 CHAPTER XXIV. VOLUME 1. CONVERSION OF SURPRISE VALUE INTO CAPITAL section 4 circumstances that independently of the proportional division of surplus value into capital and revenue determine the amount of accumulation, degree of exploitation of labor programs, and the degree of exploitation of labor programs. INTO CAPITAL section 4 circumstances that independently of the proportional division of surplus value into capital and revenue determine the amount of accumulation, degree of exploitation of labor power, productivity of labor, growing difference in amount between capital employed and capital consumed, magnitude of capital advanced. The proportion in which surplus value breaks up into capital and revenue being given, the magnitude of the capital accumulated clearly depends on the absolute magnitude of the surplus value. Suppose that 80% were capitalized and 20% eaten up. The accumulated capital will be 2400 pounds or 200 pounds, according as the total surplus value has amounted to 3000 pounds or 500 pounds. Hence, all the circumstances that determine the mass of surplus value operate to determine the magnitude of the accumulation. We sum them up once again, but only insofar as they afford new points of view in regard to accumulation. It will be remembered that the rate of surplus value depends in the first place on the degree of exploitation of labor power. Political economy values this fact so highly that it occasionally identifies the acceleration of accumulation due to increased productiveness of labor with its acceleration due to increased exploitation of the laborer. In the chapters on the production of surplus value it was constantly presupposed that wages are at least equal to the value of labor power. Forcible reduction of wages below this value plays, however, in practice, too important a part for us not to pause upon it for a moment. It in turn transforms within certain limits the laborer's necessary consumption fund into a fund for the accumulation of capital. Footnote. Ricardo says in different stages of society the accumulation of capital or of the means of employing, i.e. exploiting, labor is more or less rapid and must in all cases depend on the productive powers of labor. The productive powers of labor are generally greatest where there is an abundance of fertile land. If in the first sentence the productive powers of labor mean the smallness of that eloquent part of any produce that goes to those whose manual labor produced it, the sentence is nearly identical because the remaining eloquent part is the fund when its capital can if the owner pleases be accumulated. But then this does not generally happen where there is most fertile land. Observations on certain verbal disputes, etc. pages 74 and 75. Endnote. Wages, says John Stuart Mill, have no productive power. They are the price of a productive power. Wages do not contribute along with labor to the production of commodities, no more than the price of tools contributes along with the tools themselves. If labor could be had without purchase, wages might be dispensed with. Footnote. John Stuart Mill, essays on some unsettled questions of political economy, London, 1844, page 90. Endnote. But if the laborers could live on air, they could not be bought at any price. The zero of their cost is therefore a limit in a mathematical sense, always beyond reach, although we can always approximate more and more nearly to it. The constant tendency of capital is to force the cost of labor back towards the zero. A writer of the 18th century, often quoted already, the author of the essay on trade and commerce only betrays the innermost secret soul of English capitalism when he declares the historic mission of England to be the forcing down of English wages to the level of the French and the Dutch. Footnote. An essay on trade and commerce, London, 1770, page 44. The times of December 1866 and January 1867 in like manner published certain outpourings of the heart of the English mine owner in which the happy lot of the Belgian miners was pictured who asked and received no more than was strictly necessary for them to live for their masters. The Belgian laborers have to suffer much, but to figure in the times as model laborers. In the beginning of February 1867 came the answer, strike of the Belgian miners at Marchienne, put down by powder and lead. Endnote. With other things he says naively, but if our poor, technical term for laborers, will live luxuriously, then labor must of course be dear. When it is considered what luxuries the manufacturing populace consume, such as brandy, gin, tea, sugar, foreign fruit, strong beer, printed linens, snuff, tobacco, etc., first see pages 44 and 46. He quotes the work of a Northamptonshire manufacturer, who, with eyes squinting heavenwards, moans, labor is one-third cheaper in France than in England, for their poor work hard and fare hard, as to their food and clothing. Their chief diet is bread, fruit, herbs, roots, and dried fish, for they very seldom eat flesh, and when wheat is dear they eat very little bread. To which may be added, our SAS goes on, that their drink is either water or other small liquors, so that they spend very little money. These things are very difficult to be brought about, but they are not impracticable since they have been affected both in France and in Holland. Footnote. The Northamptonshire manufacturer commits a pious fraud, pardonable in one whose heart is so full. He nominally compares the life of the English and French manufacturing laborer, but in the words just quoted he is painting, as he himself confesses in his confused way the French agricultural laborers. Endnote. Note. First see pages 70 and 71. Note in the third German edition. Today, thanks to the competition on the world market, established since then, we have advanced much further. If China, says Mr. Stapleton, MP to his constituents, should become a great manufacturing country, I do not see how the manufacturing population of Europe could sustain the contest without descending to the level of their competitors. Times, September 3rd, 1873, page 8. The wished war goal of English capital is no longer continental wages, but Chinese. Endnote. Twenty years later, an American humbug, the baronized Yankee, Benjamin Thompson, alias Count Rumpford, followed the same line of philanthropy to the great satisfaction of God and man. His essays are a cookery book with receipts of all kinds, for replacing, by some succotinium, the ordinary dear food of the laborer. The following is a particularly successful receipt of this wonderful philosopher. Five pounds of barley meal, seven and a half pence. Five pounds of Indian corn, six and one quarter pence. Three pence worth of red herring. One pence salt. One pence vinegar. Two pence pepper and sweet herbs. In all, thirty and three quarter pence. Make a soup for sixty-four men, and at the medium price of barley and of Indian corn, this soup may be provided at one quarter pence, the portion of twenty ounces. Footnote. Benjamin Thompson, essays, political, economical, and philosophical, etc., three volumes, London, 1796-1802, volume one, page 294. In his State of the Poor, or An History of the Laboring Classes in England, etc., Sir F. M. Eden strongly recommends the Rumpfordian beggar soup to workhouse overseers, and reproachfully warns the English laborers that many poor people, particularly in Scotland, live, and that very comfortably, for months together, upon oatmeal and barley meal, mixed with only water and salt. Volume one, book one, chapter two, page 503. The same sorts of hints in the nineteenth century. The most wholesome mixtures of flour having been refused by the English agricultural laborer in Scotland where education is better, this prejudice is probably unknown. Charles H. Perry, M.D., the question of the necessity of the existing corn laws, considered. London, 1816, page 69. This same Perry, however, complains that the English laborer is now, 1815, in a much worse condition than in Eden's time, 1797. Endnote. With the advance of capitalistic production, the adulteration of food rendered Thompson's ideal superfluous. Footnote. From the reports of the last parliamentary commission on adulteration of the means of subsistence, it will be seen that the adulteration, even of medicines, is the rule, not the exception, in England. For example, the examination of thirty-four specimens of opium, purchased of as many different chemists in London, showed that thirty-one were adulterated with poppy heads, wheat flour, gum, clay, sand, etc. Several did not contain an atom of morphia. Endnote. At the end of the eighteenth, and during the first ten years of the nineteenth century, the English farmers and landlords enforced the absolute minimum of wage, by paying the agricultural laborers less than the minimum in the form of wages, and the remainder in the shape of parochial relief. An example of the waggish way in which the English dogberries acted in their legal fixing of a wages tariff. The squires of Norfolk had dined, says Mr. Burke, when they fixed the rate of wages. The squires of Burke's evidently thought the laborers ought not to do so when they fixed the rate of wages at Spenemland, seventeen ninety-five. When they decided that income, weekly, should be three shillings for a man, when the gallon or half-peck loaf of eight pounds, eleven ounces, is at one shilling, and increase regularly till bread is one shilling five pence. When it is above that sum, decrease regularly till it be at two shillings, and then his food should be one-fifth less. Footnote G. B. Noonam, Barrister at Law A review of the evidence before the Committee of the Two Houses of Parliament on the Corn Laws London, eighteen-fifteen, page twenty. Endnote Before the Committee of Inquiry of the House of Lords, eighteen-fourteen, a certain A. Bennett, large farmer, magistrate, poor law guardian and wage regulator was asked, Has any proportion of the value of daily labor been made up to laborers out of the poor's rate? Answer, yes, it has. The weekly income of every family is made up to the gallon loaf, eight pounds, eleven ounces, and three pence per head. The gallon loaf per week is what we suppose sufficient for the maintenance of every person in the family for the week, and the three pence is for clothes, and if the parish think proper to find clothes, the three pence is deducted. This practice goes through all the western