Marx turns from surplus-value arising from capital to capital arising from surplus-value. Applying surplus-value as capital, or reconverting it into capital, is accumulation. Attached German note [21] / Moore–Aveling note [1] records Malthus's definitions of accumulation as employing part of revenue as capital or converting revenue into capital.
Marx begins from an individual spinner who advances £10,000: £8,000 in cotton, machinery, and related means, and £2,000 in wages. Annual output is 240,000 lb. of yarn valued at £12,000; with a 100% rate of surplus-value, the net product contains £2,000 surplus-value. A money sum of £2,000 does not visibly reveal that it is surplus-value. Its origin explains how its owner acquired it, not the nature of money or value itself.
To convert the additional £2,000 into capital under unchanged conditions, the spinner advances four fifths, £1,600, for cotton and other means of production, and one fifth, £400, for additional spinners' labour-power. The new £2,000 capital then functions in the mill and produces £400 surplus-value.
Original capital was advanced as money; surplus-value initially exists as the value of a definite part of the gross product. Sale restores the capital-value's original money form and changes surplus-value from product-value into money. From then on both are money sums reconverted in the same way, buying the commodities needed to restart production on an enlarged scale. Those commodities must already be available in the market.
The spinner's yarn circulates only as one aliquot part of the year's total social product. Market transactions transfer the annual product's components from hand to hand; they cannot enlarge annual production or alter the kinds of objects produced. What can be done with the annual product therefore depends on its composition, not on circulation.
Annual production must first replace the material components of capital used up during the year. What remains is the net or surplus-product containing surplus-value. If that surplus-product consisted only of things for capitalist consumption, all surplus-value would be spent away and only simple reproduction would occur.
Accumulation requires converting part of the surplus-product into capital. Without a miracle, that means additional means of production and means of subsistence, produced beyond what is needed to replace the capital already advanced. Surplus-value is convertible into capital because the surplus-product whose value it is already contains those material elements of new capital. Attached German note [21a] / Moore–Aveling note [2] temporarily sets export trade aside: the argument treats the world as one capitalist nation so that luxury goods, production goods, and subsistence are not converted through foreign trade.
To make those additional materials function as capital requires additional labour. If exploitation of current workers is not intensified or extended, additional workers must be hired. Capitalist production has already reproduced them as a wage-dependent class whose ordinary wage sustains and increases the working class. Capital need only incorporate this additional labour-power with the additional means of production already present in annual output. Accumulation is thus reproduction on a progressively increasing scale: in Sismondi's attributed image, simple reproduction's circle becomes a spiral. Attached German note [21b] / Moore–Aveling note [3] attributes to Sismondi the defect of speaking of conversion of revenue into capital without sufficiently examining this operation's material conditions.
Marx resumes the spinner illustration: £10,000 produces £2,000 surplus-value, which is capitalized. The new £2,000 produces £400; when that is capitalized as a second additional capital, it produces £80, and the sequence continues.
Marx leaves aside the portion of surplus-value consumed by the capitalist, and whether additional capital is joined to the original, made independent, used by its accumulator, or transferred to another. What must remain in view is that original capital continues reproducing and producing surplus-value alongside newly formed capital; every accumulated capital likewise produces further additional capital.
The owner of the originally advanced £10,000 is said by political-economy spokesmen to have acquired it through their own labour and that of their forefathers. Marx presents this as their attributed answer, one apparently consonant with commodity-production law, not as his own settled account. Attached German note [21c] / Moore–Aveling note [4] gives Sismondi's formulation of capital's origin in “original labour.”
The additional £2,000 is different because its origin is known: it is capitalized surplus-value. It contains no value-atom not derived from others' unpaid labour; its means of production and workers' subsistence are parts of the surplus-product taken annually from the working class. Additional labour-power can still be bought at full price, with equivalent exchanged for equivalent. Marx's conqueror analogy describes buying with appropriated value; it is not evidence that the wage exchange literally defrauds the seller.
If additional capital employs its own producer, that producer must continue to valorize original capital and buy back the product of earlier labour with more labour than it cost. At class scale, using unpaid labour from currently employed workers to employ additional workers does not change this result. The capitalist may instead turn additional capital into a machine that throws its producers out of work and replaces them with a few children. In every case, the working class's surplus-labour this year creates capital that may employ additional labour next year. Attached German note [22] / Moore–Aveling note [5] attributes the formulation “labour creates capital before capital employs labour” to Wakefield.
The first additional £2,000 presupposes the capitalist's original £10,000 advance, attributed to “primitive labour.” The next £400, by contrast, presupposes the prior accumulation of the £2,000 and is its capitalized surplus-value. Ownership of past unpaid labour now appears as the condition for appropriating living unpaid labour on an increasing scale: the more the capitalist has accumulated, the more the capitalist can accumulate.
Each individual transaction may conform to commodity exchange: workers freely dispose of their capacities, owners dispose of their values, and labour-power is bought and sold at its real value. Yet the commodity-property law turns into its opposite through its own inner, repeated application. The initial exchange of equivalents becomes apparent only: capital exchanged for labour-power is already appropriated others' labour, and its producer must replace it with an added surplus. Repeated buying and selling is the form; the content is the capitalist's repeated exchange of appropriated past labour for a greater quantity of living labour. Property now becomes the capitalist's right to others' unpaid labour or its product, and the worker's inability to appropriate their own product. The separation of property from labour is the necessary consequence of a law that seemed to begin from their identity. Attached German note [23] / Moore–Aveling note [6] attributes to Cherbuliez the claim that capitalist ownership of others' product is a strict consequence of the law of appropriation, while Marx says the dialectical reversal is not properly developed there.
Capitalist appropriation may appear to contradict commodity-production law, but Marx says it arises not through violation of those laws but through their application. He now recapitulates the phases leading to accumulation. Attached Moore–Aveling note [7] explains that the following passage was added to the English text in conformity with the fourth German edition.
The original conversion of value into capital conforms to exchange law. One party sells labour-power and the other buys it; the seller receives its value and alienates its use-value, labour, to the buyer. The buyer uses means of production already owned, with labour now also owned for the agreed time, to make a new product that lawfully belongs to the buyer.
The new product includes the value of used-up means of production. Useful labour can consume those means only by transferring their value to the product; labour-power must be capable of supplying useful labour in the branch where it is employed.
The new product also includes an equivalent for labour-power's value and surplus-value. Labour-power sold for a day, week, or other period has less value than its use creates during that period. The worker has received labour-power's exchange-value and has alienated its use-value, as in any completed purchase and sale.
This German paragraph continues into the next one. Labour-power is the special commodity whose use-value is to supply labour and therefore to create value.
The special value-creating use of labour-power does not disturb commodity-production law. When value advanced as wages returns in the product enlarged by surplus-value, the seller has not been defrauded: the seller received the value of labour-power. The increment comes from the buyer's consumption of that commodity after purchase, not from a dishonest exchange.
Exchange law requires equality only in the exchange-values of commodities exchanged. It presupposes their different use-values from the start and says nothing about their consumption, which begins after the bargain has been concluded and carried out.
Money's original conversion into capital occurs in exact conformity with the economic laws of commodity production and the property right derived from them. Marx then states three results of that lawful process.
First, the product belongs to the capitalist rather than to the worker.
Second, beyond the value of capital advanced, the product contains surplus-value. It costs the worker labour and costs the capitalist nothing, yet becomes the capitalist's legitimate property.
Third, the worker retains labour-power and can sell it again on finding a buyer.
Simple reproduction periodically repeats this first operation: money is repeatedly converted afresh into capital. The law is not broken; repetition gives it continual occasion to operate.
Sismondi's attributed formulation says that several successive exchanges merely make the last exchange represent the first.
Yet simple reproduction alone gives the first operation, when viewed no longer as isolated, a completely changed character.
Sismondi says that workers acquire a new right to national income each year through new labour, while capitalists have acquired a permanent right through earlier “primitive labour.” Marx preserves this as Sismondi's attributed contrast.
Marx adds that labour is famously not the only sphere in which primogeniture works miracles.
Replacing simple reproduction with expanded reproduction, or accumulation, changes nothing decisive. Under simple reproduction the capitalist spends all surplus-value; under accumulation the capitalist consumes only part and turns the rest into money.
The capitalist can call surplus-value their own fund, even though it now derives from workers' unpaid labour. If worker B is employed from surplus-value produced by worker A, A supplied it without any cut in the value paid for A's labour-power. This transaction does not alter B's individual claim: B can demand payment of the value of B's labour-power.
Marx quotes Sismondi's claim that both parties gain, then corrects it twice. What is advanced to the worker before their own work bears fruit is the unpaid labour of other workers; and the worker's labour creates more value than the value of the wage, rather than merely being “worth more” than that wage.
The matter looks different when capitalist production is viewed in its uninterrupted renewal, with the capitalist class and working class rather than one capitalist and one worker. Marx notes that this applies a standard wholly foreign to commodity production considered in isolation.
In commodity production, independent buyers and sellers face each other. Their relation ends with the contract's term; a repeated transaction rests on a new agreement, related to the earlier one only by chance when it reunites the same parties.
To judge commodity production or one of its processes by its own economic laws, each exchange must be considered separately from those before and after it. Because purchase and sale are concluded between individuals, whole class relations cannot be sought inside that isolated act.
However long capital's history of periodic reproductions and prior accumulations, it preserves its “original virginity” when every individual exchange is considered alone. The mode of appropriation can be completely transformed while the property right corresponding to commodity production remains formally untouched. The same right thus appears both at the beginning, when producers enrich themselves by their own labour through equal exchange, and in capitalism, when social wealth increasingly belongs to those able repeatedly to appropriate others' unpaid labour.
This result becomes unavoidable once workers freely sell labour-power as a commodity. Only then does commodity production become generalized and typical: products are made for sale and all produced wealth passes through circulation. Only where wage-labour is its basis does commodity production impose itself on society and unfold its hidden powers. Marx's attached note rejects Proudhon's attempt to preserve commodity property by treating wage-labour as an adulteration rather than the development through which commodity-production property laws become laws of capitalist appropriation. Attached German note [24] / Moore–Aveling note [8] names Proudhon as the polemical target.
