Capitalism; Imperialism; Saving and investment; Socialism
Let us now take another example. A manufacturer of machinery produces
machines in his factory. The annual output is a certain number of
machines. In its value, however, this annual output contains the capital
advanced by the manufacturer as well as the net income that has been
earned. Part of the manufactured machines thus represent income for the
manufacturer and are destined to realise this income in the process of
circulation and exchange. But the person who buys these machines from
the manufacturer does not buy them as income but in order to use them as
a means of production; for him they are capital.
These examples make it seem plausible that an object which is capital
for one person may be income for another and _vice versa_. How can it be
possible under these circumstances to construct anything in the nature
of a total capital of society? Indeed almost every scientific economist
up to the time of Marx concluded that there is no social capital.[66]
Smith was still doubtful, undecided, vacillating about this question; so
was Ricardo. But already Say declared categorically:
'It is in this way, that the total value of products is distributed
amongst the members of the community; I say, the _total_ value, because
such part of the whole value produced, as does not go to one of the
consuming producers, is received by the rest. The clothier buys wool of
the farmer, pays his workmen in every department, and sells the cloth,
the result of their united exertion, at a price that reimburses all his
advances, and affords himself a profit. He never reckons as profit, or
as the revenue of his own industry, anything more than the _net_
surplus, after deducting all charges and outgoings; but those outgoings
are merely an advance of their respective revenues to the previous
producers, which are refunded by the _gross_ value of the cloth. The
price paid to the farmer for his wool is the compound of the several
revenues of the cultivator, the shepherd and the landlord. Although the
farmer reckons as _net_ produce only the surplus remaining after payment
of his landlord and his servants in husbandry, yet to them these
payments are items of revenue--rent to the one and wages to the
other--to the one, the revenue of the land, to the other, the revenue of
his industry. The aggregate of all these is defrayed out of the value of
the cloth, the whole of which forms the revenue of some one or other,
and is entirely absorbed in that way.--Whence it appears that the term
_net_ produce applies only to the individual revenue of each separate
producer or adventurer in industry, but that the aggregate of individual
revenue, the total revenue of the community, is equal to the _gross_
produce of its land, capital and industry, which entirely subverts the
system of the economists of the last century, who considered nothing but
the net produce of the land as farming revenue, and therefore concluded,
that this net produce was all that the community had to consume; instead
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