Marx’s intentions in laying out the schemes of expanded reproduction of social capital which are the central topic of this chapter, for all the subsequent fascination they have attracted, are not immediately transparent. Is it the case that Marx wished to paint a ‘picture of an economy in perpetual balanced growth’, of a capitalist reproduction in perpetual equilibrium? Or does he want to portray the conditions for equilibrium in social reproduction so as to demonstrate their practical unattainability? Is Marx painting a picture of an inevitably crisis-free capitalism, or an inherently crisis-ridden one?
In good part, Marx’s inspiration for the reproduction schemes came from the impact made on him by Quesnay’s Tableau Économique, ‘incontestably the most brilliant [conception] for which political economy had up to then been responsible.’ In Marx’s words, what Quesnay wanted to portray was
the whole production process of capital as a process of reproduction, with circulation merely as the form of this reproductive process; and the circulation of money only as a phase in the circulation of capital; at the same time to include in this reproductive process the origin of revenue, the exchange between capital and revenue, the relation between reproductive consumption and final consumption; and to include in the circulation of capital the circulation between consumers and producers (in fact between capital and revenue); and finally to present the circulation between the two great divisions of productive labour – raw material production and manufacture – as phases of this reproductive process.
It does not require a too far stretch of the imagination to conceive of Marx wanting to achieve something similar. And, in so doing, prominent in his mind was his critique of Adam Smith’s ‘dogma’ that the value of commodities in its totality could be ‘resolved’ into ‘revenue’, that is profit and wages. If this were true, argued Marx, the total social product would be consumed (by capitalists and workers) and there would be no accumulation: ‘society would have to start each year de novo, without capital.’ But if it were not true, if a part of the product was not consumed, but accumulated, then the problem to be solved was the apparent imbalance between revenue and product, between what was consumed and what was produced. How, if what was spent as ‘revenue’ was necessarily less than the value of what had been produced, would that part of the product to be accumulated be sold?
How is it […] possible for the worker with his wages, the capitalist with his profit, the landowner with his rent, to buy commodities that contain not only one of these components [constant capital, variable capital and surplus-value] but all three, and how is it possible for the value sum of wages, profit and rent, i.e. the three sources of income taken together, which are to buy the commodities which are to enter into the total consumption of the recipients of these incomes, to contain a further additional value component on top of these three, i.e. constant capital? How can a value of four be bought with a value of three?
Marx’s expanded reproduction schemes show that capitalists are not only able to recover the constant capital component of the social product (so as to continue production on the same scale) but also to accumulate more of the social product as new capital (both constant and variable).
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