level of the minimum wage.
Capital is accumulated slowly in both cases despite the high rate of profit.
The population is stagnant and the labour-time which the product costs is high,
although the wages received by the workers are small.
||882| I have explained the decline in the rate
of profit in spite of the fact that the rate of surplus-value remains the same
or even rises, by the decrease of the variable capital in relation to the
constant, that is, of the living, present labour in relation to the past labour
which is employed and reproduced. Hodgskin and the man who wrote The
Source and Remedy of the National Difficulties explain it by the fact that
it is impossible for the worker to fulfil the demands of capital which
accumulates like compound interest.
“… no labour, no productive power, no ingenuity, and no art can
answer the overwhelming demands of compound interest. But all saving is
made from the revenue of the capitalist” (that is from simple profit) “so that
actually these demands are constantly made, and as constantly the productive
power of labour refuses to satisfy them. A sort of balance is, therefore,
constantly struck” (op. cit., p. 23).
In its general sense, this amounts to the same thing. If I say that, as
capital accumulates, the rate of profit declines because constant capital
increases in relation to variable capital, it means that, disregarding the
specific form of the different portions of capital, the capital employed
increases in relation to the labour employed. [The rate of] profit falls
not because the worker is exploited less, but because altogether less labour is
employed in relation to the capital employed.
For example, let us assume that the ratio of variable to constant capital is
1:1. Then, if the total capital amounts to 1,000, c [constant
capital] will be 500, and v [variable capital] likewise 500. If
the rate of surplus-value is 50 per cent, then 50 per cent of 500 is 50×5, or
250. Thus the rate of profit on 1,000 yields a profit of 250, or
250/1,000 or
25/100 or 1/4
which is 25 per cent. If the total capital is 1,000 and if c
equals 750 and v 250, then at 50 per cent [the rate of surplus-value]
250 will yield 125.
But 125/1,000 comes to
1/8, or 121/2
per cent.
But in comparison with the first case [less] living labour is employed in the
second case. If we assume that the annual wage of the worker is £25, then
in the first case £500 [wages] will
employ 20 workers; in the second case £250 wages will
employ 10 workers. The same capital [£1,000] employs 20 workers in one
case and only 10 in the other. In the first case, the ratio of total
capital to the number of working-days is as 1,000:20; in the second as 1,000:10.
In the first case, for each of the 20 workers £50 capital (constant and
variable) is used (for 20×50=500×2=1,000). In the second case, the capital
employed per individual worker is £100 (for 100×10=1,000). Nevertheless,
in both cases, the capital which is allocated to wages is, pro rata, the same.
The formula I have given provides a new ground for explaining why, with
accumulation, less workers are employed by the same amount of capital or, what
amounts to the same thing, why a greater amount of capital has to be used for
the same amount of labour. It comes to the same thing if I say
that one worker is employed for a capital outlay of 50 in the one case, and one
worker for a capital outlay of 100 in the other, that therefore only half the
number of workers is employed by a capital of 50; in other words, if I say that
in one case there is one worker for 50 capital and only half a worker for 50
capital in the other, or if I say that in one case 50 capital is used by one
worker and in the other case 50x2 capital is used by one worker.
This latter formula is the one used by Hodgskin and others. According
to them, accumulation means in general the demand for compound interest; in
other words, that more capital is expended on one worker and that he
has therefore to produce more surplus labour proportionally to the amount of
capital expended on him. Since the capital expended on him increases at
the same rate as compound interest, but on the other hand, his labour-time has
very definite limits which even relatively no [development of the] productive
powers can reduce in accordance with the demands of this compound interest “a
sort of balance is constantly struck”. “Simple profit” remains the same,
or rather it grows. (This is in fact the surplus labour or surplus-value.)
But as the result of the accumulation of capital it is compound interest which
is disguised in the form of simple interest.
||883| It is clear furthermore that if compound
interest equals accumulation, then, apart from the absolute limits of
accumulation, the growth of this interest depends on the extent, the intensity,
etc., of the accumulation process itself, that is, on the mode of production.
Otherwise compound interest is nothing
but appropriation of the Capital (property) of
others in the form of interest as was the case in Rome and in general
with usurers.
Hodgskin’s view is as follows: Originally £50 capital, for example, falls to
the share of one worker, on which he produces, let us say, a profit of [£]25.
Later, as a result of the conversion of a part of the interest into capital and
of the fact that this process repeats itself again and again, a capital of £200
is allocated to the worker. If the entire interest of 50 per cent received
per annum was always capitalised, the process would be complete in less than
four years. Just as the worker produced [a profit of] 25 on [a capital of]
50, he is now expected to produce [a profit of] 100 on a capital of 200, or four
times as much. But that is impossible. To do that either the worker
would have to work four times as long, that is, 48 hours a day if he worked 12
hours previously, or the value of labour would have to fall by 75 per cent as a
result of increased productivity of labour.
If the working-day is 12 hours, £25 the [annual] wage, and the worker
produces £25 profit [per annum], then he has to work as much for the capitalist
as he does for himself. That is for 6 hours or half the working-day.
In order to produce 100, he would have to work 4×6 hours for the capitalist in a
12-hour working-day—which is nonsense. Let us assume that the working-day
is lengthened to 15 hours, then the worker still cannot produce 24 hours work in
15 hours. And still less can he work for 30 hours, which is what would be
necessary, since [he would have to work] 24 hours for the capitalist and 6 for
himself. If he worked the whole of his working-time for the capitalist, he
would be able to produce only £50; he would only double the amount of interest,
that is, he would produce 50 profit on a capital of 200, whereas he produced £25
for £50 capital. The rate of profit is 50 per cent in the second case and
25 per cent in the first. But even this is impossible, since the worker
must live. No matter how much productive power increases, if, as in the
above example, the value of 12 hours is 75, then that of 24 hours adds up to
2×75, or 150. And since the worker must live, he can never produce 150
profit, still less 200. His surplus labour is always a part of
his working-day, from which it does not at all follow, as Mr. Rodbertus thinks,
that profit can never reach 100 per cent. It can never be 100 per cent if
it is calculated on the working-day as a whole (for it is itself
included in it). But it can most certainly be 100 per cent in relation to
that part of the working-day which is paid for.
Let us take the above example of 50 per cent.
|
Capital
|
Surplus-value
|
Rate of surplus-value
|
Rate of Profit
|
|
constant
|
variable
|
|
|
|
|
25
|
25
|
25
|
100 per cent
|
50 percent
|
Here the profit, half a working-day, is equal whole [product].
||884| If the worker worked three-quarters day
for the capitalist then:
|
Capital
|
Surplus-value
|
Rate of surplus-value
|
Rate of Profit
|
|
constant
|
variable
|
|
|
|
|
25
|
121/2
|
371/2
|
300 per cent
|
100 percent
|
|
Total capital 371/2
|
[calculated on a capital] of 100
|
Capital
|
Surplus-value
|
Rate of surplus-value
|
Rate of Profit
|
|
constant
|
variable
|
|
|
|
|
66 2/3
|
33 1/3
|
100
|
300 per cent
|
100 percent
|
|
Total capital 100
|
Let us examine this a little more closely and see what is implied by the view
that [the rate of] profit falls
because, in consequence of progressive accumulation, it does not constitute
simple profit (consequently the rate of exploitation of the worker does not
decline but, as Hodgskin says, increases) but compound profit and it is
impossible for labour to keep pace with the demands of compound interest.
