Marx explains why those who argue that value is specific to capitalism or commodity production are wrong.
“The production of a use-value, and even that of a commodity (for this can be carried on also by independent productive labourers), is here only a means of producing absolute and relative surplus-value for a capitalist... However this appropriation of surplus-value, or this separation of the production of value into a reproduction of advanced value and a production of new value (surplus-value) which does not replace any equivalent, does not alter in any way the substance of value itself or the nature of the production of value. The substance of value is and remains nothing but expended labour-power — labour independent of the specific, useful character of this expenditure. A serf for instance expends his labour-power for six days, labours for six days, and the fact of this expenditure as such is not altered by the circumstance that he may be working three days for himself, on his own field, and three days for his lord, on the field of the latter. Both his voluntary labour for himself and his forced labour for his lord are equally labour; so far as this labour is considered with reference to the values, or to the useful articles created by it, there is no difference in his six days of labour.” (p 389-90)
Marx explains, therefore, that the same production of value takes place as a result of the expenditure of labour in each of these cases, and this labour, in each case, divides into necessary labour and surplus labour. The difference is that, under feudalism, the surplus labour/product is appropriated by the landlord as rent, and under capitalism it is appropriated by the capitalist, as industrial profit. The landlord only appropriates directly the surplus labour/product/value, whereas the capitalist, like the slave owner, appropriates the whole product of labour, before handing back to the slave/worker a portion of that product equal to the necessary labour, required for their reproduction.
So, coming back to Engels' earlier note, it is incorrect, even in terms of resolving the value of commodities into revenues, to say that it resolves entirely into wages and profit/rent, because that is the case only in relation to capitalism, the division of the value of commodities/products is different in other modes of production.
“The absurd formula that the three revenues, wages, profit and rent, form the three “component parts” of the value of commodities originates with Adam Smith from the more plausible idea that the value of commodities “resolves itself” into these three component parts. This is likewise incorrect, even granted that the value of commodities is divisible only into an equivalent of the consumed labour-power and the surplus-value created by it.” (p 389)
Marx explains the difference between constant capital and variable-capital, but also of labour-power/wages, as distinct from variable-capital. The latter is capital, and a fund from which labour-power is bought. Wages are the form of that payment, and constitute revenue for the worker, not capital. The value of constant capital is already determined, prior to, and independent of the production of the commodity.
“This value has not been produced during the process of production of this commodity, for the means of production possessed this value before the process of production, independently of it; they entered into this process as the vehicles of this value; it is only its form of appearance that has been renewed and altered.” (p 391)
It is that which characterises it as “constant” capital. But, the same is true of labour-power. Its value is also determined prior to, and independent of the production of the commodity.
“It is determined, the same as that of the means of production, independently of the process of production into which labour-power is to enter, and it is fixed in an act of circulation, the purchase and sale of labour-power, before the latter enters the process of production.” (p 391)
What distinguishes variable-capital from constant capital is that the value of labour-power, represented by wages does not transfer to the commodity. The value added by labour to the constant capital is entirely independent of the value of the labour-power, and is the result of the creation of new value by labour itself. What makes the variable-capital variable is this fact that what is originally a fixed amount of value is transformed in the production process into a greater amount of value, precisely because the new value created is greater than the value of the labour-power that was bought to produce it. Under capitalism, the capitalist has no reason to lay out capital unless they believe that this new value is greater that the value they advance as wages. The new labour, therefore, reproduces the constant capital only insofar as it is concrete labour, which preserves the value of the use values it transforms from one form to another, in the new product, whilst it reproduces the value of the variable-capital only as a result of an entirely new creation of value equal to that paid out as wages. The variable-capital is variable as opposed to being constant for the reason that, in the process of reproducing the value of labour-power, it also produces an additional amount of value, a surplus value. It turns a fixed amount into a variable-amount.
“By means of his function — the expenditure of labour-power — the wage-labourer produces a commodity-value equal to the value which the capitalist has to pay him for the use of his labour-power. He gives this value to the capitalist in the form of a commodity and is paid for it by him in money. That this portion of the commodity-value is for the capitalist but an equivalent for the variable capital which he has to advance in wages does not alter in any way the fact that it is a commodity-value newly created during the process of production and consisting of nothing but what surplus-value consists of, namely, past expenditure of labour-power. Nor is this truth affected by the fact that the value of the labour-power paid by the capitalist to the labourer in the form of wages and assumes the form of a revenue for the labourer, and that not only labour-power is continually reproduced thereby but also the class of wage-labourers as such, and thus the basis of the entire capitalist production.” (p 391-2)
And the surplus value,
“... like the portion of value which replaces the variable capital advanced in wages, is a value newly created by the labourer during the process of production — congealed labour. But it does not cost the owner of the entire product, the capitalist, anything. This circumstance actually permits the capitalist to consume the surplus-value entirely as revenue, unless he has to surrender parts of it to other participants — such as ground-rent to the landlord, in which case such portions constitute a revenue of such third persons.” (p 392)
What can be seen, here, then, is that, whilst what comes out of this commodity-product are revenues, used for consumption – wages, profit, rent, interest – what also comes out of it are other elements, which must again be thrown into the production process as capital. The value portion of the commodity-product, equal to constant capital, cannot be consumed by the capitalist as revenue, but must again be used to replace the consumed constant capital. The wages received as revenue, by workers, are used for their own consumption, but, for the capitalist, who pays out these wages, they form variable-capital, and he cannot consume it, but must again advance it for production to continue. For the capitalist or the landlord, it is only the surplus value they can consume.
It was Smith's identification of revenues with the factors of production, and the respective parts of the value of the commodity-product that led him into his cost of production theory of value.
“Compared from this point of view, parts of commodity-value thus transform themselves imperceptibly into its independent “component parts,” and finally into the “sources of all value.” A further conclusion is that commodity-value is composed of, or “resolves itself” into, revenues of various kinds, so that the revenues do not consist of commodity-values but the commodity-value consists of “revenues.”” (p 393)
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