Capitalism; Imperialism; Saving and investment; Socialism
[315] Ibid., p. 236. A quite uncompromising version of the same view is
given by V. Ilyin [Lenin]: 'The romanticists (as he calls the sceptics)
argue as follows: the capitalists cannot consume the surplus value;
therefore they must dispose of it abroad. I ask: Do the capitalists
perhaps give away their products to foreigners for nothing, throw it
into the sea, maybe? If they sell it, it means that they obtain an
equivalent. If they export certain goods, it means that they import
others' (_Economic Studies and Essays_, p. 2). As a matter of fact, his
explanation of the part played by external commerce in capitalist
production is far more correct than that of Struve and Bulgakov.
_CHAPTER XXIII_
TUGAN BARANOVSKI AND HIS 'LACK OF PROPORTION'
We have left this theorist to the end, although he already developed his
views in Russian in 1894, i.e. before Struve and Bulgakov, partly
because he only gave his theories their mature form in German at a later
date,[316] and also because the conclusions he draws from the premises
of the Marxist critics are the most far-reaching in their implications.
Like Bulgakov, Tugan Baranovski starts from Marx's analysis of social
reproduction which gave him the clue to this bewildering maze of
problems. But while Bulgakov, the enthusiastic disciple of Marx, only
sought to follow him faithfully and simply attributed his own
conclusions to the master, Tugan Baranovski, on the other hand, lays
down the law to Marx who, in his opinion, did not know how to turn his
brilliant exposition of the reproductive process to good account. Tugan
Baranovski's most important general conclusion from Marx's principles,
the pivot of his whole theory, is that, contrary to the assumptions of
the sceptics, capitalist accumulation is not only possible under the
capitalist forms of revenue and consumption, but is, in fact, completely
independent of both. It is not consumption, he says, but production
itself which makes for the best market. Production and the market are
therefore the same, and since the expansion of production is unlimited
in itself, the market, the capacity to absorb its products, has no
limits either.
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