[13. Say’s Conception of “Immaterial Products”. Vindication of an Unrestrained Growth of Unproductive Labour]

After Garnier appeared the inane Jean-Baptiste Say’s Traité d’économie politique. He reproaches Smith in that “he refuses the name of products to the results of these activities [e.g., those of the physician, actor, etc.]. He gives the labour spent on them the name unproductive” (3me éd., t. I, p. 117).

Smith does not at all deny that these activities produce a “result”, a “product” of some kind. He even expressly mentions “the protection, security, and defence of the commonwealth” as “the effect of their labour this year” (the labour of the servants of the public) ([Wealth of Nations], O.U.P. edition, Vol. I, pp. 369-70] Smith, t. II, éd, Garnier, l. II, ch. III, p. 313).

Say for his part sticks to Smith’s secondary definition, that these “services” and their product “generally perish in the very instant of their performance”, “in the very instant of their production” (Smith, l.c.).

Monsieur Say calls these consumed “services”, or their products, results—in a word, their use-value—“immaterial products or values, which are consumed in the instant of their production”. Instead of calling them “unproductive”, he calls them “productive of immaterial products”. He gives them another name. But then he declares further:

“that they do not serve to augment the national capital” (t, I, p. 119). “A nation in which there were a multitude of musicians, priests and officials, might be pleasantly entertained, well educated and governed admirably well, but that would be all, Its capital would not receive any direct increase from all the labour of these industrious men, because their products would be, consumed as fast as they were created” (l.c., p. 119).

Thus Monsieur Say declares these labours to be unproductive in the most restricted sense used by Smith. But at the same time he wants to appropriate Garnier’s “step forward”. Hence he invents a new name for unproductive labours. This is his kind of originality, his kind of productivity and way of making discoveries, And with his customary logic, he refutes himself again, He says:

“It is […] impossible to accept the view of Monsieur Garnier, who concludes from the fact that the labour of physicians, lawyers and other similar persons is productive, that it is as advantageous for a nation to increase it as any other labour” (l.c., p. 120).

And why not, if one kind of labour is as productive as the other, and the increase of productive labour is in general “advantageous for a nation”? Why is it not as advantageous to increase this kind of labour as any other? Because, Say replies with his characteristic profundity, because it is not at all advantageous to increase productive labour of any kind above the need for this labour. But then surely Garnier is right. For it is equally advantageous—that is, equally disadvantageous— to increase the one kind of labours as to increase the other kind above a certain quantity.

“The case is the same,” Say continues. “as with physical labour expended on a product beyond what is necessary to make it.”

(Not more joiner’s labour should be employed to make a table than is necessary for the production of the table. Or to patch up a sick body, not more than is necessary to cure it. So lawyers and physicians should perform only the necessary labour for the production of their immaterial product.)

“The labour which is productive of immaterial products, like all other labour, is only productive up to the point at which it increases the utility, and consequently the value” (that is the use-value, but Say mistakes the utility for the exchange-value) “of a product: beyond this point, it is a purely unproductive labour” (l.c., p. 120).

Say’s logic is therefore this:

It is not so useful for a nation to increase the “producers of immaterial products” as to increase the producers of material products. Proof: it is absolutely useless to increase the producers of any kind of product, whether material or immaterial, beyond what is necessary. Therefore it is more useful to increase the useless producers of material products than those of immaterial products. It does not follow in both cases that it is useless to increase these producers, but only the producers of a particular kind in their corresponding branch of production.

[According to Say], too many material products cannot ||400| be produced, nor can too many immaterial. But a change is diverting. So different kinds must be produced in both departments. And moreover Monsieur Say teaches: “Sluggishness in the sale of some products arises from the scarcity of some others” (l.c., p. 438).

Therefore there can never be too many tables produced, but at most perhaps too few dishes to be put on the tables. If physicians increase too much in number, what is wrong is not that their services are available in superfluity, but perhaps that the services of other producers of immaterial products are in short supply—for example, prostitutes (see l. c., p. 123, where the industries of street-porters, prostitutes, etc., are grouped together, and where Say ventures to assert that the “apprenticeship” for a prostitute “amounts to nothing”).

In the end, the scales come down on the side of the “unproductive labourers”. With given conditions of production, it is known exactly how many labourers are needed to make a table, how great the quantity of a particular kind of labour must be in order to make a particular product. With many “immaterial products” this is not the case. The quantity of labour required to achieve a particular result is as conjectural as the result itself. Twenty priests together perhaps bring about the conversion that one fails to make; six physicians consulting together perhaps discover the remedy that one alone cannot find, In a bench of judges perhaps more justice is produced than by a single judge who has no control but himself. The number of soldiers required to protect a country, of police to establish order in it, of officials “to govern it” well, etc. —all these things are problematical and are very often discussed for example in the English Parliament; although how much spinning labour is needed to spin 1,000 lbs. of twist is known very exactly in England. As for other “productive” labourers of this kind, the concept of them includes the fact that the utility which they produce depends only on their number, consists in their number itself. For example, lackeys, who should bear witness to their master’s wealth and elegance. The greater the number of them, the greater the effect they are supposed to “produce”. Thus Monsieur Say sticks to his point: “unproductive labourers” can never be sufficiently increased in numbers. |400||

[14.] Count Destutt de Tracy [Vulgar Conception of the Origin of Profit. Proclamation of the Industrial Capitalist” as the Sole Productive Labourer]

||400| Le comte Destutt de Tracy: Élémments d’idéologie, IV^e et V^e parties. Traité de la volonté et de ses effets, Paris, 1826 ([First edition] 1815).

“All useful labour is really productive, and the whole labouring class of society equally deserves the name productive” (p. 87).

But in this productive class he distinguishes “the labouring class which directly produces all our wealth” (p. 88) —that is, what Smith calls the productive labourers.

As against these, the sterile class consists of the rich, who consume their rent of land or rent on money. They are the idle class.

“The real sterile class is the class of idlers, who do nothing but live what is called nobly on the products of labours performed before them, whether these products are realised in landed property which they farm out, that is to say, which they lease to a labourer, or whether they consist in money or goods that they lend for a return, which also means to lease them. Those are the real drones of the hive (fruges consumere nati*)” (p. 87): these idlers “can expend nothing but their revenue. If they break into their funds ||401| , nothing replaces diem; and their consumption, increased for the moment, ceases for ever” (p. 237).

“This revenue is … only a deduction from the products of activity of the industrious citizens” (p. 236).

How then does it stand with the labourers whom these idlers directly employ? In so far as they consume commodities, they do not consume actual labour, but the products of the productive labourers, Here therefore we are dealing with labourers for whose labour the idlers directly exchange their revenue, that is, with labourers who draw their wages directly from revenue, not from capital.

“Since the men to whom it” (the revenue) “belongs are idle, it is obvious that they do not direct any Productive labour. All these labourers whom they pay are intended only to procure some enjoyment for them. No doubt these enjoyments are of different kinds… The expenditure of all this class of men … feeds a numerous population whose existence it makes possible, but one whose labour is completely sterile. … Some of it may he more or less fruitful, as for example the construction of a house, the improvement of e landed estate; but these are particular cases when for the tine being they cause productive labour to be performed, Apart from these minor exceptions, the whole consumption of this species of capitalists is absolutely pure loss from the standpoint of reproduction, and an equally great diminution of the wealth that has been acquired” (p. 236).

“To find how these revenues” (on which the Idlers live) “have been formed it is always necessary to go back to the industrial capitalists”(p 237, note)

The industrial capitalists—the second sort of capitalists—

“include all the entrepreneurs in any industry whatever, that Is to say, all the persons who, having capitals, … employ their talent and their labour in turning them to account themselves instead of hiring them to others, and who consequently live neither on wages nor on revenues but on profits” (p. 237).

In Destutt it is quite clear —as with Adam Smith before him —that what on the surface is glorification of the productive labourer is in fact only glorification of the industrial capitalist in contrast to landlords and such moneyed capitalists as live only on their revenue.

“They have … in their hands almost all the wealth of society… It is not only the income from this wealth that they spend annually, but even the fund itself, and sometimes many times in the year, when the course of business is rapid enough to make this possible. For since in their capacity as industrialists they spend only in order that the money shall come back to them with a pro fit, the more they can do so on this condition, the greater their profits” (pp. 237-38).

As for their personal consumption, it is the same as that of the idle capitalists. But it is

“in total moderate, because industrialists are usually unassuming” (p. 238). But it is different with their industrial consumption, it “is nothing less than final; it returns to them with profits” (l.c.). Their profit must be large enough not only for their “personal consumption, but also” for “the rents for the land and for the money which they hold from the idle capitalists” (p. 238).

Destutt is right on this. Rents of land and interest on money are only “deductions” from industrial profit, portions of the latter given by the industrial capitalist from his gross profit to landlords and moneyed capitalists.

“The revenues of the rich idlers are only rents taken from industry; it is industry alone that creates them” (p. 248). The industrial capitalists “rent their” (that is, the idle capitalists’) “land, their houses and their money, and they make use of them in such a way as to draw profits from them hi g her than this rent” [p. 237]. That is, the rent which they pay to the idlers, which therefore is only a part of this profit. This rent that they thus pay to the idlers is “the sole revenue of these idlers and the sole fund for their annual expenditures” (p. 238).

Up to here, all right. But how then does it stand with the wage-labourers (the productive labourers, who are employed by the industrial capitalists)?

