A Study of the Nature and Causes of National Wealth (Volume 2) Ping (Chinese Translation of Famous Works)

Author: Adam Smith (English) translated by Guo Dali and Wang Yannan
Publisher:
Publishing Date: Not available
Features: Adam Smith, a renowned British bourgeois economist, is the author of this representative work, The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776. At that time, it was the period of the growth of British capitalism, and British handicraft manufacturing was beginning to transition to large-scale industry. The development of British industry was still largely constrained by the remnants of feudalism and the restrictive policies of mercantilism that were once prevalent. The young British bourgeoisie, eager to remove obstacles from its path forward, urgently demanded a free economic theory system to pave the way for its progress. Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations emerged during this historical period, carrying such a class historical mission. This book summarized the experience of capitalist development in various countries during the early modern period and, on the basis of critically absorbing important economic theories of the time, provided a systematic and clear description of the entire process of national economic movement. After its publication, it not only significantly promoted the development of British capitalism but also had a more extensive impact on the development of world capitalism than any other bourgeois economic work. No wonder some bourgeois scholars at the time revered it as a treasure. However, history soon revealed its limitations and flaws. In the late 19th century, around the 1870s and 1880s, capitalist economies began to gradually transition from a stage of free competition to one of monopoly. From then on, the free and natural system emphasized by Smith ceased to function. Less than half a century later, a socialist country emerged on the historical stage, which completely refuted the eternal nature of capitalism as emphasized by Smith. Now, in the historical stage of declining imperialism and the growing victory of socialist revolutions, despite some reactionary bourgeois vulgar economists still emphasizing free-market capitalism in various ways and advocating the reform or rebirth of capitalism, Smith's economic treatise from the era of capitalist growth has long lost its practical significance and only holds historical significance in the history of political economy. Lenin once instructed us: "To judge the merits of historical figures, we should not measure them by what they failed to provide for modern demands but by what new contributions they made compared to their predecessors." What contributions did Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations make to the history of political economy, and what new insights did he offer through this work compared to his predecessors? To answer this question, we must first understand the economic questions raised by his time. The economic life of modern capitalism began in the mercantilist era. This economic life initially demanded answers to fundamental questions: what is wealth, what is the source of wealth, and how can wealth be accumulated rapidly. Mercantilism first provided answers to these questions. Scholars who held differing views on these answers included British Enlightenment economists such as Petty and Locke, as well as French economists like Boisguilbert and Physiocrats like Quesnay and Du Pont de Nemours. For an economist to establish a fundamental theory related to the movement of the entire national economy, it was necessary to observe whether the economic development of the society or country he belonged to allowed for a comprehensive understanding. Smith's predecessors in the field of economics lacked such conditions, but Smith, living in Britain during the period of capitalist growth, was able to offer new insights on these issues based on the theories of his predecessors. When mercantilists, based on the practical needs of commodity circulation in their societies and relying on intuition, emphasized that wealth consisted solely of money or gold, Enlightenment economists like Petty and Locke had to make considerable efforts to break free from this misconception. However, later physiocrats, while correctly arguing that the products of labor, including means of production and means of subsistence, were wealth, did not consider money or gold, which were also products of labor, as wealth. It was only with Adam Smith that, building on these debates, a conclusion was drawn from the realities of economic life: money was a component part of the total wealth of society or merely one such component. This conclusion encompassed the source of social wealth and how wealth accumulated. If wealth was not primarily money or gold, then its source could not be mining for gold and silver, wealthy colonies rich in gold and silver, or trade surpluses. Enlightenment economist Petty first emphasized that wealth came from nature and labor, but he did not clarify the relationship between the two in production. Physiocrats emphasized the use value of goods, believing that wealth came from agricultural labor producing pure products. Adam Smith, however, approached the formation of commodity value and, in the opening sentence of his work, argued that "the annual labor of a nation is