2. The General Relations of Production, of Distribution, Exchange and Consumption - Part 3 of 3

Marx examines this sequence and relations in the final chapters of Capital III, and picks apart the superficial appearances. This superficiality results in different forms of property, historically determined and specific, being reduced to mere factors of production. Land is land whether under communal, slave, feudal, Asiatic or capitalist production, and rent is then, simply, a return to the owner of land. Capital becomes simply means of production, and so profit a return to the owner of capital, and later, capital becomes simply money, so that the return to it is interest, whereas the owner of means of production – the entrepreneur – obtains profit as a special form of wages for their specific type of labour. Labour is labour whether that of the slave, independent producer, or wage worker, and wages are then the return to it, even though the category of wages does not exist for the slave or independent producer.

All of these factors are required for production,, and so are, inevitably, connected in production. In the primitive commune, and under communism, they are inseparable, because they are all the common property of the commune.

“Another argument is that the different factors are not considered as a single whole; as though this separation had forced its way from the textbook into real life and not, on the contrary, from real life into the textbooks, and as though it were a question of the dialectical reconciliation of concepts and not of the resolution of actually existing conditions.” (p 195)

In other words, the actual separation of these factors of production is not just some theoretical construct, but is a reflection in the realm of ideas of material reality. As soon as the primitive commune began to dissolve, means of production began to become private property, and, handed down through families, via inheritance, as did land and money, and as these factors of production become private property for some, so they become denied to others, who could, then, only live by becoming slaves, serfs, and servants.

This separation of the factors of production is mirrored in the separation of production from distribution, exchange and consumption. But, again, this separation is a reflection of material reality.

“The opponents of the economists who accuse the latter of crudely separating interconnected elements, either argue from the same standpoint or even from a lower one, no matter whether these opponents come from within or without the domain of political economy. Nothing is more common than the reproach that the economists regard production too much as a goal in itself, and that distribution is equally important. This argument is based on the concept of the economists that distribution is a separate and independent sphere alongside production.” (p 194-5)

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Forward To 2a Production and Consumption.