Karl Marx

Capital Volume One

Prefaces and Afterwords

1867: Dedication to Wilhelm Wolff

1867: Preface to the First German Edition (Marx)

1872: Preface to the French Edition (Marx)

1873: Afterword to the Second German Edition (Marx)

1875: Afterword to the French Edition (Marx)

1883: Preface to the Third German Edition (Engels)

1886: Preface to the English Edition (Engels)

1890: Preface to the Fourth German Edition (Engels)

1867: Marx's thank you letter to Engels

Capital Volume One- Index

Karl Marx. Capital Volume One

Part I: Commodities and Money

Chapter One: Commodities

Contents

Section 1 - The Two Factors of a Commodity: Use-Value and Value

Section 2 - The two-fold Character of the Labour Embodied in Commodities

Section 3 - The Form of Value or Exchange-Value

A. Elementary or Accidental Form of Value

1. The Two Poles of the Expression of Value: Relative Form and Equivalent Form

2. The Relative Form of Value

a. The Nature and Import of this Form

b. Quantitative Determination of Relative Value

3. The Equivalent Form of Value

4. The Elementary Form of Value Considered as a Whole

B. Total or Expanded Form of Value

1. The Expanded Relative Form of Value

2. The Particular Equivalent Form

3. Defects of the Total or Expanded Form of Value

C. The General Form of Value

1. The Altered Character of the Form of Value

2. The Interdependent Development of the Relative Form of Value, and of the Equivalent Form

3. Transition from the General Form of Value to the Money-Form

D. The Money-Form

Section 4 - The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret thereof

### SECTION 1

THE TWO FACTORS OF A COMMODITY:

USE-VALUE AND VALUE

(THE SUBSTANCE OF VALUE AND THE MAGNITUDE OF VALUE)

The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as “an immense accumulation of commodities,”[1] its unit being a single commodity. Our investigation must therefore begin with the analysis of a commodity.

A commodity is, in the first place, an object outside us, a thing that by its properties satisfies human wants of some sort or another. The nature of such wants, whether, for instance, they spring from the stomach or from fancy, makes no difference.[2] Neither are we here concerned to know how the object satisfies these wants, whether directly as means of subsistence, or indirectly as means of production.

Every useful thing, as iron, paper, &c., may be looked at from the two points of view of quality and quantity. It is an assemblage of many properties, and may therefore be of use in various ways. To discover the various uses of things is the work of history.[3] So also is the establishment of socially-recognized standards of measure for the quantities of these useful objects. The diversity of these measures has its origin partly in the diverse nature of the objects to be measured, partly in convention.

The utility of a thing makes it a use value.[4] But this utility is not a thing of air. Being limited by the physical properties of the commodity, it has no existence apart from that commodity. A commodity, such as iron, corn, or a diamond, is therefore, so far as it is a material thing, a use value, something useful. This property of a commodity is independent of the amount of labour required to appropriate its useful qualities. When treating of use value, we always assume to be dealing with definite quantities, such as dozens of watches, yards of linen, or tons of iron. The use values of commodities furnish the material for a special study, that of the commercial knowledge of commodities.[5] Use values become a reality only by use or consumption: they also constitute the substance of all wealth, whatever may be the social form of that wealth. In the form of society we are about to consider, they are, in addition, the material depositories of exchange value.

Exchange value, at first sight, presents itself as a quantitative relation, as the proportion in which values in use of one sort are exchanged for those of another sort,[6] a relation constantly changing with time and place. Hence exchange value appears to be something accidental and purely relative, and consequently an intrinsic value, i.e., an exchange value that is inseparably connected with, inherent in commodities, seems a contradiction in terms.[7] Let us consider the matter a little more closely.

A given commodity, e.g., a quarter of wheat is exchanged for x blacking, y silk, or z gold, &c. – in short, for other commodities in the most different proportions. Instead of one exchange value, the wheat has, therefore, a great many. But since x blacking, y silk, or z gold &c., each represents the exchange value of one quarter of wheat, x blacking, y silk, z gold, &c., must, as exchange values, be replaceable by each other, or equal to each other. Therefore, first: the valid exchange values of a given commodity express something equal; secondly, exchange value, generally, is only the mode of expression, the phenomenal form, of something contained in it, yet distinguishable from it.

Let us take two commodities, e.g., corn and iron. The proportions in which they are exchangeable, whatever those proportions may be, can always be represented by an equation in which a given quantity of corn is equated to some quantity of iron: e.g., 1 quarter corn = x cwt. iron. What does this equation tell us? It tells us that in two different things – in 1 quarter of corn and x cwt. of iron, there exists in equal quantities something common to both. The two things must therefore be equal to a third, which in itself is neither the one nor the other. Each of them, so far as it is exchange value, must therefore be reducible to this third.

A simple geometrical illustration will make this clear. In order to calculate and compare the areas of rectilinear figures, we decompose them into triangles. But the area of the triangle itself is expressed by something totally different from its visible figure, namely, by half the product of the base multiplied by the altitude. In the same way the exchange values of commodities must be capable of being expressed in terms of something common to them all, of which thing they represent a greater or less quantity.

This common “something” cannot be either a geometrical, a chemical, or any other natural property of commodities. Such properties claim our attention only in so far as they affect the utility of those commodities, make them use values. But the exchange of commodities is evidently an act characterised by a total abstraction from use value. Then one use value is just as good as another, provided only it be present in sufficient quantity. Or, as old Barbon says,

“one sort of wares are as good as another, if the values be equal. There is no difference or distinction in things of equal value ... An hundred pounds’ worth of lead or iron, is of as great value as one hundred pounds’ worth of silver or gold.”[8]

As use values, commodities are, above all, of different qualities, but as exchange values they are merely different quantities, and consequently do not contain an atom of use value.

If then we leave out of consideration the use value of commodities, they have only one common property left, that of being products of labour. But even the product of labour itself has undergone a change in our hands. If we make abstraction from its use value, we make abstraction at the same time from the material elements and shapes that make the product a use value; we see in it no longer a table, a house, yarn, or any other useful thing. Its existence as a material thing is put out of sight. Neither can it any longer be regarded as the product of the labour of the joiner, the mason, the spinner, or of any other definite kind of productive labour. Along with the useful qualities of the products themselves, we put out of sight both the useful character of the various kinds of labour embodied in them, and the concrete forms of that labour; there is nothing left but what is common to them all; all are reduced to one and the same sort of labour, human labour in the abstract.

Let us now consider the residue of each of these products; it consists of the same unsubstantial reality in each, a mere congelation of homogeneous human labour, of labour power expended without regard to the mode of its expenditure. All that these things now tell us is, that human labour power has been expended in their production, that human labour is embodied in them. When looked at as crystals of this social substance, common to them all, they are – Values.

We have seen that when commodities are exchanged, their exchange value manifests itself as something totally independent of their use value. But if we abstract from their use value, there remains their Value as defined above. Therefore, the common substance that manifests itself in the exchange value of commodities, whenever they are exchanged, is their value. The progress of our investigation will show that exchange value is the only form in which the value of commodities can manifest itself or be expressed. For the present, however, we have to consider the nature of value independently of this, its form.

A use value, or useful article, therefore, has value only because human labour in the abstract has been embodied or materialised in it. How, then, is the magnitude of this value to be measured? Plainly, by the quantity of the value-creating substance, the labour, contained in the article. The quantity of labour, however, is measured by its duration, and labour time in its turn finds its standard in weeks, days, and hours.

Some people might think that if the value of a commodity is determined by the quantity of labour spent on it, the more idle and unskilful the labourer, the more valuable would his commodity be, because more time would be required in its production. The labour, however, that forms the substance of value, is homogeneous human labour, expenditure of one uniform labour power. The total labour power of society, which is embodied in the sum total of the values of all commodities produced by that society, counts here as one homogeneous mass of human labour power, composed though it be of innumerable individual units. Each of these units is the same as any other, so far as it has the character of the average labour power of society, and takes effect as such; that is, so far as it requires for producing a commodity, no more time than is needed on an average, no more than is socially necessary. The labour time socially necessary is that required to produce an article under the normal conditions of production, and with the average degree of skill and intensity prevalent at the time. The introduction of power-looms into England probably reduced by one-half the labour required to weave a given quantity of yarn into cloth. The hand-loom weavers, as a matter of fact, continued to require the same time as before; but for all that, the product of one hour of their labour represented after the change only half an hour’s social labour, and consequently fell to one-half its former value.

We see then that that which determines the magnitude of the value of any article is the amount of labour socially necessary, or the labour time socially necessary for its production.[9] Each individual commodity, in this connexion, is to be considered as an average sample of its class.[10] Commodities, therefore, in which equal quantities of labour are embodied, or which can be produced in the same time, have the same value. The value of one commodity is to the value of any other, as the labour time necessary for the production of the one is to that necessary for the production of the other. “As values, all commodities are only definite masses of congealed labour time.”[11]

The value of a commodity would therefore remain constant, if the labour time required for its production also remained constant. But the latter changes with every variation in the productiveness of labour. This productiveness is determined by various circumstances, amongst others, by the average amount of skill of the workmen, the state of science, and the degree of its practical application, the social organisation of production, the extent and capabilities of the means of production, and by physical conditions. For example, the same amount of labour in favourable seasons is embodied in 8 bushels of corn, and in unfavourable, only in four. The same labour extracts from rich mines more metal than from poor mines. Diamonds are of very rare occurrence on the earth’s surface, and hence their discovery costs, on an average, a great deal of labour time. Consequently much labour is represented in a small compass. Jacob doubts whether gold has ever been paid for at its full value. This applies still more to diamonds. According to Eschwege, the total produce of the Brazilian diamond mines for the eighty years, ending in 1823, had not realised the price of one-and-a-half years’ average produce of the sugar and coffee plantations of the same country, although the diamonds cost much more labour, and therefore represented more value. With richer mines, the same quantity of labour would embody itself in more diamonds, and their value would fall. If we could succeed at a small expenditure of labour, in converting carbon into diamonds, their value might fall below that of bricks. In general, the greater the productiveness of labour, the less is the labour time required for the production of an article, the less is the amount of labour crystallised in that article, and the less is its value; and vice versâ, the less the productiveness of labour, the greater is the labour time required for the production of an article, and the greater is its value. The value of a commodity, therefore, varies directly as the quantity, and inversely as the productiveness, of the labour incorporated in it. [A]

A thing can be a use value, without having value. This is the case whenever its utility to man is not due to labour. Such are air, virgin soil, natural meadows, &c. A thing can be useful, and the product of human labour, without being a commodity. Whoever directly satisfies his wants with the produce of his own labour, creates, indeed, use values, but not commodities. In order to produce the latter, he must not only produce use values, but use values for others, social use values. (And not only for others, without more. The mediaeval peasant produced quit-rent-corn for his feudal lord and tithe-corn for his parson. But neither the quit-rent-corn nor the tithe-corn became commodities by reason of the fact that they had been produced for others. To become a commodity a product must be transferred to another, whom it will serve as a use value, by means of an exchange.)[12] Lastly nothing can have value, without being an object of utility. If the thing is useless, so is the labour contained in it; the labour does not count as labour, and therefore creates no value.

### SECTION 2

THE TWO-FOLD CHARACTER OF

THE LABOUR EMBODIED IN COMMODITIES

At first sight a commodity presented itself to us as a complex of two things – use value and exchange value. Later on, we saw also that labour, too, possesses the same two-fold nature; for, so far as it finds expression in value, it does not possess the same characteristics that belong to it as a creator of use values. I was the first to point out and to examine critically this two-fold nature of the labour contained in commodities. As this point is the pivot on which a clear comprehension of political economy turns, we must go more into detail.

Let us take two commodities such as a coat and 10 yards of linen, and let the former be double the value of the latter, so that, if 10 yards of linen = W, the coat = 2W.

The coat is a use value that satisfies a particular want. Its existence is the result of a special sort of productive activity, the nature of which is determined by its aim, mode of operation, subject, means, and result. The labour, whose utility is thus represented by the value in use of its product, or which manifests itself by making its product a use value, we call useful labour. In this connection we consider only its useful effect.

As the coat and the linen are two qualitatively different use values, so also are the two forms of labour that produce them, tailoring and weaving. Were these two objects not qualitatively different, not produced respectively by labour of different quality, they could not stand to each other in the relation of commodities. Coats are not exchanged for coats, one use value is not exchanged for another of the same kind.

To all the different varieties of values in use there correspond as many different kinds of useful labour, classified according to the order, genus, species, and variety to which they belong in the social division of labour. This division of labour is a necessary condition for the production of commodities, but it does not follow, conversely, that the production of commodities is a necessary condition for the division of labour. In the primitive Indian community there is social division of labour, without production of commodities. Or, to take an example nearer home, in every factory the labour is divided according to a system, but this division is not brought about by the operatives mutually exchanging their individual products. Only such products can become commodities with regard to each other, as result from different kinds of labour, each kind being carried on independently and for the account of private individuals.

To resume, then: In the use value of each commodity there is contained useful labour, i.e., productive activity of a definite kind and exercised with a definite aim. Use values cannot confront each other as commodities, unless the useful labour embodied in them is qualitatively different in each of them. In a community, the produce of which in general takes the form of commodities, i.e., in a community of commodity producers, this qualitative difference between the useful forms of labour that are carried on independently of individual producers, each on their own account, develops into a complex system, a social division of labour.

Anyhow, whether the coat be worn by the tailor or by his customer, in either case it operates as a use value. Nor is the relation between the coat and the labour that produced it altered by the circumstance that tailoring may have become a special trade, an independent branch of the social division of labour. Wherever the want of clothing forced them to it, the human race made clothes for thousands of years, without a single man becoming a tailor. But coats and linen, like every other element of material wealth that is not the spontaneous produce of Nature, must invariably owe their existence to a special productive activity, exercised with a definite aim, an activity that appropriates particular nature-given materials to particular human wants. So far therefore as labour is a creator of use value, is useful labour, it is a necessary condition, independent of all forms of society, for the existence of the human race; it is an eternal nature-imposed necessity, without which there can be no material exchanges between man and Nature, and therefore no life.