“These have no other treasure but their everyday labour. This labour obtains wages for them… But whence come these wages? It is clear that they come from the properties of those to whom the ||402| wage-labourers sell their labour, that is to say, from the funds which are in their possession beforehand, and which are nothing but the accumulated products of labours previously performed. It follows from this that the consumption paid for by this wealth is the consumption of the wage-labourers, in the sense that it is they whom it maintains, but at bottom it is not they who pay it. Or at least they only pay for it with funds existing beforehand in the hands of those who employ them. Their consumption should therefore be regarded as having been made by those who hire them. They only receive with one hand and return with the other,.,, It is therefore necessary to regard not only all that they” (the wage-labourers) “spend but even all that they receive as the real expenditure and consumption of those who buy their labour. That is so true that in order to see whether this consumption is more or less destructive of wealth that has been acquired, or even if it tends to increase it … it is necessary to know what use the capitalists make of the labour that they buy” (pp. 234-35).

Very well. And whence come the profits of the entrepreneurs which enable them to pay revenue to themselves and to the idle capitalists, etc.?

“I will be asked how these industrial entrepreneurs can make such large profits, and whence they can draw them? I reply that it is through their selling everything that they produce at a higher price than it has cost them to produce” (p. 239).

And to whom do they sell everything at a higher price than it costs them?

“They sell it,

“1. to themselves, for the whole part of their consumption destined for the satisfaction of their needs, which they pay for with a portion of their profits;

“2. to the wage-labourers, both those whom they pay and those paid by the idle capitalists; in this way they take beck from these labourers the total amount of their wages, apart from any small economies which these may be able to make;

“3. to the idle capitalists, who pay them with the part of their revenue which they have not already given to the labourers directly employed by them, so that all the rent which they annually pay to the idle capitalists comes back to them in one or other of these ways” (p. 239).

Let us now have a look at these three categories of sales.

1. The industrial capitalists themselves consume one part of their product (or profit). They cannot possibly enrich themselves by swindling themselves and selling their products to themselves at a dearer price than they themselves have paid for them. Nor can any one of them swindle the others in this way. If A sells his product, which the industrial capitalist B consumes, at too dear a price, then B sells his product, which the industrial capitalist A consumes, at too dear a price. It is the same thing as if A and B had sold their products to each other at their real value. Category 1 shows us how the capitalists spend a part of their profit; it does not show us whence they draw the profit. In any case they make no profit by selling “to one another” “everything that they produce at a higher price than it has cost to produce “.

2. They can likewise draw no profit from the part of the product which they sell to their labourers above the costs of production, It is presupposed that the whole consumption of the labourers is in fact “the consumption of those who buy their labour “. Moreover Destutt rubs this in by remarking that the capitalists, by selling their products to the wage-labourers (their own and those of the idle capitalists), only “get back their total wages ”. And in fact not even the total, but after deducting their economies. It is all the same whether they sell the products to them cheap or dear, since they always only get back what they have given them, and, as said above, the wage-labourers only “receive with one hand and return with the other”. First the capitalist pays money to the labourer as wages. Then he sells him his product “too dear”, and by so doing draws the money back again. But as the labourer cannot pay back to the capitalist more money than he has received from him, so the capitalist can never sell his products to him dearer than he has paid him for his labour. He can always only get back from him as much money for the sale of his products as the money he has given him for his labour. Not a farthing more. How then can his money increase through this “circulation”?

||403| In addition to this, there is another absurdity in Destutt. Capitalist C pays the labourer L a weekly wage of £1, and then draws back the £1 for himself again by selling him commodities for £1. By this means, Tracy thinks, he has drawn back to himself the total of the wages paid. But first he gives the labourer £1. And then he gives him commodities for £1. So what in fact he has given him is £2: £1 in commodities and £1 in money. Of this £2, he takes back £1 in the form of money. Therefore in fact he has not drawn back a farthing of the £1 wage. And if he intended to enrich himself by this kind of “drawing back” the wages (instead of by the labourer giving him back in labour what he advanced to him in commodities), he would soon come to his senses.

Here, therefore, the noble Destutt confuses the circulation of money with the real circulation of commodities. Because the capitalist, instead of giving the labourer directly commodities to the value of £1, gives him £1, with which the labourer then decides as he likes which commodities he wants to buy, and returns to the capitalist in the form of money the draft he had given him on his merchandise—after he, the labourer, has appropriated his aliquot share of the merchandise—Destutt imagines that the capitalist “draws back” the wages, because the same piece of money flows back to him, And on the same page Monsieur Destutt remarks that the phenomenon of circulation is “little known” (p. 239). Totally unknown to himself, at any rate. If Destutt had not explained “the drawing back of the total wages” in this peculiar way, the nonsense might at least have been conceivable in a way we shall mention now.

(But before that, a further illustration of his sapience. If I go into a shop and the shopkeeper gives me £1 and I then use this £1 to buy commodities to the value of £1 in his shop, he then draws back the £1 again. No one will assert that he has enriched himself by this operation. Instead of £1 in money and £1 in commodities he now has only £1 in money left. Even if his commodity was only worth l0s. and he sold it to me for £1, in this case too he is 10s. poorer than he was before the sale, even though he has drawn back the whole of one pound sterling.)

If C, the capitalist, gives the labourer £1 wages, and afterwards sells him commodities to the value of 10s. for £1, he would certainly have made a profit of 10s. because he had sold the commodities to the labourer 10s. too dear. But from Monsieur Destutt’s point of view even so it could not be understood how any profit from this transaction arises for C. (The profit arises from the fact that he has paid him less wages—in fact has given the labourer a smaller aliquot part of the product in exchange for his labour—than he gives him nominally.) If he gave the labourer 10s. and sold his commodity for 10s., he would be just as rich as if he gives him £1 and sells him his 10s. commodity for £1. Moreover, Destutt bases his argument on the assumption of necessary wages. In the best case any profit here would only be explained by the labourer having been cheated over his wages.

This case 2 therefore shows that Destutt has absolutely forgotten what a productive labourer is, and has not the slightest idea of the source of profit. At most it could be said that the capitalist makes a profit by raising the price of the products above their value, in so far as he sells them not to his own wage-labourers but to the wage-labourers of idle capitalists. But since the consumption of unproductive labourers is in fact only a part of the consumption of idle capitalists, we come now to case 3.

3. The industrial capitalist sells his products “too dear”, above their value, to the

“idle capitalists, who pay them with the part of their revenue which they have not already given to the labourers directly employed by them, so that all the rent which they annually pay to the idle capitalists comes back to them” (the industrial capitalists) “in one or other of these ways”.

Here again there is the childish conception of the rent, etc., coming back, as there was above of the drawing back of the whole of the wages. For example, C pays £100 rent for land and money to I (the idle capitalist). The £100 are means of payment for C. They are means of purchase for I, who with them draws £100 of commodities from C’s warehouse. Thus the £100 return to C as the transformed form of his commodity. But he has £100 less in commodities than before. Instead of giving them direct to I, he has given him £100 in money, with which the latter buys £100 of his commodities. But he buys these £100 worth of commodities with C’s money, not with his own funds. And Tracy imagines that in this way the rent which C has paid over to I comes back to C. What imbecility! First absurdity.

Secondly, Destutt himself has told us that rent of land and interest on money are only deductions from the industrial capitalist’s profit, and therefore only quotas of profit given away to the idler. On the assumption that C drew back this whole quota ||404| to himself by some sort of trick, though not in one or other of the ways described by Tracy —in other words, that capitalist C paid no rent at all, neither to the landlord nor to the moneyed capitalist—lie would retain his whole profit, but the question is precisely how to explain whence he derived the profit, how he has made it, how it arose. As this cannot be explained by his having or retaining it without giving a quota of it to landlord and moneyed capitalist, just as little can it be explained by the fact that either part or the whole of the quota of profit which he has given away to the idler under one category or another is entirely or partially, in one way or another, dragged back by him from the hand of the idler into his own hand again. Second absurdity!

Let us disregard these absurdities. C has to pay I —the idler—rent to the amount of £100 for the land or the capital that he has rented (loué) from him. He pays the £100 out of his profit (whence the latter arises we do not yet know). Then he sells his products to I, which are consumed either by I directly or through his retainers (the unproductive wage-labourers), and he sells them to him too dear, for example, 25 per cent above their value. He sells him products worth £80 for £100. In this transaction C undoubtedly makes a profit of £20. He has given I a draft for £100 worth of commodities. When the latter presents the draft, he gives his commodities only to the value of £80, by fixing the nominal price of his goods 25 per cent above their value. Even if I would be satisfied with consuming commodities worth £80 and paying £100 for them, C’s profit could never rise above 25 per cent. The prices and the fraud would be repeated every year. But I wants to consume to the value of £100. If he is a landlord, what is he to do? He mortgages property to C for £25, in exchange for which C gives him commodities worth £20—for he sells his commodities at 25 per cent (one-quarter) above their value, If he is a money-lender, he hands over to C £25 of his capital, in exchange for which C gives him commodities worth £20.

