Das Kapital

SIMPLE REPRODUCTION

Economic Manuscripts: Capital Vol. I - Chapter Twenty-Three
Karl Marx. Capital Volume One
Part VII: The Accumulation of Capital
The conversion of a sum of money into means of production
and labour-power, is the first step taken by the quantum of value that
is going to function as capital. This conversion takes place in the market,
within the sphere of circulation. The second step, the process of production,
is complete so soon as the means of production have been converted into
commodities whose value exceeds that of their component parts, and, therefore,
contains the capital originally advanced, plus a surplus-value. These commodities
must then be thrown into circulation. They must be sold, their value realised
in money, this money afresh converted into capital, and so over and over
again. This circular movement, in which the same phases are continually
gone through in succession, forms the circulation of capital.
The first condition of accumulation is that the capitalist must
have contrived to sell his commodities, and to reconvert into capital the
greater part of the money so received. In the following pages we shall
assume that capital circulates in its normal way. The detailed analysis
of the process will be found in Book II.
The capitalist who produces surplus-value — i.e., who
extracts unpaid labour directly from the labourers, and fixes it in commodities,
is, indeed, the first appropriator, but by no means the ultimate owner,
of this surplus-value. He has to share it with capitalists, with landowners,
&c., who fulfil other functions in the complex of social production.
Surplus-value, therefore, splits up into various parts. Its fragments fall
to various categories of persons, and take various forms, independent the
one of the other, such as profit, interest, merchants’ profit, rent, &c.
It is only in Book III. that we can take in hand these modified forms of
surplus-value.
On the one hand, then, we assume that the capitalist sells at
their value the commodities he has produced, without concerning ourselves
either about the new forms that capital assumes while in the sphere of
circulation, or about the concrete conditions of reproduction hidden under
these forms. On the other hand, we treat the capitalist producer as owner
of the entire surplus-value, or, better perhaps, as the representative
of all the sharers with him in the booty. We, therefore, first of all consider
accumulation from an abstract point of view — i.e., as a mere phase
in the actual process of production.
So far as accumulation takes place, the capitalist must have succeeded
in selling his commodities, and in reconverting the sale-money into capital.
Moreover, the breaking-up of surplus-value into fragments neither alters
its nature nor the conditions under which it becomes an element of accumulation.
Whatever be the proportion of surplus-value which the industrial capitalist
retains for himself, or yields up to others, he is the one who, in the
first instance, appropriates it. We, therefore, assume no more than what
actually takes place. On the other hand, the simple fundamental form of
the process of accumulation is obscured by the incident of the circulation
which brings it about, and by the splitting up of surplus-value. An exact
analysis of the process, therefore, demands that we should, for a time,
disregard all phenomena that hide the play of its inner mechanism.
Chapter Twenty-Three: Simple Reproduction
Whatever the form of the process of production
in a society, it must be a continuous process, must continue to go periodically
through the same phases. A society can no more cease to produce than it
can cease to consume. When viewed, therefore, as a connected whole, and
as flowing on with incessant renewal, every social process of production
is, at the same time, a process of reproduction.
The conditions of production are also those of reproduction. No
society can go on producing, in other words, no society can reproduce,
unless it constantly reconverts a part of its products into means of production,
or elements of fresh products. All other circumstances remaining the same,
the only mode by which it can reproduce its wealth, and maintain it at
one level, is by replacing the means of production — i.e., the
instruments of labour, the raw material, and the auxiliary substances consumed
in the course of the year — by an equal quantity of the same kind of articles;
these must be separated from the mass of the yearly products, and thrown
afresh into the process of production. Hence, a definite portion of each
year’s product belongs to the domain of production. Destined for productive
consumption from the very first, this portion exists, for the most part,
in the shape of articles totally unfitted for individual consumption.
If production be capitalistic in form, so, too, will be reproduction.
