 CHAPTER XXV. VOLUME I. BY CARL MARKS. CHAPTER XXV. The accumulation of capital, though originally appearing as its quantitative extension only, is affected, as we have seen, under a progressive, qualitative change in its composition, under a constant increase of its constant, at the expense of its variable constituent. Footnote Note in the third German edition. In Marks's copy there is here the marginal note. Here note for working out later, if the extension is only quantitative, then for a greater and smaller capital in the same branch of business, the profits are as the magnitudes of the capital's advanced. If the quantitative extension induces the qualitative change, then the rate of profit on the larger capital rises simultaneously. Friedrich Engels Note The specifically capitalist mode of production, the development of the productive power of labor corresponding to it, and the change then resulting in the organic composition of capital, do not merely keep pace with the advance of accumulation, or with the growth of social wealth. They develop at a much quicker rate because mere accumulation, the absolute increase of the total social capital, is accompanied by the centralization of the individual capitals of which the total is made up, and because the change in the technological composition of the additional capital goes hand in hand with a similar change in the technological composition of the original capital. With the advance of accumulation, therefore, the proportion of constant to variable capital changes. If it was originally, say, one-one, it now becomes successively two-one, three-one, four-one, five-one, seven-one, et cetera, so that as the capital increases, instead of one-half its total value, only one-third, one-fourth, one-fifth, one-sixth, one-eighth, et cetera, is transformed into labor power, and on the other hand, two-thirds, three-quarters, four-fifths, five-sixths, seven-eighths into means of production. Since the demand for labor is determined not by the amount of capital as a whole, but by its variable constituent alone, that demand falls progressively with the increase of the total capital, instead of, as previously assumed, rising in proportion to it. It falls relatively to the magnitude of the total capital and at an accelerated rate, as this magnitude increases. With the growth of the total capital, its variable constituent, or the labor incorporated in it, also does increase, but in a constantly diminishing proportion. The intermediate pauses are shortened, in which accumulation works as simple extension of production, on a given technical basis. It is not merely that an accelerated accumulation of total capital, accelerated in a constantly growing progression, is needed to absorb an additional number of laborers, or even on account of the constant metamorphosis of old capital, to keep employed those already functioning. In its turn, this increasing accumulation and centralization becomes a source of new changes in the composition of capital, of a more accelerated diminution of its variable, as compared with its constant constituent. This accelerated relative diminution of the variable constituent that goes along with the accelerated increase of the total capital, and moves more rapidly than this increase, makes the inverse form at the other pole of an apparently absolute increase of the laboring population, an increase always moving more rapidly than that of the variable capital or the means of employment. But in fact, it is capitalistic accumulation itself that constantly produces, and produces in the direct ratio of its own energy and extent, a relatively redundant population of laborers, i.e., a population of greater extent than suffices for the average needs of the self expansion of capital, and therefore a surplus population. Considering the social capital in its totality, the movement of its accumulation now causes periodical changes, affecting it more or less as a whole, now distributes its various phases simultaneously over the different spheres of production. In some spheres, a change in the composition of capital occurs without increase of its absolute magnitude, as a consequence of simple centralization. In others, the absolute growth of capital is connected with an absolute diminution of its variable constituent, or of the labor power absorbed by it. In others again, capital continues growing for a time on its given technical basis, and attracts additional labor power in proportion to its increase, while at other times it undergoes organic change, and lessens its variable constituent. In all spheres, the increase of the variable part of capital, and therefore of the number of laborers employed by it, is always connected with violent fluctuations in transitory production of surplus population, whether this takes the more striking form of the repulsion of laborers already employed, or the less evident but not less real form of the more difficult absorption of the additional laboring population through the usual channels. With the magnitude of social capital already functioning, and the degree of its increase, with the extension of the scale of production and the mass of the laborers set in motion, with the development of the productiveness of their labor, with the greater breadth and fullness of all sources of wealth, there is also an extension of the scale on which greater attraction of laborers by capital is accompanied by their greater repulsion, the rapidity of the change in the organic composition of capital, and in its technical form increases, and an increasing number of spheres of production becomes involved in this change, now simultaneously, now alternately. The laboring population therefore produces, along with the accumulation of capital produced by it, the means by which it in itself is made relatively superfluous, is turned into a relative surplus population, and it does this to an always increasing extent. This is a law of population peculiar to the capitalist mode of production, and in fact every special historic mode of production has its own special laws of population, historically valid within its limits, and only insofar as man has not interfered with them. Footnote added in the fourth German edition, the law of progressive diminution of the relative magnitude of variable capital, and its effect on the condition of the class of wage workers, is conjectured rather than understood by some of the prominent economists of the classical school. The greatest service was rendered