In the case of small property in land the illusion, that the land itself has value and may, therefore, pass as a capital into the price of production of the product, like a machine or raw materials, fortifies itself still more. But we have seen that the rent, and with it capitalised rent, or the price of land, can pass over into the price of the products of the soil in two cases only. The first case is that, in which the value of the products of the soil stands higher than their price of production and the market conditions enable the landlord to realise this difference; this condition of values and prices of production obtains, when the composition of the agricultural capital raises the value above the price of production. This agricultural capital has nothing to do with the capital invested in the purchase of the land. The seoorid oase is that in which g^2 Capitalist Production.
a monopoly price exists. And both cases occnr less under small peasants' property and small land ownership than under any other form, because production largely satisfies the producers' own wants in their case and is carried on independently of the regulation by the average rate of profit. Even where small peasants' economy is carried on upon leased land, the lease money comprises more than under any other conditions a portion of the profit and even a deduction from the wages; this money is then only a nominal rent, not a rent representing an independent category as compared to wages and profit.
The expenditure of money-capital for the purchase of land, then, is not an investment of agi'icultural capital. It is a proportionate deduction from the capital, which the small farmers can employ in their own sphere of production. It reduces to that extent the size of their means of production and thereby narrows the economic basis of their reproduction. It subjects the small farmer to the money lender's extortion, since credit, in the strict meaning of the term, occurs but rarely in this sphere. It is an obstacle to agriculture, even where such a purchase takes place in the case of large estates. In fact, it contradicts the capitalist mode of production, which is on the whole indifferent to the question whether the landowner is in debt, no matter whether he inherited or bought his estate. The management of the leased estate itself is not altered in its nature, whether the landowner pockets the rent himself or whether he has to pay it over to the holder of his mortgage.
We have seen that the price of land is regulated by the rate of interest, if the ground-rent is a given magnitude. If the rate of interest is low, then the price of land is high, and vice versa. Normally, then, a high price of land and a low rate of interest would have to go hand in hand, so that if the farmer paid a high price for the land in consequence of a low rate of interest, the same low rate of interest should also secure for him his running capital on easy terms of credit. But in reality, things turn out differently under small peasants' property, as the prevailing form. In the first place, the Small Peasants' Property. 943 general laws of credit do not apply to the farmer, since these laws rest upon the capitalist as a producer. In the second place, where small peasants' property predominates — we are not speaking of colonies here — and the small peasant forms the foundation of the nation, the formation of capital, that is social reproduction, is relatively weak, and the formation of loanable money-capital, in the sense in which we have previously analyzed this term, is still weaker. For this is conditioned upon concentration and the existence of a class of rich and idle capitalists (Massie). In the third place, where the ownership of the land is a necessary condition for the existence of the greater part of the producers, as it is here, and an indispensable field of investment for their capital, the price of land is raised independently of the rate of interest, and often in an inverse ratio to it, by tlie preponderance of the demand for land over its supply. If sold in small lots, the land in this case brings a far higher price than it does by its sale in large estates, because the number of small buyers is large and that of the large buyers small (Bandes Noires, Rubichonj Newman). For all these reasons the price of land rises here while the rate of interest is relatively high. The relatively low interest, which the farmer here derives from the capital invested in the purchase of land (Mounier), corresponds on the other hand to the high rate of interest exacted by usury, which he himself has to pay to his mortgage creditors. The Irish system shows the same thing, only in another form.
This price of land, an element foreign in itself to production, may here rise to such a point that it makes production impossible (Dombasle).
The fact that the price of land plays such a role, that the sale and purchase of land, the circulation of land as a commodity, develops to this degree, is a practical result of capitalist development, since a commodity is here the form generally assumed by all products and all instruments of production. On the other hand, this development takes place only wherever capitalist production develops but to a limited extent and does not bring forth all its peculiarities. For 944 Capitalist Production.
this condition rests precisely upon the fact that agriculture is no longer, or not yet, subject to the capitalist mode of production, but rather to a mode handed down from obsolete forms of society. The disadvantages of the capitalist mode of production, which makes the ■ producers dependent upon the money price of their products, coincide here with the disadvantages due to the imperfect development of capitalist production. The farmer becomes a merchant and an industrial without the conditions which would enable him to produce his goods as commodities.