Just as in the former the labour process figures but as a means towards
the self-expansion of capital, so in the latter it figures but as a means
of reproducing as capital — i.e., as self-expanding value — the
value advanced. It is only because his money constantly functions as capital
that the economic guise of a capitalist attaches to a man. If, for instance,
a sum of £100 has this year been converted into capital, and produced
a surplus-value of £20, it must continue during next year, and subsequent
years, to repeat the same operation. As a periodic increment of the capital
advanced, or periodic fruit of capital in process, surplus-value acquires
the form of a revenue flowing out of capital.
If this revenue serve the capitalist only as a fund to provide
for his consumption, and be spent as periodically as it is gained, then,
caeteris paribus, simple reproduction will take place. And although
this reproduction is a mere repetition of the process of production on
the old scale, yet this mere repetition, or continuity, gives a new character
to the process, or, rather, causes the disappearance of some apparent characteristics
which it possessed as an isolated discontinuous process.
The purchase of labour-power for a fixed period is the prelude
to the process of production; and this prelude is constantly repeated when
the stipulated term comes to an end, when a definite period of production,
such as a week or a month, has elapsed. But the labourer is not paid until
after he has expended his labour-power, and realised in commodities not
only its value, but surplus-value. He has, therefore, produced not only
surplus-value, which we for the present regard as a fund to meet the private
consumption of the capitalist, but he has also produced, before it flows
back to him in the shape of wages, the fund out of which he himself is
paid, the variable capital; and his employment lasts only so long as he
continues to reproduce this fund. Hence, that formula of the economists,
referred to in Chapter XVIII, which represents wages as a share in the
product itself. What flows back to the labourer in the shape of wages is a portion of the product that is continuously reproduced
by him. The capitalist, it is true, pays him in money, but this money is
merely the transmuted form of the product of his labour. While he is converting
a portion of the means of production into products, a portion of his former
product is being turned into money. It is his labour of last week, or of
last year, that pays for his labour-power this week or this year. The illusion
begotten by the intervention of money vanishes immediately,
if, instead of taking a single capitalist and a single labourer, we take
the class of capitalists and the class of labourers as a whole. The capitalist
class is constantly giving to the labouring class order-notes, in the form
of money, on a portion of the commodities produced by the latter and appropriated
by the former. The labourers give these order-notes back just as constantly
to the capitalist class, and in this way get their share of their own product.
The transaction is veiled by the commodity form of the product and the
money form of the commodity.
Variable capital is therefore only a particular historical form
of appearance of the fund for providing the necessaries of life, or the
labour-fund which the labourer requires for the maintenance of himself
and family, and which, whatever be the system of social production, he
must himself produce and reproduce. If the labour-fund constantly flows
to him in the form of money that pays for his labour, it is because the
product he has created moves constantly away from him in the form of capital.
But all this does not alter the fact, that it is the labourer’s own labour,
realised in a product, which is advanced to him by the capitalist. Let us take a peasant liable to do compulsory service for his lord. He
works on his own land, with his own means of production, for, say, 3 days
a week. The 3 other days he does forced work on the lord’s domain. He constantly
reproduces his own labour-fund, which never, in his case, takes the form
of a money payment for his labour, advanced by another person. But in return,
his unpaid forced labour for the lord, on its side, never acquires the
character of voluntary paid labour. If one fine morning the lord appropriates
to himself the land, the cattle, the seed, in a word, the, means of production
of this peasant, the latter will thenceforth be obliged to sell his labour-power
to the lord. He will, ceteris paribus, labour 6 days a week as before,
3 for himself, 3 for his lord, who thenceforth becomes a wages-paying capitalist.
As before, he will use up the means of production as means of production,
and transfer their value to the product. As before, a definite portion
of the product will be devoted to reproduction. But from the moment that
the forced labour is changed into wage labour, from that moment the labour-fund,
which the peasant himself continues as before to produce and reproduce,
takes the form of a capital advanced in the form of wages by the lord.
The bourgeois economist whose narrow mind is unable to separate the form
of appearance from the thing that appears, shuts his eyes to the fact,
that it is but here and there on the face of the earth, that
even nowadays the labour fund crops up in the form of capital.