Let us assume that the capital (or value of the land) was lent at 5 per cent. Then it amounted to £2,000. Now it amounts to only £1,975. His rents are now £98 ³/₄. And so it would go on, with I constantly consuming commodities to the real value of £100, but his rents constantly falling, because in order to have commodities to the value of £100 he must always consume an ever greater part of his capital itself. Thus bit by bit C would get the whole of I’s capital into his own hands, and the rents of it together with the capital—that is to say, along with the capital itself he would appropriate that portion of the profit which he makes from borrowed capital. Mr. Destutt evidently has this process in view, for he continues:

“But, I will he told, if that is so and if industrial entrepreneurs in effect reap each year more than they have sown, in a very short time they must have attracted to themselves the whole public fortune, and soon there would be nothing left in a State but labourers without funds and capitalist entrepreneurs. That is true, and things would in fact be so if the entrepreneurs or their heirs did not take the course of resting as they grow wealthy, and did not thus continually go to recruit the class of idle capitalists; and even in spite of this frequent emigration, it still happens that when industry has been at work in a country for some time without too great disturbances, its capitals are always being augmented not only because of the growth of the total wealth, but also in a much greater proportion… It might be added this effect would he felt even more strongly but for the immense levies that all governments impose each year on the industrious class by means of taxes (pp. 240-41),

And Monsieur Destutt is quite right up to a certain point, although not at all in what he wants to explain. In the period of the declining Middle Ages and rising capitalist production the rapid enrichment of the industrial capitalists is in part to be explained by the direct fleecing of the landlords. As the value of money fell, as a result of the discoveries in America, the farmers paid them nominally, but not really, the old rent, while the manufacturers sold them commodities above their value —not only on the basis of the higher value of money. Similarly in all countries, as for example the Asiatic, where the principal revenue of the country is in the hands of landlords, princes, etc., in the form of rent, the manufacturers, few in number and therefore not restricted by competition, sell them their commodities at monopoly prices, and in this way appropriate a part of their revenue; they enrich themselves ||405| not only by selling to them “unpaid” labour, but by selling the commodities at over the quantity of labour contained in them. Only Monsieur Destutt is again wrong if he believes that money-lenders let themselves be fleeced in this way. On the contrary, they share, through the high interest they draw, in those high profits, in that fleecing, directly and indirectly.

The following passage shows that this phenomenon was in Monsieur Destutt’s mind:

“One has only to see how weak they” (the industrial capitalists) “were throughout all Europe three or four centuries ago, in comparison with the immense wealth of all the powerful men of those days, and how today they have increased and grown in number, while the others have diminished” (l.c., p. 241).

What Monsieur Destutt wanted to explain to us was the profits and the high profits of industrial capital. He has explained it in two ways. First, because the money which these capitalists pay out in the form of wages and rents flows back to them again, since these wages and rents buy products from them. In fact, what this explains is only why they do not pay wages and rents twice, first in the form of money, and secondly in the form of commodities to the same amount in money. The second explanation is that they sell their commodities above their price, they sell them too dear, first to themselves, thus cheating themselves; secondly to the labourers, thus again cheating themselves, as Monsieur Destutt tells us that the consumption of the wage-labourers “must be regarded as the consumption of those who pay them” (p. 235); finally, in the third place, to the gentlemen living on rents, whom they fleece, and this would in fact explain why the industrial capitalists always keep for themselves a larger part of their profit, instead of giving it away to the idlers. It would show why the distribution of the total profit between the industrial and non-industrial capitalists is increasingly to the advantage of the former at the cost of the latter. It would not help one iota to an understanding of whence this total profit comes. Let us assume that the industrial capitalists had got the whole of it for themselves, the question remains where does it come from?

Therefore Destutt has not only given no answer, but he has only revealed that he thinks the reflux of the money is a reflux of the commodity itself. This reflux of money means only that the capitalists first pay wages and rents in money, instead of paying them in commodities; that their commodities are bought with this money and hence they have paid in commodities in this roundabout way. This money therefore constantly flows back to them, but only to the extent that commodities to the same money value are definitively taken from them and fall to the share of the consumption of the wage-labourers and drawers of rent.

Monsieur Destutt (in a really French way—similar exclamations of astonishment about himself are to be found in Proudhon) is altogether astonished at the “clarity” which this

“way of looking at the consumption of our wealth…sheds on the whole progress of society. Whence comes this consistency and this lucidity? From the fact that we have lighted upon the truth. This recalls the effect of those mirrors in which objects are outlined clearly and in their right proportions when one is in the right spot from which to view them, and in which everything appears confused and disjointed when one is too near or too far” (pp.242-43).

Later, quite incidentally, Monsieur Destutt recalls (from Adam Smith) the real course of things, which however in essence he only repeats as a phrase which he has not understood—as otherwise he (this Member of the Institute of France) would have been unable to shed the streams of light referred to above. Destutt writes (p. 246):

“Whence come their revenues to these idle men? Is it not from the rent which those who set their capitals to work pay to them out of their profits, that is to say, those who use their funds to pay labour which produces more than it costs, in a word, the men of industry? ”

<Aha! So the rents (and also their own profits) which the industrial capitalists pay to the idle capitalists for the funds borrowed from the latter come from their using these funds to pay wages to labour “which produces more than it costs”; that is to say, therefore, whose product has more value than is paid to them —in other words, profit comes from what the wage-labourers produce over and above what they cost; a surplus-product which the industrial capitalist appropriates for himself, and of which he gives away only one part to those receiving rent from land and money.>

Monsieur Destutt concludes from this: not that we must go back to these productive labourers, but that we must go back to the capitalists who set them in motion.

“It is these who really maintain even the labourers employed by the others” (p. 246).

To be sure; inasmuch as they directly exploit labour, and the idle capitalists only do it through their agency. And in this sense it is correct to regard industrial capital as the source of wealth. ||406|

“We must therefore always go back to these” (the industrial capitalists) “in order to find the source of all wealth” (p. 246).

“In the coarse of time, wealth has accumulated in greater or less quantity, because the result of previous labours has not been entirely consumed as soon as produced. Some of the possessors of this wealth are content to draw a rent from it and consume it. These are those whom we have called idle. The other more active ones set to work both their own funds and those which they borrow. They employ them to pay labour which reproduces them with a profit.”< Hence, therefore, not only the reproduction of this fund, but [the production ] of the surplus, which forms profit.> “With this profit they pay for their own consumption and defray that of others. By these consumptions themselves” (their own and that of the idlers? Here again the same absurdity) “their funds come back to them somewhat increased, and they start again. That is what constitutes circulation” (pp. 246-47).

The inquiry into the “productive labourer”, and the result that only one whose buyer is an industrial capitalist is a productive labourer—one whose labour produces profit for its immediate buyer—led Monsieur Destutt to the conclusion that in fact the industrial capitalists are the sole productive labourers in the higher meaning of the word.

“They” (the industrial capitalists) “who live on profits maintain all the others and alone augment the public fortune and create all our means of enjoyment. That must be so, because labour is the source of oil wealth and because they alone give a useful direction to current labour, by making a useful application of accumulated labour” (p. 242).

That they give “a useful direction to current labour” in fact means only that they employ useful labour, labour which results in use-values. But that they make “useful application of accumulated labour” —if it is not to mean the same thing again, that they make industrial use of accumulated wealth for the production of use-values —means that they make “useful application of accumulated labour” by buying with it more current labour than is contained in it. In the passage just cited Destutt naïvely epitomises the contradictions which make up the essence of capitalist production. Because labour is the source of all wealth, capital is the source of all wealth; the actual propagator of wealth is not he who labours, but he who makes a profit out of another’s labour. The productive powers of labour are the productive powers of capital.

“Our faculties are our only original wealth; our labour produces all other wealth, and all labour, properly directed, is productive” (p. 243).

Hence, according to Destutt, it follows as a matter of course that the industrial capitalists “maintain all the others and alone augment the public fortune and create all our means of enjoyment”.

Our faculties (facultés) are our only original wealth, therefore the faculty of labour is not wealth. Labour produces all other wealth, that means: it produces wealth for all others except for itself, and it itself is not wealth, but only its product is wealth. All properly directed labour is productive; that means: all productive labour, all labour which yields profit to the capitalist, is properly directed.

The following remarks of Destutt —which refer not to the different classes of consumers, but to the different nature of the articles of consumption —are a very good paraphrase of Adam Smith’s views in Book II, Chapter III, at the end of which he inquires into what kind of (unproductive) expenditure, that is to say, of individual consumption, consumption of revenue, is more or less advantageous. He opens this inquiry (Garnier, t. II, p. 345) with the words:

“As frugality increases, and prodigality diminishes, the public capital, so the conduct of those whose expense just equals their revenue, without either accumulating or encroaching, neither increases nor diminishes it. Some modes of expense, however, seem to contribute more to the growth of public opulence than others” [Wealth of Nations, O.U.P, edition, Vol. I, pp. 387-88].

Destutt summarises Smith’s exposition as follows:

“If consumption is very different according to the kind of consumer, it varies also according to the nature of the things consumed. All indeed represent labour, but its value is fixed more securely in some than in others. As much trouble may have been taken in making a firework as in finding and cutting a diamond, and consequently one may have as much value as the other. But when I have bought, paid for and used both, at the end of half an hour I shall have nothing left of the first, and the second can still be a resource for my grandchildren a century later..,, It is the same with what ||4O7| are called” that is, (by Say) “immaterial products. An invention is of eternal utility. An intellectual work, a picture also have a utility that is more or less durable, while that of a ball, a concert, a play is instantaneous and disappears immediately. The same can be said of the personal services of doctors, lawyers, soldiers, domestic servants, and in general of all who are called employed persons. Their utility is that of the moment of need… The most ruinous consumption is the quickest, because it is that which destroys more labour in the same time, or an equal quantity of labour in less time; in comparison with it, consumption which is slower is a kind of treasuring up, since it leaves to times to come the enjoyment of part of the present sacrifices… Everyone knows that it is more economical to get, for the same price, a coat that will last three years than a similar one which will only last three months” (pp. 243-44).

