b) Production and Distribution
Marx discusses, here, the ideas set out in Capital III, Chapters 48-51, concerning the factors of production and their revenues. It is also covered in Theories of Surplus Value, Part III, Addenda.
“When looking through the ordinary run of economic works, one's attention is attracted forthwith by the fact that everything is mentioned twice, e.g., rent, wages, interest and profit figure under the heading distribution, while under the heading of production land, labour and capital appear as factors of production. As to capital, it is evident from the outset that this is counted twice, first as a factor of production, and secondly as a source of income; i.e., as a determining and determinate form of distribution. Interest and profit appear therefore in production as well, since they are forms in which capital increases and grows, and are thus phases of its production. As forms of distribution, interest and profit presuppose capital as a factor of production. They are forms of distribution whose pre-condition is the existence of capital as a factor of production. They are likewise modes of reproduction of capital.” (p 200)
On the one hand, this is because capital takes the form of industrial capital (productive and commercial capital) as well as interest-bearing capital (fictitious-capital). On the other hand, capital becomes understood as the latter, so that the return to capital is interest, whilst profit is viewed as the return to entrepreneurship, as wages to a special type of labour. This is all the more the case when private capital is superseded by socialised capital, and when the private capitalist is replaced by the functioning capitalist/professional manager.
Factories, machines and so on continue to be described as “capital”, but they can only contribute their own value to production, the profit deriving from the entrepreneurial skill of the professional managers, in bringing them together, and organising production.
Then, there is labour and wages. But,
“If labour did not have the distinct form of wage-labour, then its share in the product would not appear as wages, as for instance in slavery.” (p 200)
Indeed, for the direct producer, their labour does not appear as wages either. It is only bourgeois production, and the development of wage labour which creates the category, and it is then read into other modes of production, where it does not exist. For example, if we take the self-employed, independent producer, they do not actually employ themselves as their own wage labourer. There is no distinction between the revenue they obtain as “wages”, as against that they receive as “profit”, as entrepreneur, “interest” on the capital they loan to the business, or “rent” on any land used by the business.
“Finally rent – if we take the most advanced form of distribution by which landed property obtains a share in the product-presupposes large-scale landed property (strictly speaking, large-scale agriculture) as a factor of production, and not land in general; just as wages do not presuppose labour in general.” (p 200)
Capitalist rent, as indeed, with interest, is not the same as feudal rent and interest is not the same as interest paid to usurers. Feudal rent is tribute paid to the Lord of the Manor, most clearly seen in the form of corvee labour, whereas capitalist rent is surplus profit, which itself presumes the existence of an average industrial rate of profit. Interest is determined by the demand for money-capital relative to the supply of of money-capital, which again presumes the development of industrial capital, and an average industrial rate of profit (the use value of capital), so that capital itself can be sold as a commodity, whose price is the rate of interest. Usurers interest, by contrast simply exists on the basis of a desperate need for money as currency, so as to make payments.
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