From Marxists Internet Archive
Karl Marx. Capital Volume One
Part VII: The Accumulation of Capital
The conversion of a sum of money into means of production and labour-power,
is the first step taken by the quantum of value that is going to function as
capital. This conversion takes place in the market, within the sphere of
circulation. The second step, the process of production, is complete so soon as
the means of production have been converted into commodities whose value exceeds
that of their component parts, and, therefore, contains the capital originally
advanced, plus a surplus-value. These commodities must then be thrown into
circulation. They must be sold, their value realised in money, this money afresh
converted into capital, and so over and over again. This circular movement, in
which the same phases are continually gone through in succession, forms the
circulation of capital.
The first condition of accumulation is that the capitalist must have
contrived to sell his commodities, and to reconvert into capital the greater
part of the money so received. In the following pages we shall assume that
capital circulates in its normal way. The detailed analysis of the process will
be found in Book II.
The capitalist who produces surplus-value — i.e., who extracts
unpaid labour directly from the labourers, and fixes it in commodities, is,
indeed, the first appropriator, but by no means the ultimate owner, of this
surplus-value. He has to share it with capitalists, with landowners, &c.,
who fulfil other functions in the complex of social production. Surplus-value,
therefore, splits up into various parts. Its fragments fall to various
categories of persons, and take various forms, independent the one of the other,
such as profit, interest, merchants’ profit, rent, &c. It is only in Book
III. that we can take in hand these modified forms of surplus-value.
On the one hand, then, we assume that the capitalist sells at their value the
commodities he has produced, without concerning ourselves either about the new
forms that capital assumes while in the sphere of circulation, or about the
concrete conditions of reproduction hidden under these forms. On the other hand,
we treat the capitalist producer as owner of the entire surplus-value, or,
better perhaps, as the representative of all the sharers with him in the booty.
We, therefore, first of all consider accumulation from an abstract point of view
— i.e., as a mere phase in the actual process of production.
So far as accumulation takes place, the capitalist must have succeeded in
selling his commodities, and in reconverting the sale-money into capital.
Moreover, the breaking-up of surplus-value into fragments neither alters its
nature nor the conditions under which it becomes an element of accumulation.
Whatever be the proportion of surplus-value which the industrial capitalist
retains for himself, or yields up to others, he is the one who, in the first
instance, appropriates it. We, therefore, assume no more than what actually
takes place. On the other hand, the simple fundamental form of the process of
accumulation is obscured by the incident of the circulation which brings it
about, and by the splitting up of surplus-value. An exact analysis of the
process, therefore, demands that we should, for a time, disregard all phenomena
that hide the pity of its inner mechanism.
Chapter Twenty-Three: Simple Reproduction
Whatever the form of the process of production in a society, it must be a
continuous process, must continue to go periodically through the same phases. A
society can no more cease to produce than it can cease to consumer When viewed,
therefore, as a connected whole, and as flowing on with incessant renewal, every
social process of production is, at the same time, a process of reproduction.
The conditions of production are also those of reproduction. No society can
go on producing, in other words, no society can reproduce, unless it constantly
reconverts a part of its products into means of production, or elements of fresh
products. All other circumstances remaining the same, the only mode by which it
can reproduce its wealth, and maintain it at one level, is by replacing the
means of production — i.e., the instruments of labour, the raw
material, and the auxiliary substances consumed in the course of the year-by an
equal quantity of the same kind of articles; these must be separated from the
mass of the yearly products, and thrown afresh into the process of production.
Hence, a definite portion of each year’s product belongs to the domain of
production. Destined for productive consumption from the very first, this
portion exists, for the most part, in the shape of articles totally unfitted for
individual consumption.
If production be capitalistic in form, so, too, will be reproduction. Just as
in the former the labour-process figures but as a means towards the
self-expansion of capital, so in the latter it figures but as a means of
reproducing as capital — i.e., as self-expanding value — the value
advanced. It is only because his money constantly functions as capital that the
economic guise of a capitalist attaches to a man. If, for instance, a sum of £100
has this year been converted into capital. and produced a surplus-value of £20,
it must continue during next year, and subsequent years, to repeat the same
operation. As a periodic increment of the cap
ital advanced, or periodic fruit of capital in process, surplus-value acquires
the form of a revenue flowing out of capital. [1]
If this revenue serve the capitalist only as a fund to provide for his
consumption, and be spent as periodically as it is gained, then, caeteris
paribus, simple reproduction will take place. And although this
reproduction is a mere repetition of the process of production on the old scale,
yet this mere repetition, or continuity, gives a new character to the process,
or, rather, causes the disappearance of some apparent characteristics which it
possessed as an isolated discontinuous process.
