Marx's diagram of enlarged reproduction cannot explain the actual and
historical process of accumulation. And why? Because of the very
premises of the diagram. The diagram sets out to describe the
accumulative process on the assumption that the capitalists and workers
are the sole agents of capitalist consumption. We have seen that Marx
consistently and deliberately assumes the universal and exclusive
domination of the capitalist mode of production as a theoretical premise
of his analysis in all three volumes of _Capital_. Under these
conditions, there can admittedly be no other classes of society than
capitalists and workers; as the diagram has it, all 'third persons' of
capitalist society--civil servants, the liberal professions, the clergy,
etc.--must, as consumers, be counted in with these two classes, and
preferably with the capitalist class. This axiom, however, is a
theoretical contrivance--real life has never known a self-sufficient
capitalist society under the exclusive domination of the capitalist mode
of production. This theoretical device is perfectly admissible so long
as it merely helps to demonstrate the problem in its integrity and does
not interfere with its very conditions. A case in point is the analysis
of simple reproduction of the aggregate social capital, where the
problem itself rests upon a fiction: in a society producing by
capitalist methods, i.e. a society which creates surplus value, the
whole of the latter is taken to be consumed by the capitalists who
appropriate it. The object is to present the forms of social production
and reproduction under these given conditions. Here the very formulation
of the problem implies that production knows no other consumers than
capitalists and workers and thus strictly conforms to Marx's premise:
universal and exclusive domination of the capitalist mode of production.
The implications of both fictions are the same. Similarly, it is quite
legitimate to postulate absolute dominance of capital in an analysis of
the accumulation of individual capitals, such as is given in _Capital_,
volume i. The reproduction of individual capitals is an element in total
social reproduction but one which follows an independent course,
contrary to the movements of the other elements. In consequence it will
not do simply to take together the individual movements of the
respective capitals in order to arrive at the total movement of social
capital, since the latter is essentially different. The natural
conditions of reproducing individual capitals therefore neither conform
with one another, nor do they conform to the relations of the total
capital. Under normal conditions of circulation, every individual
capital engages in the process of circulation and of accumulation
entirely on its own account, depending upon others only in so far, of
course, as it is compelled to find a market for its product and must
find available the means of production it requires for its specific
activities. Whether the strata who afford this market and provide the
necessary means of production are themselves capitalist producers or not
is completely immaterial for the individual capital, although, in
theory, the most favourable premise for analysing the accumulation of
individual capital is the assumption that capitalist production has
attained universal and exclusive domination and is the sole setting of
this process.[345]
Now, however, the question arises whether the assumptions which were
decisive in the case of individual capital, are also legitimate for the
consideration of aggregate capital.
'We must now put the problem in this form: _given universal
accumulation_, that is to say provided that in all branches of
production there is greater or less accumulation of capital--which in
fact is a condition of capitalist production, and which is just as
natural to the capitalist _qua_ capitalist as it is natural to the miser
to amass money (but which is also necessary for the perpetuation of
capitalist production)--what are the _conditions_ of this universal
accumulation, to what elements can it be reduced?'
And the answer: '_The conditions for the accumulation of capital are
precisely those which rule its original production and reproduction in
general_: these conditions being that one part of the money buys labour
and the other commodities (raw materials, machinery, etc.) ...
Accumulation of new capital can only proceed therefore under the same
conditions under which already existing capital is reproduced.'[346]
In real life the actual conditions for the accumulation of the aggregate
capital are quite different from those prevailing for individual
capitals and for simple reproduction. The problem amounts to this: If an
increasing part of the surplus value is not consumed by the capitalists
but employed in the expansion of production, what, then, are the forms
of social reproduction? What is left of the social product after
deductions for the replacement of the constant capital cannot, _ex
hypothesi_, be absorbed by the consumption of the workers and
capitalists--this being the main aspect of the problem--nor can the
workers and capitalists themselves realise the aggregate product. They
can always only realise the variable capital, that part of the constant
capital which will be used up, and the part of the surplus value which
will be consumed, but in this way they merely ensure that production can
be renewed on its previous scale. The workers and capitalists themselves
cannot possibly realise that part of the surplus value which is to be
capitalised. Therefore, the realisation of the surplus value for the
purposes of accumulation is an impossible task for a society which
consists solely of workers and capitalists. Strangely enough, all
theorists who analysed the problem of accumulation, from Ricardo and
Sismondi to Marx, started with the very assumption which makes their
problem insoluble. A sure instinct that realisation of the surplus value
requires 'third persons', that is to say consumers other than the
immediate agents of capitalist production (i.e. workers and capitalists)
led to all kinds of subterfuges: 'unproductive consumption' as presented
by Malthus in the person of the feudal landowner, by Vorontsov in
militarism, by Struve in the 'liberal professions' and other hangers-on
of the capitalist class; or else foreign trade is brought into play
which proved a useful safety valve to all those who regarded
accumulation with scepticism, from Sismondi to Nicolayon. Because of
these insoluble difficulties, others like v. Kirchmann and Rodbertus
tried to do without accumulation altogether, or, like Sismondi and his
Russian 'populist' followers, stressed the need for at least putting the
dampers on accumulation as much as possible.
