[65]Ibid., p. 23.
[66]As to the concept of ‘national capital’ specific to Rodbertus, see below, Section II.
[67]J. B. Say, A Treatise on Political Economy (transl. by C. R. Prinsep, vol. ii, London, 1821); pp. 75-7.
[68]Attention must be drawn to the fact that Mirabeau in his Explications on the Tableau Économique explicitly mentions the fixed capital of the unproductive class: ‘The primary advances of this class, for the establishment of manufactures, for instruments, machines, mills, smithies (ironworks) and other factories ... (amount to) 2,000 million livres’ (Tableau Économique avec ses Explications, 1760, p. 82). In his confusing sketch of the Tableau itself, Mirabeau, too, fails to take this fixed capital of the sterile class into account.
[69]Smith accordingly arrives at this general formulation: ‘The value which the workmen add to the materials, therefore, resolves itself in this case into two parts, of which the one pays their wages, the other the profits of their employer upon the whole stock of materials and wages which he advanced’ (op. cit., vol. i, p. 83). Further, in Book II, chap. 8, on industrial labour in particular: ‘The labour of a manufacturer adds generally to the value of the materials which he works upon, that of his own maintenance and of his master’s profit. The labour of a menial servant, on the contrary, adds to the value of nothing. Though the manufacturer has his wages advanced to him by his master, he in reality costs him no expense, the value of those wages being generally restored, together with a profit, in the improved value of the subject upon which his labour is bestowed’ (op. cit., vol. ii, pp. 93-4).
[70]‘The labourers ... therefore, employed in agriculture, not only occasion, like the workmen in manufactures, the reproduction of a value equal to their own consumption, or to the capital which employs them, together with its owner’s profit, but of a much greater value. Over and above the capital of the farmer and all its profits, they regularly occasion the reproduction of the rent of the landlord’ (ibid., p. 149).
[71]Ibid., pp. 97-8. Yet already in the following sentence Smith converts capital completely into wages, that is variable capital: ‘That part of the annual produce of the land and labour of any country which replaces a capital, never is immediately employed to maintain any but productive hands. It pays the wages of productive labour only. That which is immediately destined for constituting a revenue, either as profit or as rent, may maintain indifferently either productive or unproductive hands’ (ibid., p. 98).
[72]Ibid., p. 19.
[73]Smith, op. cit., vol. ii, pp. 19-20.
[74]Ibid., vol. i, pp. 21-2.