originally the source of the whole annual produce of its consumption, both of necessaries and of conveniences." The labor he referred to was general, breaking free from the narrow circle of agricultural labor set by the physiocrats. In Smith's view, social wealth came from labor, and the growth of social wealth depended not only on the amount of labor involved but more importantly on the greater labor productivity. For capitalist society, the productivity of labor was reflected in that it not only produced wages as the price of labor for workers but also generated profits for capitalists and rent for landlords. These two forms of income were deducted from the products or value produced by labor. Here, we see: first, Smith regarded labor as the correct universal measure of commodity value, believing that "only labor can compare the values of commodities in all times and places"; second, he saw capitalist production as the production of value and surplus value; and third, he considered the production relations between the three classes of capitalist society—capitalists, landlords, and workers—as the foundation of circulation and distribution relations, with the theory of value serving as the basis for distribution theory. In all these fundamental arguments that embody the labor theory of value—surplus value, especially in his comprehensive and systematic discussion of the entire capitalist economic movement or its process of capital accumulation, he indeed introduced some new insights that his predecessors had not proposed. However, due to the limitations of his class position and the underdeveloped economic conditions of capitalism at the time, Smith could not correctly understand the historical transitional nature of the capitalist system itself. He consistently believed that capitalism was natural and human, and that as long as some artificial and unnatural social and economic measures that hindered its development, such as the abolition of outdated guild systems and mercantilist restrictions, were removed, allowing everyone to participate in free competition with their labor or capital, capitalism would naturally and freely establish itself and continue to develop indefinitely. He also believed that individuals were naturally self-interested and that as long as their freedom to compete was not hindered, the greater the benefits they gained personally, the richer society would become. This bourgeois utilitarian misunderstanding led him to remain within the limits of: "starting with the critique of the remnants of feudal productive and exchange forms, proving that they must inevitably be replaced by capitalist forms," thereby establishing the aforementioned relatively correct arguments about value—surplus value in this sense; but when faced with the contradictions of capitalism itself, guided by this bourgeois utilitarianism, he could no longer advance. This dual methodology, determined by his class perspective—on one hand, examining internal connections, and on the other, examining external phenomena—made each of his correct arguments appear half-finished, incomplete, and full of contradictions. For example, even regarding the crucial argument about the determination of commodity value by labor, he sometimes argued that the value of a commodity was determined by the amount of labor consumed in its production, while in other instances, he emphasized that the value of a commodity was determined by the amount of labor it could command in exchange. He sometimes stated that the value of a commodity decomposed into wages, profits, and rent, a proposition whose error lay only in omitting constant capital; but in other contexts, he emphasized that the value of a commodity was composed of wages, profits, and rent, which not only omitted constant capital but also made the commodity value determined in the previous context extremely uncertain. Not only were these arguments about commodity value, but also those about the functions of money and its production process, and the theory of capital accumulation, were a mixture of correct and incorrect, scientific and vulgar arguments. Regarding this point, in addition to explaining it from the perspective of his viewpoint and methodology, we must also deeply understand Marx's historical materialist evaluation of Smith's contradictory theory of value. He said: "In Adam Smith's book, we not only see the traces of 'opposing concepts' of value but not only two but three, or more precisely, even four sharply opposing views on value, coexisting and interweaving in his work. In the founders of political economy, this was natural, for he had to explore, experiment, and struggle against the confusion of ideas that had just begun to take shape." As for his relatively optimistic and naturally harmonious tendency in discussing distribution, regarding the relationships between the three classes of society, this was also due to the fact that the struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat was still in its early stages, and the conflict between the capitalist class and the landlord class was not as sharp as after the Industrial Revolution. This was different from the later vulgar economists who blindly advocated class harmony as a pretext to conceal the already intense class struggle. In short, this economic treatise by Smith, in terms of its analysis of capitalist production