The use values, coat, linen, &c., i.e., the bodies of commodities, are combinations of two elements – matter and labour. If we take away the useful labour expended upon them, a material substratum is always left, which is furnished by Nature without the help of man. The latter can work only as Nature does, that is by changing the form of matter.[13] Nay more, in this work of changing the form he is constantly helped by natural forces. We see, then, that labour is not the only source of material wealth, of use values produced by labour. As William Petty puts it, labour is its father and the earth its mother.

Let us now pass from the commodity considered as a use value to the value of commodities.

By our assumption, the coat is worth twice as much as the linen. But this is a mere quantitative difference, which for the present does not concern us. We bear in mind, however, that if the value of the coat is double that of 10 yds of linen, 20 yds of linen must have the same value as one coat. So far as they are values, the coat and the linen are things of a like substance, objective expressions of essentially identical labour. But tailoring and weaving are, qualitatively, different kinds of labour. There are, however, states of society in which one and the same man does tailoring and weaving alternately, in which case these two forms of labour are mere modifications of the labour of the same individual, and not special and fixed functions of different persons, just as the coat which our tailor makes one day, and the trousers which he makes another day, imply only a variation in the labour of one and the same individual. Moreover, we see at a glance that, in our capitalist society, a given portion of human labour is, in accordance with the varying demand, at one time supplied in the form of tailoring, at another in the form of weaving. This change may possibly not take place without friction, but take place it must.

Productive activity, if we leave out of sight its special form, viz., the useful character of the labour, is nothing but the expenditure of human labour power. Tailoring and weaving, though qualitatively different productive activities, are each a productive expenditure of human brains, nerves, and muscles, and in this sense are human labour. They are but two different modes of expending human labour power. Of course, this labour power, which remains the same under all its modifications, must have attained a certain pitch of development before it can be expended in a multiplicity of modes. But the value of a commodity represents human labour in the abstract, the expenditure of human labour in general. And just as in society, a general or a banker plays a great part, but mere man, on the other hand, a very shabby part,[14] so here with mere human labour. It is the expenditure of simple labour power, i.e., of the labour power which, on an average, apart from any special development, exists in the organism of every ordinary individual. Simple average labour, it is true, varies in character in different countries and at different times, but in a particular society it is given. Skilled labour counts only as simple labour intensified, or rather, as multiplied simple labour, a given quantity of skilled being considered equal to a greater quantity of simple labour. Experience shows that this reduction is constantly being made. A commodity may be the product of the most skilled labour, but its value, by equating it to the product of simple unskilled labour, represents a definite quantity of the latter labour alone.[15] The different proportions in which different sorts of labour are reduced to unskilled labour as their standard, are established by a social process that goes on behind the backs of the producers, and, consequently, appear to be fixed by custom. For simplicity’s sake we shall henceforth account every kind of labour to be unskilled, simple labour; by this we do no more than save ourselves the trouble of making the reduction.

Just as, therefore, in viewing the coat and linen as values, we abstract from their different use values, so it is with the labour represented by those values: we disregard the difference between its useful forms, weaving and tailoring. As the use values, coat and linen, are combinations of special productive activities with cloth and yarn, while the values, coat and linen, are, on the other hand, mere homogeneous congelations of undifferentiated labour, so the labour embodied in these latter values does not count by virtue of its productive relation to cloth and yarn, but only as being expenditure of human labour power. Tailoring and weaving are necessary factors in the creation of the use values, coat and linen, precisely because these two kinds of labour are of different qualities; but only in so far as abstraction is made from their special qualities, only in so far as both possess the same quality of being human labour, do tailoring and weaving form the substance of the values of the same articles.

Coats and linen, however, are not merely values, but values of definite magnitude, and according to our assumption, the coat is worth twice as much as the ten yards of linen. Whence this difference in their values? It is owing to the fact that the linen contains only half as much labour as the coat, and consequently, that in the production of the latter, labour power must have been expended during twice the time necessary for the production of the former.

While, therefore, with reference to use value, the labour contained in a commodity counts only qualitatively, with reference to value it counts only quantitatively, and must first be reduced to human labour pure and simple. In the former case, it is a question of How and What, in the latter of How much? How long a time? Since the magnitude of the value of a commodity represents only the quantity of labour embodied in it, it follows that all commodities, when taken in certain proportions, must be equal in value.

If the productive power of all the different sorts of useful labour required for the production of a coat remains unchanged, the sum of the values of the coats produced increases with their number. If one coat represents x days’ labour, two coats represent 2x days’ labour, and so on. But assume that the duration of the labour necessary for the production of a coat becomes doubled or halved. In the first case one coat is worth as much as two coats were before; in the second case, two coats are only worth as much as one was before, although in both cases one coat renders the same service as before, and the useful labour embodied in it remains of the same quality. But the quantity of labour spent on its production has altered.

An increase in the quantity of use values is an increase of material wealth. With two coats two men can be clothed, with one coat only one man. Nevertheless, an increased quantity of material wealth may correspond to a simultaneous fall in the magnitude of its value. This antagonistic movement has its origin in the two-fold character of labour. Productive power has reference, of course, only to labour of some useful concrete form, the efficacy of any special productive activity during a given time being dependent on its productiveness. Useful labour becomes, therefore, a more or less abundant source of products, in proportion to the rise or fall of its productiveness. On the other hand, no change in this productiveness affects the labour represented by value. Since productive power is an attribute of the concrete useful forms of labour, of course it can no longer have any bearing on that labour, so soon as we make abstraction from those concrete useful forms. However then productive power may vary, the same labour, exercised during equal periods of time, always yields equal amounts of value. But it will yield, during equal periods of time, different quantities of values in use; more, if the productive power rise, fewer, if it fall. The same change in productive power, which increases the fruitfulness of labour, and, in consequence, the quantity of use values produced by that labour, will diminish the total value of this increased quantity of use values, provided such change shorten the total labour time necessary for their production; and vice versâ.

On the one hand all labour is, speaking physiologically, an expenditure of human labour power, and in its character of identical abstract human labour, it creates and forms the value of commodities. On the other hand, all labour is the expenditure of human labour power in a special form and with a definite aim, and in this, its character of concrete useful labour, it produces use values.[16]

### SECTION 3

THE FORM OF VALUE OR EXCHANGE VALUE

Commodities come into the world in the shape of use values, articles, or goods, such as iron, linen, corn, &c. This is their plain, homely, bodily form. They are, however, commodities, only because they are something two-fold, both objects of utility, and, at the same time, depositories of value. They manifest themselves therefore as commodities, or have the form of commodities, only in so far as they have two forms, a physical or natural form, and a value form.

The reality of the value of commodities differs in this respect from Dame Quickly, that we don’t know “where to have it.” The value of commodities is the very opposite of the coarse materiality of their substance, not an atom of matter enters into its composition. Turn and examine a single commodity, by itself, as we will, yet in so far as it remains an object of value, it seems impossible to grasp it. If, however, we bear in mind that the value of commodities has a purely social reality, and that they acquire this reality only in so far as they are expressions or embodiments of one identical social substance, viz., human labour, it follows as a matter of course, that value can only manifest itself in the social relation of commodity to commodity. In fact we started from exchange value, or the exchange relation of commodities, in order to get at the value that lies hidden behind it. We must now return to this form under which value first appeared to us.

Every one knows, if he knows nothing else, that commodities have a value form common to them all, and presenting a marked contrast with the varied bodily forms of their use values. I mean their money form. Here, however, a task is set us, the performance of which has never yet even been attempted by bourgeois economy, the task of tracing the genesis of this money form, of developing the expression of value implied in the value relation of commodities, from its simplest, almost imperceptible outline, to the dazzling money-form. By doing this we shall, at the same time, solve the riddle presented by money.

The simplest value-relation is evidently that of one commodity to some one other commodity of a different kind. Hence the relation between the values of two commodities supplies us with the simplest expression of the value of a single commodity.

### A. Elementary or Accidental Form Of Value

x commodity A = y commodity B, or

x commodity A is worth y commodity B.

20 yards of linen = 1 coat, or

20 Yards of linen are worth 1 coat.

### 1. The two poles of the expression of value. Relative form and Equivalent form

The whole mystery of the form of value lies hidden in this elementary form. Its analysis, therefore, is our real difficulty.

Here two different kinds of commodities (in our example the linen and the coat), evidently play two different parts. The linen expresses its value in the coat; the coat serves as the material in which that value is expressed. The former plays an active, the latter a passive, part. The value of the linen is represented as relative value, or appears in relative form. The coat officiates as equivalent, or appears in equivalent form.

The relative form and the equivalent form are two intimately connected, mutually dependent and inseparable elements of the expression of value; but, at the same time, are mutually exclusive, antagonistic extremes – i.e., poles of the same expression. They are allotted respectively to the two different commodities brought into relation by that expression. It is not possible to express the value of linen in linen. 20 yards of linen = 20 yards of linen is no expression of value. On the contrary, such an equation merely says that 20 yards of linen are nothing else than 20 yards of linen, a definite quantity of the use value linen. The value of the linen can therefore be expressed only relatively – i.e., in some other commodity. The relative form of the value of the linen presupposes, therefore, the presence of some other commodity – here the coat – under the form of an equivalent. On the other hand, the commodity that figures as the equivalent cannot at the same time assume the relative form. That second commodity is not the one whose value is expressed. Its function is merely to serve as the material in which the value of the first commodity is expressed.

No doubt, the expression 20 yards of linen = 1 coat, or 20 yards of linen are worth 1 coat, implies the opposite relation. 1 coat = 20 yards of linen, or 1 coat is worth 20 yards of linen. But, in that case, I must reverse the equation, in order to express the value of the coat relatively; and so soon as I do that the linen becomes the equivalent instead of the coat. A single commodity cannot, therefore, simultaneously assume, in the same expression of value, both forms. The very polarity of these forms makes them mutually exclusive.

Whether, then, a commodity assumes the relative form, or the opposite equivalent form, depends entirely upon its accidental position in the expression of value – that is, upon whether it is the commodity whose value is being expressed or the commodity in which value is being expressed.

### 2. The Relative Form of value

### (a.) The nature and import of this form

In order to discover how the elementary expression of the value of a commodity lies hidden in the value relation of two commodities, we must, in the first place, consider the latter entirely apart from its quantitative aspect. The usual mode of procedure is generally the reverse, and in the value relation nothing is seen but the proportion between definite quantities of two different sorts of commodities that are considered equal to each other. It is apt to be forgotten that the magnitudes of different things can be compared quantitatively, only when those magnitudes are expressed in terms of the same unit. It is only as expressions of such a unit that they are of the same denomination, and therefore commensurable.[17]

Whether 20 yards of linen = 1 coat or = 20 coats or = x coats – that is, whether a given quantity of linen is worth few or many coats, every such statement implies that the linen and coats, as magnitudes of value, are expressions of the same unit, things of the same kind. Linen = coat is the basis of the equation.

But the two commodities whose identity of quality is thus assumed, do not play the same part. It is only the value of the linen that is expressed. And how? By its reference to the coat as its equivalent, as something that can be exchanged for it. In this relation the coat is the mode of existence of value, is value embodied, for only as such is it the same as the linen. On the other hand, the linen’s own value comes to the front, receives independent expression, for it is only as being value that it is comparable with the coat as a thing of equal value, or exchangeable with the coat. To borrow an illustration from chemistry, butyric acid is a different substance from propyl formate. Yet both are made up of the same chemical substances, carbon (C), hydrogen (H), and oxygen (O), and that, too, in like proportions – namely, C4H8O2. If now we equate butyric acid to propyl formate, then, in the first place, propyl formate would be, in this relation, merely a form of existence of C4H8O2; and in the second place, we should be stating that butyric acid also consists of C4H8O2. Therefore, by thus equating the two substances, expression would be given to their chemical composition, while their different physical forms would be neglected.

If we say that, as values, commodities are mere congelations of human labour, we reduce them by our analysis, it is true, to the abstraction, value; but we ascribe to this value no form apart from their bodily form. It is otherwise in the value relation of one commodity to another. Here, the one stands forth in its character of value by reason of its relation to the other.

By making the coat the equivalent of the linen, we equate the labour embodied in the former to that in the latter. Now, it is true that the tailoring, which makes the coat, is concrete labour of a different sort from the weaving which makes the linen. But the act of equating it to the weaving, reduces the tailoring to that which is really equal in the two kinds of labour, to their common character of human labour. In this roundabout way, then, the fact is expressed, that weaving also, in so far as it weaves value, has nothing to distinguish it from tailoring, and, consequently, is abstract human labour. It is the expression of equivalence between different sorts of commodities that alone brings into relief the specific character of value-creating labour, and this it does by actually reducing the different varieties of labour embodied in the different kinds of commodities to their common quality of human labour in the abstract.[18]

There is, however, something else required beyond the expression of the specific character of the labour of which the value of the linen consists. Human labour power in motion, or human labour, creates value, but is not itself value. It becomes value only in its congealed state, when embodied in the form of some object. In order to express the value of the linen as a congelation of human labour, that value must be expressed as having objective existence, as being a something materially different from the linen itself, and yet a something common to the linen and all other commodities. The problem is already solved.

When occupying the position of equivalent in the equation of value, the coat ranks qualitatively as the equal of the linen, as something of the same kind, because it is value. In this position it is a thing in which we see nothing but value, or whose palpable bodily form represents value. Yet the coat itself, the body of the commodity, coat, is a mere use value. A coat as such no more tells us it is value, than does the first piece of linen we take hold of. This shows that when placed in value-relation to the linen, the coat signifies more than when out of that relation, just as many a man strutting about in a gorgeous uniform counts for more than when in mufti.

