)
6 --This is a remarkably peculiar property of productive labour.
6 --This is a remarkably peculiar property of productive labour.
Marx - Capital-Volume-I
urges emigration.
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The master cannot willingly see his labour supply being removed; he may think, and perhaps justly, that it is both wrong and unsound.
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But if the public funds are to be devoted to assist emigration, he bas a right to be heard, and perhaps to protest.
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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 15 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
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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. '16 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
? 401 Chapter 23
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. 17 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 bondage18 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. 19
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. 20
1 --Mais ces riches, qui consomment les produits du travail des autres, ne peuvent les obtenir que par des e? changes [purchases of commodities]. S'ils donnent cependant leur richesse acquise et accumule? e en retour contre ces produits nouveaux qui sont l'objet de leur fantaisie, ils semblent expose? s a` e? puiser biento^t leur fonds de re? serve; ils ne travaillent point, avons-nous dit, et ils ne peuvent me^me 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 e? change aux ouvriers qui travaillent exclusivement pour eux. . . . Mais dans l'ordre social, la richesse a acquis la proprie? te? de se reproduire par le travail d'autrui, et sans que son proprie? taire y concoure. La richesse, comme le travail, et par le travail, donne un fruit annuel qui peut e^tre de? truit chaque anne? e sans que le riche en devienne plus pauvre. Ce fruit est le revenu qui nai^t 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, --Ele? ments, &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,
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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 broad 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
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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.
? ? Chapter 24: Conversion of Surplus value into Capital
Section 1: Capitalist Production on a Progressively Increasing Scale. Transition of the Laws of Property that Characterise
Production of Commodities into Laws of Capitalist Appropriation
Hitherto we have investigated how surplus value emanates from capital; we have now to see how capital arises from surplus value. Employing surplus value as capital, reconverting it into capital, is called accumulation of capital. 1
First let us consider this transaction from the standpoint of the individual capitalist. Suppose a spinner to have advanced a capital of ? 10,000, of which four-fifths (? 8,000) are laid out in cotton, machinery, &c. , and one-fifth (? 2,000) in wages. Let him produce 240,000 lbs. of yarn annually, having a value of ? 2,000. The rate of surplus value being 100%, the surplus value lies in the surplus or net product of 40,000 lbs. of yarn, one-sixth of the gross product, with a value of ? 2,000 which will be realised by a sale. ? 2,000 is ? 2,000. We can neither see nor smell in this sum of money a trace of surplus value. When we know that a given value is surplus value, we know how its owner came by it; but that does not alter the nature either of value or of money.
In order to convert this additional sum of ? 2,000 into capital, the master-spinner will, all circumstances remaining as before, advance four-fifths of it (? 1,600) in the purchase of cotton, &c. , and one-fifth (? 400) in the purchase of additional spinners, who will find in the market the necessaries of life whose value the master has advanced to them.
Then the new capital of ? 2,000 functions in the spinning mill, and brings in, in its turn, a surplus value of ? 400.
The capital value was originally advanced in the money form. The surplus value on the contrary is, originally, the value of a definite portion of the gross product. If this gross product be sold, converted into money, the capital value regains its original form. From this moment the capital value and the surplus value are both of them sums of money, and their reconversion into capital takes place in precisely the same way. The one, as well as the other, is laid out by the capitalist in the purchase of commodities that place him in a position to begin afresh the fabrication of his goods, and this time, on an extended scale. But in order to be able to buy those commodities, he must find them ready in the market.
His own yarns circulate, only because he brings his annual product to market, as all other capitalists likewise do with their commodities. But these commodities, before coming to market, were part of the general annual product, part of the total mass of objects of every kind, into which the sum of the individual capitals, i. e. , the total capital of society, had been converted in the course of the year, and of which each capitalist had in hand only an aliquot part. The transactions in the market effectuate only the interchange of the individual components of this annual product, transfer them from one hand to another, but can neither augment the total annual production, nor alter the nature of the objects produced. Hence the use that can be made of the total annual product, depends entirely upon its own composition, but in no way upon circulation.
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The annual production must in the first place furnish all those objects (use values) from which the material components of capital, used up in the course of the year, have to be replaced. Deducting these there remains the net or surplus-product, in which the surplus value lies. And of what does this surplus-product consist? Only of things destined to satisfy the wants and desires of the capitalist class, things which, consequently, enter into the consumption fund of the capitalists? Were that the case, the cup of surplus value would be drained to the very dregs, and nothing but simple reproduction would ever take place.
To accumulate it is necessary to convert a portion of the surplus-product into capital. But we cannot, except by a miracle, convert into capital anything but such articles as can be employed in the labour process (i. e. , means of production), and such further articles as are suitable for the sustenance of the labourer (i. e. , means of subsistence). Consequently, a part of the annual surplus labour must have been applied to the production of additional means of production and subsistence, over and above the quantity of these things required to replace the capital advanced. In one word, surplus value is convertible into capital solely because the surplus-product, whose value it is, already comprises the material elements of new capital. 2
Now in order to allow of these elements actually functioning as capital, the capitalist class requires additional labour. If the exploitation of the labourers already employed do not increase, either extensively or intensively, then additional labour-power must be found. For this the mechanism of capitalist production provides beforehand, by converting the working class into a class dependent on wages, a class whose ordinary wages suffice, not only for its maintenance, but for its increase. It is only necessary for capital to incorporate this additional labour-power, annually supplied by the working class in the shape of labourers of all ages, with the surplus means of production comprised in the annual produce, and the conversion of surplus value into capital is complete. From a concrete point of view, accumulation resolves itself into the reproduction of capital on a progressively increasing scale. The circle in which simple reproduction moves, alters its form, and, to use Sismondi's expression, changes into a spiral. 3
Let us now return to our illustration. It is the old story: Abraham begat Isaac, Isaac begat Jacob, and so on. The original capital of ? 10,000 brings in a surplus value of ?
