[420] Dr. Renner indeed makes this assumption the basis of his treatise
on taxation. 'Every particle of value created in the course of one year
is made up of these four parts: profit, interest, rent, and wages; and
annual taxation, then, can only be levied upon these' (_Das arbeitende
Volk und die Steuern_, Vienna, 1909). Though Renner immediately goes on
to mention peasants, he cursorily dismisses them in a single sentence:
'A peasant e.g. is simultaneously entrepreneur, worker, and landowner,
his agricultural proceeds yield him wage, profit, and rent, _all in
one_.' Obviously, it is an empty abstraction to apply simultaneously all
the categories of capitalist production to the peasantry, to conceive of
the peasant as entrepreneur, wage labourer and landlord all in one
person. If, like Renner, we want to put the peasant into a single
category, his peculiarity for economics lies in the very fact that he
belongs neither to the class of capitalist entrepreneurs nor to that of
the wage proletariat, that he is not a representative of capitalism at
all but of simple commodity production.
[421] It would go beyond the scope of the present treatise to deal with
cartels and trusts as specific phenomena of the imperialist phase. They
are due to the internal competitive struggle between individual
capitalist groups for a monopoly of the existing spheres for
accumulation and for the distribution of profits.
[422] In a reply to Vorontsov, Professor Manuilov, for example, wrote
what was then greatly praised by the Russian Marxists: 'In this context,
we must distinguish strictly between a group of entrepreneurs producing
weapons of war and the capitalist class as a whole. For the
manufacturers of guns, rifles and other war materials, the existence of
militarism is no doubt profitable and indispensable. It is indeed quite
possible that the abolition of the system of armed peace would spell
ruin for Krupp. The point at issue, however, is not a special group of
entrepreneurs but the capitalists as a class, capitalist production as a
whole.' In this connection, however, it should be noted that 'if the
burden of taxation falls chiefly on the working population, every
increase of this burden diminishes the purchasing power of the
population and hence the demand for commodities'. This fact is taken as
proof that militarism, under the aspect of armament production, does
indeed 'enrich one group of capitalists, but at the same time it injures
all others, spelling gain on the one hand but loss on the other'
(_Vesnik Prava_, Journal of the Law Society (St. Petersburg, 1890), no.
1, 'Militarism and Capitalism').
[423] Ultimately, the deterioration of the normal conditions under which
labour power is renewed will bring about a deterioration of labour
itself, it will diminish the average efficiency and productivity of
labour, and thus jeopardise the conditions for the production of surplus
value. But capital will not feel these results for a long time, and so
they do not immediately enter into its economic calculations, except in
so far as they bring about more drastic defensive measures of the wage
labourers in general.