The conflict between the price of land, as an element in the cost price of the producers, but not an element in the price of production of the product (even though the rent should pass as a determining element into the price of the products of the soil, the capitalized rent, which is advanced for 20 years or more, does not pass into their price in this way), is but one of the forms through which the antagonism between private ownership of the land and between a rational agriculture, a normal social utilization of the soil, expresses itself. But on the other hand, the private ownership of the land, and w^ith it the expropriation of tlie direct producers from the land — the private property of some, which implies lack of private property on the part of others — is the basis of the capitalist mode of production.
Here, in agriculture on a small scale, the price of the land a form and result of private ownership of the land, appears as a barrier of production itself. In agriculture on a large scale, and in the case of large estates resting upon a capitalist mode of production, private o^vnership likewise acts as a barrier, because it limits the tenant in his investment of productive capital, which in the last analysis benefits, not him, but the landlord. In both forms the exploitation and devastation of the powers of the soil takes the place of a consciously rational treatment of the soil in its role of an eternal social property, of an indispensable condition of existence and reproduction for successive generations of human beings. And besides, this exploitation is made dependent, not upon the attained degree of social development, but upon tlie ac- Small Peasants' Property. 945 cidental and unequal situations of individual producers. In the case of small property this happens from lack of means and science, by which the social productivity of labor-power might be utilized. In the case of large property, it is done by the exploitation of such means for the purpose of the most rapid accumulation of wealth for the tenant and proprietor. The dependence of both of them upon the market price is instrumental in accomplishing this result.
All critique of small property resolves itself in the last\ resort into a critique of private ownership as a barrier and obstacle of agriculture. And so does all counter-critique of large property. In either case, we leave aside, of course, all minor considerations of politics. This barrier and this obstacle, which are set up by all private property of land against agricultural production and against a rational treatment, conservation and improvement of the soil itself, develop on both sides merely in different forms. In the controversy over these specific forms of the evil its ultimate cause is, forgotten.
Small property in land is conditioned upon the premise that the overwhelming majority of the population is rural, and that not the social, but the isolated labor predominates; that, therefore, in view of such conditions, the wealth and development of reproduction, both in its material and intellectual sides, are out of the question and with them the prerequisites of a rational culture. On the other hand, large landed property redtrees-tlte agricultural population to a continually decreasing minimum, and induces on the other side a continual increase of the industrial population crowded together in large cities. In this way it creates conditions, which cause an incurable break in the interconnections of the social circulation of matter prescribed by the natural laws of life. As a result the strength of the soil is wasted, and this prodigality is carried far beyond the boundaries of a certain country by commerce (Liebig).
While small j)roperty in land creates a class of barbarians standing half way outside of society, a class suffering all the tortures and all miseries of civilized countries in addition to 3H 946 Capitalist Production.
the crudeness of primitive forms of society, large property in land undermines labor-power in the last region, in which its primal energy seeks refuge, and in it which stores up its strength as a reserve fund for the regeneration of the vital power of nations, the land itself. Large industry and large agriculture on an industrial scale work together. Originally distinguished by the fact, that large industry lays waste and destroys principally the labor-power, the natural power, of human beings, whereas large agriculture industrially managed destroys and wastes mainly the natural powers of the soil, both of them join hands in the further course of development, so that the industrial system weakens also the laborers of the country districts, and industry and commerce supply agriculture with the means by which the soil may be exhausted.
I PAET VII.
THE EEVENUES AND THEIE SOUECES.
CHAPTEE XLVIII.
THE TRINITARIAN FORMULA.
Capital — Profit (Profit of Enterprise plus Interest), Land — Ground-Rent, Labor — Wages, this is the trinitarian formula which comprises all the secrets of the social process of production.
Furthermore, since interest, as previously demonstrated, appears as the characteristic product of capital, and profit of enterprise distinguishes itself from interest by appearing as wages independent of capital, the above trinitarian formula reduces itself more specifically to the following: Capital — Interest, Land — Ground-Eent, Labor — Wages. Here profit, the specific mark characterizing the form of surplusvalue belonging to the capitalist mode of production, is happily eliminated.
ISTow, if we look more closely at this economic trinity, we observe: 1) The alleged sources of the annually available wealth belong to widely dissimilar spheres and have not the least analogy with one another. They have about the same relation to each other as lawyer's fees, carrots, and music.
Capital, Land, Labor! But capital is not a thing. It is a *** The following three fragments were found in different places of the manuscript for Part VI. — F. E.