Even under simple reproduction, all capital advanced, whatever its source, becomes accumulated capital or capitalized surplus-value. In production's continuing flow, originally advanced capital becomes a vanishing magnitude beside directly accumulated surplus-value or surplus-product reconverted into capital, whether used by its accumulator or another. Political economy's descriptions of capital as accumulated wealth reused to produce surplus-value, of the capitalist as owner of surplus-product, and of all existing capital as accumulated or capitalized interest are attributed voices. Marx notes that interest is only a fraction of surplus-value. Attached German notes [25]–[27] / Moore–Aveling notes [9]–[11] attribute these formulations respectively to Malthus and Jones, The Source and Remedy of the National Difficulties, and the Economist.
Before adding further determinations of accumulation—the reconversion of surplus-value into capital—Marx clears away an ambiguity devised by classical political economy.
Commodities and personal services bought for the capitalist's own needs do not serve production or valorization. Their purchase consumes surplus-value as revenue. Against feudal-noble consumption—Hegel's “consuming what is at hand,” especially personal retainers—bourgeois economy preached accumulation as the first civic duty and urged spending revenue on additional productive workers who yield more than they cost. It also rightly opposed the popular confusion of accumulation with hoarding. Wealth accumulated as capital is not merely preserved from consumption or circulation. Money locked out of circulation cannot valorize; hoarding commodities is folly; large commodity masses arise from stopped circulation or overproduction. Goods slowly consumed by the rich and reserve stocks common to all modes of production are distinct. German note [28] / M–A [12] quotes Malthus on saving as different employment rather than mere hoarding. German [28a] / M–A [13] invokes Balzac's Gobseck hoarding goods in senility. German [29] / M–A [14] quotes Corbet on stocks, non-exchange, and overproduction. M–A [15], without a German counterpart here, adds Necker's luxury objects accumulated in one class's hands.
Classical economy is right that productive rather than unproductive workers consuming surplus-product is characteristic of accumulation. Its error begins when Smith makes this the whole process and treats capitalizing surplus-value as merely turning it into labour-power. Marx then introduces Ricardo's formulation. Moore–Aveling places the first three movements of this German paragraph at the end of EN p2 and retains only the Ricardo lead-in in EN p3; no content is omitted.
Ricardo says every national product is consumed, but distinguishes consumption by people who reproduce value from consumption by those who do not. Saved revenue added to capital is, on his account, consumed by productive rather than unproductive workers; capital is not increased by non-consumption. German note [30] / M–A note [16] attributes the quotation to Ricardo.
Marx calls the formula repeated by Ricardo and later economists after Smith the greater error; this German paragraph is an incomplete lead-in to the quotation in p6.
The quoted claim is that the portion of revenue added to capital is consumed by productive workers. The next paragraph explains why that statement is insufficient.
Smith's account would turn all capitalized surplus-value into variable capital. Instead, it divides, like the original advance, into constant and variable capital—means of production and labour-power. Capital consumes labour-power in production; labour in use consumes means of production; wage money becomes necessaries consumed by the productive worker, not “productive labour.” Smith then turns each individual capital's constant/variable division into the absurd claim that social capital is only variable capital or wages. A cloth manufacturer capitalizes £2,000: one portion buys weavers, another yarn and machinery. Their sellers pay labour “and so on” until Smith declares the whole sum wages. Marx says those words send the inquiry from Pontius to Pilate and stop exactly where the difficulty begins. German note [31] quotes J. S. Mill repeating that capital ultimately resolves into wages. Local M–A footnote [17] has no body marker and remains reported but unattached; it is not silently fabricated as p7's counterpart.
The annual reproduction process looks simple while only the total annual fund is in view. Difficulty begins when every component must enter the commodity market: individual capitals and personal revenues cross and intermingle in the circulation of social wealth. Marx defers the full connection to Volume II. He credits the Physiocrats' Tableau économique as the first attempt to depict annual production as it emerges from circulation. German note [32] / M–A note [18] says Smith regressed from the Physiocrats and connects his illusion to the dogma that commodity price consists only of wages, profit/interest, and rent; Storch then calls decomposition into simple elements impossible. Marx points forward to Volumes II and III.
Political economy, acting in the capitalist class's interest, exploits Smith's claim that the entire capitalized part of the net product is consumed by the working class.
Marx distinguishes two uses of surplus-value. It is neither solely the capitalist's individual consumption fund nor solely an accumulation fund: one part is consumed as revenue and another is applied as capital. Attached German note [33] / Moore–Aveling note [19] explains that “revenue” has two senses here: surplus-value as capital's periodic fruit, and the part periodically consumed by the capitalist.
With the total mass of surplus-value fixed, the revenue and capital shares move inversely. Their ratio determines accumulation's magnitude. The capitalist, as owner of the surplus-value, makes that division deliberately. Calling the accumulated part “saving” names the capitalist's function of enriching himself from tribute already obtained; it does not make his will the source of value.
Marx grants the capitalist historical significance only as personified capital, within the transitory necessity of capitalist production. The motive is exchange-value and its expansion, not use-value or enjoyment. The drive to make value expand develops social productive powers and material conditions that could form the basis of a higher society. This is not a moral portrait of a greedy individual. What looks like a miser's individual mania appears in the capitalist as the effect of a social mechanism. Competition makes the laws of capitalist production external coercive laws: capital must be continually enlarged in order to be preserved.
So far as the capitalist acts as capital endowed with will and consciousness, private consumption appears to him as a debit against accumulation. Accumulation conquers the world of social wealth and enlarges the capitalist's direct and indirect domination along with the exploited human material. Attached German note [34] / Moore–Aveling note [20] gives Luther's polemic against the usurer, including domination as an element of the drive to get rich.
Marx begins an “original sin” sentence that runs across the German paragraph break: with capitalist production, accumulation, and wealth, the capitalist ceases to be a mere incarnation of capital. Moore–Aveling likewise carries this continuation in EN p5.
The modernized capitalist develops fellow-feeling for his own Adam and smiles at asceticism as the old miser's prejudice. Marx contrasts the classical capitalist's “Enthaltung” from accumulation with the modernized capitalist's “Entsagung” from pleasure, then quotes Goethe's two souls. Moore–Aveling renders both German terms as “abstinence,” including “abstinence from pleasure.” This secondary translation loss does not alter the central critique. Its marked note [21], attached to EN p7, identifies Goethe and has no marked German counterpart.
At capitalism's historical dawn, avarice and the desire to get rich rule; every capitalist upstart repeats that stage personally. Later development opens speculation and credit as sources of sudden enrichment. Luxury becomes a display of wealth, a source of credit, and a representation cost of capital. The capitalist does not become rich through personal work or restricted consumption, but by extracting others' labour-power and imposing renunciation on workers. His expenditure can grow with accumulation without stopping it, while a Faustian conflict develops between accumulation and enjoyment.
Marx introduces Dr. Aikin's 1795 account of Manchester industry and its four periods. Aikin's first period begins with manufacturers compelled to work hard for their livelihood.
In Aikin's first period, manufacturers enriched themselves through the parents who paid premiums to bind children as apprentices, while the apprentices were starved. Average profits were low, accumulation required great parsimony, and the manufacturers lived like misers without consuming even their capital's interest.
Aikin's second period has manufacturers acquiring small fortunes while working as hard and living as frugally as before. Marx interrupts the quotation to say that direct exploitation costs work, as every slave-driver knows; that interruption is Marx's, not Aikin's account. Aikin's third period begins luxury and commercial expansion through travelling riders seeking orders. His chronology continues through the earlier scarcity of industrial capitals, new brick houses, and the social disapproval once attached to serving foreign wine.
Aikin's chronology continues: before machinery, manufacturers' evening spending was slight; in 1758 an actively engaged businessperson with a private carriage marked an epoch. His fourth period is one of great luxury and expenditure supported by expanded trade. Marx then asks what the good Dr. Aikin would say if resurrected in Manchester. Attached German note [35] / Moore–Aveling note [22] identifies Aikin's 1795 Description of the Country from 30 to 40 Miles round Manchester.
“Accumulate, accumulate” is Marx's formula for the classical-economy imperative. Citing Smith, he glosses it as reconverting as much surplus-value or surplus-product as possible into capital. Accumulation for accumulation's sake and production for production's sake express the historical vocation of the bourgeois period. Classical economy recognizes wealth's birth-throes yet treats the proletarian as a machine for producing surplus-value and the capitalist as a machine for converting it into additional capital. This is its historical account, not a timeless norm. Attached German notes [36]–[37] / Moore–Aveling notes [23]–[24] preserve the Smith formula and the Say/Sismondi material.
To protect the capitalist from the conflict between enjoyment and enrichment, Malthus proposes a division of labour: the capitalist actually engaged in production accumulates, while landlords, state place-holders, beneficed clergy, and other recipients of surplus-value spend. His stated importance is keeping the passions for expenditure and accumulation separate. The capitalists, now men of the world, object. Marx introduces their Ricardian spokesman before the reply continues in the following paragraphs. Attached German note [38] / Moore–Aveling note [25] identifies Malthus's formulation.
The Ricardian/MacCulloch spokesman's quotation says that Malthus's arrangement curbs rather than promotes production. It also calls it unfair to maintain some people in idleness merely to squeeze others whose character supposedly shows they would work successfully if forced. This is the spokesman's argument, not Marx's neutral claim. Attached German note [39] / Moore–Aveling note [26] preserves the source of that quotation.
The spokesman finds it unfair to spur the industrial capitalist toward accumulation by taking the butter from his bread, while finding it necessary to hold workers to the lowest possible wage in order to keep them industrious. He also openly states that appropriating unpaid labour is the secret of making a gain.
In the same quoted argument, increased demand by workers means workers taking less of their own product and leaving more to employers. Reduced worker consumption is said to create “glut”; the spokesman answers that glut is synonymous with high profits. Attached German note [40] / Moore–Aveling note [27] preserves this continuation of the Ricardian/MacCulloch voice.
The learned dispute over distributing booty pumped from workers between industrial capitalists and idle property-holders is silenced by the July Revolution. Marx then moves through Lyon, English rural fires, Owenism, Saint-Simonism, and Fourierism toward the arrival of vulgar economy.