Variable capital, it is true, only then loses its character of
a value advanced out of the capitalist’s funds, when we view the process of capitalist production in the flow of its constant
renewal. But that process must have had a beginning of some kind. From
our present standpoint it therefore seems likely that the capitalist, once
upon a time, became possessed of money, by some accumulation that took
place independently of the unpaid labour of others, and that this was,
therefore, how he was enabled to frequent the market as a buyer of labour-power.
However this may be, the mere continuity of the process, the simple reproduction,
brings about some other wonderful changes, which affect not only the variable,
but the total capital.
If a capital of £1,000 beget yearly a surplus-value of £200,
and if this surplus-value be consumed every year, it is clear that at the
end of 5 years the surplus-value consumed will amount to 5 × £200
or the £1,000 originally advanced. If only a part, say one half,
were consumed, the same result would follow at the end of 10 years, since
10 × £100= £1,000. General Rule: The value of the capital advanced
divided by the surplus-value annually consumed, gives the number of years,
or reproduction periods, at the expiration of which the capital originally
advanced has been consumed by the capitalist and has disappeared. The capitalist
thinks, that he is consuming the produce of the unpaid labour of others,
i.e., the surplus-value, and is keeping intact his original capital;
but what he thinks cannot alter facts. After the lapse of a certain number
of years, the capital value he then possesses is equal to the sum total
of the surplus-value appropriated by him during those years, and the total
value he has consumed is equal to that of his original capital. It is true,
he has in hand a capital whose amount has not changed, and of which a part,
viz., the buildings, machinery, &c., were already there when the work
of his business began. But what we have to do with here, is not the material
elements, but the value, of that capital. When a person gets through all
his property, by taking upon himself debts equal to the value of that property,
it is clear that his property represents nothing but the sum total of his
debts. And so it is with the capitalist; when he has consumed the equivalent
of his original capital, the value of his present capital represents
nothing but the total amount of the surplus-value appropriated by him without
payment. Not a single atom of the value of his old capital continues to
exist.
Apart then from all accumulation, the mere continuity of the process
of production, in other words simple reproduction, sooner or later, and
of necessity, converts every capital into accumulated capital, or capitalised
surplus-value. Even if that capital was originally acquired by the personal
labour of its employer, it sooner or later becomes value appropriated without
an equivalent, the unpaid labour of others materialised either in money
or in some other object. We saw in Chapt. IV.-VI. that in order to convert
money into capital something more is required than the production and circulation
of commodities. We saw that on the one side the possessor of value or money,
on the other, the possessor of the value-creating substance; on the one
side, the possessor of the means of production and subsistence, on the
other, the possessor of nothing but labour-power, must confront one another
as buyer and seller. The separation of labour from its product, of subjective
labour-power from the objective conditions of labour, was therefore the
real foundation in fact, and the starting-point of capitalist production.
But that which at first was but a starting-point, becomes, by
the mere continuity of the process, by simple reproduction, the peculiar
result, constantly renewed and perpetuated, of capitalist production. On
the one hand, the process of production incessantly converts material wealth
into capital, into means of creating more wealth and means of enjoyment
for the capitalist. On the other hand, the labourer, on quitting the process,
is what he was on entering it, a source of wealth, but devoid of all means
of making that wealth his own. Since, before entering on the process, his
own labour has already been alienated from himself by the sale of his labour-power,
has been appropriated by the capitalist and incorporated with capital,
it must, during the process, be realised in a product that does not belong
to him. Since the process of production is also the process by which the
capitalist consumes labour-power, the product of the labourer is incessantly
converted, not only into commodities, but into capital, into value that
sucks up the value-creating power, into means of subsistence that buy the
person of the labourer, into means of production that command the producers.
The labourer therefore constantly produces material,
objective wealth, but in the form of capital, of an alien power that dominates
and exploits him; and the capitalist as constantly produces
labour-power, but in the form of a subjective source of wealth, separated
from the objects in and by which it can alone be realised; in short he
produces the labourer, but as a wage labourer. This incessant reproduction, this perpetuation of the labourer, is the sine
quâ non of capitalist production.