948 Capitalist Production.
definite interrelation in social production belonging to a definite historical formation of society. This interrelation expresses itself through a certain thing and gives to this thing a specific social character. Capital is not the sum of the material and produced means of production. Capital means rather the means of production converted into capital, and means of production bj themselves are no more capital than gold or silver are money in themselves. Capital signifies the means of production monopolized by a certain part of society, the products and material requirements of labor made independent of labor-power in living human beings and antagonistic to them, and personified in capital by this antagonism. Capital means not merely the products of the laborers made independent of them and turned into social powers, the products turned into rulers and buyers of their own producers, but also tlie social powers and the future (illegible) form of labor, which antagonize the producers in the shape of qualities of their products. Here, then, we have a definite and, at first sight, very mystical, social form of one of the factors in a historically produced process of social production.
By the side of this factor we have the land, the unorganic nature as such, a crude and uncouth mass, in its whole primal wildness. Value is labor. Therefore surplus-value cannot be land. The absolute fertility of the soil accomplishes no more than that a certain quantity of labor produces a certain product conditioned upon the natural fertility of the soil. The difference in the fertility of the soil brings it about that the same quantities of labor and capital, hence the same value, express themselves in different quantities of agricultural products, so that these products have different individual values. The equalization of these individual values into market-values is responsible for the fact that the " advantages of fertile over inferior soil...are transferred from the cultivator or consumer to the landlord." (Kicardo, Principles, p. 6.)
And finally, the third party in this conspiracy is a mere ghost, " Labor," a mere abstraction, and which does not exist The Trinit avian Formula. 949 when taken by itself, or, if we take...(illegible), the productive activity of human beings in general, by which they promote the circulation of matter between themselves and nature, divested not only of every definiteness of social form and character, but even of its mere natural existence, independent of society, lifted above all societies, being the common attribute of unsocial man as well as of man with any form of society and a general expression and assertion of life.
Capital — Interest; Private Land, Private Ownership of the Earth, in modern form and corresponding to the capitalist mode of production — ' Rent; Wage Labor — Wages. This is supposed to be the connection between the sources of revenue. Wage Labor and Private Land, like Capital, are historically determined social forms; one a social form of labor, the other a social form of the monopolized terrestrial globe, and both forms belong to the same economic formation of society corresponding to capital.
The first remarkable thing about this formula is that Land and Labor are placed indiscriminately by the side of Capital. The one. Capital, is a definite form of an element of production belonging to a definite mode of production having a definite cast. It is an element of production combined with and rej)resented by a definite social form. The other two, Land on the one hand and Labor on the other, are two elements of the real labor process. In their material form they are common to all modes of production, they are the material elements of all processes of production, and have nothing to do with the social form of productive processes.
Secondly. In this formula (Capital — Interest, Land — Ground-Eent, Labor — Wages of Labor), capital, land and labor respectively appear as sources of interest (instead of profit), ground-rent and wages, and these things appear as their fruits; capital, land and labor appear as the cause, interest, ground-rent and wages as the effect; and this is done 950 Capitalist Production.
in such a way that each individual source is combined with the thing which it puts forth and produces. All three revenues, interest (instead of profit), rent, Avages, are three parts of the value of the product; generally speaking they are parts of value, or, expressed in money, they are certain parts of money, certain parts of price. The formula " Capital — Interest" has indeed the least meaning of any formula of capital; still it is one of its formulae. But how is land supposed to create value, that is, a socially defined quantity of labor, or even that particular portion of the value of its own products which forms the rent? For instance, land takes part as an agent of production, in the creation of a use-value, of a material product, of wheat. But it has nothing to do with the production of the value of wheat. To the extent that value is represented by wheat, we consider wheat merely as a definite quantity of materialized social labor, regardless of the particular substance, in which this labor is materialized, or of the particular use-value of this substance.
This is not in contradiction with the fact that, in the first place, other circumstances being equal, the cheapness or dearness of the wheat depends upon the productivity of the soil. The productivity of agricultural labor is conditioned upon natural circumstances, and the same quantity of labor is represented by many or by few products, usevalues, according to the productivity of such labor. How large the quantity of labor may be, which is materialized in one bushel of wheat, depends upon the number of bushels produced by the same quantity of labor. It depends, in this case, upon the productivity of the soil, in what proportions of product value shall be materialized. But this value is given, independently of such a distribution. Value is represented by use-value; and use-value is a prerequisite for the creation of exchange-value; but it is folly to construe an antagonism by placing upon one side a use-value, like land, and upon the other side an exchange-value, and at that some particular portion of exchange-value. In the second place...[here the manuscript stops short].
The Trinitarian Formula. 951 III.