It has to be noted first of all that this has to be defined in more detail if
it is to make any sense at all. Regarded as a product of accumulation
(that is, of the appropriation of surplus labour)—and this approach is necessary
if one considers reproduction as a whole—all capital is made up of profit (or of
interest, if this word is considered to be synonymous with profit and not with
interest in the strict sense). If the rate of profit is 10 per cent, then
this is “compound interest”, compound profit. And it would be impossible
to see how 10 to 100 could—in economic terms—differ from 11 to 110. So
what emerges is that “simple profit” too is impossible, or at least that simple
profit must also decline, because, in fact, simple profit is made up in exactly
the same way as compound profit. If one narrows the problem, that is,
considers solely interest-bearing capital, then compound interest would swallow
up profit and more than profit; and the fact that the producer (capitalist or
not) has to pay the lender compound
interest means that sooner or later, in addition to
profit he has to pay him part of his capital as well.
Thus it should be noted first of all that Hodgskin’s view only has meaning if
it is assumed that capital grows more rapidly than population, that is, than the
working population. (Even this latter is a relative growth. It is in
the nature of capitalism to overwork one section of the working population while
it turns another into paupers.) If the population grows at the same rate
as capital, then there is no reason whatsoever why I should not be able to
extract from 8x workers with £800 the [same rate of] surplus labour
that I can extract from x workers with £100. ||885| Eight times 100 C makes no greater demand
on 8 times x workers than 100
C on x workers. Thus “Hodgskin’s” argument
becomes groundless. (In reality, things turn out differently. Even
if the population grows at the same rate as capital, capitalist development
nevertheless results in one part of the population being made redundant, because
constant capital develops at the expense of variable capital.)
<“…it is very material, with reference to labour,
whether you distribute them” (goods) “so as to induce a
greater supply of labour or a less: whether you distribute them where
they will be conditions for labour, or where they will be opportunities for
idleness” (An Inquiry into those Principles, respecting the Nature of Demand
and the Necessity of Consumption, lately advocated by Mr. Malthus etc.,
London, 1821, p. 57).
“… that increased supply of labour is promoted by the increased
numbers of mankind…”(loc. cit., p. 58).
“The not being able to command so much labour as
before, too, is only important where that[cc]
labour would produce no more than before. If labour has been rendered more
productive, production will not be checked, though the existing mass of
commodities should command less labour than before”(loc. cit., p. 60).
(This is directed against Malthus. True, production would not be
checked, but the rate of profit would. These cynical propositions stating
that a “mass of commodities commands labour”, reflect the same cynicism
which finds expression in Malthus’s explanation of value[dd];
command of the commodity over labour is very good and is absolutely
characteristic of the nature of capital.)
The same author makes the following correct observation directed against
West:
“The author of the Essay […]
observes[ee] […] that more will be given for labour when there is
most increase of stock, and
that […] will be when profits on stock are highest. ‘The greater
the profits of stock’, he adds, ‘the higher will be the wages of labour.’
The fault of this is, that a word or two is left out. ‘The greater
have been
the profits of stock’ … ‘the higher
will be the wages of labour’… The high profits and the high wages
are not simultaneous;
they do not occur in the same bargain; the one counteracts the other,
and reduces it to a level. It might as well be argued, ‘the supply of a
commodity is most rapid when the price is highest, therefore, large supply and
high price go together’. It is a mixing up of cause and effect” (op. cit.,
pp. 100-01).>
Hodgskin’s proposition, therefore, has meaning only if, as a result of the
process of accumulation, more capital is set in motion by the same
workers, or if the capital grows in relation to labour. That is, if, for
example, the capital was 100 and becomes 110 by accumulation, and if the same
worker who produced a surplus-value of 10, is to produce a surplus-value of 11,
corresponding to the growth of capital, i.e., compound interest. So that
it is not simply the same capital he set in motion previously which, after its
reproduction, is to yield the same profit (simple profit) but this capital has
been increased by his surplus labour [so that] he has to provide surplus labour
for the original capital (or its value) and also for his own accumulated (i.e.
capitalised) surplus labour. And since this capital increases every year,
the same worker would constantly have to furnish more labour.
It is however only [under the following conditions] possible for more capital
to be applied per worker:
First. If the productive power of labour remains the same,
then this is only possible if the worker prolongs his working-time absolutely,
i.e., for example, if he works 15 hours instead of 12 hours, or if he works more
intensively and performs 15 hours’ labour in 12 hours, does 5 hours’ labour in 4
hours or 1 hour’s labour in
4/5 of an hour. Since he
reproduces his means of subsistence in a definite number of hours, then, in this
case, three hours of labour are won for the capitalist in the same way as if the
productive power of labour had been increased, while, in fact, it is labour
which has been increased, not its productive power. If the intensification
of labour were to become general, then the value of commodities would fall in
proportion to the reduced labour-time which they cost. The degree of
intensity would become the average [intensity of labour], its natural quality.
If,
however ||886| , this only
occurs in particular spheres, then it amounts to more complex labour, simple
labour raised to a higher power. Less than an hour of more intensive
labour then counts as much—and creates as much value—[as an hour of] the more
extensive labour. For example, in the above case, 4/5
of an hour [produces] as much as 5/5,
or an hour.
Both the extension of labour-time and the increase of labour through its
greater intensification by means of the compression of the pores of Labour as it
were, have their limits (although the London bakers, for example, regularly work
17 hours [a day] if not more), very definite, physical, limitations, and it is
when encountering these that compound interest—composite profit—ceases.
Within these limitations the following applies:
If the capitalist pays nothing for the extension or intensification of
labour, then his surplus-value
(his profit as well, provided there is no change in the
value of the constant capital, for we assume that the mode of
production remains the same)—and, in accordance with the proviso, his
profit—increases more rapidly than his capital. He pays no necessary
labour for the capital which has been added.
If he pays for the surplus labour at the same rate as previously, then the
growth of the surplus-value is proportionate to the increase in capital.
The profit grows more rapidly. For there is a more rapid turnover of fixed
capital, while the more intensive use of the machinery does not cause the wear
and tear to increase at the same rate. There is a reduction of expenditure
on fixed capital, for less machinery, workshops etc. are required for 100
workers who work longer hours than for 200 workers employed simultaneously.
