The popular school of economists would have us believe thatpolitics and political power cannot be taken into consideration inpolitical economy.So far as it makes only values and exchange thesubjects of its investigations, this may be correct; we can definethe ideas of value and capital, profit, wages, and rent; we canresolve them into their elements, and speculate on what mayinfluence their rising or falling, &c.without thereby taking intoaccount the political circumstances of the nation.Clearly,however, these matters appertain as much to private economy as tothe economy of whole nations.We have merely to consider thehistory of Venice, of the Hanseatic League, of Portugal, Holland,and England, in order to perceive what reciprocal influencematerial wealth and political power exercise on each other.
The school also always falls into the strangest inconsistencieswhenever this reciprocal influence forces itself on theirconsideration.Let us here only call to mind the remarkable dictumof Adam Smith on the English Navigation Laws.(3*)The popular school, inasmuch as it does not duly consider thenature of the powers of production, and does not take into accountthe conditions of nations in their aggregate, disregards especiallythe importance of developing in an equal ratio agriculture,manufactures and commerce, political power and internal wealth, anddisregards especially the value of a manufacturing power belongingspecially to the nation and fully developed in all its branches.Itcommits the error of placing manufacturing power in the samecategory with agricultural power, and of speaking of labour,natural power, capital, &c.in general terms without consideringthe differences which exist between them.It does not perceive thatbetween a State devoted merely to agriculture and a Statepossessing both agriculture and manufactures, a much greaterdifference exists than between a pastoral State and an agriculturalone.In a condition of merely agricultural industry, caprice andslavery, superstition and ignorance, want of means of culture, oftrade, and of transport, poverty and political weakness exist.Inthe merely agricultural State only the least portion of the mentaland bodily powers existing in the nation is awakened and developed,and only the least part of the powers and resources placed bynature at its disposal can be made use of, while little or nocapital can be accumulated.
Let us compare Poland with England: both nations at one timewere in the same stage of culture; and now what a difference.
Manufactories and manufactures are the mothers and children ofmunicipal liberty, of intelligence, of the arts and sciences, ofinternal and external commerce, of navigation and improvements intransport, of civilisation and political power.They are the chiefmeans of liberating agriculture from its chains, and of elevatingit to a commercial character and to a degree of art and science, bywhich the rents, farming profits, and wages are increased, andgreater value is given to landed property.The popular school hasattributed this civilising power to foreign trade, but in that ithas confounded the mere exchanger with the originator.Foreignmanufactures furnish the goods for the foreign trade, which thelatter conveys to us, and which occasion consumption of productsand raw materials which we give in exchange for the goods in lieuof money payments.
If, however, trade in the manufactures of far distant landsexercises admittedly so beneficial an influence on our agriculturalindustry, how much more beneficial must the influence be of thosemanufactures which are bound up with us locally, commercially, andpolitically, which not only take from us a small portion, but thelargest portion of their requirements of food and of raw materials,which are not made dearer to us by great costs of transport, ourtrade in which cannot be interrupted by the chance of foreignmanufacturing nations learning to supply their own wantsthemselves, or by wars and prohibitory import duties?
We now see into what extraordinary mistakes and contradictionsthe popular school has fallen in making material wealth or value ofexchange the sole object of its investigations, and by regardingmere bodily labour as the sole productive power.
The man who breeds pigs is, according to this school, aproductive member of the community, but he who educates men is amere non-productive.The maker of bagpipes or jews-harps for saleis a productive, while the great composers and virtuosos arenon-productive simply because that which they play cannot bebrought into the market.The physician who saves the lives of hispatients does not belong to the productive class, but on thecontrary the chemist's boy does so, although the values of exchange(viz.the pills) which he produces may exist only for a few minutesbefore they pass into a valueless condition.A Newton, a Watt, ora Kepler is not so productive as a donkey, a horse, or a draught-ox(a class of labourers who have been recently introduced byM'Culloch into the series of the productive members of humansociety).
We must not believe that J.B.Say has remedied this defect inthe doctrine of Adam Smith by his fiction of 'immaterial goods' orproducts; he has thu s merely somewhat varnished over the folly ofits results, but not raised it out of its intrinsic absurdity.Themental (immaterial) producers are merely productive, according tohis views, because they are remunerated with values of exchange,and because their attainments have been obtained by sacrificingvalues of exchange, and not because they produce productivepowers.(4*) They merely seem to him an accumulated capital.
