Marginal efficiency of capital

“ The difficulties in the way of maintaining effective demand at a level high enough to provide full employment, which ensue from the association of a conventional and fairly stable long-term rate of interest with a fickle and highly unstable marginal efficiency of capital, should be, by now, obvious to the reader. ”

“ If I am right in supposing it to be comparatively easy to make capital-goods so abundant that the marginal efficiency of capital is zero, this may be the most sensible way of gradually getting rid of many of the objectionable features of capitalism. ”

“ The capital remains unemployed for a time, during which the labor market is overstocked, and wages fall. Afterward the demand revives, and perhaps becomes unusually brisk, enabling the manufacturer to sell his commodity [pg 184] even faster than he can produce it; his whole capital is then brought into complete efficiency, and, if he is able, he borrows capital in addition, which would otherwise have gone into some other employment. ”

“ The efficiency of the new manufacturing processes has provided a large surplus of goods that must be taken somewhere, exchanged for food and raw materials, which must, in turn, be brought to the producers of manufactured goods. In the course of these transactions, a generous share of the values produced goes, in the form of profit, to the owners of the industry, another considerable portion goes into reinvestment, thus swelling the volume of productive capital.
The increased wealth, the larger capital and the greater amount of surplus all make possible the maintenance of a larger population. ”

“ It is, therefore, absolutely essential that there should be an adequate increase of the amount and efficiency of the capital item requisite to additional employment and production. It is obvious that this may be increased from its own slow growth and accretion in the course of industry; and that for a higher degree of prosperity there must be even additional savings from available fruits or income. People have thus already learned how pernicious excess profit taxes are, and are unanimously seeking their abandonment. ”

“ Care must be taken not to claim for this part of the adjustment any unerring accuracy; for the marginal productivity law does not work without friction. With real capital creating five and a half per cent, the lender might get only five. When, however, the play of forces that fixes real interest has had its way and has determined that, in commodity, capital shall secure for its owners five per cent a year, that amount is unerringly conveyed to them by the monetary payments that follow. ”

“ From the treatment of the production of surplus-value, so far, it follows that not every sum of money, or of value, is at pleasure transformable into capital. To effect this transformation, in fact, a certain minimum of money or of exchange-value must be presupposed in the hands of the individual possessor of money or commodities. The minimum of variable capital is the cost price of a single labour-power, employed the whole year through, day in, day out, for the production of surplus-value. ”

“ The scale of production is more and more extended, and the amount of initial outlay becomes ever greater, because only large capitals are capable of creating relative surplus value in sufficient sums to assure a profit on the enterprise and payment of interest, and thus assist the accumulation of capital.
The more extended scale of production is not possible to the less powerful capitalist undertakings. ”

“ If invention and improvement still go on, the efficiency of labor will be further increased, and the amount of labor and capital necessary to produce a given result further diminished. The same causes will lead to the utilization of this new gain in productive power for the production of more wealth; the margin of cultivation will be again extended, and rent will increase, both in proportion and amount, without any increase in wages and interest. ”

“ Eational standards of living are justified by coextensive industrial efficiency. Progressive well-being tends to affect consumption and production in direct proportion; indeed, the stimulus to increased production normally exceeds the desire to spend, and no lasting influence towards advancing prices or costs results. If, however, expenditures are permitted to infringe upon the capital of the country, or of any particular group of the population, or even upon the rate of accumulation of savings, the effect on prices and costs will be immediate. ”

“ The profit is shared between the banker, who receives interest, and a succession of borrowers, mostly for short periods, who, after paying the interest, gain a profit in addition, or a convenience equivalent to profit. The capital itself in the long run becomes entirely wages, and, when replaced by the sale of the produce, becomes wages again; thus affording a perpetual fund, of the value of $200,000,000, for the maintenance of productive labor, and increasing the annual produce of the country by all that can be produced through the means of a capital of that value. ”

“ With progressing labour productivity and an expanding volume of production, this mass increases not only absolutely but also [Pg 356] relatively to the part which is consumed in production in every case, together with a corresponding increase in the efficiency of the constant capital. It is the more intensive exploitation of this part of the constant capital, irrespective of its increase in value, which is of paramount importance for the expansion of production. ”

“ The very fundamental assumptions as to the elasticity of population, and the accumulation of capital as wages and profits fluctuate, are clearly not absolute truths. An increase of the capitalist's share, for example, at the expense of wages, may lead to the lowered efficiency of the labourer; and, instead of the compensating process supposed to result from the stimulus to accumulation, the actual result may be a general degeneration of the industry. ”

“ As the Trust develops, therefore, there will be an increasing tendency to convert only that portion of the products of labor into capital which is actually needed to supply the economic requirements of society; hence, every increase in the intensity of labor, every method for increasing the total product, "industrial efficiency," in a word, which is so dear to the hearts of our exploiters, will have the very opposite effect to that claimed for it, as a lesser quantity of that portion of capital advanced as wages will be required. ”

“ This negative balance for the means of production may be only imaginary in part. The increasing productivity of labour ensures that the means of production grow faster in bulk than in value, in other words: means of production become cheaper. As it is use value, i.e. the material elements of capital, which is relevant for technical improvements of production, we may [Pg 338] assume that the quantity of means of production, in spite of their lower value, will suffice for progressive accumulation up to a certain point. ”

