Capitalism; Imperialism; Saving and investment; Socialism
of commodities and can be expressed by the same formula _c + v + s_.
Part _c_ recompenses the capitalist for his advances on means of
production that have been used up, part _v_ recompenses him for his
advances on wages, and the last part, _s_, represents the expected
surplus, the capitalist's clear profit in cash.[59]
This conversion of capital from its original form, from the starting
point of all capitalist production, into means of production, dead and
living, such as raw materials, instruments, and labour; its further
conversion into commodities by a living labour process; and its final
reconversion into money, a greater amount of money indeed than at the
initial stage--this transformation of capital is, however, required for
more than the production and appropriation of surplus value. The aim and
incentive of capitalist production is not a surplus value pure and
simple, to be appropriated in any desired quantity, but a surplus value
ever growing into larger quantities, surplus value _ad infinitum_. But
to achieve this aim, the same magic means must be used over and over
again, the means of capitalist production--the ever repeated
appropriation of the proceeds of unpaid wage labour in the process of
commodity manufacture, and the subsequent realisation of the commodities
so produced.
Thus quite a new incentive is given to constantly renewed production, to
the process of reproduction as a regular phenomenon in capitalist
society, an incentive unknown to any other system of production. In
every other economic system known to history, reproduction is determined
by the unceasing need of society for consumer goods, whether they are
the needs of all the workers determined in a democratic manner as in an
agrarian and communist market community, or the despotically determined
needs of an antagonistic class society, as in an economy of slave labour
or _corvée_ and the like. But in a capitalist system of production, it
is not consideration of social needs which actuates the individual
private producer who alone matters in this connection. His production is
determined entirely by the effective demand, and even this is to him a
mere means for the realisation of surplus value which for him is
indispensable. Appropriation of surplus value is his real incentive, and
production of consumer goods for the satisfaction of the effective
demand is only a detour when we look to the real motive, that of
appropriation of surplus value, although for the individual capitalist
it is also a rule of necessity. This motive, to appropriate surplus
value, also urges him to re-engage in reproduction over and over again.
It is the production of surplus value which turns reproduction of social
necessities into a _perpetuum mobile_. Reproduction, for its part, can
obviously be only resumed when the products of the previous period, the
commodities, have been realised; that is, converted into money; for
capital in the form of money, in the form of pure value, must always be
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