[OPE-L:8534] Richard Jones

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Karl Marx, 1861-63 Mss, vol 33:

Jones was a professor of political economy at Haileybury and the
successor Malthus. One can see here how the real science of
political economy ends by regarding the bourgeois production
relations as merely historical ones, leading to higher relations in
which the antagonism on which they are based is resolved. By
analyzing them political economy breaks down the apparently
mutually independent forms in which wealth appears. This
analysis (even in Ricardo) goes so far that 1) The independent
material form of wealth disappears and wealth is shown to be
simply the activity of men. Everything which is not the result of
human activity, of labour, is nature and, as such, is not social
wealth. The phantom of the world of goods fades away and it is
seen to be simply a continually disappearing and continually
reproduced objectivisation of human labour. All solid material
wealth is only transitory materialisation of social labour,
crystallisation of the production process whose measure is time,
the measure of a movement itself. 2)The manifold forms of which
the various component parts of wealth are distributed amongst
different sections of society lose their apparent independence.
Interest is merely part of profit, rent is merely surplus profit. Both
are consequently merged in profit, which itself can be resolved in
surplus value, that is, to unpaid labour. The value of the commodity
itself, however, can only be reduced to labour time. The Ricardian
school reaches the point where it rejects one of the forms of
appropriation of this surplus value--landed property (rent)--as
useless, in so far as it is pocketed by private individuals. It rejects
the idea that the landowner is an agent of capitalist production.
The antithesis is thus reduced to that between capitalist and wage
labourer. This relationship however is regarded by Ricardian
political economists as given, as a natural law, on which the
production process itself is based. The later economists go one
step further and like Jones admit only the historical justification for
this relationship. But from the moment that the bourgeois mode of
production and the conditions of production and distribution which
correspond to it are recognized as historical, the delusion of
regarding them as natural laws of production vanishes and the
prospect opens of a new society, [a new] economic formation of
society, to which the bourgeois mode of production is only a
transition." p. 345-6