The salient feature of the problem of accumulation, and the vulnerable
point of earlier attempts to solve it, has only been shown up by Marx's
more profound analysis, his precise diagrammatic demonstration of the
total reproductive process, and especially his inspired exposition of
the problem of simple reproduction. Yet he could not supply immediately
a finished solution either, partly because he broke off his analysis
almost as soon as he had begun it, and partly because he was then
preoccupied, as we have shown, with denouncing the analysis of Adam
Smith and thus rather lost sight of the main problem. In fact, he made
the solution even more difficult by assuming the capitalist mode of
production to prevail universally. Nevertheless, a solution of the
problem of accumulation, in harmony both with other parts of Marx's
doctrine and with the historical experience and daily practice of
capitalism, is implied in Marx's complete analysis of simple
reproduction and his characterisation of the capitalist process as a
whole which shows up its immanent contradictions and their development
(in _Capital_, vol. iii). In the light of this, the deficiencies of the
diagram can be corrected. All the relations being, as it were,
incomplete, a closer study of the diagram of enlarged reproduction will
reveal that it points to some sort of organisation more advanced than
purely capitalist production and accumulation.
Up to now we have only considered one aspect of enlarged reproduction,
the problem of realising the surplus value, whose difficulties hitherto
had claimed the sceptics' whole attention. Realisation of the surplus
value is doubtless a vital question of capitalist accumulation. It
requires as its prime condition--ignoring, for simplicity's sake, the
capitalists' fund of consumption altogether--that there should be strata
of buyers outside capitalist society. Buyers, it should be noted, not
consumers, since the material form of the surplus value is quite
irrelevant to its realisation. The decisive fact is that the surplus
value cannot be realised by sale either to workers or to capitalists,
but only if it is sold to such social organisations or strata whose own
mode of production is not capitalistic. Here we can conceive of two
different cases:
(1) Capitalist production supplies consumer goods over and above its own
requirements, the demand of its workers and capitalists, which are
bought by non-capitalist strata and countries. The English cotton
industry, for instance, during the first two-thirds of the nineteenth
century, and to some extent even now, has been supplying cotton textiles
to the peasants and petty-bourgeois townspeople of the European
continent, and to the peasants of India, America, Africa and so on. The
enormous expansion of the English cotton industry was thus founded on
consumption by non-capitalist strata and countries.[347] In England
herself, this flourishing cotton industry called forth large-scale
development in the production of industrial machinery (bobbins and
weaving-looms), and further in the metal and coal industries and so on.
In this instance, Department II realised its products to an increasing
extent by sale to non-capitalist social strata, and by its own
accumulation it created on its part an increasing demand for the home
produce of Department I, thus helping the latter to realise its surplus
value and to increase its own accumulation.
(2) Conversely, capitalist production supplies means of production in
excess of its own demand and finds buyers in non-capitalist countries.
English industry, for instance, in the first half of the nineteenth
century supplied materials for the construction of railroads in the
American and Australian states. (The building of railways cannot in
itself be taken as evidence for the domination of capitalist production
in a country. As a matter of fact, the railways in this case provided
only one of the first conditions for the inauguration of capitalist
production.) Another example would be the German chemical industry which
supplies means of production such as dyes in great quantities to
Asiatic, African and other countries whose own production is not
capitalistic.[348] Here Department I realises its products in
extra-capitalist circles. The resulting progressive expansion of
Department I gives rise to a corresponding expansion of Department II in
the same (capitalistically producing) country in order to supply the
means of subsistence for the growing army of workers in Department I.