Likewise fewer overseers, etc. (This gives rise to a most satisfactory
situation for the capitalist, who is able to expand or contract his production
without hindrance, in accordance with the market conditions. In addition,
his power grows, since that portion of labour which is over-employed, has its
counterpart in an unemployed or semi-employed reserve army, so that competition
amongst the workers increases.)
Although there is in this case no change in the purely numerical ratio
between necessary labour and surplus labour—this is however the only case where
both can simultaneously increase in the same proportion—the exploitation of
labour has nevertheless grown, both by means of an extension of the working-day
and by its intensification (condensation) provided the working-day
is not shortened at the same time (as with the 10 Hours
Bill). The period for which the worker is fit to work is reduced and his
labour-power is exhausted in a much greater measure than his wages increase and
he becomes even more of a work machine. But disregarding the latter
aspect, if he lives for 20 years working a normal working-day and only 15 years
when his working-day is extended and intensified, then he sells the value of his
labour-power in 15 years in the latter case and in 20 years in the former.
In one case it has to be replaced in 15 years, in the other, in 20 years.
A value of 100 which lasts for 20 years is replaced if 5 per cent is paid on
it annually, for 5×20=100. A value of 100 which lasts 15 years is replaced
if 610/15 or 62/3
per cent is paid on it annually. But in the given case, the worker
receives for 3 hours of additional labour only an amount equivalent to the daily
value of his labour calculated over 20 years. Assuming that he works 8
hours necessary labour and 4 hours surplus labour, then he receives two-thirds
of each hour for
12×2/3=8 And in the same way
he receives 2 out of the 3 hours over-time that he works. Or two-thirds of
each hour. But this is only the value of his hourly labour-power on the
assumption that it will last for 20 years. If he uses it up in 15 years,
its value [per hour] increases.
Anticipation of the future—real anticipation—occurs in the
production of wealth only in relation to the worker and to the land. The
future can indeed be anticipated and ruined in both cases by premature
over-exertion and exhaustion, and by the disturbance of the balance between
expenditure and income. In capitalist production this happens to both the
worker and the land. As far as so-called anticipation is concerned, in
relation to the national debt for example, Ravenstone remarks with justice:
||887| “In pretending to stave off the expenses
of the present hour to a future day, in contending that you can burthen
posterity to supply the wants of the existing generation, they in reality assert
the monstrous proposition[ff] that you can consume what does not yet exist, that you
can feed on provisions before their seeds have been sown in the earth” (Piercy
Ravenstone, [Thoughts on the Funding System, and Its Effects, London,
1824], p. 8.)
“All the wisdom of our statesmen will have ended in a great
transfer of property from one class of persons to another, in creating an
enormous fund for the reward of jobs and peculation” (loc. cit., p. 9).
It is different in the case of the worker and the
land. What is expended here exists as δίναμις[gg] and the life span of this δίναμις is shortened as a
result of accelerated expenditure.
Finally, if the capitalist is forced to pay more for over-time than for
normal working-time, then, according to the facts outlined above, this is by no
means an increase in wages, but only compensation for the increased value of
over-time—and in reality over-time pay is rarely sufficient to cover this.
In fact, in order to pay for the increased wear and tear of the labour-power,
when over-time is worked, a higher rate ought to be paid for every working hour
not merely for the additional hours.
Thus there is in any case an increased exploitation of labour. At the
same time, as a result of the accumulation of capital, a reduction in
surplus-value takes place at all events and also a decline in the rate of
profit, insofar as this is not counteracted by saving on constant capital. |887||
||887| This is therefore a situation where, in
consequence of the accumulation of capital—of the appearance of compound
profit—the rate of profit must decline. If on a capital of [£] 300 (the
original amount) the rate of profit was 10 per cent (that is profit came to [£]
30), and if for an additional [£] 100 it is 6 per cent, then profit is [£] 36
for [£] 400. Thus on the whole it is 9 for 100. And the rate of
profit has fallen from 10 per cent to 9 per cent.
But, as has been stated, on this basis (if the productivity of labour remains
the same) not only must the profit on additional capital fall, hut at a certain
point it must cease altogether, thus the whole accumulation based on this
compound profit would be stopped. In this case, the decline in profit is
linked with increased exploitation of labour and the cessation of profit at a
certain point is not due to the worker or someone else receiving the whole
product of his labour, hut to the fact that it is physically impossible to work
over and above a certain amount of labour-time or to increase the intensity of
labour beyond a certain degree.
Secondly. The only other case, where, with the number of
workers remaining constant, more capital is applied per worker, and therefore
the additional capital can be laid out and used for the increased exploitation
of the same number ||888| of workers,
occurs when the productivity of labour increases, i.e. the method
of production is changed. This presupposes a
change in the organic ratio between constant and variable capital. In
other words, the increase in the capital in relation to labour is here identical
with the increase of constant capital as compared with variable capital and, in
general, with the amount of living labour employed.
This is where Hodgskin’s view merges with the general law which I have
outlined.
The surplus-value, i.e. the exploitation of the worker, increases, but, at
the same time, the rate of profit falls because the variable capital declines as
against the constant capital, because in general, the amount of living labour
falls relatively in comparison with the amount of capital which sets it in
motion. A larger portion of the annual product of labour is appropriated
by the capitalist under the signboard of capital, and a smaller portion under
the signboard of profit.
<Hence the phantasy of the Rev. Thomas Chalmers to the effect that
the smaller the amount of the annual product laid out by the capitalists as
capital, the larger the profit they pocket. The Established Church then
comes to their assistance and sees to it that a large part of the surplus
product is consumed instead of being capitalised. The miserable priest
confuses cause with effect. Moreover, with a smaller rate [of profit] the
amount of profit increases as the size of the capital laid out grows. In
addition, the quantity of use-value which this smaller proportion represents,
increases. At the same time, however, this leads to the centralisation of
capital, since the conditions of production now demand the application of
capital on a mass scale. It brings about the swallowing up of the smaller
capitalists by the bigger ones and the “decapitalisation” of the former.
This is once again, only in a different form, the separation of the conditions
of labour from labour (for there is still a great deal of self-employment
amongst the smaller capitalists; in general the labour done by the capitalist
stands in inverse proportion to the size of his capital, that is, to the degree
in which he is a capitalist. This process would soon bring capitalist
production to a head if it were not for the fact that, alongside the centripetal
forces, counteracting tendencies exist, which continuously exert a
decentralising influence; this need not be described here, for it belongs to the
chapter dealing with the competition of capitals). It is this separation
which constitutes the concept of capital and of primitive accumulation,
which then appears as a continual process
in the accumulation of capital and here finally takes the
form of the centralisation of already existing capitals in a few hands and of
many being divested of capital.>
The fact that the (proportionally) declining quantity of labour is not fully
offset by increased productivity, or that the ratio of surplus labour to the
capital expended does not increase at the same rate as the relative
amount of labour employed declines, is due partly to the fact that the
development of the productive power of labour reduces the value of labour, the
necessary labour, only in certain capital investment spheres, and that, even in
these spheres, it does not develop uniformly, and that factors exist which
nullify this effect; for example, the workers themselves, although they cannot
prevent reductions in (real) wages, will not permit them to be reduced to the
absolute minimum; on the contrary, they achieve a certain quantitative
participation in the general growth of wealth.
