In a factory, suppose that 100
labourers
working 8 hours a day yield 800 working-hours.
Marx - Capital-Volume-I
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.
.
It is probable that few or no capitals of ?
3,000 to ?
4,000 acquired by trade existed here before 1690.
However, about that time, or a little later, the traders had got money beforehand, and began to build modern brick houses, instead of those of wood and plaster.
?
Even in the early part of the 18th century, a Manchester manufacturer, who placed a pint of foreign wine before his guests, exposed himself to the remarks and headshakings of all his neighbours. Before the rise of machinery, a manufacturer's evening expenditure at the public house where they all met, never exceeded sixpence for a glass of punch, and a penny for a screw of tobacco. It was not till 1758, and this marks an epoch, that a person actually engaged in business was seen with an equipage of his own.
--The fourth period,? the last 30 years of the 18th century, --is that in which expense and luxury have made great progress, and was supported by a trade extended by means of riders and factors through every part of Europe. ? 22
What would the good Dr. Aikin say if he could rise from his grave and see the Manchester of today?
Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets! --Industry furnishes the material which saving accumulates. ? 23 Therefore, save, save, i. e. , reconvert the greatest possible portion of surplus value, or surplus-product into capital! Accumulation for accumulation's sake, production for production's sake: by this formula classical economy expressed the historical mission of the bourgeoisie, and did not for a single instant deceive itself over the birth-throes of wealth. 24 But
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what avails lamentation in the face of historical necessity? If to classical economy, the proletarian is but a machine for the production of surplus value; on the other hand, the capitalist is in its eyes only a machine for the conversion of this surplus value into additional capital. Political Economy takes the historical function of the capitalist in bitter earnest. In order to charm out of his bosom the awful conflict between the desire for enjoyment and the chase after riches, Malthus, about the year 1820, advocated a division of labour, which assigns to the capitalist actually engaged in production, the business of accumulating, and to the other sharers in surplus value, to the landlords, the place-men, the beneficed clergy, &c. , the business of spending. It is of the highest importance, he says,
--to keep separate the passion for expenditure and the passion for accumulation. ? 25
The capitalists having long been good livers and men of the world, uttered loud cries. What, exclaimed one of their spokesmen, a disciple of Ricardo, Mr. Malthus preaches high rents, heavy taxes, &c. , so that the pressure of the spur may constantly be kept on the industrious by unproductive consumers! By all means, production, production on a constantly increasing scale, runs the shibboleth; but
--production will, by such a process, be far more curbed in than spurred on. Nor is it quite fair thus to maintain in idleness a number of persons, only to pinch others, who are likely, from their characters, if you can force them to work, to work with success. ? 26
Unfair as he finds it to spur on the industrial capitalist, by depriving his bread of its butter, yet he thinks it necessary to reduce the labourer's wages to a minimum "to keep him industrious. ? Nor does he for a moment conceal the fact, that the appropriation of unpaid labour is the secret of surplus value.
--Increased demand on the part of the labourers means nothing more than their willingness to take less of their own product for themselves, and leave a greater part of it to their employers; and if it be said, that this begets glut, by lessening consumption? (on the part of the labourers), --I can only reply that glut is synonymous with large profits. ? 27
The learned disputation, how the booty pumped out of the labourer may be divided, with most advantage to accumulation, between the industrial capitalist and the rich idler, was hushed in face of the revolution of July. Shortly afterwards, the town proletariat at Lyons sounded the tocsin of revolution, and the country proletariat in England began to set fire to farm-yards and corn-stacks. On this side of the Channel Owenism began to spread; on the other side, St. Simonism and Fourierism. The hour of vulgar economy had struck. Exactly a year before Nassau W. Senior discovered at Manchester, that the profit (including interest) of capital is the product of the last hour of the twelve, he had announced to the world another discovery.
--I substitute,? he proudly says, --for the word capital, considered as an instrument of production, the word abstinence. ?
An unparalleled sample this, of the discoveries of vulgar economy! It substitutes for an economic category, a sycophantic phrase - voila` tout. [that's all]
--When the savage,? says Senior, --makes bows, he exercises an industry, but he does not practise abstinence. ? 28
This explains how and why, in the earlier states of society, the implements of labour were fabricated without abstinence on the part of the capitalist.
--The more society progresses, the more abstinence is demanded,? 29
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Namely, from those who ply the industry of appropriating the fruits of others' industry. All the conditions for carrying on the labour process are suddenly converted into so many acts of abstinence on the part of the capitalist. If the corn is not all eaten, but part of it also sown - abstinence of the capitalist. If the wine gets time to mature - abstinence of the capitalist30 The capitalist robs his own self, whenever he --lends (! ) the instruments of production to the labourer,? that is, whenever by incorporating labour-power with them, he uses them to extract surplus value out of that labour-power, instead of eating them up, steam-engines, cotton, railways, manure, horses, and all; or as the vulgar economist childishly puts it, instead of dissipating --their value? in luxuries and other articles of consumption. 31 How the capitalists as a class are to perform that feat, is a secret that vulgar economy has hitherto obstinately refused to divulge. Enough, that the world still jogs on, solely through the self-chastisement of this modern penitent of Vishnu, the capitalist. Not only accumulation, but the simple --conservation of a capital requires a constant effort to resist the temptation of consuming it. ? 32 The simple dictates of humanity therefore plainly enjoin the release of the capitalist from this martyrdom and temptation, in the same way that the Georgian slave-owner was lately delivered, by the abolition of slavery, from the painful dilemma, whether to squander the surplus-product, lashed out of his niggers, entirely in champagne, or whether to reconvert a part of it into more niggers and more land.
In economic forms of society of the most different kinds, there occurs, not only simple reproduction, but, in varying degrees, reproduction on a progressively increasing scale. By degrees more is produced and more consumed, and consequently more products have to be converted into means of production. This process, however, does not present itself as accumulation of capital, nor as the function of a capitalist, so long as the labourer's means of production, and with them, his product and means of subsistence, do not confront him in the shape of capital. 33 Richard Jones, who died a few years ago, and was the successor of Malthus in the chair of Political Economy at Haileybury College, discusses this point well in the light of two important facts. Since the great mass of the Hindu population are peasants cultivating their land themselves, their products, their instruments of labour and means of subsistence never take --the shape of a fund saved from revenue, which fund has, therefore, gone through a previous process of accumulation. ? 34 On the other hand, the non-agricultural labourers in those provinces where the English rule has least disturbed the old system, are directly employed by the magnates, to whom a portion of the agricultural surplus-product is rendered in the shape of tribute or rent. One portion of this product is consumed by the magnates in kind, another is converted, for their use, by the labourers, into articles of luxury and such like things, while the rest forms the wages of the labourers, who own their implements of labour. Here, production and reproduction on a progressively increasing scale, go on their way without any intervention from that queer saint, that knight of the woeful countenance, the capitalist --abstainer. ?