The purchase of labour-power for a fixed period is the prelude to the process
of production; and this prelude is constantly repeated when the stipulated term
comes to an end, when a definite period of production, such as a week or a
month, has elapsed. But the labourer is not paid until after he has expended his
labour-power, and realised in commodities not only its value, but surplus-value.
He has, therefore, produced not only surplus-value, which we for the present
regard as a fund to meet the private consumption of the capitalist, but he has
also produced, before it flows back to him in the shape of wages, the fund out
of which he himself is paid, the variable capital; and his employment lasts only
so long as he continues to reproduce this fund. Hence, that formula of the
economists, referred to in Chapter XVIII,, which represents wages as a share in
the product itself. [2] What flows
back to the labourer in the shape of wages is a portion of the product that is
continuously reproduced by him. The capitalist, it is true, pays him in money,
but this money is merely the transmuted form of the product of his labour. While
he is converting a – portion of the means of production into products, a
portion of his former product is being turned into money. It is his labour of
last week, or of last year, that pays for his labour-power this week or this
year. The illusion begotten by the intervention
of money vanishes immediately, if, instead of taking a single capitalist and a
single labourer, we take the class of capitalists and the class of labourers as
a whole. The capitalist class is constantly giving to the labouring class
order-notes, in the form of money, on a portion of the commodities produced by
the latter and appropriated by the former. The labourers give these order-notes
back just as constantly to the capitalist class, and in this way get their share
of their own product. The transaction is veiled by the commodity-form of the
product and the money-form of the commodity.
Variable capital is therefore only a particular historical form of appearance
of the fund for providing the necessaries of life, or the labour-fund which the
labourer requires for the maintenance of himself and family, and which, whatever
be the system of social production, he must himself produce and reproduce. If
the labour-fund constantly flows to him in the form of money that pays for his
labour, it is because the product he has created moves constantly away from him
in the form of capital. But all this does not alter the fact, that it is the
labourer’s own labour, realised in a product, which is advanced to him by the
capitalist. [3] Let us take a peasant
liable to do compulsory service for his lord. He works on his own land, with his
own means of production, for, say, 3 days a week. The 3 other days he does
forced work on the lord’s domain. He constantly reproduces his own labour-fund,
which never, in his case, takes the form of a money payment for his labour,
advanced by another person. But in return, his unpaid forced labour for the
lord, on its side, never acquires the character of voluntary paid labour. If one
fine morning the lord appropriates to himself the land, the cattle, the seed, in
a word, the, means of production of this peasant, the latter will thenceforth be
obliged to sell his labour-power to the lord. He will, ceteris paribus,
labour 6 days a week as before, 3 for himself, 3 for his lord, who
thenceforth becomes a wages-paying capitalist. As before, he will use up the
means of production as means of production, and transfer their value to the
product. As before, a definite portion of the product will be devoted to
reproduction. But from the moment that the forced labour is changed into wage-labour,
from that moment the labour-fund, which the peasant himself
continues as before to produce and reproduce, takes the form of a capital
advanced in the form of wages by the lord. The bourgeois economist whose narrow
mind is unable to separate the form of appearance from the thing that appears,
shuts his eyes to the fact, that it is but here and there on the face of the
earth, that even now-a-days the labour-fund crops up in the form of capital. [4]
Variable capital, it is true, only then loses its character of a value
advanced out of the capitalist’s funds, [5]
when we view the process of capitalist production in the flow of its constant
renewal. But that process must have had a beginning of some kind. From our
present standpoint it therefore seems likely that the capitalist, once upon a
time, became possessed of money, by some accumulation that took place
independently of the unpaid labour of others, and that this was, therefore, how
he was enabled to frequent the market as a buyer of labour-power. However this
may be, the mere continuity of the process, the simple reproduction, brings
about some other wonderful changes, which affect not only the variable, but the
total capital.