[15. General Nature of the Polemics against Smith’s Distinction between Productive and Unproductive Labour. Apologetic Conception of Unproductive Consumption as a Necessary Spur to Production]

Most of the writers who contested Smith’s view of productive and unproductive labour regard consumption as a necessary spur to production. For this reason they regard the wage-labourers who live on revenue—the unproductive labourers whose hire does not produce wealth, but is itself a new consumption of wealth—as equally productive even of material wealth as the productive labourers, since they widen the field of material consumption and therewith the field of production. This was therefore for the most part apologetics from the standpoint of bourgeois economy, partly for the rich idlers and the “unproductive labourers” whose services they consume, partly for “strong governments” whose expenditure is heavy, for the increase of the State debts, for holders of church and State benefices, holders of sinecures, etc. For these “unproductive labourers”—whose services figure in the expenses of the idle rich—all have in common the fact that although they produce “immaterial products”, they consume “material products”, that is, products of the productive labourers.

Other economists, like Malthus, admit the distinction between productive labourers and unproductive, but prove to the industrial capitalist that the latter are as necessary to him as the former, even for the production of material wealth.

To say that production and consumption are identical or that consumption is the purpose of all production or that production is the pre-condition of all consumption, is of no help in this connection. What—apart from the tendentious purpose—is at the bottom of the whole dispute is rather this:

The labourer’s consumption on the average is only equal to his costs of production, it is not equal to his output. He therefore produces the whole surplus for others, and so this whole part of his production is production for others. Moreover, the industrial capitalist who drives the labourer to this overproduction (that is, production over and above his own subsistence needs) and makes use of all expedients to increase it to the greatest extent possible—to increase this relative overproduction as distinct from the necessary production—directly appropriates the surplus-product for himself. But as personified capital he produces for the sake of production, he wants to accumulate wealth for the sake of the accumulation of wealth. In so far as he is a mere functionary of capital, that is, an agent of capitalist production, what matters to him is exchange-value and the increase of exchange-value, not use-value and its increase. What he is concerned with is the increase of abstract wealth, the rising appropriation of the labour of others. He is dominated by the same absolute drive to enrich himself as the miser, except that he does not satisfy it in the illusory form of building up a treasure of gold and silver, but in the creation of capital, which is real production. If the labourer’s overproduction is production for others, the production of the normal capitalist, of the industrial capitalist as he ought to be, is production for the sake of production. It is true that the more his wealth grows, the more he falls behind this ideal, and becomes extravagant, even if only to show off his wealth. But he is always enjoying wealth with a guilty conscience, with frugality and thrift at the back of his mind. In spite of all his prodigality he remains, like the miser, essentially avaricious.

When Sismondi says that the development of the productive powers of labour makes it possible for the labourer to obtain ever-increasing enjoyments, but that these very enjoyments, if put at his disposal, would make him unfit for labour (as a wagelabourer)*; it is equally true that the industrial capitalist becomes more or less unable to fulfill his function as soon as he personifies the enjoyment of wealth, as soon as he wants the accumulation of pleasures instead of the pleasure of accumulation.

He is therefore also a producer of overproduction, production for others. Over against this overproduction on one side must be placed overconsumption on the other, production for the sake of production must be confronted by consumption for the sake of consumption. What the industrial capitalist has to surrender to landlords, the State, creditors of the State, the church, and so forth, who only consume revenue, ||408| is an absolute diminution of his wealth, but it keeps his lust for enrichment going and thus preserves his capitalist soul. If the landlords, moneylenders, etc., were to consume their revenue also in productive instead of unproductive labour, the purpose would not be achieved. They would become themselves industrial capitalists, instead of representing the function of consumption as such. With regard to this point we shall examine later an extremely comical dispute between a Ricardian and a Malthusian.

Production and consumption are in their nature [an sich] inseparable. From this it follows that since in the system of capitalist production they are in fact separated, their unity is restored through their opposition—that if A must produce for B, B must consume for A. Just as we find with every individual capitalist that he favours prodigality on the part of those who are co-partners with him in his revenue, so the older Mercantile system as a whole depends on the idea that a nation must be frugal as regards itself, but must produce luxuries for foreign nations to enjoy. The idea here is always: on the one side, production for production, therefore on the other side consumption of foreign production. This idea of the Mercantile system is expressed for example by Dr. Paley, Moral Philosophy, Vol. II, Ch.XI:

“… A laborious, frugal people, ministering to the demands of an opulent, luxurious nation.” [W. Paley, Principles of Moral and Political Phylosophy, Edinburgh, 1788, Vol. II, p. 359.]

“They” (our politicians, Garnier, etc.) says Destutt, “put forward as a general principle that consumption is the cause of production, that therefore it is good for it to be very plentiful. They declare that it is this which constitutes a great difference between public economy and the economy of individuals” (l.c., pp. 249-50).

One more fine phrase:

“The poor nations are those where the people are comfortably off; and the rich nations, those where the people are generally poor” (l.c., p. 231).

[16.] Henri Storch [Unhistorical Approach to the Problem of the Interaction between Material and Spiritual Production. Conception of “Immaterial Labour” Performed by the Ruling Class]

Henri Storch, Cours d’économie politique, etc., edited by Jean— Baptiste Say, Paris, 1823 (Lectures read to Grand Duke Nicholas, concluded in 1815), Vol. III.

After Garnier, Storch is in fact the first writer to polemise against Adam Smith’s distinction between productive and unproductive labour on a new basis.

He distinguishes the “internal goods or the elements of civilisation”, with the laws of whose production the “Theory of Civilisation” has to concern itself, from material goods, component parts of material production (l.c., t. III, p. 217).

(On p age 136 of t. I [he says]: “It is evident that man only attains to the production of wealth in so far as he is endowed with internal goods, that is to say, in so far as he has developed his physical, intellectual and moral faculties, which implies the means for their development such as social institutions, etc. Thus the more civilised a people, the more its national wealth can grow.” The reverse is also true.)

Against Smith:

“Smith…excludes from productive labours all those which do not contribute directly to the production of wealth: but also he only considers the national wealth.” His error is “not to have distinguished immaterial values from wealth” (t. III, p. 218).

And that is really all there is to it. The distinction between productive labours and unproductive labours is of decisive importance for what Smith was considering: the production of material wealth, and in fact one definite form of that production, the capitalist mode of production. In spiritual production another kind of labour appears as productive. But Smith does not take it into consideration. Finally, the interaction and the inner connection between the two kinds of production also do not fall within the field be is considering; moreover, they can only lead to something more than empty phrases when material production is examined in its own form. In so far as he speaks of workers who are not directly productive, this is only to the extent that they participate directly in the consumption of material wealth but not in its production.

With Storch himself the theory of civilisation does not get beyond trivial phrases, although some ingenious observations slip in here and there—for example, that the material division of labour is the pre-condition for the division of intellectual labour. How much it was inevitable that Storch could not get beyond trivial phrases, how little he had even formulated for himself the task, let alone its solution, is apparent from one single circumstance. In order to examine the connection between spiritual ||409| production and material production it is above all necessary to grasp the latter itself not as a general category but in definite historical form. Thus for example different kinds of spiritual production correspond to the capitalist mode of production and to the mode of production of the Middle Ages. If material production itself is not conceived in its specific historical form, it is impossible to understand what is specific in the spiritual production corresponding to it and the reciprocal influence of one on the other. Otherwise one cannot get beyond inanities. This because of the talk about “civilisation”.

Further: from the specific form of material production arises in the first place a specific structure of society, in the second place a specific relation of men to nature. Their State and their spiritual outlook is determined by both. Therefore also the kind of their spiritual production.

Finally, by spiritual production Storch means also all kinds of professional activities of the ruling class, who carry out social functions as a trade. The existence of these strata, like the function they perform, can only be understood from the specific historical structure of their production relations.

Because Storch does not conceive material production itself historically—because he conceives it as production of material goods in general, not as a definite historically developed and specific form of this production—he deprives himself of the basis on which alone can be understood partly the ideological component parts of the ruling class, partly the free spiritual production of this particular social formation. He cannot get beyond meaningless general phrases. Consequently, the relation is not so simple as he presupposes. For instance, capitalist production is hostile to certain branches of spiritual production, for example, art and poetry. If this is left out of account, it opens the way to the illusion of the French in the eighteenth century which has been so beautifully satirised by Lessing. Because we are further ahead than the ancients in mechanics, etc., why shouldn’t we be able to make an epic too? And the Henriade in place of the Iliad!

Storch, however, rightly stresses—with special reference to Garnier, who was actually the father of this attack on Smith —that Smith’s opponents had set about it the wrong way.

“What do his critics do? Far from establishing this distinction” (between immaterial values and wealth), “they succeed in confusing two kinds of value that are so evidently different.”

(They assert that the production of spiritual products or the production of services is material production.)

“In regarding immaterial labour as productive, they assume it is productive of wealth” (that is, directly), “that is to say, of material and exchangeable values, while it produces only immaterial and immediate values: they assume that the products of immaterial labour are subject to the same laws as those of material labour: and yet the former are governed by other principles than the latter” (t, III, p. 218).