In the production of the coat, human labour power, in the shape of tailoring, must have been actually expended. Human labour is therefore accumulated in it. In this aspect the coat is a depository of value, but though worn to a thread, it does not let this fact show through. And as equivalent of the linen in the value equation, it exists under this aspect alone, counts therefore as embodied value, as a body that is value. A, for instance, cannot be “your majesty” to B, unless at the same time majesty in B’s eyes assumes the bodily form of A, and, what is more, with every new father of the people, changes its features, hair, and many other things besides.

Hence, in the value equation, in which the coat is the equivalent of the linen, the coat officiates as the form of value. The value of the commodity linen is expressed by the bodily form of the commodity coat, the value of one by the use value of the other. As a use value, the linen is something palpably different from the coat; as value, it is the same as the coat, and now has the appearance of a coat. Thus the linen acquires a value form different from its physical form. The fact that it is value, is made manifest by its equality with the coat, just as the sheep’s nature of a Christian is shown in his resemblance to the Lamb of God.

We see, then, all that our analysis of the value of commodities has already told us, is told us by the linen itself, so soon as it comes into communication with another commodity, the coat. Only it betrays its thoughts in that language with which alone it is familiar, the language of commodities. In order to tell us that its own value is created by labour in its abstract character of human labour, it says that the coat, in so far as it is worth as much as the linen, and therefore is value, consists of the same labour as the linen. In order to inform us that its sublime reality as value is not the same as its buckram body, it says that value has the appearance of a coat, and consequently that so far as the linen is value, it and the coat are as like as two peas. We may here remark, that the language of commodities has, besides Hebrew, many other more or less correct dialects. The German “Wertsein,” to be worth, for instance, expresses in a less striking manner than the Romance verbs “valere,” “valer,” “valoir,” that the equating of commodity B to commodity A, is commodity A’s own mode of expressing its value. Paris vaut bien une messe. [Paris is certainly worth a mass]

By means, therefore, of the value-relation expressed in our equation, the bodily form of commodity B becomes the value form of commodity A, or the body of commodity B acts as a mirror to the value of commodity A.[19] By putting itself in relation with commodity B, as value in propriâ personâ, as the matter of which human labour is made up, the commodity A converts the value in use, B, into the substance in which to express its, A’s, own value. The value of A, thus expressed in the use value of B, has taken the form of relative value.

### (b.) Quantitative determination of Relative value

Every commodity, whose value it is intended to express, is a useful object of given quantity, as 15 bushels of corn, or 100 lbs of coffee. And a given quantity of any commodity contains a definite quantity of human labour. The value form must therefore not only express value generally, but also value in definite quantity. Therefore, in the value relation of commodity A to commodity B, of the linen to the coat, not only is the latter, as value in general, made the equal in quality of the linen, but a definite quantity of coat (1 coat) is made the equivalent of a definite quantity (20 yards) of linen.

The equation, 20 yards of linen = 1 coat, or 20 yards of linen are worth one coat, implies that the same quantity of value substance (congealed labour) is embodied in both; that the two commodities have each cost the same amount of labour or the same quantity of labour time. But the labour time necessary for the production of 20 yards of linen or 1 coat varies with every change in the productiveness of weaving or tailoring. We have now to consider the influence of such changes on the quantitative aspect of the relative expression of value.

I. Let the value of the linen vary,[20] that of the coat remaining constant. If, say in consequence of the exhaustion of flax-growing soil, the labour time necessary for the production of the linen be doubled, the value of the linen will also be doubled. Instead of the equation, 20 yards of linen = 1 coat, we should have 20 yards of linen = 2 coats, since 1 coat would now contain only half the labour time embodied in 20 yards of linen. If, on the other hand, in consequence, say, of improved looms, this labour time be reduced by one-half, the value of the linen would fall by one-half. Consequently, we should have 20 yards of linen = ½ coat. The relative value of commodity A, i.e., its value expressed in commodity B, rises and falls directly as the value of A, the value of B being supposed constant.

II. Let the value of the linen remain constant, while the value of the coat varies. If, under these circumstances, in consequence, for instance, of a poor crop of wool, the labour time necessary for the production of a coat becomes doubled, we have instead of 20 yards of linen = 1 coat, 20 yards of linen = ½ coat. If, on the other hand, the value of the coat sinks by one-half, then 20 yards of linen = 2 coats. Hence, if the value of commodity A remain constant, its relative value expressed in commodity B rises and falls inversely as the value of B.

If we compare the different cases in I and II, we see that the same change of magnitude in relative value may arise from totally opposite causes. Thus, the equation, 20 yards of linen = 1 coat, becomes 20 yards of linen = 2 coats, either, because the value of the linen has doubled, or because the value of the coat has fallen by one-half; and it becomes 20 yards of linen = ½ coat, either, because the value of the linen has fallen by one-half, or because the value of the coat has doubled.

III. Let the quantities of labour time respectively necessary for the production of the linen and the coat vary simultaneously in the same direction and in the same proportion. In this case 20 yards of linen continue equal to 1 coat, however much their values may have altered. Their change of value is seen as soon as they are compared with a third commodity, whose value has remained constant. If the values of all commodities rose or fell simultaneously, and in the same proportion, their relative values would remain unaltered. Their real change of value would appear from the diminished or increased quantity of commodities produced in a given time.

IV. The labour time respectively necessary for the production of the linen and the coat, and therefore the value of these commodities may simultaneously vary in the same direction, but at unequal rates or in opposite directions, or in other ways. The effect of all these possible different variations, on the relative value of a commodity, may be deduced from the results of I, II, and III.

Thus real changes in the magnitude of value are neither unequivocally nor exhaustively reflected in their relative expression, that is, in the equation expressing the magnitude of relative value. The relative value of a commodity may vary, although its value remains constant. Its relative value may remain constant, although its value varies; and finally, simultaneous variations in the magnitude of value and in that of its relative expression by no means necessarily correspond in amount.[21]

### 3. The Equivalent form of value

We have seen that commodity A (the linen), by expressing its value in the use value of a commodity differing in kind (the coat), at the same time impresses upon the latter a specific form of value, namely that of the equivalent. The commodity linen manifests its quality of having a value by the fact that the coat, without having assumed a value form different from its bodily form, is equated to the linen. The fact that the latter therefore has a value is expressed by saying that the coat is directly exchangeable with it. Therefore, when we say that a commodity is in the equivalent form, we express the fact that it is directly exchangeable with other commodities.

When one commodity, such as a coat, serves as the equivalent of another, such as linen, and coats consequently acquire the characteristic property of being directly exchangeable with linen, we are far from knowing in what proportion the two are exchangeable. The value of the linen being given in magnitude, that proportion depends on the value of the coat. Whether the coat serves as the equivalent and the linen as relative value, or the linen as the equivalent and the coat as relative value, the magnitude of the coat’s value is determined, independently of its value form, by the labour time necessary for its production. But whenever the coat assumes in the equation of value, the position of equivalent, its value acquires no quantitative expression; on the contrary, the commodity coat now figures only as a definite quantity of some article.

For instance, 40 yards of linen are worth – what? 2 coats. Because the commodity coat here plays the part of equivalent, because the use-value coat, as opposed to the linen, figures as an embodiment of value, therefore a definite number of coats suffices to express the definite quantity of value in the linen. Two coats may therefore express the quantity of value of 40 yards of linen, but they can never express the quantity of their own value. A superficial observation of this fact, namely, that in the equation of value, the equivalent figures exclusively as a simple quantity of some article, of some use value, has misled Bailey, as also many others, both before and after him, into seeing, in the expression of value, merely a quantitative relation. The truth being, that when a commodity acts as equivalent, no quantitative determination of its value is expressed.

The first peculiarity that strikes us, in considering the form of the equivalent, is this: use value becomes the form of manifestation, the phenomenal form of its opposite, value.

The bodily form of the commodity becomes its value form. But, mark well, that this quid pro quo exists in the case of any commodity B, only when some other commodity A enters into a value relation with it, and then only within the limits of this relation. Since no commodity can stand in the relation of equivalent to itself, and thus turn its own bodily shape into the expression of its own value, every commodity is compelled to choose some other commodity for its equivalent, and to accept the use value, that is to say, the bodily shape of that other commodity as the form of its own value.

One of the measures that we apply to commodities as material substances, as use values, will serve to illustrate this point. A sugar-loaf being a body, is heavy, and therefore has weight: but we can neither see nor touch this weight. We then take various pieces of iron, whose weight has been determined beforehand. The iron, as iron, is no more the form of manifestation of weight, than is the sugar-loaf. Nevertheless, in order to express the sugar-loaf as so much weight, we put it into a weight-relation with the iron. In this relation, the iron officiates as a body representing nothing but weight. A certain quantity of iron therefore serves as the measure of the weight of the sugar, and represents, in relation to the sugar-loaf, weight embodied, the form of manifestation of weight. This part is played by the iron only within this relation, into which the sugar or any other body, whose weight has to be determined, enters with the iron. Were they not both heavy, they could not enter into this relation, and the one could therefore not serve as the expression of the weight of the other. When we throw both into the scales, we see in reality, that as weight they are both the same, and that, therefore, when taken in proper proportions, they have the same weight. Just as the substance iron, as a measure of weight, represents in relation to the sugar-loaf weight alone, so, in our expression of value, the material object, coat, in relation to the linen, represents value alone.

Here, however, the analogy ceases. The iron, in the expression of the weight of the sugar-loaf, represents a natural property common to both bodies, namely their weight; but the coat, in the expression of value of the linen, represents a non-natural property of both, something purely social, namely, their value.

Since the relative form of value of a commodity – the linen, for example – expresses the value of that commodity, as being something wholly different from its substance and properties, as being, for instance, coat-like, we see that this expression itself indicates that some social relation lies at the bottom of it. With the equivalent form it is just the contrary. The very essence of this form is that the material commodity itself – the coat – just as it is, expresses value, and is endowed with the form of value by Nature itself. Of course this holds good only so long as the value relation exists, in which the coat stands in the position of equivalent to the linen.[22] Since, however, the properties of a thing are not the result of its relations to other things, but only manifest themselves in such relations, the coat seems to be endowed with its equivalent form, its property of being directly exchangeable, just as much by Nature as it is endowed with the property of being heavy, or the capacity to keep us warm. Hence the enigmatical character of the equivalent form which escapes the notice of the bourgeois political economist, until this form, completely developed, confronts him in the shape of money. He then seeks to explain away the mystical character of gold and silver, by substituting for them less dazzling commodities, and by reciting, with ever renewed satisfaction, the catalogue of all possible commodities which at one time or another have played the part of equivalent. He has not the least suspicion that the most simple expression of value, such as 20 yds of linen = 1 coat, already propounds the riddle of the equivalent form for our solution.

The body of the commodity that serves as the equivalent, figures as the materialisation of human labour in the abstract, and is at the same time the product of some specifically useful concrete labour. This concrete labour becomes, therefore, the medium for expressing abstract human labour. If on the one hand the coat ranks as nothing but the embodiment of abstract human labour, so, on the other hand, the tailoring which is actually embodied in it, counts as nothing but the form under which that abstract labour is realised. In the expression of value of the linen, the utility of the tailoring consists, not in making clothes, but in making an object, which we at once recognise to be Value, and therefore to be a congelation of labour, but of labour indistinguishable from that realised in the value of the linen. In order to act as such a mirror of value, the labour of tailoring must reflect nothing besides its own abstract quality of being human labour generally.

In tailoring, as well as in weaving, human labour power is expended. Both, therefore, possess the general property of being human labour, and may, therefore, in certain cases, such as in the production of value, have to be considered under this aspect alone. There is nothing mysterious in this. But in the expression of value there is a complete turn of the tables. For instance, how is the fact to be expressed that weaving creates the value of the linen, not by virtue of being weaving, as such, but by reason of its general property of being human labour? Simply by opposing to weaving that other particular form of concrete labour (in this instance tailoring), which produces the equivalent of the product of weaving. Just as the coat in its bodily form became a direct expression of value, so now does tailoring, a concrete form of labour, appear as the direct and palpable embodiment of human labour generally.

Hence, the second peculiarity of the equivalent form is, that concrete labour becomes the form under which its opposite, abstract human labour, manifests itself.

But because this concrete labour, tailoring in our case, ranks as, and is directly identified with, undifferentiated human labour, it also ranks as identical with any other sort of labour, and therefore with that embodied in the linen. Consequently, although, like all other commodity-producing labour, it is the labour of private individuals, yet, at the same time, it ranks as labour directly social in its character. This is the reason why it results in a product directly exchangeable with other commodities. We have then a third peculiarity of the equivalent form, namely, that the labour of private individuals takes the form of its opposite, labour directly social in its form.

The two latter peculiarities of the equivalent form will become more intelligible if we go back to the great thinker who was the first to analyse so many forms, whether of thought, society, or Nature, and amongst them also the form of value. I mean Aristotle.

In the first place, he clearly enunciates that the money form of commodities is only the further development of the simple form of value – i.e., of the expression of the value of one commodity in some other commodity taken at random; for he says:

5 beds = 1 house (κλῖναι πέντε ἀντὶ οἰκίας)

is not to be distinguished from

5 beds = so much money. (κλῖναι πέντε ἀντὶ ... ὅσου αἱ πέντε κλῖναι)

He further sees that the value relation which gives rise to this expression makes it necessary that the house should qualitatively be made the equal of the bed, and that, without such an equalisation, these two clearly different things could not be compared with each other as commensurable quantities. “Exchange,” he says, “cannot take place without equality, and equality not without commensurability.” (οὔτ᾿ ἰσότης μὴ οὔσης συμμετρίας). Here, however, he comes to a stop, and gives up the further analysis of the form of value. “It is, however, in reality, impossible (τῇ μὲν οὖν ἀληθείᾳ ἀδύνατον), that such unlike things can be commensurable” – i.e., qualitatively equal. Such an equalisation can only be something foreign to their real nature, consequently only “a makeshift for practical purposes.”

