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

50
V. I. LENIN
the country’s total product Adam Smith excluded capital,
asserting that it resolves itself into wages, profit and rent,
i.e., into (net) revenue; but in the gross revenue of society
he includes capital, separating it from articles of consumption
(= net revenue). This is the contradiction in which
Marx catches Adam Smith: how can there be capital in the
revenue if there was no capital in the product? (Cf. Das
Kapital, II, S. 355.) 24 Without noticing it himself, Adam
Smith here recognises three component parts in the value
of the total product: not only variable capital and surplusvalue,
but also constant capital. Further on, Adam Smith
comes up against another very important difference, one of
enormous significance in the theory of realisation. “The
whole expense of maintaining the fixed capital,” he says,
“must evidently be excluded from the neat revenue of the
society. Neither the materials necessary for supporting their
useful machines and instruments of trade, their profitable
buildings, etc., nor the produce of the labor necessary for
fashioning those materials into the proper form, can ever
make any part of it. The price of that labor may indeed make
a part of it; as the workmen so employed may place the
whole value of their wages in their stock reserved for immediate
consumption.” But in other kinds of labour, both the
“price” (of labour) “and the produce” (of labour) “go to
this stock, the price to that of the workmen, the produce to
that of other people” (A. Smith, ibid.). Here we find a gleam
of recognition of the need to distinguish two kinds of labour:
one that produces articles of consumption which may enter
into the “neat revenue,” and another which produces “useful
machines and instruments of trade . . . buildings, etc.,”
i.e., articles that can never be used for personal consumption.
From this it is only one step to the admission that an
explanation of realisation absolutely requires that two
forms of consumption be distinguished: personal and productive
(= putting back into production). It was the rectification
of these two mistakes made by Smith (the omission of constant
capital from the value of the product, and the
confusing of personal with productive consumption) that
enabled Marx to build up his brilliant theory of the
realisation of the social product in capitalist society.
As for the other economists, those between Adam Smith