The following passages from Storch are to be noted as having been copied from him by later authors:

“From the fact that internal goods are in part the product of services. the conclusion has been drawn that they are no more lasting than the services themselves, and that they were necessarily consumed as they were produced” (l.c., t. III, p. 234). “The original” [internal] “goods, far from being destroyed by the use made of them, expand and grow with use, so that even the consumption of them augments their value” (l.c., p. 236). “Internal goods are susceptible of being accumulated like wealth, and of forming capitals that can be used in reproduction”, etc. (l.c., p. 236). “Material labour must be divided up and its products must be accumulated before the dividing up of immaterial labour can be thought of” (p. 241).

These are nothing but general superficial analogies and relations between spiritual and material wealth. So for example is his observation that undeveloped nations borrow their spiritual capitals from abroad, just as materially undeveloped nations borrow their material capitals (l.c., p. 306); and that the division of immaterial labour depends on the demand for it, in a word, on the market, etc. (p. 246).

Here are the passages which have actually been copied:

||410| “The production of internal goods, far from diminishing the national wealth by the consumption of material products it requires, is on the contrary a powerful means of increasing it; as the production of wealth, in its turn, is an equally powerful means of increasing civilisation” (l.c., p. 517). “It is the equilibrium of the two kinds of production that causes the advance of national prosperity” (l.c., p. 521).

According to Storch, the physician produces health (but also illness), professors and writers produce enlightenment (but also obscurantism), poets, painters, etc., produce good taste (but also had taste), moralists, etc., produce morals, preachers religion, the sovereign’s labour security, and so on (pp. 347-50). It can just as well be said that illness produces physicians, stupidity produces professors and writers, lack of taste poets and painters, immorality moralists, superstition preachers and general insecurity produces the sovereign. This way of saying in fact that all these activities, these services, produce a real or imaginary use-value is repeated by later writers in order to prove that they are productive workers in Smith’s sense, that is to say, that they directly produce not products suigeneris* but products of material labour and consequently immediate wealth. In Storch there is not yet this nonsense, which for that matter can be reduced to the following:

1. that the various functions in bourgeois society mutually presuppose each other;

2. that the contradictions in material production make necessary a superstructure of ideological strata, whose activity— whether good or bad—is good, because it is necessary;

3. that all functions are in the service of the capitalist, and work out to his “benefit”;

4. that even the most sublime spiritual productions should merely be granted recognition, and apologies for them made to the bourgeoisie, that they are presented as, and falsely proved to be, direct producers of material wealth.

[17.] Nassau Senior [Proclamation of All Functions Useful to the Bourgeoisie as Productive. Toadyism to the Bourgeoisie and the Bourgeois State]

Nassau William Senior, Principes fondamentaux de 1’économie politique, traduit par Jean Arrivabene, Paris, 1836. Nassau Senior mounts his high horse:

“According to Smith, the lawgiver of the Hebrews was an unproductive labourer” (l.c., p. 198).

Was it Moses of Egypt or Moses Mendelssohn? Moses would have been very grateful to Mr. Senior for calling him a “productive labourer” in the Smithian sense. These people are so dominated by their fixed bourgeois ideas that they would think they were insulting Aristotle or Julius Caesar if they called them “unproductive labourers”. Aristotle and Caesar would have regarded even the title “labourers” as an insult.

“Does not the doctor who, by a prescription, heals a sick child and thus assures him many years of life, produce a durable result?” (l.c.)

Rubbish! If the child dies, the result is no less durable. And if the child is no better after treatment, the doctor’s service has to be paid for just the same. According to Nassau doctors should only be paid in so far as they cure, and lawyers in so far as they win lawsuits, and soldiers in so far as they are victorious. But now he gets really lofty:

“Did the Dutch produce temporary results by fighting against the tyranny of the Spaniards, or the English by revolting against a tyranny that threatened to be even more terrible?” (l.c., p. 198).

Belletristic trash! Dutch and English revolted at their own cost. No one paid them for labouring “in revolution”. But with either productive or unproductive labourers there is always a buyer and seller of labour. Hence what rubbish!

These insipid literary flourishes used by these fellows when they polemise against Smith show only that they are representatives of the “educated capitalist”, while Smith was the interpreter of the frankly brutal bourgeois upstart. The educated bourgeois and his mouthpiece are both so stupid that they measure the effect of every activity by its ||411| effect on the purse. On the other hand, they are so educated that they grant recognition even to functions and activities that have nothing to do with the production of wealth; and indeed they grant them recognition because they too “indirectly” increase, etc., their wealth, in a word, fulfill a “useful” function for wealth.

Man himself is the basis of his material production, as of any other production that he carries on. All circumstances, therefore, which affect man, the subject of production, more or less modify all his functions and activities, and therefore too his functions and activities as the creator of material wealth, of commodities. In this respect it can in fact be shown that all human relations and functions, however and in whatever form they may appear, influence material production and have a more or less decisive influence on it.

“There are countries where it is quite impossible for people to work the land unless there are soldiers to protect them. Well, according to Smith’s classification, the harvest is not produced by the joint labour of the man who guides the plough and of the man at his side with arms in hand: according to him, the ploughman alone is a productive worker, and the soldier’s activity is unproductive” (l.c., p. 202).

First, that is not true. Smith would say that the soldier’s protective care is productive of defence, but not of the corn. If order was restored in the country, the ploughman would produce the corn just as before, without being compelled to produce the maintenance, and therefore the life, of the soldiers into the bargain. The soldier belongs to the incidental expenses of production, in the same way as a large part of the unproductive labourers who produce nothing themselves, either spiritual or material, but who are useful and necessary only because of the faulty social relations—they owe their existence to social evils.

However, Nassau might say: if a machine is invented that makes nineteen out of twenty labourers superfluous, then these nineteen too are incidental expenses of production. But the soldier can drop out although the material conditions of production, the conditions of agriculture as such, remain unchanged. The nineteen labourers can only drop out if the labour of the one remaining labourer becomes twenty times more productive, that is to say, only through a revolution in the actual material conditions of production. Moreover, Buchanan already observes:

“If the soldier, for example, be termed a productive labourer because his labour is subservient to production, the productive labourer might, by the same rule, lay claim to military honours; as it is certain that without his assistance no army could ever take the field to fight battles or to gain victories” (David Buchanan, Observations on the Subjects Treated of in Dr. Smith’s Inquiry, etc., Edinburgh, 1814, p. 132).

“The wealth of a nation does not depend on a numerical proportion between those who produce services and those who produce values, but on the proportion between them that is most fitted to render the labour of each more efficacious” (Senior, l.c., p. 204).

Smith never denied this, as he wants to reduce the “necessary unproductive labourers like State officials, lawyers, priests, etc., to the extent in which their services are indispensable. And this is in any case the “proportion” in which they make the labour of productive labourers most efficacious. As for the other “unproductive labourers”, whose labours are only bought voluntarily by anyone in order to enjoy their services, that is, as an article of consumption of his own choice, different cases must be distinguished. If the number of these labourers living on revenue is large in proportion to the “productive” labourers, it is, either, because the total wealth is small or is of a one-sided character—for example the medieval barons with their retainers. Instead of consuming manufactured goods on any considerable scale, they and their retainers consumed their agricultural products. When instead of these products they began to consume manufactured goods, the retainers had to be set to labour. The number of those living on revenue was only large because a large part of the annual product was not reproductively consumed. Along with this, the total population was small. Or, the number of those living on revenue is large, because the productivity of the productive labourers is large, and therefore their surplus-produce upon which the retainers feed. In this case the labour of the productive labourers is not productive because there are so many retainers, but on the contrary—there are so many retainers because the labour of the productive labourers is so productive.

Taking two countries with equal populations and an equal development of the productive powers of labour, it would always be true to say, with Adam Smith, that the wealth of the two countries must be measured according to the proportion of productive and of unproductive labourers. For that means only that in the country which has a relatively greater number of productive labourers, a relatively greater amount of the annual revenue is reproductively consumed, and consequently a greater mass of values is produced annually. Therefore Mr. Senior has only paraphrased a statement of ||412| Adam’s, instead of counterposing it with a novelty. Moreover, he himself here makes the distinction between the producers of services and the producers of values, and so it is the same with him as with most of those who polemise against the Smithian distinction —they accept and themselves use this distinction, at the same time as they reject it.

It is characteristic that all “unproductive” economists, who achieve nothing in their own speciality, [come out] against the distinction between productive labour and unproductive labour. However, in relation to the bourgeois, it is on the one hand an expression of their servility that they present all functions as serving the production of wealth for him; then on the other hand, they present the bourgeois world as the best of all possible worlds, in which everything is useful, and the bourgeois himself is so educated that he understands this.

In relation to the labourers, [what it expresses is:] it is quite all right that the unproductive ones consume the great mass [of products], since they contribute just as much as the labourers to the production of wealth even though in their own way.

Finally however Nassau blurts out, showing that he has not understood one word of the essential distinction made by Smith:

“It seems, in truth, that in this case Smith’s attention was entirely absorbed by the position of the great landowners, the only ones to whom his observations on the unproductive classes can in general be applied. I do not know how otherwise to account for his supposition that capital is only employed to maintain productive labourers, while unproductive labourers live from revenue, The greater number of those whom be calls preeminently unproductive—teachers, and those who govern the State—are maintained at the expense of capital, that is to say, by means of what is spent in advance for reproduction” (l.c., pp. 204-05).

This, in fact, is past all understanding. Mr. Nassau’s discovery that State and schoolmasters live at the cost of capital and not at the cost of revenue needs no further commentary. Does Mr. Senior mean by it that they live on profit from capital, and in this sense at the expense of capital? If so, he only forgets that revenue from capital is not capital itself, and that this revenue, the result of capitalist production, is not spent in advance for reproduction, of which on the contrary it is the result. Or does he mean that it is so because certain taxes enter into the production costs of particular commodities? That is, enter into the expenses of certain branches of production? Then he should know that this is only a form of levying taxes on revenue.