part of Wiltshire, and I believe throughout the country. For years, exclaims a bourgeois author of that time, they, the farmers, have degraded a respectable class of their countrymen by forcing them to have recourse to the workhouse. The farmer, while increasing his own gains, has prevented any accumulation on the part of his laboring dependence. Footnote First C, pages 19 and 20. Endnote Footnote C. H. Perry, pages 77 and 69. The landlords, on their side, not only indemnified themselves for the anti-jackabin war, which they waged in the name of England, but enriched themselves enormously. Their rents doubled, trebled, quadrupled, and in one instance increased sixfold in eighteen years. Pages 100, 101. Endnote The part played in our days by the direct robbery from the laborer's necessary consumption fund in the formation of surplus value, and therefore of the accumulation fund of capital, the so-called domestic industry, has served to show Chapter 15, Section 8. Further facts on this subject will be given later. Although in all branches of industry that part of the constant capital consisting of instruments of labor must be sufficient for a certain number of laborers determined by the magnitude of the undertaking, it by no means always necessarily increases in the same proportion as the quantity of labor employed. In a factory, suppose that one hundred laborers working eight hours a day yield eight hundred working hours. If the capitalist wishes to raise this sum by one half, he can employ fifty more workers, but then he must also advance more capital, not merely for wages, but for instruments of labor. But he might also let the one hundred laborers work twelve hours instead of eight, and then the instruments of labor all ready to hand would be enough. These would then simply be more rapidly consumed. Thus additional labor, begotten of the greater tension of labor power, can augment surplus product and surplus value, i.e. the subject matter of accumulation, without corresponding augmentation in the constant part of capital. In the extractive industries, mines, etc., the raw materials form no part of the capital advanced. The subject of labor is, in this case, not a product of previous labor, but is furnished by nature, gratis, as in the case of metals, minerals, coal, stone, etc. In these cases the constant capital consists almost exclusively of instruments of labor, which can very well absorb an increased quantity of labor, day and night shifts of laborers, for example. All other things being equal, the mass and value of the product will rise in direct proportion to the labor expended. As on the first day of production, the original produce farmers, now turned into the creatures of the material elements of capital, man and nature, still work together. Thanks to the elasticity of labor power, the domain of accumulation has extended without any previous enlargement of constant capital. In agriculture the land under cultivation cannot be increased without the advance of more seed and manure, but this advance once made the purely mechanical working of the soil itself produces a marvelous effect on the amount of the product. A greater quantity of labor, done by the same number of laborers as before, thus increases the fertility, without requiring any new advance in the instrument of labor. It is once again the direct action of man on nature, which becomes an immediate source of greater accumulation, without the intervention of any new capital. Finally, in what is called manufacturing industry, every additional expense of labor presupposes a corresponding additional expenditure of raw materials, but not necessarily of instruments of labor. And as extractive industry and agriculture supply, manufacturing industry with its raw materials and those of its instruments of labor, the additional product the former have created without additional advance of capital tells also in favor of the latter. General result. By incorporating with itself the two primary creators of wealth, labor power and the land, capital acquires the power of expansion that permits it to augment the elements of its accumulation beyond the limits apparently fixed by its own magnitude or by the value and the mass of the means of production already produced in which it has its being. Another important factor in the accumulation of capital is the degree of productivity of social labor. With the productive power of labor increases the mass of the products in which a certain value and therefore a surplus value of a given magnitude is embodied. The rate of surplus value remaining the same or even falling, so long as it only falls more slowly than the productive power of labor rises, the mass of the surplus product increases. The division of this product into revenue and additional capital remaining the same, the consumption of the capitalist may therefore increase without any decrease in the fund of accumulation. The relative magnitude of the accumulation fund may even increase at the expense of the consumption fund whilst the cheapening of commodities places at the disposal of the capitalist as many means of enjoyment as formerly or even more than formerly. But hand in hand with the increasing productivity of labor goes, as we have seen, the cheapening of the laborer, therefore a higher rate of surplus value even when the real wages are rising. The latter never rise proportionally to the productive power of labor. The same value and variable capital therefore sets in movement more labor power and therefore more labor. The same value in constant capital is embodied in more means of production, i.e., in more instruments of labor, materials of labor and auxiliary materials. It therefore also supplies more elements for the production both of use value and of value, and with these more absorbers of labor. The value of the additional capital, therefore, remaining the same or even diminishing, accelerated accumulation still takes place. Not only does the scale of reproduction materially extend, but the production of surplus value increases more rapidly than the value of the additional capital. The development of the productive power of labor reacts also on the original capacity already engaged in the process of production. A part of the functioning constant capital consists of instruments of labor, such as machinery, etc., which are not consumed and therefore not reproduced or replaced by new ones of the same kind until after long periods of time. But every year a part of these instruments of labor perishes or reaches the limit of its productive function. It reaches, therefore, in that year, the time for its periodical reproduction for its replacement by new ones of the same kind. If the productiveness of labor has, during the using up of these instruments of labor, increased, and it develops continually with the uninterrupted advance of science and technology, more efficient and, considering their increased efficiency, cheaper machines, tools, apparatus, etc., replace the old. The old capital is reproduced in a more productive form, apart from the constant detail improvements in the instruments of labor already in use. The other part of the constant capital, raw material and auxiliary substances, is constantly reproduced in less than a year, those produced by agriculture for the most part annually. Every introduction of improved methods, therefore, works almost simultaneously on the new capital and on that already in action. Every advance in chemistry not only multiplies the number of useful materials and the useful applications of those already known, thus extending with the growth of capital its sphere of investment. It teaches at the same time how to throw the increments of the processes of production and consumption back again into the circle of the process of reproduction, and thus, without any previous outlay of capital, creates new matter for capital. Like the increased exploitation of natural wealth by the mere increase in the tension of labor power, science and technology give capital a power of expansion independent of the given magnitude of the capital already functioning. They react at the same time on that part of the original capital which has entered upon its stage of renewal. Thus, in passing into its new shape, incorporates gratis the social advance made while its old shape was being used up. Of course, this development of productive power is accompanied by a partial depreciation of functioning capital. So far as this depreciation makes itself acutely felt in competition, the burden falls on the laborer in the increased exploitation of whom the capitalist looks for his indemnification. Labor transmits to its product the value of the means of production consumed by it. On the other hand, the value and mass of the means of production set in motion by a given quantity of labor increase as the labor becomes more productive. Though the same quantity of labor adds always to its products only the sum of new value, still the old capital value transmitted by the labor to the products increases with the growing productivity of labor. An English and a Chinese spinner, for example, may work the same number of hours with the same intensity, then they will both in a week create equal values. But in spite of this equality an immense difference will obtain between the value of the week's product of the Englishman who works with a mighty automaton and that of the Chinaman who has but a spinning wheel. In the same time as the Chinaman spins one pound of cotton, the Englishman spins several hundreds of pounds. A sum many hundred times as great of old value swells the value of his product in which those reappear in a new useful form and can thus function as new capital. In 1782, as Friedrich Engels teaches us, all the wool crop in England of the three preceding years lay untouched for want of laborers and so it must have lain if newly invented machinery had not come to its aid and spun it. Footnote. Friedrich Engels, Lager der Arbeitendenklasse in England, page 20, end note. Labor embodied in the form of machinery of course did not directly force into life a single man, but it made possible for a smaller number of laborers with the addition of relatively less living labor not only to consume the wool productively and to put into it new value, but to preserve in the form of yarn, et cetera, its old value. At the same time it caused and stimulated increased