The Accumulation of Capital. Rosa Luxemburg

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ on capital actually invested in the new territories, great capital gains are made simply by acquiring possession of land and other natural resources.[50] Labour to work the resources may be provided by the local dispossessed peasantry or by immigration from the centres of capitalism.[51] Investment in equipment for it to use is more profitable than in that operated by home labour, partly because the wretched condition of the colonial workers makes the rate of exploitation higher,[52] but mainly just because they are on the spot, and can turn the natural resources seized by the capitalists into means of production. No amount of investment in equipment for British labour would produce soil bearing cotton, rubber or copper. Thus investment is deflected abroad[53] and the promise of profit represented by the natural resources calls into existence, by fair means or foul, the labour and capital to make it come true. The process of building up this capital provides an outlet for the old industries and rescues them from the contradictions inherent in deficiency of demand.

      The analysis of militarism in the last chapter over-reaches itself by trying to prove too much. The argument is that armaments are built up out of taxes which fall entirely on wages.[54] This can be regarded as a kind of ‘forced saving’ imposed on the workers. These savings are extra to the saving out of surplus. They are invested in armaments, and that ends the story. On this basis the armaments, in themselves, cannot be held to provide an outlet for the investment of surplus (though the use of the armaments, as in the Opium War,[55] to break up primitive economies is a necessary condition for the colonial investment already described) and capital equipment to produce armaments is merely substituted for capital formerly producing consumers’ goods. The analysis which best fits Rosa Luxemburg’s own argument, and the facts, is that armaments provide an outlet for the investment of surplus (over and above any contribution there may be from forced saving out of wages), which, unlike other kinds of investment, creates no further problem by increasing productive capacity (not to mention the huge new investment opportunities created by reconstruction after the capitalist nations have turned their weapons against each other).

      All this is perhaps too neat an account of what our author is saying. The argument streams along bearing a welter of historical examples in its flood, and ideas emerge and disappear again bewilderingly. But something like the above seems to be intended. And something like it is now widely accepted as being true. Rosa Luxemburg, as we have seen, neglects the rise in real wages which takes place as capitalism develops, and denies the internal inducement to invest provided by technical progress, two factors which help to rescue capitalism from the difficulties which it creates for itself. She is left with only one influence (economic imperialism) to account for continuous capital accumulation, so that her analysis is incomplete. All the same, few would deny that the extension of capitalism into new territories was the mainspring of what an academic economist has called the ‘vast secular boom’ of the last two hundred years,[56] and many academic economists account for the uneasy condition of capitalism in the twentieth century largely by the ‘closing of the frontier’ all over the world.[57] But the academic economists are being wise after the event. For all its confusions and exaggerations, this book shows more prescience than any orthodox contemporary could claim.

      JOAN ROBINSON

      Cambridge.

SECTION ONE

       Table of Contents

      ★

THE PROBLEM OF REPRODUCTION

       Table of Contents

CHAPTER I

      THE OBJECT OF OUR INVESTIGATION

       Table of Contents

      Karl Marx made a contribution of lasting service to the theory of economics when he drew attention to the problem of the reproduction of the entire social capital. It is significant that in the history of economics we find only two attempts at an exact exposition of this problem: one by Quesnay, the father of the Physiocrats, at its very inception; and in its final stage this attempt by Marx. In the interim, the problem was ever with bourgeois economics. Yet bourgeois economists have never been fully aware of this problem in its pure aspects, detached from related and intersecting minor problems; they have never been able to formulate it precisely, let alone solve it. Seeing that the problem is of paramount importance, their attempts may all the same help us to some understanding of the trend of scientific economics.

      What is it precisely that constitutes this problem of the reproduction of total capital? The literal meaning of the word ‘reproduction’ is repetition, renewal of the process of production. At first sight it may be difficult to see in what respect the idea of reproduction differs from that of repetition which we can all understand—why such a new and unfamiliar term should be required. But in the sort of repetition which we shall consider, in the continual recurrence of the process of production, there are certain distinctive features. First, the regular repetition of reproduction is the general sine qua non of regular consumption which in its turn has been the precondition of human civilisation in every one of its historical forms. The concept of reproduction, viewed in this way, reflects an aspect of the history of civilisation. Production can never be resumed, there can be no reproduction, unless certain prerequisites such as tools, raw materials and labour have been established during the preceding period of production. However, at the most primitive level of man’s civilisation, at the initial stage of man’s power over nature; this possibility to re-engage in production depended more or less on chance. So long as hunting and fishing were the main foundations of social existence, frequent periods of general starvation interrupted the regular repetition of production. Some primitive peoples recognised at a very early stage that for reproduction as a regularly recurring process certain measures were essential; these they incorporated into ceremonies of a religious nature; and in this way they accepted such measures as traditional social commitments. Thus, as the thorough researches of Spencer and Gillen have taught us, the totem cult of the Australian negroes is fundamentally nothing but certain measures taken by social groups for the purpose of securing and preserving their animal and vegetable foodstuffs; these precautions had been taken year by year since time immemorial and thus they became fossilised into religious ceremonials. Yet the circle of consumption and production which forms the essence of reproduction became possible only with the invention of tillage with the hoe, with the taming of domestic animals, and with cattle-raising for the purpose of consumption. Reproduction is something more than mere repetition in so far as it presupposes a certain level of society’s supremacy over nature, or, in economic terms, a certain standard of labour productivity.

      On the other hand, at all stages of social development, the process of production is based on the continuation of two different, though closely connected factors, the technical and social conditions—on the precise relationship between man and nature and that between men and men. Reproduction depends to the same degree on both these conditions. We have just seen how reproduction is bound up with the conditions of human working techniques, how far it is indeed solely the result of a certain level of labour productivity; but the social forms of production prevailing in each case are no less decisive. In a primitive communist agrarian community, reproduction as well as the whole plan of economic life is determined by the community of all workers and their democratic organs. The decision to re-engage in labour—the organisation of labour—the provision of raw materials, tools, and man-power as the essential preliminaries of labour—the arrangement of reproduction and the determination of its volume are all results of a planned co-operation in which everybody within the boundaries of the community takes his part. In an economic system based on slave labour or corvée, reproduction is enforced and regulated in all details by personal relations СКАЧАТЬ