But this growth of surplus labour too is relative, [and is only possible]
within certain limits. In order to make this growth correspond to the
demands of compound interest, the necessary labour-time in this case would have
to be reduced to zero in the same way as [the surplus labour-time] had to be
extended endlessly in the case considered previously.
The rise and fall in the rate of profit—insofar as it is determined by the
rise or fall of wages resulting from the conditions of demand and supply [in the
labour market], or caused by the temporary rise or fall in the prices of
necessaries compared with those of luxuries, as a result of the changes in
demand and supply and the rise or fall in wages to which this leads—has as
little to do with the general law of ||889| the
rise or fall in the profit rate as the rise or fall in the market prices of
commodities has to do with the determination of value in general. This has
to be analysed in the chapter on the real movement of wages. If the
conditions of demand and supply are favourable to the workers and wages rise,
then it is possible (but by no means certain) that the prices of
certain necessaries, especially food, will rise correspondingly for a time.
The author of the Inquiry into Those Principles etc. rightly remarks in
this connection:
In this case there will be “… an increase of demand for
necessaries, in proportion to that for superfluities, as compared with what
would have been the proportion between these two sorts of demand, if he had
exerted that command” (i.e., the capitalist, his command over commodities) “to
procure things for his own consumption. Necessaries will thereby exchange for more of things in general… And, in part, at least,
these necessaries will be food” (op. cit., p. 22).
He then correctly expresses the Ricardian view as follows:
“At all events, then, the increased price of corn was not the
original cause of that rise of wages which made profits fall, but, on the
contrary, the rise of wages was the cause of the increased price of corn at
first, and the nature of land, yielding less and less proportional returns to
increased tillage, made part of that increase of price permanent,
prevented a complete
reaction from taking place through the principle of population” (loc.
cit., p. 23).
Hodgskin and the author of The Source and Remedy etc. since they
explain the fall of profits by the impossibility of living labour to fulfil the
demands of compound interest, and although they do not analyse this, are much
nearer the truth than Smith and Ricardo, who explain the fall of profits by the
rise in wages, one of them, [by the rise in] real and nominal wages, the other
[by the rise in] nominal wages, with rather a decrease of real wages.
Hodgskin and all the other proletarian opponents have enough common sense to
emphasise the fact that the proportional number of those who live on profit has
increased with the development of capital.
[f) Hodgskin on the Social Character of Labour and on the Relation of
Capital to Labour]
Now a few concluding passages from Hodgskin’s Labour Defended etc.
The treatment of the exchange-value of the product, hence of the labour
embodied in the commodity, as social labour.
“Almost every product of art and skill is the result of
joint and combined labour… ”
(This is the result of capitalist production.)
“… So dependent is man on man, and so much does this dependence
increase as society advances, that hardly any labour of any single
individual … is of the least value but as forming part of the great social
task…”
<This passage has to be quoted, and in doing so [it is necessary to
emphasise] that it is only on the basis of capitalism that commodity
production or the production of products as commodities becomes all-embracing
and affects the nature of the products themselves.>
“Wherever the division of labour is
introduced […] the judgement of other men intervenes before the labourer can
realise his earnings, and there is no longer any thing which we can call natural
reward of individual labour. Each labourer produces only some part of a
whole, and each part, having no value or utility of itself, there is nothing on
which the labourer can seize and say, ‘this is my product, this I will keep to
myself’. Between the commencement of any joint operation, such as that of
making cloth, and the division of its product among the different persons whose
combined exertions have produced it, the judgement of men must intervene several
times, and the question is, how much of this joint product should go to each of
the individuals whose united labour produced it?” ( [Thomas Hodgskin,
Labour Defended etc., London, 1825,] p. 25.)
“… I know no way ||890| of deciding this but by leaving it to be settled
by the unfettered judgements of the labourers themselves” (loc. cit., p. 25).
“I must [… ] add that it is doubtful whether one species of
labour is more valuable than another; certainly it is not more necessary” (loc.
cit., p. 26).
Finally Hodgskin writes about the relation of capital [and labour]:
“Masters […] are labourers as well as their journeymen.
In this character their interest is precisely the same as that of their men.
But they are also either capitalists or the agents of the capitalist, and in
this respect their interest is decidedly opposed to the interest of their
workmen” (loc. cit., p. 27).
“The wide spread of education among the journeymen mechanics of
this country, diminishes daily the value of the labour and skill of almost all
masters and employers, by increasing the numbers of persons who possess their
peculiar knowledge” (loc. cit., p. 30).
“But put the capitalist, the oppressive middleman out of view”[hh] then “… it is plain that capital, or the
power to employ labour, and coexisting labour, are one; and […]
productive capital and skilled labour are also
one; consequently capital and a labouring population are precisely
synonymous. In the system of nature, mouths are united with hands and with
intelligence” (loc. cit., p. 33).
The capitalist mode of production disappears with the form of alienation
which the various aspects of social labour bear to one another and which is
represented in
capital. This is the conclusion arrived at by Hodgskin.
***
The primitive accumulation of capital. Includes the
centralisation of the conditions of labour. It means that the conditions
of labour acquire an independent existence in relation to the
worker and to labour itself. This historical act is
the historical genesis of capital, the historical
process of separation which transforms the conditions of labour into capital and
labour into wage-labour. This provides the basis for capitalist
production.
Accumulation of capital on the basis of capital itself, and
therefore also on the basis of the relationship of capital and wage-labour,
reproduces the separation and the independent existence of material wealth as
against labour on an ever increasing scale.
Concentration of capital. Accumulation of large amounts of
capital by the destruction of the smaller capitals. Attraction.
Decapitalisation of the intermediate links between capital and labour.
This is only the last degree and the final form of the process which transforms
the conditions of labour into capital, then reproduces capital and the separate
capitals on a larger scale and finally separates from their owners the various
capitals which have come. into existence at many points of society, and
centralises them in the hands of big capitalists. It is in this extreme
form of the contradiction and conflict that production—even though in alienated
form—is transformed into social production. There is social labour, and in
the real labour process the instruments of production are used in common.
As functionaries of the process which at the same time accelerates this
social production and thereby also the development of the productive
forces, the capitalists become superfluous in the measure that they, on behalf
of society, enjoy the usufruct and that they become overbearing as owners
of this social wealth and commanders of social labour. Their
position is similar to that of the feudal lords whose exactions in the measure
that their services became superfluous with the rise of bourgeois
society, became mere outdated and inappropriate privileges and who therefore
rushed headlong to destruction. |XV-890||
[g) Hodgskin’s Basic Propositions as Formulated in His Book—”Popular
Political Economy”]
||XVIII-1084| Thomas Hodgskin, Popular
Political Economy. Four Lectures delivered at the London Mechanics’
Institution, London, 1827.
