The value freshly added in a year by freshly added labour – and so also the part of the annual product in which this value is expressed, and which can be extracted and separated from the total product – can therefore be divided into three parts which take on three different forms of revenue, forms that express one part of this value as belonging or accruing to the owner of labour-power, one part to the owner of capital and a third part to the owner of landed property. These are thus relations or forms of distribution, for they express the relationships in which the total value newly produced is distributed among the owners of the various agents of production.
In the customary view, these relations of distribution appear to be natural relations, relations arising from the nature of all social production, from the laws of human production pure and simple. It cannot be denied, of course, that pre-capitalist societies display other modes of distribution, but these are then explained as undeveloped, incomplete and disguised, not reduced to their purest expression and highest form, modalities of these natural relations of distribution with a different hue.
The only bit of truth in this conception is this: once any kind of social production is assumed (e.g. that of the indigenous Indian communities or the more artificially developed communism of the Peruvians), it is always possible to distinguish between the portion of labour whose product is directly consumed individually by the producers and their dependants, and – leaving aside the portion for productive consumption – a further portion of labour that is always surplus labour, whose product serves to satisfy general social needs, no matter how this surplus product is distributed and who functions as the representative of these social needs. The identity of the different modes of distribution thus comes down to the fact that they are identical if we abstract from their distinctions and specific forms and cling on just to their unity in contrast to what distinguishes them.
A more developed and critical awareness concedes the historically developed character of these relations of distribution,56a but holds all the more firmly to the supposedly constant character of the relations of production themselves, as arising from human nature and hence independent of all historical development.
The scientific analysis of the capitalist mode of production proves the contrary, i.e. that this is a mode of production of a particular kind and a specific historical determinacy; that like any other particular mode of production it assumes a given level of social productive forces and of their forms of development as its historical precondition, a condition that is itself the historical result and product of a previous process and from which the new mode of production proceeds as its given foundation; that the relations of production corresponding to this specific and historically determined mode of production – relations into which men enter in their social life-process, in the production of their social life – have a specific, historical and transitory character; and that finally the relations of distribution are essentially identical with these relations of production, the reverse side of the same coin, so that the two things share the same historically transitory character.
In dealing with the relations of distribution, it is usual to start from the ostensible fact that the annual product is divided into wages, profit and ground-rent. But expressed in this way, that is wrong. The product is divided into capital on the one hand and revenues on the other. One of these revenues, wages, only ever assumes the form of a revenue, the revenue of the worker, after it has previously confronted the same worker in the form of capital. The confrontation between the produced conditions of labour and the products of labour all together as capital, and the immediate producers, gives the material conditions of labour right from the start a specific social character vis-à-vis the workers, and hence sets up a specific relationship which the workers enter into, in production itself, to the owners of these conditions of labour and to one another. The transformation of these conditions of labour into capital also involves the expropriation of the immediate producers from the land, and hence a specific form of landed property.
If one part of the product were not transformed into capital, the other would not assume the forms of wages, profit and rent.
On the other hand, if the capitalist mode of production presupposes this specific social form of the conditions of production, it constantly reproduces it as well. It not only produces the material products, but constantly reproduces the relations of production in which these are produced, and with them also the corresponding relations of distribution.
It may be said, incidentally, that capital (and landed property, which this includes as its antithesis) itself already presupposes a distribution: it presupposes the expropriation of the workers from the conditions of labour, the concentration of these conditions in the hands of a minority of individuals, the exclusive ownership of the land by other individuals, in short, all the relations that were developed in the section on primitive accumulation (Volume 1, Part Eight). But this is a completely different distribution from what is understood by relations of distribution when a historical character is claimed for these, in contrast to the relations of production. What is meant under this rubric are the different titles to the part of the product that falls to individual consumption. The former relations of distribution, on the other hand, are the foundation of particular social functions which are ascribed to specific agents of production within the relation of production itself, as distinct from the immediate producers. They give the actual conditions of production, and their representatives, a specific social quality. They determine the whole character and movement of production.