reproduction of wool. It is the natural property of living labor to transmit old value whilst it creates new. Hence with the increase in efficacy, extent and value of its means of production, consequently with the accumulation that accompanies the development of its productive power, labor keeps up and eternizes and always increasing capital value in a form ever new. This natural power of labor takes the appearance of an intrinsic property of capital in which it is incorporated just as the productive forces of social labor take the appearance of inherent properties of capital and as the constant appropriation of surplus labor by the capitalists takes that of a constant self expansion of capital. Footnote. Classic economy has, on account of a deficient analysis of the labor process and of the process of creating value, never properly grasped this weighty element of reproduction as may be seen in Ricardo. He says, for example, whatever the change in productive power, a million men always produce and manufactures the same value. This is accurate if the extension and degree of intensity of their labor are given. But it does not prevent, this Ricardo overlooks in certain conclusions he draws, a million men with different powers of productivity in their labor turning into products very different masses of the means of production and therefore preserving in their products very different masses of value in consequence of which the values of the products yielded may vary considerably. Ricardo has, it may be noted in passing, tried in vain to make clear to J.B. Say by that very example the difference between use value, which he here calls wealth or material riches, and exchange value. Say answers. As for the difficulty raised by Ricardo when he says that, by using better methods of production, a million people can produce two or three times as much wealth without producing any more value, this difficulty disappears when one bears in mind, as one should, that production is like an exchange in which a man contributes the productive services of his labor, his land, and his capital in order to obtain products. It is by means of these productive services that we acquire all the products existing in the world. Therefore we are richer, our productive services have the more value, the greater quantity of useful things than they bring through the exchange which is called production. J.B. Say, Letras a. M. Malthus, Paris 1820 pages 168 and 169. The difficulty, it exists for him, not for Ricardo, that say means to clear up is this. Why does not the exchange value of the use value increase when their quantity increases in consequence of increased productive power of labor? Answer. The difficulty is met by calling use value exchange value, if you please. Exchange value is a thing that is connected one way or another with exchange. If, therefore, production is called an exchange of labor and means of production against the product, it is clear as day that you obtain more exchange value in proportion as the production yields more use value. In other words, the more use values, i.e. stockings, a working day yields to the stocking manufacturer the richer he is in stockings. Suddenly, however, say recollects with a great quantity of stockings their price, which of course has nothing to do with their exchange value falls, because competition obliges them, the producers, to sell their products for what they cost to make. But when does the profit come if the capitalist sells the commodities at cost price? Never mind, say declares that, in consequence of increased productivity, everyone now receives in return for a given equivalent two pairs of stockings instead of one as before. The result he arrives at is precisely that proposition of Ricardo that he aimed at disproving. After this mighty effort of thought, he triumphantly apostrosizes Malthus in the words, This, sir, is the well-founded doctrine without which it is impossible, I say, to explain the greatest difficulties in political economy, and in particular to explain why it is that a nation can be richer when its products fall in value, even though wealth is value. First, see page 170. An English economist remarks upon the conjuring tricks of the same nature that appear in say's letters. Those affected ways of talking make up in general that which Mr. Say is pleased to call his doctrine, and which he earnestly urges Malthus to teach at Hartford, as it is already taught in numerous parts of Europe. He says, if all those propositions appear paradoxical to you, look at the things they express, and I venture to believe that they will then appear very simple and very rational. Doubtless, and in consequence of the same process, they will appear everything else except original. An inquiry into those principles respecting the nature of demand, etc., pages 116 and 110. With the increase of capital, the difference between the capital employed and the capital consumed increases. In other words, there is increase in the value and the material mass of the instruments of labor, such as buildings, machinery, drain pipes, working cattle, apparatus of every kind that function for a longer or shorter time in process of production constantly repeated, or that serve for the attainment of particular useful effects, whilst they themselves only gradually wear out, therefore only lose their value piecemeal, therefore transfer that value to the product only bit by bit. In the same proportion as these instruments of labor serve as product formers without adding value to the product, i.e. in the same proportion as they are wholly employed, but only partly consumed, they perform as we saw earlier the same gratuitous service as the natural forces, water, steam, air, electricity, etc. This gratuitous service of past labor, when seized and filled with the soul by living labor, increases with the advancing stages of accumulation. Since past labor always disguises itself as capital, i.e. since the passive of the labor of A, B, C takes the form of the active of non-laborer X, bourgeois and political economists are full of praises of the services of dead and gone labor, which, according to the Scotch genius McCulloch, ought to receive a special remuneration in the shape of interest, profit, etc. The powerful and ever-increasing assistance given by past labor to the living labor process under the form of means of production is, therefore, attributed to that form of past labor in which it is alienated as unpaid labor from the worker himself, i.e. to its capitalistic form. The practical agents of capitalist production and their pedophogging ideologists are as unable to think of the means of production as separate from the antagonistic social mask they wear today as a slave owner to think of the worker himself as distinct from his character as a slave. Footnote. McCulloch took out a patent for wages of past labor long before senior did for wages of abstinence. Endnote. With a given degree of exploitation of labor power, the mass of the surplus value produced is determined by the number of workers simultaneously exploited, and this corresponds, although in varying proportions, with the magnitude of capital. The more, therefore, capital increases by means of successive accumulations, the more does the sum of the value increase that is divided into the consumption fund and accumulation fund. The capitalist can, therefore, live a more jolly life and, at the same time, show more abstinence. And, finally, all the springs of production act with greater elasticity, the more its scale extends with the mass of the capital advanced. End of Chapter 24, Section 4. Chapter 24, Section 5 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 Gesine. Capital. 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 Engelt. Part 7. The Accumulation of Capital. Chapter 24. Conversion of surplus value into capital. Section 5. The so-called Labour Fund. It has been shown in the course of this inquiry that capital is not a fixed magnitude, but is a part of social wealth, elastic and constantly fluctuating with a division of fresh surplus value into revenue and additional capital. It has been seen further that, even with a given magnitude of functioning capital, the labour power, the science and the land, by which are to be understood economically all conditions of labour furnished by nature independently of man, embodied in it form elastic powers of capital, allowing it within certain limits, a field of action independent of its own magnitude. In this inquiry we have neglected all effects of the process of circulation, effects which may produce very different degrees of efficiency in the same mass of capital. And as we presuppose the limits set by capitalist production, that is to say presupposed the process of social production in a form developed by purely spontaneous growth, we neglected any more rational combination, directly and systematically practicable with the means of production, and the mass of labour power at present disposable. Classical economy always loved to conceive social capital as a fixed magnitude of a fixed degree of efficiency. But this prejudice was first established as a dogma by the Arch Philistine, Jeremy Benson, that insipid pedantic leather-tongued oracle of the ordinary bourgeois intelligence of the 19th century. Footnote Compare, among others, Jeremy Benson, Theorie des peines et des récompenses, Traduction d'édition du mot 3ème édition Paris 1826, T2L4 Chapter 2. End of footnote Benson is among philosophers, what Martin Tupper is among poets. Both could only have been manufactured in England. Footnote Benson is a purely English phenomenon. Not even accepting our philosopher, Christian Wolff, in no time and in no country has the most homespun commonplace ever strutted about in so self-satisfied a way. The principle of utility was no discovery of Benson. He simply reproduced in his dull way what heritius and other Frenchmen had said with esprit in the 18th century. To know what is useful for a dog, one must study dog nature. This nature itself is not to be deduced from the principle of utility. Applying this to man, he that would criticise all human acts, movements, relations, etc., by the principle of utility, must first deal with human nature in general and then with human nature as modified in each historical epoch. Benson makes short work of it. With a driest naivete, he takes the modern shopkeeper, especially the