Struve also shares the crude view of the Russian ‘populists’ who saw hardly more than a merchant’s sordid concern for his market in the international connections of capitalist economy, and its historical tendency to create a homogeneous living organism based on social division of labour as well as the countless variety of natural wealth and productive conditions of the globe. Moreover he accepts the Three Empire fiction of Wagner and Schmoller (the self-contained Empires of Great Britain, Russia and the U.S.A.) which completely ignores or artificially minimises the vital part played by an unlimited supply of means of subsistence, of raw and auxiliary materials and of labour power which is just as necessary for a capitalist industry computed in terms of a world market as the demand for finished products. Alone the history of the English cotton industry, a reflection in miniature of the history of capitalism in general, spreading over five continents throughout the nineteenth century, makes a mockery of the professors’ childish pretensions which have only one real significance: to provide the theoretical justification for the system of protective tariffs.
CHAPTER XXII
BULGAKOV AND HIS COMPLETION OF MARX’S ANALYSIS
The second critic of ‘populist’ scepticism, S. Bulgakov, is no respecter of Struve’s ‘third persons’ and at once denies that they form the sheet-anchor for capitalist accumulation.
‘The majority of economists before Marx’, he declares, ‘solved the problem by saying that some sort of “third person” is needed, as a deus ex machina, to cut the Gordian knot, i.e. to consume the surplus value. This part is played by luxury-loving landowners (as with Malthus), or by indulgent capitalists, or yet by militarism and the like. There can be no demand for the surplus value without some such extraordinary mediators; a deadlock will be reached on the markets and the result will be over-production and crises.’[300]
‘Struve thus assumes that capitalist production in its development, too, may find its ultimate mainstay in the consumption of some fantastic sort of “third person”. But if this great public is essentially characterised as consuming the surplus value, whence does it obtain the means to buy?’[301]
For his part, Bulgakov centres the whole problem from the first in the analysis of the social aggregate product and its reproduction as given by Marx in the second volume of Capital. He has a thorough grasp of the fact that he must start with simple reproduction and must fully understand its working in order to solve the question of accumulation. In this context, he says, it is of particular importance to obtain a clear picture of the consumption of surplus value and wages in such branches of production as do not turn out goods for consumption, and further, to understand fully the circulation of that portion of the social aggregate product which represents used-up constant capital. This, he argues, is a completely new problem of which economists had not even been aware before Marx brought it up. ‘In order to solve this problem, Marx divides all capitalistically produced commodities into two great and fundamentally different categories: the production of producer and consumer goods. There is more theoretical importance in this division than in all previous squabbles on the theory of markets.’[302]
Bulgakov, we see, is an outspoken and enthusiastic supporter of Marx’s theory. The object of his study, as he puts it, is thus a critique of the doctrine that capitalism cannot exist without external markets. ‘For this purpose, the author has made use of the most valuable analysis of social reproduction given by Marx in volume ii of Capital which for reasons unknown has scarcely been utilised in economic theory. Though this analysis cannot be taken as fully completed, we are yet of opinion that even in its present fragmentary shape it offers an adequate foundation for a solution of the market problem that differs from that adopted by Messrs. Nikolayon, V. V. and others, and which they claim to have found in Marx.’[303]