Two characteristic traits mark the capitalist mode of production right from the start.
Firstly. It produces its products as commodities. The fact that it produces commodities does not in itself distinguish it from other modes of production; but that the dominant and determining character of its product is that it is a commodity certainly does so. This means, first of all, that the worker himself appears only as a seller of commodities, and hence as a free wage-labourer – i.e. labour generally appears as wage-labour. It is unnecessary after the argument already developed to demonstrate once again how the relationship of capital and wage-labour determines the whole character of the mode of production. The principal agents of this mode of production itself, the capitalist and the wage-labourer, are as such simply embodiments and personifications of capital and wage-labour – specific social characters that the social production process stamps on individuals, products of these specific social relations of production.
The character (1) of the product as a commodity, and (2) of the commodity as the product of capital, already involves all the relations of circulation, i.e. a specific social process which products must pass through and in which they assume specific social characters; it involves equally specific relationships between the agents of production, determining the valorization of their product and ils transformation back into either means of subsistence or means of production. But even leaving this aside, the two above characters of the product as commodity and the commodity as capitalistically produced commodity give rise to the entire determination of value and the regulation of the total production by value. In this quite specific form of value, labour is valid only as social labour; on the other hand the division of this social labour and the reciprocal complementarity or metabolism of its products, subjugation to and insertion into the social mechanism, is left to the accidental and reciprocally countervailing motives of the individual capitalist producers. Since these confront one another only as commodity owners, each trying to sell his commodity as dear as possible (and seeming to be governed only by caprice even in the regulation of production), the inner law operates only by way of their competition, their reciprocal pressure on one another, which is how divergences are mutually counterbalanced. It is only as an inner law, a blind natural force vis-à-vis the individual agents, that the law of value operates here and that the social balance of production is asserted in the midst of accidental fluctuations.
What is also implied already in the commodity, and still more so in the commodity as the product of capital, is the reification of the social determinations of production and the subjectification [Versubjektifierung] of the material bases of production which characterize the entire capitalist mode of production.
The second thing that particularly marks the capitalist mode of production is the production of surplus-value as the direct object and decisive motive of production. Capital essentially produces capital, and it does this only as long as it produces surplus-value. In dealing with relative surplus-value and then with the transformation of surplus-value into profit, we have seen how a mode of production peculiar to the capitalist period is based on this – a particular form of development of the social productive powers of labour, but as powers of capital that have asserted their autonomy vis-à-vis the worker, thus directly opposing his own development. Production for value and surplus-value involves a constantly operating tendency, as we went on to show, to reduce the labour-time needed to produce a commodity, i.e. to reduce the commodity’s value, below the existing social average at any given time. The pressure to reduce the cost price to its minimum becomes the strongest lever for raising the social productivity of labour, though this appears here simply as a constant increase in the productivity of capital.
The authority that the capitalist assumes in the immediate production process, as personification of capital, the social function he dons as manager and ruler of production, is essentially different from authority on the basis of production with slaves or serfs, etc.
Although on the basis of capitalist production the social character of their production confronts the mass of immediate producers in the form of a strict governing authority, and the social mechanism of the labour process has received here a completely hierarchical articulation – though this authority accrues to its bearers only as the personification of the conditions of labour vis-à-vis labour itself, not to them as political or theocratic rulers as in earlier forms of production – the most complete anarchy reigns among the bearers of this authority, the capitalists themselves, who confront one another simply as owners of commodities, and within this anarchy the social interconnection of production prevails over individual caprice only as an overwhelming natural law.
It is only because labour is presupposed in the form of wage-labour, and the means of production in the form of capital (i.e. only as a result of this specific form of these two essential agents of production), that one part of the value (product) presents itself as surplus-value and this surplus-value presents itself as profit (rent), the gains of the capitalist, as additional available wealth belonging to him. And it is only because it presents itself as his profit that the new additional means of production, designed for the expansion of reproduction and forming a portion of the product, present themselves as new additional capital, and the expansion of the reproduction process in general presents itself as a process of capitalist accumulation.