The labourer consumes in a two-fold way. While producing he consumes
by his labour the means of production, and converts them into products
with a higher value than that of the capital advanced. This is his productive
consumption. It is at the same time consumption of his labour-power by
the capitalist who bought it. On the other hand, the labourer turns the
money paid to him for his labour-power, into means of subsistence: this
is his individual consumption. The labourer’s productive consumption, and
his individual consumption, are therefore totally distinct. In the former,
he acts as the motive power of capital, and belongs to the capitalist.
In the latter, he belongs to himself, and performs his necessary vital
functions outside the process of production. The result of the one is,
that the capitalist lives; of the other, that the labourer lives.
When treating of the working day, we saw that the labourer is
often compelled to make his individual consumption a mere incident of production.
In such a case, he supplies himself with necessaries in order to maintain
his labour-power, just as coal and water are supplied to the steam-engine
and oil to the wheel. His means of consumption, in that case, are the mere
means of consumption required by a means of production; his individual
consumption is directly productive consumption. This, however, appears
to be an abuse not essentially appertaining to capitalist production.
The matter takes quite another aspect, when we contemplate, not
the single capitalist, and the single labourer, but the capitalist class
and the labouring class, not an isolated process of production, but capitalist
production in full swing, and on its actual social scale. By converting
part of his capital into labour-power, the capitalist augments the value
of his entire capital. He kills two birds with one stone. He profits, not
only by what he receives from, but by what he gives to, the labourer. The
capital given in exchange for labour-power is converted into necessaries,
by the consumption of which the muscles, nerves, bones, and brains of existing
labourers are reproduced, and new labourers are begotten. Within the limits
of what is strictly necessary, the individual consumption of the working class
is, therefore, the reconversion of the means of subsistence given by capital
in exchange for labour-power, into fresh labour-power at the disposal of
capital for exploitation. It is the production and reproduction of that
means of production so indispensable to the capitalist: the labourer himself.
The individual consumption of the labourer, whether it proceed within the
workshop or outside it, whether it be part of the process of production
or not, forms therefore a factor of the production and reproduction of
capital; just as cleaning machinery does, whether it be done while the
machinery is working or while it is standing. The fact that the labourer
consumes his means of subsistence for his own purposes, and not to please
the capitalist, has no bearing on the matter. The consumption of food by
a beast of burden is none the less a necessary factor in the process of
production, because the beast enjoys what it eats. The maintenance and
reproduction of the working class is, and must ever be, a necessary condition
to the reproduction of capital. But the capitalist may safely leave its
fulfilment to the labourer’s instincts of self-preservation and of propagation.
All the capitalist cares for, is to reduce the labourer’s individual consumption
as far as possible to what is strictly necessary, and he is far away from
imitating those brutal South Americans, who force their labourers to take
the more substantial, rather than the less substantial, kind of food.
Hence both the capitalist and his ideological representative,
the political economist, consider that part alone of the labourer’s individual
consumption to be productive, which is requisite for the perpetuation of
the class, and which therefore must take place in order that the capitalist
may have labour-power to consume; what the labourer consumes for his own
pleasure beyond that part, is unproductive consumption. If the accumulation of capital were to cause a rise of wages and an increase in the labourer’s consumption, unaccompanied by increase in the consumption
of labour-power by capital, the additional capital would be
consumed unproductively. In reality, the individual consumption of the labourer is unproductive as regards himself, for it
reproduces nothing but the needy individual; it is productive to the capitalist
and to the State, since it is the production of the power that creates
their wealth.
From a social point of view, therefore, the working class, even
when not directly engaged in the labour process, is just as much an appendage
of capital as the ordinary instruments of labour. Even its individual consumption
is, within certain limits, a mere factor in the process of production.
That process, however, takes good care to prevent these self-conscious
instruments from leaving it in the lurch, for it removes their product,
as fast as it is made, from their pole to the opposite pole of capital.
Individual consumption provides, on the one hand, the means for their maintenance
and reproduction: on the other hand, it secures by the annihilation of
the necessaries of life, the continued re-appearance of the workman in
the labour-market. The Roman slave was held by fetters: the wage labourer
is bound to his owner by invisible threads. The appearance of independence
is kept up by means of a constant change of employers, and by the fictio
juris of a contract.