Marx introduces Nassau Senior's “last hour” claim before reporting Senior's other discovery: replace capital, considered as an instrument of production, with “abstinence.” Marx immediately calls this vulgar economy's replacement of an economic category by a sycophantic phrase. Senior's bow-maker and progress claims remain Senior's quoted voice; Marx's replies remain Marx's irony. Marx makes the escalation concrete: precapitalist tools did not require capitalist abstinence; appropriating others' industry is recast as abstinence; corn that is sown and wine allowed to mature become the capitalist's sacrifices. The supposed “loan” of instruments conceals capital's incorporation of labour-power to extract surplus-value. Marx then invokes the Vishnu penitent, the alleged effort required merely to conserve capital, and the Georgian slave-owner supposedly released from a painful choice about surplus-product. These are polemical reversals, not narrator theory. Real reinvestment and deferred consumption can occur, but neither produces profit nor morally warrants appropriation. Attached German notes [41]–[45] / Moore–Aveling notes [28]–[32] preserve, in order, Senior/Cazenove, Senior, Scrope, Molinari, and Courcelle-Seneuil. Moore–Aveling [28] is marked after Senior's bow example at EN p25, not after the formula at EN p23; [29] is at EN p27, and [30]–[32] at EN p28.
Many economic formations have simple reproduction and reproduction on an enlarged scale: progressively more is produced and consumed, and more product becomes means of production. This is not accumulation of capital, or a capitalist's function, where workers do not confront their means of production, product, and subsistence as capital. Marx attributes two Indian cases to Richard Jones, Malthus's successor at Haileybury College. Self-cultivating peasants do not hold their means and product as a fund saved from another's revenue; in other provinces, magnates directly employ non-agricultural workers while those workers retain their instruments. Production and enlarged reproduction thus proceed without Marx's “abstaining” capitalist. Attached German notes [46]–[47] / Moore–Aveling notes [33]–[34] preserve Jones's account.
Given the fixed proportion in which surplus-value splits into capital and revenue, the size of the accumulated capital obviously depends on the absolute magnitude of the surplus-value produced. If 80 percent were capitalized and 20 percent consumed, the accumulated capital would be £2,400 or £1,200 depending on whether total surplus-value came to £3,000 or £1,500.
Hence every circumstance that determines the mass of surplus-value also determines the magnitude of accumulation. Marx gathers these circumstances once more, but only insofar as they offer new points of view specifically bearing on accumulation.
It will be remembered that the rate of surplus-value depends, in the first place, on the degree of exploitation of labour-power — the section's first determinant. Political economy values this so highly that it sometimes identifies accelerated accumulation through higher productive power of labour with accelerated accumulation through higher exploitation of the worker. In the chapters on the production of surplus-value it was constantly assumed that wages were at least equal to the value of labour-power; but the forcible depression of wages below that value plays too important a role in practice to pass over, since it converts, within limits, the worker's necessary consumption fund into a fund for accumulating capital. Attached German note [48] / Moore–Aveling note [35] cites Ricardo on the productive powers of labour and the accumulation of capital.
"Wages," says J. St. Mill, "have no productive power; they are the price of a productive power. Wages do not contribute, along with labour itself, to the production of commodities, any more than the price of machinery contributes along with the machinery. If labour could be had without purchase, wages would be superfluous." Attached German note [49] / Moore–Aveling note [36] cites Mill's Essays on Some Unsettled Questions of Political Economy.
But if workers could live on air, they could not be bought at any price. The zero of their cost is therefore a limit in the mathematical sense — always approached, never reached — and it is capital's constant tendency to force wages down toward this nihilistic point. A frequently cited eighteenth-century writer, the author of the Essay on Trade and Commerce, betrays only the innermost secret of English capital when he declares it England's historic mission to force English wages down to the French and Dutch level. Marx introduces the Essayist's own words. Attached German note [50] / Moore–Aveling note [37] cites the Essay on Trade and Commerce and adds the Times reports on Belgian miners and the 1867 Marchienne strike.
"But if our poor" (a technical term for labourers) "will live luxuriously ... then their labour must of course be dear ... Consider only the appalling mass of superfluities that our manufacturing workers consume: brandy, gin, tea, sugar, foreign fruit, strong beer, printed linens, snuff and smoking tobacco," the Essayist complains. Attached German note [51] cites the Essay again; corresponding Moore–Aveling note [38] exists in the raw MIA source footnote block but has no English body marker. It is deliberately excluded from the attached handoff and reported only, not restored.
The Essayist cites the writing of a Northamptonshire manufacturer who, with eyes squinting heavenward, laments the cost of English labour.
"Labour is a whole third cheaper in France than in England: for the French poor work hard and fare hard as to food and clothing, their chief diet being bread, fruit, herbs, roots, and dried fish, since they very seldom eat meat, and when wheat is dear, very little bread," the manufacturer claims. "To which may be added," the Essayist continues, "that their drink is water or similarly weak liquors, so that they spend astonishingly little money ... Such a state of things is certainly hard to bring about, but it is not unattainable, as its existence in both France and Holland strikingly proves." Attached German note [52] exposes the manufacturer's comparison as a pious fraud — he in fact describes French agricultural, not manufacturing, labourers — and note [53], a third-edition addition, adds Stapleton's 1873 remark that England's wished-for goal has become Chinese wages, not merely continental ones. The corresponding Moore–Aveling notes [39]–[40] carry the same content.
Two decades later an American humbug, the baronized Yankee Benjamin Thompson, alias Count Rumford, pursued the same line of philanthropy to the great satisfaction of God and man. His Essays are a cookbook of recipes of every kind for substituting cheap surrogates for the worker's ordinary, dearer food. Marx introduces a particularly successful recipe of this whimsical "philosopher."
"Five pounds of barley, five pounds of maize, threepence-worth of herring, a penny of salt, a penny of vinegar, twopence of pepper and herbs — a total of twenty and three-quarter pence — makes a soup for sixty-four people; and at average grain prices the cost per head can be brought down to a quarter of a penny," Rumford's recipe reports. Attached German note [54] / Moore–Aveling note [41] cites Thompson's Essays and Eden's State of the Poor, which recommends the Rumford soup to workhouse overseers and reproaches English labourers with the frugal example of Scottish families living on oatmeal and barley-meal.
With the advance of capitalist production, the adulteration of food made Thompson's ideal superfluous. Attached German note [55] / Moore–Aveling note [42] reports that a parliamentary commission found even medicines routinely adulterated, citing opium samples doctored with poppy heads, wheat flour, gum, clay, and sand.
At the end of the eighteenth and during the first decades of the nineteenth century, English farmers and landlords enforced an absolute minimum wage by paying agricultural day-labourers less than the minimum in wages and making up the rest as parish relief. Marx introduces an example of the buffoonery with which the English Dogberries conducted their "legal" fixing of a wage tariff.
"When the squires fixed the wages for Speenhamland in 1795, they had dined at midday, but evidently thought the labourers needed no such thing ... They decided the weekly wage should be 3 shillings for a man when the eight-pound-eleven-ounce loaf stood at 1 shilling, rising regularly until the loaf cost 1 shilling 5 pence. Once it rose above that price, wages should decrease proportionally until the loaf reached 2 shillings, at which point the man's food should be a fifth less than before." Attached German note [56] / Moore–Aveling note [43] cites Newnham's Review of the Evidence before the Committees of the two Houses of Parliament on the Corn Laws.
Before the House of Lords committee of inquiry in 1814, a certain A. Bennett — a large farmer, magistrate, workhouse administrator, and wage-regulator — is questioned.
"Is any proportion observed between the value of a day's labour and the parish relief given to the labourer?" "Yes. Every family's weekly income is made up beyond its nominal wage to the gallon loaf (eight pounds eleven ounces) and threepence per head ... we assume the gallon loaf sufficient to maintain each person in the family for the week, and the threepence is for clothes; if the parish supplies the clothes itself, the threepence is deducted. This practice prevails not only throughout western Wiltshire but, I believe, throughout the country," Bennett answers. "So," exclaims a bourgeois writer of the time, "the farmers have for years degraded a respectable class of their countrymen by forcing them into the workhouse ... the farmer has increased his own profits while preventing his labouring dependents from accumulating even the most indispensable consumption fund." Attached German notes [57]–[58] / Moore–Aveling notes [44]–[45] cite Bennett's testimony and Parry on landlords whose rents doubled, tripled, or even sextupled within eighteen years.
The role played today by direct robbery from the worker's necessary consumption fund in forming surplus-value, and so capital's accumulation fund, is shown by the so-called domestic industry discussed in Chapter XV, section 8c. Further facts follow later in this section.
Although in every branch of industry the portion of constant capital consisting of instruments of labour must suffice for a certain number of workers fixed by the scale of the undertaking, it need not always grow in the same proportion as the labour employed. In a factory, a hundred workers on an eight-hour day may yield 800 working-hours. If the capitalist wants to raise this by half, he can hire fifty new workers, but must then advance new capital for both wages and instruments. Alternatively he can work the same hundred workers twelve hours instead of eight, so the existing instruments suffice and merely wear out faster. Additional labour produced this way by greater tension of labour-power can thus raise the surplus-product and surplus-value — the substance of accumulation — without a proportionate increase in the constant part of capital.
In extractive industry, mining for instance, raw materials form no part of the capital advanced: the object of labour is not the product of prior labour but nature's free gift, as with ore, minerals, coal, and stone. Here constant capital consists almost entirely of instruments of labour, which can readily absorb an increased quantity of labour, such as day and night shifts. All else being equal, the mass and value of the product rise directly with the labour applied; as on the first day of production, the original formers of the product — and so of capital's material elements — man and nature, work together. Thanks to the elasticity of labour-power, the domain of accumulation has extended here without any prior enlargement of constant capital.
In agriculture, cultivated land cannot be extended without advancing additional seed and manure. But once that advance is made, even the purely mechanical working of the soil has a marvelous effect on the mass of the product. A greater quantity of labour performed by the existing number of workers thus raises fertility without requiring any new advance in instruments of labour: once again it is the direct action of man on nature that becomes an immediate source of increased accumulation, without any new capital intervening.
Finally, in manufacture proper, every additional outlay on labour presupposes a corresponding additional outlay on raw materials, but not necessarily on instruments of labour. And since extractive industry and agriculture supply manufacture with its own raw materials and those of its instruments, the additional product those sectors create without additional capital outlay benefits manufacture as well.
