Hermann von Schullern zu Schrattenhofen, Die Lehre von den Produktionselementen und der Sozialismus (1885)

Schullern’s theoretical study examines the ultimate elements of economic production through a critical history of economic doctrine. It distinguishes the factors employed in particular productive acts from the elements underlying accumulated production. Capital resolves historically into nature and labour, but nature cannot itself be reduced to labour. Directed chiefly against socialist production theory, the argument uses subjective valuation and natural scarcity to challenge the identification of economic costs with labour alone.

The opening places production within the management of scarce goods. Abundant goods may be indispensable to welfare without possessing economic value; production improves welfare by enlarging the availability of useful goods. Consumption depends on existing productive means:

Die Konsumtion ist nicht eine Ursache, sondern eine Folge der Produktion, alle Wirtschaft zielt auf Erweiterung der Konsumtionsmöglichkeit, dieselbe beruht auf der Produktion und diese Produktion hängt ab von der Menge der vorhandenen Produktionsmittel$^{1)}$.

English translation: Consumption is not a cause but a consequence of production; all economic activity aims at the expansion of the possibility of consumption, this rests upon production, and this production depends upon the quantity of the available means of production.

Production thus entails an expenditure justified by increased usefulness, rather than simply the creation of physical objects. Schullern connects output with sacrifice:

Diese Güter werden geschaffen durch wirtschaftliche Güter, also durch einen Aufwand, durch eine Hingabe von Gütern, welche nur statthaft in Voraussetzung einer Brauchbarkeitsvermehrung.

English translation: These goods are created by economic goods, hence by an expenditure, by a surrender of goods, which is permissible only on the presupposition of an increase in usefulness.

His inquiry identifies the scarce goods surrendered in production and examines their historical composition. Labour, nature, and capital are factors of particular productive acts; capital, however, is itself the product of earlier acts. Tracing that dependence backwards leaves nature and labour as the ultimate elements.

Schullern challenges attempts to retain capital as an independent element in order to explain interest. He associates capital’s additional usefulness with its proximity to consumption and the significance of waiting, without making time itself a consumable economic good. Abstinence likewise supplies no separate productive constituent: refraining from consumption adds no further element to the goods preserved. His discussion of the Physiocrats distinguishes their recognition of nature’s productivity from their restrictive identification of production with agriculture.

The historical argument examines labour-centred theories in Locke, Galiani, Hobbes, Smith, Ricardo, Sismondi, and Mac Culloch before turning to Rodbertus, Marx, Lassalle, and Schäffle. Schullern diagnoses confusions between production and enrichment, usefulness and exchange value, and collective production and individual acquisition. A trading community’s ability to obtain provisions through industry does not establish independence from nature: its supplies still require natural resources elsewhere.

Rodbertus provides the decisive confrontation over costs. Schullern accepts that costs involve irreversible expenditure borne by an affected subject, but rejects the conclusion that nature contributes no cost because it cannot feel deprivation. Consuming a scarce natural resource imposes a loss upon its owner; under common ownership, that loss is borne collectively. Human agency therefore does not imply that labour supplies every economically significant input:

Alle wirtschaftliche Produktion kennt begrifflich als ihr Subjekt den Menschen, nur der Mensch produziert.

English translation: All economic production knows, conceptually, man as its subject; only man produces.

The distinction between the subject of production and its means underpins the criticism of labour-only accounts. Schullern similarly juxtaposes Marx’s recognition that nature and labour jointly produce use-values with the definition of value through objectified labour. He considers nature’s exclusion from the latter insufficiently justified. This criticism proceeds from Schullern’s scarcity-and-cost framework rather than accepting Marx’s distinction between material wealth and value.

The concluding analysis specifies the economic character of nature and labour. Capital remains a mediating product, and the state a condition of production rather than an ultimate element. Natural materials and powers enter economic calculation when scarcity and depletion make their expenditure consequential. Soil exhaustion, mining, declining forest fertility, animal extinction, and limits to agricultural improvement illustrate why nature cannot simply be considered gratuitous. Such costs persist regardless of the property regime.

Labour is costly because human powers are limited and exhaustible. Against its restriction to manual activity, Schullern includes intellectual effort and stresses the interdependence of mental and bodily work. He asserts the joint indispensability of nature and labour while rejecting unsupported numerical divisions of their contributions. The study connects subjective valuation with resource depletion in an anti-socialist argument; its demonstration establishes nature’s economic costliness more directly than it establishes a general refutation of socialist institutions.