here by John Barton, although he, like all the rest, lumps together constant and fixed capital, the variable and circulating capital. He says, quote, the demand for labor depends on the increase of circulating, and not of fixed capital. Were it true that the proportion between these two sorts of capital is the same at all times, and in all circumstances, then indeed it follows that the number of laborers employed is in proportion to the wealth of the state. But such a proposition has not the semblance of probability. As arts are cultivated and civilization is extended, fixed capital bears a larger and larger proportion to circulating capital. The amount of fixed capital employed in the production of a piece of British Muslim is at least a hundred, probably a thousand times greater, than that employed in a similar piece of Indian Muslim. And the proportion of circulating capital is a hundred or a thousand times less. The hull of the annual savings added to the fixed capital would have no effect in increasing the demand for labor. End quote. John Barton, observations on the circumstances which influence the condition of the laboring classes of society, London, 1817, page 16, 17, quote, the same cause which may increase the net revenue of the country may at the same time render the population redundant and deteriorate the condition of the laborer. End quote. Ricardo, first to see page 469. With an increase of capital, quote, the demand for labor will be in a diminishing ratio. I bid, page 480, note, quote, the amount of capital devoted to the maintenance of labor may vary independently of any changes in the whole amount of capital. Great fluctuations in the amount of employment and great suffering may become more frequent as capital itself becomes more plentiful. End quote. Richard Jones, an introductory lecture on political economy, London, 1833, page 13, quote, demand for labor will rise not in proportion to the accumulation of the general capital. Every augmentation, therefore, in the national stock destined for reproduction comes in the progress of society to have less and less influence upon the conditions of the laborer. Ramsay, first to see pages 90 and 91. End note. But if a surplus laboring population is a necessary product of accumulation or of the development of wealth on a capitalist basis, this surplus population becomes, conversely, the lever of capitalistic accumulation, nay, a condition of existence of the capitalist mode of production. It forms a disposable industrial reserve army that belongs to capital quite as absolutely as if the latter had bred it at its own cost. Independently of the limits of the actual increase of population, it creates, for the changing needs of the self-expansion of capital, a mass of human material always ready for exploitation. With accumulation and the development of the productiveness of labor that accompanies it, the power of sudden expansion of capital grows also. It grows not merely because the elasticity of the capital already functioning increases, not merely because the absolute wealth of society expands, of which capital only forms an elastic part, not merely because credit, under every special stimulus, at once places an unusual part of this wealth at the disposal of production in the form of additional capital. It grows also because the technical conditions of the process of production themselves, machinery, means of transport, etc., now must admit of the rapidest transformation of masses of surplus product into additional means of production. The mass of social wealth overflowing with the advance of accumulation and transformable into additional capital thrust itself frantically into the old branches of production whose market suddenly expands or into newly formed branches such as railways, etc., the need for which grows out of the development of the old ones. In all such cases there must be the possibility of throwing great masses of men suddenly on the decisive points without injury to the scale of production in other spheres. Overpopulation supplies these masses. The coarse characteristic of modern industry vis a decennial cycle interrupted by smaller oscillations of periods of average activity, production at a high pressure, crisis and stagnation depends on the constant formation, the greater or less absorption, and the reformation of the industrial reserve army or surplus population. In their turn the varying phases of the industrial cycle recruit the surplus population and become one of the most energetic agents of its reproduction. This peculiar course of modern industry, which occurs in no earlier period of human history, was also impossible in the childhood of capitalist production. The composition of capital changed but very slowly. With its accumulation therefore there kept pace on the whole a corresponding growth in the demand for labour. Slow as was the advance of accumulation compared with that of more modern times it found a check in the natural limits of the exploitable labouring population, limits which could only be got rid of by forcible means to be mentioned later. The expansion by fits and starts of the scale of production is the preliminary to its equally sudden contraction. The latter, again, evokes the former, but the former is impossible without disposable human material, without an increase in the number of labourers independently of the absolute growth of the population. This increase is affected by the simple process that constantly sets free a part of the labourers, by methods which lessen the number of labourers employed in proportion to the increased production. The whole form of the movement of modern industry depends therefore upon the constant transformation of a part of the labouring population into unemployed or half-employed hands. The superficiality of political economy shows itself in the fact that it looks upon the expansion and contraction of credit, which is a mere symptom of the periodic changes of the industrial cycle as their cause. As the heavenly bodies, once thrown into a certain definite motion, always repeat this, so is it with social production as soon as it is once thrown into this movement of alternate expansion and contraction. Effects in their turn become causes, and the varying accidents of the whole process, which always reproduces its own conditions, take on the form of periodicity. When this periodicity is once consolidated, even political economy then sees that the production of a relative surplus population, i.e., surplus