“Easy labour is only transmitted skill” (p. 48).
“But as all the advantages derived from the division of labour
naturally centre in, and […] belong to the labourers, if they are deprived of
them, and in the progress of society those only are enriched by their
improved skill who never labour,—this must arise from
unjust appropriation; from usurpation and plunder in the party enriched, and
from consenting submission in the party impoverished” (op. cit., pp. 108-09).
||1085| “The labourers, to be
sure, multiply too rapidly when that multiplication is only compared with the
want of the capitalist for their services…”[ii] (op. cit., p. 120).
“Mr. Malthus points out the effects which an increase in the
number of labourers has in lessening the share which each one receives of
the annual produce—the portion of that distributed amongst them being a
definite and determinate quantity, not regulated in any degree by what they
annually create” (op. cit., p. 126).
“… labour […] the exclusive standard of value,” but “labour,
the creator of all wealth” [is] “not a commodity” (op. cit., p. 186,
note).
Regarding the influence of money on the expansion of wealth, Hodgskin remarks
correctly:
“As a man can dispose of small portions of produce that is
corruptible, for what is incorruptible, he is under no temptation to throw it
away; and thus the use of money adds to wealth, by preventing waste” (op. cit.,
p. 197).
The chief advantage of retail trade derives from the fact that
the quantity in which commodities are best produced is not that in which they
are best distributed[jj] (op. cit., p. 146).
“Both the theory relative to capital, 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” (op. cit., p. 238).
With regard to the accumulation of capital, Hodgskin advances
roughly the same ideas as those contained in his first book.
Nevertheless—for the sake of completeness—we will reproduce the main passages.
“Taking only fixed capital into consideration […] the subject
most favourable to the idea of capital aiding production [… ] For this purpose
we may distinguish three classes of circumstances under which the effects of an
accumulation of capital will be very different. First, if it is made and
used by the same persons […][kk] every accumulation in his possession of
the instruments he makes and uses, facilitates his
labour. The limit to such an accumulation is […] the power of
the labourer to make and use the instruments in question.”
“… second, if it be[ll] made and used by different […] persons,
who share between them in just proportion the produce of their combined
labour.[… ] Capital may be made by one labourer and used by another […] both may[mm] divide the commodity […] in proportion as each has
contributed by his labour to produce it… I should rather express this
fact, however, by saying that a part of the society employed in making
instruments, while another part uses them, is a branch of division of labour
which aids productive power and adds to the general wealth. As long as the
produce of the two […] classes of labourers.-be[nn] divided between them, the accumulation or[oo]
increase of such instruments as they can make and use, is as beneficial as if
they were made and used by one person.”
Third, “if it be owned by a class of persons who neither make
nor use it [… ] The capitalist being the mere owner of the instruments,
is not, as such, a labourer. He in no manner assists production.”
<In other words, production is assisted by the
instrument, but not by the title which A holds to the instrument, i.e.
not by the circumstance that the instrument is owned by a non-labourer.>
“He acquires possession of the
produce of one labourer, which he makes over to another, either for a
time—as is the case with most kinds of fixed capital, or for ever, as is the
case with wages—whenever he thinks it can be used or consumed for his
advantage. He never does allow the produce of one labourer, when it comes
into his possession, to be either used or consumed by another, unless it is for
his benefit. He employs or lends his property
to shore the produce, or natural revenue, of labourers; and
every accumulation of such property in his hands is a mere
extension of his power over the produce of labour, and retards the progress
of national wealth, […] this [is] at present the case… When the
capitalist, being. the owner of all the produce, will allow labourers
neither to make nor use instruments, unless he obtains a profit over
and above the subsistence of the labourer, it is plain that bounds are set to
productive labour much within what Nature prescribes. In proportion as
capitol in the hands of a third party is accumulated, so the whole
amount of profit required by the capitalist increases, and so there arises
an artificial check to production and population… In the present state of
society, the labourers being la no case the owners of capital, every
accumulation of it adds to the amount of profit demanded from them, and
extinguishes all that labour which would only procure the labourer his
comfortable subsistence… when it is admitted that labour produces all things,
even capital, it is nonsense to attribute productive power to the
instruments labour makes and uses…”
“…wages do not, like instruments, facilitate
production.[pp] […] labour, not capital, pays all wages”
(op. cit., pp. 243-47).
||1086| “…the greater part of […]
the advances of capitalists consists of such promises.”[qq]
“…the invention and employment of paper-money had done
nothing else but show [the incorrectness of the notion] that capital is
something saved[rr]
[… ] As long as the capitalist, to realise his wealth, or command over other
people’s labour, was obliged to have in his possession an actual accumulation of
the precious metals or of commodities, we might have continued to suppose,[ss]
that accumulation of capital was the result of an actual saving, and that on it
depended the progress of society. But when paper-money and parchment
securities were invented—when the possessor of nothing but such a piece of
parchment received an annual revenue in pieces of paper with which he obtained
whatever was necessary for his own use and consumption, and not giving away all
the pieces of paper, was richer at the end of the year than at the beginning, or
was entitled next year to receive a still greater number of pieces of paper,
obtaining a still greater
command over the produce of labour, it became evident […] that capital
was not any thing saved; and that the individual capitalist did not
grow rich by an actual and material saving, but by doing something
which enabled him … to obtain more of the produce of other men’s[tt]
labour” (loc. cit., p. 248, note).
“The master manufacturer has either money or paper with which
he pays wages; those wages his labourer exchanges for the produce of other
labourers, who will not keep the wages, whether money or paper; and it is
returned to the manufacturer, who gives in exchange for it the cloth which his
own labourers have made. With it he again pays wages, and the money or
paper again goes the same round …”
“It ascribes to his” (the capitalist’s) “property
merely, whether he employ it to pay wages, or whether it consist in
useful instruments, all that vast assistance, which
knowledge and skill, when realised in machinery, give to labour.
[…] the united labours of the miner, the smelter, the smith, the engineer, the
stoker, and of numberless other persons, and not the lifeless machines, perform
whatever is done by steam engines…
By the common mode of speaking, the productive power of this skill is
attributed to its visible products, the instruments, the mere owners of
which, who neither make nor use them, imagine themselves to be very
productive persons…” (loc. cit., pp. 248-51).
With regard to his polemic against “the danger of forcing […]
capital out of the country” [loc. cit., p. 253], and against the interest
of capital as a necessary stimulus for [the development
of] industry, or concerning the savings theory, see IX,
47. To be included in the chapter on the vulgar economists.
“As their numbers are increased,[uu] both increased production and
consumption take place, which is all that is ever meant by the terms
accumulation or increase of national wealth” (op. cit., p. 257). |XVIII-1086||
[h) Hodgskin on the Power of Capital and on the Upheaval in the Right of
Property]
|XIII-670a| [Hodgskin,] The Natural and Artificial Right of Property
Contrasted, London, 1832.