General result: by incorporating the two original creators of wealth, labour-power and earth, capital acquires a power of expansion. The German sentence runs on into p22, splitting mid-word at "Expansions-"; Moore–Aveling's EN p19 carries the whole result as a single unbroken paragraph.
Continuing the sentence begun in p21, that power of expansion lets capital extend the elements of its accumulation beyond the limits apparently fixed by its own magnitude — limits set by the value and mass of the means of production already produced, in which capital has its being.
Another important factor in the accumulation of capital is the degree of productivity of social labour.
With the productive power of labour, the mass of products in which a given value — and so a surplus-value of given size — is represented, grows. At a given, or even a falling, rate of surplus-value, so long as it falls more slowly than productive power rises, the mass of the surplus-product still grows; with the division into revenue and additional capital unchanged, the capitalist's consumption can then grow without diminishing the accumulation fund, and the fund's relative size can even grow at the expense of the consumption fund while cheapened commodities still leave the capitalist as many or more means of enjoyment as before. But growing productivity of labour goes hand in hand, as we have seen, with the cheapening of the worker — hence a rising rate of surplus-value even where real wages rise, though wages never rise in proportion to productivity. The same variable capital-value thus sets more labour-power, and so more labour, in motion; the same constant capital-value takes the form of more means of production, supplying more product-formers and more value-formers or labour-absorbers alike. Accelerated accumulation therefore takes place even where the value of the additional capital stays the same or actually falls: not only does the material scale of reproduction expand, but the production of surplus-value grows faster than the value of the additional capital.
The development of the productive power of labour also reacts on the original capital already engaged in production. Part of the functioning constant capital consists of instruments of labour, such as machinery, consumed and so reproduced or replaced only over longer periods; but every year part of these instruments dies off or reaches the end of its productive function, entering its stage of periodic reproduction or replacement. If productive power has meanwhile expanded at the birthplace of these instruments — and it develops continually with the unbroken advance of science and technology — a more effective and, relative to its performance, cheaper machine, tool, or apparatus takes the old one's place. The old capital is reproduced in a more productive form, quite apart from the constant detail changes made to instruments already in use. The other part of constant capital, raw material and auxiliary substances, is continually reproduced within the year, agriculture's share mostly annually, so every introduction of better methods affects additional capital and capital already functioning almost simultaneously. Every advance in chemistry multiplies useful materials and the applications of those already known, extending capital's sphere of investment as it grows, and teaches how to throw the waste of production and consumption back into the cycle of reproduction, creating new capital-material without any prior outlay. Like increased exploitation of natural wealth through mere higher tension of labour-power, science and technology form a power of capital's expansion independent of the given magnitude of the capital actually functioning; this power also acts on the part of the original capital that has entered its renewal stage, which incorporates gratis, in its new form, the social progress achieved behind the back of its old form. This development of productive power is of course accompanied by partial depreciation of functioning capitals, and where competition makes that depreciation acutely felt, its main weight falls on the worker, in whose increased exploitation the capitalist seeks compensation.
Labour transfers to the product the value of the means of production it consumes. On the other hand, the value and mass of the means of production set in motion by a given quantity of labour grow as labour becomes more productive. The same quantity of labour thus always adds only the same sum of new value to its products, yet the old capital-value it simultaneously transfers to them grows with rising productivity of labour.
An English and a Chinese spinner, for example, may work the same number of hours at the same intensity and so create equal values in a week. Despite this equality, there is an immense difference between the value of the Englishman's weekly product, made with a mighty automaton, and the Chinese spinner's, made with only a spinning-wheel: in the time the Chinese spinner works one pound of cotton, the Englishman spins several hundred pounds, and a correspondingly vastly greater sum of old values swells the value of his product, preserved there in a new, usable form so they can function again as capital. "In 1782," Friedrich Engels tells us, "the whole wool crop in England of the three preceding years lay untouched for want of labourers, and would have had to lie so had not newly invented machinery come to its aid and spun it." Labour objectified as machinery naturally did not directly stamp any human being out of the ground, but it let a small number of workers, adding relatively little living labour, not only consume the wool productively and add new value to it, but preserve its old value in the form of yarn, thereby also supplying the means and spur for wool's expanded reproduction. It is the natural gift of living labour to preserve old value while creating new value; with the growth in effectiveness, extent, and value of its means of production — the accumulation that accompanies the development of its productive power — labour thus preserves and perpetuates an ever-swelling capital-value in ever-new form. Marx then writes that this natural power of labour appears as a self-preserving power belonging to the capital in which it is incorporated — a sentence that runs across the paragraph break into p28. Attached German note [59] cites Engels's Condition of the Working Class in England; corresponding Moore–Aveling note [46] exists in the raw MIA source footnote block but has no English body marker. It is deliberately excluded from the attached handoff and reported only, not restored. Attached German note [60], carried as Moore–Aveling note [47] within EN p26, gives Marx's long critique of Ricardo's failure to distinguish product-value from value-product, and Say's confused reply.
The capital in which labour's preserving power is incorporated is credited with that power, just as labour's social productive powers appear as capital's own properties, and the capitalist's constant appropriation of surplus-labour appears as capital's constant self-valorization. All the powers of labour project themselves as powers of capital, just as all the value-forms of the commodity project themselves as forms of money.
With the growth of capital, the difference between capital employed and capital consumed grows. In other words, the value and material mass of instruments of labour — buildings, machinery, drainage pipes, working cattle, apparatus of every kind — grows, instruments that function in their whole extent, or serve to achieve particular useful effects, through repeated processes of production over longer or shorter periods, while wearing out only gradually and so losing, and transferring to the product, their value only piecemeal. To the extent that these instruments serve as product-formers without adding value to the product — wholly employed yet only partly consumed — they perform, as noted earlier, the same gratis service as natural forces like water, steam, air, or electricity. This gratis service of past labour, once seized and animated by living labour, accumulates as the scale of accumulation grows.
Because past labour always disguises itself as capital — the passive labour of A, B, C and so on becoming the active possession of the non-worker X — citizens and political economists are full of praise for the merits of past labour, which, according to the Scottish genius MacCulloch, must even draw its own special wage in the form of interest, profit, and the like. The ever-growing weight of past labour cooperating in the living labour-process under the form of means of production is thus credited to that form, alienated from the worker himself whose past and unpaid labour it actually is — its capital-form. The practical agents of capitalist production and their ideological windbags are as unable to think of the means of production apart from the antagonistic social mask stuck on it today as a slaveholder is to think of the worker apart from his character as a slave. Attached German note [61] / Moore–Aveling note [48] notes that MacCulloch patented "wages of past labour" long before Senior patented "wages of abstinence."
At a given degree of exploitation of labour-power, the mass of surplus-value is determined by the number of workers simultaneously exploited, which corresponds, though not in fixed proportion, to the size of capital. The more, then, capital grows through successive accumulations, the more the sum of value grows that divides between a consumption fund and an accumulation fund — a sentence that runs across the paragraph break into p32.
The capitalist can therefore live more freely while claiming to "renounce" more. And finally, all the springs of production act the more energetically the more their scale expands with the mass of capital advanced.
Marx gathers the preceding results: capital is not fixed but an elastic, fluctuating part of social wealth, changing with the division of fresh surplus-value between revenue and additional capital. Even at a given functioning magnitude, incorporated labour-power, science, and land—all objects of labour nature supplies independently of people—give capital a field of action partly independent of its size.
Two brackets matter. The analysis has set aside circulation conditions that give the same mass of capital different efficiencies, and, because it presupposes capitalist limits, has also set aside more rational combinations directly and systematically practicable with existing means and labour-powers. Classical economy instead treats social capital as fixed in size and effect. Bentham hardens that prejudice into dogma; Marx's Bentham/Tupper comparison is satire, not doctrine.
Bentham, Malthus, James Mill, and MacCulloch use the dogma apologetically to present variable capital as fixed. Its material means of subsistence—the so-called labour fund—are thereby fabled into a naturally walled-off part of wealth. A definite mass of living labour is technologically required to move means of production, but neither the required worker number nor labour-power's price is fixed; only a highly elastic minimum limit is given. Workers have no say in dividing wealth between non-workers' enjoyment and production, and enlarge the fund at rich revenue's expense only in favourable exceptions.
German notes [62]–[65] / Moore–Aveling notes [49]–[52] preserve the Bentham source, Marx's extended utility-principle critique, Bailey's circulation-based objection, and Mill's unequal-reward passage with Marx's warning not to equate Mill with vulgar apologists.
Marx introduces Professor Fawcett as an example of the absurd tautology produced when a capitalist limit of the labour fund is rewritten as society's natural limit. Moore–Aveling note [53] supplies Fawcett's bibliographic citation corresponding to German note [66], which the German text attaches to the quotation in p3.
Fawcett identifies a country's circulating capital with its wage fund and says average money wages follow by dividing that capital by the labouring population. This remains Fawcett's claim. German notes [66]–[67] give his source and Marx's warning that political economy confuses constant/variable capital with fixed/circulating forms; Moore–Aveling places the source at note [53] on EN p2 and the category warning at note [54] here.
Marx reconstructs the circular procedure: first add the individual wages actually paid; then declare that total the labour fund decreed by God and nature; finally divide it by the number of workers to rediscover the average individual wage. His 'uncommonly knowing dodge' is irony. Fawcett immediately adds another statement that undermines the fixed-fund premise.
Fawcett says the total wealth annually accumulated in England divides into two parts: one is used in England to maintain domestic industry, while the second part—completed after the German paragraph break—is exported abroad. Moore–Aveling carries the whole quotation in EN p5.
Completing Fawcett's sentence, one portion is exported and the part employed in English industry is not a significant share of the wealth accumulated annually. German note [68] cites Fawcett. The M-A body ends the corresponding EN p5 with malformed 55]; raw note [55] exists in the source footnote block but has no valid marker, so it is reported only and not attached or silently repaired.
The larger part of the annually growing surplus-product, taken from English workers without an equivalent, is therefore capitalized not in England but abroad. Marx closes by turning the dogma against itself: exported additional capital also exports part of the labour fund invented by God and Bentham. German note [69] / Moore–Aveling note [56] answers the emigration objection and distinguishes exported interest-bearing additional capital from emigrants' property.
