Capitalism; Imperialism; Saving and investment; Socialism
Nor does the reader, we might add, know what to do with v. Kirchmann's
constructions. His model is so childish that every advance leads deeper
into the maze.
First of all, there seems to be no reason whatever why, and to what
purpose, v. Kirchmann should devise this splitting-up of production into
three parts. If analogous examples by Ricardo and MacCulloch usually
confront tenant farmers and manufacturers, that is presumably only
inspired by the antiquated Physiocrat conception of social reproduction
which Ricardo had adopted, although his own theory of value as against
the Physiocrats deprived it of all meaning, and although Adam Smith had
already made a good start in considering the real material foundations
of the social reproductive process. Still, we have seen that the
tradition of distinguishing between agriculture and industry as the
foundation of reproduction was kept up in economic theory until Marx
introduced his epoch-making distinction of the two productive
departments in society for producer and consumer goods. v. Kirchmann's
three departments, however, have no real significance at all. Obviously,
no material consideration of reproduction can have been responsible for
this supremely arbitrary division which jumbles up tools and furniture,
raw materials and food, but makes clothing a department in its own
right. One might as well postulate one department for food, clothing and
housing, another for medicines and a third for tooth brushes. v.
Kirchmann's primary concern, no doubt, is with the social division of
labour; hence the assumption of as nearly equal quantities of products
as possible in the transactions of exchange. Yet this exchange, on which
the argument turns, plays no part at all in v. Kirchmann's example since
it is not the value which is distributed but the quantities of products,
the bulk of use-values as such. In this intriguing _Ort_ of v.
Kirchmann's imagining, again, the products are distributed first, and
only afterwards, when the distribution is accomplished, is there to be
universal exchange, whereas on the solid ground of capitalist production
it is, as we know, the exchange which inaugurates the distribution of
the product and serves as its agent. Besides, the queerest things happen
in v. Kirchmann's distributive system: 'As we all know', the prices of
the products, i.e. the price of the aggregate product of society,
consist of _v + s_, of wage and capital interest alone--so that the
aggregate product must be distributed entirely among workers and
entrepreneurs; but then unhappily v. Kirchmann dimly remembers the fact
that production needs things like raw materials and tools. So _Ort_ is
provided with raw materials furtively introduced among the food, and
with tools among the furniture. But now the question arises: who is to
get these indigestible items in the course of general distribution? the
workers as wages, or the capitalists as profits of enterprise? They
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