“ Assuming, therefore, that the labourer is paid in the very article he produces, it is evident that, when any saving of expense takes place in the production of that article, if the labourer still receives the same cost of production as before, he must receive an increased quantity, in the very same ratio in which the productive power of capital has been increased. But, if so, the outlay of the capitalist will bear exactly the same proportion to the return as it did before; and profits will not rise. ”

“ It will change the full working of the industrial machine into an imperfect working; it will make the produce of that machine less than usual instead of more than usual; instead of there being more than the average of general dividend to be distributed between the producers, there will immediately be less than the average.
And in so far as the apparent prosperity is caused by an unusual plentifulness of loanable capital and a consequent rise in prices, that prosperity is not only liable to reaction, but certain to be exposed to reaction. ”

“ Nevertheless, I do not believe that, as things are actually transacted, improvements in production are often, if ever, injurious, even temporarily, to the laboring-classes in the aggregate. They would be so if they took place suddenly to a great amount, because much of the capital sunk must necessarily in that case be provided from funds already employed as circulating capital. But improvements are always introduced very gradually, and are seldom or never made by withdrawing circulating capital from actual production, but are made by the employment of the annual increase. ”

“ Although generally mistaken for profits of capital, the special profits thus arising are really the returns of monopoly and, to the extent that they subtract from the benefits of an improvement, they do not primarily affect general distribution. For instance, the benefits of a railway or similar improvement in cheapening transportation are diffused or monopolized, according as its charges are reduced to a rate which will yield ordinary interest on the capital invested, or as its charges are kept up to a point which will yield an extraordinary return. ”

“ But all methods for the production of surplus value are at the same time methods of accumulation; and every extension of accumulation becomes again a means for the development of those methods. It follows, therefore, that in proportion as capital accumulates, the lot of the labourer, be his payment high or low, must grow worse. ”

“ By the conversion of the commodity-capital into money, the surplus-product, in which the surplus-value is incorporated, is also monetised. The capitalist reconverts the surplus-value thus monetised into additional natural elements of his productive capital. In the next cycle of production the increased capital furnishes an increased product. ”

“ To these considerations must be added, that even if improvements did for a time decrease the aggregate produce and the circulating capital of the community, they would not the less tend in the long run to augment both. They increase the return to capital; and of this increase the benefit must necessarily accrue either to the capitalist in greater profits, or to the customer in diminished prices; affording, in either case, an augmented fund from which accumulation may be made, while enlarged profits also hold out an increased inducement to accumulation. ”

“ But as it is impossible to create surplus value with money, it cannot, in this form, advance beyond the threshold of its career. Capital must assume commodity-form, so that the particular portion of it which is earmarked for accumulation can be capitalised. For only in this form can it become productive capital; that is, capital begetting new surplus value. Therefore, like the original capital, it must again be divided into two parts; a constant part, comprising the inanimate means of production, and a variable part, the wages. ”

“ They would not change unless gains to be made in the new industry were greater. Hence the gain is the difference only between the profits of the old and the profits of the new. The protectionists, however, when they talk about “creating an industry,” seem to suppose that the total profit of the industry (and some of them seem to think that the total expenditure of capital) measures their good work. In any case, then, even of a true and legitimate increase of industrial power and opportunity, the only gain would be a margin. ”

“ The result is a greater productiveness of industry, and so a greater sum from which both labor and capital may be rewarded. Whenever capital, unrestrained by artificial support, leaves one employment as unprofitable, it means that that employment is naturally, and in itself, less productive than the usual run of other industries in the country, and so less profitable to both labor and capital than the majority of other occupations. ”

“ The annual surplus of production, tho larger than before, is only sufficient to provide for the new undertakings which the growing optimism demands. Interest rates rise moderately in response to the added demand for capital. A few years further along, as business activity increases and success appears plainly to wait upon new ventures, the demand for new capital with which to develop increased facilities and new enterprises exceeds the annual supply of wealth created. Prosperity having increased, another factor commences to assert itself. ”

“ It is only in consequence of such variations, that capital is apportioned precisely, in the requisite abundance and no more, to the production of the different commodities which happen to be in demand. With the rise or fall of price, profits are elevated above, or depressed below their general level, and capital is either encouraged to enter into, or is warned to depart from the particular employment in which the variation has taken place.
Whilst every man is free to employ his capital where he pleases, he will naturally seek for it that employment which is most advantageous ”

“ If, on the other hand, the worker will save from his surplus earnings, he will increase the community's capital, and this will tend, directly or indirectly, to cause the production of further commodities, so increasing the supply of commodities and therefore tending to reduce prices. ”

“ This is not all;—if two things are produced with a like amount of fixed [Pg xvii] capital, yet, if the durability of the capital is different, there will be more labour where there is less durability, and more profits where there is more durability; the things produced by the more durable fixed capital will be lowered in value by a rise in wages, which lowers the rate of profit; and so on, mutatis mutandis. In short, value is affected not only by labour, but by the wages of labour. ”

“ It becomes necessary for capital progressively to dispose ever more fully of the whole globe, to acquire an unlimited choice of means of production, with regard to both quality and quantity, so as to find productive employment for the surplus value it has realised. ”