Each of these cases differs from Marx's diagram. In one case, the
product of Department II exceeds the needs of both departments, measured
by the variable capital and the consumed part of the surplus value. In
the second case, the product of Department I exceeds the volume of
constant capital in both departments, enlarged though it is for the
purpose of expanding production. In both cases, the surplus value does
not come into being in that natural form which would make its
capitalisation in either department possible and necessary. These two
prototypes continually overlap in real life, supplement each other and
merge.
In this contest, one point seems still obscure. The surplus of consumer
goods, say cotton fabrics, which is sold to non-capitalist countries,
does not exclusively represent surplus value, but, as a capitalist
commodity, it embodies also constant and variable capital. It seems
quite arbitrary to assume that just those commodities which are sold
outside the capitalist strata of society should represent nothing but
surplus value. On the other hand, Department I clearly can in this case
not only realise its surplus value but also accumulate, and that without
requiring another market for its product than the two departments of
capitalist production. Yet both these objections are only apparent. All
we need remember is that each component of the aggregate product
represents a proportion of the total value, that under conditions of
capitalist production not only the aggregate product but every single
commodity contains surplus value; which consideration does not prevent
the individual capitalist, however, from computing that the sale of his
specific commodities must first reimburse him for his outlay on constant
capital and secondly replace his variable capital (or, rather loosely,
but in accordance with actual practice: it must first replace his fixed,
and then his circulating capital); what then remains will go down as
profit. Similarly, we can divide the aggregate social product into three
proportionate parts which, in terms of value, correspond to (1) the
constant capital that has been used up in society, (2) the variable
capital, and (3) the extracted surplus value. In the case of simple
reproduction these proportions are also reflected in the material shape
of the aggregate product: the constant capital materialises as means of
production, the variable capital as means of subsistence for the
workers, and the surplus value as means of subsistence for the
capitalist. Yet as we know, the concept of simple reproduction with
consumption of the entire surplus value by the capitalists is a mere
fiction. As for enlarged reproduction or accumulation, in Marx's diagram
the composition of the social product in terms of value is also strictly
in proportion to its material form: the surplus value, or rather that
part of it which is earmarked for capitalisation, has from the very
beginning the form of material means of production and means of
subsistence for the workers in a ratio appropriate to the expansion of
production on a given technical basis. As we have seen, this conception,
which is based upon the self-sufficiency and isolation of capitalist
production, falls down as soon as we consider the realisation of the
surplus value. If we assume, however, that the surplus value is realised
outside the sphere of capitalist production, then its material form is
independent of the requirements of capitalist production itself. Its
material form conforms to the requirements of those non-capitalist
circles who help to realise it, that is to say, capitalist surplus value
can take the form of consumer goods, e.g. cotton fabrics, or of means of
production, e.g. materials for railway construction, as the case may be.
If one department realises its surplus value by exporting its products,
and with the ensuing expansion of production helps the other department
to realise its surplus value on the home market, then the fact still
remains that the _social_ surplus value must yet be taken as realised
outside the two departments, either mediately or immediately. Similar
considerations enable the individual capitalist to realise his surplus
value, even if the whole of his commodities can only replace either the
variable or the constant capital of another capitalist.
Nor is the realisation of the surplus value the only vital aspect of
reproduction. Given that Department I has disposed of its surplus value
outside, thereby starting the process of accumulation, and further, that
it can expect a new increase in the demand in non-capitalist circles,
these two conditions add up to only half of what is required for
accumulation. There is many a slip 'twixt the cup and the lip. The
second requirement of accumulation is access to material elements
necessary for expanding reproduction. Seeing that we have just turned
the surplus product of Department I into money by getting rid of the
surplus means of production to non-capitalist circles, from where are
these material elements then to come? The transaction which is the
portal for realising the surplus value is also, as it were, a backdoor
out of which flies all possibility of converting this realised surplus
value into productive capital--one leads to the nether regions and the
other to the deep sea. Let us take a closer look.
Here we use _c_ in both Departments I and II as if it were the entire
constant capital in production. Yet this we know is wrong. Only for the
sake of simplifying the diagram have we disregarded that the _c_ which
figures in Departments I and II of the diagram is only part of the
aggregate constant capital of society, that is to say that part which,
circulating during one year, is used up and embodied in the products of
one period of production. Yet it would be perfectly absurd if capitalist
production--or any other--would use up its entire constant capital and
create it anew in every period of production. On the contrary, we assume
that the whole mass of means of production, for the periodical total
renewal of which the diagram provides in annual instalments--renewal of
the used-up part--lies at the back of production as presented in the
diagram. With progressing labour productivity and an expanding volume of
production, this mass increases not only absolutely but also relatively
to the part which is consumed in production in every case, together with
a corresponding increase in the efficiency of the constant capital. It
is the more intensive exploitation of this part of the constant capital,
irrespective of its increase in value, which is of paramount importance
for the expansion of production.
