[316] _Studies on the Theory and History of Commercial Crises in
England_ (Jena, 1901) and _Theoretical Foundations of Marxism_ (1905).
[317] _Studies on the Theory and History_ ..., p. 23.
[318] Ibid., p. 34.
[319] Ibid., p. 333.
[320] Ibid., p. 191.
[321] Ibid., p. 231, italics in the original.
[322] Ibid., p. 305.
[323] _Studies on the Theory and History_ ..., p. 191
[324] Ibid., p. 27.
[325] _Studies on the Theory and History_ ..., p. 58.
[326] V. Ilyin [Lenin] 'Studies and Essays in Economics' (_Oekonomische
Studien und Artikel. Zur Charakterisierung des ökonomischen
Romantizismus_, St. Petersburg, 1899), p. 20.--Incidentally, the same
author is responsible for the statement that enlarged reproduction
begins only with capitalism. It quite escapes him that under conditions
of simple reproduction, which he takes to be the rule for all
pre-capitalist modes of production, we should probably never have
advanced beyond the stage of the paleolithic scraper.
[327] _Die Neue Zeit_, vol. xx, part 2, _Krisentheorien_, p. 116.
Kautsky's mathematical demonstration to Tugan Baranovski that
consumption is bound to grow, and 'in the precise ratio as the bulk of
producer goods in terms of value', calls for two comments: first, like
Marx, Kautsky paid no attention to the progress in the productivity of
labour so that consumption appears to have a relatively larger volume
than it would in fact have. Secondly, the increase in consumption to
which Kautsky here refers is only a consequence, a result of enlarged
reproduction, it is neither its basis nor its aim; it is mainly due to
the growth of the variable capital, the continual employment of
additional workers. The upkeep of these workers, however, neither is nor
ought to be the object of the expansion of reproduction--no more, for
that matter, than the increasing personal consumption of the capitalist
class. Kautsky's argument no doubt refutes Tugan Baranovski's pet
notion: the whimsy to construe enlarged reproduction with an absolute
decrease in consumption. But for all that, he does not get anywhere near
the fundamental problem, the relations between production and
consumption under the aspect of the reproductive process, though we are
told in another passage of the same work: 'With the capitalists growing
richer, and the workers they exploit increasing in numbers, they
constitute between them a market for the consumer goods produced by
capitalist big industry which expands continually, yet it does not grow
as rapidly as the accumulation of capital and the productivity of
labour, and must therefore remain inadequate.' An additional market is
required for these consumer goods, a market outside their own province,
among those occupational groups and nations whose mode of production is
not yet capitalistic. This market is found and also widens increasingly,
but the expansion is again too slow, since the additional market is not
nearly so elastic and capable of expansion as the capitalist productive
process. As soon as capitalist production has developed to the big
industry stage, as in England already in the first quarter of the
nineteenth century, it is capable of expanding by leaps and bounds so as
soon to out-distance all expansions of the market. Every period of
prosperity subsequent to a considerable extension of the market is thus
from the outset doomed to an early end--the inevitable crisis. This, in
brief, is the theory of crises established by Marx, and, as far as we
can see, generally accepted by the "orthodox" Marxists' (ibid., p. 80).
Kautsky, however, is not interested in harmonising this conception of
the realisation of the aggregate product with Marx's diagram of enlarged
reproduction, perhaps because, as our quotation also shows, he deals
with the problem solely from the aspect of crises, regarding, in other
words, the social product as a more or less homogeneous bulk of goods
and ignoring the fact that it is differentiated in the reproductive
process.