Vulgar economy really does nothing else but to interpret, in doctrinaire fashion, the ideas of persons entrapped in capitalist conditions of production and performing the function of agents in such production, to systematize and to defend these ideas. We need not wonder, then, that vulgar economy feels particularly at home in the estranged form of manifestation, in which economic conditions are absurd and complete contradictions, and that these conditions appear so much more self-explanatory tO' it, the more their internal connection is concealed. So long as the ordinary brain accepts these conceptions, vulgar economy is satisfied. But all science woidd be superfluous, if the appearance, the form, and the nature of things were wholly identical. Vulgar economy has not the slightest inkling of the fact that the trinity from which it takes its departure, namely Land — Rent, Capital — Interest, Labor — Wages of Labor (or Price of Labor), are on their very face three incompatible propositions. First we have the use-value Land, which has no value, and the exchange-value Rent. Here a social relation is conceived as a thing and proportioned to nature. Two incommensurable magnitudes are supposed to be proportional to each other. Then we have Capital — • Interest. If capital is conceived as a certain sum of values independently represented by money, then it is manifestly nonsense to say that a certain value shall be valued higher than its value.
It is precisely in the formula Capital — Interest that all intermediate links are eliminated, and capital is reduced to its most general formula, which for this reason is inexplicable by itself and absurd. It is also for this reason that the vulgar economist prefers the formula Capital — Interest, with its occult faculty of making a value unequal to itself, to the formula of Capital — Profit, which approaches more nearly to the actual capitalist relations. Then again, driven by the restless thought that four is not five and that 100 dollars cannot be 110 dollars, he flees from Capital as an exchange-value to the material substance of capital, to its use-value as a material requirement of labor, as machinery, 952 Capitalist Production.
raw materials, etc. By this means lie succeeds in putting into the place of the first incomprehensible relation, which makes four equal to five, a wholly incommensurable one between a use-value, a thing, upon the one hand, and a definite relation of social production, surplus-value, upon the other, as he does also in the case of private property in land. As soon as the vulgar economist has arrived at this incommensurable magnitude, everything becomes clear to him, and he no longer feels the need of thinking any further. For he has arrived at what is " rational " in bourgeois conception. Finally we have Labor — Wages of Labor, or Price of Labor. This last expression, as we have shown in Volume I, contradicts on its very face the conception of value as well as of price. Price, generally speaking, is but a definite expression of value. And " Price of Labor " is just as irrational as a yellow leogarithm. But here the vulgar economist is all the more satisfied, because it brings him to the deep understanding of the bourgeois, that he pays for labor with money, and because the fact that this formula contradicts the conception of value relieves him from all obligation to understand value.
We ^"^^ have seen that the capitalist process of production is a historically determined form of the social process of production in general. This process is on the one hand the process by which the material requirements of life are produced, and on the other hand a process which takes place under specific historical and economic conditions of production and which produces and reproduces these conditions of production themselves, and with them the human agents of this process, their material conditions of existence and their mutual relations, that is, their particular economic form of society. For the aggregate of these relations, in which the agents of this production live with regard to nature and to themselves, and in which they produce, is precisely their society, considered from the point of view of its economic structure. Like all its predecessors, the capitalist process of 1** Beginning of Chapter XLVIII according to the manuscript.
TJie Trinitarian Formula.
production takes place under definite material conditions, which are at the same time the bearers of definite social re lations maintained towards one another by the individuals in the process of producing their life's requirements. These conditions and these relations are on tlie one hand preriquisites, on the other hand results and creations of the capitalist process of production. They are produced and reproduced by it. We have also seen that capital (the capitalist is merely capital personified and functions in the process of production as the agent of capital), in the social process of production corresponding to it, pumps a certain quantity of surplus labor out of the direct producer, or laborer. It extorts this surplus without returning an equivalent. This surplus labor always remains forced labor in essence, no matter how much it may seem to be the result of free contract. This surplus labor is represented by a surplus-value, and this surplus-value is materialized in a surplus product. It must always remain surplus labor in the sense that it is labor performed above the normal requirements of the producer.
