 CHAPTER XXI. VOLUME I. BY CARL MARX. TRANSLATED FROM THE THIRD GERMAN EDITION BY SAMUEL MOORE AND EDWARD AVELING AND EDITED BY FREDERICK ANGELS. CHAPTER XXII. NATIONAL DIFFERENCES OF WAGES. In the seventeenth chapter we were occupied with the manifold combinations which may bring about a change in magnitude of the value of labor power, this magnitude being considered either absolutely or relatively, i.e. as compared with surplus value, whilst on the other hand the quantum of the means of subsistence in which the price of labor is realized might again undergo fluctuations independent of, or different from, the changes of this price. FOOT NOTE. IT IS NOT ACCURATE TO SAY THAT WAGES, HE DEALS HERE WITH THEIR MONEY EXPRESSION, ARE INCREASED BECAUSE THEY PURCHASE MORE OF A CHEAPER ARTICLE. DAVID BUCHANON IN HIS EDITION OF ADAM SMITH'S WEALTH OF NATIONS, 1814, VOLUME I, PAGE 417, END NOTE. As has been already said, the simple translation of the value, or respectively of the price of labor power, into the exoteric form of wages, transforms all these laws into the laws of the fluctuations of wages. That which appears in these fluctuations of wages within a single country, as a series of varying combinations, may appear in different countries as contemporaneous difference of national wages. In the comparison of the wages in different nations, we must therefore take into account all the factors that determine changes in the amount of the value of labor power. The price and the extent of the prime necessaries of life, as naturally and historically developed, the cost of training the laborers, the part played by the labor of women and children, the productiveness of labor, its extensive and intensive magnitude. Even the most superficial comparison requires the reduction first of the average day wage for the same trades in different countries to a uniform working day. Under this reduction to the same terms of the day wages, time wage must again be translated into piece wage, as the latter only can be a measure both of the productivity and the intensity of labor. In every country there is a certain average intensity of labor below which the labor for the production of a commodity requires more than the socially necessary time, and therefore does not recognize labor of normal quality. Only a degree of intensity above the national average affects, in a given country, the measure of value by the mere duration of the working time. This is not the case on the universal market, whose integral parts are the individual countries. The average intensity of labor changes from country to country. Here it is greater, there less. These national averages form a scale, whose unit of measure is the average unit of universal labor. The more intense national labor, therefore, as compared with the less intense, produces in the same time more value, which expresses itself in more money. But the law of value in its international application is yet more modified by the fact that on the world market the more productive national labor reckons also as the more intense, so long as the more productive nation is not compelled by competition to lower the selling price of its commodities to the level of their value. In proportion as capitalist production is developed in a country, in the same proportion do the national intensity and productivity of labor there rise above the international level. The different quantities of commodities of the same kind produced in different countries in the same working time have, therefore, unequal international values, which are expressed in different prices, i.e., in sums of money varying according to international values. The relative value of money will, therefore, be less in the nation with more developed capitalist mode of production than in the nation with less developed. It follows, then, that the nominal wages, the equivalent of labor power expressed in money, will also be higher in the first nation than in the second, which does not at all prove that this holds also for the real wages, i.e., for the means of subsistence placed at the disposal of the laborer. We shall inquire in another place what circumstances in relation to productivity may modify this law for individual branches of industry. But even apart from these relative differences of the value of money in different countries, it will be found frequently that the daily or weekly, etc., wage in the first nation is higher than in the second, whilst the relative price of labor, i.e., the price of labor as compared both with surplus value and with the value of the product, stands higher in the second than in the first. James Anderson remarks in his polemic against Adam Smith. It deserves likewise to be remarked that, although the apparent price of labor is usually lower in poor countries, where the produce of the soil and grain in general is cheap, yet it is, in fact, for the most part really higher than in other countries. For it is not the wages that is given to the laborer per day that constitutes the real price of labor, although it is its apparent price. The real price is that which a certain quantity of work performed actually costs the employer, and considered in this light labor is, in almost all cases, cheaper in rich countries than in those that are poorer, although the price of grain and other provisions is usually much lower in the last than in the first. Labor estimated by the day is much lower in Scotland than in England. Labor by the piece is generally cheaper in England. James Anderson observations on the means of exciting a spirit of national industry, et cetera, Edinburgh, 1777, pages 350 and 351. On the contrary, lowness of wages produces, in its turn, dearness of labor. Labor being dearer in Ireland than it is in England, because the wages are so much lower. Note 2079 in Royal Commission on Railways, minutes, 1867. End note. Member of the Factory Commission of 1833, after careful investigation of the spinning trade, came to the conclusion that, in England, wages are virtually lower to the capitalist, though higher to the operative than on the continent of Europe. Note, Urey, Opsite, page 314. End note. The English factory inspector, Alexander Redgrave, in his report of 31st October, 1866, proves by comparative statistics with continental states that, in spite of lower wages and much longer working time, continental labor is, in proportion to the product, dearer than English. An English manager of a cotton factory in Oldenburg declares that the working time there lasted from 5.30 a.m. to 8.00 p.m., Saturdays included, and that the work people there, and under English overlookers, did not supply, during this time, quite so much product as the English in 10 hours, but under German overlookers, much less. Wages are much lower than in England, in many cases 50%, but the number of hands in proportion to the machinery was much greater, in certain departments in the proportion of 5 to 3. Mr. Redgrave gives very full details as to the Russian cotton factories. The data were given, Tim, by an English manager, until recently employed there. On this Russian soil, so fruitful of all infamies, the old horrors of the early days of English factories are in full swing. The managers are, of course, English, as the native Russian capitalist is of no use in factory business. Despite all overwork, continued day and night, despite the most shameful underpayment of the work people, Russian manufacture manages to vegetate only by prohibition of foreign competition. I give in conclusion a comparative table of Mr. Redgrave's, on the average number of spindles per factory and per spinner in the different countries of Europe. He himself remarks that he had collected these figures a few years ago, and that since that time the size of the factories and the number of spindles per laborer in England has increased. He supposes, however, an approximately equal progress in the continental countries mentioned, so that the numbers given would still have their value for purposes of comparison. Average number of spindles per factory, England, 12,600, France, 1,500, Prussia, 1,500, Belgium, 4,000, Saxony, 4,500, Austria, 7,000, Switzerland, 8,000. Average number of persons employed to spindles, France, 1 to 14 spindles. Russia, 1 to 28 spindles. Prussia, 1 to 37 spindles. Bavaria, 1 to 46 spindles. Austria, 1 to 49 spindles. Belgium, 1 to 50 spindles. Saxony, 1 to 50 spindles. Switzerland, 1 to 55 spindles. Smaller states of Germany, 1 to 55 spindles. Great Britain, 1 to 74 spindles. This comparison, says Mr. Redgrave, is yet more unfavorable to Great Britain in as much as there is so large a number of factories in which weaving by power is carried on in conjunction with spinning. Whilst in the table the weavers are not deducted, and the factories abroad are chiefly spinning factories, if it were possible to compare like with like, strictly, I could find many cotton spinning factories in my district in which mules containing 2,200 spindles are mined by one man, the minder, and two assistants only, turning off daily 220 pounds of yarn, measuring 400 miles in length. Footnote, reports of the inspectors of factories 31st October, 1866, pages 31 through 37. It is well known that in Eastern Europe, as well as in Asia, English companies have undertaken the construction of railways, and have in making them employed side by side with the native laborers a certain number of English working men. Compelled by practical necessity, they thus have had to take into account the national difference in the intensity of labor, but this has brought them no loss. Their experience shows that even if the height of wages corresponds more or less with the average intensity of labor, the relative price of labor varies generally in the inverse direction. In an essay on the rate of wages, one of his first economic writings, H. Carey tries to prove that the wages of the different nations are directly proportional to the degree of productiveness of the national working days. In order to draw from this international relation, the conclusion that wages everywhere rise and fall in proportion to the productiveness of labor. The whole of our analysis of the production of surplus value shows the absurdity of this conclusion, even if Carey himself had proved his premises instead of, after his usual uncritical and superficial fashion, shuffling to and fro a confused