English shopkeeper, as the normal man. Whatever is useful to this queer normal man and to his world is absolutely useful. This yard measure, then, he applies to past, present and future. The Christian religion, for example, is useful, quote, because it forbids in the name of religion the same faults that the penal code condemns in the name of the law, unquote. Artistic criticism is harmful, because it disturbs worthy people in the enjoyment of Martin Tupper, etc. With such rubbish as the brave fellow with his motto, Nui-la-dies, Sine-line, piled up mountains of books, had I the courage of my friend Heinrich Heine, I should call Mr. Jeremy a genius in the way of bourgeois stupidity. End of footnote. In the light of his dogma, the commonist phenomena of the process of production, as, for example, its sudden expansions and contractions, nay, even accumulation itself, become perfectly inconceivable. Footnote. Quote. That food, raw materials and tools should be previously augmented, which is, in fact, maintaining that no increase of production can take place without a previous increase, or, in other words, that an increase is impossible, unquote. S. Bailey. Money and its vicissitudes. Pages 58 and 70. Bailey criticizes the dogma mainly from the point of view of the process of circulation. End of footnote. The dogma was used by Benson himself, as well as by Malthus, James Mill, McCulloch, etc., for an apologetic purpose, and especially in order to represent one part of capital, namely, variable capital, or that part convertible into labour power as a fixed magnitude. The material of variable capital, that is, the mass of the means of subsistence it represents for the labourer, or the so-called labour fund, was fabled as a separate part of social wealth, fixed by natural laws and unchangeable. To set in motion the part of social wealth, which is to function as constant capital, or to express it in a material form as means of production, a definite mass of living labour is required. This mass is given technologically. But neither is the number of labourers required to render fluid this mass of labour power given. It changes with a degree of exploitation of the individual labour power. Nor is the price of this labour power given, but only its minimum limit, which is, moreover, very variable. The facts that lie at the bottom of this dogma are these. On the one hand, the labourer has no right to interfere in the division of social wealth into means of enjoyment for the non-labourer and means of production. John Stuart Mill, in his Principles of Political Economy, says, The really exhausting and the really repulsive labourers, instead of being better paid than others, are almost invariably paid the worst of all. The more revolting the occupation, the more certain it is to receive the minimum of remuneration. The hardships and the earning, instead of being directly proportional, as in any just arrangements of society they would be, are generally in an inverse ratio to one another. To avoid misunderstanding, let me say that although men like John Stuart Mill are to blame for the contradiction between their traditional economic dogmas and their modern tendencies, it would be very wrong to class with them the herd of vulgar economic apologists. End of footnote. On the other hand, only in favourable and exceptional cases, has he the power to enlarge the so-called labour fund at the expense of the revenue of the wealthy. What silly tautology results from the attempt to represent the capitalistic limits of the labour fund as its natural and social limits may be seen, for example, in Professor Fawcett. Footnote. Age Fawcett, Professor of Political Economy at Cambridge. The economic position of the British labourer, London 1865, page 120. End of footnote. Quote. The circulating capital of a country, he says, is its wage fund. Hence, if we desire to calculate the average money wages received by each labourer, we have simply to divide the amount of this capital by the number of the labouring population. Footnote. I must here remind the reader that the categories variable and constant capital were first used by me. The labour economy, since the time of Adam Smith, has confusedly mixed up the essential distinctions involved in these categories with the mere formal differences arising out of the process of circulation of fixed and circulating capital. For further details on this point, see book two, part two. End of footnote. That is to say, we first add together the individual wages actually paid, and then we affirm that the sum thus obtained forms the social value of the labour fund determined and vouchsafed to us by God and nature. Lastly, we divide the sum thus obtained by the number of labourers to find out again how much may come to each on the average. An uncommonly knowing dodge this. It did not prevent Mr. Fawcett saying in the same breath, quote, the aggregate wealth which is annually saved in England is divided into two portions. One portion is employed as capital to maintain our industry, and the other portion is exported to foreign countries. Only a portion and perhaps not a large portion of the wealth which is annually saved in this country is invested in our own industry, unquote, footnote. Fawcett, first chapter, pages 122, 123. End of footnote. The greater part of the yearly accruing surplus product embezzled because abstracted without return of an equivalent from the English labourer is thus used as capital, not in England, but in foreign countries. But with the additional capital thus exported as part of the labour fund invented by God and Bentham is also exported. Footnote. It might be said that not only capital but also labourers in the shape of emigrants are annually exported from England. In the text, however, there is no question of the peculiar of the emigrants who are in great part not labourers. The sons of farmers make up a great part of them. The additional capital annually transported abroad to be put out at interest is in much greater proportion to the annual accumulation than the yearly emigration is to the yearly increase of population. End of footnote. End of part 7, chapter 24, section 5. Chapter 25, 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 25, the general law of capitalist accumulation. Section 1, the increased demand for labour power that accompanies accumulation. The composition of capital remaining the same. In this chapter we consider the influence of the growth of capital on the lot of the labouring class. The most important factor in this inquiry is the composition of capital and the changes it undergoes in the course of the process of accumulation. The composition of capital is to be understood in a twofold sense. On the side of value it is determined by the proportion in which it is divided into constant capital or value of the means of production and variable capital or value of labour power, the sum total of wages. On the side of material, as it functions in the process of production, all capital is divided into means of production and living labour power. This latter composition is determined by the relation between the mass of the means of production employed on the one hand and the mass of labour necessary for their employment on the other. I call the former the value composition, the latter the technical composition of capital. Between the two there is a strict correlation. To express this I call the value composition of capital insofar as it is determined by its technical composition and mirrors the changes of the latter, the organic composition of capital. Whenever I refer to the composition of capital without further qualification its organic composition is always understood. The many individual capitals invested in a particular branch of production have, one with another, more or less different compositions. The average of their individual compositions gives us the composition of the total capital in this branch of production. Lastly, the averages of these averages in all branches of production gives us the composition of the total social capital of a country and with this alone are we in the last resort concerned in the following investigation. Growth of capital involves growth of its variable constituent or of the part invested in labour power. A part of the surplus value turned into additional capital must always be retransformed into variable capital or additional labour fund. If we suppose that all other circumstances remaining the same the composition of capital also remains constant, i.e. that a definite mass of means of production constantly needs the same mass of labour power to set it in motion, then demand for labour and the subsistence fund of the labourers clearly increase in the same proportion as the capital, and the more rapidly the more rapidly the capital increases. Since the capital produces yearly a surplus value of which one part is yearly added to the original capital, since this increment itself grows yearly along with the augmentation of the capital already functioning, since lastly under special stimulus to enrichment such as the opening of new markets or of new spheres for the outlay of capital in consequence of newly developed social wants, etc., the scale of accumulation may be suddenly extended merely by a change in the division of the surplus value or surplus product into capital and revenue. The requirements of accumulating capital may exceed the increase of labour power or of the number of labourers. The demand for labourers may exceed the supply and therefore wages may rise. This must indeed ultimately be the case if the conditions supposed above continue. For since in each year more labourers are employed than in its predecessor, sooner or later a point must be reached at which the requirements of accumulation begin to surpass the customary supply of labour, and therefore a rise of wages takes place. A lamentation on this score was heard in England during the whole of the 15th and the first half of the 18th centuries. The more or less favourable circumstances in which the wage working class supports and multiplies itself in no way alter the fundamental character of capitalist production. As simple reproduction constantly reproduces the capital itself, i.e. the relation of capitalists on the one hand and wage workers on the other, so reproduction on a progressive scale, i.e. accumulation, reproduces the capital relation on a progressive