'In the extractive industries, mines, etc., the raw materials form no
part of the capital advanced. The subject of labour is in this case not
a product of previous labour, but is furnished by Nature gratis, as in
the case of metals, minerals, coal, stone, etc. In these cases the
constant capital consists almost exclusively of instruments of labour,
which can very well absorb an increased quantity of labour (day and
night shifts of labourers, e.g.). All other things being equal, the mass
and value of the product will rise in direct proportion to the labour
expended. As on the first day of production, the original
produce-formers, now turned into the creators of the material elements
of capital--man and Nature--still work together. Thanks to the
elasticity of labour-power, the domain of accumulation has extended
without any previous enlargement of constant capital.--In agriculture
the land under cultivation cannot be increased without the advance of
more seed and manure. But this advance once made, the purely mechanical
working of the soil itself produces a marvellous effect on the amount of
the product. A greater quantity of labour, done by the same number of
labourers as before, thus increases the fertility, without requiring any
new advance in the instruments of labour. It is once again the direct
action of man on Nature which becomes an immediate source of greater
accumulation, without the intervention of any new capital. Finally, in
what is called manufacturing industry, every additional expenditure of
labour presupposes a corresponding additional expenditure of raw
materials, but not necessarily of instruments of labour. And as
extractive industry and agriculture supply manufacturing industry with
its raw materials and those of its instruments of labour, the additional
product the former have created without additional advance of capital,
tells also in favour of the latter.--General result: by incorporating
with itself the two primary creators of wealth, labour-power and the
land, capital acquires a power of expansion that permits it to augment
the elements of its accumulation beyond the limits apparently fixed by
its own magnitude, or by the value and the mass of the means of
production, already produced, in which it has its being.'[349]
In addition, there is no obvious reason why means of production and
consumer goods should be produced by capitalist methods alone. This
assumption, for all Marx used it as the corner-stone of his thesis, is
in conformity neither with the daily practice, and the history, of
capital, nor with the specific character of this mode of production. In
the first half of the nineteenth century, a great part of the surplus
value in England was produced in form of cotton fabrics. Yet the
material elements for the capitalisation of this surplus value, although
they certainly represented a surplus product, still were by no means all
capitalist surplus value, to mention only raw cotton from the slave
states of the American Union, or grain (a means of subsistence for the
English workers) from the fields of serf-owning Russia. How much
capitalist accumulation depends upon means of production which are not
produced by capitalist methods is shown for example by the cotton crisis
in England during the American War of Secession, when the cultivation of
the plantations came to a standstill, or by the crisis of European
linen-weaving during the war in the East, when flax could not be
imported from serf-owning Russia. We need only recall that imports of
corn raised by peasants--i.e. not produced by capitalist methods--played
a vital part in the feeding of industrial labour, as an element, that is
to say, of variable capital, for a further illustration of the close
ties between non-capitalist strata and the material elements necessary
to the accumulation of capital.
Moreover, capitalist production, by its very nature, cannot be
restricted to such means of production as are produced by capitalist
methods. Cheap elements of constant capital are essential to the
individual capitalist who strives to increase his rate of profit. In
addition, the very condition of continuous improvements in labour
productivity as the most important method of increasing the rate of
surplus value, is unrestricted utilisation of all substances and
facilities afforded by nature and soil. To tolerate any restriction in
this respect would be contrary to the very essence of capital, its whole
mode of existence. After many centuries of development, the capitalist
mode of production still constitutes only a fragment of total world
production. Even in the small Continent of Europe, where it now chiefly
prevails, it has not yet succeeded in dominating entire branches of
production, such as peasant agriculture and the independent handicrafts;
the same holds true, further, for large parts of North America and for a
number of regions in the other continents. In general, capitalist
production has hitherto been confined mainly to the countries in the
temperate zone, whilst it made comparatively little progress in the
East, for instance, and the South. Thus, if it were dependent
exclusively on elements of production obtainable within such narrow
limits, its present level and indeed its development in general would
have been impossible. From the very beginning, the forms and laws of
capitalist production aim to comprise the entire globe as a store of
productive forces. Capital, impelled to appropriate productive forces
for purposes of exploitation, ransacks the whole world, it procures its
means of production from all corners of the earth, seizing them, if
necessary by force, from all levels of civilisation and from all forms
of society. The problem of the material elements of capitalist
accumulation, far from being solved by the material form of the surplus
value that has been produced, takes on quite a different aspect. It
becomes necessary for capital progressively to dispose ever more fully
of the whole globe, to acquire an unlimited choice of means of
production, with regard to both quality and quantity, so as to find
productive employment for the surplus value it has realised.