Aristotle therefore, himself, tells us what barred the way to his further analysis; it was the absence of any concept of value. What is that equal something, that common substance, which admits of the value of the beds being expressed by a house? Such a thing, in truth, cannot exist, says Aristotle. And why not? Compared with the beds, the house does represent something equal to them, in so far as it represents what is really equal, both in the beds and the house. And that is – human labour.

There was, however, an important fact which prevented Aristotle from seeing that, to attribute value to commodities, is merely a mode of expressing all labour as equal human labour, and consequently as labour of equal quality. Greek society was founded upon slavery, and had, therefore, for its natural basis, the inequality of men and of their labour powers. The secret of the expression of value, namely, that all kinds of labour are equal and equivalent, because, and so far as they are human labour in general, cannot be deciphered, until the notion of human equality has already acquired the fixity of a popular prejudice. This, however, is possible only in a society in which the great mass of the produce of labour takes the form of commodities, in which, consequently, the dominant relation between man and man, is that of owners of commodities. The brilliancy of Aristotle’s genius is shown by this alone, that he discovered, in the expression of the value of commodities, a relation of equality. The peculiar conditions of the society in which he lived, alone prevented him from discovering what, “in truth,” was at the bottom of this equality.

### 4. The Elementary Form of value considered as a whole

The elementary form of value of a commodity is contained in the equation, expressing its value relation to another commodity of a different kind, or in its exchange relation to the same. The value of commodity A, is qualitatively expressed, by the fact that commodity B is directly exchangeable with it. Its value is quantitatively expressed by the fact, that a definite quantity of B is exchangeable with a definite quantity of A. In other words, the value of a commodity obtains independent and definite expression, by taking the form of exchange value. When, at the beginning of this chapter, we said, in common parlance, that a commodity is both a use value and an exchange value, we were, accurately speaking, wrong. A commodity is a use value or object of utility, and a value. It manifests itself as this two-fold thing, that it is, as soon as its value assumes an independent form – viz., the form of exchange value. It never assumes this form when isolated, but only when placed in a value or exchange relation with another commodity of a different kind. When once we know this, such a mode of expression does no harm; it simply serves as an abbreviation.

Our analysis has shown, that the form or expression of the value of a commodity originates in the nature of value, and not that value and its magnitude originate in the mode of their expression as exchange value. This, however, is the delusion as well of the mercantilists and their recent revivers, Ferrier, Ganilh,[23] and others, as also of their antipodes, the modern bagmen of Free-trade, such as Bastiat. The mercantilists lay special stress on the qualitative aspect of the expression of value, and consequently on the equivalent form of commodities, which attains its full perfection in money. The modern hawkers of Free-trade, who must get rid of their article at any price, on the other hand, lay most stress on the quantitative aspect of the relative form of value. For them there consequently exists neither value, nor magnitude of value, anywhere except in its expression by means of the exchange relation of commodities, that is, in the daily list of prices current. Macleod, who has taken upon himself to dress up the confused ideas of Lombard Street in the most learned finery, is a successful cross between the superstitious mercantilists, and the enlightened Free-trade bagmen.

A close scrutiny of the expression of the value of A in terms of B, contained in the equation expressing the value relation of A to B, has shown us that, within that relation, the bodily form of A figures only as a use value, the bodily form of B only as the form or aspect of value. The opposition or contrast existing internally in each commodity between use value and value, is, therefore, made evident externally by two commodities being placed in such relation to each other, that the commodity whose value it is sought to express, figures directly as a mere use value, while the commodity in which that value is to be expressed, figures directly as mere exchange value. Hence the elementary form of value of a commodity is the elementary form in which the contrast contained in that commodity, between use value and value, becomes apparent.

Every product of labour is, in all states of society, a use value; but it is only at a definite historical epoch in a society’s development that such a product becomes a commodity, viz., at the epoch when the labour spent on the production of a useful article becomes expressed as one of the objective qualities of that article, i.e., as its value. It therefore follows that the elementary value form is also the primitive form under which a product of labour appears historically as a commodity, and that the gradual transformation of such products into commodities, proceeds pari passu with the development of the value form.

We perceive, at first sight, the deficiencies of the elementary form of value: it is a mere germ, which must undergo a series of metamorphoses before it can ripen into the price form.

The expression of the value of commodity A in terms of any other commodity B, merely distinguishes the value from the use value of A, and therefore places A merely in a relation of exchange with a single different commodity, B; but it is still far from expressing A’s qualitative equality, and quantitative proportionality, to all commodities. To the elementary relative value form of a commodity, there corresponds the single equivalent form of one other commodity. Thus, in the relative expression of value of the linen, the coat assumes the form of equivalent, or of being directly exchangeable, only in relation to a single commodity, the linen.

Nevertheless, the elementary form of value passes by an easy transition into a more complete form. It is true that by means of the elementary form, the value of a commodity A, becomes expressed in terms of one, and only one, other commodity. But that one may be a commodity of any kind, coat, iron, corn, or anything else. Therefore, according as A is placed in relation with one or the other, we get for one and the same commodity, different elementary expressions of value.[24] The number of such possible expressions is limited only by the number of the different kinds of commodities distinct from it. The isolated expression of A’s value, is therefore convertible into a series, prolonged to any length, of the different elementary expressions of that value.

### B. Total or Expanded Form of value

z Com. A = u Com. B or = v Com. C or = w Com. D or = Com. E or = &c.

(20 yards of linen = 1 coat or = 10 lbs tea or = 40 lbs. coffee or

= 1 quarter corn or = 2 ounces gold or = ½ ton iron or = &c.)

### 1. The Expanded Relative form of value

The value of a single commodity, the linen, for example, is now expressed in terms of numberless other elements of the world of commodities. Every other commodity now becomes a mirror of the linen’s value.[25] It is thus, that for the first time, this value shows itself in its true light as a congelation of undifferentiated human labour. For the labour that creates it, now stands expressly revealed, as labour that ranks equally with every other sort of human labour, no matter what its form, whether tailoring, ploughing, mining, &c., and no matter, therefore, whether it is realised in coats, corn, iron, or gold. The linen, by virtue of the form of its value, now stands in a social relation, no longer with only one other kind of commodity, but with the whole world of commodities. As a commodity, it is a citizen of that world. At the same time, the interminable series of value equations implies, that as regards the value of a commodity, it is a matter of indifference under what particular form, or kind, of use value it appears.

In the first form, 20 yds of linen = 1 coat, it might, for ought that otherwise appears, be pure accident, that these two commodities are exchangeable in definite quantities. In the second form, on the contrary, we perceive at once the background that determines, and is essentially different from, this accidental appearance. The value of the linen remains unaltered in magnitude, whether expressed in coats, coffee, or iron, or in numberless different commodities, the property of as many different owners. The accidental relation between two individual commodity-owners disappears. It becomes plain, that it is not the exchange of commodities which regulates the magnitude of their value; but, on the contrary, that it is the magnitude of their value which controls their exchange proportions.

### 2. The particular Equivalent form

Each commodity, such as, coat, tea, corn, iron, &c., figures in the expression of value of the linen, as an equivalent, and, consequently, as a thing that is value. The bodily form of each of these commodities figures now as a particular equivalent form, one out of many. In the same way the manifold concrete useful kinds of labour, embodied in these different commodities, rank now as so many different forms of the realisation, or manifestation, of undifferentiated human labour.

### 3. Defects of the Total or Expanded form of value

In the first place, the relative expression of value is incomplete because the series representing it is interminable. The chain of which each equation of value is a link, is liable at any moment to be lengthened by each new kind of commodity that comes into existence and furnishes the material for a fresh expression of value. In the second place, it is a many-coloured mosaic of disparate and independent expressions of value. And lastly, if, as must be the case, the relative value of each commodity in turn, becomes expressed in this expanded form, we get for each of them a relative value form, different in every case, and consisting of an interminable series of expressions of value. The defects of the expanded relative value form are reflected in the corresponding equivalent form. Since the bodily form of each single commodity is one particular equivalent form amongst numberless others, we have, on the whole, nothing but fragmentary equivalent forms, each excluding the others. In the same way, also, the special, concrete, useful kind of labour embodied in each particular equivalent, is presented only as a particular kind of labour, and therefore not as an exhaustive representative of human labour generally. The latter, indeed, gains adequate manifestation in the totality of its manifold, particular, concrete forms. But, in that case, its expression in an infinite series is ever incomplete and deficient in unity.

The expanded relative value form is, however, nothing but the sum of the elementary relative expressions or equations of the first kind, such as:

20 yards of linen = 1 coat

20 yards of linen = 10 lbs of tea, etc.

Each of these implies the corresponding inverted equation,

1 coat = 20 yards of linen

10 lbs of tea = 20 yards of linen, etc.

In fact, when a person exchanges his linen for many other commodities, and thus expresses its value in a series of other commodities, it necessarily follows, that the various owners of the latter exchange them for the linen, and consequently express the value of their various commodities in one and the same third commodity, the linen. If then, we reverse the series, 20 yards of linen = 1 coat or = 10 lbs of tea, etc., that is to say, if we give expression to the converse relation already implied in the series, we get,

### C. The General Form of Value

1 coat

10 lbs of tea

40 lbs of coffee

1 quarter of corn

2 ounces of gold

½ a ton of iron

x Commodity A, etc.

= 20 yards of linen

### 1. The altered character of the form of value

All commodities now express their value (1) in an elementary form, because in a single commodity; (2) with unity, because in one and the same commodity. This form of value is elementary and the same for all, therefore general.

The forms A and B were fit only to express the value of a commodity as something distinct from its use value or material form.

The first form, A, furnishes such equations as the following: – 1 coat = 20 yards of linen, 10 lbs of tea = ½ a ton of iron. The value of the coat is equated to linen, that of the tea to iron. But to be equated to linen, and again to iron, is to be as different as are linen and iron. This form, it is plain, occurs practically only in the first beginning, when the products of labour are converted into commodities by accidental and occasional exchanges.

The second form, B, distinguishes, in a more adequate manner than the first, the value of a commodity from its use value, for the value of the coat is there placed in contrast under all possible shapes with the bodily form of the coat; it is equated to linen, to iron, to tea, in short, to everything else, only not to itself, the coat. On the other hand, any general expression of value common to all is directly excluded; for, in the equation of value of each commodity, all other commodities now appear only under the form of equivalents. The expanded form of value comes into actual existence for the first time so soon as a particular product of labour, such as cattle, is no longer exceptionally, but habitually, exchanged for various other commodities.

The third and lastly developed form expresses the values of the whole world of commodities in terms of a single commodity set apart for the purpose, namely, the linen, and thus represents to us their values by means of their equality with linen. The value of every commodity is now, by being equated to linen, not only differentiated from its own use value, but from all other use values generally, and is, by that very fact, expressed as that which is common to all commodities. By this form, commodities are, for the first time, effectively brought into relation with one another as values, or made to appear as exchange values.

The two earlier forms either express the value of each commodity in terms of a single commodity of a different kind, or in a series of many such commodities. In both cases, it is, so to say, the special business of each single commodity to find an expression for its value, and this it does without the help of the others. These others, with respect to the former, play the passive parts of equivalents. The general form of value, C, results from the joint action of the whole world of commodities, and from that alone. A commodity can acquire a general expression of its value only by all other commodities, simultaneously with it, expressing their values in the same equivalent; and every new commodity must follow suit. It thus becomes evident that since the existence of commodities as values is purely social, this social existence can be expressed by the totality of their social relations alone, and consequently that the form of their value must be a socially recognised form.

All commodities being equated to linen now appear not only as qualitatively equal as values generally, but also as values whose magnitudes are capable of comparison. By expressing the magnitudes of their values in one and the same material, the linen, those magnitudes are also compared with each other. For instance, 10 lbs of tea = 20 yards of linen, and 40 lbs of coffee = 20 yards of linen. Therefore, 10 lbs of tea = 40 lbs of coffee. In other words, there is contained in 1 lb of coffee only one-fourth as much substance of value – labour – as is contained in 1 lb of tea.

The general form of relative value, embracing the whole world of commodities, converts the single commodity that is excluded from the rest, and made to play the part of equivalent – here the linen – into the universal equivalent. The bodily form of the linen is now the form assumed in common by the values of all commodities; it therefore becomes directly exchangeable with all and every of them. The substance linen becomes the visible incarnation, the social chrysalis state of every kind of human labour. Weaving, which is the labour of certain private individuals producing a particular article, linen, acquires in consequence a social character, the character of equality with all other kinds of labour. The innumerable equations of which the general form of value is composed, equate in turn the labour embodied in the linen to that embodied in every other commodity, and they thus convert weaving into the general form of manifestation of undifferentiated human labour. In this manner the labour realised in the values of commodities is presented not only under its negative aspect, under which abstraction is made from every concrete form and useful property of actual work, but its own positive nature is made to reveal itself expressly. The general value form is the reduction of all kinds of actual labour to their common character of being human labour generally, of being the expenditure of human labour power.

The general value form, which represents all products of labour as mere congelations of undifferentiated human labour, shows by its very structure that it is the social resumé of the world of commodities. That form consequently makes it indisputably evident that in the world of commodities the character possessed by all labour of being human labour constitutes its specific social character.

### 2. The Interdependent Development of the Relative Form of Value, and of the Equivalent Form

The degree of development of the relative form of value corresponds to that of the equivalent form. But we must bear in mind that the development of the latter is only the expression and result of the development of the former.

