第165章

THE REPRODUCTION AND CIRCULATION

OF THE AGGREGATE SOCIAL CAPITAL

FORMER PRESENTATIONS OF THE SUBJECT I. THE PHYSIOCRATSQuesnay's Tableau Economique 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 bodily 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 though which is called forth by the mirage of circulation.

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 grammarians 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 representative of industrial capital -- the class of tenants -- 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 birth-place 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 "productive" labour, the producer of surplus-value, [Marx analyses Quesnay's Tableau Economique in greater detail in his Theories of Surplus-Value (see English edition: Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus-Value [Volume IV of Capital], Part I, Moscow, 1963, pp. 299-333 and 367-69). -- Ed .]

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 and Mably, on the other by the champions of the small freeholders.