Capitalism; Imperialism; Saving and investment; Socialism
Thus, after five years of accumulation, the aggregate social product is
found to have grown from 9,000 to 14,348, the social aggregate capital
from (_5,500c + 1,750v = 7,250_) to (_8,784c + 2,782v = 11,566_) and the
surplus value from (_1,000s + 500s = 1,500_) to (_1,464s + 1,065s =
2,529_), whereby the surplus value for personal consumption, being 1,500
at the beginning of accumulation, has grown to 732 + 958 = 1,690 in the
last year.[102] The capitalist class, then, has capitalised more, it has
practised greater abstinence, and yet it has been able to live better.
Society, in a material respect, has become richer, richer in means of
production, richer in consumer goods, and it has equally become richer
in the capitalist sense of the term since it produces more surplus
value. The social product circulates _in toto_ in society. Partly it
serves to enlarge reproduction and partly it serves consumption. The
requirements of capitalist accumulation correspond to the material
composition of the aggregate social product. What Marx said in volume i
of _Capital_ is true: the increased surplus value can be added on to
capital because the social surplus product comes into the world from the
very first in the material form of means of production, in a form
incapable of utilisation except in the productive process. At the same
time reproduction expands in strict conformity with the laws of
circulation: the mutual supply of the two departments of production with
additional means of production and consumer goods proceeds as an
exchange of equivalents. It is an exchange of commodities in the course
of which the very accumulation of one department is the condition of
accumulation in the other and makes this possible. The complicated
problem of accumulation is thus converted into a diagrammatic
progression of surprising simplicity. We may continue the above chain of
equations _ad infinitum_ so long as we observe this simple principle:
that a certain increase in the constant capital of Department I always
necessitates a certain increase in its variable capital, which
predetermines beforehand the extent of the increase in Department II,
with which again a corresponding increase in the variable capital must
be co-ordinated. Finally, it depends on the extent of increase in the
variable capital in both departments, how much of the total may remain
for personal consumption by the capitalist class. The extent of this
increase will also show that this amount of consumer goods which remains
for private consumption by the capitalist is exactly equivalent to that
part of the surplus value which has not been capitalised in either
department.
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