scale. More capitalists or larger capitalists at this pole, more wage workers at that. The reproduction of a mass of labour power which must incessantly reincorporate itself with capital for that capital's self-expansion, which cannot get free from capital and whose enslavement to capital is only concealed by the variety of individual capitalists to whom it sells itself, this reproduction of labour power forms, in fact, an essential of the reproduction of capital itself. Accumulation of capital is, therefore, increase of the proletariat. Footnote. Karl Marx a égalité de pression des masses plus un pays à de proletaires et plus ill et riches. Collins, l'économie politique, source des révolutions et des utopies, prétendue socialiste. Paris, 1857, page 331. Our proletarian is economically none other than the wage labourer who produces and increases capital and is thrown out on the streets as soon as he is superfluous for the needs of a grandisement of Monsieur Capital, as Pecure calls this person. The sickly proletarian of the primitive forest is a pretty rochery and fancy. The primitive forester is owner of the primitive forest and uses the primitive forest as his property with the freedom of an orangutan. He is not, therefore, a proletarian. This would only be the case if the primitive forest exploited him instead of being exploited by him. As far as his health is concerned, such a man would bear well comparison, not only with the modern proletarian, but also with the syphilitic and scruffy-less upper classes. But no doubt, Herr Wilhelm Rocher, by primitive forest, means his native heath of Lüneburg. Classical economy grasped this fact so thoroughly that Adam Smith, Ricardo, etc., as mentioned earlier, inaccurately identified accumulation with the consumption by the productive workers of all the capitalized part of the surplus product, or with its transformation into additional wage labourers. As early as 1696 John Bellers says, For if one had a hundred thousand acres of land and as many pounds and money and as many capital, without a labourer, what would the rich man be but a labourer? As the labourers make men rich, so the more labourers there will be, the more rich men, the labourer of the poor being the minds of the rich. So also Bernard de Mandeville at the beginning of the eighteenth century. It would be easier where property is well secured to live without money than without poor, for who would do the work? As they, the poor, ought to be kept from starving, so they should receive nothing worth saving. If here and there one of the lowest class by uncommon industry and pinching his belly, lifts himself above the condition he was brought up in, nobody ought to hinder him. Nay, it is undeniably the wisest course for every person in the society and for every private family to be frugal. But it is in the interest of all rich nations that the greatest part of the poor should be almost never idle and yet continually spend what they get. Those that get their living by their daily labour have nothing to stir them up to be serviceable but their wants, which it prudence to relieve, but folly to cure. The only thing then that can render the labouring man industrious is a moderate quantity of money, for as too little will, according to his temper is, either disparate or make him desperate, so too much will make him insolent and lazy. From what has been said, it is manifest that in a free nation where slaves are not allowed of, the surest wealth consists in a multitude of labourers poor, for besides that they are the never-failing nursery of fleets and armies, without them there could be no enjoyment and no product of any country would be valuable. To make the society, which of course consists of non-workers, happy and people easier under the meanest circumstances, it is requisite that great numbers of them should be ignorant as well as poor. Knowledge both enlarges and multiplies our desires, and the fewer things a man wishes for, the more easily his necessities may be supplied. Footnote. Bernard de Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, Fifth Edition, London, 1728. Remarks. Pages 212, 213, 328. Temporate living and constant employment is the direct road for the poor to rational happiness, by which he most probably means long working days and little means of subsistence, and to riches and strength for the state, viz for the landlords, capitalists, and their political dignitaries and agents. An essay on trade and commerce, London, 1770, page 54. Endnote. What Mandeville, an honest, clear-headed man had not yet seen, is that the mechanism of the process of accumulation itself increases, along with the capital, the mass of labouring poor, i.e. the wage labourers who turn their labour power into an increasing power of self-expansion of the growing capital, and even by doing so must eternise their dependent relation on their own product, as personified in the capitalists. In reference to this relation of dependence, Sir F. M. Eden, in his The State of the Poor, an History of the Laboring Classes in England, says, The natural produce of our soil is certainly not fully adequate to our subsistence. We can neither be clothed, lodged, nor fed, but in consequence of some previous labour. A portion at least of the society must be indefatagably employed. There are others who, though they neither toil nor spin, can yet command the produce of industry, but who owe their exemption from labour solely to civilisation in order. They are peculiarly the creatures of civil institutions, which have recognised that individuals may acquire property by various other means besides the exertion of labour. Persons of independent fortune owe their superior advantages by no means to any superior abilities of their own, but almost entirely to the industry of others. It is not the possession of land or of money, but the command of labour which distinguishes the opulent from the labouring part of the community. This scheme approved by Eden would give the people of property sufficient, but by no means too much influence and authority over those who work for them, and it would place such labourers not in an abject or servile condition, but in such a state of easy and liberal dependence as all who know human nature and its history will allow to be necessary for their own comfort. Eden should have asked whose creatures then are the civil institutions. From his standpoint of juridical illusion he does not regard the law as a product of the material relations of production, but conversely the relations of production as products of the law. Lingue overthrew Montesquieu's illusory esprit de loi with one word, l'esprit de loi c'est la propriété. The spirit of laws is property. Sir F. M. Eden, it may be remarked in passing, is the only disciple of Adam Smith during the eighteenth century that produced any work of importance. Footnote. If the reader reminds me of Malthus, whose essay on population appeared in 1798, I remind him that this work, in its first form, is nothing more than a schoolboyish, superficial plagiary of depot, Sir James Stewart, Townsend, Franklin, Wallace, etc., and does not contain a single sentence thought out by himself. The great sensation this pamphlet caused was due solely to party interest. The French Revolution had found passionate defenders in the United Kingdom, the principle of population slowly worked out in the eighteenth century, and then, in the midst of a great social crisis, proclaimed with drums and trumpets as the infallible antidote to the teachings of Condorcet, etc., was greeted with jubilance by the English oligarchy as the great destroyer of all hankerings after human development. Malthus, hugely astonished at his success, gave himself to stuffing into his book materials superficially compiled and adding to it new matter, not discovered but annexed by him. Note, further, although Malthus was a parson of the English State Church, he had taken the monastic fallow celibacy, one of the conditions of holding a fellowship in Protestant Cambridge University. Socios Caligiorum Maritos Esenon Prometis said Statham Pasquam Quis Auxorum Duxerit Socios Caligiae Decinate Essay. Reports of Cambridge University Commission, page 172. This circumstance favorably distinguished Malthus from the other Protestant parsons who have shuffled off the command in joining celibacy of the priesthood and have taken be fruitful and multiply as their special Biblical mission in such a degree that they generally contribute to the increase of population to a really unbecoming extent, whilst they preach at the same time to the laborers the principle of population. It is characteristic that the economic fall of man, the Adam's apple, the urgent appetite, the checks which tend to blunt the shafts of Cupid as Parson Townsend waggishly puts it, that this delicate question was and is monopolized by the reverence of Protestant theology or rather of the Protestant church. With the exception of the Venetian monks, ortees, an original and clever writer, most of the population theory teachers are Protestant parsons. For instance, Bruckner, Thierry du Système animale, Léde, 1767, in which the whole subject of the modern population theory is exhausted and to which the passing quarrel between Quesné and his pupil, the Elder Mirabeau, furnished ideas on the same topic. Then Parson Wallace, Parson Townsend, Parson Malthus and his pupil, the Arch-Parson Thomas Chalmers, to say nothing of lesser reverence scribblers in this line. Originally, political economy was studied by philosophers like Hobbes, Locke, Hume, by businessmen and statesmen like Thomas Moore, Temple, Sully, DeWitt, North Law, Vanderland, Cantillon, Franklin, and especially and with greatest success by medical men like Petty, Barband, Mandeville, Quesné. Even in the middle of the eighteenth century, the reverend Mr. Tucker, a notable economist of his time, excused himself for meddling with the things of Mammon. Later on and in truth with this very principle of population, struck the hour of the Protestant parsons. Petty, who regarded the population as the basis of wealth and was, like Adam Smith, an outspoken foe to parsons, says, as if he had a presentiment of their bungling interference, that religion best flourishes when the priests are most mortified, as was before said of the law, which best flourishes when lawyers have least to do. He advises the Protestant priests, therefore, if