With reference to Storch Nassau Senior, the sophist, also remarks:

“Mr. Storch is doubtless in error when he expressly asserts that these results” (health, good taste, etc.) “like other things which have value, form part of the revenue of those who possess them, and that they are also exchangeable” (that is, in so far as they can be bought from their produces). “If this was so, if good taste, morality, religion, were really things which could be bought, wealth would have an importance very different from that given to it by the economists. What we buy is not health, knowledge or piety. The doctor, the priest, the teacher…can only produce the instruments by means of which with greater or less certainty and perfection, these ulterior results will be produced… If in each particular case the most suitable means to obtain success have been employed, the producer of these means has a right to a reward, even when he has not succeeded or when he has not produced the results expected. The exchange is completed as soon as the advice or the lesson has been given and the payment for it has been received” (l.c., pp. 288-89).

Finally, the great Nassau himself adopts the Smithian distinction. For in fact he distinguishes between “productive consumption and unproductive consumption” (p. 206) instead of between productive and unproductive labour. But the object of consumption is either a commodity—which is not referred to here —or direct labour.

Consumption would be productive if it employed labour that either produced labour-power itself (which for example the schoolmaster’s or the physician’s labour might do) or reproduced the value of the commodities with which it was bought. The consumption of labour which accomplished neither the one nor the other of these would be unproductive. And indeed Smith says: the labour which can only be consumed productively (i.e., industrially) I call productive labour, and that which can be consumed unproductively, whose consumption is by its nature not industrial consumption, I call unproductive labour. Mr. Senior has therefore proved his genius by giving things new names.

In general, Nassau copies from Storch.

[18.] Pellegrino Rossi [Disregard of the Social Form of Economic Phenomena. Vulgar Conception of “Labour-saving” by Unproductive Labourers]

||413| Pellegrino Rossi, Cours d’économie politique (année 1836 to 1837), édit. Bruxelles, 1842.

Here is wisdom!

“The indirect means” (of production) “include everything that furthers production, everything which tends to remove an obstacle, to make production more active, more speedy, easier.” (Earlier, p. 268, be says: “There are direct and indirect means of production. That is to say, there are means which are a cause sine qua non of the effect in question, forces which make this production. There are others which contribute to production, but do not make it. The former can act even by themselves, the latter can only help the former to produce.”) “.., The whole labour of government is an indirect means of production, … The man who has made this hat must surely recognise that the gendarme who goes by in the street, the judge who sits in his court, the gaoler who takes over a criminal and keeps him in prison, the army which defends the frontier against enemy invasions, contribute to production” (p. 272).

What a pleasure it must be for the hatter, that everyone gets moving so that he can produce and sell this hat! Inasmuch as he makes these gaolers, etc., contribute indirectly, not directly, to material production, Rossi in fact makes the same distinction as Adam (lecture XII).

In the following lecture XIII, Rossi takes the field particularly against Smith —indeed rather [the same as] his predecessors.

The erroneous distinction between productive labourers and unproductive labourers, he says, arises for three reasons.

1. “Among the buyers, some buy products or labour for their own direct consumption; others only buy them in order to sell the new products that they obtain by means of the products and the labour that they have acquired.”

The determining factor for the former is the use-value; for the latter, the exchange-value. But in paying attention only to exchange-value, one falls into Smith’s error.

“My servant’s labour is unproductive for me: let us admit that for a moment; is it unproductive for him?” (l.c., pp. 275-76).

As all capitalist production rests on the direct purchase of labour in order to appropriate a part of it without purchase in the process of production; which part however is sold in the product—since this is the basis of existence of capital, its very essence —is not the distinction between labour which produces capital and that which does not produce it the basis for an understanding of the process of capitalist production? Smith does not deny that the servant’s labour is productive for him. Every service is productive for its seller. To swear false oaths is productive for the person who does it for cash. Forging documents is productive for anyone paid to do it. A murder is productive for a man who gets paid for doing it. The trade of sycophant, informer, toady, parasite, lickspittle, is productive for people who do not perform these “services” gratis. Hence they are “productive labourers”, producers not only of wealth but of capital. The thief, too, who pays himself—just as the law-courts and the State do —“employs his energy, uses it in a particular way, produces a result which satisfies a human need”, i.e., the need of the thief and perhaps also that of his wife and children. Consequently [he is a] productive labourer if it is merely a question of producing a “result” which satisfies a “need”, or as in the cases mentioned above, if selling his “services” is enough to make them “productive”.

2. “A second error has been not to distinguish between direct production and indirect production.” That is why Adam Smith thinks that a magistrate is not productive. But “if production is almost impossible” (without the magistrate’s labour) “is it not clear that this labour contributes to it, if not by direct and material co-operation, at least by an indirect action which cannot be left out of account?” (l.c., p. 276).

It is precisely this labour which participates indirectly in production (and it forms only a part of unproductive labour) that we call unproductive labour. Otherwise we would have to say that since the magistrate is absolutely unable to live without the peasant, therefore the peasant is an indirect producer of justice! And so on. Utter nonsense! There is yet another point of view hearing on the division of labour, with which we shall deal later.

[3.] “The three principal facts of the phenomenon of production have not been carefully distinguished: the force or productive means, the application of this force, the result.”

We buy a clock at a clockmarker’s; we are only interested in the result of the labour. The same applies when we buy a coat at the tailor’s. But:

“There are still people, men of the old school, who do not understand things in this way. They make a workman come to their home and get him to make such-and-such a piece of clothing, giving him the material and everything he needs for this labour. What is it that these people buy? They buy a force” <hut also an application of this force>, “a means to produce results of some kind at their peril and risk… The object of the contract is the purchase of a force.”

(The point here is only that these “men of the old school” make use of a mode of production that has nothing in common with the capitalist mode, and in which all development of labour’s productive powers, such as capitalist production brings with it, is impossible. It is characteristic that for Rossi and all the rest of them such a specific distinction is inessential.)

In the case of a servant, “you buy a force”, capable of doing “a thousand different things. The results it produces depend on the use that you make of the force” (p. 276).

All this has nothing to do with the matter.

||414| “To buy or to hire…a definite application of this force ….You do not buy a product, you do not buy the result that you have in view.” Will the lawyer’s pleading win your case? Who knows? “What is certain. what passes between you and your lawyer, is that, for a certain value, he will go on a certain day to a certain place to speak on your behalf, to apply his intellectual powers in your interests” (p. 276).

<One further point on this. In lecture XII, p. 273, Rossi says:

“I am far from seeing producers only in those who pass their hives in making cotton cloth or shoes. I honour labour, whatever it may be…but this respect should not be the exclusive privilege of the manual labourer.”

Adam Smith does not do this. For him, a person who produces a book, a painting, a musical composition or a statue, is a “productive labourer” in the second sense, although the person who improvises, recites, plays a musical instrument, etc., is not. And Adam Smith treats services, in so far as they directly enter into production, as materialised in the product, both the labour of the manual labourer and that of the manager, clerk, engineer, and even of the scientist in so far as he is an inventor, an indoor or outdoor labourer for the workshop. In dealing with the division of labour, Smith explains how these operations are distributed among different persons; and that the product, the commodity, is the result of their co-operative labour, not of the labour of any individual among them. But the “spiritual” labourers à la Rossi are anxious to justify the large share which they draw out of material production.>

After this discourse, Rossi continues:

“Thus in exchange transactions attention is fixed on one or other of the three principal facts of production. But can these different forms of exchange deprive certain products of the character of wealth and deprive the exertions of a class of producers of the quality of being productive labours? Clearly, there is no link between these ideas such as would justify a deduction of this kind. Because instead of buying the result, I buy the force necessary to produce it, why should the action of the force not be productive and the product not be wealth? Take again the example of the tailor. Whether one buys ready-made clothes from a tailor, or whether one gets them from a jobbing tailor who has been given the material and a wage, as far as the results are concerned the two actions are perfectly similar. No one will say that the former is a productive labour and the latter an unproductive labour; only in the second case the man who wants a coat has been his own entrepreneur. Well, from the standpoint of productive forces what difference is there between the jobbing tailor you have brought to your home and your domestic servant? None” (l.c., p. 277).

Here we have the quintessence of the whole superwise and would-be profound windbag! When Adam Smith, in his second and more superficial presentation, distinguishes between productive and unproductive labour, according to whether it is or is not directly realised in a vendible commodity for the buyer of the labour, he calls the tailor productive in both cases. But according to his more profound definition the latter is an “unproductive” labourer. Rossi only shows that he “evidently” does not understand Adam Smith.

That the “forms of exchange” seem to Rossi to be a matter of complete indifference is just as if a physiologist said that the different forms of life are a matter of complete indifference, that they are all only forms of organic matter. It is precisely these forms that are alone of importance when the question is the specific character of a mode of social production. A coat is a coat. But have it made in the first form of exchange, and you have capitalist production and modern bourgeois society; in the second, and you have a form of handicraft which is compatible even with Asiatic relations or those of the Middle Ages, etc. And these forms are decisive for material wealth itself.

