Capitalism; Imperialism; Saving and investment; Socialism
Bouding, just like Kautsky, holds that the law of a quicker growth in
the means-of-production department relative to the means-of-subsistence
department is a delusion of Tugan Baranovski's.
[328] 'Apart from natural conditions, such as fertility of the soil,
etc., and from the skill of independent and isolated producers (shown
rather qualitatively in the genus than quantitatively in the mass of
their products), the degree of productivity of labour, in a capitalist
society, is expressed in the relative extent of the means of production
that one labourer, during a given time, with the same tension of
labour-power, turns into products. The mass of means of production which
he thus transforms, increases with the productiveness of his labour. But
those means of production play a double part. The increase of some is a
consequence, that of the others a condition of the increasing
productivity of labour. E.g., with the division of labour in
manufacture, and with the use of machinery, more raw material is worked
up in the same time and, therefore, a greater mass of raw material and
auxiliary substances enter into the labour-process. That is the
consequence of the increasing productivity of labour. On the other hand,
the mass of machinery, beasts of burden, mineral manures, drainpipes,
etc., is a condition of the increasing productivity of labour. So also
is it with the means of production concentrated in buildings, furnaces,
means of transport, etc. But whether condition or consequence, the
growing extent of the means of production, as compared with the
labour-power incorporated with them, is an expression of the growing
productiveness of labour. The increase of the latter appears, therefore,
in the diminution of the mass of labour in proportion to the mass of
means of production moved by it, or in the diminution of the subjective
factor of the labour-process as compared with the objective factor'
(_Capital_, vol. i, pp. 635-6). And yet another passage: 'We have seen
previously, that with the development of the productivity of labour, and
therefore with the development of the capitalist mode of production,
which develops the socially productive power of labour more than all
previous modes of production, there is a steady increase of the mass of
means of production, which are permanently embodied in the productive
process as instruments of labour and perform their function in it for a
longer or shorter time at repeated intervals (buildings, machinery,
etc.); also, that this increase is at the same time the premise and
result of the development of the productivity of social labour. It is
especially capitalist production, which is characterised by relative as
well as absolute growth of this sort of wealth' (_Capital_, vol. i,
chap. xxiii, 2). 'The material forms of existence of constant capital,
the means of production, do not consist merely of such instruments of
labour, but also of raw material in various stages of finished and of
auxiliary substances.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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