The classical or surplus approach starts with Petty, Cantillon and Quesnay, is dominant up to the 1830s,
is resumed by Marx at a time when the main current of economic thought is already moving in a different direction, and is then nearly completely submerged by the marginalist approach and no longer well understood until the clarification of its structure by Sraffa (1951) and Garegnani (1960, 1987).
It revolves around the notion of social surplus, that is, what is left of the yearly social product (that is, of the vector of all commodities produced during a year), after the replacement of the goods - inclusive of the subsistence of labourers - advanced and used up for production so as to permit the repetition of productive activity on an unchanged scale the subsequent year. Its origin lies in the perception of the labourers’ subsistence as a production expense as necessary as fodder for horses, and nearly as fixed (although not only by physiological but also by social processes); this allows a determination of the excess over what is indispensable to the continuation of production as a residue. The size and the destination of the surplus determine the incomes of the social classes other than labourers, and the potential for economic growth as well as for state revenue (and hence for military and other state expenses).The notion of surplus precedes the consideration of the advances as “capital” in the sense of a source of income; thus, strictly speaking, there is no capital theory in Quesnay’s Tableau, where however important analytical distinctions are made between the components of advances, distinctions partly lost with Adam Smith but recuperated by Marx: (1) subsistence goods, (2) advances different from subsistence but also destined to disappear in a single yearly production cycle (for example, seed), and (3) advances destined to maintain durable tools, long-lived animals, structures. (A fourth type, once- and-for-all advances permanently modifying land, such as canals or dykes, is not part of the advances indispensable to reproduction and to be subtracted from the social product to obtain the surplus.) But in Quesnay the advances are not “capital” in the sense of a
source of profits; there are no profits in the Tableau, the surplus (entirely agricultural) is absorbed by land rent, which induces the Physiocrats mistakenly to see the capacity to produce a surplus as pertaining to agricultural labour only.
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- The classical or surplus approach starts with Petty, Cantillon and Quesnay, is dominant up to the 1830s,
- Faccarello G., Kurz H.-D.. Handbook on the history of economic analysis. Volume III, Developments in major fields of economics. Edward Elgar,2016. — 659 p, 2016