The process of accumulation, elastic and spasmodic as it is, requires
inevitably free access to ever new areas of raw materials in case of
need, both when imports from old sources fail or when social demand
suddenly increases. When the War of Secession interfered with the import
of American cotton, causing the notorious 'cotton famine' in the
Lancashire district, new and immense cotton plantations sprang up in
Egypt almost at once, as if by magic. Here it was Oriental despotism,
combined with an ancient system of bondage, which had created a sphere
of activity for European capital. Only capital with its technical
resources can effect such a miraculous change in so short a time--but
only on the pre-capitalist soil of more primitive social conditions can
it develop the ascendancy necessary to achieve such miracles. Another
example of the same kind is the enormous increase in the world
consumption of rubber which at present (1912) necessitates a supply of
latex to the value of £50,000,000 _per annum_. The economic basis for
the production of raw materials is a primitive system of exploitation
practised by European capital in the African colonies and in America,
where the institutions of slavery and bondage are combined in various
forms.[350]
Between the production of surplus value, then, and the subsequent period
of accumulation, two separate transactions take place--that of realising
the surplus value, i.e. of converting it into pure value, and that of
transforming this pure value into productive capital. They are both
dealings between capitalist production and the surrounding
non-capitalist world. From the aspect both of realising the surplus
value and of procuring the material elements of constant capital,
international trade is a prime necessity for the historical existence of
capitalism--an international trade which under actual conditions is
essentially an exchange between capitalistic and non-capitalistic modes
of production.
Hitherto we have considered accumulation solely with regard to surplus
value and constant capital. The third element of accumulation is
variable capital which increases with progressive accumulation. In
Marx's diagram, the social product contains ever more means of
subsistence for the workers as the material form proper to this variable
capital. The variable capital, however, is not really the means of
subsistence for the workers but is in fact living labour for whose
reproduction these means of subsistence are necessary. One of the
fundamental conditions of accumulation is therefore a supply of living
labour which can be mobilised by capital to meet its demands. This
supply can be increased under favourable conditions--but only up to a
certain point--by longer hours and more intensive work. Both these
methods of increasing the supply, however, do not enlarge the variable
capital, or do so only to a small extent (e.g. payment for overtime).
Moreover, they are confined to definite and rather narrow limits which
they cannot exceed owing to both natural and social causes. The
increasing growth of variable capital which accompanies accumulation
must therefore become manifest in ever greater numbers of employed
labour. Where can this additional labour be found?
In his analysis of the accumulation of individual capital, Marx gives
the following answer: 'Now in order to allow of these elements actually
functioning as capital, the capitalist class requires additional labour.
