Ravenstone's asceticism is reflected in his statement,
““If each man’s labour were but enough to procure his own food, there could be no property, and no part of a people’s industry could be turned away to work for the wants of the imagination” (loc. cit., pp. 14-15).” (p 262)
This is also consistent with the view put forward by Thomas Hobbes that each man should only own sufficient property that they could themselves cultivate, and whose product they could consume. And, Ravenstone continues in the same vein,
““In every [subsequent] stage of society, as increased numbers and better contrivances add to each man’s power of production, the number of those who labour is gradually diminished… Property grows from the improvement of the means of production; its sole business is the encouragement of idleness. When each man’s labour is barely sufficient for his own subsistence, as there can be no property, there will be no idle man. When one man’s labour can maintain five, there will be four idle men for one employed in production: in no other way can the produce be consumed… the object of society is to magnify the idle at the expense of the industrious, to create power out of plenty” (loc. cit., p. 11).” (p 262)
Whilst Ravenstone is forced to acknowledge the progressive historical role that capital plays in utilising this surplus product to create fixed capital, develop science, and establish global trade, he does not connect this to its compulsion to do these things as a result of competition. Rather, it comes down to utilising the surplus product for these purposes because otherwise it would mean an increased supply of necessaries having to be handed back to workers. The concept remains within the confines of a view of capital as being driven by the subjective desires of the capitalist, for consumption, rather than the objective requirement for accumulation.
Ravenstone explains rent in a similar way that, as productivity rises, the proportion of surplus product rises, which means that rent rises. As Marx says, this is a correct explanation for the increase in surplus value, in general, but it is not a sufficient explanation of rent, because it does not explain why this larger surplus product lands in the pocket of the landlord, as rent, rather than the capitalist farmer as profit.
Marx notes of Ravenstone's book,
“An original piece of work. Its real subject is the modern system of national debt, as its title indicates.” (p 262)
In respect of that subject, Marx quotes the following section from it, which might (with the appropriate recognition of the times, in respect to the use of words) equally be applied to the last thirty years of dominance of conservative ideas that promoted financial and property speculation above the interests of industry and production, and attempted to rescue those that benefited from that process, when it inevitably resulted in a financial and property market crash, by using the state and central banks to use money printing to artificially reflate asset prices, thereby creating the inevitability of an even greater busting of those asset price bubbles, as I have described in my book, Marx and Engels' Theories of Crisis: Understanding the Coming Storm.
““…the history of the last thirty years […] has achieved no higher adventure than the turning of a few Jews into gentlemen, and a few blockheads into political economists” (op. cit., pp. 66-67).
The funding system has one beneficial consequence although “the ancient gentry of the land” are robbed “of a large portion of their property” in order “to transfer it to these new fangled hidalgos as a reward for their skill in the arts of fraud and peculation… If it encourage fraud and meanness; if it clothe quackery and pretension in the garb of wisdom; if it turn a whole people into a nation of jobbers … if it break down all the prejudices of rank and birth to render money the only distinction among men … it destroys the perpetuity of property…” (op. cit., pp. 51-52).” (p 263)
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