with regard to the average needs of the self-expansion of capital, is a necessary condition of modern industry. Suppose, says H. Meravale, formerly Professor of Political Economy at Oxford, subsequently employed in the English Colonial Office, suppose that, on the occasion of some of these crises, the nation were to rouse itself to the effort of getting rid, by emigration, of some hundreds of thousands of superfluous arms. What would be the consequence? That at the first returning demand for labour there would be a deficiency. However rapid reproduction may be, it takes at all events the space of a generation to replace the loss of adult labour. Now, the profits of our manufacturers depend mainly on the power of making use of the prosperous moment, when demand is brisk, and thus compensating themselves for the interval during which it is slack. This power is secured to them only by the command of machinery and of manual labour. They must have hands ready by them, they must be able to increase the activity of their operations when required, and to slacken it again, according to the state of the market, or they cannot possibly maintain that preeminence in the race of competition on which the wealth of the country is founded. H. Maravale, Lectures on Colonialization and Colonies, 1841, Volume 1, Page 146 Even Malthus recognizes overpopulation as a necessity of modern industry, though after his narrow fashion he explains it by the absolute overgrowth of the labouring population, not by their becoming relatively supernumerary. He says, Prudential habits with regard to marriage carry to a considerable extent among the labouring class of a country, mainly depending on manufacturers and commerce, might injure it. From the nature of a population, an increase of labourers cannot be brought into market in consequence of a particular demand, till after the lapse of sixteen or eighteen years, and the conversion of revenue into capital by saving may take place much more rapidly. A country is always liable to an increase in the quantity of the funds for the maintenance of labour faster than the increase of population. Malthus, Principles of Political Economy, Pages 215, 319, and 320 In this work, Malthus finally discovers, with the help of Sismondi, the beautiful trinity of capitalistic production, overproduction, overpopulation, over consumption, three very delicate monsters indeed. C, for example, Friedrich Engels, Umrisa, Zueiner Kritik, Der National Economy, 1st C, page 107, and forward, end-note. After political economy has thus demonstrated the constant production of a relative surplus population of labourers to be a necessity of capitalistic accumulation, she very aptly, in the guise of an old maid, puts in the mouth of her beau-ideal of a capitalist the following words addressed to these super-numeraries thrown on the streets by their own creation of additional capital, we manufacturers do what we can for you, whilst we are increasing that capital on which you must subsist, and you must do the rest by accommodating your numbers to the means of subsistence. Footnote, Harriet Martinot, A Manchester Strike, 1832, page 101, end-note. Capitalist production can by no means content itself with the quantity of disposable labour-power which the natural increase of population yields. It requires for its free play an industrial reserve army independent of these natural limits. Up to this point it has been assumed that the increase or diminution of the variable capital corresponds rigidly with the increase or diminution of the number of labourers employed. The number of labourers commanded by capital may remain the same or even fall, while the variable capital increases. This is the case if an individual labourer yields more labour, and therefore his wages increase, and this, although the price of labour remains the same, or even falls, only more slowly than the mass of labour rises. Increase of variable capital in this case becomes an index of more labour, but not of more labourers employed. It is the absolute interest of every capitalist to press a given quantity of labour out of a smaller rather than a greater number of labourers, if the cost is about the same. In the latter case, the outlay of constant capital increases in proportion to the mass of labour set in action. In the former, that increases much smaller. The more extended the scale of production, the stronger this motive. Its force increases with the accumulation of capital. We have seen that the development of the capitalistic mode of production and of the productive power of labour, at once the cause and effect of accumulation, enables the capitalist, with the same outlay of variable capital, to set in action more labour by greater exploitation, extensive or intensive, of each individual labour power. We have further seen that the capitalist buys, with the same capital, a greater mass of labour power, as he progressively replaces skilled labourers by less skilled, mature labour power by immature, male by female, that of adults by that of young persons or children. On the one hand, therefore, with the progress of accumulation, a larger variable capital sets more labour in action without enlisting more labourers. On the other, a variable capital of the same magnitude sets in action more labour with the same mass of labour power, and finally, a greater number of inferior labour powers by displacement of higher. The production of a relative surplus population, or the setting free of labourers, goes on, therefore, yet more rapidly than the technical revolution of the process of production that accompanies, and is accelerated by, the advance of accumulation, and more rapidly than the corresponding diminution of the variable part of capital as compared with the constant. As they increase in extent and effective power, become to a less extent means of employment of labourers, this state of things is again modified by the fact that in proportion as the productiveness of labour increases, capital increases its supply of labour more quickly than its demand for labourers. The overwork of the employed part of the working class swells the ranks of the reserve, whilst, conversely, the greater pressure that the latter, by its competition exerts on the former, forces these to submit to overwork, and to subjugation under the dictates of capital. The condemnation of one part of the working class to enforced idleness by the overwork of the other part, and the converse, becomes a means of enriching the