mass of statistical materials. The best of it is that he does not assert that things actually are as they ought to be according to his theory. For state intervention has falsified the natural economic relations. The different national wages must be reckoned, therefore, as if that part of each that goes to the state in the form of taxes came to the laborer himself. Ought not Mr. Carey to consider further whether those state expenses are not the natural fruits of capitalistic development? The reasoning is quite worthy of the man who first declared the relations of capitalist production to be eternal laws of nature and reason, whose free, harmonious working is only disturbed by the intervention of the state in order afterwards to discover that the diabolical influence of England on the world market and influence which it appears does not spring from the natural laws of capitalist production necessitates state intervention, i.e., the protection of those laws of nature and reason by the state, alias the system of protection. He discovered further that the theorems of Ricardo and others in which existing social antagonisms and contradictions are formulated are not the ideal product of the real economic movement, but on the contrary, that the real antagonisms of capitalist production in England and elsewhere are the result of the theories of Ricardo and others. Finally he discovered that it is, in the last resort, commerce that destroys the inborn beauties and harmonies of the capitalist mode of production. A step further, and he will, perhaps, discover that the one evil in capitalist production is capital itself. Only a man with such atrocious want of the critical faculty and such spurious erudition deserved in spite of his protectionist heresy to become the secret source of the harmonious wisdom of Abassiat and of all the other free trade optimists of today. Footnote. Essay on the rate of wages with an examination of the causes of the difference in the condition of the laboring population throughout the world. Philadelphia, 1835. End of Chapter 22. Chapter 23 of Capital Volume 1. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org, recording by Anna Simon. Capital, a critical analysis of capitalist production. Volume 1 by Karl Marx. Translated from the third German edition by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling and edited by Frederick Engels. Part 7, The Accumulation of Capital. The conversion of a sum of money into a means of production and labor 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 realized 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 two. The capitalist who produces surplus value, that is, who extracts unpaid labor directly from the laborers 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, et cetera, who fulfill 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 to one of the other, such as profit, interest, merchants profit, rent, et cetera. It is only in book three 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, that is, 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 shoot for a time disregard all phenomena that hide the pity of its inner mechanism. Chapter 23, simple reproduction. Whatever the form of the process of production in a society, it must be a continuous process, must continue to go periodically through the same phases. A society can no more cease to produce than it can cease to consume. When viewed therefore as a connected whole and as flowing on with incessant renewal, every social process of production is at the same time a process of reproduction. The conditions of production are also those of reproduction. No society can go on producing. In other words, no society can reproduce unless it constantly reconverts a part of its products into means of production or elements of fresh products. All other circumstances remaining the same, the only mode by which it can reproduce its wealth and maintain it at one level is by replacing the means of production, i.e. the instruments of labor, 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 labor 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, that is, 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 pounds has this year been converted into capital and produced a surplus value of 20 pounds, it must continue during next year and subsequent years to repeat the same operation. As a periodic increment of the capital advanced or periodic fruit of capital and process, surplus value acquires the form of a revenue flowing out of capital. Footnote. But it is rich, which consumes the product of the labor of others can only be obtained by trade-offs. If they spend their wealth acquired and accumulated in return against these new products which are the object of fantasy, they seem to be exposed to abuse soon the reserve fund. They do not have a point, before we were told, and they cannot be sold. We would therefore believe that each day must have to reduce the old wealth and that when it will no longer yield it, nothing will be offered to the workers who work exclusively for them. But in the social order, wealth has acquired the property of reproducing itself by the labor of others and without its owner being conquered. The wealth, like the labor and by the labor, gives annual fruit which may be destroyed every year without the wealth becoming poorer. This fruit has come from the capital. This world is the new principle of political economy. Paris, 1819, Volume I, page 81 and 82. And footnote. If this revenue serves the capitalist only as a fund to provide for his consumption and be spent as periodically as it is gained, then, caterers, paribas, 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 labor 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 laborer is not paid until after he has expended his labor power and realized 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 is 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 18 which represents wages as a share in the product itself. Footnote. Quote, wages as well as profits are to be considered, each of them as really a portion of the finished product. End quote. Ramsey, Lococitato page 142. Quote, the share of the product which comes to the laborer in the form of wages. End quote. J. Mill, Elements, et cetera. Translated by Parison, Paris, 1823, page 34. End footnote. What flows back to the laborer in the shape of wages is a portion of the product that is continuously reproduced by him. The capitalist that is true pays him in money but this money is merely the transmuted form of the product of his labor. 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 labor of last week or of last year that pays for his labor 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 laborer, we take the class of capitalists and the class of laborers as a whole. The capitalist class is constantly giving to the laborer in class order notes in the form of money on a portion of the commodities produced by the letter and appropriated by the former. The laborers 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 labor fund which the laborer 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 labor fund constantly flows to him in the form of money that pays for his labor, 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 laborers own labor realized in a product which is advanced to him by the capitalist. Footnote quote, When capital is employed in advancing to the workmen his wages, it adds nothing to the funds for the maintenance of labor. End quote. Kazanov in note to his edition of Malthus definitions in political economy, London 1853, page 22, end footnote. 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 three days week. The three other days he does forced work on the lord's domain. He constantly reproduces his own labor fund which never in his case takes the form of a money payment for his labor advanced by another person. But in return his unpaid forced labor for the lord on its side never acquires the character of voluntary paid labor. If one fine morning the lord appropriates to himself the land, the kettle, the seed. In a word the means of production of this peasant, the latter will then afford to be obliged to sell his labor power to the lord. He will cater his paravers, labor six days a week as before, three for himself, three for his lord, who then's forth 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 labor is changed into wage labor, from that moment the labor fund which the peasant himself continues as before to produce and reproduce takes the form of a capital advanced in the form of wages by the lord. The bourgeois economist whose narrow mind is unable to separate the form of appearance from the thing that appears shuts his eyes to the fact that it is but here and there on the face of the earth that even nowadays the labor fund crops up in the form of capital. Footnote quote, the wages of labor are advanced by capitalists in the case of less than one fourth of the laborers of the earth, end quote, Richard Jones, textbook of lectures on the political economy of nations, Hearthford 1852, page 36, and footnote, variable capital it is true only then loses its character of a value advanced out of the capitalists funds when we view the process of capitalist production in the flow of its constant renewal. Footnote quote, though the manufacturer that is the laborer 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 labor is bestowed. A. Smith, logo citato, book two, chapter three, page 311, end footnote. 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 labor of others and that this was therefore how he was enabled to frequent the market as a buyer of labor 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 pounds beget yearly a surplus value of 200 pounds and if the surplus value be consumed every year, it is clear that at the end of five years the surplus value consumed will amount to five times 200 pounds or the 1,000 pounds originally advanced. If only a part say one half were consumed, the same result would follow at the end of 10 years since 10 times 100 pounds is 1,000 pounds. 