Capitalism; Imperialism; Saving and investment; Socialism
(1) There is a fixed capital of society, no part of which enters into
its net revenue. This fixed capital consists in 'the materials necessary
for supporting their useful machines and instruments of trade' and 'the
produce of labour necessary for fashioning those materials into the
proper form'.[77] By singling out the production of such fixed capital
as of a special kind, and explicitly contrasting it with the production
of consumer goods, Smith in effect transformed fixed capital into what
Marx calls 'constant capital'--that part of capital which consists of
all material means of production, as opposed to labour power.
(2) There is a circulating capital of society. After eliminating the
part of fixed, or constant, capital, there remains only the category of
consumer goods; these are not capital for society but net revenue, a
fund of consumption.
(3) Capital and net revenue of an individual do not strictly correspond
with capital and net revenue of society. What is nothing but fixed, or
constant capital for society as a whole cannot be capital for the
individual; it must be revenue, too, a fund of consumption, comprising
as it does those parts of fixed capital which represent the workers'
wages and the capitalists' profits. On the other hand, the circulating
capital of the individuals cannot be capital for society but must be
revenue, especially in so far as it takes the form of provisions.
(4) As regards the value of the total annual social product, no trace of
capital remains. It can be resolved completely into the three kinds of
income: wages, profits of capital, and rents.
If we tried from this haphazard collection of odd ideas to build up a
picture of the annual reproduction of total social capital, and of its
mechanism, we should soon despair of our task. Indeed, all these
observations leave us infinitely remote from the solution of the problem
how social capital is annually renewed, how everybody's consumption is
ensured by his income, while the individuals can nevertheless adhere to
their own points of view on capital and income. Yet if we wish to
appreciate fully Marx's contribution to the elucidation of this problem,
we must be fully aware of all this confusion of ideas, the mass of
conflicting points of view.
Let us begin with Adam Smith's last thesis which alone would suffice to
wreck the treatment of the problem of reproduction in classical
economics.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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