If a capital of £1,000 beget yearly a surplus-value of £200, and if this
surplus-value be consumed every year, it is clear that at the end of 5 years the
surplus-value consumed will amount to 5 × £200 or the £1,000 originally
advanced. If only a part, say one half, were consumed, the same result would
follow at the end of 10 years, since 10 × £100= £1,000. General Rule: The
value of the capital advanced divided by the surplus-value annually consumed,
gives the number of years, or reproduction periods, at the expiration of which
the capital originally advanced has been consumed by the capitalist and has
disappeared. The capitalist thinks, that he is consuming the produce of the
unpaid labour of others, i.e., the surplus-value, and is keeping intact
his original capital; but what he thinks cannot alter facts. After the lapse of
a certain number of years, the capital value he then possesses is equal to the
sum total of the surplus-value appropriated by him during those years, and the
total value he has consumed is equal to that of his original capital. It is
true, he has in hand a capital whose amount has not changed, and of which a
part, viz., the buildings, machinery, &c., were already there when the work
of his business began. But what we have to do with here, is not the material
elements, but the value, of that capital. When a person gets through all his
property, by taking upon himself debts equal to the value of that property, it
is clear that his property represents nothing but the sum total of his debts.
And so it is with the capitalist; when he has consumed the equivalent of his
original capital, the value
of his present capital represents nothing but the total amount of the
surplus-value appropriated by him without payment. Not a single atom of the
value of his old capital continues to exist.
Apart then from all accumulation, the mere continuity of the process of
production, in other words simple reproduction, sooner or later, and of
necessity, converts every capital into accumulated capital, or capitalised
surplus-value. Even if that capital was originally acquired by the personal
labour of its employer, it sooner or later becomes value appropriated without an
equivalent, the unpaid labour of others materialised either in money or in some
other object. We saw in Chapt. IV.-VI. that in order to convert money into
capital something more is required than the production and circulation of
commodities. We saw that on the one side the possessor of value or money, on the
other, the possessor of the value-creating substance; on the one side, the
possessor of the means of production and subsistence, on the other, the
possessor of nothing but labour-power, must confront one another as buyer and
seller. The separation of labour from its product, of subjective labour-power
from the objective conditions of labour, was therefore the real foundation in
fact, and the starting-point of capitalist production.
But that which at first was but a starting-point, becomes, by the mere
continuity of the process, by simple reproduction, the peculiar result,
constantly renewed and perpetuated, of capitalist production. On the one hand,
the process of production incessantly converts material wealth into capital,
into means of creating more wealth and means of enjoyment for the capitalist. On
the other hand, the labourer, on quitting the process, is what he was on
entering it, a source of wealth, but devoid of all means of making that wealth
his own. Since, before entering on the process, his own labour has already been
alienated from himself by the sale of his labour-power, has been appropriated by
the capitalist and incorporated with capital, it must, during the process, be
realised in a product that does not belong to him. Since the process of
production is also the process by which the capitalist consumes labour-power,
the product of the labourer is incessantly converted, not only into commodities,
but into capital, into value that sucks up the value-creating power, into
means of subsistence that buy the person of the labourer, into means of
production that command the producers. [6]
The labourer therefore constantly produces material, objective wealth, but in
the form of capital, of an alien power that dominates and exploits him:
and the capitalist as constantly produces labour-power, but in the form of a
subjective source of wealth, separated from the objects in and by which it can
alone be realised; in short he produces the labourer, but as a wage-labourer. [7]
This incessant reproduction, this perpetuation of the labourer, is the sine quâ
non of capitalist production.
The labourer consumes in a two-told way. While producing he consumes by his
labour the means of production, and converts them into products with a higher
value than that of the capital advanced This is his productive consumption. It
is at the same time consumption of his labour-power by the capitalist who bought
it. On the other hand, the labourer turns the money paid to him for his labour-power,
into means of subsistence: this is his individual consumption. The labourer’s
productive consumption, and his individual consumption, are therefore totally
distinct. In the former, he acts as the motive power of capital, and belongs to
the capitalist. In the latter, he belongs to himself, and performs his necessary
vital functions outside the process of production. The result of the one is,
that the capitalist lives; of the other, that the labourer lives.
When treating of the working-day, we saw that the labourer is often compelled
to make his individual consumption a mere incident of production. In such a
case, he supplies himself with necessaries in order to maintain his labour-power,
just as coal and water are supplied to the steam-engine and oil to the wheel.
His means of consumption, in that case, are the mere means of consumption
required by a means of production; his individual consumption is directly
productive consumption. This, however, appears to be an abuse not essentially
appertaining to capitalist production. [8]
The matter takes quite another aspect, when we contemplate, not the single
capitalist, and the single labourer, but the capitalist class and the labouring
class, not an isolated process of production, but capitalist production in full
swing, and on its actual social scale. By converting part of his capital into
labour-power, the capitalist augments the value of his entire capital. He kills
two birds with one stone. He profits, not only by what he receives from, but by
what he gives to, the labourer.