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Section 4: Circumstances that, Independently of the Proportional Division of Surplus value into Capital and
Revenue, Determine the Amount of Accumulation. Degree of Exploitation of Labour-Power. Productivity of Labour. Growing Difference in Amount Between Capital Employed and Capital Consumed. Magnitude of Capital Advanced
The proportion in which surplus value breaks up into capital and revenue being given, the magnitude of the capital accumulated clearly depends on the absolute magnitude of the surplus value. Suppose that 80 per cent. were capitalised and 20 per cent. eaten up, the accumulated capital will be ? 2,400 or ? 200, according as the total surplus value has amounted to ? 3,000 or ? 500. Hence all the circumstances that determine the mass of surplus value operate to determine the magnitude of the accumulation. We sum them up once again, but only in so far as they afford new points of view in regard to accumulation.
It will be remembered that the rate of surplus value depends, in the first place, on the degree of exploitation of labour-power. Political Economy values this fact so highly, that it occasionally identifies the acceleration of accumulation due to increased productiveness of labour, with its acceleration due to increased exploitation of the labourer. 35 In the chapters on the production of surplus value it was constantly presupposed that wages are at least equal to the value of labour- power. Forcible reduction of wages below this value plays, however, in practice too important a part, for us not to pause upon it for a moment. It, in fact, transforms, within certain limits, the labourer's necessary consumption fund into a fund for the accumulation of capital.
--Wages,? says John Stuart Mill, --have no productive power; they are the price of a productive power. Wages do not contribute, along with labour, to the production of commodities, no more than the price of tools contributes along with the tools themselves. If labour could be had without purchase, wages might be dispensed with. ? 36
But if the labourers could live on air they could not be bought at any price. The zero of their cost is therefore a limit in a mathematical sense, always beyond reach, although we can always approximate more and more nearly to it. The constant tendency of capital is to force the cost of labour back towards this zero. A writer of the 18th century, often quoted already, the author of the --Essay on Trade and Commerce,? only betrays the innermost secret soul of English capitalism, when he declares the historic mission of England to be the forcing down of English wages to the level of the French and the Dutch. 37 With other things he says naively:
--But if our poor? (technical term for labourers) --will live luxuriously . . . then labour must, of course, be dear . . . When it is considered what luxuries the manufacturing populace consume, such as brandy, gin, tea, sugar, foreign fruit, strong beer, printed linens, snuff, tobacco, &c. ? 38
He quotes the work of a Northamptonshire manufacturer, who, with eyes squinting heavenward moans:
--Labour is one-third cheaper in France than in England; for their poor work hard, and fare hard, as to their food and clothing. Their chief diet is bread, fruit, herbs, roots, and dried fish; for they very seldom eat flesh; and when wheat is dear, they
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eat very little bread. ? 39 --To which may be added,? our essayist goes on, --that their drink is either water or other small liquors, so that they spend very little money. . . . These things are very difficult to be brought about; but they are not impracticable, since they have been effected both in France and in Holland. ? 40
Twenty years later, an American humbug, the baronised Yankee, Benjamin Thompson (alias Count Rumford) followed the same line of philanthropy to the great satisfaction of God and man. His --Essays? are a cookery book with receipts of all kinds for replacing by some succedaneum the ordinary dear food of the labourer. The following is a particularly successful receipt of this wonderful philosopher:
--5 lbs. of barleymeal, 71/2d. ; 5 lbs. of Indian corn, 61/4d. ; 3d. worth of red herring, 1d. salt, 1d. vinegar, 2d. pepper and sweet herbs, in all 203/4. ; make a soup for 64 men, and at the medium price of barley and of Indian corn . . . this soup may be provided at 1/4d. , the portion of 20 ounces. ? 41
With the advance of capitalistic production, the adulteration of food rendered Thompson's ideal superfluous. 42 At the end of the 18th and during the first ten years of the 19th century, the English farmers and landlords enforced the absolute minimum of wage, by paying the agricultural labourers less than the minimum in the form of wages, and the remainder in the shape of parochial relief. An example of the waggish way in which the English Dogberries acted in their --legal? fixing of a wages tariff:
--The squires of Norfolk had dined, says Mr. Burke, when they fixed the rate of wages; the squires of Berks evidently thought the labourers ought not to do so, when they fixed the rate of wages at Speenhamland, 1795. . . . There they decide that ? income (weekly) should be 3s. for a man,' when the gallon or half-peck loaf of 8 lbs. 11 oz. is at 1s. , and increase regularly till bread is 1s. 5d. ; when it is above that sum decrease regularly till it be at 2s. , and then his food should be 1/5 th less. ? 43
Before the Committee of Inquiry of the House of Lords, 1814, a certain A. Bennett, a large farmer, magistrate, poor-law guardian, and wage-regulator, was asked:
--Has any proportion of the value of daily labour been made up to the labourers out of the poors' rate? ? Answer: --Yes, it has; the weekly income of every family is made up to the gallon loaf (8 lbs. 11 oz. ), and 3d. per head! . . . The gallon loaf per week is what we suppose sufficient for the maintenance of every person in the family for the week; and the 3d. is for clothes, and if the parish think proper to find clothes; the 3d. is deducted. This practice goes through all the western part of Wiltshire, and, I believe, throughout the country. ? 44 --For years,? exclaims a bourgeois author of that time, --they (the farmers) have degraded a respectable class of their countrymen, by forcing them to have recourse to the workhouse . . . the farmer, while increasing his own gains, has prevented any accumulation on the part of his labouring dependents. ? 45
The part played in our days by the direct robbery from the labourer's necessary consumption fund in the formation of surplus value, and, therefore, of the accumulation fund of capital, the so-called domestic industry has served to show. (Ch. xv. , sect. 8, c. ) Further facts on this subject will be given later.
Although in all branches of industry that part of the constant capital consisting of instruments of labour must be sufficient for a certain number of labourers (determined by the magnitude of the undertaking), it by no means always necessarily increases in the same proportion as the quantity
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of labour employed.
In a factory, suppose that 100 labourers working 8 hours a day yield 800 working-hours. If the capitalist wishes to raise this sum by one half, he can employ 50 more workers; but then he must also advance more capital, not merely for wages, but for instruments of labour. But he might also let the 100 labourers work 12 hours instead of 8, and then the instruments of labour already to hand would be enough. These would then simply be more rapidly consumed. Thus additional labour, begotten of the greater tension of labour-power, can augment surplus-product and surplus value (i. e. , the subject-matter of accumulation), without corresponding augmentation in the constant part of capital.