Marx turns from surplus-value arising from capital to capital arising from surplus-value. Applying surplus-value as capital, or reconverting it into capital, is accumulation. Attached German note [21] / Moore–Aveling note [1] records Malthus's definitions of accumulation as employing part of revenue as capital or converting revenue into capital.
Marx begins from an individual spinner who advances £10,000: £8,000 in cotton, machinery, and related means, and £2,000 in wages. Annual output is 240,000 lb. of yarn valued at £12,000; with a 100% rate of surplus-value, the net product contains £2,000 surplus-value. A money sum of £2,000 does not visibly reveal that it is surplus-value. Its origin explains how its owner acquired it, not the nature of money or value itself.
To convert the additional £2,000 into capital under unchanged conditions, the spinner advances four fifths, £1,600, for cotton and other means of production, and one fifth, £400, for additional spinners' labour-power. The new £2,000 capital then functions in the mill and produces £400 surplus-value.
Original capital was advanced as money; surplus-value initially exists as the value of a definite part of the gross product. Sale restores the capital-value's original money form and changes surplus-value from product-value into money. From then on both are money sums reconverted in the same way, buying the commodities needed to restart production on an enlarged scale. Those commodities must already be available in the market.
The spinner's yarn circulates only as one aliquot part of the year's total social product. Market transactions transfer the annual product's components from hand to hand; they cannot enlarge annual production or alter the kinds of objects produced. What can be done with the annual product therefore depends on its composition, not on circulation.
Annual production must first replace the material components of capital used up during the year. What remains is the net or surplus-product containing surplus-value. If that surplus-product consisted only of things for capitalist consumption, all surplus-value would be spent away and only simple reproduction would occur.
Accumulation requires converting part of the surplus-product into capital. Without a miracle, that means additional means of production and means of subsistence, produced beyond what is needed to replace the capital already advanced. Surplus-value is convertible into capital because the surplus-product whose value it is already contains those material elements of new capital. Attached German note [21a] / Moore–Aveling note [2] temporarily sets export trade aside: the argument treats the world as one capitalist nation so that luxury goods, production goods, and subsistence are not converted through foreign trade.
To make those additional materials function as capital requires additional labour. If exploitation of current workers is not intensified or extended, additional workers must be hired. Capitalist production has already reproduced them as a wage-dependent class whose ordinary wage sustains and increases the working class. Capital need only incorporate this additional labour-power with the additional means of production already present in annual output. Accumulation is thus reproduction on a progressively increasing scale: in Sismondi's attributed image, simple reproduction's circle becomes a spiral. Attached German note [21b] / Moore–Aveling note [3] attributes to Sismondi the defect of speaking of conversion of revenue into capital without sufficiently examining this operation's material conditions.
Marx resumes the spinner illustration: £10,000 produces £2,000 surplus-value, which is capitalized. The new £2,000 produces £400; when that is capitalized as a second additional capital, it produces £80, and the sequence continues.
Marx leaves aside the portion of surplus-value consumed by the capitalist, and whether additional capital is joined to the original, made independent, used by its accumulator, or transferred to another. What must remain in view is that original capital continues reproducing and producing surplus-value alongside newly formed capital; every accumulated capital likewise produces further additional capital.
The owner of the originally advanced £10,000 is said by political-economy spokesmen to have acquired it through their own labour and that of their forefathers. Marx presents this as their attributed answer, one apparently consonant with commodity-production law, not as his own settled account. Attached German note [21c] / Moore–Aveling note [4] gives Sismondi's formulation of capital's origin in “original labour.”
The additional £2,000 is different because its origin is known: it is capitalized surplus-value. It contains no value-atom not derived from others' unpaid labour; its means of production and workers' subsistence are parts of the surplus-product taken annually from the working class. Additional labour-power can still be bought at full price, with equivalent exchanged for equivalent. Marx's conqueror analogy describes buying with appropriated value; it is not evidence that the wage exchange literally defrauds the seller.
If additional capital employs its own producer, that producer must continue to valorize original capital and buy back the product of earlier labour with more labour than it cost. At class scale, using unpaid labour from currently employed workers to employ additional workers does not change this result. The capitalist may instead turn additional capital into a machine that throws its producers out of work and replaces them with a few children. In every case, the working class's surplus-labour this year creates capital that may employ additional labour next year. Attached German note [22] / Moore–Aveling note [5] attributes the formulation “labour creates capital before capital employs labour” to Wakefield.
The first additional £2,000 presupposes the capitalist's original £10,000 advance, attributed to “primitive labour.” The next £400, by contrast, presupposes the prior accumulation of the £2,000 and is its capitalized surplus-value. Ownership of past unpaid labour now appears as the condition for appropriating living unpaid labour on an increasing scale: the more the capitalist has accumulated, the more the capitalist can accumulate.
Each individual transaction may conform to commodity exchange: workers freely dispose of their capacities, owners dispose of their values, and labour-power is bought and sold at its real value. Yet the commodity-property law turns into its opposite through its own inner, repeated application. The initial exchange of equivalents becomes apparent only: capital exchanged for labour-power is already appropriated others' labour, and its producer must replace it with an added surplus. Repeated buying and selling is the form; the content is the capitalist's repeated exchange of appropriated past labour for a greater quantity of living labour. Property now becomes the capitalist's right to others' unpaid labour or its product, and the worker's inability to appropriate their own product. The separation of property from labour is the necessary consequence of a law that seemed to begin from their identity. Attached German note [23] / Moore–Aveling note [6] attributes to Cherbuliez the claim that capitalist ownership of others' product is a strict consequence of the law of appropriation, while Marx says the dialectical reversal is not properly developed there.
Capitalist appropriation may appear to contradict commodity-production law, but Marx says it arises not through violation of those laws but through their application. He now recapitulates the phases leading to accumulation. Attached Moore–Aveling note [7] explains that the following passage was added to the English text in conformity with the fourth German edition.
The original conversion of value into capital conforms to exchange law. One party sells labour-power and the other buys it; the seller receives its value and alienates its use-value, labour, to the buyer. The buyer uses means of production already owned, with labour now also owned for the agreed time, to make a new product that lawfully belongs to the buyer.
The new product includes the value of used-up means of production. Useful labour can consume those means only by transferring their value to the product; labour-power must be capable of supplying useful labour in the branch where it is employed.
The new product also includes an equivalent for labour-power's value and surplus-value. Labour-power sold for a day, week, or other period has less value than its use creates during that period. The worker has received labour-power's exchange-value and has alienated its use-value, as in any completed purchase and sale.
This German paragraph continues into the next one. Labour-power is the special commodity whose use-value is to supply labour and therefore to create value.
The special value-creating use of labour-power does not disturb commodity-production law. When value advanced as wages returns in the product enlarged by surplus-value, the seller has not been defrauded: the seller received the value of labour-power. The increment comes from the buyer's consumption of that commodity after purchase, not from a dishonest exchange.
Exchange law requires equality only in the exchange-values of commodities exchanged. It presupposes their different use-values from the start and says nothing about their consumption, which begins after the bargain has been concluded and carried out.
Money's original conversion into capital occurs in exact conformity with the economic laws of commodity production and the property right derived from them. Marx then states three results of that lawful process.
First, the product belongs to the capitalist rather than to the worker.
Second, beyond the value of capital advanced, the product contains surplus-value. It costs the worker labour and costs the capitalist nothing, yet becomes the capitalist's legitimate property.
Third, the worker retains labour-power and can sell it again on finding a buyer.
Simple reproduction periodically repeats this first operation: money is repeatedly converted afresh into capital. The law is not broken; repetition gives it continual occasion to operate.
Sismondi's attributed formulation says that several successive exchanges merely make the last exchange represent the first.
Yet simple reproduction alone gives the first operation, when viewed no longer as isolated, a completely changed character.
Sismondi says that workers acquire a new right to national income each year through new labour, while capitalists have acquired a permanent right through earlier “primitive labour.” Marx preserves this as Sismondi's attributed contrast.
Marx adds that labour is famously not the only sphere in which primogeniture works miracles.
Replacing simple reproduction with expanded reproduction, or accumulation, changes nothing decisive. Under simple reproduction the capitalist spends all surplus-value; under accumulation the capitalist consumes only part and turns the rest into money.
The capitalist can call surplus-value their own fund, even though it now derives from workers' unpaid labour. If worker B is employed from surplus-value produced by worker A, A supplied it without any cut in the value paid for A's labour-power. This transaction does not alter B's individual claim: B can demand payment of the value of B's labour-power.
Marx quotes Sismondi's claim that both parties gain, then corrects it twice. What is advanced to the worker before their own work bears fruit is the unpaid labour of other workers; and the worker's labour creates more value than the value of the wage, rather than merely being “worth more” than that wage.
The matter looks different when capitalist production is viewed in its uninterrupted renewal, with the capitalist class and working class rather than one capitalist and one worker. Marx notes that this applies a standard wholly foreign to commodity production considered in isolation.
In commodity production, independent buyers and sellers face each other. Their relation ends with the contract's term; a repeated transaction rests on a new agreement, related to the earlier one only by chance when it reunites the same parties.
To judge commodity production or one of its processes by its own economic laws, each exchange must be considered separately from those before and after it. Because purchase and sale are concluded between individuals, whole class relations cannot be sought inside that isolated act.
However long capital's history of periodic reproductions and prior accumulations, it preserves its “original virginity” when every individual exchange is considered alone. The mode of appropriation can be completely transformed while the property right corresponding to commodity production remains formally untouched. The same right thus appears both at the beginning, when producers enrich themselves by their own labour through equal exchange, and in capitalism, when social wealth increasingly belongs to those able repeatedly to appropriate others' unpaid labour.
This result becomes unavoidable once workers freely sell labour-power as a commodity. Only then does commodity production become generalized and typical: products are made for sale and all produced wealth passes through circulation. Only where wage-labour is its basis does commodity production impose itself on society and unfold its hidden powers. Marx's attached note rejects Proudhon's attempt to preserve commodity property by treating wage-labour as an adulteration rather than the development through which commodity-production property laws become laws of capitalist appropriation. Attached German note [24] / Moore–Aveling note [8] names Proudhon as the polemical target.