L. Bouding seems to come closer to the crucial point. In his brilliant
review on Tugan Baranovski he gives the following formulation: 'With a
single exception to be considered below, the existence of a surplus
product in capitalist countries does not put a spoke in the wheel of
production, not because production will be distributed more efficiently
among the various spheres, or because the manufacture of machinery will
replace that of cotton goods. The reason is rather that, capitalist
development having begun sooner in some countries than in others, and
because even to-day there are still some countries that have no
developed capitalism, the capitalist countries in truth have at their
disposal an outside market in which they can get rid of their products
which they cannot consume themselves, no matter whether these are cotton
or iron goods. We would by no means deny that it is significant if iron
goods replace cotton goods as the main products of the principal
capitalist countries. On the contrary, this change is of paramount
importance, but its implications are rather different from those
ascribed to it by Tugan Baranovski. It indicates the beginning of the
end of capitalism. So long as the capitalist countries exported
commodities for the purpose of consumption, there was still a hope for
capitalism in these countries, and the question did not arise how much
and how long the non-capitalist outside world would be able to absorb
capitalist commodities. The growing share of machinery at the cost of
consumer goods in what is exported from the main capitalist countries
shows that areas which were formerly free of capitalism, and therefore
served as a dumping-ground for its surplus products, are now drawn into
the whirlpool of capitalism. It shows that, since they are developing a
capitalism of their own, they can by themselves produce the consumer
goods they need. At present they still require machinery produced by
capitalist methods since they are only in the initial stages of
capitalist development. But all too soon they will need them no longer.
Just as they now make their own cotton and other consumer goods, they
will in future produce their own iron ware. Then they will not only
cease to absorb the surplus produce of the essentially capitalist
countries, but they will themselves produce surplus products which they
can place only with difficulty' (_Die Neue Zeit_, vol. xxv, part 1,
_Mathematische Formeln gegen Karl Marx_, p. 604). Bouding here broaches
an important aspect of the general relations pertaining to the
development of international capitalism. Further, as a logical
consequence, he comes to the question of imperialism but unfortunately
he finally puts the wrong kind of edge on his acute analysis by
considering the whole of militarist production together with the system
of exporting international capital to non-capitalist countries under the
heading of 'reckless expenditure'.--We must say in parenthesis that
Bouding, just like Kautsky, holds that the law of a quicker growth in
the means-of-production department relative to the means-of-subsistence
department is a delusion of Tugan Baranovski's.
[328] 'Apart from natural conditions, such as fertility of the soil,
etc., and from the skill of independent and isolated producers (shown
rather qualitatively in the genus than quantitatively in the mass of
their products), the degree of productivity of labour, in a capitalist
society, is expressed in the relative extent of the means of production
that one labourer, during a given time, with the same tension of
labour-power, turns into products. The mass of means of production which
he thus transforms, increases with the productiveness of his labour. But
those means of production play a double part. The increase of some is a
consequence, that of the others a condition of the increasing
productivity of labour. E.g., with the division of labour in
manufacture, and with the use of machinery, more raw material is worked
up in the same time and, therefore, a greater mass of raw material and
auxiliary substances enter into the labour-process. That is the
consequence of the increasing productivity of labour. On the other hand,
the mass of machinery, beasts of burden, mineral manures, drainpipes,
etc., is a condition of the increasing productivity of labour. So also
is it with the means of production concentrated in buildings, furnaces,
means of transport, etc. But whether condition or consequence, the
growing extent of the means of production, as compared with the
labour-power incorporated with them, is an expression of the growing
productiveness of labour. The increase of the latter appears, therefore,
in the diminution of the mass of labour in proportion to the mass of
means of production moved by it, or in the diminution of the subjective
factor of the labour-process as compared with the objective factor'
(_Capital_, vol. i, pp. 635-6). And yet another passage: 'We have seen
previously, that with the development of the productivity of labour, and
therefore with the development of the capitalist mode of production,
which develops the socially productive power of labour more than all
previous modes of production, there is a steady increase of the mass of
means of production, which are permanently embodied in the productive
process as instruments of labour and perform their function in it for a
longer or shorter time at repeated intervals (buildings, machinery,
etc.); also, that this increase is at the same time the premise and
result of the development of the productivity of social labour. It is
especially capitalist production, which is characterised by relative as
well as absolute growth of this sort of wealth' (_Capital_, vol. i,
chap. xxiii, 2). 'The material forms of existence of constant capital,
the means of production, do not consist merely of such instruments of
labour, but also of raw material in various stages of finished and of
auxiliary substances. With the enlargement of the scale of production
and the increase in the productivity of labour by co-operation, division
of labour, machinery, etc., the mass of raw materials and auxiliary
substances used in the daily process of reproduction, grows likewise'
(_Capital_, vol. ii, p. 160).
_CHAPTER XXIV_