In the extractive industries, mines, &c. , the raw materials form no part of the capital advanced. The subject of labour is in this case not a product of previous labour, but is furnished by Nature gratis, as in the case of metals, minerals, coal, stone, &c. In these cases the constant capital consists almost exclusively of instruments of labour, which can very well absorb an increased quantity of labour (day and night shifts of labourers, e. g. ). All other things being equal, the mass and value of the product will rise in direct proportion to the labour expended. As on the first day of production,. the original produce-formers, now turned into the creators of the material elements of capital - man and Nature - still work together. Thanks to the elasticity of labour-power, the domain of accumulation has extended without any previous enlargement of constant capital.
In agriculture the land under cultivation cannot be increased without the advance of more seed and manure. But this advance once made, the purely mechanical working of the soil itself produces a marvellous effect on the amount of the product. A greater quantity of labour, done by the same number of labourers as before, thus increases the fertility, without requiring any new advance in the instruments of labour. It is once again the direct action of man on Nature which becomes an immediate source of greater accumulation, without the intervention of any new capital.
Finally, in what is called manufacturing industry, every additional expenditure of labour presupposes a corresponding additional expenditure of raw materials, but not necessarily of instruments of labour. And as extractive industry and agriculture supply manufacturing industry with its raw materials and those of its instruments of labour, the additional product the former have created without additional advance of capital, tells also in favour of the latter.
General result: by incorporating with itself the two primary creators of wealth, labour-power and the land, capital acquires a power of expansion that permits it to augment the elements of its accumulation beyond the limits apparently fixed by its own magnitude, or by the value and the mass of the means of production, already produced, in which it has its being.
Another important factor in the accumulation of capital is the degree of productivity of social labour.
With the productive power of labour increases the mass of the products, in which a certain value, and, therefore, a surplus value of a given magnitude, is embodied. The rate of surplus value remaining the same or even falling, so long as it only falls more slowly, than the productive power of labour rises, the mass of the surplus-product increases. The division of this product into revenue and additional capital remaining the same, the consumption of the capitalist may, therefore, increase without any decrease in the fund of accumulation. The relative magnitude of the accumulation fund may even increase at the expense of the consumption fund, whilst the cheapening of commodities places at the disposal of the capitalist as many means of enjoyment as formerly, or even more than formerly. But hand-in-hand with the increasing productivity of labour, goes, as we have seen, the cheapening of the labourer, therefore a higher rate of surplus value, even when the real wages are rising. The latter never rise proportionally to the productive power of labour. The same value in variable capital therefore sets in movement more labour-
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power, and, therefore, more labour. The same value in constant capital is embodied in more means of production, i. e. , in more instruments of labour, materials of labour and auxiliary materials; it therefore also supplies more elements for the production both of use value and of value, and with these more absorbers of labour. The value of the additional capital, therefore, remaining the same or even diminishing, accelerated accumulation still takes place. Not only does the scale of reproduction materially extend, but the production of surplus value increases more rapidly than the value of the additional capital.
The development of the productive power of labour reacts also on the original capital already engaged in the process of production. A part of the functioning constant capital consists of instruments of labour, such as machinery, &c. , which are not consumed, and therefore not reproduced, or replaced by new ones of the same kind, until after long periods of time. But every year a part of these instruments of labour perishes or reaches the limit of its productive function. It reaches, therefore, in that year, the time for its periodical reproduction, for its replacement by new ones of the same kind. If the productiveness of labour has, during the using up of these instruments of labour, increased (and it develops continually with the uninterrupted advance of science and technology), more efficient and (considering their increased efficiency), cheaper machines, tools, apparatus, &c. , replace the old. The old capital is reproduced in a more productive form, apart from the constant detail improvements in the instruments of labour already in use. The other part of the constant capital, raw material and auxiliary substances, is constantly reproduced in less than a year; those produced by agriculture, for the most part annually. Every introduction of improved methods, therefore, works almost simultaneously on the new capital and on that already in action. Every advance in Chemistry not only multiplies the number of useful materials and the useful applications of those already known, thus extending with the growth of capital its sphere of investment. It teaches at the same time how to throw the excrements of the processes of production and consumption back again into the circle of the process of reproduction, and thus, without any previous outlay of capital, creates new matter for capital. Like the increased exploitation of natural wealth by the mere increase in the tension of labour- power, science and technology give capital a power of expansion independent of the given magnitude of the capital actually functioning. They react at the same time on that part of the original capital which has entered upon its stage of renewal. This, in passing into its new shape, incorporates gratis the social advance made while its old shape was being used up. Of course, this development of productive power is accompanied by a partial depreciation of functioning capital. So far as this depreciation makes itself acutely felt in competition, the burden falls on the labourer, in the increased exploitation of whom the capitalist looks for his indemnification.
Labour transmits to its product the value of the means of production consumed by it. On the other hand, the value and mass of the means of production set in motion by a given quantity of labour increase as the labour becomes more productive. Though the same quantity of labour adds always to its products only the same sum of new value, still the old capital value, transmitted by the labour to the products, increases with the growing productivity of labour.
An English and a Chinese spinner, e. g. , may work the same number of hours with the same intensity; then they will both in a week create equal values. But in spite of this equality, an immense difference will obtain between the value of the week's product of the Englishman, who works with a mighty automaton, and that of the Chinaman, who has but a spinning-wheel. In the same time as the Chinaman spins one pound of cotton, the Englishman spins several hundreds of pounds. A sum, many hundred times as great, of old values swells the value of his product, in which those re-appear in a new, useful form, and can thus function anew as capital.
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--In 1782,? as Frederick Engels teaches us, --all the wool crop in England of the three preceding years, lay untouched for want of labourers, and so it must have lain, if newly invented machinery had not come to its aid and spun it. ? 46
Labour embodied in the form of machinery of course did not directly force into life a single man, but it made it possible for a smaller number of labourers, with the addition of relatively less living labour, not only to consume the wool productively, and put into it new value, but to preserve in the form of yarn, &c. , its old value. At the same time, it caused and stimulated increased reproduction of wool. It is the natural property of living labour, to transmit old value, whilst it creates new. Hence, with the increase in efficacy, extent and value of its means of production, consequently with the accumulation that accompanies the development of its productive power, labour keeps up and eternises an always increasing capital value in a form ever new. ? 47 This natural power of labour takes the appearance of an intrinsic property of capital, in which it is incorporated, just as the productive forces of social labour take the appearance of inherent properties of capital, and as the constant appropriation of surplus labour by the capitalists, takes that of a constant self-expansion of capital.
With the increase of capital, the difference between the capital employed and the capital consumed increases. In other words, there is increase in the value and the material mass of the instruments of labour, such as buildings, machinery, drain-pipes, working-cattle, apparatus of every kind that function for a longer or shorter time in processes of production constantly repeated, or that serve for the attainment of particular useful effects, whilst they themselves only gradually wear out, therefore only lose their value piecemeal, therefore transfer that value to the product only bit by bit. In the same proportion as these instruments of labour serve as product- formers without adding value to the product, i. e. , in the same proportion as they are wholly employed but only partly consumed, they perform, as we saw earlier, the same gratuitous service as the natural forces, water, steam, air, electricity, etc. This gratuitous service of past labour, when seized and filled with a soul by living labour, increases with the advancing stages of accumulation.