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's consuming the produce of the unpaid labor of others, that is 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, that is the buildings, machinery, et cetera, 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 the capital. When a person gets through all his property by taking upon himself deaths 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 capitalized surplus value. Even if that capital was originally acquired by the personal labor of its employer, it sooner or later becomes value appropriated without an equivalent, the unpaid labor of others materialized either in money or in some other object. We saw in chapters four to six 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 labor power must confront one another as buyer and seller. The separation of labor from its product of subjective labor power from the objective conditions of labor 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 laborer 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 labor has already been alienated from himself by the sale of his labor power, has been appropriated by the capitalist and incorporated with capital, it must, during the process, be realized in a product that does not belong to him. Since the process of production is also the process by which the capitalist consumes labor power, the product of the laborer is incessantly converted, not only into commodities, but into capital, into value that sucks up the value creating power, into means of subsistence that bind the person of the laborer, into means of production that command the producers. Footnote, quote, this is a remarkably peculiar property of productive labor. Whatever is productively consumed is capital and it becomes capital by consumption. End quote. James Mill, Lococitato, page 242. James Mill, however, never got under the track of this remarkably peculiar property. End footnote. The laborer 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 labor power, but in the form of a subjective source of wealth, separated from the objects in and by which it can alone be realized. In short, he produces the laborer, but as a wage laborer. Footnote, quote, it is true indeed that the first introducing a manufacturer employs many poor, but they cease not to be so and the continuance of it makes many. End quote. Reasons for a limited exploitation of all London 1677, page 19, quote, the farmer now absurdly asserts that he keeps the poor. They are indeed captive misery, end quote. Reasons for the late increase of the poor rates or a comparative view of the prices of labor and provisions, London 1777, page 31. End footnote. This incessant reproduction, this perpetuation of the laborer is the sine qua non of capitalist production. The laborer consumes in a twofold way. While producing, he consumes by his labor 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 labor power by the capitalists who bought it. On the other hand, the laborer turns the money paid to him for his labor power into means of subsistence. This is his individual consumption. The laborer's productive consumption and his individual consumption are therefore totally distinct. In the former, he acts as the mode of 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 laborer lives. When treating of the working day, we saw that the laborer 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 labor 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. Footnote. Rossi would not declaim so emphatically against this had he really penetrated the secret of productive consumption and footnote. The meta takes quite another aspect when we contemplate not the single capitalist and the single laborer, but the capitalist class and the laboring 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 labor 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 laborer. The capital given in exchange for labor power is converted into necessaries by the consumptions of which the muscles, nerves, bones, and brains of existing laborers are reproduced and new laborers 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 labor power into fresh labor 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 laborer himself. The individual consumption of the laborer, 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 laborer 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 nonetheless 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 fulfillment to the laborer's instincts of self-preservation and of propagation. All the capitalist cares for is to reduce the laborer'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 laborers to take the more substantial rather than a less substantial kind of food. Footnote, quote, the laborers in the minds of South 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 death of 450 feet, live on bread and beans only. They themselves would prefer the bread alone for food but their masters who have found out that the man 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. End quote, Liebich, loco citeto, volume one, page 194, note. End footnote. Hence both the capitalist and his ideological representative, the political economist, consider that part alone of the laborer'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 labor power to consume. What the laborer consumes for his own pleasure beyond that part is unproductive consumption. Footnote, James Mill, loco citeto, page 238, end footnote. If the accumulation of capital were to cause a rise of wages and an increase in the laborer's consumption unaccompanied by increase in the consumption of labor power by capital, the additional capital would be consumed unproductively. Footnote, quote, if the price of labor 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. End quote, Ricardo, loco citeto, page 163, end footnote. In reality, the individual consumption of the laborer 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. Footnote, quote, 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, end quote. Multus definitions, et cetera, page 30, end footnote. From a social point of view, therefore, the working class, even when not directly engaged in the labor process, is just as much an appendage of capital as the ordinary instruments of labor. 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 reappearance of the workmen in the labor market. The Roman slave was held by fetters. The wage laborer 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 fixture use of a contract. In former times, capital resorted to legislation whenever necessary to enforce its proprietary rights over the free laborer. 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. Footnote, quote, the only thing of which one can say that it is stored up and prepared beforehand is the skill of the laborer. The accumulation and storage of skilled labor that most important operation is, as regards the great mass of laborers accomplished without any capital whatever end quote, Thomas Hodgkin, labor defendant, et cetera, page 13, end footnote. 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 of 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 manufacturer's manifesto, footnote, quote. That letter might be looked upon as the manifesto of the manufacturers, end quote. Ferrand, motion on the cotton famine, House of Commons, 27th of April, 1863, end footnote. We call here a few characteristic passages in which the proprietary rights of capital over labour power are unblushingly asserted. Quote, he, that is 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 has a right to be heard and perhaps to protest, end quote. Mr. Potter then shows how useful the cotton trade is, how the, quote, trade has undoubtedly drawn the surplus population from Ireland and from the agricultural districts, end quote. How immense is its extent, how in the year 1860 it yielded five out of 13th 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 six pence per pound. He then continues, quote. Sometime, 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 worthwhile 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, they improved in a 12 month, footnote. It will not be forgotten that this same capital sings quite another song in their ordinary circumstances when there is a question of reducing wages. Then the masters exclaim with one voice, quote. 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 masters machinery, open brackets which we now learn can be replaced with advantage in 12 months, close brackets, really plays a far more important part in the business of production and the labour and skill for the operative, open brackets who cannot now be replaced under 30 years, close brackets, which six months education can reach and a common labourer can learn, end quote, C. Ante, page 423, end footnote. Continue, quote. 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 a short supply of inferior labour. We are told the workers wish it. That is 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 effect upwards to the small farmer, the better householder and the land owner 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 million sterling extending it maybe over two or three years administered by special commissioners added to the boards of gardens in the cotton districts under special legislative regulations and forcing some occupational labour as a means of keeping up at least the moral standard of the recipients of the loan. Can anything be worse for land owners or masters than parting with the best of the workers and demoralizing and disappointing the rest by an extended depletive emigration, a depletion of capital and value in an entire province. End quote. 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 its factory the other at night time and on Sundays is housed outside the factory in colleges. 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. Quote. 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 it does not mean to use them as an absolute property. We must confess that we do not think it worthwhile 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 requires some time to reproduce the workers but having machinists and capitalists at hand we could always find thrifty, hard, industrious men were with 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. Footnote. Parliament did not vote a single farthing in aid of emigration but simply passed some acts empowering in municipal corporations to keep the operatives in a half-staffed state that is to exploit them at less than the normal wages. On the other hand when three 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. And footnote. Continuation of the Times quote. He says that it's 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 someday want them. The time has 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. End quote. The Times article was only a jurispris. 