Even under simple reproduction, all capital advanced, whatever its source, becomes accumulated capital or capitalized surplus-value. In production's continuing flow, originally advanced capital becomes a vanishing magnitude beside directly accumulated surplus-value or surplus-product reconverted into capital, whether used by its accumulator or another. Political economy's descriptions of capital as accumulated wealth reused to produce surplus-value, of the capitalist as owner of surplus-product, and of all existing capital as accumulated or capitalized interest are attributed voices. Marx notes that interest is only a fraction of surplus-value. Attached German notes [25]–[27] / Moore–Aveling notes [9]–[11] attribute these formulations respectively to Malthus and Jones, The Source and Remedy of the National Difficulties, and the Economist.
Before adding further determinations of accumulation—the reconversion of surplus-value into capital—Marx clears away an ambiguity devised by classical political economy.
Commodities and personal services bought for the capitalist's own needs do not serve production or valorization. Their purchase consumes surplus-value as revenue. Against feudal-noble consumption—Hegel's “consuming what is at hand,” especially personal retainers—bourgeois economy preached accumulation as the first civic duty and urged spending revenue on additional productive workers who yield more than they cost. It also rightly opposed the popular confusion of accumulation with hoarding. Wealth accumulated as capital is not merely preserved from consumption or circulation. Money locked out of circulation cannot valorize; hoarding commodities is folly; large commodity masses arise from stopped circulation or overproduction. Goods slowly consumed by the rich and reserve stocks common to all modes of production are distinct. German note [28] / M–A [12] quotes Malthus on saving as different employment rather than mere hoarding. German [28a] / M–A [13] invokes Balzac's Gobseck hoarding goods in senility. German [29] / M–A [14] quotes Corbet on stocks, non-exchange, and overproduction. M–A [15], without a German counterpart here, adds Necker's luxury objects accumulated in one class's hands.
Classical economy is right that productive rather than unproductive workers consuming surplus-product is characteristic of accumulation. Its error begins when Smith makes this the whole process and treats capitalizing surplus-value as merely turning it into labour-power. Marx then introduces Ricardo's formulation. Moore–Aveling places the first three movements of this German paragraph at the end of EN p2 and retains only the Ricardo lead-in in EN p3; no content is omitted.
Ricardo says every national product is consumed, but distinguishes consumption by people who reproduce value from consumption by those who do not. Saved revenue added to capital is, on his account, consumed by productive rather than unproductive workers; capital is not increased by non-consumption. German note [30] / M–A note [16] attributes the quotation to Ricardo.
Marx calls the formula repeated by Ricardo and later economists after Smith the greater error; this German paragraph is an incomplete lead-in to the quotation in p6.
The quoted claim is that the portion of revenue added to capital is consumed by productive workers. The next paragraph explains why that statement is insufficient.
Smith's account would turn all capitalized surplus-value into variable capital. Instead, it divides, like the original advance, into constant and variable capital—means of production and labour-power. Capital consumes labour-power in production; labour in use consumes means of production; wage money becomes necessaries consumed by the productive worker, not “productive labour.” Smith then turns each individual capital's constant/variable division into the absurd claim that social capital is only variable capital or wages. A cloth manufacturer capitalizes £2,000: one portion buys weavers, another yarn and machinery. Their sellers pay labour “and so on” until Smith declares the whole sum wages. Marx says those words send the inquiry from Pontius to Pilate and stop exactly where the difficulty begins. German note [31] quotes J. S. Mill repeating that capital ultimately resolves into wages. Local M–A footnote [17] has no body marker and remains reported but unattached; it is not silently fabricated as p7's counterpart.
The annual reproduction process looks simple while only the total annual fund is in view. Difficulty begins when every component must enter the commodity market: individual capitals and personal revenues cross and intermingle in the circulation of social wealth. Marx defers the full connection to Volume II. He credits the Physiocrats' Tableau économique as the first attempt to depict annual production as it emerges from circulation. German note [32] / M–A note [18] says Smith regressed from the Physiocrats and connects his illusion to the dogma that commodity price consists only of wages, profit/interest, and rent; Storch then calls decomposition into simple elements impossible. Marx points forward to Volumes II and III.
Political economy, acting in the capitalist class's interest, exploits Smith's claim that the entire capitalized part of the net product is consumed by the working class.
Marx distinguishes two uses of surplus-value. It is neither solely the capitalist's individual consumption fund nor solely an accumulation fund: one part is consumed as revenue and another is applied as capital. Attached German note [33] / Moore–Aveling note [19] explains that “revenue” has two senses here: surplus-value as capital's periodic fruit, and the part periodically consumed by the capitalist.
With the total mass of surplus-value fixed, the revenue and capital shares move inversely. Their ratio determines accumulation's magnitude. The capitalist, as owner of the surplus-value, makes that division deliberately. Calling the accumulated part “saving” names the capitalist's function of enriching himself from tribute already obtained; it does not make his will the source of value.
Marx grants the capitalist historical significance only as personified capital, within the transitory necessity of capitalist production. The motive is exchange-value and its expansion, not use-value or enjoyment. The drive to make value expand develops social productive powers and material conditions that could form the basis of a higher society. This is not a moral portrait of a greedy individual. What looks like a miser's individual mania appears in the capitalist as the effect of a social mechanism. Competition makes the laws of capitalist production external coercive laws: capital must be continually enlarged in order to be preserved.
So far as the capitalist acts as capital endowed with will and consciousness, private consumption appears to him as a debit against accumulation. Accumulation conquers the world of social wealth and enlarges the capitalist's direct and indirect domination along with the exploited human material. Attached German note [34] / Moore–Aveling note [20] gives Luther's polemic against the usurer, including domination as an element of the drive to get rich.
Marx begins an “original sin” sentence that runs across the German paragraph break: with capitalist production, accumulation, and wealth, the capitalist ceases to be a mere incarnation of capital. Moore–Aveling likewise carries this continuation in EN p5.
The modernized capitalist develops fellow-feeling for his own Adam and smiles at asceticism as the old miser's prejudice. Marx contrasts the classical capitalist's “Enthaltung” from accumulation with the modernized capitalist's “Entsagung” from pleasure, then quotes Goethe's two souls. Moore–Aveling renders both German terms as “abstinence,” including “abstinence from pleasure.” This secondary translation loss does not alter the central critique. Its marked note [21], attached to EN p7, identifies Goethe and has no marked German counterpart.
At capitalism's historical dawn, avarice and the desire to get rich rule; every capitalist upstart repeats that stage personally. Later development opens speculation and credit as sources of sudden enrichment. Luxury becomes a display of wealth, a source of credit, and a representation cost of capital. The capitalist does not become rich through personal work or restricted consumption, but by extracting others' labour-power and imposing renunciation on workers. His expenditure can grow with accumulation without stopping it, while a Faustian conflict develops between accumulation and enjoyment.
Marx introduces Dr. Aikin's 1795 account of Manchester industry and its four periods. Aikin's first period begins with manufacturers compelled to work hard for their livelihood.
In Aikin's first period, manufacturers enriched themselves through the parents who paid premiums to bind children as apprentices, while the apprentices were starved. Average profits were low, accumulation required great parsimony, and the manufacturers lived like misers without consuming even their capital's interest.
Aikin's second period has manufacturers acquiring small fortunes while working as hard and living as frugally as before. Marx interrupts the quotation to say that direct exploitation costs work, as every slave-driver knows; that interruption is Marx's, not Aikin's account. Aikin's third period begins luxury and commercial expansion through travelling riders seeking orders. His chronology continues through the earlier scarcity of industrial capitals, new brick houses, and the social disapproval once attached to serving foreign wine.
Aikin's chronology continues: before machinery, manufacturers' evening spending was slight; in 1758 an actively engaged businessperson with a private carriage marked an epoch. His fourth period is one of great luxury and expenditure supported by expanded trade. Marx then asks what the good Dr. Aikin would say if resurrected in Manchester. Attached German note [35] / Moore–Aveling note [22] identifies Aikin's 1795 Description of the Country from 30 to 40 Miles round Manchester.
“Accumulate, accumulate” is Marx's formula for the classical-economy imperative. Citing Smith, he glosses it as reconverting as much surplus-value or surplus-product as possible into capital. Accumulation for accumulation's sake and production for production's sake express the historical vocation of the bourgeois period. Classical economy recognizes wealth's birth-throes yet treats the proletarian as a machine for producing surplus-value and the capitalist as a machine for converting it into additional capital. This is its historical account, not a timeless norm. Attached German notes [36]–[37] / Moore–Aveling notes [23]–[24] preserve the Smith formula and the Say/Sismondi material.
To protect the capitalist from the conflict between enjoyment and enrichment, Malthus proposes a division of labour: the capitalist actually engaged in production accumulates, while landlords, state place-holders, beneficed clergy, and other recipients of surplus-value spend. His stated importance is keeping the passions for expenditure and accumulation separate. The capitalists, now men of the world, object. Marx introduces their Ricardian spokesman before the reply continues in the following paragraphs. Attached German note [38] / Moore–Aveling note [25] identifies Malthus's formulation.
The Ricardian/MacCulloch spokesman's quotation says that Malthus's arrangement curbs rather than promotes production. It also calls it unfair to maintain some people in idleness merely to squeeze others whose character supposedly shows they would work successfully if forced. This is the spokesman's argument, not Marx's neutral claim. Attached German note [39] / Moore–Aveling note [26] preserves the source of that quotation.
The spokesman finds it unfair to spur the industrial capitalist toward accumulation by taking the butter from his bread, while finding it necessary to hold workers to the lowest possible wage in order to keep them industrious. He also openly states that appropriating unpaid labour is the secret of making a gain.
In the same quoted argument, increased demand by workers means workers taking less of their own product and leaving more to employers. Reduced worker consumption is said to create “glut”; the spokesman answers that glut is synonymous with high profits. Attached German note [40] / Moore–Aveling note [27] preserves this continuation of the Ricardian/MacCulloch voice.
The learned dispute over distributing booty pumped from workers between industrial capitalists and idle property-holders is silenced by the July Revolution. Marx then moves through Lyon, English rural fires, Owenism, Saint-Simonism, and Fourierism toward the arrival of vulgar economy.