they, once for all, will not follow the apostle Paul and mortify themselves by celibacy, not to breed more churchmen than the benefices, as they now stand shared out will receive. That is to say, if there be places for about twelve thousand in England and Wales, it will not be safe to breed up twenty-four thousand ministers, for then the twelve thousand which are unprovided for will seek ways how to get themselves a livelihood, which they cannot do more easily than by persuading the people that the twelve thousand incumbents do poison or starve their souls and misguide them in their way to heaven. Petty, a treatise of taxes and contributions, London, 1667, page 57. Adam Smith's position with the Protestant priesthood of his time is shown by the following. In a letter to A. Smith, L. L. D., on the life, death, and philosophy of his friend, David Hume, by one of the people called Christians, fourth edition, Oxford, 1784, Dr. Horn, Bishop of Norwich, reproves Adam Smith, because in a published letter to Mr. Strahan he involved his friend David Hume because he told the world how Hume amused himself on his deathbed with Lucian and Wist, and because he even had the impudence to write of Hume, I have always considered him, both in his lifetime and since his death, as approaching as nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man, as perhaps the nature of human frailty will permit. The bishop cries out in a passion, Is it right in you, sir, to hold up to our view as perfectly wise and virtuous, the character and conduct of one, who seems to have been possessed with an incurable antipathy to all that is called religion, and who strained every nerve to explode, suppress, and extirpate the spirit of it among men, that its very name, if he could affect it, might no more be had in remembrance. First C. page 8. But let not the lovers of truth be discouraged. Atheism cannot be of long continuance. P. 17. Adam Smith had the atrocious wickedness to propagate atheism through the land, vis by his theory of moral sentiments. Upon the whole, doctor, your meaning is good, but I think you will not succeed this time. You would persuade us by the example of David Hume, Esquire, that atheism is the only cordial for low spirits, and the proper antidote against the fear of death. You may smile over Babylon in ruins and congratulate the hardened pharaoh on his overthrow in the Red Sea. First C. pages 21 and 22. One Orthodox individual, amongst Adam Smith's college friends, writes after his death, Smith's well-placed affection for Hume hindered him from being a Christian. When he met with honest men whom he liked, he would believe almost anything they said. Had he been a friend of the worthy and genius Horax, he would have believed that the moon sometimes disappeared in a clear sky without the interposition of a cloud. He approached to republicanism in his political principles. The B. by James Anderson, 18 volumes. Volume 3. P. 166. 165. Edinburgh, 1791 to 93. Parsons Thomas Chalmers has his suspicions as to Adam Smith having invented the category of unproductive laborers solely for the Protestant Parsons in spite of their blessed work in the vineyard of the Lord. End note. Under the conditions of accumulation supposed thus far, which conditions are those most favorable to the laborers, their relation of dependence upon capital takes on a form endurable, or as Eden says, easy and liberal. Instead of becoming more intensive with the growth of capital, this relation of dependence only becomes more extensive, i.e., the sphere of capital's exploitation and rule merely extends with its own dimensions and the number of its subjects. A larger part of their own surplus product, always increasing and continually transformed into additional capital, comes back to them in the shape of means of payment so that they can extend the circle of their enjoyments, can make some additions to their consumption fund of clothes, furniture, etc., and can lay by small reserve funds of money. But just as little as better clothing, food and treatment, and a larger peculum do away with the exploitation of the slave, so little do they set aside that of the wage worker. A rise in the price of labor, as a consequence of accumulation of capital, only means, in fact, that the length and weight of the golden chain the wage worker has already forged for himself, allow of a relaxation of the tension of it. In the controversies on this subject, the chief fact has generally been overlooked, vis, the differential specifica, defining characteristic, of capitalist production. Labor power is sold today, not with a view of satisfying, by its service or by its product, the personal needs of the buyer. His aim is augmentation of his capital, production of commodities containing more labor than he pays for, containing, therefore, a portion of value that costs him nothing, and that is nevertheless realized when the commodities are sold. Production of surplus value is the absolute law of this mode of production. Labor power is only saleable so far as it preserved the means of production in their capacity of capital, reproduces its own value as capital, and yields, in unpaid labor, a source of additional capital. Footnote. The limit, however, to the employment of both the operative and the laborer is the same, namely, the possibility of the employer realizing a profit on the produce of their industry. If the rate of wages is such as to reduce the master's gains below the average profit of capital, he will cease to employ them, or he will only employ them on condition of submission to a reduction of wages. John Wade, page 241, endnote. The conditions of its sale, whether more or less available to the laborer, include therefore the necessity of its constant reselling and the constantly extended reproduction of all wealth in the shape of capital. Wages, as we have seen by their very nature, always imply the performance of a certain quantity of unpaid labor on the part of the laborer. All together, irrespective of the case of a rise in wages with a falling price of labor, etc., such an increase only means at best a quantitative diminution of the unpaid labor that the worker has to supply. This diminution can never reach the point at which it would threaten the system itself. Apart from violent conflicts as to the rate of wages, and Adam Smith has already shown that in such a conflict taken on the whole, the master is always master. A rise in the price of labor resulting from accumulation of capital implies the following alternative. Either the price of labor keeps on rising because its rise does not interfere with the progress of accumulation. In this there is nothing wonderful. Four, says Adam Smith, after these profits are diminished, stock may not only continue to increase, but to increase much faster than before. A great stock, though with small profits, generally increases faster than a small stock with great profits. In this case it is evident that a diminution in the unpaid labor in no way interferes with the extension of the domain of capital. Or, on the other hand, accumulation slackens in consequence of the rise in the price of labor, because the stimulus of gain is blunted. The rate of accumulation lessens, but with its lessening, the primary cause of that lessening vanishes, i.e. the disproportion between capital and exploitable labor power. The mechanism of the process of capitalist production removes the very obstacles that it temporarily creates. The price of labor falls again to a level corresponding with the needs of the stealth expansion of capital, whether the level be below, the same as, or above, the one which was normal before the rise of wages took place. We see thus, in the first case, it is not the diminished rate, either of the absolute or of the proportional increase in labor power or laboring population, which causes capital to be in excess, but conversely the excess of capital that makes exploitable labor power insufficient. In the second case, it is not the increased rate, either of the absolute or of the proportional increase in labor power, or laboring population, that makes capital insufficient. But conversely, the relative diminution of capital that causes the exploitable labor power, or rather its price, to be in excess. It is these absolute movements of the accumulation of capital which are reflected as relative movements of the mass of exploitable labor power, and therefore seem produced by the latter's own independent movement. To put it mathematically, the rate of accumulation is the independent, not the dependent variable, the rate of wages, the dependent, not the independent variable. Thus, when the industrial cycle is in the phase of crisis, a general fall in the price of commodities is expressed as a rise in the value of money, and in the phase of prosperity, a general rise in the price of commodities as a fall in the value of money. The so-called currency school concludes from this that, with high prices too much, with low prices too little money is in circulation. Their ignorance and complete misunderstanding of facts are worthily paralleled by the economists who interpret the above phenomena of accumulation by saying that there are now too few, now too many, wage laborers. Footnote. Note by the institute of Marxism-Leninism to the Russian edition. The manuscript in the first case says little, and in the second case much. The correction has been introduced according to the authorized French translation. End note. Footnote. See, for example, Karl Marx, Zur critic der Politischen Economy, page 166. End note. The law of capitalist production that is at the bottom of the pretended natural law of population reduces itself simply to this. The correlation between accumulation of capital and rate of wages is nothing else than the correlation between the unpaid labor transformed into capital and the additional paid labor necessary for the setting in motion of this additional capital. It is therefore in no way a relation between two magnitudes, independent one of the other, on the one hand the magnitude of the capital, on the other the number of the laboring population. It is rather at bottom only the relation between the unpaid and the paid labor of the same laboring population. If the quantity of unpaid labor supplied by the working class and accumulated by the capitalist class increases so rapidly that its conversion into capital requires