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 so-called strength of the cotton manufacturers of Lancashire. Capitalist production therefore of itself reproduces the separation between labor power and the means of labor. It thereby reproduces and perpetuates the condition for exploiting the laborer. It incessantly forces him to sell his labor power in order to live and enables the capitalist to purchase labor power in order that he may enrich himself. Footnote. L'ouvrier demandait de la subsistance pour vivre le chef demandait du travail pour gagner. C'est ce qu'on dit. Lococyteto page 91. End footnote. It is no longer a mere accident that capitalist and laborer confront each other in the market as buyer and seller. It is the process itself that incessantly hurls back the laborer onto the market as a vendor of his labor power and that incessantly converts his own product into a means by which another man can purchase him. In reality, the laborer belongs to capital before he has sold himself to capital. His economic bondage is both brought about and concealed by the periodic sale of himself, by his change of masters and by the oscillations in the market price of labor power. Footnote on economic bondage. A borishly 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 laborer. 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 laborer scottages. The rent of the cottage is a part of the wages. These scottages are known as Heinz houses. They are led to the laborers in consideration of certain feudal services under a contract called bondage, which, amongst other things, binds the laborer during the time he's employed elsewhere to leave someone, say his daughter, et cetera, to supply his place. The laborer himself is called a bondsman. The relationship here set up also shows how individual consumption by the laborer becomes consumption on behalf of capital or productive consumption from quite a new point of view. Quote, it is curious to observe that the very dung of the Heinz and bondsman is the perquisite of the calculating lord, and the lord will allow no privy but his own to exist in the neighborhood and will rather give a bit of manure here and there for a garden than bait any part of a seniorial right. End quote. Public Health reports seven, 1864, page 188. It will not be forgotten that, with respect to the labor of children, et cetera, even the formality of a voluntary sale disappears. End footnote. 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 laborer. Footnote. Quote, capital presupposes wage labor and wage labor presupposes 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 labor, and that, by means of such command, create fresh values. End quote. Karl Marx, Lohn Arbeit und Kapital in the Neue Reinische Zeitung, number 266, 7th April, 1849. The articles published under the above title in the Neue Reinische Zeitung are part of some lectures given by me on that subject in 1847 in the German Arbeiterverein at Brussels, the publication of which was interrupted by the Revolution of February. End footnote. End of Part 7, Chapter 23. Chapter 24, Section 1 of Capital Volume 1. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Capital, a critical analysis of capitalist production, Volume 1 by Karl Marx. Translated from the third German edition by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, and edited by Friedrich Engels. Part 7, The Accumulation of Capital. Chapter 24, Conversion of Surplus Value into Capital. Section 1, Capitalist Production on a Progressively Increasing Scale, Transition of the Laws of Property that Characterize 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. Footnote, accumulation of capital, the employment of a portion of revenue as capital. Malthus, definitions, et cetera. Addition, Casanovae, page 11. Conversion of revenue into capital, Malthus, principles of political economy, second edition, London, 1836, page 320. End note. First, let us consider this transaction from the standpoint of the individual capitalist. Suppose a spinner to have advanced a capital of 10,000 pounds of which four fifths, 8,000 pounds are laid out in cotton, machinery, et cetera, and one fifth, 2,000 pounds in wages. Let him produce 24,000 pounds of yarn annually, having a value of 2,000 pounds. The rate of surplus value being 100%, the surplus value lies in the surplus or net product of 40,000 pounds of yarn, one sixth of the gross product with a value of 2,000 pounds, which will be realized by a sale. 2,000 pounds is 2,000 pounds. 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 pounds into capital, the master spinner will, all circumstances remaining as before, advance four fifths of it, 1,600 pounds in the purchase of cotton, et cetera, and one fifth, 400 pounds 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 pounds functions in the spinning mill and brings in in its turn a surplus value of 400 pounds. 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 a fresh, 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 yarn 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 capitalists, 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 end use that can be made of the total annual product depends entirely upon its own composition, but in no way upon circulation. 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 capitalist. 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 labor process, i.e. means a production, and such further articles as are suitable for the sustenance of the laborer, i.e. means of subsistence. Consequently, a part of the annual surplus labor 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. Footnote, 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. End note. Now, in order to allow these elements actually functioning as capital, the capitalist class requires additional labor. If the exploitation of the laborers already employed do not increase either extensively or intensively, then additional labor 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 necessary only for capital to incorporate this additional labor power annually supplied by the working class in the shape of laborers 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. Footnote. Sismondi's analysis of accumulation suffers from the great defect that he contends himself to to great an extent with the phrase conversion of revenue into capital without fathoming the material conditions of this operation. And note. 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 pounds brings in a surplus value of 2,000 pounds, which is capitalized. The new capital of 2,000 pounds brings in a surplus value of 400 pounds, and this too is capitalized, converted into a second additional capital, which in its turn produces a further surplus value of 80 pounds, and so the ball rolls on. We here leave out of consideration the portion of the surplus value consumed by the capitalist. Just as little does it concern us for the moment, whether the additional capital is joined onto the original capital or is separated from it to function independently, whether the same capital is to accumulated it, employs it, or whether he hands it over to another. This only we must not forget that by the side of the newly formed capital, the original capital continues to reproduce itself and to produce surplus value, and that this is also true of all accumulated capital and the additional capital engendered by it. The original capital was formed by the advance of 10,000 pounds. How did the owner become possessed of it? By his own labor and that of his forefathers, answer unanimously the spokesman of political economy. And in fact, their supposition appears the only one consonant with the laws of the production of commodities. Footnote, the travail primitif accueil son capital e du son neissance. The original labor to which his capital owed its origin, Cizmondi, first C, addition Paris, page 109, end note. But it is quite otherwise with regard to the additional capital of 2,000 pounds. How that originated, we know perfectly well. There is not one single atom of its value that does not owe its existence to unpaid labor. The means of production with which the additional labor power is incorporated, as well as the necessaries with which the laborers are sustained, are nothing but component parts of the surplus product of the tribute annually exacted from the working class by the capitalist class. Though the latter with a portion of that tribute purchases the additional labor power even at its full price so that equivalent is exchanged for equivalent, yet the transaction is for all that only the old dodge of every conqueror who buys commodities from the conquered with the money he has robbed them of. If the additional capital employs the person who produced it, this producer must not only continue to augment the value of the original capital but must buy back the fruits of his previous labor with more labor than they cost. When viewed as a transaction between the capitalist class and the working class, it makes no difference that additional laborers are employed by means of the unpaid labor of the previously employed laborers. The capitalist may even convert the additional capital into a machine that throws the producers of that capital out of work and that replaces them by a few children. In every case, the working class creates by the surplus labor of one year the capital destined to employ additional labor in the following year. And this is what is called creating capital out of capital. Footnote, labor creates capital before capital employs labor, e.g. Wakefield, England and America, London, 1833, volume two, page 110, end note. The accumulation of the first additional capital of 2,000 pounds presupposes a value of 10,000 pounds belonging to the capitalist by virtue of his primitive labor and advanced by him. The second additional capital of 400 pounds presupposes, on the contrary, only the previous accumulation of the 2,000 pounds of which the 400 pounds is the surplus value capitalized. The ownership of past unpaid labor is thenceforth the sole condition for the appropriation of living unpaid