Some quotations from Linguet above have already shown that the nature of capitalist production was clear to him nevertheless, Linguet, can be brought in here after Necker. In his two works Sur la l gislation et le commerce des grains (first published 1775) and De l administration des finances de la France, etc. [published 1784], Necker shows how the development of the productive powers of labour merely results in the worker requiring less time for the reproduction of his own wage, and therefore working more time for his employer unpaid. In dealing with this, he rightly starts from the basis of the average wage, the minimum of wages. What he is mainly concerned with, however, is not the transformation of labour itself into capital and the accumulation of capital through this process, but rather the general development of the antithesis between poverty and wealth, between poverty and luxury, because, to the extent that a smaller quantity of labour suffices to produce the necessary means of subsistence, part of the labour becomes more and more superfluous and can therefore be used in the production of luxury articles, in a different sphere of production. Some of these luxury articles are durable; and so they accumulate from century to century in the possession of those who have surplus-labour at their disposal, making the contrast ever deeper. The important thing is that Necker traces the origin of the wealth of the non-labouring classes ||420| profit and rent entirely to surplus-labour. In his treatment of surplus-value, however, what he has in mind is relative surplus-value, resulting not from the lengthening of the total working-day but from the shortening of the necessary labour-time. The productive power of labour becomes the productive power of the owner of the conditions of labour. And productive power itself is equivalent to the shortening of the labour-time that is necessary to produce a certain result. The chief passages are the following: First: De l administration des finances de la France, etc. ( uvres, t. II, Lausanne et Paris, 1789): (The latter argument is directed against those who held that luxury was the result of the growth in the amount of money.) Secondly: Sur la l gislation et le commerce des grains, etc. ( uvres, t. IV): This contrast between wealth that does not labour and poverty that labours in order to live also gives rise to a contrast of knowledge. Knowledge and labour become separated. The former confronts the latter as capital, or as a luxury article for the rich. Necker ridicules the economic confusion characteristic of the Physiocrats in relation to the land, and of all subsequent economists in relation to the material elements of capital which glorifies the owners of the conditions of production, not because they themselves, but these conditions, are necessary for labour and the production of wealth.
Economic Manuscripts: Theories of Surplus-Value, Chapter 5