individual capitalists, and accelerates at the same time the production of the industrial reserve army on a scale corresponding with the advance of social accumulation. How important is this element in the formation of the relative surplus population is shown by the example of England? Her technical means for saving labour are colossal. Nevertheless, if tomorrow morning labour generally were reduced to a rational amount, and proportioned to the different sections of the working class, according to age and sex, the working population to hand would be absolutely insufficient for the carrying on of national production on its present scale. The great majority of the labourers now unproductive would have to be turned into productive ones. Footnote, even in the cotton famine of 1863 we find, in a pamphlet of the operative cotton spinners of Blackburn, fierce denunciations of overwork, which, in consequence of the factory acts, of course only affected adult male labourers. The adult operatives at this mill have been asked to work from twelve to thirteen hours per day, while there are hundreds who are compelled to be idle who would willingly work partial time in order to maintain their families and save their brethren from a premature grave through being overworked. We, it goes on to say, would ask if the practice of working overtime by a number of hands is likely to create a good feeling between masters and servants. Those who are worked overtime feel the injustice equally with those who are condemned to forced idleness. There is in the district almost sufficient work to give all partial employment if fairly distributed. We are only asking what is right in requesting the masters generally to pursue a system of short hours, particularly until a better state of things begins to dawn upon us, rather than to work a portion of the hands overtime while others, for want of work, are compelled to exist upon charity. The Office of Inspectors of Factories, October 31st, 1863, page eight. The author of the essay on trading commerce grasped the effect of a relative surplus population on the employed labourers with his usual unerring bourgeois instinct. Another cause of idleness in this kingdom is the want of a sufficient number of labouring hands. Whenever, from an extraordinary demand for manufacturers, labour grows scarce, the labourers feel their own consequence and will make their masters feel it likewise. It is amazing, but so depraved are the dispositions of these people that in such cases a set of workmen have combined to distress the employer by idling a whole day together. Essay, et cetera, pages 27 and 28. The fellows, in fact, were hankering after a rise in wages. And nope. Taking them as a whole, the general movements of wages are exclusively regulated by the expansion and contraction of the industrial reserve army. And these, again, correspond to the periodic changes of the industrial cycle. They are therefore not determined by the variations of the absolute number of the working population, but by the varying proportions in which the working class is divided into active and reserve army, by the increase or diminution in the relative amount of the surplus population, by the extent to which it is now absorbed, now set free. For modern industry, with its decennial cycles and periodic phases, which, moreover, as accumulation advances, are complicated by irregular oscillations following each other more and more quickly, that would indeed be a beautiful law, which pretends to make the action of capital dependent on the absolute variation of the population, instead of regulating the demand and supply of labor by the alternate expansion and contraction of capital. The labor market now appearing relatively under full because capital is expanding, now again over full because it is contracting. Yet this is the dogma of the economists. According to them, wages rise in consequence of accumulation of capital. The higher wages stimulate the working population to more rapid multiplication. And this goes on until the labor market becomes too full, and therefore capital, relatively to the supply of labor, becomes insufficient. Wages fall, and now we have the reverse of the metal. The working population is little by little decimated as a result of the fallen wages, so that capital is again in excess relatively to them. Or as others explain it, falling wages and the corresponding increase in the exploitation of the laborer again accelerates accumulation. Whilst at the same time, the lower wages hold the increase of the working class in check. Then comes again the time when the supply of labor is less than the demand. Wages rise and so on. A beautiful mode of motion, this for developed capitalist production. Before in consequence of the rise of wages, any positive increase of the population really fit for work could occur. The time would have been passed again and again during which the industrial campaign must have been carried through the battle fought and won. Between 1849 and 1859, a rise of wages practically insignificant, though accompanied by falling prices of corn took place in the English agricultural districts. In Wiltshire, for example, the weekly wages rose from seven shillings to eight shillings, endorse its share from seven shillings or eight shillings to nine shillings, and et cetera. This was the result of an unusual exodus of the agricultural surplus population caused by the demands of war, the vast extension of railroads, factories, mines, et cetera. The lower the wages, the higher is the proportion in which ever so insignificant a rise of them expresses itself. If the weekly wage, for example, is 20 shillings and it rises to 22 shillings, that is a rise of 10%. But if it is only seven shillings and it rises to nine shillings, that is a rise of 28 and four sevenths percent, which sounds very fine. Everywhere the farmers were howling and the London economist, with reference to the starvation wages, prattled quite seriously of a general and substantial advance. What did the farmers do now? Did they wait until, in consequence of this brilliant remuneration, the agricultural laborers had so increased and multiplied that their wages must fall again as prescribed by the dogmatic economic brain? They introduced more machinery and in a moment the laborers were redundant again in a proportion satisfactory even to the farmers. There was now more capital laid out in agriculture than before and in a more productive form. With this the demand for labor fell not