“At present, all the wealth of society goes first into the
possession of the
capitalist, and even most of the land has been purchased by him; he
pays the landowner his rent, the labourer his wages, the tax and tithe
gatherer their claims, and keeps a large, indeed the largest and continually
augmenting share, of the annual produce of labour for himself. The
capitalist may now be said to be the
first owner of all the wealth of the community; though no law has
conferred on him the right to this property” (p. 98).
“… this change has been effected by the taking of interest
on capital, and by the process of compound interest; and it is not a little
curious, that all the lawgivers of Europe, endeavoured to prevent this by
statutes, viz., statutes against usury” (loc. cit., p. 98, note).
“… the power of the capitalist over all the wealth of the
country, is a complete change in the right of property, and by what
law, or series of laws, was it effected?” (loc. cit., p. 99).
|XIII-670a||
[4.] Bray as an Opponent of the Economists
|X-441| J. F. Bray,
Labour’s Wrongs and Labour’s Remedy, etc., Leeds, 1839.
Since human existence is determined by labour, and labour
presupposes instruments of labour … “the great field for all exertion and the
raw material of all wealth—the earth—is[vv] the common property of all its inhabitants” (p. 28).
“… life is dependent upon food, […] food […] upon labour […],
those dependencies are absolute […] therefore, if labour be evaded by any human
being, it can be thus evaded by individuals only on the condition of increased
labour by the mass” (loc. cit., p. 31).
“… all the wrongs and the woes which man has ever
committed or endured, may be traced to the assumption of a right in the soil, by
certain individuals and classes, to the exclusion of other individuals and
classes… The next step which man has ever taken, after having claimed property
in land, has been to claim property in man…” (loc. cit., p. 34).
Bray declares that his purpose is:
“…fighting them” (the economists) “upon
their own ground, and with their own weapons” (loc. cit., p. 41) (in order to
prove that poverty need not be the lot of the workers under every social
system). “Before the conclusions arrived at by such a course of proceeding
can be overthrown, the economists must unsay or disprove those established
truths and principles on which their arguments are founded” (loc. cit., p. 41).
According to the economists the production of wealth requires:
1) labour, 2) accumulation of previous labour, or capital, and 3) exchange.[ww] These are, according to the economists themselves, the
universal conditions of production.
“They are applied to society at barge, and, from their nature,
cannot exempt any individual or any class from their operation” (loc. cit., p.
42).
“The ban—‘Thou shalt babour’—rests alike on all created beings…
Man only can escape this law; and, from its nature, it can be evaded by one man
only at the expense of another” (loc. cit., p. 43).
“From the very nature of labour and exchange, strict justice
not only requires” <in this context, Bray refers to the economic definitions of
the exchange-value of commodities> “that all exchangers should be mutually,
but that they should
likewise be equally, benefited… If a just system of exchanges
were acted upon, the value of all articles would he determined by the entire
cost of production; and equal values should always exchange for equal values…
the workmen have given the capitalist the labour of a whole year, in exchange
for the value of only half a year—and from this […] has arisen the inequality of
wealth and power which at present exists around us. It is an inevitable
condition of inequality of exchanges—of buying at one price and selling at
another—that capitalists shall continue to be capitalists, and working men be
working men—the one a class of tyrants and the other a class of slaves—to
eternity” (op. cit., pp. 48-49).
“By the present […] system, exchanges are not only not mutually
beneficial to all parties, as the political economists have asserted, but it is
plain […] that there is, in most transactions between the capitalist and the
producer, […] no exchange whatever … what is it that the capitalist, whether he
be manufacturer or banded proprietor gives […] for the labour of the working
man? The capitalist gives no labour, for he does not work—he gives no
capital, for his store of wealth is being perpetually augmented… the capitalist
[…]
cannot […] make an exchange with anything that belongs to himself.
The whole transaction, therefore, plainly skews that the capitalists and
proprietors do no more than give the working man, for his labour of one week, a
part of the wealth which they obtained from him the week before!—which just
amounts to giving him nothing for something… The wealth which the
capitalist appears to give in exchange for the workmen’s labour was generated
neither by the labour nor the riches of the capitalist, but it was originally
obtained by the labour of the workman; and it is still daily taken from him, by
a fraudulent system of unequal exchanges” (loc. cit., pp. 49-50). “The
whole transaction […] between the producer and the capitalist, is a palpable
deception, a mere farce” (loc. cit., p. 50).
“…the law which says ‘There shall be
accumulation’, is only half fulfilled, and is made to subserve the interests of
a particular class, to the detriment of all the rest of the community…” (loc.
cit., p. 50).
“Under the present social system, the whole of the working
class are dependent upon the capitalist or employer for the means of labour; and
where one class, by its position in society, is thus dependent upon another
class for the means of labour, it is dependent, likewise, for the
means of life; and this is a condition so contrary to the very intention of
society—so revolting to reason … that it cannot for one moment be palliated or
defended. It confers on man a power which ought to be vested in nothing
mortal” (loc. cit., p. 52).
“Our daily experience teaches us, that if we take a slice from
a loaf, the slice never grows on again: the loaf is but an accumulation of
slices, and the more we eat of it, the less will there remain to be eaten.
Such is the ||442|
case with the loaf of the working man; but that of the capitalist follows not
this rule. His loaf continually increases instead of diminishing: with
him, it is cut and come again, for ever. … if exchanges were equal, would the
wealth of the present capitalists gradually go from them to the working classes:
every shilling that the rich man spent, would leave him a shilling less rich”
(loc. cit., pp. 54-55).
Bray also shows in his work that:
“… it is […] impossible that any capitalist can have derived
even one thousand pounds sterling from the actual hoarded labour of his
working-class progenitors” (loc. cit., p. 55).
It follows from the teachings of the economists themselves that
“…there can be no exchanges without accumulations—no accumulations with-out
labour” (loc. cit., p. 55).
“…under the present system, every working man gives to an
employer at least six days’ labour for an equivalent worth only four or five
days’ labour, the gains of the last man are necessarily the losses of the first
man” (loc. cit., p. 56).
“Thus, in whatever light” [the genesis of wealth is]
“examined—whether as a gift, […] individual accumulation, […] exchange, […]
inheritance—there is proof upon proof that there is a flaw in the rich man’s
title which takes away at once its very show of justice, and its value” (loc.
cit., pp. 56-57).
“… this wealth has all been derived from the bones and sinews
of the working classes during successive ages, and it has been taken from them
by the fraudulent and slavery-creating system of unequal exchanges” (loc. cit.,
p. 57).
If “a working man under the present system […] would become
wealthy, he […] instead of exchanging his own labour, must become a capitalist,
or exchanger of the labour of other people; and thus, by plundering others in
the same manner as he was plundered, through the medium of unequal exchanges, he
will be enabled to acquire great gains from the small losses of other people”
(loc. cit., p. 57).