an extraordinary addition of paid labor, then wages rise, and all other circumstances remaining equal, the unpaid labor diminishes in proportion. But as soon as this diminution touches the point at which the surplus capital is no longer supplied in normal quantity, a reaction sets in. A smaller part of revenue is capitalized, accumulation lags, and the movement of rise in wages receives a check. The rise of wages therefore is confined within limits that not only leave intact the foundations of the capitalistic system, but also secure its reproduction on a progressive scale. The law of capitalistic accumulation metamorphosed by economists into pretended law of nature in reality merely states that the very nature of accumulation excludes every diminution in the degree of exploitation of labor and every rise in the price of labor which could seriously imperil the continual reproduction on an ever enlarging scale of the capitalistic relation. It cannot be otherwise an emotive production in which the laborer exists to satisfy the needs of self expansion of existing values. On the contrary, material wealth existing to satisfy the needs of development on the part of the laborer. As in religion, man is governed by the products of his own brain, so in capitalistic production he is governed by the products of his own hand. Footnote. If we now return to our first inquiry, wherein it was shown that capital itself is only the result of human labor, it seems quite incomprehensible that man can have fallen under the impression of capital, his own product, can be subordinated to it, and as in reality this is beyond dispute the case involuntarily the question arises how has the laborer been able to pass from being master of capital as its creator to being its slave? Von Thunen der Isiolertstadt Part 2, Section 2, Rostock, 1863 pages 5 and 6. It is Thunen's merit to have asked the question, his answer is simply childish. Endnote. End of Chapter 25, Section 1 Chapter 25, Section 2 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 Abbelling and edited by Friedrich Engels. Part 7, The Accumulation of Capital Chapter 25 The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation Section 2, Relative Diminution of the Variable Part of Capital simultaneously with the progress of accumulation and of the concentration that accompanies it. According to the economists themselves it is neither the actual extent of social wealth nor the magnitude of the capital already functioning that leads to a rise of wages but only the constant growth of accumulation and the degree of the rapidity of that growth. Adam Smith, Book 1, Chapter 8 So far we have only considered one special phase of this process, that in which the increase of capital occurs along with a constant technical composition of capital. But the difference is not beyond this phase. Once given the general basis of the capitalistic system, then in the course of accumulation a point is reached at which the development of the productivity of social labor becomes the most powerful lever of accumulation. The same cause, says Adam Smith which raises the wages of labor the increase of stock tends to increase its productive powers and to make a smaller quantity of labor produce a part from natural conditions such as fertility of soil etc. and from the skill of independent and isolated producers shown rather qualitatively in the goodness than quantitatively in the mass of their products. The degree of productivity of labor in a given society is expressed in a relative extent of the means of production that one laborer during a given time with the same tension of labor power turns into products. The mass of the means of production which he thus transforms increases with the productiveness of his labor but those means of production play a double part. The increase of some is a consequence that of the others a condition of the increasing productivity of labor. For example, with the division of labor and manufacture and with the use of machinery more raw material is worked up in the same time and therefore a greater mass of raw material auxiliary substances enter into the labor process. That is the consequence of the increasing productivity of labor. On the other hand the mass of machinery beasts of burden, mineral manures, drain pipes etc is a condition of the increasing productivity of labor. So also is it with the means of production concentrated in buildings furnaces, means of transport etc. But whether condition or consequence the growing extent of the means of production as compared with the labor power incorporated with them is an expression of the growing productiveness of labor. The increase of the latter appears therefore in the diminution of the mass of labor in proportion to the mass of means of production moved by it or in the diminution of the subjective factor of the labor process as compared with the objective factor. This change in the technical composition of capital, this growth in the mass of the means of production as compared with the mass of the labor power that vivifies them is reflected again in its value composition by the increase of the constant constituent of capital at the expense of its variable constituent. There may be for example originally 50% of a capital laid out in means of production and 50% in labor power later on with the development of the productivity of labor 80% in means of production 20% in labor power and so on. This law of the progressive increase in constant capital in proportion to the variable is confirmed at every step as already shown by the comparative analysis of the prices of commodities whether we compare different economic epics or different nations in the same epic. The relative magnitude of the element of price which represents the value of the means of production only or the constant part of capital consumed is indirect the relative magnitude of the other element of price that pays labor the variable part of capital is in inverse proportion to the advance of accumulation. This diminution in the variable part of capital as compared with the constant or the altered value composition of the capital however only shows approximately the change in the composition of its material constituents. If for example the capital value employed today in spinning is 7 8th constant and 1 8th variable whilst at the beginning of the 18th century it was 1 half constant and 1 half variable on the other hand the mass of raw material, instruments of labor etc that a certain quantity of spinning labor consumes productively today is many hundred times greater than at the beginning of the 18th century. The reason is simply that with the increasing productivity of labor not only does the mass of the means of production consumed by an increase but their value compared with their mass diminishes. Their value therefore rises absolutely but not in proportion to their mass. The increase of the difference between constant and variable capital is therefore much less than that of the difference between the mass of the means of production into which the constant and the mass of the labor power into which the variable capital is converted. The former difference increases with the latter but in a smaller degree. But if the process of accumulation lessens the relative magnitude of the variable part of capital it by no means in doing this excludes the possibility of a rise in its absolute magnitude. Suppose that a capital value at first is divided into 50% of constant and 50% of variable capital. Later into 80% of constant and 20% of variable. If in the meantime the original capital say 6,000 pounds has increased to 18,000 pounds its variable constituent has also increased. It was 3,000 pounds it is now 3,600 pounds. But whereas formerly an increase of capital by 20% would have suffice to raise the demand for labor by 20% now this latter rise requires a tripling of the original capital. In part 4 it was shown how the development of the productiveness of social labor presupposes cooperation on a large scale. How it is only upon this supposition that division and combination of labor can be organized and the means of production economized by concentration on a vast scale. How instruments of labor which from their very nature are only fit for use in common such as a system of machinery can be called into being. How huge natural forces can be pressed into the service of production and how the transformation can be affected of the process of production into a technological application of science. On the basis of the production of commodities where the means of production are the property of private persons and where the artisan therefore either produces commodities isolated from an independent of others or sells his labor power as a commodity because he lacks the means for independent industry cooperation on a large scale can realize itself only in the increase of individual capitals only in proportion as the means of social production and the means of subsistence are transformed into the private property of capitalists. The basis of the production of commodities can admit a production on a large scale in the capitalistic form alone. A certain accumulation of capital in the hands of individual producers of commodities forms therefore the necessary preliminary of the specifically capitalist mode of production. We had therefore to assume that this occurs during the transition from handicraft to capitalistic industry. It may be called primitive accumulation because it is the historic basis instead of the historic result of specifically capitalist production. How it itself originates we need not here inquire as yet. It is enough that it forms the starting point. But all methods for raising the social productive power of labor that are developed on this basis are at the same time methods for the increased production of surplus value or surplus product which in its turn is the formative element of accumulation. They are therefore at the same time methods of the production of capital by capital or methods of its accelerated accumulation. The continual retransformation of surplus value into capital now appears in the shape of the increasing magnitude of the capital that enters into the process of production. This in turn is the basis of an extended scale of production of the methods for raising the productive power of labor that accompany it and of accelerated production of surplus