A coat is a coat—that is Rossi’s wisdom. But in the first case the jobbing tailor produces not only a coat, he produces capital; therefore also profit; he produces his master as a capitalist and himself as a wage-labourer. When I have a coat made for me at home by a jobbing tailor, for me to wear, that no more makes me my own entrepreneur (in the sense of an economic category) than it makes the entrepreneur tailor an entrepreneur when ||415| he himself wears and consumes a coat made by his workmen. In one case the purchaser of tailoring labour and the jobbing tailor confront each other as mere buyers and sellers. One pays money and the other supplies the commodity into whose use-value my money is transformed. In this transaction there is no difference at all from my buying the coat in a shop. Buyer and seller confront each other simply as such. In the other case, on the contrary, they confront each other as capital and wage-labour. As for the domestic servant, he has the same determinate form as the jobbing tailor No. II, whom I buy for the sake of the use-value of his labour. Both are simply buyers and sellers. But the way in which the use-value is enjoyed in this case in addition bears a patriarchal form of relation, a relation of master and servant, which modifies the relation in its content, though not in its economic form, and makes it distasteful.

For that matter Rossi only repeats in other phrases what Garnier said:

“When Smith wrote that nothing remained of the servant’s labour, he was mistaken, to a greater extent, we must say, than an Adam Smith should be mistaken. A manufacturer manages himself a larger manufactory which requires very active and very assiduous supervision… This man, not wanting to have unproductive labourers around him, has no servants, He is then compelled to serve himself… What becomes of his productive labour during the time that he has to devote to this so-called unproductive labour? Is it not evident that your serving people perform a labour which enables you to apply yourself to a labour more appropriate to your abilities? Then how can it be said that no trace remains of their services? There remains everything that you do and that you could not have done if they had not replaced you in the service of your person and your home” (l.c., p. 277).

This is once more the labour-saving idea of Garnier, Lauderdale and Ganilh. According to this, unproductive labours would only be productive in so far as they save labour and leave more time for a person’s own labour, whether he is an industrial capitalist or a productive labourer, who can perform a more valuable labour through this replacement by a less valuable labour. A large part of the unproductive labourers who would be excluded by this are menial servants (in so far as they provide only luxury articles), and all unproductive labourers who produce merely enjoyment and whose labour I can only enjoy in so far as I use just as much time to enjoy it as its seller uses to produce it, to provide it for me. In both cases there can be no talk of “saving” labour. Finally, even really labour-saving personal services would only be productive in so far as their consumer is a producer. If he is an idle capitalist, they only save him the labour of doing anything at all: like a slut having her hair curled or her nails cut instead of doing it herself, or a foxhunter employing a stable-lad instead of being his own stable-lad, or someone who is just a glutton keeping a cook instead of cooking for himself.

Then these labourers would include too those who, according to Storch (l.c.), produce “leisure”, through which a man gets free time for pleasure, spiritual labour, and so on. The police-man saves me the time of being my own gendarme, the soldier of defending myself, the government official of governing myself, the shoe cleaner of cleaning my shoes myself, the priest the time required for thinking, and so on.

What is correct in this matter is—the division of labour. Everyone, apart from his productive labour or the exploitation of productive labour, would have a number of functions to fulfill which would not be productive and would in part enter into the costs of consumption. (The real productive labourers have to bear these consumption costs themselves and to perform their unproductive labour themselves.) If these “services” are pleasant, then sometimes the master performs them for the servant, as the jus primae noctis* shows, or as is shown by the labour of ruling, etc., which the masters have always taken on themselves. This in no way obliterates the distinction between productive and unproductive labour, but this distinction itself appears as a result of the division of labour and thus furthers the general productivity of the labourers by making unproductive labour the exclusive function of one section of labourers and productive labour the exclusive function of another section.

But even the labour of a number of menial servants for mere show, to satisfy vanity, “is not unproductive”. Why? Because it produces something, the satisfaction of vanity, ostentation, the exhibition of wealth (l.c., p.277). Here once again we meet the nonsense that every kind of services produces something —the courtesan sensual pleasure, the murderer homicide, etc. Moreover Smith said that every form of this trash has its value. All that is missing ||416| is that these services are rendered gratis. That is not the point in question. But even if they are rendered gratis, they will not increase (material) wealth by a single farthing.

Then the belletristic piffle:

“The singer (they claim), when he has finished singing, leaves us nothing—He leaves us a memory!” (Very fine!) “When you have drunk champagne, what remains?…Whether the consumption does or does not follow closely on the act of production, whether it takes place more or less rapidly, will bring about different economic results, but the fact of consumption, of whatever kind it may be, cannot deprive the product of its character as wealth. There are immaterial products which are of greater durability than certain material products. A palace lasts a long time, but the Iliad is a source of even more durable pleasures” (pp. 277-78).

What bosh!

In the sense in which he is here speaking of wealth, as use-value, it is precisely consumption, whether slow or rapid (its length depends on its own nature and on the nature of the object), and only consumption, that makes the product wealth at all. Use-value has only value for use, and its existence for use is only existence as an object for consumption, its existence is in consumption. Drinking champagne, although this may produce a “hangover”, is as little productive consumption as listening to music, although this may leave behind “a memory”. If the music is good and if the listener understands music, the consumption of music is more sublime than the consumption of champagne, although the production of the latter is a “productive labour” and the production of the former is not.

If we consider all the twaddle against Smith’s distinction between productive and unproductive labour, we find that Garnier, and perhaps also Lauderdale and Ganilh (though the latter said nothing new), exhausted [these polemics]. Those who came later (apart from Storch’s unsuccessful effort) [produced] merely pretentious literary arguments, learned prattle. Garnier is the economist of the Directory and the Consulate, Ferrier and Ganilh are the economists of the Empire. On the other hand Lauderdale, the Earl, was far more concerned to make apologies] or consumers by presenting them as the producers of “unproductive labour”. The glorification of servility and flunkeyism, of tax-gatherers and parasites, runs through the lot of them. Compared with these, the rough cynical character of classical economy stands out as a critique of existing conditions.

[19. Apologia for the Prodigality of the Rich by the Malthusian Chalmers]

One of the most fanatic Malthusians is the Reverend Thomas Chalmers, who thinks that the only means for curing all social ills is the religious education of the labouring class (by which he means ramming down their throats the Malthusian population theory with edifying Christian priestly trimmings); at the same time he is a great defender of all abuses, of wasteful expenditure by the State, of fat livings for the clergy and of wild extravagance on the part of the rich. He laments (p. 260 sqq.) the spirit of the time, the “hard and hunger-bitten economy”; and he wants heavy taxes, a good deal to eat for the “higher” and unproductive workers, clergymen and so on (l.c.). Naturally, he blusters about the Smithian distinction. He devoted a whole chapter to it (Chapter XI) which contains nothing new except that parsimony, etc., only harms “the productive labourers”, but whose tendency is exemplified in the following summing up: This “distinction seems to be nugatory […I; and withal, mischievous in application” (l.c., p. 344). And in what does this mischief consist?

“We have entered at so much length into this argument, because we think the political economy of our days bears a hard and hostile aspect towards an ecclesiastical establishment; and we have no doubt, that to this, the hurtful definition* of Smith has largely […] contributed” (Thomas Chalmers, Professor of Divinity, On Political Economy, in Connexion with the Moral State and Moral Prospects of Society, 2nd ed., London, 1832, p. 346).

By the “ecclesiastical establishment” the cleric means his own church, the Church of England as by law “established”. Moreover he was one of the fellows who had fostered this “Establishment” upon Ireland. The parson is at least plain spoken.

[20. Concluding Observations on Adam Smith and His Views on Productive and Unproductive Labour]

||417| Before we finish with Adam Smith, we will cite two further passages, the first, in which he gives vent to his hatred of the unproductive government; the second, in which he aims to explain why the advance of industry, etc., presupposes free labour. Concerning Smith’s hatred of the clergy.

The first passage runs:

“it is the highest impertinence and presumption, therefore, in kings and ministers, to pretend to watch over the economy of private people, and to restrain their expense, either by sumptuary laws, or by prohibiting the importation of foreign luxuries. They are themselves always, and with out any exception, the greatest spendthrifts in the society. Let them look well after their own expense, and they may safely trust private people with theirs. If their own extravagance does not ruin the State, that of their subjects never will” ([Wealth 0f Nations], t, II, l. II, ch. III, ed. McCulloch, p. 122).

And once more the following passage —*

“The labour of some of the most respectable orders in the** society is, like that of mental servants, unproductive of any value,” <it has value, and therefore costs an equivalent, but it produces no value> “and does not fix or realise itself in any permanent subject, or vendible commodity. … The sovereign, for example, with all the officers both of justice and war who serve*** under him, the whole army and navy, are unproductive labourers. They are the servants of the public, and are maintained by a part of the annual produce of the industry of other people… In the same class must be ranked…churchmen, lawyers, physicians, men of letters of all kinds; players, buffoons, musicians, opera-singers, opera-dancers, etc.” (l.c., pp. 94-95).

This is the language of the still revolutionary bourgeoisie, which has not yet subjected to itself the whole of Society, the State, etc. All these illustrious and time-honoured occupations— sovereign, judge, officer, priest, etc., —with all the old ideological professions to which they give rise, their men of letters, their teachers and priests, are from an economic standpoint put on the same level as the swarm of their own lackeys and jesters maintained by the bourgeoisie and by idle wealth—the landed nobility and idle capitalists. They are mere servants of the public, just as the others are their servants. They live on the produce of other people’s industry, therefore they must be reduced to the smallest possible number. State, church, etc., are only justified in so far as they are committees to superintend or administer the common interests of the productive bourgeoisie; and their costs —since by their nature these costs belong to the overhead costs of production—must be reduced to the unavoidable minimum. This view is of historical interest in sharp contrast partly to the standpoint of antiquity, when material productive labour bore the stigma of slavery and was regarded merely as a pedestal for the idle citizen, and partly to the standpoint of the absolute or aristocratic-constitutional monarchy which arose from the disintegration of the Middle Ages—as Montesquieu, still captive to these ideas, so naïvely expressed them in the following passage (Esprit des lois, l. VII, ch. IV): “If the rich do not spend much, the poor will perish of hunger”.