“The political economists and capitalists have written and
printed many books to impress upon the working man the fallacy that ‘the gain of
the capitalist is not the boss of the producer’. We are told that
Labour cannot move one step without Capital—that Capital is as a shovel to the
man who digs—that Capital is just as necessary to production as Labour
itself is… this mutual dependency between Capital
and Labour has nothing to do with the relative position of the capitalist and
the working man; nor does it show that the former should be maintained by the
latter… It is the capital, and not the capitalist, that is essential to
the operations of the producer; and there is as much difference between the two,
as there is between the actual cargo and the bill of lading” (loc. cit., p. 59).
“From the relation which capital and labour bear to each other,
it is evident that the more capital or accumulated produce there is in a
country, the greater will be the facilities for production, and the less labour
will it require to obtain a given result. Thus the people of Great
Britain, with the aid of their present vast accumulations of capital—their
buildings, machinery, ships, canals and railways—can produce more manufactured
wealth in one week, than their ancestors of a thousand years since could have
created in half a century. It is not our superior physical powers,[xx] but our capital, which enables us to do
this; for, wherever there is a deficiency of capital, production will progress
slowly and laboriously, and vice versa. From these considerations, then,
it is apparent, that whatever is gained to Capital, is likewise gained to
Labour—that every increase of the former tends to diminish the toil of the
latter—and that, therefore, every loss to Capital must also be a loss to Labour.
This truth, though long since observed by the political economists, has never
yet been fairly stated by them” [loc. cit., pp. 59-60].
<In fact, the fellows argue in the following way:
Accumulated products of labour, i.e., products not consumed, lighten labour
and make it more productive. As a consequence, the fruits of this
lightening and so on must go not to labour itself but to accumulation.
Consequently, it is not accumulation which must be the property of labour but
labour must be the property of accumulation—[that is, it must be the property 1
of its own products. Consequently, the worker must not accumulate for
himself but for someone else, and the accumulation must confront him as capital.
For the economists, the material element of capital is so integrated with its
social form as capital—with its antagonistic character as the product of labour
dominating labour—that they cannot write a single sentence without contradicting
themselves.>
“They have even identified Capital with one class of the
community, and Labour with another
class—although the two powers have naturally, and should have artificially, no
such connection. The economists always attempt to make the prosperity, if
not the very existence, of the working man dependent upon the condition of
maintaining the capitalist in luxury and idleness. They would not have the
working man to eat a meal until he has produced two—one for himself and the
other for his master—the batter receiving his portion indirectly, by unequal
exchanges” (ibid., p. 60).
“When the workman has produced a thing,
it is his no longer—it belongs to the capitalist—it has been conveyed from the
one to the other by the unseen magic of unequal exchanges” (loc. cit., p. 61).
“Under the present social system, Capital and Labour—the shovel
and the digger—are two separate and antagonistic powers” (loc. cit., p. 60).
||443| “But even if all the land
and the machinery and the houses did belong to the capitalists, and the working
class were not in being, the former would not thereby be enabled to evade the
great condition ‘that there shall be labour’. Their wealth would leave
them in the choice only of working or starving. They cannot eat the land
and the houses; and the land will not yield sustenance, nor the machinery make
clothing, without the application of human labour. Therefore, when the
capitalists and proprietors say that the working class must support them, they
likewise say, in effect, that the producers belong to them as well as the houses
and bands do—that the working man was created only for the rich man’s use!” (op.
cit., p. 68).
“… the producer […] receives, in exchange for what he gives to
the capitalist—not the labour nor the produce of the labour of the capitalist,
but—work! Through the instrumentality of money, the working class are not
only compelled to perform the labour which the preservation of existence
naturally imposes upon them, but they are likewise saddled with the labour of
other classes. It matters not whether the producers now receive gold, or
silver, or other commodities from a non-producing class: it all amounts to
this—that the working class perform their own labour, and support them-selves,
and likewise perform the labour of the capitalist, and maintain him into the
bargain! Whatever may be the nominal receipts which the producers
receive from the capitalists, their actual receipts are—the transfer of that
labour which ought to be rendered by the capita lists” (op. cit., pp.
153-54).
“… we will suppose the population of the United Kingdom […] to
be [… ] 25,000,000 of human beings. […] we may […] estimate the entire
maintenance of the twenty-five millions of people to be worth,[yy] on the average, at least £15 per head annually.
This gives £375,000,000 as the yearly value of the maintenance of the whole
people of the United Kingdom. We do not, however, employ ourselves merely
in producing articles of subsistence, for our labour creates, likewise, many
unconsumable articles. We every year add to our stock of accumulations, or
capital, by increasing the number of our houses, ships, implements, machines,
roads, and other assistants to further production, beside making good all wear
and tear. Thus, although our subsistence may be worth but three hundred
and seventy-five millions sterling a year, the total annual value of the wealth
created by the people […] will not be loss than five hundred millions sterling”
(op. cit., p. 81).
“… we cannot calculate upon having above one-fourth of our
population, or about six millions of men—that is, those between the ages of
fourteen and fifty—as effective producers. Of this number […] scarcely
five millions can be said, under the present arrangements […] to assist in
production;” (Bray writes later on that only four millions are directly employed
in actual production) “for thousands of able-bodied men
[…] are compelled to stand idle while the work which they ought to do is being
performed by women and children; and hundreds of thousands of men in Ireland can
obtain no employment whatever. Thus less than five millions of men,
assisted by a few thousands of women and children, have […] to create produce
for […] twenty-five millions…” (loc. cit., pp. 81-82).
“… the present number of working men, if unassisted by
machinery, could not support themselves and the present number of idlers and
unprofitable labourers [… ] The agricultural and manufacturing machinery of
every kind which we bring to our aid in the business of productions, has been
computed to perform the labour of about one hundred millions of effective men…
this machinery—and its application under the present system, which has generated
the hundreds of thousands of idlers and livers on profit who now press the
working class into the earth” (loc. cit., p. 82).
“The present constitution of society has been fertilised by
machinery, and by machinery will it be destroyed… The machinery itself is
good—is indispensable; it is the application of it—the circumstance of its being
possessed by individuals instead of by the nation—that is bad” (loc. cit., pp.
82-83).
“The five millions of men already enumerated as assisting in
production will include all who labour little or much. Some […] do not
work five hours a day, while others again toil on fifteen hours;[zz]
and when to this is added the time lost by the compulsory idleness of great
numbers in times of depression in trade, it will be found that our annual
production is created and distributed by less than one-fifth of the community,
working, on the average, ten hours a day” (loc. cit., p. 83).
“… we suppose that the wealthy non-producers of every
description, with their families, and dependents, amount only to two millions of
persons, yet this number alone would cost the working classes 230,000,000
annually, if their maintenance were averaged, bike that of the latter, at £15
per head… therefore,[aaa] upon the most moderate computation
their maintenance will cost not less than £50 per head. This gives a total
of £100,000,000 as the annual cost of the mere drones of society—the utterly
unproductive…” (loc. cit., pp. 83-84).
