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

THE DEVELOPMENT OF CAPITALISM IN RUSSIA
faster than the latter (and there its “independence” ends),
but it goes without saying that, in the last analysis, productive
consumption is always bound up with personal consumption.
Marx says in this connection: “. . .We have seen
(Book II, Part III) that continuous circulation takes
place between constant capital and constant capital. . .”
(Marx has in mind constant capital in means of production,
which is realised by exchange among capitalists in the same
department). “It is at first independent of individual
consumption because it never enters the latter. But this
consumption definitely limits it nevertheless, since constant
capital is never produced for its own sake but solely because
more of it is needed in spheres of production whose products
go into individual consumption” (Das Kapital, III, 1, 289.
Russ. trans., p. 242). 27
This larger consumption of constant capital is nothing
but a higher level of the development of the productive
forces, one expressed in terms of exchange-value, because the
rapidly developing “means of production” consist, in the
main, of materials, machines, instruments, buildings and
all sorts of other accessories for large-scale, especially
machine, production. It is quite natural, therefore, that
capitalist production, which develops the productive forces
of society and creates large-scale production and machine
industry, is also distinguished by a particular expansion
of that department of social wealth which consists of means
of production. . . . “In this case” (namely, the production of
means of production), “what distinguishes capitalist society
from the savage is not, as Senior thinks, the privilege and
peculiarity of the savage to expend his labour at times in
a way that does not procure him any products resolvable
(exchangeable) into revenue, i.e., into articles of consumption.
No, the distinction consists in the following:
“a) Capitalist society employs more of its available
annual labour in the production of means of production
(ergo, of constant capital) which are not resolvable into
revenue in the form of wages or surplus-value, but can
function only as capital.
“b) When a savage makes bows, arrows, stone hammers,
axes, baskets, etc., he knows very well that he did not
spend the time so employed in the production of articles
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