Marx introduces Nassau Senior's “last hour” claim before reporting Senior's other discovery: replace capital, considered as an instrument of production, with “abstinence.” Marx immediately calls this vulgar economy's replacement of an economic category by a sycophantic phrase. Senior's bow-maker and progress claims remain Senior's quoted voice; Marx's replies remain Marx's irony. Marx makes the escalation concrete: precapitalist tools did not require capitalist abstinence; appropriating others' industry is recast as abstinence; corn that is sown and wine allowed to mature become the capitalist's sacrifices. The supposed “loan” of instruments conceals capital's incorporation of labour-power to extract surplus-value. Marx then invokes the Vishnu penitent, the alleged effort required merely to conserve capital, and the Georgian slave-owner supposedly released from a painful choice about surplus-product. These are polemical reversals, not narrator theory. Real reinvestment and deferred consumption can occur, but neither produces profit nor morally warrants appropriation. Attached German notes [41]–[45] / Moore–Aveling notes [28]–[32] preserve, in order, Senior/Cazenove, Senior, Scrope, Molinari, and Courcelle-Seneuil. Moore–Aveling [28] is marked after Senior's bow example at EN p25, not after the formula at EN p23; [29] is at EN p27, and [30]–[32] at EN p28.
Many economic formations have simple reproduction and reproduction on an enlarged scale: progressively more is produced and consumed, and more product becomes means of production. This is not accumulation of capital, or a capitalist's function, where workers do not confront their means of production, product, and subsistence as capital. Marx attributes two Indian cases to Richard Jones, Malthus's successor at Haileybury College. Self-cultivating peasants do not hold their means and product as a fund saved from another's revenue; in other provinces, magnates directly employ non-agricultural workers while those workers retain their instruments. Production and enlarged reproduction thus proceed without Marx's “abstaining” capitalist. Attached German notes [46]–[47] / Moore–Aveling notes [33]–[34] preserve Jones's account.
Given the fixed proportion in which surplus-value splits into capital and revenue, the size of the accumulated capital obviously depends on the absolute magnitude of the surplus-value produced. If 80 percent were capitalized and 20 percent consumed, the accumulated capital would be £2,400 or £1,200 depending on whether total surplus-value came to £3,000 or £1,500.
Hence every circumstance that determines the mass of surplus-value also determines the magnitude of accumulation. Marx gathers these circumstances once more, but only insofar as they offer new points of view specifically bearing on accumulation.
It will be remembered that the rate of surplus-value depends, in the first place, on the degree of exploitation of labour-power — the section's first determinant. Political economy values this so highly that it sometimes identifies accelerated accumulation through higher productive power of labour with accelerated accumulation through higher exploitation of the worker. In the chapters on the production of surplus-value it was constantly assumed that wages were at least equal to the value of labour-power; but the forcible depression of wages below that value plays too important a role in practice to pass over, since it converts, within limits, the worker's necessary consumption fund into a fund for accumulating capital. Attached German note [48] / Moore–Aveling note [35] cites Ricardo on the productive powers of labour and the accumulation of capital.
"Wages," says J. St. Mill, "have no productive power; they are the price of a productive power. Wages do not contribute, along with labour itself, to the production of commodities, any more than the price of machinery contributes along with the machinery. If labour could be had without purchase, wages would be superfluous." Attached German note [49] / Moore–Aveling note [36] cites Mill's Essays on Some Unsettled Questions of Political Economy.
But if workers could live on air, they could not be bought at any price. The zero of their cost is therefore a limit in the mathematical sense — always approached, never reached — and it is capital's constant tendency to force wages down toward this nihilistic point. A frequently cited eighteenth-century writer, the author of the Essay on Trade and Commerce, betrays only the innermost secret of English capital when he declares it England's historic mission to force English wages down to the French and Dutch level. Marx introduces the Essayist's own words. Attached German note [50] / Moore–Aveling note [37] cites the Essay on Trade and Commerce and adds the Times reports on Belgian miners and the 1867 Marchienne strike.
"But if our poor" (a technical term for labourers) "will live luxuriously ... then their labour must of course be dear ... Consider only the appalling mass of superfluities that our manufacturing workers consume: brandy, gin, tea, sugar, foreign fruit, strong beer, printed linens, snuff and smoking tobacco," the Essayist complains. Attached German note [51] cites the Essay again; corresponding Moore–Aveling note [38] exists in the raw MIA source footnote block but has no English body marker. It is deliberately excluded from the attached handoff and reported only, not restored.
The Essayist cites the writing of a Northamptonshire manufacturer who, with eyes squinting heavenward, laments the cost of English labour.
"Labour is a whole third cheaper in France than in England: for the French poor work hard and fare hard as to food and clothing, their chief diet being bread, fruit, herbs, roots, and dried fish, since they very seldom eat meat, and when wheat is dear, very little bread," the manufacturer claims. "To which may be added," the Essayist continues, "that their drink is water or similarly weak liquors, so that they spend astonishingly little money ... Such a state of things is certainly hard to bring about, but it is not unattainable, as its existence in both France and Holland strikingly proves." Attached German note [52] exposes the manufacturer's comparison as a pious fraud — he in fact describes French agricultural, not manufacturing, labourers — and note [53], a third-edition addition, adds Stapleton's 1873 remark that England's wished-for goal has become Chinese wages, not merely continental ones. The corresponding Moore–Aveling notes [39]–[40] carry the same content.
Two decades later an American humbug, the baronized Yankee Benjamin Thompson, alias Count Rumford, pursued the same line of philanthropy to the great satisfaction of God and man. His Essays are a cookbook of recipes of every kind for substituting cheap surrogates for the worker's ordinary, dearer food. Marx introduces a particularly successful recipe of this whimsical "philosopher."
"Five pounds of barley, five pounds of maize, threepence-worth of herring, a penny of salt, a penny of vinegar, twopence of pepper and herbs — a total of twenty and three-quarter pence — makes a soup for sixty-four people; and at average grain prices the cost per head can be brought down to a quarter of a penny," Rumford's recipe reports. Attached German note [54] / Moore–Aveling note [41] cites Thompson's Essays and Eden's State of the Poor, which recommends the Rumford soup to workhouse overseers and reproaches English labourers with the frugal example of Scottish families living on oatmeal and barley-meal.
With the advance of capitalist production, the adulteration of food made Thompson's ideal superfluous. Attached German note [55] / Moore–Aveling note [42] reports that a parliamentary commission found even medicines routinely adulterated, citing opium samples doctored with poppy heads, wheat flour, gum, clay, and sand.
At the end of the eighteenth and during the first decades of the nineteenth century, English farmers and landlords enforced an absolute minimum wage by paying agricultural day-labourers less than the minimum in wages and making up the rest as parish relief. Marx introduces an example of the buffoonery with which the English Dogberries conducted their "legal" fixing of a wage tariff.
"When the squires fixed the wages for Speenhamland in 1795, they had dined at midday, but evidently thought the labourers needed no such thing ... They decided the weekly wage should be 3 shillings for a man when the eight-pound-eleven-ounce loaf stood at 1 shilling, rising regularly until the loaf cost 1 shilling 5 pence. Once it rose above that price, wages should decrease proportionally until the loaf reached 2 shillings, at which point the man's food should be a fifth less than before." Attached German note [56] / Moore–Aveling note [43] cites Newnham's Review of the Evidence before the Committees of the two Houses of Parliament on the Corn Laws.
Before the House of Lords committee of inquiry in 1814, a certain A. Bennett — a large farmer, magistrate, workhouse administrator, and wage-regulator — is questioned.
"Is any proportion observed between the value of a day's labour and the parish relief given to the labourer?" "Yes. Every family's weekly income is made up beyond its nominal wage to the gallon loaf (eight pounds eleven ounces) and threepence per head ... we assume the gallon loaf sufficient to maintain each person in the family for the week, and the threepence is for clothes; if the parish supplies the clothes itself, the threepence is deducted. This practice prevails not only throughout western Wiltshire but, I believe, throughout the country," Bennett answers. "So," exclaims a bourgeois writer of the time, "the farmers have for years degraded a respectable class of their countrymen by forcing them into the workhouse ... the farmer has increased his own profits while preventing his labouring dependents from accumulating even the most indispensable consumption fund." Attached German notes [57]–[58] / Moore–Aveling notes [44]–[45] cite Bennett's testimony and Parry on landlords whose rents doubled, tripled, or even sextupled within eighteen years.
The role played today by direct robbery from the worker's necessary consumption fund in forming surplus-value, and so capital's accumulation fund, is shown by the so-called domestic industry discussed in Chapter XV, section 8c. Further facts follow later in this section.
Although in every branch of industry the portion of constant capital consisting of instruments of labour must suffice for a certain number of workers fixed by the scale of the undertaking, it need not always grow in the same proportion as the labour employed. In a factory, a hundred workers on an eight-hour day may yield 800 working-hours. If the capitalist wants to raise this by half, he can hire fifty new workers, but must then advance new capital for both wages and instruments. Alternatively he can work the same hundred workers twelve hours instead of eight, so the existing instruments suffice and merely wear out faster. Additional labour produced this way by greater tension of labour-power can thus raise the surplus-product and surplus-value — the substance of accumulation — without a proportionate increase in the constant part of capital.
In extractive industry, mining for instance, raw materials form no part of the capital advanced: the object of labour is not the product of prior labour but nature's free gift, as with ore, minerals, coal, and stone. Here constant capital consists almost entirely of instruments of labour, which can readily absorb an increased quantity of labour, such as day and night shifts. All else being equal, the mass and value of the product rise directly with the labour applied; as on the first day of production, the original formers of the product — and so of capital's material elements — man and nature, work together. Thanks to the elasticity of labour-power, the domain of accumulation has extended here without any prior enlargement of constant capital.
In agriculture, cultivated land cannot be extended without advancing additional seed and manure. But once that advance is made, even the purely mechanical working of the soil has a marvelous effect on the mass of the product. A greater quantity of labour performed by the existing number of workers thus raises fertility without requiring any new advance in instruments of labour: once again it is the direct action of man on nature that becomes an immediate source of increased accumulation, without any new capital intervening.
Finally, in manufacture proper, every additional outlay on labour presupposes a corresponding additional outlay on raw materials, but not necessarily on instruments of labour. And since extractive industry and agriculture supply manufacture with its own raw materials and those of its instruments, the additional product those sectors create without additional capital outlay benefits manufacture as well.