labor on a constantly increasing scale. The more the capitalist has accumulated, the more he is able to accumulate. Insofar as the surplus value of which the additional capital, number one, consists, is the result of the purchase of labor power with part of the original capital, a purchase that conformed to the laws of the exchange of commodities. And that, from a legal standpoint, presupposes nothing beyond the free disposal on the part of the laborer of his own capacities and on the part of the owner of money or commodities of the values that belong to him. Insofar as the additional capital, number two, et cetera, is the mere result of number one, and therefore a consequence of the above conditions. Insofar as each single transaction invariably conforms to the laws of the exchange of commodities, the capitalist buying labor power, the laborer selling it, and we will assume at its real value, insofar as all this is true, it is evident that the laws of appropriation, or of private property, laws that are based on the production and circulation of commodities, become by their own inner and inexorable dialectic changed into their very opposite. The exchange of equivalents, the original operation with which we started, has now become turned around in such a way that there is only an apparent exchange. This is owing to the fact that first, that the capital which is exchanged for labor power is itself but a portion of the product of others' labor appropriated without an equivalent, and secondly that this capital must not only be replaced by its producer, but replaced together with an added surplus. The relation of exchange subsisting between capitalist and laborer becomes a mere semblance appertaining to the process of circulation, a mere form foreign to the real nature of the transaction and only mystifying it. The ever-repeated purchase and sale of labor power is now the mere form. What really takes place is this. The capitalist again and again appropriates, without equivalent, a portion of the previously materialized labor of others, and exchanges it for a greater quantity of living labor. At first the rights of property seemed to us to be based on a man's own labor. At last some such assumption was necessary since only commodity owners with equal rights confronted each other, and the sole means by which a man could become possessed of the commodities of others was by alienating his own commodities, and these could be replaced by labor alone. Now, however, property turns out to be the right on the part of the capitalist to appropriate the unpaid labor of others or its product, and to be the impossibility on the part of the laborer of appropriating his own product. The separation of property from labor has become the necessary consequence of a law that apparently originated in their identity. Footnote. The property of the capitalist in the product of the labor 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 laborer to the product of his own labor. Cherbouliès riche sous pauvreté. Paris, 1841, page 58, where, however, the dialectical reversal is not properly developed. Endnote. Therefore, however much the capitalist mode of appropriation may seem to fly in the face of the original laws of commodity production, it nevertheless arises not from a violation, but on the contrary from the application of these laws. Let us make this clear once more by briefly reviewing the consequent phases of motion whose culminating point is capitalist accumulation. Footnote. The following passage to page 551, the laws of capitalist appropriation has been added to the English text in conformity with the fourth German edition. Endnote. We saw in the first place that the original conversion of a sum of values into capital was achieved in complete accordance with the laws of exchange. One party to the contract sells his labor power, the other buys it. The former receives the value of his commodity whose use value, labor, is thereby alienated to the buyer. Means of production which already belonged to the latter are then transformed by him with the aid of labor equally belonging to him into a new product which is likewise lawfully his. The value of this product includes first the value of the used-up means of production. Useful labor cannot consume these means of production without transferring their value to the new product, but to be saleable labor power must be capable of supplying useful labor in the branch of industry in which it is to be employed. The value of the new product further includes the equivalent of the value of the labor power together with a surplus value. This is so because the value of the labor power sold for a definite length of time, say a day, a week, et cetera, is less than the value created by its use during that time. But the worker has received payment for the exchange value of his labor power and by doing so has alienated its use value, this being the case in every sale and purchase. The fact that this particular commodity, labor power, possesses the peculiar use value of supplying labor and therefore of creating value cannot affect the general law of commodity production. If, therefore, the magnitude of value advanced in wages is not merely found again in the product but is found there augmented by a surplus value, this is not because the seller has been defrauded for he has really received the value of his commodity. It is due solely to the fact that this commodity has been used up by the buyer. The law of exchange requires equality only between the exchange values of the commodities given in exchange for one another. From the very outset, it presupposes even a difference between their use values and it has nothing whatever to do with their consumption which only begins after the deal is closed and executed. Thus the original conversion of money into capital is achieved in the most exact accordance with the economic laws of commodity production and with the right of property derived from them. Nevertheless, its result is, one, that the product belongs to the capitalist and not to the worker. Two, that the value of this product includes besides the value of the capital advanced, a surplus value which costs the worker labor but the capitalist nothing and which nonetheless becomes the legitimate property of the capitalist. Three, that the worker has retained his labor power and can sell it anew if he can find a buyer. Simple reproduction is only the periodical repetition of this first operation. Each time, money is converted afresh into capital. Thus the law is not broken. On the contrary, it is merely enabled to operate continuously. Several successive acts of exchange have only made the last represent the first. Sismondi, nouveau principes, et cetera, page 70. And yet we have seen that simple reproduction suffices to stamp this first operation. Insofar as it is conceived as an isolated process with a totally changed character. Of those who share the national income among themselves, the one side, the workers, acquire every year a fresh right to their share by fresh work. The others, the capitalists, have already acquired by work done originally, a permanent right to their share. Sismondi, first to see page 110 and 111. It is indeed notorious that the sphere of labor is not the only one in which primogenitor works miracles. Nor does it matter if simple reproduction is replaced by reproduction on an extended scale by accumulation. In the former case, the capitalist squanders the whole surplus value in dissipation. In the latter, he demonstrates his bourgeois virtue by consuming only a portion of it and converting the rest into money. The surplus value is his property. It has never belonged to anyone else. If he advances it for the purposes of production, the advances made come from his own funds, exactly as on the day when he first entered the market. The fact that on this occasion, the funds are derived from the unpaid labor of his workers makes absolutely no difference. If worker B is paid out of the surplus value, which worker A produced, then in the first place, A furnished that surplus value without having the just price of his commodity cut by a half penny. And in the second place, the transaction is of no concern of B's, whatever. Whatever B claims and has a right to claim is that the capitalist should pay him the value of his labor power. Both were still gainers. The worker, because he was advanced the fruits of his labor, should read of the unpaid labor of other workers before the work was done, should read before his own labor had borne fruit. The employer, Le Matre, because the labor of this worker was worth more than his wages, should read, produced more value than the value of his wages. Says Mondi, First C, page 135. To be sure, the matter looks quite different if we consider capitalist production in the uninterrupted flow of its renewal. And if in place of the individual capitalist and the individual worker, we view in their totality the capitalist class and the working class confronting each other. But in so doing, we should be applying the standards entirely foreign to commodity production. Only buyer and seller, mutually independent, face each other in commodity production. The relations between them cease on the day when the term stipulated in the contract they concluded expires. If the transaction is repeated, it is repeated as the result of a new agreement, which has nothing to do with the previous one and which only by chance brings the same seller together again with the same buyer. If, therefore, commodity production, or one of its associated processes, is to be judged according to its own economic laws, we must consider each act of exchange by itself, apart from any connection with the act of exchange preceding it and that following it. And since sales and purchases are negotiated solely between particular individuals, it is not admissible to seek care for relations between whole social classes. However long a series of periodical reproductions and preceding accumulations the capital functioning today may have passed through, it always preserves its original virginity. So long as the laws of exchange are observed in every single act of exchange, the mode of appropriation can be completely revolutionized without in any way affecting the property rights which correspond to commodity production. These same rights belong in force