value. If therefore a certain degree of accumulation of capital appears as a condition of the specifically capitalist mode of production, the latter causes conversely an accelerated accumulation of capital. With the accumulation of capital therefore the specifically capitalist mode of production develops and with the capitalist mode of production the accumulation of capital. Both these economic factors bring about in the compound ratio of the impulses they reciprocally give one another that change in the technical composition of capital by which the variable constituent becomes always smaller and smaller as compared with the constant. Every individual capital is a larger or smaller concentration of means of production with a corresponding command over a larger or smaller labor army. Every accumulation becomes the means of new accumulation. With the increasing mass of wealth which functions as capital accumulation increases the concentration of that wealth in the hands of individual capitalists and thereby widens the basis of production on a large scale and of the specific methods of capitalistic production. The growth of social capital is affected by the growth of many individual capitals. All other circumstances remaining the same, individual capitals and with them the concentration of the means of production increase in such proportion as they form aliquot parts of the total social capital. At the same time portions of the original capitals disengage themselves and function as new independent capitals. Besides other causes the division of property within capitalist families plays a great part in this. With the accumulation of capital therefore the number of capitalists grows to a lesser or lesser extent. Two points characterize this kind of concentration which grows directly out of or rather is identical with accumulation. First the increasing concentration of the social means of production in the hands of individual capitalists is other things remaining equal limited by the degree of increase of social wealth. Second the part of social capital domiciled in each particular sphere production is divided among many capitalists who face one another as independent commodity producers competing with each other. Accumulation and the concentration accompanying it are therefore not only scattered over many points but the increase of each functioning capital is thwarted by the formation of new and the subdivision of old capitals. Accumulation therefore presents itself on the one hand as increasing concentration of the means of production and of the command over labor on the other as repulsion of many individual capitals one from another. This splitting up of the total social capital into many individual capitals or the repulsion of its fractions one from another is counteracted by their attraction. This last does not mean that simple concentration of the means of production and of the command over labor which is identical with accumulation. It is the concentration of capitals already formed, destruction of their individual independence, expropriation of capitalist by capitalist, transformation of many small into few large capitals. This process differs from the former in this that it only presupposes a change in the distribution of capital already to hand and functioning its field of action is therefore not limited by the absolute growth of social wealth by the absolute limits of accumulation. Capital grows in one place to a huge mass in a single hand because it has in another place been lost by many. This is centralization proper as distinct from accumulation and concentration. The laws of this centralization of capitals or of the attraction of capital by capital cannot be developed here. A brief hint at a few facts must suffice. The battle of competition is fought by cheapening of commodities. The cheapness of commodities demands ceteris paribus on the productiveness of labor and this again on the scale of production. Therefore the larger capitals beat the smaller. It will further be remembered that with the development of the capitalist mode of production there is an increase in the minimum amount of individual capital necessary to carry on a business under its normal conditions. The smaller capitals therefore crowd into spheres of production which modern industry has only sporadically or incompletely got hold of. Here competition rages in direct proportion to the number and in inverse proportion to the magnitudes of the antagonistic capitals. It always ends in the ruin of many small capitalists whose capital partly pass into the hands of their conquerors partly vanish. Apart from this with capitalist production and altogether the new force comes into play the credit system which in its first stages furtively creeps in as the humble assistant of accumulation drawing into the hands of individual or associated capitalists by invisible threads the money resources which lie scattered over the surface of society in larger or smaller amounts. But it soon becomes a new and terrible weapon in the battle of competition and is finally transformed into the centralization of capitals. Commensurately with the development of capitalist production and accumulation there develop the two most powerful levers of centralization competition and credit. At the same time the progress of accumulation increases the material amenable to centralization i.e. the individual capitalists while the expansion of capital production creates on the one hand the social want and on the other the technical issues immense industrial undertakings which require a previous centralization of capital for their accomplishment. Today therefore the force of attraction drawing together individual capitals and the tendency to centralization are stronger than ever before. But if the relative extension and energy of the movement towards centralization is determined in a certain degree by the magnitude of capitalist wealth and superiority of economic mechanism already attained progress in centralization does not in any way depend upon a positive growth in the magnitude of social capital and this is the specific difference between centralization and concentration the latter being only another name for reproduction on an extended scale. Centralization may result from a mere change in the distribution of capitals already existing from a simple alteration in the quantitative grouping of the component parts of social capital. Here capital can grow into a powerful mass in a single hand because there it has been withdrawn from many individual hands. In any given branch of industry centralization would reach its extreme limit if all the individual capitals invested in it were fused into a single capital. In a given society the limit would be reached only when the entire social capital was united in the hands of either a single capitalist or a single capitalist company. Note in the fourth German edition the latest English and American trusts are already striving to attain this goal by attempting to unite at least all the large scale concerns in one branch of industry into one great joint stock company with a practical monopoly Friedrich Engels. And note. Centralization completes the work of accumulation by enabling industrial capitalists to extend the scale of their operations. Whether this latter result is the consequence of accumulation or centralization. Whether centralization is accomplished by the violent method of annexation when certain capitals become such preponderant centers of attraction for others that they shatter the individual cohesion of the latter and then draw the separate fragments to themselves. Or whether the fusion of a number of capitals already formed or in process of formation takes place by the smoother process of organizing companies, the economic effect remains the same. Everywhere the increased scale of industrial establishments is the starting point for a more comprehensive organization of the collective work of many for a wider development of their material motive forces. In other words for the progressive transformation of isolated processes of production carried on by customary methods into processes of production socially combined and scientifically arranged. But accumulation the gradual increase of capital by reproduction as it passes from the circular to the spiral form is clearly a very slow procedure compared with centralization which has only to change the quantitative groupings of the constituent parts of social capital. The world would still be without railways if it had to wait until accumulation had got a few individual capitalists far enough to be adequate for the construction of a railway. On the contrary, accomplished this in the twinkling of an eye by means of joint stock companies. And whilst centralization thus intensifies and accelerates the effects of accumulation it simultaneously extends and speeds those revolutions in the technical composition of capital which raise its constant portion at the expense of its variable portion thus diminishing the relative demand for labor. The masses of capital fused together by centralization reproduce and multiply as the others do only more rapidly thereby becoming new and powerful levers in social accumulation. Therefore, when we speak of the progress of social accumulation we tacitly include today the effects of centralization. The additional capitals formed in the normal course of accumulation see Chapter 24, Section 1 serve particularly as vehicles for the exploitation of new inventions and industrial improvements in general. But in time the old capital also reaches the moment of renewal from top to toe when it sheds its skin and is reborn like the others in a perfected technical form in which a smaller quantity of labor will suffice to set in motion a larger quantity of machinery and raw materials. The absolute reduction in the demand for labor which necessarily follows from this is obviously so much the greater the higher the degree in which capitals undergoing this process of renewal are already massed together by virtue of the centralization movement. On the one hand therefore the additional capital formed in the course of accumulation attracts fewer and fewer laborers in proportion to its magnitude. On the other hand the old capital periodically reproduced with change of composition repels more and more of the laborers formerly employed by it. End of Chapter 25, Section 2