We see that inasmuch as the need for money capital originates in the length of the working period, it is conditioned by two things: First, that money in general is the form in which every individual capital (apart from credit) must make its appearance in order to transform itself into productive capital; this follows from the nature of capitalist production and of commodity production in general.— Second, the magnitude of the required money advance is due to the circumstance that labour power and means of production are continually withdrawn from society for a comparatively long time without any return to it, during that period, of products convertible into money. The first condition, that the capital to be advanced must be advanced in the form of money, is not eliminated by the form of this money itself, whether it is metal money, credit money, token money, etc. The second condition is in no way affected by what money medium or in what form of production labour, means of subsistence, and means of production are withdrawn without the return of some equivalent to the circulation.
Quesnay's Tableau 'économique[4]'[9] shows in a few broad outlines how the annual result of the national production, representing a definite value, is distributed by means of the circulation in such a way that, other things being equal, simple reproduction, i. e., reproduction on the same scale, can take place. The starting-point of the period of production is properly the preceding year's harvest. The innumerable individual acts of circulation are at once brought together in their characteristic social mass movement — the circulation between great functionally determined economic classes of society. We are here interested in the following: A portion of the total product — being, like every other portion of it, a use object, it is a new result of last year's labour — is at the same time only the depository of old capital value re-appearing in the same natural form. It does not circulate but remains in the hands of its producers, the class of farmers, in order to resume there its service as capital. In this portion of the year's product, the constant capital, Quesnay includes impertinent elements, but he strikes upon the main thing, thanks to the limitations of his horizon, within which agriculture is the only sphere of investment of human labour producing surplus value, hence the only really productive one from the capitalist point of view. The economic process of reproduction, whatever may be its specific social character, always becomes intertwined in this sphere (agriculture) with a natural process of reproduction. The obvious conditions of the latter throw light on those of the former, and keep off a confusion of thought which is called forth by the mirage of circulation.
Beginning of Manuscript VIII.
The label of a system differs from that of other articles, among other things, by the fact that it cheats not only the buyer but often also the seller. Quesnay himself and his immediate disciples believed in their feudal shop-sign. So do our academic pedants even this day and hour. But as a matter of fact the system of the Physiocrats is the first systematic conception of capitalist production. The representa-tive of industrial capital — the class of farmers — directs the entire economic movement. Agriculture is carried on capitalistically, that is to say, it is the enterprise of a capitalist farmer on a large scale; the direct cultivator of the soil is the wage labourer. Production creates not only articles of use but also their value; its compelling motive is the procurement of surplus value, whose birthplace is the sphere of production, not of circulation. Among the three classes which figure as the vehicles of the social process of reproduction brought about by the circulation, the immediate exploiter of "productive" labour, the producer of surplus value, the capitalist farmer, is distinguished from those who merely appropriate the surplus value.
The capitalist character of the physiocratic system excited opposition even during its florescence: on the one side it was challenged by Linguet[50] and Mably, on the other by the champions of the small freeholders.
Adam Smith's retrogression36) in the analysis of the process of reproduction is so much the more remarkable because he not only elab-orates upon Quesnay's correct analyses, generalising his "avances primitives" and "avances annuelles" for instance and calling them respectively "fixed" and "circulating" capital,[37]' but even relapses in spots entirely into physiocratic errors. For instance in order to demonstrate that the farmer produces more value than any other sort of capitalist, he says:
36; Kapital, Band I, 2. Ausgabe, S. 612, Note 32.a
37i Some Physiocrats had paved the way for him even here, especially Turgot. The latter uses the term capital for avances more frequently than Quesnay and the other Physiocrats and identifies still more the avances, or capitaux, of the manufacturers with those of the farmers. For instance: "Like these" (the entrepreneurs-manufacturers), "they" (lesfermiers, i.e., the capitalist farmers) "must receive in addition to returning capitals, etc." (Turgot, Oeuvres, Daire édition, Paris, 1844, Vol. I, p. 40).
English edition: Vol. I, Ch. XXIV, 2 (present edition, Vol. 35).