both at the outset when the product belongs to its producer who in exchanging equivalent for equivalent can enrich himself only by his own labor and also in the period of capitalism when social wealth becomes to an ever increasing degree the property of those who are in a position to appropriate continually and ever afresh the unpaid labor of others. This result becomes inevitable from the moment there is a free sale by the laborer himself of labor power as a commodity. But it is also only from then onwards that commodity production is generalized and becomes the typical form of production. It is only from then onwards that from the first every product is produced for sale and all wealth produced goes through the sphere of circulation. Only when and where wage labor is its basis does commodity production impose itself upon society as a whole. But only then and there does it unfold all its hidden potentialities. To say that the supervention of wage labor adulterates commodity production is to say that commodity production must not develop if it is to remain unadulterated. To the extent that commodity production in accordance with its own inherent laws develops further into capitalist production the property laws of commodity production change into the laws of capitalist appropriation. Footnote, 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. Endnote, we have seen that even in the case of simple reproduction all capital whatever its original source becomes converted into accumulated capital, capitalized surplus value. But in the flood of production all the capital originally advanced becomes a vanishing quantity. Magnetudo, evanescence in the mathematical sense compared with the directly accumulated capital, i.e. with the surplus value or surplus product that is reconverted into capital whether it functions in the hands of its accumulator or in those of others. Hence, political economy describes capital in general as accumulated wealth, converted surplus value or revenue that is employed over again in the production of surplus value and the capitalist as the owner of surplus value. It is merely another way of expressing the same thing to say that all existing capital is accumulated or capitalized interest for interest is a mere fragment of surplus value. Footnote, capital, vis, accumulated wealth employed with a view to profit. Malthus, first seat. Capital consists of wealth saved from revenue and used with a view to profit. Arjones, an introductory letter on political economy. London, 1833, page 16, Endnote. Note, the possessors of surplus produce or capital, the source and remedy of the national difficulties, a letter to Lord John Russell, London, 1821, Endnote. Note, capital with compound interest on every portion of capital saved is so all-engrossing that all the wealth in the world from which income is derived has long ago become the interest on capital. London, economist, 19th July, 1851, Endnote. End of chapter 24, section one. Chapter 24, section two of capital, volume one. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Capital, a critical analysis of capitalist production, volume one, by Karl Marx. Translated from the third German edition by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling and edited by Friedrich Engels. Part seven, the accumulation of capital. Chapter 24, conversion of surplus value into capital. Section two, erroneous conception by political economy of reproduction on a progressively increasing scale. Before we further investigate accumulation or the reconversion of surplus value into capital, we must brush on one side in ambiguity introduced by the classical economists. Just as little is the commodities that the capitalist buys with a part of the surplus value for his own consumption serve the purpose of production and of creation of value, so little is the labor that he buys for the satisfaction of his natural and social requirements, productive labor. Instead of converting the surplus value into capital, he, on the contrary, by the purchase of those commodities and that labor, consummates or expends it as revenue. In the face of the habitual mode of life of the old feudal nobility, which, as Hegel rightly says, consists in consuming what is in hand and more especially displays itself in the luxury of personal retainers, it was extremely important for bourgeois economy to promulgate the doctrine that accumulation of capital is the first duty of every citizen and to preach without ceasing that a man cannot accumulate if he eats up all his revenue instead of spending a good part of it in the acquisition of additional productive laborers who bring in more than they cost. On the other hand, the economists had to contend against the popular prejudice that confuses capitalist production with hoarding and fancies that accumulated wealth is either wealth that is rescued from being destroyed in its existing form, i.e. from being consumed or wealth that is withdrawn from circulation. Exclusion of money from circulation would also exclude absolutely its self expansion as capital while accumulation of a hoard in the shape of commodities would be sheer tomfoolery. The accumulation of commodities in great masses is the result either of overproduction or of a stoppage of circulation. It is true that the popular mind is impressed by the site on the one hand of the massive goods that are stored up for gradual consumption by the rich and on the other hand by the formation of reserve stocks, the latter a phenomenon that is common to all modes of production and on which we shall dwell for a moment when we come to analyze circulation. Classical economy is therefore quite right when it maintains that the consumption of surplus products by productive instead of by unproductive laborers is a characteristic feature of the process of accumulation. But at this point the mistakes also begin. Adam Smith has made it the fashion to represent accumulation as nothing more than consumption of surplus products by productive laborers which amounts to saying that the capitalizing of surplus value consists in merely turning surplus value into labor power. Footnote. No political economists of the present day can by saving mean mere hoarding and beyond this contracted and insufficient proceeding no use of the term in reference to the national wealth can be well imagined. But that which must arise from a different application of what is saved founded upon a real distinction between the different kinds of labor maintained by it. Malthus first see pages 38 and 39 and note. Thus for instance Balzac who so thoroughly studied every shade of avarice represents the old usurper gobsack in his second childhood when he begins to heat up a hoard of commodities. End note. Footnote. Accumulation of stocks upon exchange over production. Theodore Corbett first see page 104. End note. Footnote. In this sense Necker speaks of the things of pomp and luxury of which accumulation has grown with time and with which the laws of property have brought into the hands of one class of society alone. Ure de Monsieur Necker, Paris and Lucen, 1789, page 291, end note. Let us see what Ricardo for example says. It must be understood that all the productions of a country are consumed but it makes the greatest difference imaginable whether they are consumed by those who reproduce or by those who do not reproduce another value. When we say that revenue is saved and added to capital what we mean is that the portion of revenue so said to be added to capital is consumed by productive instead of unproductive laborers. There can be no greater error than in supposing that capital is increased by non-consumption. Footnote, Ricardo first see page 163. Note. End note. There can be no greater error than that which Ricardo and all subsequent economists repeat after A. Smith vis that the part of revenue of which it is said it has been added to capital is consumed by productive laborers. According to this all surplus value that is changed into capital becomes variable capital. So far from this being the case the surplus value like the original capital divides itself into constant capital and variable capital into means of production and labor power. Labor power is the form under which variable capital exists during the process of production. In this process the labor power is itself consumed by the capitalist while the means of production are consumed by the labor power in the exercise of its function labor. At the same time the money paid for the purchase of the labor power is converted into necessaries that are consumed not by productive labor but by the productive laborer. Adam Smith by a fundamentally perverted analysis arrives at the absurd conclusion that even though each individual capital is divided into a constant and a variable part the capital of society resolves itself only into variable capital. IE is laid out exclusively in payment of wages. For instance suppose a cloth manufacturer converts 2,000 pounds into capital. One portion he lays out in buying weavers the other in woolen yarn, machinery, et cetera. But the people from whom he buys the yarn in the machinery pay for labor with a part of the purchase money and so on until the whole 2,000 pounds are spent in payment of wages. IE until the entire product represented by the 2,000 pounds has been consumed by productive laborers. It is evident that the whole gist of this argument lies in the words and so on which send us from pillar to post. In truth Adam Smith breaks his investigation off just where its difficulties begin. Footnote. In spite of his logic John St. Mill never detects even such faulty analysis as this when made by his predecessors. An analysis which even from the bourgeois standpoint of the science cries out for rectification. In every case he registers with the dogmatism of a disciple the confusion of his master's thoughts. So here the capital itself in the long run becomes entirely wages and when replaced by the sale of produce becomes wages again. End note. The annual process of reproduction is easily understood so long as we keep in view merely the sum total of the year's production. But every single component of this product must be brought into the market as a commodity and there the difficulty begins. The movements of the individual capitals and of the personal revenues cross and intermingle and are lost in the