only relatively, but absolutely. Footnote, economist January 21st, 1860. And note, the above economic fiction confuses the laws that regulate the general movement of wages or the ratio between the working class, i.e. the total labor power and the total social capital with the laws that distribute the working population over the different spheres of production. If, for example, in consequence of favorable circumstances, accumulation in a particular sphere of production becomes especially active and profits in it, being greater than the average profits, attract additional capital, of course the demand for labor rises and wages also rise. The higher wages draw a larger part of the working population into the favored sphere until it is glutted with labor power and wages at length fall again to their average level or below it, if the pressure is too great. Then not only does the immigration of laborers into the branch of industry in question cease, it gives place to their immigration. Here the political economist thinks he sees the why and wherefore of an absolute increase of workers accompanying an increase of wages and of a diminution of wages accompanying an absolute increase of laborers. But he sees really only the local oscillation of the labor market in a particular sphere of production. He sees only the phenomena accompanying the distribution of the working population into the different spheres of outlay of capital according to its varying needs. The industrial reserve army, during the periods of stagnation and average prosperity, weighs down the active labor army. During the periods of overproduction and paroxysm, it holds its pretensions in check. Relative surplus population is therefore the pivot upon which the law of demand and supply of labor works. It confines the field of action of this law within the limits absolutely convenient to the activity of exploitation and to the domination of capital. This is the place to return to one of the grand exploits of economic apologetics. It will be remembered that if through the introduction of new or the extension of old machinery, a portion of variable capital is transformed into constant, the economic apologist interprets this operation which fixes capital and by that very act sets laborers free in exactly the opposite way, pretending that it sets free capital for the laborers. Only now can one fully understand the effrontery of these apologists. What are set free are not only the laborers immediately turned out by the machines, but also their future substitutes in the rising generation and the additional contingent, that with the usual extension of trade on the old basis would be regularly absorbed. They are now all set free and every bit of new capital looking out for employment can dispose of them. Whether it attracts them or others, the effect on the general labor demand will be nil if this capital is just sufficient to take out of the market as many laborers as the machines through upon it. If it employs a smaller number, that of the super numeraries increases. If it employs a greater, the general demand for labor only increases to the extent of the excess of the employed over those set free. The impulse that additional capital seeking an outlet would otherwise have given to the general demand for labor is therefore in every case neutralized to the extent of the laborers thrown out of employment by the machine. That is to say, the mechanism of capitalistic production so manages matters that the absolute increase of capital is accompanied by no corresponding rise in the general demand for labor. And this the apologist calls a compensation for the misery, the sufferings, the possible death of the displaced laborers during the transition period that banishes them into the industrial reserve army. The demand for labor is not identical with increase of capital nor supply of labor with increase of the working class. It is not a case of two independent forces working on one another. Les dessins pipaises. Capital works on both sides at the same time. If its accumulation on the one hand increases the demand for labor, it increases on the other the supply of laborers by the setting free of them. Whilst at the same time, the pressure of the unemployed compels those that are employed to furnish more labor and therefore makes the supply of labor to a certain extent independent of the supply of laborers. The action of the law of supply and demand of labor on this basis completes the despotism of capital. As soon therefore as the laborers learn the secret, how it comes to pass that in the same measure as they work more, they produce more wealth for others. And as the productive power of their labor increases, so in the same measure, even their function as a means of the self expansion of capital becomes more and more precarious for them. As soon as they discover that the degree of intensity of the competition among themselves depends wholly on the pressure of the relative surplus population, as soon as by trades unions, et cetera, they try to organize a regular cooperation between employed and unemployed in order to destroy or weaken the ruinous effects of this natural law of capitalistic production on their class, so soon as capital and its sycophant political economy cry out at the infringement of the eternal and so to say sacred law of supply and demand. Every combination of employed and unemployed disturbs the harmonious action of this law. But on the other hand, as soon as in the colonies, for example, adverse circumstances prevent the creation of an industrial reserve army, and with it the absolute dependence of the working class upon the capitalist class, along with its commonplace Sancho Panza rebels against the sacred law of supply and demand and tries to check its inconvenient action by forcible means and state interference. End of Chapter 25, Section 3 Chapter 25, Section 4 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 Capitalistic Accumulation Section 4, Different Forms of the Relative Surplus Population The General Law of Capitalistic Accumulation The relative surplus population exists in every possible form. Every laborer belongs to it during the time when he is only partially employed or wholly unemployed. Not taking into account the great periodically recurring forms that the changing phases of the industrial cycle impress on it, now an acute form during the crisis, then again a chronic form during dull times, it has always three forms, the floating, the latent, the