"No equal capital puts into motion a greater quantity of productive labour than that of the farmer. Not only his labouring servants, but his labouring cattle are productive labourers." //Fine compliment for the labouring servants!// "In agriculture too nature labours along with man; and though her labour costs no expense, its produce has its value, as well as that of the most expensive workmen. The most important operations of agriculture seem intended not so much to increase, though they do that too, as to direct the fertility of nature towards the production of the plants most profitable to man. A field overgrown with briars and brambles may frequently produce as great a quantity of vegetables as the best cultivated vineyard or corn field. Planting and tillage frequently regulate more than they animate the active fertility of nature; and after all their labour, a great part of the work always remains to be done by her. The labourers and labouring cattle" (!), "therefore, employed in agriculture, not only occasion, like the workmen in manufactures, the reproduction of a value equal to their own consumption, or to the capital which employs them, together with its owners' profits; but of a much greater value. Over and above the capital of the farmer and all its profits, they regularly occasion the reproduction of the rent of the landlord. This rent may be considered as the produce of those powers of nature the use of which the landlord lends to the farmer. It is greater or smaller according to the supposed extent of those powers, or, in other words, according to the supposed natural or improved fertility of the land. It is the work of nature which remains after deducting or compensating everything which can be regarded as the work of man. It is seldom less than a fourth, and frequently more than a third of the whole produce. No equal quantity of productive labour employed in manufactures can ever occasion so great a reproduction. In them nature does nothing; man does all; and the reproduction must always be in proportion to the strength of the agents that occasion it. The capital employed in agriculture, therefore, not only puts into motion a greater quantity of productive labour than any equal capital employed in manufactures, but in proportion, too, to the quantity of productive labour which it employs, it adds a much greater value to the annual produce of the land and labour of the country, to the real wealth and revenue of its inhabitants" (Book II, Ch. 5, p. 242).
Adam Smith says in Book II, Ch. 1:
"The whole value of the seed, too, is properly a fixed capital.
Here, then, capital = capital value; it exists in a "fixed" form.
"Though it [the seed] goes backwards and forwards between the ground and the granary, it never changes masters, and therefore does not properly circulate. The farmer makes his profit, not by its sale, but by its increase" (p. 186).
Endnotes
[4] State socialism — a bourgeois-reformist and opportunist conception whose adherents reduced the essence of socialism to bourgeois state interference in economics and to a certain degree of regulation of social relations. Among its theoreticians were Louis Blanc (France), Ferdinand Lassalle, Karl Rodbertus-Jagetzow (Germany) and others. Armchair socialism (Kathedersozialismus) — a trend in German bourgeois political economy that emerged in Germany at the close of 1860s as a reaction to the growth of the working-class movement and the dissemination within it of the ideas of scientific socialism propounded by Marx and Engels. Under the banner of socialism its exponents (L. Brentano, A. Wagner, W. Zombart and others) preached bourgeois reformism; they asserted that any state, including the German Empire, had a super-class character and that with its help it was possible to achieve a considerable improvement in the condition of the working class through social reforms effected by governments. The armchair socialists called upon the workers to refrain from economic and political revolutionary struggle.— 9
[9] Marx copied out passages from this pamphlet in Notebook XII (London, 1851).— 15 10 "This most incredible cobbler" — was the way John Wilson, the author of the pam-
[50] Concerning Linguet see present edition, Vol. 31, pp. 241-45.— 358
[37] piled in London in 1858.—188 37 This passage is taken from A. Potter's book Political Economy: Its Objects, Uses, and Principles: Considered with Reference to the Condition of the American People, New York, 1841. As is seen from the introduction, the greater part of this book is a reprint (with changes introduced by A. Potter) of the first ten chapters of J. P. Scrope's book Principles of Political Economy..,, published in England in 1833. Passages from Scrope's book as given by Potter are copied out by Marx in his London Notebook VII for 1859-63. Passages taken directly from Scrope's book are quoted in Marx's Notebook IX (1851). See MEGA 2, Abt. IV, Bd. 8, Berlin, 1986, S. 592-96.— 188