general change of places in the circulation of the wealth of society. This daises the site and propounds very complicated problems for solution. In the third part of book two I shall give the analysis of the real bearing of the facts. It is one of the great merits of the physiocrats that in their tableau économique they were the first to attempt to depict the annual production in the shape in which it is presented to us after passing through the process of circulation. Footnote. In his description of the process of reproduction and of accumulation Adam Smith in many ways not only made no advance but even lost considerable ground compared with his predecessors especially by the physiocrats. Connected with the illusion mentioned in the text is the really wonderful dogma left by him as an inheritance to political economy the dogma that the price of commodities is made up of wages profit or interest and rent i.e. of wages and surplus value. Starting from this basis Storch naively confesses it is impossible to resolve the necessary price into its simplest elements. Storch first seed Petersburg edition 1815 T2 page 141 note. A fine science of economy this which declares it impossible to resolve the price of a commodity into its simplest elements. The point will be further investigated in the seventh part of book three. End note. For the rest it is a matter of course that political economy acting in the interests of the capitalist class has not failed to exploit the doctrine of Adam Smith vis that the whole of that part of the surplus product which is converted into capital is consumed by the working class. End of chapter twenty-four section two. Chapter twenty-four section three of capital volume one this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org capital a critical analysis of capitalist production volume one by Karl Marx translated from the third German edition by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling and edited by Friedrich Engels Part seven the accumulation of capital chapter twenty-four conversion of surplus value into capital section three separation of surplus value into capital and revenue the abstinence theory in the last preceding chapter we treated surplus value or the surplus product solely as a fund for supplying the individual consumption of the capitalist in this chapter we have so far treated it solely as a fund for accumulation it is however neither the one nor the other but is both together one portion is consumed by the capitalist as revenue the other is employed as capital is accumulated footnote the reader will notice that the word revenue is used in a double sense first to designate surplus value so far as it is the fruit periodically yielded by capital secondly to designate the part of that fruit which is periodically consumed by the capitalist or added to the fund that supplies his private consumption i have retained this double meaning because it harmonizes with the language of the English and French economists and note given the mass of surplus value then the larger the one of these parts the smaller is the other setterist paribas the ratio of these parts determines the magnitude of the accumulation but it is by the owner of the surplus value by the capitalist alone that the division is made it is his deliberate act that part of the tribute exacted by him which he accumulates is said to be saved by him because he does not eat it i.e. because he performs the function of a capitalist and enriches himself except as personified capital the capitalist has no historical value and no right to that historical existence which to use an expression of the witty lichnowski hasn't got no date and so far only is the necessity for his own transitory existence implied in the transitory necessity for the capitalist mode of production but so far as he personified capital it is not values in use and the enjoyment of them but exchange value and its augmentation that spur him into action fanatically bent on making value expend itself he ruthlessly forces the human race to produce for production's sake he thus forces the development of the productive powers of society and creates those material conditions which alone can form the real basis of a higher form of society a society in which the full and free development of every individual forms the ruling principle only as personified capital is the capitalist respectable as such he shares with the miser the passion for wealth as well but that which in the miser is a mere idiosyncrasy is in the capitalist the effect of the social mechanism of which he is but one of the wheels moreover the development of capitalist production makes it constantly necessary to keep increasing the amount of the capital laid out in a given industrial undertaking and competition makes the eminent laws of capitalist production to be felt by each individual capitalist as external coercive laws it compels him to keep constantly extending his capital in order to preserve it but extended he cannot except by means of progressive accumulation so far therefore as his actions are a mere function of capital endowed as capital is in his person with consciousness and will his own private consumption is a robbery perpetrated on accumulation just as in bookkeeping by double entry the private expenditure of the capitalist is placed on the debtor side of his account against capital to accumulate is to conquer the world of social wealth to increase the mass of human beings exploited by him and thus to extend both the direct and the indirect sway of the capitalist footnote taking the user that old-fashioned but ever renewed specimen of the capitalist for his text luther shows very aptly that the love of power is an element in the desire to get rich the heathen were able by the light of reason to conclude that a user is a double-died thief and murderer we Christians however hold them in such honor that we fairly worship them for the sake of their money whoever eats up robs and steals the nourishment of another that man commits as great a murder so far as in him lies as he who starves a man or utterly undoes him such does a user and sits the while safe on a stool when he ought rather to be hanging on the gallows and be eaten by as many ravens as he has stolen guilders if only there were so much flesh on him that so many ravens could stick their beaks in and share it meanwhile we hang the small thieves little thieves are put in the stops great thieves go flaunting in golden silk therefore is there on this earth no greater enemy of man after the devil than a grip money and user for he wants to be god over all men turks soldiers and tyrants are also bad men yet must they let the people live and confess that they are bad and enemies and do they must now and then show pity to some but a user and money glutton such a one would have the whole world perish of hunger and thirst misery and what so far as in him lies so that he may have all to himself and everyone may receive from him as from a god and be his serve forever to where fine cloaks golden chains tings to wipe his mouth to be deemed and taken for a worthy pious man usury is a great huge monster like a werewolf who lays waste all more than any casus garyan or antice and yet dex himself out and would be thought pious so that people may not see where the oxen have gone that he drags backwards into his den but hercules shall hear the cry of the oxen and of his prisoners and shall seek caucus even in cliffs and among rocks and shall set the oxen loose again from the villain for caucus means the villain that is a pious user and steals robes and eats everything and will not own that he has done it and thinks no one will find him out because the oxen drawn backwards into his den make it seem from their footprints that they have been let out so the user would deceive the world as though he were of use and gave the world oxen which he however rents and eats all alone and since we break on the wheel and behead high women murderers and housebreakers how much more ought we to break on the wheel and kill hunt down curse and behead all users martin luther first see and note but original sentence at work everywhere as capitalist production accumulation and wealth become developed the capitalist ceases to be the mere incarnation of capital he has a fellow feeling for his own adam and his education gradually enables him to smile at the rage for asceticism as a mere prejudice of the old-fashioned miser while the capitalist of the classical tight-brands individual consumption as a sin against his function and as abstinence from accumulating the modernized capitalist is capable of looking upon accumulation as abstinence from pleasure two souls alas do dwell within his breast the one is ever parting from the other footnote see gertus faust and note at the historical dawn of capitalist production and every capitalist upstart has personally to go through this historical stage avarice and desire to get rich are the ruling passions but the progress of capitalist production not only creates a world of delights it lays open in speculation in the credit system a thousand sources of sudden enrichment when a certain stage of development has been reached a conventional degree of prodigality which is also an exhibition of wealth and consequently a source of credit becomes a business necessity to the unfortunate capitalist luxury enters into capital's expenses of representation moreover the capitalist gets rich not like the miser in proportion to his personal labor and restricted consumption but at the same rate as he squeezes out the labor power of others and enforces on the laborer abstinence from all life's enjoyments although therefore the prodigality of the capitalist never possesses the bona fide character of the open-handed feudal lords prodigality but on the contrary has always been lurking behind the most sordid avarice and the most anxious calculation yet his expenditure grows with his accumulation without the one necessarily restricting the other but along with this growth there is at the same time developed in his breast a Faustian conflict between the passion for accumulation and the desire for enjoyment doctor achon says in a work published in seventeen ninety-five the trade of manchester may be divided into four periods first when manufacturers were obliged to work hard for their livelihood they