stagnant. In the centers of modern industry, factories, manufacturers, ironworks, mines, et cetera, the laborers are sometimes repelled, sometimes attracted again in greater masses. The number of those employed increasing on the whole, although in a constantly decreasing proportion to the scale of production. Here the surplus population exists in the floating form. In the automatic factories, as in all the great workshops where machinery enters as a factor, or where only the modern division of labor is carried out, large numbers of boys are employed up to the age of maturity. When this term is once reached, only a very small number continue to find employment in the same branches of industry, whilst the majority are regularly discharged. This majority forms an element of the floating surplus population, growing with the extension of those branches of industry. Part of them emigrates following in fact capital that has emigrated. One consequence is that the female population grows more rapidly than the male, Testa, England. That the natural increase of the number of laborers does not satisfy the requirements of the accumulation of capital, and yet all the time is in excess of them, is a contradiction inherent to the movement of capital itself. It wants larger numbers of youthful laborers, a smaller number of adults. The contradiction is not more glaring than that other one that there is a complaint of the want of hands while at the same time many thousands are out of work because the division of labor chains them to a particular branch of industry. Footnote, whilst during the last six month of 1866, 80 to 90,000 working people in London were thrown out of work, the factory report for that same half year says, it does not appear absolutely true to say that demand will always produce supply just at the moment when it is needed. It has not done so with labor, for much machinery has been idle last year for want of hands. Report of the Inspector of Factories, 31st October, 1866, page 81, end note. The consumption of labor power by capital is, besides so rapid that the laborer, halfway through his life, has already more or less completely lived himself out. He falls into the ranks of the supernumeraries or is thrust down from a higher to a lower step in the scale. It is precisely among the work people of modern industry that we meet with the shortest duration of life. Dr. Lee, Medical Officer of Health for Manchester, stated that the average age at death of the Manchester upper middle class was 38 years, while the average age at death of the laboring class was 17. While at Liverpool, those figures were represented as 35 against 15. It does appear that the well-to-do classes had a lease of life, which was more than double the value of that which fell to the lot of the less-favored citizens. Footnote, opening address to the Sanitary Conference, Birmingham, January 15th, 1875, by J. Chamberlain, Mayor of the town, now 1833, President of the Board of Trade. End note. In order to conform to these circumstances, the absolute increase of this section of the proletariat must take place under conditions that shall swell their numbers, although the individual elements are used up rapidly. Hence, rapid renewal of the generations of laborers, this law does not hold for the other classes of the population. The social need is met by early marriages, a necessary consequence of the conditions in which the laborers of modern industry live and by the premium that the exploitation of children sets on their production. As soon as capitalist production takes possession of agriculture and in proportion to the extent to which it does so, the demand for an agricultural laboring population falls absolutely, while the accumulation of capital employed in agriculture advances. Without this repulsion being, as in non-agricultural industries, compensated by greater attraction, part of the agricultural population is therefore constantly on the point of passing over into an urban or manufacturing proletariat and on the outlook for circumstances favorable to this transformation. Manufacture is used here in the sense of all non-agricultural industries. This source of relative surplus population is thus constantly flowing, but the constant flow towards the towns presupposes in the country itself a constant latent surplus population, the extent of which becomes evident only when its channels of outlet open to exceptional width. The agricultural labor is therefore reduced to the minimum of wages and always stands with one foot already in the swamp of pauperism. Footnote, 781 towns given in the census for 1861 for England and Wales contain 10,960,998 inhabitants, while the villages and country parishes contained 9,105,226. In 1851, 580 towns were distinguished and the population in them and the surrounding country was nearly equal. But while in the subsequent 10 years the population in the villages and the country increased half a million, the population in the 580 towns increased by a million and a half. The increase of the population of the country parishes 6.5% and of the towns 17.3%. The difference in the rates of increase is due to the migration from country to town. Three fourths of the total increase in population has taken place in the towns. Census, page 11 and 12, end note. The third category of the relative surplus population, the stagnant, forms a part of the active labor army, but with extremely irregular employment. Hence it furnishes to capital an inexhaustible reservoir of disposable labor power. Its conditions of life sink below the average normal level of the working class. This makes it at once the broad basis of special branches of capitalist exploitation. It is characterized by maximum of working time and minimum of wages. We have learned to know its chief form under the rubric of domestic industry. It recruits itself constantly from the supernumerary forces of modern industry and agriculture, and specially from those decaying branches of industry where handicraft is yielding to manufacturer, manufacturer to machinery. Its extent grows as with the extent and energy of accumulation, the creation of a surplus population advances. But it forms at the same time a self reproducing and self perpetuating element of the working class, taking a proportionally greater part in the general increase of that class than the other elements. In fact, not only the number of births and deaths, but the absolute size of the families stand in inverse proportion to the height of wages, and