If the exploitation of the labourers already employed does not increase,
either extensively or intensively, then additional labour-power must be
found. For this the mechanism of capitalist production provides
beforehand, by converting the working class into a class dependent on
wages, a class whose ordinary wages suffice, not only for its
maintenance, but for its increase. It is only necessary for capital to
incorporate this additional labour-power, annually supplied by the
working class in the shape of labourers of all ages, with the surplus
means of production comprised in the annual produce, and the conversion
of surplus-value into capital is complete.'[351]
Thus the increase in the variable capital is directly and exclusively
attributed to the natural physical increase of a working class already
dominated by capital. This is in strict conformity with the diagram of
enlarged reproduction which recognises only the social classes of
capitalists and workers, and regards the capitalist mode of production
as exclusive and absolute. On these assumptions, the natural increase of
the working class is the only source of extending the labour supply
commanded by capital. This view, however, is contrary to the laws
governing the process of accumulation. The natural propagation of the
workers and the requirements of accumulating capital are not correlative
in respect of time or quantity. Marx himself has most brilliantly shown
that natural propagation cannot keep up with the sudden expansive needs
of capital. If natural propagation were the only foundation for the
development of capital, accumulation, in its periodical swings from
overstrain to exhaustion, could not continue, nor could the productive
sphere expand by leaps and bounds, and accumulation itself would become
impossible. The latter requires an unlimited freedom of movement in
respect of the growth of variable capital equal to that which it enjoys
with regard to the elements of constant capital--that is to say it must
needs dispose over the supply of labour power without restriction. Marx
considers that this can be achieved by an 'industrial reserve army of
workers'. His diagram of simple reproduction admittedly does not
recognise such an army, nor could it have room for it, since the natural
propagation of the capitalist wage proletariat cannot provide an
industrial reserve army. Labour for this army is recruited from social
reservoirs outside the dominion of capital--it is drawn into the wage
proletariat only if need arises. Only the existence of non-capitalist
groups and countries can guarantee such a supply of additional labour
power for capitalist production. Yet in his analysis of the industrial
reserve army[352] Marx only allows for (_a_) the displacement of older
workers by machinery, (_b_) an influx of rural workers into the towns in
consequence of the ascendancy of capitalist production in agriculture,
(_c_) occasional labour that has dropped out of industry, and (_d_)
finally the lowest residue of relative over-population, the paupers. All
these categories are cast off by the capitalist system of production in
some form or other, they constitute a wage proletariat that is worn out
and made redundant one way or another. Marx, obviously influenced by
English conditions involving a high level of capitalist development,
held that the rural workers who continually migrate to the towns belong
to the wage proletariat, since they were formerly dominated by
agricultural capital and now become subject to industrial capital. He
ignores, however, the problem which is of paramount importance for
conditions on the continent of Europe, namely the sources from which
this urban and rural proletariat is recruited: the continual process by
which the rural and urban middle strata become proletarian with the
decay of peasant economy and of small artisan enterprises, the very
process, that is to say, of incessant transition from non-capitalist to
capitalist conditions of a labour power that is cast off by
pre-capitalist, not capitalist, modes of production in their progressive
breakdown and disintegration. Besides the decay of European peasants and
artisans we must here also mention the disintegration of the most varied
primitive forms of production and of social organisation in non-European
countries.
Since capitalist production can develop fully only with complete access
to all territories and climes, it can no more confine itself to the
natural resources and productive forces of the temperate zone than it
can manage with white labour alone. Capital needs other races to exploit
territories where the white man cannot work. It must be able to mobilise
world labour power without restriction in order to utilise all
productive forces of the globe--up to the limits imposed by a system of
producing surplus value. This labour power, however, is in most cases
rigidly bound by the traditional pre-capitalist organisation of
production. It must first be 'set free' in order to be enrolled in the
active army of capital. The emancipation of labour power from primitive
social conditions and its absorption by the capitalist wage system is
one of the indispensable historical bases of capitalism. For the first
genuinely capitalist branch of production, the English cotton industry,
not only the cotton of the Southern states of the American Union was
essential, but also the millions of African Negroes who were shipped to
America to provide the labour power for the plantations, and who later,
as a free proletariat, were incorporated in the class of wage labourers
in a capitalist system.[353] Obtaining the necessary labour power from
non-capitalist societies, the so-called 'labour-problem', is ever more
important for capital in the colonies. All possible methods of 'gentle
compulsion' are applied to solving this problem, to transfer labour from
former social systems to the command of capital. This endeavour leads to
the most peculiar combinations between the modern wage system and
primitive authority in the colonial countries.[354] This is a concrete
example of the fact that capitalist production cannot manage without
labour power from other social organisations.
Admittedly, Marx dealt in detail with the process of appropriating
non-capitalist means of production as well as with the transformation of
the peasants into a capitalist proletariat. Chapter xxiv of _Capital_,
vol. i, is devoted to describing the origin of the English proletariat,
of the capitalistic agricultural tenant class and of industrial capital,
with particular emphasis on the looting of colonial countries by
European capital. Yet we must bear in mind that all this is treated
solely with a view to so-called primitive accumulation. For Marx, these
processes are incidental, illustrating merely the genesis of capital,
its first appearance in the world; they are, as it were, travails by
which the capitalist mode of production emerges from a feudal society.
As soon as he comes to analyse the capitalist process of production and
circulation, he reaffirms the universal and exclusive domination of
capitalist production.