Since past labour always disguises itself as capital, i. e. , since the passive of the labour of A, B, C, etc. , takes the form of the active of the non-labourer X, bourgeois and political economists are full of praises of the services of dead and gone labour, which, according to the Scotch genius MacCulloch, ought to receive a special remuneration in the shape of interest, profit, etc. 48 The powerful and ever-increasing assistance given by past labour to the living labour process under the form of means of production is, therefore, attributed to that form of past labour in which it is alienated, as unpaid labour, from the worker himself, i. e. , to its capitalistic form. The practical agents of capitalistic production and their pettifogging ideologists are as unable to think of the means of production as separate from the antagonistic social mask they wear today, as a slave- owner to think of the worker himself as distinct from his character as a slave.
With a given degree of exploitation of labour-power, the mass of the surplus value produced is determined by the number of workers simultaneously exploited; and this corresponds, although in varying proportions, with the magnitude of the capital. The more, therefore, capital increases by means of successive accumulations, the more does the sum of the value increase that is divided into consumption fund and accumulation fund. The capitalist can, therefore, live a more jolly life, and at the same time show more --abstinence. ? And, finally, all the springs of production act with greater elasticity, the more its scale extends with the mass of the capital advanced.
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Section 5: The So-Called Labour Fund
It has been shown in the course of this inquiry that capital is not a fixed magnitude, but is a part of social wealth, elastic and constantly fluctuating with the division of fresh surplus value into revenue and additional capital. It has been seen further that, even with a given magnitude of functioning capital, the labour-power, the science, and the land (by which are to be understood, economically, all conditions of labour furnished by Nature independently of man), embodied in it, form elastic powers of capital, allowing it, within certain limits, a field of action independent of its own magnitude. In this inquiry we have neglected all effects of the process of circulation, effects which may produce very different degrees of efficiency in the same mass of capital. And as we presupposed the limits set by capitalist production, that is to say, presupposed the process of social production in a form developed by purely spontaneous growth, we neglected any more rational combination, directly and systematically practicable with the means of production, and the mass of labour-power at present disposable. Classical economy always loved to conceive social capital as a fixed magnitude of a fixed degree of efficiency. But this prejudice was first established as a dogma by the arch-Philistine, Jeremy Bentham, that insipid, pedantic, leather- tongued oracle of the ordinary bourgeois intelligence of the 19th century. 49 Bentham is among philosophers what Martin Tupper is among poets. Both could only have been manufactured in England. 50 In the light of his dogma the commonest phenomena of the process of production, as, e. g. , its sudden expansions and contractions, nay, even accumulation itself, become perfectly inconceivable. 51The dogma was used by Bentham himself, as well as by Malthus, James Mill, MacCulloch, etc. , for an apologetic purpose, and especially in order to represent one part of capital, namely, variable capital, or that part convertible into labour-power, as a fixed magnitude. The material of variable capital, i. e. , the mass of the means of subsistence it represents for the labourer, or the so-called labour fund, was fabled as a separate part of social wealth, fixed by natural laws and unchangeable. To set in motion the part of social wealth which is to function as constant capital, or, to express it in a material form, as means of production, a definite mass of living labour is required. This mass is given technologically. But neither is the number of labourers required to render fluid this mass of labour-power given (it changes with the degree of exploitation of the individual labour-power), nor is the price of this labour-power given, but only its minimum limit, which is moreover very variable. The facts that lie at the bottom of this dogma are these: on the one hand, the labourer has no right to interfere in the division of social wealth into means of enjoyment for the non-labourer and means of production. 52 On the other hand, only in favourable and exceptional cases, has he the power to enlarge the so-called labour fund at the expense of the --revenue? of the wealthy.
What silly tautology results from the attempt to represent the capitalistic limits of the labour fund as its natural and social limits may be seen, e. g. , in Professor Fawcett. 53
--The circulating capital of a country,? he says, --is its wage-fund. Hence, if we desire to calculate the average money wages received by each labourer, we have simply to divide the amount of this capital by the number of the labouring population. ? 54
That is to say, we first add together the individual wages actually paid, and then we affirm that the sum thus obtained, forms the total value of the --labour fund? determined and vouchsafed to us by God and Nature. Lastly, we divide the sum thus obtained by the number of labourers to find out again how much may come to each on the average. An uncommonly knowing dodge this. It did not prevent Mr. Fawcett saying in the same breath:
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--The aggregate wealth which is annually saved in England, is divided into two portions; one portion is employed as capital to maintain our industry, and the other portion is exported to foreign countries. . . Only a portion, and perhaps, not a large portion of the wealth which is annually saved in this country, is invested in our own industry. 55
The greater part of the yearly accruing surplus-product, embezzled, because abstracted without return of an equivalent, from the English labourer, is thus used as capital, not in England, but in foreign countries. But with the additional capital thus exported, a part of the --labour fund? invented by God and Bentham is also exported. 56
1 --Accumulation of capital; the employment of a portion of revenue as capital. ? (Malthus: --Definitions, &c. ,? ed. Cazenove, p. 11. ) --Conversion of revenue into capital,? (Malthus: --Princ. of Pol. Econ -- 2nd Ed. , Lond. . 1836, p. 320. )
2 We here take no account of export trade, by means of which a nation can change articles of luxury either into means of production or means of subsistence, and vice versa`. In order to examine the object of our investigation in its integrity, free from all disturbing subsidiary circumstances, we must treat the whole world as one nation, and assume that capitalist production is everywhere established and has possessed itself of every branch of industry.
3 Sismondi's analysis of accumulation suffers from the great defect, that he contents himself, to too great an extent, with the phrase --conversion of revenue into capital,? without fathoming the material conditions of this operation.
4 --Le travail primitif auquel son capital a du^ sa naissance. ? [the original labour, to which his capital owed its origin] Sismondi, l. c. , ed. Paris, t. I. , p. 109.
5 --Labour creates capital before capital employs labour. ? E. G. Wakefield, --England and America,? Lond. , 1833, Vol. II, p. 110.
6 The property of the capitalist in the product of the labour of others --is a strict consequence of the law of appropriation, the fundamental principle of which was, on the contrary, the exclusive title of every labourer to the product of his own labour. ? (Cherbuliez, --Richesse ou Pauvrete? ,? Paris, 1841, p. 58, where, however, the dialectical reversal is not properly developed. )
7 The following passage (to p. 551 --laws of capitalist appropriation. ? ) has been added to the English text in conformity with the 4th German edition.
8 We may well, therefore, feel astonished at the cleverness Of Proudhon, who would abolish capitalistic property by enforcing the eternal laws of property that are based on commodity production!