therefore to the amount of means of subsistence of which the different categories of laborers dispose. This law of capitalistic society would sound absurd to savages or even civilized colonists. It calls to mind the boundless reproduction of animals individually weak and constantly hunted down. Footnote, poverty seems favorable to generation, A. Smith. This is even a specially wise arrangement of God according to the gallant and witty Abe Galliani, page 78. God ordains that men who carry on trades of primary utility are born in abundance. Misery up to the extreme point of famine and pestilence instead of checking tends to increase population. S. Lang, National Distress, 1844, page 69. After Lang has illustrated this by statistics, he continues, if the people were all in easy circumstances, the world would soon be depopulated. End note. The lowest sediment of the relative surplus population finally dwells in the sphere of pauperism. Exclusive of vagabonds, criminals, prostitutes, in a word, the dangerous classes, this layer of society consists of three categories. First, those able to work. One need only glance superficially at the statistics of English pauperism to find that the quantity of paupers increases with every crisis and diminishes with every revival of trade. Second, orphans and pauper children. These are candidates for the Industrial Reserve Army and are in times of great prosperity as 1860, especially speedily and in large numbers enrolled in the active army of laborers. Third, the demoralized and ragged and those unable to work. Chiefly, people who succumbed their incapacity for adaptation due to the division of labor, people who have passed the normal age of the laborer, the victims of industry whose number increases with the increase of dangerous machinery, of mines, chemical words, et cetera, the mutilated, the sickly, the widows, et cetera. Pauperism is the hospital of the active labor army and the dead weight of the Industrial Reserve Army. Its production is included in that of the relative surplus population. Its necessity in theirs, along with the surplus population, pauperism forms a condition of capitalist production and of the capitalist development of wealth. It enters into the faux fray of capitalist production but capital knows how to throw these. For the most part from its own shoulders onto those of the working class and the lower middle class. The greater the social wealth, the functioning capital, the extent and energy of its growth and therefore also the absolute mass of the proletariat and the productiveness of its labor, the greater is the Industrial Reserve Army. The same causes which developed the expansive power of capital develop also the labor power at its disposal. The relative mass of the Industrial Reserve Army increases therefore with the potential energy of wealth. But the greater this reserve army in proportion to the active labor army, the greater is the mass of a consolidated surplus population whose misery is an inverse ratio to its torment of labor. The more extensive, finally, the Lazarus layers of the working class and the Industrial Reserve Army, the greater is official pauperism. This is the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation. Like all other laws, it is modified in its working by many circumstances, the analysis of which does not concern us here. The folly is now patent of the economic wisdom that preaches to the laborers the accommodation of their number to the requirements of capital. The mechanism of capitalist production and accumulation constantly affects this adjustment. The first word of this adaptation is the creation of a relative surplus population or Industrial Reserve Army. Its last word is the misery of constantly extending strata of the active army of labor and the dead weight of pauperism. The law by which a constantly increasing quantity of means of production, thanks to the advance in the productiveness of social labor may be set in movement by a progressively diminishing expenditure of human power, this law in a capitalist society where the laborer does not employ the means of production but the means of production employ the laborer undergoes a complete inversion and is expressed thus. The higher the productiveness of labor the greater is the pressure of the laborers on the means of employment. The more precarious therefore becomes their condition of existence. Viz, the sale of their own labor power for the increasing of another's wealth or for the self expansion of capital. The fact that the means of production and the productiveness of labor increase more rapidly than the productive population expresses itself therefore capitalistically in the inverse form that the laboring population always increases more rapidly than the conditions under which capital can employ this increase for its own self expansion. We saw in part four when analyzing the production of relative surplus value within the capitalist system all methods for raising the social productiveness of labor are brought about at the cost of the individual laborer. All means for the development of production transform themselves into means of domination over and exploitation of the producers. They mutilate the laborer into a fragment of a man degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine destroy every remnant of charm in his work and turn it into a hated toil. They estranged from him the intellectual potentialities of the labor process in the same proportion as science is incorporated in it as an independent power. They distort the conditions under which he works, subject him during the labor process to a despotism the more hateful for its meanness. They transform his lifetime into working time and drag his wife and child beneath the wheels of the juggernaut of capital. But all methods for the production of surplus value are at the same time methods of accumulation and every extension of accumulation becomes again a means for the development of those methods. It follows therefore that in proportion as capital accumulates the lot of the laborer be his payment high or low must grow worse. The law finally that always equilibriates the relative surplus population or industrial reserve army to the extent and energy of accumulation this law rivets the laborer to capital more firmly than the wedges of Vulcan did Prometheus to the rock. It establishes an accumulation of misery corresponding with accumulation of capital. Accumulation of wealth at one pole is therefore