In former times, capital resorted to legislation, whenever necessary,
to enforce its proprietary rights over the free labourer. For instance,
down to 1815, the emigration of mechanics employed in machine making was,
in England, forbidden, under grievous pains and penalties.
The reproduction of the working class carries with it the accumulation
of skill, that is handed down from one generation to another. To what extent the capitalist reckons the existence of such a skilled class among the factors of production that belong to him by right, and to what
extent he actually regards it as the reality of his variable capital, is
seen so soon as a crisis threatens him with its loss. In consequence of
the civil war in the United States and of the accompanying cotton famine,
the majority of the cotton operatives in Lancashire were, as is well known,
thrown out of work. Both from the working class itself, and from other
ranks of society, there arose a cry for State aid, or for voluntary
national subscriptions, in order to enable the “superfluous” hands to emigrate
to the colonies or to the United States. Thereupon, The Times published
on the 24th March, 1863, a letter from Edmund Potter, a former president
of the Manchester Chamber of Commerce. This letter was rightly called in
the House of Commons, the manufacturers’ manifesto. We cull here a few characteristic passages, in which the proprietary rights of capital over labour-power are unblushingly asserted.
“He” (the man out of work) “may be told the supply of cotton-workers
is too large ... and ... must ... in fact be reduced by a third, perhaps,
and that then there will be a healthy demand for the remaining two-thirds....
Public opinion... urges emigration.... The master cannot willingly see
his labour supply being removed; he may think, and perhaps justly, that
it is both wrong and unsound.... But if the public funds are to be devoted
to assist emigration, he bas a right to be heard, and perhaps to protest.”
Mr. Potter then shows how useful the cotton trade is, how the “trade has
undoubtedly drawn the surplus-population from Ireland and from the agricultural
districts,” how immense is its extent, how in the year 1860 it yielded
5/13 ths of the total English exports, how, after a few years, it will
again expand by the extension of the market, particularly of the Indian
market, and by calling forth a plentiful supply of cotton at 6d. per lb.
He then continues:
“Some time ...,one, two, or three years, it may be,
will produce the quantity.... The question I would put then is this —
Is the trade worth retaining? Is it worth while to keep the machinery (he
means the living labour machines) in order, and is it not the greatest
folly to think of parting with that? I think it is. I allow that the workers
are not a property, not the property of Lancashire and the masters; but
they are the strength of both; they are the mental and trained power which
cannot be. replaced for a generation; the mere machinery which they work
might much of it be beneficially replaced, nay improved, in a twelvemonth
Encourage or allow (!) the working-power
to emigrate, and what of the capitalist?... Take away the cream of the
workers, and fixed capital will depreciate in a great degree, and the floating
will not subject itself to a struggle with the short supply of inferior
labour.... We are told the workers wish it” (emigration). “Very natural
it is that they should do so.... Reduce, compress the cotton trade by taking
away its working power and reducing their wages expenditure, say one-fifth,
or five millions, and what then would happen to the class above, the small
shopkeepers; and what of the rents, the cottage rents.... Trace out the
effects upwards to the small farmer, the better householder, and ... the
landowner, and say if there could be any suggestion more suicidal to all
classes of the country than by enfeebling a nation by exporting the best
of its manufacturing population, and destroying the value of some of its
most productive capital and enrichment .... I advise a loan (of five or
six millions sterling), ... extending it may be over two or three years,
administered by special commissioners added to the Boards of Guardians
in the cotton districts, under special legislative regulations, enforcing
some occupation or labour, as a means of keeping up at least the moral
standard of the recipients of the loan... can anything be worse for landowners
or masters than parting with the best of the workers, and demoralising
and disappointing the rest by an extended depletive emigration, a depletion
of capital and value in an entire province?”