The primary or isolated relative form of value of one commodity converts some other commodity into an isolated equivalent. The expanded form of relative value, which is the expression of the value of one commodity in terms of all other commodities, endows those other commodities with the character of particular equivalents differing in kind. And lastly, a particular kind of commodity acquires the character of universal equivalent, because all other commodities make it the material in which they uniformly express their value.

The antagonism between the relative form of value and the equivalent form, the two poles of the value form, is developed concurrently with that form itself.

The first form, 20 yds of linen = one coat, already contains this antagonism, without as yet fixing it. According as we read this equation forwards or backwards, the parts played by the linen and the coat are different. In the one case the relative value of the linen is expressed in the coat, in the other case the relative value of the coat is expressed in the linen. In this first form of value, therefore, it is difficult to grasp the polar contrast.

Form B shows that only one single commodity at a time can completely expand its relative value, and that it acquires this expanded form only because, and in so far as, all other commodities are, with respect to it, equivalents. Here we cannot reverse the equation, as we can the equation 20 yds of linen = 1 coat, without altering its general character, and converting it from the expanded form of value into the general form of value.

Finally, the form C gives to the world of commodities a general social relative form of value, because, and in so far as, thereby all commodities, with the exception of one, are excluded from the equivalent form. A single commodity, the linen, appears therefore to have acquired the character of direct exchangeability with every other commodity because, and in so far as, this character is denied to every other commodity.[26]

The commodity that figures as universal equivalent, is, on the other hand, excluded from the relative value form. If the linen, or any other commodity serving as universal equivalent, were, at the same time, to share in the relative form of value, it would have to serve as its own equivalent. We should then have 20 yds of linen = 20 yds of linen; this tautology expresses neither value, nor magnitude of value. In order to express the relative value of the universal equivalent, we must rather reverse the form C. This equivalent has no relative form of value in common with other commodities, but its value is relatively expressed by a never ending series of other commodities. Thus, the expanded form of relative value, or form B, now shows itself as the specific form of relative value for the equivalent commodity.

### 3. Transition from the General form of value to the Money form

The universal equivalent form is a form of value in general. It can, therefore, be assumed by any commodity. On the other hand, if a commodity be found to have assumed the universal equivalent form (form C), this is only because and in so far as it has been excluded from the rest of all other commodities as their equivalent, and that by their own act. And from the moment that this exclusion becomes finally restricted to one particular commodity, from that moment only, the general form of relative value of the world of commodities obtains real consistence and general social validity.

The particular commodity, with whose bodily form the equivalent form is thus socially identified, now becomes the money commodity, or serves as money. It becomes the special social function of that commodity, and consequently its social monopoly, to play within the world of commodities the part of the universal equivalent. Amongst the commodities which, in form B, figure as particular equivalents of the linen, and, in form C, express in common their relative values in linen, this foremost place has been attained by one in particular – namely, gold. If, then, in form C we replace the linen by gold, we get,

### D. The Money-Form

20 yards of linen =

1 coat =

10 lbs of tea =

40 lbs of coffee =

1 quarter of corn =

½ a ton of iron =

x Commodity A =

2 ounces of gold

In passing from form A to form B, and from the latter to form C, the changes are fundamental. On the other hand, there is no difference between forms C and D, except that, in the latter, gold has assumed the equivalent form in the place of linen. Gold is in form D, what linen was in form C – the universal equivalent. The progress consists in this alone, that the character of direct and universal exchangeability – in other words, that the universal equivalent form – has now, by social custom, become finally identified with the substance, gold.

Gold is now money with reference to all other commodities only because it was previously, with reference to them, a simple commodity. Like all other commodities, it was also capable of serving as an equivalent, either as simple equivalent in isolated exchanges, or as particular equivalent by the side of others. Gradually it began to serve, within varying limits, as universal equivalent. So soon as it monopolises this position in the expression of value for the world of commodities, it becomes the money commodity, and then, and not till then, does form D become distinct from form C, and the general form of value become changed into the money form.

The elementary expression of the relative value of a single commodity, such as linen, in terms of the commodity, such as gold, that plays the part of money, is the price form of that commodity. The price form of the linen is therefore

20 yards of linen = 2 ounces of gold, or, if 2 ounces of gold when

coined are £2, 20 yards of linen = £2.

The difficulty in forming a concept of the money form, consists in clearly comprehending the universal equivalent form, and as a necessary corollary, the general form of value, form C. The latter is deducible from form B, the expanded form of value, the essential component element of which, we saw, is form A, 20 yards of linen = 1 coat or x commodity A = y commodity B. The simple commodity form is therefore the germ of the money form.

### SECTION 4

THE FETISHISM OF COMMODITIES

AND THE SECRET THEREOF

A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties. So far as it is a value in use, there is nothing mysterious about it, whether we consider it from the point of view that by its properties it is capable of satisfying human wants, or from the point that those properties are the product of human labour. It is as clear as noon-day, that man, by his industry, changes the forms of the materials furnished by Nature, in such a way as to make them useful to him. The form of wood, for instance, is altered, by making a table out of it. Yet, for all that, the table continues to be that common, every-day thing, wood. But, so soon as it steps forth as a commodity, it is changed into something transcendent. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than “table-turning” ever was. [26a]

The mystical character of commodities does not originate, therefore, in their use value. Just as little does it proceed from the nature of the determining factors of value. For, in the first place, however varied the useful kinds of labour, or productive activities, may be, it is a physiological fact, that they are functions of the human organism, and that each such function, whatever may be its nature or form, is essentially the expenditure of human brain, nerves, muscles, &c. Secondly, with regard to that which forms the ground-work for the quantitative determination of value, namely, the duration of that expenditure, or the quantity of labour, it is quite clear that there is a palpable difference between its quantity and quality. In all states of society, the labour time that it costs to produce the means of subsistence, must necessarily be an object of interest to mankind, though not of equal interest in different stages of development.[27] And lastly, from the moment that men in any way work for one another, their labour assumes a social form.

Whence, then, arises the enigmatical character of the product of labour, so soon as it assumes the form of commodities? Clearly from this form itself. The equality of all sorts of human labour is expressed objectively by their products all being equally values; the measure of the expenditure of labour power by the duration of that expenditure, takes the form of the quantity of value of the products of labour; and finally the mutual relations of the producers, within which the social character of their labour affirms itself, take the form of a social relation between the products.

A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men’s labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour. This is the reason why the products of labour become commodities, social things whose qualities are at the same time perceptible and imperceptible by the senses. In the same way the light from an object is perceived by us not as the subjective excitation of our optic nerve, but as the objective form of something outside the eye itself. But, in the act of seeing, there is at all events, an actual passage of light from one thing to another, from the external object to the eye. There is a physical relation between physical things. But it is different with commodities. There, the existence of the things quâ commodities, and the value relation between the products of labour which stamps them as commodities, have absolutely no connection with their physical properties and with the material relations arising therefrom. There it is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy, we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world. In that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands. This I call the Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour, so soon as they are produced as commodities, and which is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities.

This Fetishism of commodities has its origin, as the foregoing analysis has already shown, in the peculiar social character of the labour that produces them.

As a general rule, articles of utility become commodities, only because they are products of the labour of private individuals or groups of individuals who carry on their work independently of each other. The sum total of the labour of all these private individuals forms the aggregate labour of society. Since the producers do not come into social contact with each other until they exchange their products, the specific social character of each producer’s labour does not show itself except in the act of exchange. In other words, the labour of the individual asserts itself as a part of the labour of society, only by means of the relations which the act of exchange establishes directly between the products, and indirectly, through them, between the producers. To the latter, therefore, the relations connecting the labour of one individual with that of the rest appear, not as direct social relations between individuals at work, but as what they really are, material relations between persons and social relations between things. It is only by being exchanged that the products of labour acquire, as values, one uniform social status, distinct from their varied forms of existence as objects of utility. This division of a product into a useful thing and a value becomes practically important, only when exchange has acquired such an extension that useful articles are produced for the purpose of being exchanged, and their character as values has therefore to be taken into account, beforehand, during production. From this moment the labour of the individual producer acquires socially a two-fold character. On the one hand, it must, as a definite useful kind of labour, satisfy a definite social want, and thus hold its place as part and parcel of the collective labour of all, as a branch of a social division of labour that has sprung up spontaneously. On the other hand, it can satisfy the manifold wants of the individual producer himself, only in so far as the mutual exchangeability of all kinds of useful private labour is an established social fact, and therefore the private useful labour of each producer ranks on an equality with that of all others. The equalisation of the most different kinds of labour can be the result only of an abstraction from their inequalities, or of reducing them to their common denominator, viz. expenditure of human labour power or human labour in the abstract. The two-fold social character of the labour of the individual appears to him, when reflected in his brain, only under those forms which are impressed upon that labour in every-day practice by the exchange of products. In this way, the character that his own labour possesses of being socially useful takes the form of the condition, that the product must be not only useful, but useful for others, and the social character that his particular labour has of being the equal of all other particular kinds of labour, takes the form that all the physically different articles that are the products of labour, have one common quality, viz., that of having value.

Hence, when we bring the products of our labour into relation with each other as values, it is not because we see in these articles the material receptacles of homogeneous human labour. Quite the contrary: whenever, by an exchange, we equate as values our different products, by that very act, we also equate, as human labour, the different kinds of labour expended upon them. We are not aware of this, nevertheless we do it.[28] Value, therefore, does not stalk about with a label describing what it is. It is value, rather, that converts every product into a social hieroglyphic. Later on, we try to decipher the hieroglyphic, to get behind the secret of our own social products; for to stamp an object of utility as a value, is just as much a social product as language. The recent scientific discovery, that the products of labour, so far as they are values, are but material expressions of the human labour spent in their production, marks, indeed, an epoch in the history of the development of the human race, but, by no means, dissipates the mist through which the social character of labour appears to us to be an objective character of the products themselves. The fact, that in the particular form of production with which we are dealing, viz., the production of commodities, the specific social character of private labour carried on independently, consists in the equality of every kind of that labour, by virtue of its being human labour, which character, therefore, assumes in the product the form of value – this fact appears to the producers, notwithstanding the discovery above referred to, to be just as real and final, as the fact, that, after the discovery by science of the component gases of air, the atmosphere itself remained unaltered.

What, first of all, practically concerns producers when they make an exchange, is the question, how much of some other product they get for their own? In what proportions the products are exchangeable? When these proportions have, by custom, attained a certain stability, they appear to result from the nature of the products, so that, for instance, one ton of iron and two ounces of gold appear as naturally to be of equal value as a pound of gold and a pound of iron in spite of their different physical and chemical qualities appear to be of equal weight. The character of having value, when once impressed upon products, obtains fixity only by reason of their acting and re-acting upon each other as quantities of value. These quantities vary continually, independently of the will, foresight and action of the producers. To them, their own social action takes the form of the action of objects, which rule the producers instead of being ruled by them. It requires a fully developed production of commodities before, from accumulated experience alone, the scientific conviction springs up, that all the different kinds of private labour, which are carried on independently of each other, and yet as spontaneously developed branches of the social division of labour, are continually being reduced to the quantitative proportions in which society requires them. And why? Because, in the midst of all the accidental and ever fluctuating exchange relations between the products, the labour time socially necessary for their production forcibly asserts itself like an over-riding law of Nature. The law of gravity thus asserts itself when a house falls about our ears.[29] The determination of the magnitude of value by labour time is therefore a secret, hidden under the apparent fluctuations in the relative values of commodities. Its discovery, while removing all appearance of mere accidentality from the determination of the magnitude of the values of products, yet in no way alters the mode in which that determination takes place.

Man’s reflections on the forms of social life, and consequently, also, his scientific analysis of those forms, take a course directly opposite to that of their actual historical development. He begins, post festum, with the results of the process of development ready to hand before him. The characters that stamp products as commodities, and whose establishment is a necessary preliminary to the circulation of commodities, have already acquired the stability of natural, self-understood forms of social life, before man seeks to decipher, not their historical character, for in his eyes they are immutable, but their meaning. Consequently it was the analysis of the prices of commodities that alone led to the determination of the magnitude of value, and it was the common expression of all commodities in money that alone led to the establishment of their characters as values. It is, however, just this ultimate money form of the world of commodities that actually conceals, instead of disclosing, the social character of private labour, and the social relations between the individual producers. When I state that coats or boots stand in a relation to linen, because it is the universal incarnation of abstract human labour, the absurdity of the statement is self-evident. Nevertheless, when the producers of coats and boots compare those articles with linen, or, what is the same thing, with gold or silver, as the universal equivalent, they express the relation between their own private labour and the collective labour of society in the same absurd form.

The categories of bourgeois economy consist of such like forms. They are forms of thought expressing with social validity the conditions and relations of a definite, historically determined mode of production, viz., the production of commodities. The whole mystery of commodities, all the magic and necromancy that surrounds the products of labour as long as they take the form of commodities, vanishes therefore, so soon as we come to other forms of production.

Since Robinson Crusoe’s experiences are a favourite theme with political economists,[30] let us take a look at him on his island. Moderate though he be, yet some few wants he has to satisfy, and must therefore do a little useful work of various sorts, such as making tools and furniture, taming goats, fishing and hunting. Of his prayers and the like we take no account, since they are a source of pleasure to him, and he looks upon them as so much recreation. In spite of the variety of his work, he knows that his labour, whatever its form, is but the activity of one and the same Robinson, and consequently, that it consists of nothing but different modes of human labour. Necessity itself compels him to apportion his time accurately between his different kinds of work. Whether one kind occupies a greater space in his general activity than another, depends on the difficulties, greater or less as the case may be, to be overcome in attaining the useful effect aimed at. This our friend Robinson soon learns by experience, and having rescued a watch, ledger, and pen and ink from the wreck, commences, like a true-born Briton, to keep a set of books. His stock-book contains a list of the objects of utility that belong to him, of the operations necessary for their production; and lastly, of the labour time that definite quantities of those objects have, on an average, cost him. All the relations between Robinson and the objects that form this wealth of his own creation, are here so simple and clear as to be intelligible without exertion, even to Mr. Sedley Taylor. And yet those relations contain all that is essential to the determination of value.