at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation at the opposite pole i.e. on the side of the class that produces its own product in the form of capital. This antagonistic character of capitalist accumulation is enunciated in various forms by political economists, although by them it is confounded with phenomena, certainly to some extent analogous, but nevertheless essentially distinct and belonging to pre-capitalistic modes of production. Footnote, from day to day it thus becomes clearer that the production in relations in which the bourgeoisie moves have not a simple uniform character, but a dual character, that the self-same relations in which wealth is produced, poverty is produced also. That in the self-same relations in which there is a development of productive forces, there is also a force producing repression. That there relations produce bourgeois wealth, i.e. the wealth of the bourgeois class only by continually annihilating the wealth of the individual members of this class and by producing an ever-growing proletariat. Karl Marx, Miser de la philosophie, page 116, end note. The Venetian monk Ortiz, one of the great economic writers of the 18th century, regards the antagonism of capitalist production as a general natural law of social wealth. Quote, in the economy of a nation, advantages and evils always balance one another. The abundance of wealth with some people is always equal to the want of it with others. The great riches of a small number are always accompanied by the absolute privation of the first necessaries of life for many others. The wealth of a nation corresponds with its population, and its misery corresponds with its wealth. Diligence in some compels idleness in others. The poor and idle are a necessary consequence of the rich and active. Footnote, G. Ortiz, de la economia nazionale libre se, 1777, in Costode, parte moderna, pages six, nine, 22, 25, et cetera. Ortiz says, page 32, instead of projecting useless systems for achieving the happiness of people, I shall limit myself to investigating the reasons for their unhappiness. End note, in a thoroughly brutal way about 10 years after Ortiz, the Church of England parson, Townsend, glorified misery as a necessary condition of wealth. Legal constraint to labor is attended with too much trouble, violence and noise, whereas hunger is not only a peaceable, silent, unremitted pleasure, but as the most natural motive to industry and labor, it calls forth the most powerful exertions. Everything therefore depends upon making hunger permanent among the working class, and for this, according to Townsend, the principle of population, especially active among the poor, provides. It seems to be a law of nature that the poor should be to a certain degree improvident, i.e., so improvident as to be born without a silver spoon in the mouth, that there may always be some to fulfill the most servile, the most sorted, and the most ignoble offices in the community. The stock of human happiness is thereby much increased, whilst the more delicate are not only relieved from drudgery, but are left at liberty without interruption to pursue those callings which are suited to their various dispositions. It, the poor law, tends to destroy the harmony and beauty, the symmetry and order of that system which God and nature have established in the world. If the Venetian monk found in the fatal destiny that makes misery eternal, the raison d'etre of a Christian charity, celibacy, monasteries, and holy houses, the protested preventory finds in it a pretext for condemning the laws in virtue of which the poor possessed a right to a miserable public relief. Footnote, a dissertation on the poor laws by a well-wisher of mankind, the Reverend J. Thompson, 1786, republished London, 1817, pages 15, 39, 41. This delicate parson, from whose work just quoted, as well as from his journey through Spain, Malthus often copies whole pages, himself borrowed the greater part of his doctrine from Sir James Stewart, whom he however alters in the borrowing. For example, when Stewart says, here in slavery was a forcible method of making mankind diligent for the non-workers, men were then forced to work, i.e., to work gratis for others, because they were slaves of others, men are now forced to work, i.e., to work gratis for non-workers, because they are the slaves of their necessities. He does not thence conclude, like the fat holder of benefices, that the wage laborer must always go fasting. He wishes, on the contrary, to increase their wants and to make the increasing number of their wants a stimulus to their labor for the more delicate. And note, the process of social wealth, says Stewart, begets this useful class of society, which performs the most wearisome, the vilest, the most disgusting functions, which takes, in a word, on its shoulders all that is disagreeable and servile in life, and procures, thus, for other classes, leisure, serenity of mind, and conventional, c'est bon, dignity of character. Footnote, Stewart, page 223, end note. Storch asks himself in what then really consists the progress of this capitalistic civilization with its misery and its degradation of the masses, as compared with barbarism. He finds, but one answer, security. Thanks to the advance of every industry in science, says Sismondi, every laborer can produce every day much more than his consumption requires. But at the same time, whilst his labor produces wealth, that wealth would, were he called on to consume it himself, make him less fit for labor. According to him, men, i.e., non-workers, would probably prefer to do without all artistic perfection and all the enjoyments that manufacturers procure from us if it were necessary that all should buy them by constant toil, like that of the laborer. Exertion today is separated from its recompense. It is not the same man that first works and then reposes, but it is because the one works that the other rests. The indefinite multiplication of the productive powers of labor can then only have, for result, the increase of luxury and enjoyment of the idle rich. Footnote, Sismondi, pages 79, 80, 85, end note. Finally, Destin de Tracey, the fish-blooded bourgeois doctrinaire, blurts out brutally. In poor nations, the people are comfortable. In rich nations, they are generally poor. Footnote, Destin de Tracey, page 231. The poor nations are those where the people are comfortably off, and the rich nations, those where the people are generally poor. End note. End of chapter 25, section four.