Former Presentations of the Subject (Chap. 2.19.1)

Chapter 19: [35] Former Presentations of the Subject

I. The Physiocrats

Quesnay’s Tableau Économique shows in a few broad outlines how the annual result of the national production, representing a definite value, is distributed by means of the circulation in such a way that, other things being equal, simple reproduction, i.e., reproduction on the same scale, can take place. The starting-point of the period of production is properly the preceding year’s harvest. The innumerable individual acts of circulation are at once brought together in their characteristic social mass movement — the circulation between great functionally determined economic classes of society. We are here interested in the following: A portion of the total product — being, like every other portion of it, a use-object, it is a new result of last year’s labour — is at the same time only the depository of old capital-value re-appearing in the same bodily form. It does not circulate but remains in the hands of its producers, the class of farmers, in order to resume there its service as capital. In this portion of the year’s product, the constant capital, Quesnay includes impertinent elements, but he strikes upon the main thing, thanks to the limitations of his horizon, within which agriculture is the only sphere of investment of human labour producing surplus-value, hence the only really productive one from the capitalist point of view. The economic process of reproduction, whatever may be its specific social character, always becomes intertwined in this sphere (agriculture) with a natural process of reproduction. The obvious conditions of the latter throw light on those of the former, and keep off a confusion of thought which is called forth by the mirage of circulation.

The label of a system differs from that of other articles, among other things, by the fact that it cheats not only the buyer but often also the seller. Quesnay himself and his immediate disciples believed in their feudal shop-sign. So do our grammarians even this day and hour. But as a matter of fact the system of the physiocrats is the first systematic conception of capitalist production. The representative of industrial capital — the class of tenants — directs the entire economic movement. Agriculture is carried on capitalistically, that is to say, it is the enterprise of a capitalist farmer on a large scale; the direct cultivator of the soil is the wage-labourer. Production creates not only articles of use but also their value; its compelling motive is the procurement of surplus-value, whose birth-place is the sphere of production, not of circulation. Among the three classes which figure as the vehicles of the social process of reproduction brought about by the circulation, the immediate exploiter of “productive” labour, the producer of surplus-value, [Marx analyses Quesnay’s Tableau Économique in greater detail in his Theories of Surplus-Value (see English edition: Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus-Value [Volume IV of Capital], Part I, Moscow, 1963, pp. 299-333 and 367-69). — Ed.] the capitalist farmer, is distinguished from those who merely appropriate the surplus-value.

The capitalist character of the physiocratic system excited opposition even during its florescence: on the one side it was challenged by Linguet and Mably, on the other by the champions of the small freeholders.
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Adam Smith’s retrogression [36] in the analysis of the process of reproduction is so much the more remarkable because he not only elaborates upon Quesnay’s correct analyses, generalising his “avances primitives” and “avances annuelles” for instance and calling them respectively “fixed” and “circulating” capital [37], but even relapses in spots entirely into physiocratic errors. For instance in order to demonstrate that the farmer produces more value than any other sort of capitalist, he says:

“No equal capital puts into motion a greater quantity of productive labour than that of the farmer. Not only his labouring servants, but his labouring cattle are productive labourers.” (Fine compliment for the labouring servants!) “In agriculture too nature labours along with man; and though her labour costs no expense, its produce has its value, as well as that of the most expensive workmen. The most important operations of agriculture seem intended not so much to increase, though they do that too, as to direct the fertility of nature towards the production of the plants most profitable to man. A field overgrown with briars and brambles may frequently produce as great a quantity of vegetables as the best cultivated vineyard or corn field. Planting and tillage frequently regulate more than they animate the active fertility of nature; and after all their labour, a great part of the work always remains to be done by her. The labourers and labouring cattle (sic!), therefore, employed in agriculture, not only occasion, like the workmen in manufactures, the reproduction of a value equal to their own consumption, or to the capital which employs them, together with its owners’ profits; but of a much greater value. Over and above the capital of the farmer and all its profits, they regularly occasion the reproduction of the rent of the landlord. This rent may be considered as the produce of those powers of nature the use of which the landlord lends to the farmer. It is greater or smaller according to the supposed extent of those powers, or, in other words, according to the supposed natural or improved fertility of the land. It is the work of nature which remains after deducting or compensating everything which can be regarded as the work of man. It is seldom less than a fourth, and frequently more than a third of the whole produce. No equal quantity of productive labour employed in manufactures can ever occasion so great a reproduction. In them nature does nothing; man does all; and the reproduction must always be in proportion to the strength of the agents that occasion it. The capital employed in agriculture, therefore, not only puts into motion a greater quantity of productive labour than any equal capital employed in manufactures, but in proportion too to the quantity of productive labour which it employs, it adds a much greater value to the annual produce of the land and labour of the country, to the real wealth and revenue of its inhabitants.” (Book II, Ch. 5, p. 242.)

Adam Smith says in Book II, Ch. 1:

“The whole value of the seed, too, is properly a fixed capital.”

Here, then, capital equals capital-value; it exists in a “fixed” form.

“Though it (the seed) goes backwards and forwards between the ground and the granary, it never changes masters, and therefore does not properly circulate. The farmer makes his profit, not by its sale, but by its increase.” (p. 186.)

The absurdity of the thing lies here in the fact that Smith does not, like Quesnay before him, see the re-appearance of the value of constant capital in a renewed form, and hence fails to see an important element of the process of reproduction, but merely offers one more illustration, and a wrong one at that, of his distinctions between circulating and fixed capital. In Smith’s translation of “avances primitives” and “avances annuelles” as “fixed capital” and “circulating capital,” the progress consists in the term “capital,” the concept of which is generalised, and becomes independent of the special consideration for the “agricultural” sphere of application of the physiocrats; the retrogression consists in the fact that “fixed” and “circulating” are regarded as the overriding distinction, and are so maintained.

Notes

35. Beginning of Manuscript VIII. — F. E.

36. Kapital, Band I, 2. Ausgabe, S. 612, Note 32. [Eng. ed., Moscow, 1954, p. 591, Note 1.]

37. Some physiocrats had paved the way for him even here, especially Turgot. The latter uses the term capital for avances more frequently than Quesnay and the other physiocrats and identifies still more the avances, or capitaux, of the manufacturers with those of the farmers. For instance: “Like these (the entrepreneurs-manufacturers), they (les fermiers, i.e., the capitalist farmers) must receive in addition to returning capitals, etc.” (Turgot, Oeuvres, Daire edition, Paris, 1844, Vol. I, p. 40.)