Potter, the chosen mouthpiece of the manufacturers, distinguishes
two sorts of “machinery,” each of which belongs to the capitalist, and
of which one stands in his factory, the other at night-time and on Sundays
is housed outside the factory, in cottages. The one is inanimate, the other
living. The inanimate machinery not only wears out and depreciates from
day to day, but a great part of it becomes so quickly superannuated, by
constant technical progress, that it can be replaced with advantage by
new machinery after a few months. The living machinery, on the contrary
gets better the longer it lasts, and in proportion as the skill, handed
from one generation to another, accumulates. The Times answered
the cotton lord as follows:
“Mr. Edmund Potter is so impressed with the exceptional and supreme
importance of the cotton masters that, in order to preserve this class
and perpetuate their profession, he would keep half a million of the labouring
class confined in a great moral workhouse against their will. ‘Is the
trade worth retaining?’ asks Mr. Potter. ‘Certainly by all honest means
it is,’ we answer. ‘Is it worth while keeping the machinery in order?’
again asks Mr. Potter. Here we hesitate. By the ‘machinery’ Mr. Potter
means the human machinery, for he goes on to protest that he does not mean
to use them as an absolute property. We must confess that we do not think
it ‘worth while,’ or even possible, to keep the human machinery
in order-that is to shut it up and keep it oiled till it is wanted. Human
machinery will rust under inaction, oil and rub it as you may. Moreover,
the human machinery will, as we have just seen, get the steam up of its
own accord, and burst or run amuck in our great towns. It might, as Mr.
Potter says, require some time to reproduce the workers, but, having machinists
and capitalists at hand, we could always find thrifty, hard, industrious
men wherewith to improvise more master manufacturers than we can ever want.
Mr. Potter talks of the trade reviving ‘in one, two, or three years,’ and
he asks us not ‘to encourage or allow (!) the working power to emigrate.’
He says that it is very natural the workers should wish to emigrate; but he thinks that in spite of their desire, the nation
ought to keep this half million of workers with their 700,000 dependents,
shut up in the cotton districts; and as a necessary consequence, he must
of course think that the nation ought to keep down their discontent by
force, and sustain them by alms — and upon the chance that the cotton
masters may some day want them.... The time is come when the great public
opinion of these islands must operate to save this ‘working power’ from
those who would deal with it as they would deal with iron, and coal, and
cotton.”
The Times’ article was only a jeu d’esprit. The “great
public opinion” was, in fact, of Mr. Potter’s opinion, that the factory
operatives are part of the movable fittings of a factory. Their emigration
was prevented. They were locked up in that “moral workhouse,” the cotton
districts, and they form, as before, “the strength” of the cotton manufacturers
of Lancashire.
Capitalist production, therefore, of itself reproduces the separation
between labour-power and the means of labour. It thereby reproduces and
perpetuates the condition for exploiting the labourer. It incessantly forces
him to sell his labour-power in order to live, and enables the capitalist
to purchase labour-power in order that he may enrich himself. It is no longer a mere accident, that capitalist and labourer confront each other in the market as buyer and seller. It is the process itself
that incessantly hurls back the labourer on to the market as a vendor of
his labour-power, and that incessantly converts his own product
into a means by which another man can purchase him. In reality, the labourer
belongs to capital before he has sold himself to capital. His economic
bondage is both brought about and concealed by
the periodic sale of himself, by his change of masters, and by the oscillations
in the market-price of labour-power.
Capitalist production, therefore, under its aspect of a continuous
connected process, of a process of reproduction, produces not only commodities,
not only surplus-value, but it also produces and reproduces the capitalist
relation; on the one side the capitalist, on the other the wage labourer.

