Collected Works of V. I. Lenin - Vol. 3 - From Marx to Mao

48
V. I. LENIN
total of commodities, the total annual social product, into
the same parts and allocated them directly to the “revenue”
of the two classes of society: the workmen and the capitalists
(undertakers and landlords, as Smith calls them).*
On what did he base his omission of the third component
of value, constant capital? Adam Smith could not
fail to observe this part, but he assumed that it also is
made up of wages and surplus-value. Here is how he argued
on this subject: “In the price of corn, for example, one part
pays the rent of the landlord, another pays the wages or
maintenance of the labourers and labouring cattle employed
in producing it, and the third pays the profit of the farmer.
These three parts seem either immediately or ultimately
to make up the whole price of corn. A fourth part, it may
perhaps be thought, is necessary for replacing the stock of
the farmer, or for compensating the wear and tear of his
labouring cattle, and other instruments of husbandry. But
it must be considered that the price of any instrument of
husbandry, such as a labouring horse, is itself made up of
the same three parts” (namely, rent, profit and wages).
“Though the price of the corn, therefore, may pay the price
as well as the maintenance of the horse, the whole price
still resolves itself either immediately or ultimately into
the same three parts of rent, labour and profit.”** Marx calls
this theory of Smith’s “astonishing.” “His proof consists
simply in the repetition of the same assertion” (II, S. 366). 20
Smith sends us “from pillar to post” (I. B., 2. Aufl., S.
612***). 21 In saying that the price of farming instruments
itself resolves into the same three parts, Smith forgets to
add: and also into the price of the means of production
employed in the making of these instruments. The erroneous
exclusion by Adam Smith (and also by subsequent economists)
of the constant part of capital from the price of the
product is due to an erroneous conception of accumulation
in capitalist economy, i.e., of the expansion of production,
the transformation of surplus-value into capital. Here too
Adam Smith omitted constant capital, assuming that the
* Loc. cit., I, p. 78. Russ. trans., I, p. 174.
** Ibid., Vol. I, pp. 75-76. Russ. trans., I, p. 171.
*** Vol. I, 2nd ed., p, 612.—Ed.