ent on labour-power is variable capital. The more profound and correct ideas developed by him elsewhere did not prevail, but this blunder of his did. Indeed, other writers after him went even further. They were not content to make it the decisive definition of the part of capital invested in labour-power to be circulating as opposed to fixed capital; they made it the essential definition of circulating capital to be invested in labour-power to be circulating as opposed to fixed capital; they made it the essential definition of circulating capital to be invested in means of subsistence for labourers. Naturally associated with this is the doctrine that the labour-fund, [Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I, pp. 609-11. — Ed.] consisting of the necessary means of subsistence, is of a definite magnitude, which on the one hand physically limits the share of the labourers in the social product, but on the other has to be fully expended in the purchase of labour-power.
23 Cf. Quesnay, Analyse du Tableau Economique (Physiocrates, èd. Daire, 1. partie, Paris, 1846). There we read, for instance: "The annual advances consist of the expenses incurred annually for the labour of cultivation; these advances must be distinguished from the original advances, which form the fund for the establishment of the farming enterprise." (P. 59.) In the works of the later physiocrats these advances are sometimes termed directly capital: Capital ou avances Dupont de Nemours, Maximes du Docteur Quesnay, ou Rèsumè de ses Principes d’Economie Sociale (Daire, I, p. 391); furthermore Le Trosne writes: "As a result of the greater or smaller durability of the works of human labour, a nation possesses a substantial fund of wealth independent of its annual reproduction, this fund forming a capital — accumulated over a long period and originally paid with products — which is continually preserved and augmented." (Daire, II, pp. 928-29.) Turgot employs the term capital more regularly for avances, and identifies the avances of the manufacturers still more with those of the farmers. (Turgot, Rèflexions surla Formation et la Distribution des Richesses, 1766.)
24 To what extent Adam Smith has blocked his own way to an understanding of the role of labour-power in the process of self-expansion of value is proven by the following sentence, which in the manner of the physiocrats places the labour of labourers on a level with that of labouring cattle. “Not only his (the farmer’s) labouring servants, but his labouring cattle are productive labourers.” (Book II, Ch. V, p. 243.)