The Accumulation of Capital

by Rosa Luxemburg

That is how v. Kirchmann described somewhat clumsily, but on the whole correctly, what is in fact the capitalisation of surplus value, the process of capitalist accumulation, which constitutes the whole significance of saving, advocated by classical economists ‘since Adam Smith’ with unerring instinct. Declaring war on saving and accumulation was quite in keeping with v. Kirchmann’s premises, considering that he, like Sismondi, saw the immediate cause of the crises in accumulation. Here, too, Rodbertus is more ‘thorough’. Having learned from Ricardo’s theory of value that labour is the source of all value, and consequently of capital, too, he is completely blinded by this elementary piece of knowledge to the entire complexity of capitalist production and capital movements. Since capital is generated by labour, both the accumulation of capital, i.e. ‘saving’, and the capitalisation of the surplus value are nothing but eyewash.

In order to untangle this intricate network of errors by ‘economists since Adam Smith’, he takes, as we might expect, the example of the ‘isolated husbandman’ and proves all that he needs by a long-drawn vivisection of the unhappy creature. Here already he discovers ‘capital’, that is to say, of course, that famous ‘original stick’ with which ‘economists since Adam Smith’ have hooked the fruits of a theory of capital from the tree of knowledge. ‘Would saving be able to produce this stick?’ is his query. And since every normal person will understand that ‘saving’ cannot produce any stick, that Robinson [Crusoe] must have made it of wood, we have already proved that the ‘savings’ theory is quite mistaken. Presently, the ‘isolated husbandman’ hooks a fruit from the tree with the stick, and this fruit is his ‘income’.

‘If capital were the source of income, already this most elementary and primitive event would have to give evidence of this relation. Would it be true to say, then, without doing violence to facts and concepts, that the stick is a source of income or of part of the income consisting in the fruit brought down? can we trace income, wholly or in part, back to the stick as its cause, may we consider it, wholly or in parts, as a product of the stick?’[270]

Surely not. And since the fruit is the product, not of the stick which brought it down, but of the tree which grew it, Rodbertus has already proved that all ‘economists since Adam Smith’ are grossly mistaken if they maintain that income derives from capital. After a clear exposition of all fundamental concepts of economics on the example of Robinson [Crusoe]’s ‘economy’, Rodbertus transfers the knowledge thus acquired first to a fictitious society ‘without ownership in capital or land’, that is to say to a society with a communist mode of possession, and then to a society ‘with ownership in capital and land’, that is to say contemporary society, and, lo and behold—all the laws of Robinson [Crusoe]’s economy apply point for point to these two forms of society as well. Rodbertus contrives here a theory of capital and income which is the very crown of his Utopian imagination. Since he has discovered that Robinson [Crusoe]’s ‘capital’ is the means of production pure and simple, he identifies capital with the means of production in capitalist economy as well. Thus reducing capital, with a wave of his hand, to constant capital, he protests in the name of justice and morality against the fact that the wages, the workers’ means of subsistence, are also considered capital. He contends furiously against the concept of variable capital, seeing in it the cause of every disaster. ‘If only’, he grieves, ‘economists would pay attention to what I say, if only they would examine without prejudice whether they are right or I. This is the focal point of all errors about capital in the ruling system, this is the ultimate source of injustice against the working classes, in theory and practice alike.’[271]

For ‘justice’ demands that the goods constituting the ‘real wages’ of the workers be counted, not as part of capital, but as belonging to the category of income. Though Rodbertus knows very well that the capitalist must regard the wages he has ‘advanced’ as part of his capital, just like the other part laid out on immediate means of production, yet in his opinion this applies only to individual capitals. As soon as it is a question of the social aggregate product, of reproduction as a whole, he declares the capitalist categories of production an illusion, a malicious lie and a ‘wrong’. ‘Capital per se (properly so-called), the items which make up capital, capital from the nation’s point of view, is something quite different from private capital, capital assets, capital property, all that “capital” in the modern use of the term usually stands for.’[272]

An individual capitalist produces by capitalist methods, but society as a whole must produce like Robinson [Crusoe], as a collective owner employing communist methods.

‘It makes no difference from this general and national point of view that greater or smaller parts of the aggregate national product are now owned in all the various phases of production by private persons who must not be numbered among the producers proper, and that the latter always manufacture this national aggregate product as servants—without sharing in the ownership of their own product—of these few owners.’

Certain peculiarities of the relations within the society as a whole no doubt result from this, namely (1) the institution of ‘exchange’ as an intermediary, and (2) the inequality in the distribution of the product.

‘Yet all these consequences do not affect the movements of national production and the shaping of the national product which are always the same, now as ever (under the rule of communism), no more than they alter in any respect, as far as the national point of view is concerned, the contrast between capital and income so far established.’

Sismondi had laboured in the sweat of his brow, as had Smith and many others, to disentangle the concepts of capital and income from the contradictions of capitalist production. Rodbertus has a simpler method and abstracts from the specific forms determined by capitalist production for society as a whole; he simply calls the means of production ‘capital’ and the article of consumption ‘revenue’ and leaves it at that.