Footnotes
1. “Mais ces riches, qui consomment les produits du travail des autres, ne peuvent les obtenir que par des échanges
[purchases of commodities]. S’ils donnent cependant leur richesse acquise
et accumulée en retour contre ces produits nouveaux qui sont l’objet
de leur fantaisie, ils semblent exposés à épuiser
bientôt leur fonds de réserve; ils ne travaillent point,
avons-nous dit, et ils ne peuvent même travailler; on croirait donc que
chaque jour doit voir diminuer leurs vieilles richesses, et que lorsqu’il
ne leur en restera plus, rien ne sera offert en échange aux ouvriers
qui travaillent exclusivement pour eux.... Mais dans l’ordre social, la
richesse a acquis la propriété de se reproduire par le travail
d’autrui, et sans que son propriétaire y concoure. La richesse, comme le
travail, et par le travail, donne un fruit annuel qui peut être détruit
chaque année sans que le riche en devienne plus pauvre. Ce fruit
est le revenu qui naît du capital.” [The rich, who consume the labour of others, can only obtain them by making exchanges ... By giving away their acquired and accumulated wealth in exchange for the new products which are the object of their capricious wishes, they seem to be exposed to an early exhaustion of their reserve fund; we have already said that they do not work and are unable to work; therefore it could be assumed with full justification that their former wealth would be diminishing with every day and that, finally, a day would come when they would have nothing, and they would have nothing to offer to the workers, who work exclusively for them. ... But, in the social order, wealth has acquired the power of reproducing itself through the labour of others, without the help of its owners. Wealth, like labour, and by means of labour, bears fruit every year, but this fruit can be destroyed every year without making the rich man any poorer thereby. This fruit is the revenue which arises our of capital.] (Sismondi: “Nouv. Princ.
d’Econ. Pol.” Paris, 1819, t. I, pp. 81-82.)
2. “Wages as well as profits are to be considered, each of them, as really a portion of the finished product.”
(Ramsay, l. c., p. 142.) “The share of the product which comes to the labourer
in the form of wages.” (J. Mill, “Eléments, &c.” Translated
by Parissot. Paris, 1823, p. 34.)
3. “When capital is employed in advancing to the workman his wages, it adds nothing to the funds for the maintenance
of labour.” (Cazenove in note to his edition of Malthus’ “Definitions in
Pol. Econ.” London, 1853, p. 22.)
4. “The wages of labour are advanced by capitalists in the case of less than one fourth of the labourers of
the earth.” (Rich. Jones: “Textbook of Lectures on the Pol. Econ. of Nations.”
Hertford, 1852, p. 36.)
5. “Though the manufacturer” (i.e., the labourer) “has his wages advanced to him by his master, he in reality costs him no expense, the value of these wages being generally reserved, together with a profit, in the improved value of the subject upon which his labour is bestowed.” (A. Smith, l. c., Book II. ch. III, p. 311.)
6. “This is a remarkably peculiar property of productive labour. Whatever is productively consumed is capital and
it becomes capital by consumption.” (James Mill, l. c., p. 242.) James
Mill, however, never got on the track of this “remarkably peculiar property.”
7. “It is true indeed, that the first introducing a manufacture employs many poor, but they cease not to be so,
and the continuance of it makes many.” (“Reasons for a Limited Exportation
of Wool.” London, 1677, p. 19.) “The farmer now absurdly asserts, that
he keeps the poor. They are indeed kept in misery.” (“Reasons for the Late
Increase of the Poor Rates: or a Comparative View of the Prices of Labour
and Provisions.” London, 1777, p. 31.)
8. Rossi would not declaim so emphatically against this, had he really penetrated the secret of “productive consumption.”
9. “The labourers in the mines of S. America, whose daily task (the heaviest perhaps in the world) consists
in bringing to the surface on their shoulders a load of metal weighing
from 180 to 200 pounds, from a depth of 450 feet, live on bread and beans
only; they themselves would prefer the bread alone for food, but their
masters, who have found out that the men cannot work so hard on bread,
treat them like horses, and compel them to eat beans; beans, however, are
relatively much richer in bone-earth (phosphate of lime) than is bread.”
(Liebig, l. c., vol. 1., p. 194, note.)
10. James Mill, l. c., p. 238.
11. “If the price of labour should rise so high that, notwithstanding the increase of capital, no more could be
employed, I should say that such increase of capital would be still unproductively
consumed.” (Ricardo, l. c., p. 163.)
12. “The only productive consumption, properly so called, is the consumption or destruction of wealth” (he alludes to the means of production) “by capitalists with a view to reproduction.... The workman ... is a productive consumer to the person who employs him, and to the State, but not, strictly speaking, to himself.” (Malthus’ “Definitions, &c.,” p. 30.)