9 --Capital, viz. , accumulated wealth employed with a view to profit. ? (Malthus, l. c. ) --Capital . . . consists of wealth saved from revenue, and used with a view to profit. ? (R. Jones: --An Introductory Lecture on Polit. Econ. ,? Lond. , 1833, p.
Even in the early part of the 18th century, a Manchester manufacturer, who placed a pint of foreign wine before his guests, exposed himself to the remarks and headshakings of all his neighbours. Before the rise of machinery, a manufacturer's evening expenditure at the public house where they all met, never exceeded sixpence for a glass of punch, and a penny for a screw of tobacco. It was not till 1758, and this marks an epoch, that a person actually engaged in business was seen with an equipage of his own.
--The fourth period,? the last 30 years of the 18th century, --is that in which expense and luxury have made great progress, and was supported by a trade extended by means of riders and factors through every part of Europe. ? 22
What would the good Dr. Aikin say if he could rise from his grave and see the Manchester of today?
Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets! --Industry furnishes the material which saving accumulates. ? 23 Therefore, save, save, i. e. , reconvert the greatest possible portion of surplus value, or surplus-product into capital! Accumulation for accumulation's sake, production for production's sake: by this formula classical economy expressed the historical mission of the bourgeoisie, and did not for a single instant deceive itself over the birth-throes of wealth. 24 But
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what avails lamentation in the face of historical necessity? If to classical economy, the proletarian is but a machine for the production of surplus value; on the other hand, the capitalist is in its eyes only a machine for the conversion of this surplus value into additional capital. Political Economy takes the historical function of the capitalist in bitter earnest. In order to charm out of his bosom the awful conflict between the desire for enjoyment and the chase after riches, Malthus, about the year 1820, advocated a division of labour, which assigns to the capitalist actually engaged in production, the business of accumulating, and to the other sharers in surplus value, to the landlords, the place-men, the beneficed clergy, &c. , the business of spending. It is of the highest importance, he says,
--to keep separate the passion for expenditure and the passion for accumulation. ? 25
The capitalists having long been good livers and men of the world, uttered loud cries. What, exclaimed one of their spokesmen, a disciple of Ricardo, Mr. Malthus preaches high rents, heavy taxes, &c. , so that the pressure of the spur may constantly be kept on the industrious by unproductive consumers! By all means, production, production on a constantly increasing scale, runs the shibboleth; but
--production will, by such a process, be far more curbed in than spurred on. Nor is it quite fair thus to maintain in idleness a number of persons, only to pinch others, who are likely, from their characters, if you can force them to work, to work with success. ? 26
Unfair as he finds it to spur on the industrial capitalist, by depriving his bread of its butter, yet he thinks it necessary to reduce the labourer's wages to a minimum "to keep him industrious. ? Nor does he for a moment conceal the fact, that the appropriation of unpaid labour is the secret of surplus value.
--Increased demand on the part of the labourers means nothing more than their willingness to take less of their own product for themselves, and leave a greater part of it to their employers; and if it be said, that this begets glut, by lessening consumption? (on the part of the labourers), --I can only reply that glut is synonymous with large profits. ? 27
The learned disputation, how the booty pumped out of the labourer may be divided, with most advantage to accumulation, between the industrial capitalist and the rich idler, was hushed in face of the revolution of July. Shortly afterwards, the town proletariat at Lyons sounded the tocsin of revolution, and the country proletariat in England began to set fire to farm-yards and corn-stacks. On this side of the Channel Owenism began to spread; on the other side, St. Simonism and Fourierism. The hour of vulgar economy had struck. Exactly a year before Nassau W. Senior discovered at Manchester, that the profit (including interest) of capital is the product of the last hour of the twelve, he had announced to the world another discovery.
--I substitute,? he proudly says, --for the word capital, considered as an instrument of production, the word abstinence. ?
An unparalleled sample this, of the discoveries of vulgar economy! It substitutes for an economic category, a sycophantic phrase - voila` tout. [that's all]
--When the savage,? says Senior, --makes bows, he exercises an industry, but he does not practise abstinence. ? 28
This explains how and why, in the earlier states of society, the implements of labour were fabricated without abstinence on the part of the capitalist.
--The more society progresses, the more abstinence is demanded,? 29
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Namely, from those who ply the industry of appropriating the fruits of others' industry. All the conditions for carrying on the labour process are suddenly converted into so many acts of abstinence on the part of the capitalist. If the corn is not all eaten, but part of it also sown - abstinence of the capitalist. If the wine gets time to mature - abstinence of the capitalist30 The capitalist robs his own self, whenever he --lends (! ) the instruments of production to the labourer,? that is, whenever by incorporating labour-power with them, he uses them to extract surplus value out of that labour-power, instead of eating them up, steam-engines, cotton, railways, manure, horses, and all; or as the vulgar economist childishly puts it, instead of dissipating --their value? in luxuries and other articles of consumption. 31 How the capitalists as a class are to perform that feat, is a secret that vulgar economy has hitherto obstinately refused to divulge. Enough, that the world still jogs on, solely through the self-chastisement of this modern penitent of Vishnu, the capitalist. Not only accumulation, but the simple --conservation of a capital requires a constant effort to resist the temptation of consuming it. ? 32 The simple dictates of humanity therefore plainly enjoin the release of the capitalist from this martyrdom and temptation, in the same way that the Georgian slave-owner was lately delivered, by the abolition of slavery, from the painful dilemma, whether to squander the surplus-product, lashed out of his niggers, entirely in champagne, or whether to reconvert a part of it into more niggers and more land.
In economic forms of society of the most different kinds, there occurs, not only simple reproduction, but, in varying degrees, reproduction on a progressively increasing scale. By degrees more is produced and more consumed, and consequently more products have to be converted into means of production. This process, however, does not present itself as accumulation of capital, nor as the function of a capitalist, so long as the labourer's means of production, and with them, his product and means of subsistence, do not confront him in the shape of capital. 33 Richard Jones, who died a few years ago, and was the successor of Malthus in the chair of Political Economy at Haileybury College, discusses this point well in the light of two important facts. Since the great mass of the Hindu population are peasants cultivating their land themselves, their products, their instruments of labour and means of subsistence never take --the shape of a fund saved from revenue, which fund has, therefore, gone through a previous process of accumulation. ? 34 On the other hand, the non-agricultural labourers in those provinces where the English rule has least disturbed the old system, are directly employed by the magnates, to whom a portion of the agricultural surplus-product is rendered in the shape of tribute or rent. One portion of this product is consumed by the magnates in kind, another is converted, for their use, by the labourers, into articles of luxury and such like things, while the rest forms the wages of the labourers, who own their implements of labour. Here, production and reproduction on a progressively increasing scale, go on their way without any intervention from that queer saint, that knight of the woeful countenance, the capitalist --abstainer. ?
