The Accumulation of Capital. Rosa Luxemburg
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the spider produces its web from its own body, so labouring man produces value—labouring man pure and simple, every man who produces useful objects—because labouring man is by birth a producer of commodities; in the same way human society is founded by nature on the exchange of commodities, and a commodity economy is the normal form of human economy.
It was left to Marx to recognise that a given value covers a definite social relationship which develops under definite historical conditions. Thus he came to discriminate between the two aspects of commodity-producing labour: concrete individual labour and socially necessary labour. When this distinction is made, the solution of the money problem becomes clear also, as though a spotlight had been turned on it.
Marx had to establish a dynamic distinction in the course of history between the commodity producer and the labouring man, in order to distinguish the twin aspects of labour which appear static in bourgeois economy. He had to discover that the production of commodities is a definite historical form of social production before he could decipher the hieroglyphics of capitalist economy. In a word, Marx had to approach the problem with methods of deduction diametrically opposed to those of the classical school, he had in his approach to renounce the latter’s faith in the human and normal element in bourgeois production and to recognise their historical transience: he had to reverse the metaphysical deductions of the classics into their opposite, the dialectical.
On this showing Smith could not possibly have arrived at a clear distinction between the two aspects of value-creating labour, which on the one hand transfers the old value incorporated in the means of production to the new product, and on the other hand creates new value at the same time. Moreover, there seems to be yet another source of his dogma that total value can be completely resolved into v + s. We should be wrong to assume that Smith lost sight of the fact that every commodity produced contains not only the value created by its production, but also the values incorporated in all the means of production that had been spent upon it in the process of manufacturing it. By the very fact that he continually refers us from one stage of production to a former one—sending us, as Marx complains, from pillar to post, in order to show the complete divisibility of the aggregate value into v + s—Smith proves himself well aware of the point. What is strange in this connection is that he again and again resolves the old value of the means of production, too, into v + s, so as finally to cover the whole value contained in the commodity.
‘In the price of corn, for example, one part pays the rent of the landlord, another pays the wages of maintenance of the labourers and labouring cattle employed in producing it, and the third pays the profit of the farmer. These three parts (wages, profit, and rent) seem either immediately or ultimately to make up the whole price of corn. A fourth part, it may perhaps be thought, is necessary for replacing the stock of the farmer, or for compensating the wear and tear of his labouring cattle and other instruments of husbandry. But it must be considered that the price of any instrument of husbandry, such as a labouring horse, is itself made up of the same three parts: the rent of the land upon which he is reared, the labour of tending and rearing him, and the profits of the farmer who advances both the rent of this land and the wages of this labour. Though the price of the corn, therefore, may pay the price as well as the maintenance of the horse, the whole price still resolves itself either immediately or ultimately into the same three parts of rent, of labour, and profit.’[82]
Apparently Smith’s confusion arose from the following premises: first, that all labour is performed with the help of means of production of some kind or other—yet what are these means of production associated with any given labour (such as raw materials and tools) if not the product of previous labour? Flour is a means of production to which the baker adds new labour. Yet flour is the result of the miller’s work, and in his hands it was not a means of production but the very product, in the same way as now the bread and pastries are the product of the baker. This product, flour, again presupposes grain as a means of production, and if we go one step further back, this corn is not a means of production in the hands of the farmer but the product. It is impossible to find any means of production in which value is embodied, without it being itself the product of some previous labour.
Secondly, speaking in terms of capitalism, it follows further that all capital which has been completely used up in the manufacture of any commodity, can in the end be resolved into a certain quantity of performed labour.
Thirdly, the total value of the commodity, including all capital advances, can readily be resolved in this manner into a certain quantity of labour. What is true for every commodity, must go also for the aggregate of commodities produced by a society in the course of a year; its aggregate value can similarly be resolved into a quantity of performed labour.
Fourthly, all labour performed under capitalist conditions is divided into two parts: paid labour which restores the wages advanced, and unpaid labour which creates profit and rent, or surplus value. All labour carried out under capitalist conditions thus corresponds to our formula v + s.[83]
All the arguments outlined above are perfectly correct and unassailable. Smith handled them in a manner which proves his scientific analysis consistent and undeviating, and his conceptions of value and surplus value a distinct advance on the Physiocrat approach. Only occasionally, in his third thesis, he went astray in his final conclusion, saying that the aggregate value of the annually produced aggregate of commodities can be resolved into the labour of that very year, although he himself had been acute enough to admit elsewhere that the value of the commodities a nation produces in the course of one year necessarily includes the labour of former years as well, that is the labour embodied in the means of production which have been handed down.
But even if the four statements enumerated are perfectly correct in themselves, the conclusion Smith draws from them—that the total value of every commodity, and equally of the annual aggregate of commodities in a society, can be resolved entirely into v + s—is absolutely wrong. He has the right idea that the whole value of a commodity represents nothing but social labour, yet identifies it with a false principle, that all value is nothing but v + s. The formula v + s expresses the function of living labour under capitalism, or rather its double function, first to restore the wages, or the variable capital, and secondly, to create surplus value for the capitalist. Wage labour fulfils this function whilst it is employed by the capitalists, in virtue of the fact that the value of the commodities is realised in cash. The capitalist takes back the variable capital he had advanced in form of wages, and he pockets the surplus value as well. v + s therefore expresses the relation between wage labour and capitalist, a relationship that is terminated in every instance as soon as the process of commodity production is finished. Once the commodity is sold, and the relation v + s is realised for the capitalist in cash, the whole relationship is wiped out and leaves no traces on the commodity. If we examine the commodity and its value, we cannot ascertain whether it has been produced by paid or by unpaid labour, nor in what proportion these have contributed. Only one fact is beyond doubt: the commodity contains a certain quantity of socially necessary labour which is expressed in its exchange. It is completely immaterial for the act of exchange as well as for the use of the commodity whether the labour which produced it could be resolved into v + s or not. In the act of exchange all that matters is that the commodity represents value, and only its concrete qualities, its usefulness, are relevant to the use we make of it. Thus the formula v + s only expresses, as it were, the intimate relationship between capital and labour, the social function of wage labour, and in the actual product this is completely wiped out. It is different with the constant capital which has been advanced and invested in means of production, because every activity of labour requires certain raw materials, tools, and buildings. The capitalist character of this state of affairs is expressed by the fact that these means of production appear as capital, as c, the property of a person other than the labourer, divorced from labour, the property of those who themselves do not work. Secondly, the constant capital c, a mere advance laid out for the purpose of creating surplus value, appears here only as the foundation of v + s. Yet the concept of constant capital involves more than this: it expresses the function of the means of production in the process of human labour, quite independently of all its historical or social forms. Everybody must have raw materials and