This should be reversed: labour must be all, and capital nothing. This
literature was contemporaneous with the emergence of the English
revolutionary Labour movement, from which Chartism arose at a later
date. Piercy Ravenstone (1821) called capital a metaphysical (airy,
impalpable) entity. Hodgskin (1827) called it a fetish, whereas they
described labour as the economic reality. The expressions
surplus-product and surplus-value were already known to this
anti-capitalist school, with which Marx also connected himself when he
set to work to elaborate his criticism of political economy.[7] But
this literature supplied him with much less material for the
construction of the theory of surplus value than the formulation of
the theory of value of the classical economy. Besides, while the
English anti-capitalist critics, like Ravenstone, Gray, Hodgskin, and
J.F. Bray merely condemned surplus value as immoral and as the source
of all social wrongs, Marx used the theory of surplus value as the key
to unlock the mechanism of the capitalist system and to reveal its
workings, its tendencies, and its final destiny. This appears to be
the real difference between the English anti-capitalist critics and
Marx. In this matter he was obliged to perform most of the work
himself. The question he put was no longer "What is the substance of
wealth and how is it measured?" but "How is its growth and continual
accretions to be explained?" Capital is that portion of wealth which
is employed for the purpose of gain, of increase. Whence comes this
gain, this increase? The answer is as follows:
All capital that is embarked on a productive undertaking consists of
two parts: one part is expended on the technical means of
production--on buildings, machines, tools, and raw materials, the
other on wages. The first part Marx calls Constant Capital (c), the
other part Variable Capital (v). The first is called constant, because
it only adds to the commodities just as much value as it loses in the
course of the productive process; it creates no fresh value: Marx also
calls it the passive portion. The outlay on wages is called variable
capital because it undergoes an alteration in the process of
production: it creates new additional value: Marx also called variable
capital the active portion, for it creates surplus value (s).
This composition of capital of constant and variable parts Marx calls
its organic composition. He calls it average or normal composition
when the capital of a business is 80 per cent. constant and 20 per
cent. variable. If the constant part is higher, and the variable part
lower, he calls it capital of a high composition.
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