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Section 4: Circumstances that, Independently of the Proportional Division of Surplus value into Capital and
Revenue, Determine the Amount of Accumulation. Degree of Exploitation of Labour-Power. Productivity of Labour. Growing Difference in Amount Between Capital Employed and Capital Consumed. Magnitude of Capital Advanced
The proportion in which surplus value breaks up into capital and revenue being given, the magnitude of the capital accumulated clearly depends on the absolute magnitude of the surplus value. Suppose that 80 per cent. were capitalised and 20 per cent. eaten up, the accumulated capital will be ? 2,400 or ? 200, according as the total surplus value has amounted to ? 3,000 or ? 500. Hence all the circumstances that determine the mass of surplus value operate to determine the magnitude of the accumulation. We sum them up once again, but only in so far as they afford new points of view in regard to accumulation.
It will be remembered that the rate of surplus value depends, in the first place, on the degree of exploitation of labour-power. Political Economy values this fact so highly, that it occasionally identifies the acceleration of accumulation due to increased productiveness of labour, with its acceleration due to increased exploitation of the labourer. 35 In the chapters on the production of surplus value it was constantly presupposed that wages are at least equal to the value of labour- power. Forcible reduction of wages below this value plays, however, in practice too important a part, for us not to pause upon it for a moment. It, in fact, transforms, within certain limits, the labourer's necessary consumption fund into a fund for the accumulation of capital.
--Wages,? says John Stuart Mill, --have no productive power; they are the price of a productive power. Wages do not contribute, along with labour, to the production of commodities, no more than the price of tools contributes along with the tools themselves. If labour could be had without purchase, wages might be dispensed with. ? 36
But if the labourers could live on air they could not be bought at any price. The zero of their cost is therefore a limit in a mathematical sense, always beyond reach, although we can always approximate more and more nearly to it. The constant tendency of capital is to force the cost of labour back towards this zero. A writer of the 18th century, often quoted already, the author of the --Essay on Trade and Commerce,? only betrays the innermost secret soul of English capitalism, when he declares the historic mission of England to be the forcing down of English wages to the level of the French and the Dutch. 37 With other things he says naively:
--But if our poor? (technical term for labourers) --will live luxuriously . . . then labour must, of course, be dear . . . When it is considered what luxuries the manufacturing populace consume, such as brandy, gin, tea, sugar, foreign fruit, strong beer, printed linens, snuff, tobacco, &c. ? 38
He quotes the work of a Northamptonshire manufacturer, who, with eyes squinting heavenward moans:
--Labour is one-third cheaper in France than in England; for their poor work hard, and fare hard, as to their food and clothing. Their chief diet is bread, fruit, herbs, roots, and dried fish; for they very seldom eat flesh; and when wheat is dear, they
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eat very little bread. ? 39 --To which may be added,? our essayist goes on, --that their drink is either water or other small liquors, so that they spend very little money. . . . These things are very difficult to be brought about; but they are not impracticable, since they have been effected both in France and in Holland. ? 40
Twenty years later, an American humbug, the baronised Yankee, Benjamin Thompson (alias Count Rumford) followed the same line of philanthropy to the great satisfaction of God and man. His --Essays? are a cookery book with receipts of all kinds for replacing by some succedaneum the ordinary dear food of the labourer. The following is a particularly successful receipt of this wonderful philosopher:
--5 lbs. of barleymeal, 71/2d. ; 5 lbs. of Indian corn, 61/4d. ; 3d. worth of red herring, 1d. salt, 1d. vinegar, 2d. pepper and sweet herbs, in all 203/4. ; make a soup for 64 men, and at the medium price of barley and of Indian corn . . . this soup may be provided at 1/4d. , the portion of 20 ounces. ? 41
With the advance of capitalistic production, the adulteration of food rendered Thompson's ideal superfluous. 42 At the end of the 18th and during the first ten years of the 19th century, the English farmers and landlords enforced the absolute minimum of wage, by paying the agricultural labourers less than the minimum in the form of wages, and the remainder in the shape of parochial relief. An example of the waggish way in which the English Dogberries acted in their --legal? fixing of a wages tariff:
--The squires of Norfolk had dined, says Mr. Burke, when they fixed the rate of wages; the squires of Berks evidently thought the labourers ought not to do so, when they fixed the rate of wages at Speenhamland, 1795. . . . There they decide that ? income (weekly) should be 3s. for a man,' when the gallon or half-peck loaf of 8 lbs. 11 oz. is at 1s. , and increase regularly till bread is 1s. 5d. ; when it is above that sum decrease regularly till it be at 2s. , and then his food should be 1/5 th less. ? 43
Before the Committee of Inquiry of the House of Lords, 1814, a certain A. Bennett, a large farmer, magistrate, poor-law guardian, and wage-regulator, was asked:
--Has any proportion of the value of daily labour been made up to the labourers out of the poors' rate? ? Answer: --Yes, it has; the weekly income of every family is made up to the gallon loaf (8 lbs. 11 oz. ), and 3d. per head! . . . The gallon loaf per week is what we suppose sufficient for the maintenance of every person in the family for the week; and the 3d. is for clothes, and if the parish think proper to find clothes; the 3d. is deducted. This practice goes through all the western part of Wiltshire, and, I believe, throughout the country. ? 44 --For years,? exclaims a bourgeois author of that time, --they (the farmers) have degraded a respectable class of their countrymen, by forcing them to have recourse to the workhouse . . . the farmer, while increasing his own gains, has prevented any accumulation on the part of his labouring dependents. ? 45
The part played in our days by the direct robbery from the labourer's necessary consumption fund in the formation of surplus value, and, therefore, of the accumulation fund of capital, the so-called domestic industry has served to show. (Ch. xv. , sect. 8, c. ) Further facts on this subject will be given later.
Although in all branches of industry that part of the constant capital consisting of instruments of labour must be sufficient for a certain number of labourers (determined by the magnitude of the undertaking), it by no means always necessarily increases in the same proportion as the quantity
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of labour employed.
In a factory, suppose that 100 labourers working 8 hours a day yield 800 working-hours. If the capitalist wishes to raise this sum by one half, he can employ 50 more workers; but then he must also advance more capital, not merely for wages, but for instruments of labour. But he might also let the 100 labourers work 12 hours instead of 8, and then the instruments of labour already to hand would be enough. These would then simply be more rapidly consumed. Thus additional labour, begotten of the greater tension of labour-power, can augment surplus-product and surplus value (i. e. , the subject-matter of accumulation), without corresponding augmentation in the constant part of capital.
In the extractive industries, mines, &c. , the raw materials form no part of the capital advanced. The subject of labour is in this case not a product of previous labour, but is furnished by Nature gratis, as in the case of metals, minerals, coal, stone, &c. In these cases the constant capital consists almost exclusively of instruments of labour, which can very well absorb an increased quantity of labour (day and night shifts of labourers, e. g. ). All other things being equal, the mass and value of the product will rise in direct proportion to the labour expended. As on the first day of production,. the original produce-formers, now turned into the creators of the material elements of capital - man and Nature - still work together. Thanks to the elasticity of labour-power, the domain of accumulation has extended without any previous enlargement of constant capital.