relations, undoubtedly contained many contradictions and vulgar arguments, but as a representative work of bourgeois economics during its formative period, it did indeed exhibit many scientific elements and was a scientific research achievement of classical bourgeois economics built on the critique of previous economic theories. Due to the dual characteristics of correct and incorrect, scientific and vulgar in its research methodology, its influence on later political economy was also twofold. Shortly after the publication of this book, British handicraft manufacturing, driven by the Industrial Revolution, rapidly developed into large-scale industry, while the internal contradictions of the capitalist system also began to manifest. Following Smith, Ricardo took the labor theory of value and the distribution theory based on it to a level that no bourgeois scholar could surpass. Ricardo's representative work, Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, was published in 1817. In the 1820s, some utopian socialists used Ricardo's analysis to promote their sociological theories. By the 1840s, 1850s, and 1860s, Marx was continuing his efforts to critique and absorb the entire classical bourgeois economics, establishing political economy that served the proletariat. Later, both Engels and Lenin regarded classical economics, as well as Adam Smith's and Ricardo's theories of labor value and surplus value, as the source of Marxist political economy. However, as capitalism developed further, its internal contradictions became exposed, the struggle between the working class and the bourgeoisie intensified, and the spread of Marxist political economy weakened the rule of the capitalist system. As a result, bourgeois economists after the 1820s of the 19th century avoided the correct arguments in Smith's theory and instead used its vulgar arguments to slander Marx's economic theories. After the 1870s of the 19th century, Marxist economics had already gained dominance in the workers' movement, and schools like the Austrian School, which claimed to oppose Marxist economics, and its variants in the United States and Britain, all used the opposition to classical economics—or more accurately, the opposition to the scientific elements of classical economic theory—as an indirect means to oppose Marxist economic theory. Regarding this point, we need only see how economists from to opposed Adam Smith and Ricardo. When bourgeois vulgar economists, in their effort to oppose Marxist economics, fiercely attacked the classical theories of their predecessors, Adam Smith and Ricardo, in order to defend Marxist economics and enhance our understanding of it from a historical perspective, we should scientifically approach and reintroduce the economic theories of Smith and even Ricardo, which holds practical significance. In the late 19th century, Yan Fu, a figure in China's late Qing reform movement, presented this book to Emperor Guangxu, advocating for policies modeled on Adam Smith's "enriching the ruler and enriching the people" as a national policy, hoping to contribute to the late Qing reform "great cause." However, his translation, titled The Wealth of Nations (), published in 1902, failed to generate any significant response. This was not only due to the overly difficult and classical translation, with many omissions, but primarily because the socio-economic and cultural conditions of the late Qing period were far too distant from its demands. In 1931, Guo Dali and I translated it into Chinese again, renaming it The Wealth of Nations (). The main motivation for our retranslation at the time was that, after the October Socialist Revolution, there was no longer any capitalist future in China. We systematically translated this book and other works of classical bourgeois economics as preparation for translating Capital. We knew that Capital was established on the critique of bourgeois economics, especially on the critique of Adam Smith and Ricardo's works, as Marxist political economy. Familiarity with and understanding of Adam Smith's and Ricardo's economic works would greatly enhance our comprehension of Capital. In fact, during the translation of Capital, we deeply felt the help it provided to translate the works of Adam Smith and Ricardo. After the publication of Capital, our task of translating Smith's The Wealth of Nations was considered complete. After the liberation of the country, people's publishing undertakings had to be arranged comprehensively according to the current and long-term interests of socialism. The Commercial Press, in order to translate and introduce famous works of philosophy and social sciences from all over the world in a planned and selective manner, repeatedly proposed the revision of the The Wealth of Nations translation. This translation had been published for 35 years. In some places, it did not clearly express the author's original intent, there were individual errors, and there were also many grammatical and lexical issues that needed to be reviewed and standardized. After revision by Chen Fusheng and Chen Zhenhua, the translation was significantly improved. However, it still contained errors, for which we, especially I, were responsible. During this revision, the title was changed from The Wealth of Nations to The Wealth of Nations () according to the full title of the original work. Wang Yannan May 1965, Xiamen