Marx also briefly touches on some of the other relations that he covers in the later chapters of Capital III, dealing with Revenue and Its Sources. A capitalist who only uses their own capital still considers a part of the revenue they obtain interest on that capital. Interest is seen as a separate revenue from profit, resulting from the lending of money-capital, and the capitalist, here, sees the money-capital they lend to the business as the source of such interest quite apart from the profit they obtain from the productive application of the capital. Had they had to borrow that money-capital, they would have had to pay interest on it, as a deduction from their profit.
The same is true of a landlord, who also cultivates their own land, as a capitalist farmer.
“so, given the capitalist mode of production, even if the labourer—who does not employ any other labourers—owns his means of production, they are regarded as capital and the part of his own labour realised by him over and above the ordinary wage appears to be profit yielded by his capital. He himself is then divided up into different economic categories. As his own workman, he gets his wages, and as capitalist, he gets his profits.” (p 423)
Marx quotes from Jones where he sets out the same argument as provided by Marx that, once capitalism is established, the majority of capital is provided by labour, which creates its own labour fund, for the payment of wages.
“... there is a difference between the influence, on the productive powers of nations, of that wealth which has been saved, and is dispensed as wages with a view to profit; and of that wealth which is advanced out of revenue for the support of labour. With a view to this distinction, I use the word capital to denote that portion of wealth exclusively which has been saved from revenue, and is used with a view to profit” (op. cit., pp. 36-37).
“We might … comprise, under the […] term, capital, all the wealth devoted to the maintenance of labour, whether it has gone through any previous process of saving or not… we must, then, in tracing the position of the labouring classes and of their paymasters in different nations and under different circumstances, distinguish between capital which has been saved, and capital which has undergone no process of accumulation; between, in short, capital which is revenue, and capital which is not revenue…”(p. 36). “… in every country of the Old World, except England and Holland, the wages of the agriculturists are not advanced out of funds which have been saved and accumulated from revenues, but are produced by the labourers themselves, and never exist in any other shape than that of a stock for their own immediate consumption” (p. 37).” (p 423-4)
What distinguishes Jones from the other economists, apart from maybe Sismondi, Marx says, is this fact that he sees capitalism as an historically specific form. He sees the same underlying economic processes continuing in each mode of production – as Marx describes in his Letter to Kugelmann, these processes are themselves determined by, and what constitutes The Law of Value – and, in each mode of production, there exists the same basic underlying funds arising from production – the fund required to reproduce the means of production, the labour fund required to reproduce labour-power, and the surplus product, which provides for the consumption of unproductive elements in society, and also provides the basis for the accumulation of means of production.
“... he emphasises that the essential feature of capital is its socially determined form, and that he reduces the whole difference between the capitalist and other modes of production to this distinct form. It is that labour is directly converted into capital and that, on the other hand, this capital buys labour not for the sake of its use-value, but in order to increase its own value, to create surplus-value (i.e., a larger amount of exchange-value) and to use it “with a view to profit”.” (p 424)
This is what Marx means in his Letter to Kugelmann, when he says that The Law of Value, as a natural law, exists in every mode of production, and cannot be abolished simply as a consequence of any change in the mode of production, but that it simply assumes a different form in each mode of production.
“This shows, however, at the same time that the saving of revenue in order to convert it into capital and “accumulation” are distinguished from other methods only through the form in which “wealth is devoted to the maintenance of labour.” The agricultural labourers in England and Holland who receive wages which are “advanced” by capital produce “their wages themselves” just like the French peasant or the self-supporting Russian serf. If the production process is considered in its continuity, then the capitalist advances the labourer as “wages” today only a part of the product which the labourer produced yesterday.” (p 424)
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