When on the other hand the bourgeoisie has won the battle, and has partly itself taken over the State, partly made a compromise with its former possessors; and has likewise given recognition to the ideological professions as flesh of its flesh and everywhere transformed them into its functionaries, of like nature to itself; when it itself no longer confronts these as the representative of productive labour, but when the real productive labourers rise against it and moreover tell it that it lives on other people’s industry; when it is enlightened enough not to be entirely absorbed in production, but to want also to consume “in an enlightened way”; when the spiritual labours themselves are more and more performed in its service and enter into the service of capitalist production—then things take a new turn, and the bourgeoisie tries to justify “economically”, from its own standpoint, what at an earlier stage it had criticised and fought against. Its spokesmen and conscience-salvers in this line are the Garniers, etc. In addition to this, these economists, who them-selves are priests, professors, etc., are eager to prove their “productive” usefulness, to justify their wages “economically”.

||418| The second passage, referring to slavery, runs:

“Such occupations” (as artificer and manufacturer) “were considered” (in several of the ancient states) “as fit only for slaves, and the free citizens of the State were prohibited from exercising them. Even in those States where no such prohibition took place, as in Rome and Athens, the great body of the people were in effect excluded from all the trades which are now commonly exercised by the lower sort of the inhabitants of towns. Such trades were, at Athens and Rome., all occupied by the slaves of the rich, who exercised them for the benefit of their masters, whose wealth, power, and protection, made it almost impossible for a poor freeman to find a market for his work, when it came into competition with that of the slaves of the rich. Slaves, however, are very seldom inventive; and all the most important improvements, either in machinery, or in the arrangement and distribution of work, which facilitate and abridge labour have been the discoveries of freemen. Should a slave propose any improvement of this kind, his master would be very apt to consider the proposal as the suggestion of laziness, and of a desire to save his own labour at the master’s expense. The poor slave, instead of reward would probably meet with much abuse, perhaps with some punishment. In the manufactures carried on by slaves, therefore, more labour must generally have been employed to execute the same quantity of work, than in those carried on by freemen. The work of the former must, upon that account, generally have been dearer than that of the latter. The Hungarian mines, it is remarked by Mr. Montesquieu, though not richer, have always been wrought with less expense, and therefore with more profit, than the Turkish mines in their neighbourhood. The Turkish mines are wrought by slaves; and the arms of those slaves are the only machines which the Turks have ever thought of employing. The Hungarian mines are wrought by freemen, who employ a great deal of machinery, by which they facilitate and abridge their own labour. From the very little that is known about the price of manufactures in the times of the Greeks and Romans, it would appear that those of the finer sort were excessively dear” ( [Wealth of Nations, O.U.P. edition, Vol. II, pp. 305-06 I l.c., t. III, l. IV, ch. IX, pp. 549-51, ed. Garnier).

----------------

Adam Smith himself says, l.c., t. III, l. IV, ch. I, p. 5:

“Mr. Locke remarks a distinction between money and other movable goods. All other movable goods, he says, are of so consumable a nature, that the wealth which consists in them cannot be much depended on… Money, on the contrary, is a steady friend” and so on [ibid., p. 3 ].

And again, [Garnier], l. c., pp. 24-25:

“Consumable commodities, it is said, are soon destroyed; whereas gold and silver are of a more durable nature, and were it not for this continual exportation, might be accumulated for ages together, to the incredible augmentation of the real wealth of the country” [ibid., p. 14].

The man of the Monetary system raves about gold and silver because they are money, the independent, tangible form of existence of exchange-value; and a form of its existence that is indestructible, everlasting —in so far as they are not allowed to become means of circulation, the merely transient form of the exchange-value of commodities. The accumulation of gold and silver, piling it up, hoarding it, is therefore his way of growing rich. And as I showed in the quotation from Petty, other commodities are themselves valued according to the degree in which they are more or less durable, that is, remain exchange-value.

Now in the first place Adam Smith repeats this idea of the relatively greater or less durability of commodities in the section where he speaks of consumption which is more or less advantageous for the formation of wealth, according as it is consumption of less or more durable articles of consumption. Here therefore the Monetary system peeps through; and necessarily so, since even in direct consumption there is the mental reservation that the ||419| article of consumption remains wealth, a commodity, therefore a unity of use-value and exchange-value; and the latter depends on the degree to which the use-value is durable, that is, on how slowly consumption deprives it of the possibility of being a commodity or bearer of exchange-value.

Secondly, in his second distinction between productive and unproductive labour he completely returns —in a wider form —to the distinction made by the Monetary system.

Productive labour “fixes and realises itself in some particular subject or vendible commodity, which lasts jar some time at least after that labour is past. It is, as it were, a certain quantity of labour stocked and stored up to be employed, if necessary, upon some other occasion”.

On the other hand, the unproductive labour’s results or services “generally perish in the very instant of their performance, and seldom leave any trace or value behind them, for which an equal quantity of service could afterwards be procured” (Vol. II, b. II, ch. III, ed. McCulloch, p. 94).

Thus Smith makes the same difference between commodities and services as the Monetary system did between gold and silver and the other commodities. With Smith too the distinction is made from the point of view of accumulation —no longer however in the form of building a hoard, but in the real form of reproduction. The commodity perishes in consumption, but then it reproduces in turn a commodity of higher value; or, if it is not so used, it is itself value, with which another commodity can be bought. It is the nature of the product of labour that it exists in a more or less durable, and therefore again salable, use-value; in a use-value in which it is a vendible commodity, a bearer of exchange-value, a commodity, or, in essence, money. The services of unproductive labourers do not again become money. I can neither pay debts nor buy commodities nor buy labour which produces surplus-value with the services for which I pay the lawyer, doctor, priest, musician, etc., the statesman or the soldier, etc. They have gone, like perishable articles of consumption.

Thus at bottom Smith says the same thing as the Monetary system. For them, only that labour is productive which produces money, gold and silver. For Smith, only that labour is productive which produces money for its buyer; although he discerns the money character in all commodities in spite of its mask, while the Monetary system sees it only in the commodity which is the independent existence of exchange-value.

This distinction is founded on the nature of bourgeois production itself, since wealth is not the equivalent of use-value, but only the commodity is wealth, use-value as bearer of exchange-value, as money. What the Monetary system did not understand is how this money is made and is multiplied through the consumption of commodities, and not through their transformation into gold and silver —in which they are crystallised as independent exchange-value, in which however they not only lose their use-value, but do not alter the magnitude of their value.

Footnotes

* In translating this passage Marx has abridged it somewhat.—Ed.

*In the manuscript: “it does”.—Ed.

* Sterile—Ed.

+* Unproductive.—Ed.

* Incidental expenses, that is “mere expenses, unproductive expenditure either of living labour or of materialised labour” (Marx).- Ed.

* Gods of the lesser tribes.-Ed

*“Born to consume the fruits” (Horace).—Ed.

* In the manuscript: “in a variety”.—Ed.

** In the manuscript: “a plenty of silver and gold”.—Ed.

*This passage was translated by Marx into German and slightly shortened —Ed.

* Other things being equal. —Ed.

** In the manuscript: “when there”.—Ed.

*** Per day.—Ed.

* Lit.: bridges and roads—in France this designated the administration of roads and communications—Ed

* Return to an Address of the House of Commons, dated 24 April, 1861 (printed II February, 1862).

* Marx quotes Schmalz from the French translation—Ed.

** In the manuscript there is a pun upon the name of the author that cannot be translated, Marx calls him Schmalzschmiertopf. (The German noun “Schmalz” means grease, lard, dripping; “Schmiertopf”—grease can, scribbler.)—Ed.

* <And so the same fellow says one page later “that all labour is productive of wealth, in proportion to its exchange-value determined by supply and demand” (it produces wealth, not in proportion to the exchange-value it produces, but in proportion to its own exchange-value; that is to say, not on the basis of what it produces but of what it costs), “that its respective value only contributes to the accumulation of capitals by the saving and non-consumption of the products that this value is entitled to take out of total production”.>

* You work, but not for yourselves (Virgil).—Ed.

* This refers to the capitalist mode of production.—Ed.

* Marx put the passage in his own words and slightly abbreviated it.—Ed.

* Marx refers to the French translation from which be takes this and the following passages ( see Appendix, p. 450). The page reference in square brackets is to the English edition of 1804.—Ed.

* Born to consume the fruits (Horace).—Ed.

* Sismondi says: “Because of the progress made by industry and science, each labourer is able to produce each day more, and much more, than he needs to consume. But at the same time as his labour produces wealth, this wealth, if he was called upon to enjoy it, would make him little fitted for labour” (Nouveaux principes…, t. I, p. 85).

* Of their own peculiar kind.—Ed.

* The right of the first night.—Ed.

* In the manuscript: “distinction”.—Ed.

* See pp. 160, 161 and 264 of the present volume—Ed.

* in the manuscript: “of”.—Ed.

** In the manuscript: “are”.—Ed

[Chapter V] Necker

Notes

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