“… likewise[bbb] the double and quadruple allowance received by the
various classes of small proprietors, manufacturers, and tradesmen, in the shape
of profit and interest, ||444|
Upon the most moderate computation, the share of wealth enjoyed by this
extensive portion of the community will amount to not less than £140,000,000
annually,
above the average of what is received by an equal number of the best
paid of the working class. Thus, along with their government, the two
classes of idlers and livers on profit—comprising perhaps one-fourth of the
entire population—absorb about £300,000,000 annually, or above one half of the
entire wealth produced […] an average boss of above £50 per head to every
working man in the empire!—This leaves no more than an average of £11 per head
per
annum, to be divided amongst the remaining three-fourths
of the nation. From calculations made in 1815, it appears that the annual
income of the whole people of the United Kingdom amounted to about £430,000,000;
of which the working class received £99,742,547, and the rent, pension, and
profit class £330,778,825! The whole property of the country was at the
same time calculated to be worth nearby three thousand millions of pounds
sterling” (loc. cit., pp. 84-85).
Cf. the list of Gregory King etc.
England, 1844. Population: Nobility and
gentry—1,181,000. Trades men, farmers, etc.—4,221,000 (combined
total—5,402,000). Labourers, paupers, etc.—9,567,000. Banfleld
(T.C.), The Organisation of Industry, second ed., London, 1848.
|X-444||
[a] In the manuscript “i.e.” instead of
“that is to say”.—Ed.
[b] In the manuscript
“Consequently, if” instead of “If then”.—Ed.
[c] In the manuscript “But this
is” instead of “that it is”.—Ed.
* ||XV-862a| Because surplus-value and surplus labour are
identical, a qualitative limit is set to the accumulation of capital,
[it is determined by] the total working-day (the period in the 24 hours
during which labour-power can be active), the given stage of development of the
productive forces and the
population, which limits the total number of working-days that
can be utilised simultaneously at a given time. If, on the contrary,
surplus yield is understood in the abstract form of interest, that is,
as the proportion in which capital increases itself by means of a mythical
“sleight of hand”, then the limit is purely quantitative and it is
absolutely impossible to see why capital does not daily add to itself interest
as capital every morning, thus creating interest on interest in infinite
progression. |XV-862a||
[d] See
Theories of Surplus-Value, Part II, pp. 541-42 and this volume, pp.
114-15.—Ed.
[e] In the manuscript “for”.—Ed.
[f] Instead of “this surplus labour
must”, the manuscript has “This surplus labour, that is an even larger amount,
must”.—Ed.
[g] Instead of “which is the same
thing”, the manuscript has “which comes to the same thing”.—Ed.
[h] The following sentence is Marx’s
paraphrase (written in German) of the ideas the author sets forth in the
pamphlet.—Ed.
[i] The first part of the sentence up
to the words: “are worked” is not a quotation but a paraphrase by Marx (in
German).—Ed.
[j] The Source and Remedy of the
National Difficulties, deduced from Principles of Political Economy, etc.—Ed.
[k] In the manuscript “The”—Ed.
[l] In the manuscript “The entire war
against the French Revolution” instead of “the history of the last thirty
years”.—Ed.
[m] The Source and Remedy of the
National Difficulties, published anonymously.—Ed.
[n] Ravenstone,
Thoughts on the Funding System, and its Effects.—Ed.
[o] Labour Defended against the
Claims of Capital; or, the Unproductiveness of Capital Proved, which
Hodgskin published anonymously.—Ed.
[p] In the manuscript “Wealth is
nothing but disposable time”.—Ed.
[q]
Activity.—Ed.
[r] In the manuscript this reads: “The
conviction of the worker employed by the cotton spinner… ”—Ed.
[s] In the nascent state.—Ed.
[t] A mode of expression, a figure of
speech.—Ed.
[u] In kind, in this context it means:
within the framework of a natural economy.—Ed.
[v] This is not a quotation from
Chavée but a free summary of some of his ideas.—Ed.
[w]
Virtue.—Ed.
[x] To surround with a wall, to
fortify, to defend.—Ed.
[y] To be strong, vigorous.—Ed.
[z]
Wall.—Ed.
[aa] Rule, govern, control.—Ed.
[bb] In the manuscript “the vast
utility of the steam-engine
does”.—Ed.
[cc] In the manuscript “the”.—Ed.
[dd] See this volume, pp. 16-17 and
31-32.—Ed.
[ee] In the manuscript “The Author of
An Essay on the Application of Capital to Land
says”.—Ed.
[ff] Instead of the phrase: “they in
reality assert the monstrous proposition” Marx wrote in the manuscript in
German: they assert the absurd proposition.—Ed.
[gg]
Power—Ed.
[hh] In the manuscript “The
capitalist is the
oppressive middleman between the different labourers. If he is
put out of view…”.—Ed.
[ii] The words up to “rapidly”
represent Marx’s own synopsis of Hodgskin’s argument and have been translated
here from the German. The rest of the sentence is quoted directly from
Hodgskin.—Ed.
[jj] Marx paraphrases this proposition
of Hodgskin in German (apart from the words “retail trade” and “quantity”) and
his rendering has been translated here.—Ed.
[kk] This part of the quotation is
slightly condensed and partly translated into German in the manuscript; rendered
in English it reads: “If one considers for example fixed capital, the most
favourable position for the idea of capital aiding production, three classes of
circumstances are to be distinguished under which [the results of] accumulation
of capital are very different.”
1. When it is made and used by the same person. It is obvious
[that]”.—Ed.
[ll] In the manuscript “when” instead
of “if it be”.—Ed.
[mm] In the manuscript “they” instead
of “both may”.—Ed.
[nn] In the manuscript “is”.-Ed.
[oo] In the manuscript “and”.-Ed.
[pp] In the manuscript “wages do
not facilitate production, like instruments”.—Ed.
[qq] In the manuscript “consists of
promises to pay”.—Ed.
[rr] In the manuscript “The invention
and employment of paper-money has revealed that capital is by no means something
saved”.—Ed.
[ss] In the manuscript “one could
suppose”.—Ed.
[tt] In the manuscript “people”.—Ed.
[uu] In the manuscript “As the
population increases.”—Ed.
[vv] In the manuscript “must be”.—Ed.
[ww] Marx here summarises Bray’s ideas
and presents them in German.—Ed.
[xx] In the manuscript “forces”.—Ed.
[yy] Instead of “we may estimate the
entire maintenance of the 25 millions of people to be worth”, in the manuscript
“We assume that their maintenance
is”.—Ed.
[zz] In the manuscript the two
sentences, which are translated into German, are condensed to read as follows:
“Of the five million men who at present assist in production some work only five
hours a day, others fifteen.”—Ed.
[aaa] In the manuscript “But”.—Ed.
[bbb] In the manuscript “Add to
this”.—Ed.