In agriculture the land under cultivation cannot be increased without the advance of more seed and manure. But this advance once made, the purely mechanical working of the soil itself produces a marvellous effect on the amount of the product. A greater quantity of labour, done by the same number of labourers as before, thus increases the fertility, without requiring any new advance in the instruments of labour. It is once again the direct action of man on Nature which becomes an immediate source of greater accumulation, without the intervention of any new capital.
Finally, in what is called manufacturing industry, every additional expenditure of labour presupposes a corresponding additional expenditure of raw materials, but not necessarily of instruments of labour. And as extractive industry and agriculture supply manufacturing industry with its raw materials and those of its instruments of labour, the additional product the former have created without additional advance of capital, tells also in favour of the latter.
General result: by incorporating with itself the two primary creators of wealth, labour-power and the land, capital acquires a power of expansion that permits it to augment the elements of its accumulation beyond the limits apparently fixed by its own magnitude, or by the value and the mass of the means of production, already produced, in which it has its being.
Another important factor in the accumulation of capital is the degree of productivity of social labour.
With the productive power of labour increases the mass of the products, in which a certain value, and, therefore, a surplus value of a given magnitude, is embodied. The rate of surplus value remaining the same or even falling, so long as it only falls more slowly, than the productive power of labour rises, the mass of the surplus-product increases. The division of this product into revenue and additional capital remaining the same, the consumption of the capitalist may, therefore, increase without any decrease in the fund of accumulation. The relative magnitude of the accumulation fund may even increase at the expense of the consumption fund, whilst the cheapening of commodities places at the disposal of the capitalist as many means of enjoyment as formerly, or even more than formerly. But hand-in-hand with the increasing productivity of labour, goes, as we have seen, the cheapening of the labourer, therefore a higher rate of surplus value, even when the real wages are rising. The latter never rise proportionally to the productive power of labour. The same value in variable capital therefore sets in movement more labour-
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power, and, therefore, more labour. The same value in constant capital is embodied in more means of production, i. e. , in more instruments of labour, materials of labour and auxiliary materials; it therefore also supplies more elements for the production both of use value and of value, and with these more absorbers of labour. The value of the additional capital, therefore, remaining the same or even diminishing, accelerated accumulation still takes place. Not only does the scale of reproduction materially extend, but the production of surplus value increases more rapidly than the value of the additional capital.
The development of the productive power of labour reacts also on the original capital already engaged in the process of production. A part of the functioning constant capital consists of instruments of labour, such as machinery, &c. , which are not consumed, and therefore not reproduced, or replaced by new ones of the same kind, until after long periods of time. But every year a part of these instruments of labour perishes or reaches the limit of its productive function. It reaches, therefore, in that year, the time for its periodical reproduction, for its replacement by new ones of the same kind. If the productiveness of labour has, during the using up of these instruments of labour, increased (and it develops continually with the uninterrupted advance of science and technology), more efficient and (considering their increased efficiency), cheaper machines, tools, apparatus, &c. , replace the old. The old capital is reproduced in a more productive form, apart from the constant detail improvements in the instruments of labour already in use. The other part of the constant capital, raw material and auxiliary substances, is constantly reproduced in less than a year; those produced by agriculture, for the most part annually. Every introduction of improved methods, therefore, works almost simultaneously on the new capital and on that already in action. Every advance in Chemistry not only multiplies the number of useful materials and the useful applications of those already known, thus extending with the growth of capital its sphere of investment. It teaches at the same time how to throw the excrements of the processes of production and consumption back again into the circle of the process of reproduction, and thus, without any previous outlay of capital, creates new matter for capital. Like the increased exploitation of natural wealth by the mere increase in the tension of labour- power, science and technology give capital a power of expansion independent of the given magnitude of the capital actually functioning. They react at the same time on that part of the original capital which has entered upon its stage of renewal. This, in passing into its new shape, incorporates gratis the social advance made while its old shape was being used up. Of course, this development of productive power is accompanied by a partial depreciation of functioning capital. So far as this depreciation makes itself acutely felt in competition, the burden falls on the labourer, in the increased exploitation of whom the capitalist looks for his indemnification.
Labour transmits to its product the value of the means of production consumed by it. On the other hand, the value and mass of the means of production set in motion by a given quantity of labour increase as the labour becomes more productive. Though the same quantity of labour adds always to its products only the same sum of new value, still the old capital value, transmitted by the labour to the products, increases with the growing productivity of labour.
An English and a Chinese spinner, e. g. , may work the same number of hours with the same intensity; then they will both in a week create equal values. But in spite of this equality, an immense difference will obtain between the value of the week's product of the Englishman, who works with a mighty automaton, and that of the Chinaman, who has but a spinning-wheel. In the same time as the Chinaman spins one pound of cotton, the Englishman spins several hundreds of pounds. A sum, many hundred times as great, of old values swells the value of his product, in which those re-appear in a new, useful form, and can thus function anew as capital.
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--In 1782,? as Frederick Engels teaches us, --all the wool crop in England of the three preceding years, lay untouched for want of labourers, and so it must have lain, if newly invented machinery had not come to its aid and spun it. ? 46
Labour embodied in the form of machinery of course did not directly force into life a single man, but it made it possible for a smaller number of labourers, with the addition of relatively less living labour, not only to consume the wool productively, and put into it new value, but to preserve in the form of yarn, &c. , its old value. At the same time, it caused and stimulated increased reproduction of wool. It is the natural property of living labour, to transmit old value, whilst it creates new. Hence, with the increase in efficacy, extent and value of its means of production, consequently with the accumulation that accompanies the development of its productive power, labour keeps up and eternises an always increasing capital value in a form ever new. ? 47 This natural power of labour takes the appearance of an intrinsic property of capital, in which it is incorporated, just as the productive forces of social labour take the appearance of inherent properties of capital, and as the constant appropriation of surplus labour by the capitalists, takes that of a constant self-expansion of capital.
With the increase of capital, the difference between the capital employed and the capital consumed increases. In other words, there is increase in the value and the material mass of the instruments of labour, such as buildings, machinery, drain-pipes, working-cattle, apparatus of every kind that function for a longer or shorter time in processes of production constantly repeated, or that serve for the attainment of particular useful effects, whilst they themselves only gradually wear out, therefore only lose their value piecemeal, therefore transfer that value to the product only bit by bit. In the same proportion as these instruments of labour serve as product- formers without adding value to the product, i. e. , in the same proportion as they are wholly employed but only partly consumed, they perform, as we saw earlier, the same gratuitous service as the natural forces, water, steam, air, electricity, etc. This gratuitous service of past labour, when seized and filled with a soul by living labour, increases with the advancing stages of accumulation.