13. “The only thing, of which one can say, that it is stored up and prepared beforehand, is the skill of the
labourer.... The accumulation and storage of skilled labour, that most
important operation, is, as regards the great mass of labourers, accomplished
without any capital whatever.” (Th. Hodgskin: “Labour Defended, &c.,”
p. 13.)
14. “That letter might be looked upon as the manifesto of the manufacturers.” (Ferrand: “Motion on the Cotton
Famine.” H.o.C., 27th April, 1863.)
15. It will not be forgotten that this same capital sings quite another song, under ordinary circumstances, when
there is a question of reducing wages. Then the masters exclaim with one
voice: “The factory operatives should keep in wholesome remembrance the
fact that theirs is really a low species of skilled labour, and that there
is none which is more easily acquired, or of its quality more amply remunerated,
or which, by a short training of the least expert, can be more quickly,
as well as abundantly, acquired ... The master’s machinery” (which we now
learn can be replaced with advantage in 12 months,) “really plays a far
more important part in the business of production than the labour and skill
of the operative” (who cannot now be replaced under 30 years), “which six
months’ education can reach, and a common labourer can learn.” (See ante,
p. 423.)
16. Parliament did not vote a single farthing in aid of emigration, but simply passed some Acts empowering the
municipal corporations to keep the operatives in a half-starved state,
i.e., to exploit them at less than the normal wages. On the other
hand, when 3 years later, the cattle disease broke out, Parliament broke
wildly through its usages and voted, straight off, millions for indemnifying
the millionaire landlords, whose farmers in any event came off without
loss, owing to the rise in the price of meat. The bull-like bellow of the
landed proprietors at the opening of Parliament, in 1866, showed that a
man can worship the cow Sabala without being a Hindu, and can change himself
into an ox without being a Jupiter.
17. “L’ouvrier demandait de la subsistence pour vivre, le chef demandait du travail pour gagner.” [The worker required the means of subsistence to live, the boss required labour to make a profit] (Sismondi, l. c.,
p. 91.)
18. A boorishly clumsy form of this bondage exists in the county of Durham. This is one of the few counties,
in which circumstances do not secure to the farmer undisputed proprietary
rights over the agricultural labourer. The mining industry allows the latter
some choice. In this county, the farmer, contrary to the custom elsewhere,
rents only such farms as have on them labourers’ cottages. The rent of
the cottage is a part of the wages. These cottages are known as “hinds’
houses.” They are let to the labourers in consideration of certain feudal
services, under a contract called “bondage,” which, amongst other things,
binds the labourer, during the time he is employed elsewhere, to leave
some one, say his daughter, &c., to supply his place. The labourer
himself is called a “bondsman.” The relationship here set up also shows
how individual consumption by the labourer becomes consumption on behalf
of capital – or productive consumption – from quite a new point of view: “It
is curious to observe that the very dung of the hind and bondsman is the
perquisite of the calculating lord ... and the lord will allow no privy
but his own to exist in the neighbourhood, and will rather give a bit of
manure here and there for a garden than bate any part of his seigneurial
right.” (“Public Health, Report VII., 1864,” p. 188.)
19. It will not be forgotten, that, with respect to the labour of children, &c., even the formality of a voluntary sale disappears.
20. “Capital pre-supposes wage labour, and wage labour pre-supposes capital. One is a necessary condition to the
existence of the other; they mutually call each other into existence. Does
an operative in a cotton-factory produce nothing but cotton goods? No,
he produces capital. He produces values that give fresh command over his
labour, and that, by means of such command, create fresh values.” (Karl
Marx: “Lohnarbeit und Kapital,” in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung:
No. 266, 7th April, 1849.) The articles published under the above title
in the N. Rh. Z. are parts of some lectures given by me on that
subject, in 1847, in the German “Arbeiter-Verein” at Brussels, the publication
of which was interrupted by the revolution of February.
Transcribed by Zodiac
Html Markup by Stephen Baird (1999)
Next: Chapter Twenty-Four: Conversion of Surplus-Value into Capital
Capital Volume One- Index