Let us now transport ourselves from Robinson’s island bathed in light to the European middle ages shrouded in darkness. Here, instead of the independent man, we find everyone dependent, serfs and lords, vassals and suzerains, laymen and clergy. Personal dependence here characterises the social relations of production just as much as it does the other spheres of life organised on the basis of that production. But for the very reason that personal dependence forms the ground-work of society, there is no necessity for labour and its products to assume a fantastic form different from their reality. They take the shape, in the transactions of society, of services in kind and payments in kind. Here the particular and natural form of labour, and not, as in a society based on production of commodities, its general abstract form is the immediate social form of labour. Compulsory labour is just as properly measured by time, as commodity-producing labour; but every serf knows that what he expends in the service of his lord, is a definite quantity of his own personal labour power. The tithe to be rendered to the priest is more matter of fact than his blessing. No matter, then, what we may think of the parts played by the different classes of people themselves in this society, the social relations between individuals in the performance of their labour, appear at all events as their own mutual personal relations, and are not disguised under the shape of social relations between the products of labour.

For an example of labour in common or directly associated labour, we have no occasion to go back to that spontaneously developed form which we find on the threshold of the history of all civilised races.[31] We have one close at hand in the patriarchal industries of a peasant family, that produces corn, cattle, yarn, linen, and clothing for home use. These different articles are, as regards the family, so many products of its labour, but as between themselves, they are not commodities. The different kinds of labour, such as tillage, cattle tending, spinning, weaving and making clothes, which result in the various products, are in themselves, and such as they are, direct social functions, because functions of the family, which, just as much as a society based on the production of commodities, possesses a spontaneously developed system of division of labour. The distribution of the work within the family, and the regulation of the labour time of the several members, depend as well upon differences of age and sex as upon natural conditions varying with the seasons. The labour power of each individual, by its very nature, operates in this case merely as a definite portion of the whole labour power of the family, and therefore, the measure of the expenditure of individual labour power by its duration, appears here by its very nature as a social character of their labour.

Let us now picture to ourselves, by way of change, a community of free individuals, carrying on their work with the means of production in common, in which the labour power of all the different individuals is consciously applied as the combined labour power of the community. All the characteristics of Robinson’s labour are here repeated, but with this difference, that they are social, instead of individual. Everything produced by him was exclusively the result of his own personal labour, and therefore simply an object of use for himself. The total product of our community is a social product. One portion serves as fresh means of production and remains social. But another portion is consumed by the members as means of subsistence. A distribution of this portion amongst them is consequently necessary. The mode of this distribution will vary with the productive organisation of the community, and the degree of historical development attained by the producers. We will assume, but merely for the sake of a parallel with the production of commodities, that the share of each individual producer in the means of subsistence is determined by his labour time. Labour time would, in that case, play a double part. Its apportionment in accordance with a definite social plan maintains the proper proportion between the different kinds of work to be done and the various wants of the community. On the other hand, it also serves as a measure of the portion of the common labour borne by each individual, and of his share in the part of the total product destined for individual consumption. The social relations of the individual producers, with regard both to their labour and to its products, are in this case perfectly simple and intelligible, and that with regard not only to production but also to distribution.

The religious world is but the reflex of the real world.[note] And for a society based upon the production of commodities, in which the producers in general enter into social relations with one another by treating their products as commodities and values, whereby they reduce their individual private labour to the standard of homogeneous human labour – for such a society, Christianity with its cultus of abstract man, more especially in its bourgeois developments, Protestantism, Deism, &c., is the most fitting form of religion. In the ancient Asiatic and other ancient modes of production, we find that the conversion of products into commodities, and therefore the conversion of men into producers of commodities, holds a subordinate place, which, however, increases in importance as the primitive communities approach nearer and nearer to their dissolution. Trading nations, properly so called, exist in the ancient world only in its interstices, like the gods of Epicurus in the Intermundia, or like Jews in the pores of Polish society. Those ancient social organisms of production are, as compared with bourgeois society, extremely simple and transparent. But they are founded either on the immature development of man individually, who has not yet severed the umbilical cord that unites him with his fellowmen in a primitive tribal community, or upon direct relations of subjection. They can arise and exist only when the development of the productive power of labour has not risen beyond a low stage, and when, therefore, the social relations within the sphere of material life, between man and man, and between man and Nature, are correspondingly narrow. This narrowness is reflected in the ancient worship of Nature, and in the other elements of the popular religions. The religious reflex of the real world can, in any case, only then finally vanish, when the practical relations of every-day life offer to man none but perfectly intelligible and reasonable relations with regard to his fellowmen and to Nature.

The life-process of society, which is based on the process of material production, does not strip off its mystical veil until it is treated as production by freely associated men, and is consciously regulated by them in accordance with a settled plan. This, however, demands for society a certain material ground-work or set of conditions of existence which in their turn are the spontaneous product of a long and painful process of development.

Political Economy has indeed analysed, however incompletely,[32] value and its magnitude, and has discovered what lies beneath these forms. But it has never once asked the question why labour is represented by the value of its product and labour time by the magnitude of that value.[33] These formulæ, which bear it stamped upon them in unmistakable letters that they belong to a state of society, in which the process of production has the mastery over man, instead of being controlled by him, such formulæ appear to the bourgeois intellect to be as much a self-evident necessity imposed by Nature as productive labour itself. Hence forms of social production that preceded the bourgeois form, are treated by the bourgeoisie in much the same way as the Fathers of the Church treated pre-Christian religions.[34]

To what extent some economists are misled by the Fetishism inherent in commodities, or by the objective appearance of the social characteristics of labour, is shown, amongst other ways, by the dull and tedious quarrel over the part played by Nature in the formation of exchange value. Since exchange value is a definite social manner of expressing the amount of labour bestowed upon an object, Nature has no more to do with it, than it has in fixing the course of exchange.

The mode of production in which the product takes the form of a commodity, or is produced directly for exchange, is the most general and most embryonic form of bourgeois production. It therefore makes its appearance at an early date in history, though not in the same predominating and characteristic manner as now-a-days. Hence its Fetish character is comparatively easy to be seen through. But when we come to more concrete forms, even this appearance of simplicity vanishes. Whence arose the illusions of the monetary system? To it gold and silver, when serving as money, did not represent a social relation between producers, but were natural objects with strange social properties. And modern economy, which looks down with such disdain on the monetary system, does not its superstition come out as clear as noon-day, whenever it treats of capital? How long is it since economy discarded the physiocratic illusion, that rents grow out of the soil and not out of society?

But not to anticipate, we will content ourselves with yet another example relating to the commodity form. Could commodities themselves speak, they would say: Our use value may be a thing that interests men. It is no part of us as objects. What, however, does belong to us as objects, is our value. Our natural intercourse as commodities proves it. In the eyes of each other we are nothing but exchange values. Now listen how those commodities speak through the mouth of the economist.

“Value” – (i.e., exchange value) “is a property of things, riches” – (i.e., use value) “of man. Value, in this sense, necessarily implies exchanges, riches do not.”[35] “Riches” (use value) “are the attribute of men, value is the attribute of commodities. A man or a community is rich, a pearl or a diamond is valuable...” A pearl or a diamond is valuable as a pearl or a diamond.[36]

So far no chemist has ever discovered exchange value either in a pearl or a diamond. The economic discoverers of this chemical element, who by-the-bye lay special claim to critical acumen, find however that the use value of objects belongs to them independently of their material properties, while their value, on the other hand, forms a part of them as objects. What confirms them in this view, is the peculiar circumstance that the use value of objects is realised without exchange, by means of a direct relation between the objects and man, while, on the other hand, their value is realised only by exchange, that is, by means of a social process. Who fails here to call to mind our good friend, Dogberry, who informs neighbour Seacoal, that, “To be a well-favoured man is the gift of fortune; but reading and writing comes by Nature.”[37]

Footnotes

1.
Karl Marx, “Zur Kritik der Politischen Oekonomie.” Berlin, 1859, p. 3.

2.
“Desire implies want, it is the appetite of the mind, and as natural as hunger to the body... The greatest number (of things) have their value from supplying the wants of the mind.” Nicholas Barbon: “A Discourse Concerning Coining the New Money Lighter. In Answer to Mr. Locke’s Considerations, &c.”, London, 1696, pp. 2, 3.

3.
“Things have an intrinsick vertue” (this is Barbon’s special term for value in use) “which in all places have the same vertue; as the loadstone to attract iron” (l.c., p. 6). The property which the magnet possesses of attracting iron, became of use only after by means of that property the polarity of the magnet had been discovered.

4.
“The natural worth of anything consists in its fitness to supply the necessities, or serve the conveniencies of human life.” (John Locke, “Some Considerations on the Consequences of the Lowering of Interest, 1691,” in Works Edit. Lond., 1777, Vol. II., p. 28.) In English writers of the 17th century we frequently find “worth” in the sense of value in use, and “value” in the sense of exchange value. This is quite in accordance with the spirit of a language that likes to use a Teutonic word for the actual thing, and a Romance word for its reflexion.

5.
In bourgeois societies the economic fictio juris prevails, that every one, as a buyer, possesses an encyclopedic knowledge of commodities.

6.
“La valeur consiste dans le rapport d’échange qui se trouve entre telle chose et telle autre entre telle mesure d’une production et telle mesure d’une autre.” [“Value consists in the exchange relation between one thing and another, between a given amount of one product and a given amount of another”] (Le Trosne: “De l’Intérêt Social.” Physiocrates, Ed. Daire. Paris, 1846. p. 889.)

7.
“Nothing can have an intrinsick value.”
(N. Barbon, l.c., p. 6); or as Butler says – “The value of a thing is just as much as it will bring.”

8.
N. Barbon, l.c., p. 53 and 7.

9.
“The value of them (the necessaries of life), when they are exchanged the one for another, is regulated by the quantity of labour necessarily required, and commonly taken in producing them.” (“Some Thoughts on the Interest of Money in General, and Particularly in the Publick Funds, &c.” Lond., p. 36) This remarkable anonymous work written in the last century, bears no date. It is clear, however, from internal evidence that it appeared in the reign of George II, about 1739 or 1740.

10.
“Toutes les productions d’un même genre ne forment proprement qu’une masse, dont le prix se détermine en général et sans régard aux circonstances particulières.” [“Properly speaking, all products of the same kind form a single mass, and their price is determined in general and without regard to particular circumstances”] (Le Trosne, l.c., p. 893.)

11.
K. Marx. l.c., p.6.

A.
The following passage occurred only in the first edition.

Now we know the substance of value. It is labour. We know the measure of its magnitude. It is labour time. The form, which stamps value as exchange-value, remains to be analysed. But before this we need to develop the characteristics we have already found somewhat more fully.

Taken from the Penguin edition of Capital, translated by Ben Fowkes.

12.
I am inserting the parenthesis because its omission has often given rise to the misunderstanding that every product that is consumed by some one other than its producer is considered in Marx a commodity. [Engels, 4th German Edition]

13.
Tutti i fenomeni dell’universo, sieno essi prodotti della mano dell’uomo, ovvero delle universali leggi della fisica, non ci danno idea di attuale creazione, ma unicamente di una modificazione della materia. Accostare e separare sono gli unici elementi che l’ingegno umano ritrova analizzando l’idea della riproduzione: e tanto è riproduzione di valore (value in use, although Verri in this passage of his controversy with the Physiocrats is not himself quite certain of the kind of value he is speaking of) e di ricchezze se la terra, l’aria e l’acqua ne’ campi si trasmutino in grano, come se colla mano dell’uomo il glutine di un insetto si trasmuti in velluto ovvero alcuni pezzetti di metalio si organizzino a formare una ripetizione.” [“All the phenomena of the universe, whether produced by the hand of man or through the universal laws of physics, are not actual new creations, but merely a modification of matter. Joining together and separating are the only elements which the human mind always finds on analysing the concept of reproduction.’ and it is just the same with the reproduction of value” (value in use, although Verri in this passage of his controversy with the Physiocrats is not himself quite certain of the kind of value he is speaking of) “and of wealth, when earth, air and water in the fields are transformed into corn, or when the hand of man transforms the secretions of an insect into silk, or some pieces of metal are arranged to make the mechanism of a watch.”] – Pietro Verri, “Meditazioni sulla Economia Politica” [first printed in 1773] in Custodi’s edition of the Italian Economists, Parte Moderna, t. XV., p. 22.

14.
Comp. Hegel, “Philosophie des Rechts.” Berlin, 1840. p. 250.

15.
The reader must note that we are not speaking here of the wages or value that the labourer gets for a given labour time, but of the value of the commodity in which that labour time is materialised. Wages is a category that, as yet, has no existence at the present stage of our investigation.