General result: by incorporating the two original creators of wealth, labour-power and earth, capital acquires a power of expansion. The German sentence runs on into p22, splitting mid-word at "Expansions-"; Moore–Aveling's EN p19 carries the whole result as a single unbroken paragraph.
Continuing the sentence begun in p21, that power of expansion lets capital extend the elements of its accumulation beyond the limits apparently fixed by its own magnitude — limits set by the value and mass of the means of production already produced, in which capital has its being.
Another important factor in the accumulation of capital is the degree of productivity of social labour.
With the productive power of labour, the mass of products in which a given value — and so a surplus-value of given size — is represented, grows. At a given, or even a falling, rate of surplus-value, so long as it falls more slowly than productive power rises, the mass of the surplus-product still grows; with the division into revenue and additional capital unchanged, the capitalist's consumption can then grow without diminishing the accumulation fund, and the fund's relative size can even grow at the expense of the consumption fund while cheapened commodities still leave the capitalist as many or more means of enjoyment as before. But growing productivity of labour goes hand in hand, as we have seen, with the cheapening of the worker — hence a rising rate of surplus-value even where real wages rise, though wages never rise in proportion to productivity. The same variable capital-value thus sets more labour-power, and so more labour, in motion; the same constant capital-value takes the form of more means of production, supplying more product-formers and more value-formers or labour-absorbers alike. Accelerated accumulation therefore takes place even where the value of the additional capital stays the same or actually falls: not only does the material scale of reproduction expand, but the production of surplus-value grows faster than the value of the additional capital.
The development of the productive power of labour also reacts on the original capital already engaged in production. Part of the functioning constant capital consists of instruments of labour, such as machinery, consumed and so reproduced or replaced only over longer periods; but every year part of these instruments dies off or reaches the end of its productive function, entering its stage of periodic reproduction or replacement. If productive power has meanwhile expanded at the birthplace of these instruments — and it develops continually with the unbroken advance of science and technology — a more effective and, relative to its performance, cheaper machine, tool, or apparatus takes the old one's place. The old capital is reproduced in a more productive form, quite apart from the constant detail changes made to instruments already in use. The other part of constant capital, raw material and auxiliary substances, is continually reproduced within the year, agriculture's share mostly annually, so every introduction of better methods affects additional capital and capital already functioning almost simultaneously. Every advance in chemistry multiplies useful materials and the applications of those already known, extending capital's sphere of investment as it grows, and teaches how to throw the waste of production and consumption back into the cycle of reproduction, creating new capital-material without any prior outlay. Like increased exploitation of natural wealth through mere higher tension of labour-power, science and technology form a power of capital's expansion independent of the given magnitude of the capital actually functioning; this power also acts on the part of the original capital that has entered its renewal stage, which incorporates gratis, in its new form, the social progress achieved behind the back of its old form. This development of productive power is of course accompanied by partial depreciation of functioning capitals, and where competition makes that depreciation acutely felt, its main weight falls on the worker, in whose increased exploitation the capitalist seeks compensation.
Labour transfers to the product the value of the means of production it consumes. On the other hand, the value and mass of the means of production set in motion by a given quantity of labour grow as labour becomes more productive. The same quantity of labour thus always adds only the same sum of new value to its products, yet the old capital-value it simultaneously transfers to them grows with rising productivity of labour.
An English and a Chinese spinner, for example, may work the same number of hours at the same intensity and so create equal values in a week. Despite this equality, there is an immense difference between the value of the Englishman's weekly product, made with a mighty automaton, and the Chinese spinner's, made with only a spinning-wheel: in the time the Chinese spinner works one pound of cotton, the Englishman spins several hundred pounds, and a correspondingly vastly greater sum of old values swells the value of his product, preserved there in a new, usable form so they can function again as capital. "In 1782," Friedrich Engels tells us, "the whole wool crop in England of the three preceding years lay untouched for want of labourers, and would have had to lie so had not newly invented machinery come to its aid and spun it." Labour objectified as machinery naturally did not directly stamp any human being out of the ground, but it let a small number of workers, adding relatively little living labour, not only consume the wool productively and add new value to it, but preserve its old value in the form of yarn, thereby also supplying the means and spur for wool's expanded reproduction. It is the natural gift of living labour to preserve old value while creating new value; with the growth in effectiveness, extent, and value of its means of production — the accumulation that accompanies the development of its productive power — labour thus preserves and perpetuates an ever-swelling capital-value in ever-new form. Marx then writes that this natural power of labour appears as a self-preserving power belonging to the capital in which it is incorporated — a sentence that runs across the paragraph break into p28. Attached German note [59] cites Engels's Condition of the Working Class in England; corresponding Moore–Aveling note [46] exists in the raw MIA source footnote block but has no English body marker. It is deliberately excluded from the attached handoff and reported only, not restored. Attached German note [60], carried as Moore–Aveling note [47] within EN p26, gives Marx's long critique of Ricardo's failure to distinguish product-value from value-product, and Say's confused reply.
The capital in which labour's preserving power is incorporated is credited with that power, just as labour's social productive powers appear as capital's own properties, and the capitalist's constant appropriation of surplus-labour appears as capital's constant self-valorization. All the powers of labour project themselves as powers of capital, just as all the value-forms of the commodity project themselves as forms of money.
With the growth of capital, the difference between capital employed and capital consumed grows. In other words, the value and material mass of instruments of labour — buildings, machinery, drainage pipes, working cattle, apparatus of every kind — grows, instruments that function in their whole extent, or serve to achieve particular useful effects, through repeated processes of production over longer or shorter periods, while wearing out only gradually and so losing, and transferring to the product, their value only piecemeal. To the extent that these instruments serve as product-formers without adding value to the product — wholly employed yet only partly consumed — they perform, as noted earlier, the same gratis service as natural forces like water, steam, air, or electricity. This gratis service of past labour, once seized and animated by living labour, accumulates as the scale of accumulation grows.
Because past labour always disguises itself as capital — the passive labour of A, B, C and so on becoming the active possession of the non-worker X — citizens and political economists are full of praise for the merits of past labour, which, according to the Scottish genius MacCulloch, must even draw its own special wage in the form of interest, profit, and the like. The ever-growing weight of past labour cooperating in the living labour-process under the form of means of production is thus credited to that form, alienated from the worker himself whose past and unpaid labour it actually is — its capital-form. The practical agents of capitalist production and their ideological windbags are as unable to think of the means of production apart from the antagonistic social mask stuck on it today as a slaveholder is to think of the worker apart from his character as a slave. Attached German note [61] / Moore–Aveling note [48] notes that MacCulloch patented "wages of past labour" long before Senior patented "wages of abstinence."
At a given degree of exploitation of labour-power, the mass of surplus-value is determined by the number of workers simultaneously exploited, which corresponds, though not in fixed proportion, to the size of capital. The more, then, capital grows through successive accumulations, the more the sum of value grows that divides between a consumption fund and an accumulation fund — a sentence that runs across the paragraph break into p32.
The capitalist can therefore live more freely while claiming to "renounce" more. And finally, all the springs of production act the more energetically the more their scale expands with the mass of capital advanced.
Marx gathers the preceding results: capital is not fixed but an elastic, fluctuating part of social wealth, changing with the division of fresh surplus-value between revenue and additional capital. Even at a given functioning magnitude, incorporated labour-power, science, and land—all objects of labour nature supplies independently of people—give capital a field of action partly independent of its size.
Two brackets matter. The analysis has set aside circulation conditions that give the same mass of capital different efficiencies, and, because it presupposes capitalist limits, has also set aside more rational combinations directly and systematically practicable with existing means and labour-powers. Classical economy instead treats social capital as fixed in size and effect. Bentham hardens that prejudice into dogma; Marx's Bentham/Tupper comparison is satire, not doctrine.
Bentham, Malthus, James Mill, and MacCulloch use the dogma apologetically to present variable capital as fixed. Its material means of subsistence—the so-called labour fund—are thereby fabled into a naturally walled-off part of wealth. A definite mass of living labour is technologically required to move means of production, but neither the required worker number nor labour-power's price is fixed; only a highly elastic minimum limit is given. Workers have no say in dividing wealth between non-workers' enjoyment and production, and enlarge the fund at rich revenue's expense only in favourable exceptions.
German notes [62]–[65] / Moore–Aveling notes [49]–[52] preserve the Bentham source, Marx's extended utility-principle critique, Bailey's circulation-based objection, and Mill's unequal-reward passage with Marx's warning not to equate Mill with vulgar apologists.
Marx introduces Professor Fawcett as an example of the absurd tautology produced when a capitalist limit of the labour fund is rewritten as society's natural limit. Moore–Aveling note [53] supplies Fawcett's bibliographic citation corresponding to German note [66], which the German text attaches to the quotation in p3.
Fawcett identifies a country's circulating capital with its wage fund and says average money wages follow by dividing that capital by the labouring population. This remains Fawcett's claim. German notes [66]–[67] give his source and Marx's warning that political economy confuses constant/variable capital with fixed/circulating forms; Moore–Aveling places the source at note [53] on EN p2 and the category warning at note [54] here.
Marx reconstructs the circular procedure: first add the individual wages actually paid; then declare that total the labour fund decreed by God and nature; finally divide it by the number of workers to rediscover the average individual wage. His 'uncommonly knowing dodge' is irony. Fawcett immediately adds another statement that undermines the fixed-fund premise.
Fawcett says the total wealth annually accumulated in England divides into two parts: one is used in England to maintain domestic industry, while the second part—completed after the German paragraph break—is exported abroad. Moore–Aveling carries the whole quotation in EN p5.
Completing Fawcett's sentence, one portion is exported and the part employed in English industry is not a significant share of the wealth accumulated annually. German note [68] cites Fawcett. The M-A body ends the corresponding EN p5 with malformed 55]; raw note [55] exists in the source footnote block but has no valid marker, so it is reported only and not attached or silently repaired.
The larger part of the annually growing surplus-product, taken from English workers without an equivalent, is therefore capitalized not in England but abroad. Marx closes by turning the dogma against itself: exported additional capital also exports part of the labour fund invented by God and Bentham. German note [69] / Moore–Aveling note [56] answers the emigration objection and distinguishes exported interest-bearing additional capital from emigrants' property.