The capital given in exchange for labour-power is converted into necessaries, by
the consumption of which the muscles, nerves, bones, and brains of existing
labourers are reproduced, and new labourers are begotten. Within the limits of
what is strictly necessary, the individual consumption of the working-class is,
therefore, the reconversion of the means of subsistence given by capital in
exchange for labour-power, into fresh labour-power at the disposal of capital
for exploitation. It is the production and reproduction of that means of
production so indispensable to the capitalist: the labourer himself. The
individual consumption of the labourer, whether it proceed within the workshop
or outside it, whether it be part of the process of production or not, forms
therefore a factor of the production and reproduction of capital; just as
cleaning machinery does, whether it be done while the machinery is working or
while it is standing. The fact that the labourer consumes his means of
subsistence for his own purposes, and not to please the capitalist, has no
bearing on the matter. The consumption of food by a beast of burden is none the
less a necessary factor in the process of production, because
the beast enjoys what it eats. The maintenance and reproduction of the
working-class is, and must ever be, a necessary condition to the reproduction of
capital. But the capitalist may safely leave its fulfilment to the labourer’s
instincts of self-preservation and of propagation. All the capitalist cares for,
is to reduce the labourer’s individual consumption as far as possible to what
is strictly necessary, and he is far away from imitating those brutal South
Americans, who force their labourers to take the more substantial, rather than
the less substantial, kind of food. [9]
Hence both the capitalist and his ideological representative, the political
economist, consider that part alone of the labourer’s individual consumption
to be productive, which is requisite for the perpetuation of the class, and
which therefore must take place in order that the capitalist may have labour-power
to consume; what the labourer consumes for his own pleasure beyond that part, is
unproductive consumption. [10] If
the accumulation of capital were to cause a rise of wages and an increase in the
labourer’s consumption, unaccompanied by increase in the consumption of labour-power
by capital, the additional capital
would be consumed unproductively. [11]
In reality, the individual consumption of the labourer is unproductive as
regards himself, for it reproduces nothing but the needy individual; it is
productive to the capitalist and to the State, since it is the production of the
power that creates their wealth. [12]
From a social point of view, therefore, the working-class, even when not
directly engaged in the labour-process, is just as much an appendage of capital
as the ordinary instruments of labour. Even its individual consumption is,
within certain limits, a mere factor in the process of production. That process,
however, takes good care to prevent these self-conscious instruments from
leaving it in the lurch, for it removes their product, as fast as it is made,
from their pole to the opposite pole of capital. Individual consumption
provides, on the one hand, the means for their maintenance and reproduction: on
the other hand, it secures by the annihilation of the necessaries of life, the
continued re-appearance of the workman in the labour-market. The Roman slave was
held by fetters: the wage-labourer is bound to his owner by invisible threads.
The appearance of independence is kept up by means of a constant change of
employers, and by the fictio juris of a contract.
In former times, capital resorted to legislation, whenever necessary, to
enforce its proprietary rights over the free labourer. For instance, down to
1815, the emigration of mechanics employed in machine making was, in England,
forbidden, under grievous pains and penalties.
The reproduction of the working-class carries with it the accumulation of
skill, that is handed down from one generation to another. [13]
To what extent the capitalist reckons the existence of such a skilled class
among the factors of production that belong to him by right, and to what extent
he actually regards it as the reality of his variable capital, is seen so soon
as a crisis threatens him with its loss. In consequence of the civil war in the
United States and of the accompanying cotton famine, the majority of the cotton
operatives in Lancashire were, as is well known, thrown out of work. Both from
the working-class itself, and from other ranks
of society, there arose a cry for State aid, or for voluntary national
subscriptions, in order to enable the “superfluous” hands to emigrate to the
colonies or to the United States. Thereupon, The Times published on the
24th March, 1863, a letter from Edmund Potter, a former president of the
Manchester Chamber of Commerce. This letter was rightly called in the House of
Commons, the manufacturers’ manifesto. [14]
We cull here a few characteristic passages, in which the proprietary rights of
capital over labour-power are unblushingly asserted.
“He” (the man out of work) “may be told the supply of
cotton-workers is too large ... and ... must ... in fact be reduced by a third,
perhaps, and that then there will be a healthy demand for the remaining
two-thirds.... Public opinion... urges emigration.... The master cannot
willingly see his labour supply being removed; he may think, and perhaps justly,
that it is both wrong and unsound.... But if the public funds are to be devoted
to assist emigration, he bas a right to be heard, and perhaps to protest.”