16.
In order to prove that labour alone is that all-sufficient and real measure, by which at all times the value of all commodities can be estimated and compared, Adam Smith says, “Equal quantities of labour must at all times and in all places have the same value for the labourer. In his normal state of health, strength, and activity, and with the average degree of skill that he may possess, he must always give up the same portion of his rest, his freedom, and his happiness.” (“Wealth of Nations,” b. I. ch. V.) On the one hand Adam Smith here (but not everywhere) confuses the determination of value by means of the quantity of labour expended in the production of commodities, with the determination of the values of commodities by means of the value of labour, and seeks in consequence to prove that equal quantities of labour have always the same value. On the other hand he has a presentiment, that labour, so far as it manifests itself in the value of commodities, counts only as expenditure of labour power, but he treats this expenditure as the mere sacrifice of rest, freedom, and happiness, not as at the same time the normal activity of living beings. But then, he has the modern wage-labourer in his eye. Much more aptly, the anonymous predecessor of Adam Smith, quoted above in Note 1, p. 39 [note 9 etext]. says “one man has employed himself a week in providing this necessary of life ... and he that gives him some other in exchange cannot make a better estimate of what is a proper equivalent, than by computing what cost him just as much labour and time; which in effect is no more than exchanging one man’s labour in one thing for a time certain, for another man’s labour in another thing for the same time.” (l.c., p. 39.) [The English language has the advantage of possessing different words for the two aspects of labour here considered. The labour which creates use value, and counts qualitatively, is Work, as distinguished from Labour, that which creates Value and counts quantitatively, is Labour as distinguished from Work - Engels]

17.
The few economists, amongst whom is S. Bailey, who have occupied themselves with the analysis of the form of value, have been unable to arrive at any result, first, because they confuse the form of value with value itself; and second, because, under the coarse influence of the practical bourgeois, they exclusively give their attention to the quantitative aspect of the question. “The command of quantity ... constitutes value.” (“Money and its Vicissitudes.” London, 1837, p. 11. By S. Bailey.)

18.
The celebrated Franklin, one of the first economists, after Wm. Petty, who saw through the nature of value, says: “Trade in general being nothing else but the exchange of labour for labour, the value of all things is ... most justly measured by labour.” (“The works of B. Franklin, &c.,” edited by Sparks. Boston, 1836, Vol. II., p. 267.) Franklin is unconscious that by estimating the value of everything in labour, he makes abstraction from any difference in the sorts of labour exchanged, and thus reduces them all to equal human labour. But although ignorant of this, yet he says it. He speaks first of “the one labour,” then of “the other labour,” and finally of “labour,” without further qualification, as the substance of the value of everything.

19.
In a sort of way, it is with man as with commodities. Since he comes into the world neither with a looking glass in his hand, nor as a Fichtian philosopher, to whom “I am I” is sufficient, man first sees and recognises himself in other men. Peter only establishes his own identity as a man by first comparing himself with Paul as being of like kind. And thereby Paul, just as he stands in his Pauline personality, becomes to Peter the type of the genus homo.

20.
Value is here, as occasionally in the preceding pages, used in sense of value determined as to quantity, or of magnitude of value.

21.
This incongruity between the magnitude of value and its relative expression has, with customary ingenuity, been exploited by vulgar economists. For example – “Once admit that A falls, because B, with which it is exchanged, rises, while no less labour is bestowed in the meantime on A, and your general principle of value falls to the ground... If he [Ricardo] allowed that when A rises in value relatively to B, B falls in value relatively to A, he cut away the ground on which he rested his grand proposition, that the value of a commodity is ever determined by the labour embodied in it, for if a change in the cost of A alters not only its own value in relation to B, for which it is exchanged, but also the value of B relatively to that of A, though no change has taken place in the quantity of labour to produce B, then not only the doctrine falls to the ground which asserts that the quantity of labour bestowed on an article regulates its value, but also that which affirms the cost of an article to regulate its value’ (J. Broadhurst: “Political Economy,” London, 1842, pp. 11 and 14.) Mr. Broadhurst might just as well say: consider the fractions 10/20, 10/50, 10/100, &c., the number 10 remains unchanged, and yet its proportional magnitude, its magnitude relatively to the numbers 20, 50, 100 &c., continually diminishes. Therefore the great principle that the magnitude of a whole number, such as 10, is “regulated” by the number of times unity is contained in it, falls to the ground. [The author explains in section 4 of this chapter, pp. 80–81, note 2 (note 33 etext), what he understands by “Vulgar Economy.” – Engels]

22.
Such expressions of relations in general, called by Hegel reflex categories, form a very curious class. For instance, one man is king only because other men stand in the relation of subjects to him. They, on the contrary, imagine that they are subjects because he is king.

23.
F. L. A. Ferrier, sous-inspecteur des douanes, “Du gouvernement considéré dans ses rapports avec le commerce,” Paris, 1805; and Charles Ganilh, “Des Systèmes d’Economie Politique,” – 2nd ed., Paris, 1821.

24.
In Homer, for instance, the value of an article is expressed in a series of different things. Iliad. VII. 472–475.

25.
For this reason, we can speak of the coat value of the linen when its value is expressed in coats, or of its corn value when expressed in corn, and so on. Every such expression tells us, that what appears in the use values, coat, corn, &c., is the value of the linen. “The value of any commodity denoting its relation in exchange, we may speak of it as ... corn value, cloth value, according to the commodity with which it is compared; and hence there are a thousand different kinds of value, as many kinds of value as there are commodities in existence, and all are equally real and equally nominal.” (“A Critical Dissertation on the Nature, Measures and Causes of Value: chiefly in reference to the writings of Mr. Ricardo and his followers.” By the author of “Essays on the Formation, &c., of Opinions.” London, 1825, p. 39.) S. Bailey, the author of this anonymous work, a work which in its day created much stir in England, fancied that, by thus pointing out the various relative expressions of one and the same value, he had proved the impossibility of any determination of the concept of value. However narrow his own views may have been, yet, that he laid his finger on some serious defects in the Ricardian Theory, is proved by the animosity with which he was attacked by Ricardo’s followers. See the Westminster Review for example.

26.
It is by no means self-evident that this character of direct and universal exchangeability is, so to speak, a polar one, and as intimately connected with its opposite pole, the absence of direct exchangeability, as the positive pole of the magnet is with its negative counterpart. It may therefore be imagined that all commodities can simultaneously have this character impressed upon them, just as it can be imagined that all Catholics can be popes together. It is, of course, highly desirable in the eyes of the petit bourgeois, for whom the production of commodities is the nec plus ultra of human freedom and individual independence, that the inconveniences resulting from this character of commodities not being directly exchangeable, should be removed. Proudhon’s socialism is a working out of this Philistine Utopia, a form of socialism which, as I have elsewhere shown, does not possess even the merit of originality. Long before his time, the task was attempted with much better success by Gray, Bray, and others. But, for all that, wisdom of this kind flourishes even now in certain circles under the name of “science.” Never has any school played more tricks with the word science, than that of Proudhon, for “wo Begriffe fehlen, Da stellt zur rechten Zeit ein Wort sich ein.” [“Where thoughts are absent, Words are brought in as convenient replacements,” Goethe’s Faust. See Proudhon’s Philosophy of Poverty]

26a.
In the German edition, there is the following footnote here: “One may recall that China and the tables began to dance when the rest of the world appeared to be standing still – pour encourager les autres [to encourage the others].” The defeat of the 1848–49 revolutions was followed by a period of dismal political reaction in Europe. At that time, spiritualism, especially table-turning, became the rage among the European aristocracy. In 1850–64, China was swept by an anti-feudal liberation movement in the form of a large-scale peasant war, the Taiping Revolt. – Note by editors of MECW.

27.
Among the ancient Germans the unit for measuring land was what could be harvested in a day, and was called Tagwerk, Tagwanne (jurnale, or terra jurnalis, or diornalis), Mannsmaad, &c. (See G. L. von Maurer, “Einleitung zur Geschichte der Mark—, &c. Verfassung,” Munchen, 1854, p. 129 sq.)

28.
When, therefore, Galiani says: Value is a relation between persons – “La Ricchezza è una ragione tra due persone,” – he ought to have added: a relation between persons expressed as a relation between things. (Galiani: Della Moneta, p. 221, V. III. of Custodi’s collection of “Scrittori Classici Italiani di Economia Politica.” Parte Moderna, Milano 1803.)

29.
“What are we to think of a law that asserts itself only by periodical revolutions? It is just nothing but a law of Nature, founded on the want of knowledge of those whose action is the subject of it.” (Friedrich Engels: “Umrisse zu einer Kritik der Nationalökonomie,” in the “Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher,” edited by Arnold Ruge and Karl Marx. Paris. 1844.)

30.
Even Ricardo has his stories à la Robinson. “He makes the primitive hunter and the primitive fisher straightway, as owners of commodities, exchange fish and game in the proportion in which labour time is incorporated in these exchange values. On this occasion he commits the anachronism of making these men apply to the calculation, so far as their implements have to be taken into account, the annuity tables in current use on the London Exchange in the year 1817. The parallelograms of Mr. Owen appear to be the only form of society, besides the bourgeois form, with which he was acquainted.” (Karl Marx: “Zur Kritik, &c..” pp. 38, 39)

31.
“A ridiculous presumption has latterly got abroad that common property in its primitive form is specifically a Slavonian, or even exclusively Russian form. It is the primitive form that we can prove to have existed amongst Romans, Teutons, and Celts, and even to this day we find numerous examples, ruins though they be, in India. A more exhaustive study of Asiatic, and especially of Indian forms of common property, would show how from the different forms of primitive common property, different forms of its dissolution have been developed. Thus, for instance, the various original types of Roman and Teutonic private property are deducible from different forms of Indian common property.” (Karl Marx, “Zur Kritik, &c.,” p. 10.)

32.
The insufficiency of Ricardo’s analysis of the magnitude of value, and his analysis is by far the best, will appear from the 3rd and 4th books of this work. As regards value in general, it is the weak point of the classical school of Political Economy that it nowhere expressly and with full consciousness, distinguishes between labour, as it appears in the value of a product, and the same labour, as it appears in the use value of that product. Of course the distinction is practically made, since this school treats labour, at one time under its quantitative aspect, at another under its qualitative aspect. But it has not the least idea, that when the difference between various kinds of labour is treated as purely quantitative, their qualitative unity or equality, and therefore their reduction to abstract human labour, is implied. For instance, Ricardo declares that he agrees with Destutt de Tracy in this proposition: “As it is certain that our physical and moral faculties are alone our original riches, the employment of those faculties, labour of some kind, is our only original treasure, and it is always from this employment that all those things are created which we call riches... It is certain, too, that all those things only represent the labour which has created them, and if they have a value, or even two distinct values, they can only derive them from that (the value) of the labour from which they emanate.” (Ricardo, “The Principles of Pol. Econ.,” 3 Ed. Lond. 1821, p. 334.) We would here only point out, that Ricardo puts his own more profound interpretation upon the words of Destutt. What the latter really says is, that on the one hand all things which constitute wealth represent the labour that creates them, but that on the other hand, they acquire their “two different values” (use value and exchange value) from “the value of labour.” He thus falls into the commonplace error of the vulgar economists, who assume the value of one commodity (in this case labour) in order to determine the values of the rest. But Ricardo reads him as if he had said, that labour (not the value of labour) is embodied both in use value and exchange value. Nevertheless, Ricardo himself pays so little attention to the two-fold character of the labour which has a two-fold embodiment, that he devotes the whole of his chapter on “Value and Riches, Their Distinctive Properties,” to a laborious examination of the trivialities of a J.B. Say. And at the finish he is quite astonished to find that Destutt on the one hand agrees with him as to labour being the source of value, and on the other hand with J. B. Say as to the notion of value.

33.
It is one of the chief failings of classical economy that it has never succeeded, by means of its analysis of commodities, and, in particular, of their value, in discovering that form under which value becomes exchange value. Even Adam Smith and Ricardo, the best representatives of the school, treat the form of value as a thing of no importance, as having no connection with the inherent nature of commodities. The reason for this is not solely because their attention is entirely absorbed in the analysis of the magnitude of value. It lies deeper. The value form of the product of labour is not only the most abstract, but is also the most universal form, taken by the product in bourgeois production, and stamps that production as a particular species of social production, and thereby gives it its special historical character. If then we treat this mode of production as one eternally fixed by Nature for every state of society, we necessarily overlook that which is the differentia specifica of the value form, and consequently of the commodity form, and of its further developments, money form, capital form, &c. We consequently find that economists, who are thoroughly agreed as to labour time being the measure of the magnitude of value, have the most strange and contradictory ideas of money, the perfected form of the general equivalent. This is seen in a striking manner when they treat of banking, where the commonplace definitions of money will no longer hold water. This led to the rise of a restored mercantile system (Ganilh, &c.), which sees in value nothing but a social form, or rather the unsubstantial ghost of that form. Once for all I may here state, that by classical Political Economy, I understand that economy which, since the time of W. Petty, has investigated the real relations of production in bourgeois society in contradistinction to vulgar economy, which deals with appearances only, ruminates without ceasing on the materials long since provided by scientific economy, and there seeks plausible explanations of the most obtrusive phenomena, for bourgeois daily use, but for the rest, confines itself to systematising in a pedantic way, and proclaiming for everlasting truths, the trite ideas held by the self-complacent bourgeoisie with regard to their own world, to them the best of all possible worlds.