In the capitalist system as well as in the slave system, etc., it merely assumes an antagonistic form and is supplemented by the complete idleness of a portion of society. A certain quantity of surplus labor is required for the purpose of discounting accidents, and by the necessary and progressive expansion of the process of reproduction in keeping with the development of the needs and the advance of population, called accumulation from the point of view of the capitalist. It is one of the civilizing sides of capital that it enforces this surplus labor in a manner and under conditions which promote the development of the productive forces, of social conditions, and the creation of the elements for a new and higher formation better than did the preceding forms of slavery, serfdom, etc. Thus it leads on the one hand to a stage, in which the coercion and the monopolization of the social development (including its material and intellectual advantages) by a portion of society at the expense of the other portion are eliminated; on the other hand it creates the material requirements and the germ of conditions, which make 954 Capitalist Production.
it possible to combine this surplus labor in a higher form of society with a greater reduction of the time devoted to material labor. For, according to the development of the productive power of labor, surplus labor may be large in a small total labor day, and relatively small in a large total labor day. If the necessary labor time equals three, and the surplus labor three, then the total working day is equal to six, and the rate of surplus labor 100%. If the necessary labor is equal to nine, and the surplus labor three, then the total working day is twelve and the rate of surplus labor only 33^%. Furthermore, it depends upon the productivity of labor, how much use-value shall be produced in a definite time, hence also in a definite surplus labor time. The actual wealth of society, and the possibility of a continual expansion of its process of reproduction, do not depend upon the duration of the surplus labor, but upon its productivity and upon the more or less fertile conditions of production, under which it is performed. In fact, the realm of freedom does not commence until the point is passed where labor under the compulsion of necessity and of external utility is required.
In the very nature of things it lies beyond the sphere of material production in the strict meaning of the term. Just as the savage must wrestle with nature, in order to satisfy his wants, in order to maintain his life and reproduce it, so civilized man has to do it, and he must do it in all forms of society and under all possible modes of production. With his development the realm of natural necessity expands, because his wants increase; but at the same time the forces of production increase, by which these wants are satisfied. The freedom in this field cannot consist of anything else but of the fact that socialized man, the associated producers, regulate their interchange with nature rationally, bring it under ' their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by some blind powerjjthat they accomplish their task with the least 1 expenditure of energy and under conditions most adequate I to their human nature and most worthy of it. But it always Iremains a realm of necessity. Beyond it begins that develop-/ment of human power, which is its own end, the true realm The Trinitarian Formula. 955 of freedom, which, however, can flourish only upon that realm of necessity as its basis. The shortening of the working day is its fundamental premise.
In a capitalist society, this surplus-value, or this surplus product (leaving aside accidental fluctuations in its distribution and considering only the regulating law of these fluctuations), is divided among the capitalists as a dividend in proportion to the percentage of the total social capital held by each. In this shape the surplus-value appears as the average profit, which falls to the share of the capital, an average profit, which in its turn is separated into profits of enterprise and interest, and which in this way uiay fall into the hands of different kinds of capitalists. This appropriation and distribution of the surplus-value, or surplus product, by the capital however, has its barrier in private ownership of land. Just as the active capitalist pumps surplus labor, and with it surplus-value and surplus products in the form of profit out of the laborer, so the landlord in his turn pumps a portion of this surplus-value, or surplus product, out of the capitalist, in the shape of rent, according to the laws previously demonstrated by us.
Hence, when speaking of profit as that portion of surplusvalue, which falls to the share of capital, we mean average profit (profits of enterprise plus interest), which has already been limited by deducting the rent from the aggregate profits (identical in mass with the aggregate surplus-value). That rent has been deducted in the premise here. Profits of capital (profits of enterprise plus interest) and ground-rent are merely particular constituents of surplus-value, categories, by which surplus-value is distinguished according to whether it falls into the hands of capital or of private land. This classification does not alter its nature in any way. If added together, these parts form the sum of the social surplus-value. Capital pumps the surplus labor, which is represented by surplus-value and surplus product, directly out of the laborers. To this extent it may be regarded as the producer of surplusvalue. Private Land has nothing to do with the actual process of production. Its role is confined to carrying a por- 956 Capitalist Production.
tion of the produced surplus-value from the pockets of capital to its own. However, the landlord plays a role in the capitalist process of production, not merely by the pressure, which he exerts upon capital, nor by the fact that large property in land is a prerequisite and condition of capitalist production, seeing that it separates the laborer from the means of production, but particularly because the landlord appears as the personification of one of the most essential requirements of production.
Finally, the laborer, in his capacity as the owner and seller* of his individual labor-power, receives a portion of his product under the name of wages, in which that portion of his labor is materialized, which we call necessary labor, that is, the labor required for the conservation and reproduction of his labor-power, regardless of whether the conditions of this conservation and reproduction are scanty or bountiful, favorable or unfavorable.