Yet, as we have seen, capitalism in its full maturity also depends in
all respects on non-capitalist strata and social organisations existing
side by side with it. It is not merely a question of a market for the
additional product, as Sismondi and the later critics and doubters of
capitalist accumulation would have it. The interrelations of
accumulating capital and non-capitalist forms of production extend over
values as well as over material conditions, for constant capital,
variable capital and surplus value alike. The non-capitalist mode of
production is the given historical setting for this process. Since the
accumulation of capital becomes impossible in all points without
non-capitalist surroundings, we cannot gain a true picture of it by
assuming the exclusive and absolute domination of the capitalist mode of
production. Sismondi and his school, when they attributed their
difficulties entirely to the problem of realising the surplus value,
indeed revealed a proper sense for the conditions vital to accumulation.
Yet the conditions for augmenting the material elements of constant and
variable capital are quite a different matter from those which govern
the realisation of surplus value. Capital needs the means of production
and the labour power of the whole globe for untrammelled accumulation;
it cannot manage without the natural resources and the labour power of
all territories. Seeing that the overwhelming majority of resources and
labour power is in fact still in the orbit of pre-capitalist
production--this being the historical _milieu_ of accumulation--capital
must go all out to obtain ascendancy over these territories and social
organisations. There is no _a priori_ reason why rubber plantations,
say, run on capitalist lines, such as have been laid out in India, might
not serve the ends of capitalist production just as well. Yet if the
countries of those branches of production are predominantly
non-capitalist, capital will endeavour to establish domination over
these countries and societies. And in fact, primitive conditions allow
of a greater drive and of far more ruthless measures than could be
tolerated under purely capitalist social conditions.
It is quite different with the realisation of the surplus value. Here
outside consumers _qua_ other-than-capitalist are really essential.
Thus the immediate and vital conditions for capital and its accumulation
is the existence of non-capitalist buyers of the surplus value, which is
decisive to this extent for the problem of capitalist accumulation.
Whatever the theoretical aspects, the accumulation of capital, as an
historical process, depends in every respect upon non-capitalist social
strata and forms of social organisation.
The solution to this problem which for almost a century has been the
bone of contention in economic theory thus lies between the two extremes
of the petty-bourgeois scepticism preached by Sismondi, v. Kirchmann,
Vorontsov and Nicolayon, who flatly denied accumulation, and the crude
optimism advocated by Ricardo, Say and Tugan Baranovski who believed in
capital's unlimited capacity for parthenogenesis, with the logical
corollary of capitalism-in-perpetuity. The solution envisaged by Marx
lies in the dialectical conflict that capitalism needs non-capitalist
social organisations as the setting for its development, that it
proceeds by assimilating the very conditions which alone can ensure its
own existence.
At this point we should revise the conceptions of internal and external
markets which were so important in the controversy about accumulation.
They are both vital to capitalist development and yet fundamentally
different, though they must be conceived in terms of social economy
rather than of political geography. In this light, the internal market
is the capitalist market, production itself buying its own products and
supplying its own elements of production. The external market is the
non-capitalist social environment which absorbs the products of
capitalism and supplies producer goods and labour power for capitalist
production. Thus, from the point of view of economics, Germany and
England traffic in commodities chiefly on an internal, capitalist
market, whilst the give and take between German industry and German
peasants is transacted on an external market as far as German capital is
concerned. These concepts are strict and precise, as can be seen from
the diagram of reproduction. Internal capitalist trade can at best
realise only certain quantities of value contained in the social
product: the constant capital that has been used up, the variable
capital, and the consumed part of the surplus value. That part of the
surplus value, however, which is earmarked for capitalisation, must be
realised elsewhere. If capitalisation of surplus value is the real
motive force and aim of production, it must yet proceed within the
limits given by the renewal of constant and variable capital (and also
of the consumed part of the surplus value). Further, with the
international development of capitalism the capitalisation of surplus
value becomes ever more urgent and precarious, and the substratum of
constant and variable capital becomes an ever-growing mass--both
absolutely and in relation to the surplus value. Hence the contradictory
phenomena that the old capitalist countries provide ever larger markets
for, and become increasingly dependent upon, one another, yet on the
other hand compete ever more ruthlessly for trade relations with
non-capitalist countries.[355] The conditions for the capitalisation of
surplus value clash increasingly with the conditions for the renewal of
the aggregate capital--a conflict which, incidentally, is merely a
counterpart of the contradictions implied in the law of a declining
profit rate.