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 15 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
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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. '16 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
? 401 Chapter 23
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. 17 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 bondage18 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. 19
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. 20
1 --Mais ces riches, qui consomment les produits du travail des autres, ne peuvent les obtenir que par des e? changes [purchases of commodities]. S'ils donnent cependant leur richesse acquise et accumule? e en retour contre ces produits nouveaux qui sont l'objet de leur fantaisie, ils semblent expose? s a` e? puiser biento^t leur fonds de re? serve; ils ne travaillent point, avons-nous dit, et ils ne peuvent me^me 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 e? change aux ouvriers qui travaillent exclusivement pour eux. . . . Mais dans l'ordre social, la richesse a acquis la proprie? te? de se reproduire par le travail d'autrui, et sans que son proprie? taire y concoure. La richesse, comme le travail, et par le travail, donne un fruit annuel qui peut e^tre de? truit chaque anne? e sans que le riche en devienne plus pauvre. Ce fruit est le revenu qui nai^t 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, --Ele? ments, &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,
? ? 402 Chapter 23
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 broad 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
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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.
? ? Chapter 24: Conversion of Surplus value into Capital
Section 1: Capitalist Production on a Progressively Increasing Scale. Transition of the Laws of Property that Characterise
Production of Commodities into Laws of Capitalist Appropriation
Hitherto we have investigated how surplus value emanates from capital; we have now to see how capital arises from surplus value. Employing surplus value as capital, reconverting it into capital, is called accumulation of capital. 1
First let us consider this transaction from the standpoint of the individual capitalist. Suppose a spinner to have advanced a capital of ? 10,000, of which four-fifths (? 8,000) are laid out in cotton, machinery, &c. , and one-fifth (? 2,000) in wages. Let him produce 240,000 lbs. of yarn annually, having a value of ? 2,000. The rate of surplus value being 100%, the surplus value lies in the surplus or net product of 40,000 lbs. of yarn, one-sixth of the gross product, with a value of ? 2,000 which will be realised by a sale. ? 2,000 is ? 2,000. We can neither see nor smell in this sum of money a trace of surplus value. When we know that a given value is surplus value, we know how its owner came by it; but that does not alter the nature either of value or of money.
In order to convert this additional sum of ? 2,000 into capital, the master-spinner will, all circumstances remaining as before, advance four-fifths of it (? 1,600) in the purchase of cotton, &c. , and one-fifth (? 400) in the purchase of additional spinners, who will find in the market the necessaries of life whose value the master has advanced to them.
Then the new capital of ? 2,000 functions in the spinning mill, and brings in, in its turn, a surplus value of ? 400.
The capital value was originally advanced in the money form. The surplus value on the contrary is, originally, the value of a definite portion of the gross product. If this gross product be sold, converted into money, the capital value regains its original form. From this moment the capital value and the surplus value are both of them sums of money, and their reconversion into capital takes place in precisely the same way. The one, as well as the other, is laid out by the capitalist in the purchase of commodities that place him in a position to begin afresh the fabrication of his goods, and this time, on an extended scale. But in order to be able to buy those commodities, he must find them ready in the market.
His own yarns circulate, only because he brings his annual product to market, as all other capitalists likewise do with their commodities. But these commodities, before coming to market, were part of the general annual product, part of the total mass of objects of every kind, into which the sum of the individual capitals, i. e. , the total capital of society, had been converted in the course of the year, and of which each capitalist had in hand only an aliquot part. The transactions in the market effectuate only the interchange of the individual components of this annual product, transfer them from one hand to another, but can neither augment the total annual production, nor alter the nature of the objects produced. Hence the use that can be made of the total annual product, depends entirely upon its own composition, but in no way upon circulation.
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The annual production must in the first place furnish all those objects (use values) from which the material components of capital, used up in the course of the year, have to be replaced. Deducting these there remains the net or surplus-product, in which the surplus value lies. And of what does this surplus-product consist? Only of things destined to satisfy the wants and desires of the capitalist class, things which, consequently, enter into the consumption fund of the capitalists? Were that the case, the cup of surplus value would be drained to the very dregs, and nothing but simple reproduction would ever take place.
To accumulate it is necessary to convert a portion of the surplus-product into capital. But we cannot, except by a miracle, convert into capital anything but such articles as can be employed in the labour process (i. e. , means of production), and such further articles as are suitable for the sustenance of the labourer (i. e. , means of subsistence). Consequently, a part of the annual surplus labour must have been applied to the production of additional means of production and subsistence, over and above the quantity of these things required to replace the capital advanced. In one word, surplus value is convertible into capital solely because the surplus-product, whose value it is, already comprises the material elements of new capital. 2
Now in order to allow of these elements actually functioning as capital, the capitalist class requires additional labour. If the exploitation of the labourers already employed do not increase, either extensively or intensively, then additional labour-power must be found. For this the mechanism of capitalist production provides beforehand, by converting the working class into a class dependent on wages, a class whose ordinary wages suffice, not only for its maintenance, but for its increase. It is only necessary for capital to incorporate this additional labour-power, annually supplied by the working class in the shape of labourers of all ages, with the surplus means of production comprised in the annual produce, and the conversion of surplus value into capital is complete. From a concrete point of view, accumulation resolves itself into the reproduction of capital on a progressively increasing scale. The circle in which simple reproduction moves, alters its form, and, to use Sismondi's expression, changes into a spiral. 3
Let us now return to our illustration. It is the old story: Abraham begat Isaac, Isaac begat Jacob, and so on. The original capital of ? 10,000 brings in a surplus value of ?