Since past labour always disguises itself as capital, i. e. , since the passive of the labour of A, B, C, etc. , takes the form of the active of the non-labourer X, bourgeois and political economists are full of praises of the services of dead and gone labour, which, according to the Scotch genius MacCulloch, ought to receive a special remuneration in the shape of interest, profit, etc. 48 The powerful and ever-increasing assistance given by past labour to the living labour process under the form of means of production is, therefore, attributed to that form of past labour in which it is alienated, as unpaid labour, from the worker himself, i. e. , to its capitalistic form. The practical agents of capitalistic production and their pettifogging ideologists are as unable to think of the means of production as separate from the antagonistic social mask they wear today, as a slave- owner to think of the worker himself as distinct from his character as a slave.
With a given degree of exploitation of labour-power, the mass of the surplus value produced is determined by the number of workers simultaneously exploited; and this corresponds, although in varying proportions, with the magnitude of the capital. The more, therefore, capital increases by means of successive accumulations, the more does the sum of the value increase that is divided into consumption fund and accumulation fund. The capitalist can, therefore, live a more jolly life, and at the same time show more --abstinence. ? And, finally, all the springs of production act with greater elasticity, the more its scale extends with the mass of the capital advanced.
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Section 5: The So-Called Labour Fund
It has been shown in the course of this inquiry that capital is not a fixed magnitude, but is a part of social wealth, elastic and constantly fluctuating with the division of fresh surplus value into revenue and additional capital. It has been seen further that, even with a given magnitude of functioning capital, the labour-power, the science, and the land (by which are to be understood, economically, all conditions of labour furnished by Nature independently of man), embodied in it, form elastic powers of capital, allowing it, within certain limits, a field of action independent of its own magnitude. In this inquiry we have neglected all effects of the process of circulation, effects which may produce very different degrees of efficiency in the same mass of capital. And as we presupposed the limits set by capitalist production, that is to say, presupposed the process of social production in a form developed by purely spontaneous growth, we neglected any more rational combination, directly and systematically practicable with the means of production, and the mass of labour-power at present disposable. Classical economy always loved to conceive social capital as a fixed magnitude of a fixed degree of efficiency. But this prejudice was first established as a dogma by the arch-Philistine, Jeremy Bentham, that insipid, pedantic, leather- tongued oracle of the ordinary bourgeois intelligence of the 19th century. 49 Bentham is among philosophers what Martin Tupper is among poets. Both could only have been manufactured in England. 50 In the light of his dogma the commonest phenomena of the process of production, as, e. g. , its sudden expansions and contractions, nay, even accumulation itself, become perfectly inconceivable. 51The dogma was used by Bentham himself, as well as by Malthus, James Mill, MacCulloch, etc. , for an apologetic purpose, and especially in order to represent one part of capital, namely, variable capital, or that part convertible into labour-power, as a fixed magnitude. The material of variable capital, i. e. , the mass of the means of subsistence it represents for the labourer, or the so-called labour fund, was fabled as a separate part of social wealth, fixed by natural laws and unchangeable. To set in motion the part of social wealth which is to function as constant capital, or, to express it in a material form, as means of production, a definite mass of living labour is required. This mass is given technologically. But neither is the number of labourers required to render fluid this mass of labour-power given (it changes with the degree of exploitation of the individual labour-power), nor is the price of this labour-power given, but only its minimum limit, which is moreover very variable. The facts that lie at the bottom of this dogma are these: on the one hand, the labourer has no right to interfere in the division of social wealth into means of enjoyment for the non-labourer and means of production. 52 On the other hand, only in favourable and exceptional cases, has he the power to enlarge the so-called labour fund at the expense of the --revenue? of the wealthy.
What silly tautology results from the attempt to represent the capitalistic limits of the labour fund as its natural and social limits may be seen, e. g. , in Professor Fawcett. 53
--The circulating capital of a country,? he says, --is its wage-fund. Hence, if we desire to calculate the average money wages received by each labourer, we have simply to divide the amount of this capital by the number of the labouring population. ? 54
That is to say, we first add together the individual wages actually paid, and then we affirm that the sum thus obtained, forms the total value of the --labour fund? determined and vouchsafed to us by God and Nature. Lastly, we divide the sum thus obtained by the number of labourers to find out again how much may come to each on the average. An uncommonly knowing dodge this. It did not prevent Mr. Fawcett saying in the same breath:
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--The aggregate wealth which is annually saved in England, is divided into two portions; one portion is employed as capital to maintain our industry, and the other portion is exported to foreign countries. . . Only a portion, and perhaps, not a large portion of the wealth which is annually saved in this country, is invested in our own industry. 55
The greater part of the yearly accruing surplus-product, embezzled, because abstracted without return of an equivalent, from the English labourer, is thus used as capital, not in England, but in foreign countries. But with the additional capital thus exported, a part of the --labour fund? invented by God and Bentham is also exported. 56
1 --Accumulation of capital; the employment of a portion of revenue as capital. ? (Malthus: --Definitions, &c. ,? ed. Cazenove, p. 11. ) --Conversion of revenue into capital,? (Malthus: --Princ. of Pol. Econ -- 2nd Ed. , Lond. . 1836, p. 320. )
2 We here take no account of export trade, by means of which a nation can change articles of luxury either into means of production or means of subsistence, and vice versa`. In order to examine the object of our investigation in its integrity, free from all disturbing subsidiary circumstances, we must treat the whole world as one nation, and assume that capitalist production is everywhere established and has possessed itself of every branch of industry.
3 Sismondi's analysis of accumulation suffers from the great defect, that he contents himself, to too great an extent, with the phrase --conversion of revenue into capital,? without fathoming the material conditions of this operation.
4 --Le travail primitif auquel son capital a du^ sa naissance. ? [the original labour, to which his capital owed its origin] Sismondi, l. c. , ed. Paris, t. I. , p. 109.
5 --Labour creates capital before capital employs labour. ? E. G. Wakefield, --England and America,? Lond. , 1833, Vol. II, p. 110.
6 The property of the capitalist in the product of the labour of others --is a strict consequence of the law of appropriation, the fundamental principle of which was, on the contrary, the exclusive title of every labourer to the product of his own labour. ? (Cherbuliez, --Richesse ou Pauvrete? ,? Paris, 1841, p. 58, where, however, the dialectical reversal is not properly developed. )
7 The following passage (to p. 551 --laws of capitalist appropriation. ? ) has been added to the English text in conformity with the 4th German edition.
8 We may well, therefore, feel astonished at the cleverness Of Proudhon, who would abolish capitalistic property by enforcing the eternal laws of property that are based on commodity production!
9 --Capital, viz. , accumulated wealth employed with a view to profit. ? (Malthus, l. c. ) --Capital . . . consists of wealth saved from revenue, and used with a view to profit. ? (R. Jones: --An Introductory Lecture on Polit. Econ. ,? Lond. , 1833, p.