Mr. Potter then shows how useful the cotton trade is, how the “trade has
undoubtedly drawn the surplus-population from Ireland and from the agricultural
districts,” how immense is its extent, how in the year 1860 it yielded 5/13
ths of the total English exports, how, after a few years, it will again expand
by the extension of the market, particularly of the Indian market, and by
calling forth a plentiful supply of cotton at 6d. per lb. He then continues:
“Some time ...,one, two, or three years, it may be, will
produce the quantity.... The question I would put then is this
— Is the trade worth retaining? Is it worth while to keep the machinery (he
means the living labour machines) in order, and is it not the greatest folly to
think of parting with that? I think it is. I allow that the workers are not a
property, not the property of Lancashire and the masters; but they are the
strength of both; they are the mental and trained power which cannot be.
replaced for a generation; the mere machinery which they work might much of it
be beneficially replaced, nay improved, in a twelvemonth [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 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 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 bondage [18]
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]
Footnotes
1.
“Mais ces riches, qui consomment les produits du travail des autres, ne
peuvent les obtenir que par des échanges [purchases of commodities]. S’ils
donnent cependant leur richesse acquise et accumulée en retour contre ces
produits nouveaux qui sont l’objet de leur fantaisie, ils semblent exposés à
épuiser bientôt leur fonds de réserve; ils ne travaillent point, avons-nous
dit, et ils ne peuvent même travailler; on croirait donc que chaque jour doit
voir diminuer leurs vieilles richesses, et que lorsqu’il ne leur en restera
plus, rien ne sera offert en échange aux ouvriers qui travaillent exclusivement
pour eux.... Mais dans l’ordre social, la richesse a acquis la propriété de
se reproduire par le travail d’autrui, et sans que son propriétaire y
concoure. La richesse, comme le travail, et par le travail, donne un fruit
annuel qui peut être détruit chaque année sans que le riche en devienne plus
pauvre. Ce fruit est le revenu qui naît du capital.” [The
rich, who consume the labour of others, can only obtain them by making exchanges
... By giving away their acquired and accumulated wealth in exchange for the new
products which are the object of their capricious wishes, they seem to be
exposed to an early exhaustion of their reserve fund; we have already said that
they do not work and are unable to work; therefore it could be assumed with full
justification that their former wealth would be diminishing with every day and
that, finally, a day would come when they would have nothing, and they would
have nothing to offer to the workers, who work exclusively for them. ... But, in
the social order, wealth has acquired the power of reproducing itself through
the labour of others, without the help of its owners. Wealth, like labour, and
by means of labour, bears fruit every year, but this fruit can be destroyed
every year without making the rich man any poorer thereby. This fruit is the revenue
which arises our of capital.] (Sismondi: “Nouv. Princ. d’Econ.
Pol.” Paris, 1819, t. I, pp. 81-82.)
2.
“Wages as well as profits are to be considered, each of them, as really a
portion of the finished product.” (Ramsay, l. c., p. 142.) “The share of the
product which comes to the labourer in the form of wages.” (J. Mill, “Eléments,
&c.” Translated by Parissot. Paris, 1823, p. 34.)
3.
“When capital is employed in advancing to the workman his wages, it adds
nothing to the funds for the maintenance of labour.” (Cazenove in note to his
edition of Malthus’ “Definitions in Pol. Econ.” London, 1853, p. 22.)
4.
“The wages of labour are advanced by capitalists in the case of less than one
fourth of the labourers of the earth.” (Rich. Jones: “Textbook of Lectures
on the Pol. Econ. of Nations.” Hertford, 1852, p. 36.)
5.
“Though the manufacturer” (i.e., the labourer) “has his wages advanced to
him by his master, he in reality costs him no expense, the value of these wages
being generally reserved, together with a profit, in the improved value of the
subject upon which his labour is bestowed.” (A. Smith, l. c., Book II.. ch.
III, p. 311.)
6.
“This is a remarkably peculiar property of productive labour. Whatever is
productively consumed is capital and it becomes capital by consumption.”
(James Mill, l. c., p. 242.) James Mill, however, never got on the track of this
“remarkably peculiar property.”
7.
“It is true indeed, that the first introducing a manufacture employs many
poor, but they cease not to be so, and the continuance of it makes many.”
(“Reasons for a Limited Exportation of Wool.” London, 1677, p. 19.) “The
farmer now absurdly asserts, that he keeps the poor. They are indeed kept in
misery.” (“Reasons for the Late Increase of the Poor Rates: or a Comparative
View of the Prices of labour and Provisions.” London, 1777, p. 31.)
8.
Rossi would not declaim so emphatically against this, had lie 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 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.
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