enriched themselves chiefly by robbing the parents whose children were bound as apprentices to them the parents paid a high premium while the apprentices were starved on the other hand the average profits were low and to accumulate extreme parsimony was requisite they lived like misers and were far from consuming even the interest on their capital the second period when they had begun to acquire little fortunes but worked as hard as before for direct exploitation of labor cost labor as every slave driver knows and lived in as plain a manner as before the third when luxury began and the trade was pushed by sending out riders for orders into every market town in the kingdom it is probable that few or no capitals of three thousand to four thousand pounds acquired by trade existed here before sixteen ninety 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 eighteenth century a manchester manufacturer who placed a pint of foreign wine before his guests exposed himself to the remarks and headshakings of all his neighbors before the rise of machinery a manufacturers evening expenditure at the public house where they all met never exceeded six pence for a glass of punch and a penny for a screw of tobacco it was not till seventeen fifty eight and this marks an epic that a person actually engaged in business was seen with an echo page of his own the fourth period the last thirty years of the eighteenth 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 doctor achon description of the country from thirty to forty miles around manchester london seventeen ninety five page one eighty two and note what would the good doctor achon say if he could rise from his grave and see the manchester of today accumulate accumulate that is moses and the profits industry furnishes the material which saving accumulates therefore say save i.e. reconvert the greatest possible portion of surplus value or surplus product into capital accumulation for accumulations sake production for production sake by this classical formula economy expressed the historical mission of the bourgeoisie and did not for a single incident to see the self over the birth throes of wealth but what avails lamentation in the face of historical necessity if the classical economy the proletarian is the machine for the production of surplus value on the other hand the capitalist is in its eyes only a machine for the conversion of the 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 mouth is about the year eighteen twenty advocated a division of labor which assigns to the capitalist actually gauged in production the business of accumulating and to the other sharers in surplus value to the landlords the placement the benefits clergy etc the business of spending it is of the highest importance he says to keep separate the passion for expenditure and the passion for accumulation adam smith book three chapter three and note even jb say says the savings of the rich are made at the expense of the poor the roman proletarian lived almost entirely at the expense of society it can almost be said that modern society lives at the expense of the proletarians on what it keeps out of the remuneration of labor says monday a two that cetera t one page twenty four and note malthus first c page three nineteen three twenty and note the capitalist having long been good livers in men of the world uttered loud cries what exclaimed one of their spokesman a disciple of ricardo mister malthus preaches high rents heavy taxes etc so that the pressure of the spur may constantly be kept on the industrious by unproductive consumers by all means 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 an 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 an inquiry into those principles respecting the nature of demand etc page sixty seven and note 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 labor's wages to a minimum to keep him industrious nor does he for a moment conceal the fact that the appropriation of unpaid labor is the secret of surplus value increased demand on the part of the laborers 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 laborers i can only reply that glut is synonymous with large profits first c page fifty nine and note the learned disputation how the booty pumped out of the laborer may be divided with most advantage to accumulation between the industrial capitalist and the rich idler was hushed in the face of the revolution of july shortly afterwards the town proletariat at leon sounded the toxin of revolution and the country proletariat in england began to set fire to farm yards and cornstacks on this side of the channel on ism began to spread on the other side since i'm an ism and four years and the hour of vulgar economy had struck exactly a year before nasa 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 of this of the discoveries of the vulgar economy it substitutes for an economic category a sycophantic phrase wallah toot that's all when the savage says senior makes bows he exercises an industry but he does not practice abstinence footnote senior princip fundamental del economy politic paris eighteen thirty six page three oh eight this was rather too much for the adherence of the old classical school mister senior has substituted for it the expression labor and profit the expression labor and abstinence he who converts his revenue abstains from the enjoyment which its expenditure would afford him it is not the capital but the use of the capital productively which is the cause of profits john cousin of a first see page one thirty john stewart mill on the contrary accepts on the one hand rickardo's theory of profit and annexes on the other hand seniors remuneration of abstinence he is as much at home in absurd contradictions as he feels at sea in the hegelian contradiction the source of all dialectic it has never occurred to the vulgar economist to make the simple reflection that every human action may be viewed as abstinence from its opposite eating is abstinence from fasting walking abstinence from standing still working abstinence from idling idling abstinence from working etc these gentlemen would do well to ponder once in a way over spinoza's determinatio s negatio and note this explains how and why in the earlier states of society the implements of labor were fabricated without abstinence on the part of the capitalist the more society progresses the more abstinence is demanded senior first see page three forty two and note namely from those who apply the industry of appropriating the fruits of others industry all the conditions for carrying on the labor process are suddenly converted into so many acts of abstinence on the part of the capitalist if the corn is not all eaten but a part of it also so abstinence of the capitalist if the wine gets time to mature abstinence of the capitalist the capitalist robbs his own self whenever he lends the instruments of production to the labor that is whenever by incorporating labor power with them he uses them to extract surplus value out of that labor 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 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 jobs on solely through the self-chestrasment of this modern penitent of Vishnu the capitalist not only accumulation but the simple conservation of a capital requires constant effort to resist the temptation of consuming it the simple dictates of humanity therefore plainly enjoying 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 negroes entirely in champagne or whether to reconvert a part of it into morning grows and more land footnote no one will so his wheat for instance and allow it to remain a twelve month in the ground or leave his wine in a cellar for years instead of consuming these things or their equivalent at once unless he expects to acquire additional value scope political economy edited by a potter new york eighteen forty one pages one thirty three to thirty four and note footnote the deprivation of the capitalist imposes on himself by lending this euphemism used for the purpose of identifying according to the approved method of vulgar economy the laborer who is exploited with the industrial capitalist who exploits and whom other capitalists lends money his instruments of production to the worker instead of devoting their value to his own consumption by transforming them into objects of utility or pleasure g de Molinari first c page thirty six and note footnote the conservation of capital requires a constant effort for resisting the temptation to consume for sales and you first c page fifty seven and note 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 in 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 laborers means production and with them his product and means of subsistence do not confront him in the shape of capital richard jones who died a few years ago and was the successor of mouth is in the chair of political economy at haley berry 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 labor 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 on the other hand the non agricultural laborers in those provinces where the english rule has least disturbed the old system are directly employed by the magnets to whom a portion of the agricultural surplus product is rendered in the shape of a tribute or rent one portion of this product is consumed by the magnets in kind another is converted for their use by the laborers into articles of luxury and such like things while the rest forms the wages of the laborers who own their implements of labor here production and reproduction on a progressively increasing scale go on their way without any intervention from that queer saint that night of the woeful countenance the capitalist abstainer footnote the particular classes of income which yield the most abundantly to the progress of national capital change at different stages of their progress and are therefore entirely different in nations occupying different positions in that progress profits unimportant source of accumulation compared with wages and rents in the earlier stages of society when a considerable advance in the powers of national industry has actually taken place profits rise into comparative importance as a source of accumulation richard jones text book pages sixteen and twenty one footnote first see page thirty six and not end of chapter twenty four section three