Even though the form of labour as wage-labour is decisive for the shape of the entire process and for the specific mode of production itself, it is not wage-labour that is value-determining. What matters in the determination of value is the overall social labour-time, the total amount of labour which society has at its disposal and whose relative absorption by the different products determines, as it were, their respective social weight. But the particular form in which social labour-time plays its determinant role in the value of commodities coincides with the form of labour as wage-labour, and the corresponding form of the means of production as capital, in so far as it is on this basis alone that commodity production becomes the general form of production.
Let us consider, moreover, the so-called relations of distribution themselves. The wage assumes wage-labour, profit assumes capital. These specific forms of distribution thus assume specific social characters for the conditions of production and specific social relations for the agents of production. The specific relation of distribution thus simply expresses the historically determined relation of production.
To take profit, for example. This specific form of surplus-value is the presupposition for the fresh formation of means of production in the form of capitalist production; i.e. it is a relationship governing reproduction, even if it appears to the individual capitalist that he could consume the whole profit as revenue. There are limits to this, however, which he encounters already in the form of the insurance and reserve fund, the law of competition, etc., and which prove to him in a practical way that profit is not simply a category appertaining to the distribution of the product for individual consumption. The entire capitalist production process, moreover, is governed by the prices of products. But the governing prices of production are themselves governed in turn by the equalization of the rate of profit and the distribution of capital among the various spheres of social production which is appropriate to that equalization. Thus profit appears in this case as the principal factor not just of the products’ distribution but also of their actual production, part of the distribution of capitals and labour itself among the various spheres of production. The division of profit into profit of enterprise and interest appears simply as a distribution of the same revenue. But it arises first of all from the development of capital as self-valorizing, surplus-value-producing value, this specific social form of the dominant production process. It develops from within itself credit and the credit institutions, and with this the whole configuration of production. In interest, etc., the ostensible forms of distribution go into the price as determining elements of production.
It might appear for ground-rent that this is a form of distribution pure and simple, since landed property as such performs no function in the production process, at least not in the normal case. But the fact that (1) rent is limited to the excess above the average profit, while (2) the landowner is reduced from guide and master of the production process and the entire process of social life to a mere leaser of land, usurer in land and simple recipient of rent, is a specific historical result of the capitalist mode of production. It is a historical precondition for this mode of production that the earth has to receive the form of landed property. And it is a product of the specific character of this mode of production that landed property obtains forms which permit the capitalist mode of operation in agriculture. It is possible to give the name of rent to the landowner’s income in other forms of society. But this is essentially different from rent as it appears in the present mode.
The so-called relations of distribution, therefore, correspond to and arise from historically particular and specific social forms of the production process and of the relationships which men enter into among themselves in the process of reproducing their human life. The historical character of these relations of distribution is the historical character of the relations of production, and they simply express one side of these. The capitalist distribution is different from those forms of distribution that arise from other modes of production, and every form of distribution vanishes along with the particular form of production that it arises from and corresponds to.
The view that considers only the relations of distribution to be historical, and not the relations of production, is simply the perspective of a criticism of bourgeois economics that is incipient but still timid and restrained. It is also based, however, on a confusion and identification of the social production process with the simple labour process, as this would have to be performed by an abnormally isolated person without any social aids. In so far as the labour process is a simple process between man and nature, its simple elements remain common to all social forms of its development. But each particular historical form of this process further develops the material foundations and social forms. Once a certain level of maturity is attained, the particular historical form is shed and makes way for a higher form. The sign that the moment of such a crisis has arrived is that the contradiction and antithesis between, on the one hand, the relations of distribution, hence also the specific historical form of relations of production corresponding to them, and, on the other hand, the productive forces, productivity, and the development of its agents, gains in breadth and depth. A conflict then sets in between the material development of production and its social form.57