34.
“Les économistes ont une singulière manière de procéder. Il n’y a pour eux que deux sortes d’institutions, celles de l’art et celles de la nature. Les institutions de la féodalité sont des institutions artificielles celles de la bourgeoisie sont des institutions naturelles. Ils ressemblent en ceci aux théologiens, qui eux aussi établissent deux sortes de religions. Toute religion qui n’est pas la leur, est une invention des hommes tandis que leur propre religion est une émanation de Dieu—Ainsi il y a eu de l’histoire, mais il n’y en a plus.” [“Economists have a singular method of procedure. There are only two kinds of institutions for them, artificial and natural. The institutions of feudalism are artificial institutions, those of the bourgeoisie are natural institutions. In this they resemble the theologians, who likewise establish two kinds of religion. Every religion which is not theirs is an invention of men, while their own is an emanation from God. ... Thus there has been history, but there is no longer any”] (Karl Marx. Misère de la Philosophie. Réponse a la Philosophie de la Misère par M. Proudhon, 1847, p. 113.) Truly comical is M. Bastiat, who imagines that the ancient Greeks and Romans lived by plunder alone. But when people plunder for centuries, there must always be something at hand for them to seize; the objects of plunder must be continually reproduced. It would thus appear that even Greeks and Romans had some process of production, consequently, an economy, which just as much constituted the material basis of their world, as bourgeois economy constitutes that of our modern world. Or perhaps Bastiat means, that a mode of production based on slavery is based on a system of plunder. In that case he treads on dangerous ground. If a giant thinker like Aristotle erred in his appreciation of slave labour, why should a dwarf economist like Bastiat be right in his appreciation of wage labour? I seize this opportunity of shortly answering an objection taken by a German paper in America, to my work, “Zur Kritik der Pol. Oekonomie, 1859.” In the estimation of that paper, my view that each special mode of production and the social relations corresponding to it, in short, that the economic structure of society, is the real basis on which the juridical and political superstructure is raised and to which definite social forms of thought correspond; that the mode of production determines the character of the social, political, and intellectual life generally, all this is very true for our own times, in which material interests preponderate, but not for the middle ages, in which Catholicism, nor for Athens and Rome, where politics, reigned supreme. In the first place it strikes one as an odd thing for any one to suppose that these well-worn phrases about the middle ages and the ancient world are unknown to anyone else. This much, however, is clear, that the middle ages could not live on Catholicism, nor the ancient world on politics. On the contrary, it is the mode in which they gained a livelihood that explains why here politics, and there Catholicism, played the chief part. For the rest, it requires but a slight acquaintance with the history of the Roman republic, for example, to be aware that its secret history is the history of its landed property. On the other hand, Don Quixote long ago paid the penalty for wrongly imagining that knight errantry was compatible with all economic forms of society.

35.
“Observations on certain verbal disputes in Pol. Econ., particularly relating to value and to demand and supply” Lond., 1821, p. 16.

36.
S. Bailey, l.c., p. 165.

37.
The author of “Observations” and S. Bailey accuse Ricardo of converting exchange value from something relative into something absolute. The opposite is the fact. He has explained the apparent relation between objects, such as diamonds and pearls, in which relation they appear as exchange values, and disclosed the true relation hidden behind the appearances, namely, their relation to each other as mere expressions of human labour. If the followers of Ricardo answer Bailey somewhat rudely, and by no means convincingly, the reason is to be sought in this, that they were unable to find in Ricardo’s own works any key to the hidden relations existing between value and its form, exchange value.

Note. This oft-quoted aphorism was included in the first English translation prepared by Engels and published in 1887. Readers should note that this observation is consistent with Marx's explanation above. There are numerous divergences between this English edition and the first German edition. [MIA]

Marx 1867 (Capital)

## The Commodity

The wealth of societies in which a capitalistic mode of production prevails, appears as a ‘gigantic collection of commodities’ and the singular commodity appears as the elementary form of wealth. Our investigation begins accordingly with the analysis of the commodity.

The commodity is first an external object, a thing which satisfies through its qualities human needs of one kind or another. The nature of these needs is irrelevant, e.g., whether their origin is in the stomach or in the fancy. We are also not concerned here with the manner in which the entity satisfies human need; whether in an immediate way as food – that is, as object of enjoyment – or by a detour as means of production.

Each useful thing (iron, paper, etc.) is to be considered from a double point of view, in accordance with quality and quantity. Each such thing is a totality of many properties and is therefore able to be useful in different respects. The discovery of these different respects and hence of the manifold modes of utility of things is an historical act. Of such a kind is the invention of social measurement for the quantity of useful things. The diversity of the commodity-measurements arises partly from the diverse nature of the objects to be measured, and partly from convention.

It is the utility of a thing for human life that turns it into a use-value. By way of abbreviation let us term the useful thing itself (or commodity-body, as iron, wheat, diamond, etc.) use-value, good, article. In the consideration of use-values, quantitative determination is always presupposed (as a dozen watches, yard of linen, ton of iron, etc.). The use-values of commodities provide the material for a study of their own, the science of commodities. Use-value realizes itself only in use or in consumption; use-values form the substantial content of wealth, whatever its social form may be. In the form of society which we are going to examine, they form the substantial bearers at the very same time of exchange-value.

Exchange-value appears first of all as quantitative relationship, the proportion in which use-values of one kind are exchanged for use-values of another kind, a relationship which constantly changes in accordance with time and place. That is the reason why exchange-value appears to be something accidental and a purely relative thing, and therefore the reason why the formula of an exchange-value internal and immanent to the commodity (valeur intrinsique) appears to be a contradictio in adjecto (contradiction in terms). Let us examine the matter more closely.

A single commodity (e.g., a quarter of wheat) is exchanged with other articles in the most varied proportions. Nevertheless its exchange-value remains unchanged regardless of whether it is expressed in x bootblacking, y soap, z gold, etc. It must therefore be distinguishable from these, its various manners of expression.

Now let us consider two commodities: e.g., wheat and iron. Whatever their exchange relationship may be, it is always representable in an equation in which a given quantum of wheat is equated with some particular quantum of iron; e.g., one quarter of wheat = a cwt of iron. What does this equation say? That the same value exists in two different things, in one quarter of wheat and likewise in a cwt of iron. Both are equal, therefore, to a third entity, which in and for itself is neither the one nor the other. Each of the two, insofar as it is an exchange-value, must therefore be reducible to this third entity, independent of the other.

Consider a simple geometrical example. In order to determine and compare the areas of all rectilinear figures, one reduces them to triangles. One reduces the triangle itself to an expression which is entirely different from its visible figure – half the product of its base by its altitude. Likewise, the exchange-values of commodities can be reduced to a common-entity, of which they represent a greater or lesser amount.

The fact that the substance of the exchange-value is something utterly different from and independent of the physical-sensual existence of the commodity or its reality as a use-value is revealed immediately by its exchange relationship. For this is characterized precisely by the abstraction from the use-value. As far as the exchange-value is concerned, one commodity is, after all, quite as good as every other, provided it is present in the correct proportion.

Hence, commodities are first of all simply to be considered as values, independent of their exchange-relationship or from the form, in which they appear as exchange-values.

Commodities as objects of use or goods are corporeally different things. Their reality as values forms, on the other hand, their unity. This unity does not arise out of nature but out of society. The common social substance which merely manifests itself differently in different use-values, is – labour.

Commodities as values are nothing but crystallized labour. The unit of measurement of labour itself is the simple average-labour, the character of which varies admittedly in different lands and cultural epochs, but is given for a particular society. More complex labour counts merely as simple labour to an exponent or rather to a multiple, so that a smaller quantum of complex labour is equal to a larger quantum of simple labour, for example. Precisely how this reduction is to be controlled is not relevant here. That this reduction is constantly occurring is revealed by experience. A commodity may be the product of the most complex labour. Its value equates it to the product of simple labour and therefore represents on its own merely a definite quantum of simple labour.

A use-value or good only has a value because labour is objectified or materialized in it. But now how are we to measure the quantity of its value? By the quantum of the `value-forming substance’ (i.e., labour) which is contained in it. The quantity of labour itself is measured by its temporal duration and the labour-time in turn possesses a measuring rod for particular segments of time, like hour, day, etc.

It might seem that, if the value of a commodity is determined by the quantum of labour expended during its production, the more lazy- and incompetent a man the more valuable his commodity is, because he needs all the more labour-time for its completion. But only the socially necessary labour-time is labour-time required for the constitution of some particular use-value, with the available socially-normal conditions of production and the social average-level of competence and intensity of labour. After the introduction of the steam-driven loom in England, for example, perhaps half as much labour as before was sufficient to change a given quantum of yarn into cloth. The English hand-weaver needed in order to accomplish this change the same labour-time as before, to be sure, but the product of his individual labour-hour now represented only one half a social labour-hour, and sank accordingly to half its earlier value.

So it is only the quantum of socially necessary labour, or that labour-time which is socially necessary for the constitution of a use-value which determines the quantity of the value. The single commodity counts here in general as average sample of its own kind. Commodities in which equally large labour-quanta are contained, or which can be produced within the same labour-time for that reason have the same quantity of value. The value of a commodity is related to the value of every other commodity, as the labour-time necessary for the production of the one is related to the labour-time necessary for the production of the other. All commodities, as values, are only particular masses of coagulated labour-time.

The quantity of value of a commodity accordingly would remain constant if the labour-time required for its production were constant. The latter, however, changes with each change in the productive power of labour. The productive power of labour is determined by manifold conditions, among others by the average grade of competence of the workers, the level of development of science and its technological applicability, the social combination of the process of production, the scope and the efficacy of the means of production, and by natural relationships. The same quantum of labour manifests itself after propitious weather in 8 bushels of wheat, but after impropitious weather, in only 4, for example. The very same quantum of labour provides more metals in richly laden mines than in poor ones, etc. Diamonds are rare on the surface of the earth, and their discovery therefore costs on the average much labour-time. Consequently, they represent much labour in a small volume of space. Jacob doubts that gold has ever paid its complete value. This holds true even more for diamonds. According to Eschwege, by 1823 the complete yield of the eight-year old Brazilian diamond-diggings had not yet amounted to the value of the 1½ year average product of the Brazilian sugar or coffee plantations. Given more richly laden diggings the same quantum of labour would be represented by more diamonds and their value would sink. If one succeeds in converting coal into diamonds with little labour, then the value of diamonds would sink beneath that of paving stones. In general: the greater the productive power of labour the smaller is the amount of labour-time required for the production of an article, and the smaller the mass of labour crystallized in it, the smaller is its value. And on the contrary, the smaller the productive power of labour, the greater is the labour-time necessary for the-production of an article, and the greater its value is. The quantity of value of a commodity varies directly as the quantum, and inversely as the productive power of the labour embodying itself in the commodity.

Now we know the substance of value. It is labour. We know its unit of measurement. It is labour-time. We have yet to analyse its form, which precisely stamps the value as an exchange-value. Before we do that we must develop the determinations which have already been discovered in somewhat greater detail.

A thing can be a use-value without being an exchange-value. This is the case wherever the human relevance of the thing is not mediated by labour. So air, virgin land, brush in a wild. state, wood growing in wild conditions, etc. A thing can be useful and be the product of human labour without being a commodity. A man who satisfies his own need through his product creates use-value, to be sure, but not a commodity. In order to produce a commodity, he must produce not merely use-value, but use-value for others – social use-value. Finally, no entity can be a value without being an object of use. If it is useless, then the labour contained in it is also useless, does not count as labour and, hence, does not form a value.

Originally, the commodity appeared to us as a two-sided entity, use-value and exchange-value. As we consider the matter more closely it will appear that the labour which is contained in the commodity is two-sided, also. This aspect, which I am the first to have developed in a critical way, is the starting point upon which comprehension of political economy depends.

Let us consider two commodities, a coat and 10 yards of linen, perhaps. Let the first have twice the value of the second, so that if 10 yards of linen = w, the coat = 2w.

The coat is a use-value which satisfies a particular need. In order to produce it, a particular kind of purposeful productive activity is required. This is determined in accordance with purpose, manner of operation, object, means and result. The labour whose usefulness is represented in the use-value of its product or in the product in such wise that its product is a use-value, let such labour here be called for simplicity’s sake simply useful labour. From this viewpoint it is constantly under consideration with respect to the utility, production of which is the intent of the labour.

Just as coat and linen are qualitatively different use-values, so the deployments of labour which mediate their realities are qualitatively different – tailoring and weaving. If those things were not qualitatively different use-values and hence products of qualitatively different useful deployments of labour, then they would never be able to confront each other as commodities at all. A coat is not exchanged for a coat. One use-value is not exchanged for the very same use-value.

In the totality of various use-values or commodity-incarnations, there appears a totality of varying deployments of useful labour – just as manifold and differing in genus, species, family, subspecies, variety: a social division of labour. This is the precondition for the existence of commodity production, and it is not the case that commodity production is the precondition for the existence of the social division of labour. In the community of ancient India, labour is socially divided without the products becoming commodities. Or a more immediate example, in every factory labour is systematically divided, but this division is not thereby mediated by the fact that the workers exchange their individual products. Only products of those deployments of private labour which are self-sufficient and independent of one another confront one another as commodities. So we have observed the following – that a particular purposefully productive activity or useful labour lurks in the use-value of every commodity. Use-values cannot confront one another as commodities unless deployments of qualitatively different useful labour lurk in them. In a society whose products generally assume the form of commodity (i.e., in a society of commodity producers) this qualitative difference in the deployments of useful labour which are carried on independently of one another as the private businesses of self-sufficient producers develops into a multi-faceted system – to a social division of labour.

It is a matter of indifference, in any case, to the coat whether it is worn by the tailor or one of his customers. In both cases it acts as a use-value. Just as little, is the relationship between the coat and the labour which produced it changed in and for itself by virtue of the fact that tailoring is a profession in itself – an independent member of the social division of labour. Where a need for clothing compelled him, man plied the activity of tailor for whole millenia before he became a tailor instead of a man. But the reality of coat, linen, and every element of material wealth which is not given by nature in all cases had to be mediated by a special, purposely productive activity which assimilates particular natural entities to human needs. As the former of use-values, as useful labour, labour is thereby the precondition of existence for man – independent of all social forms – and an eternal necessity of nature for the sake of mediating the material interchange between man and nature (i.e., human life).

The use-values coat, linen, etc. – in brief, the commodity-bodies – are connections of two elements, natural matter and labour. If one subtracts the total sum of all different instances of useful labour which lurk inside the coat, linen, etc., there always remains a material substrate left over which is present naturally without the interference of man. Man can only proceed in his producing like nature does herself; i.e., only change the forms of material. And what is more, in this labour of formation itself he is constantly supported by natural forces. Labour is not, therefore, the only source of those use-values which are produced by it – material wealth. Labour is its father, as William Petty says, and the earth is its mother.

Now let us pass from the consideration of the commodity insofar as it is a use-object to that of commodity-value (i.e., exchange-value).

According to our assumption the coat has double the value of linen. This, however, is only a quantitative difference, which is not yet of immediate interest to us. We recall, therefore, that if the value of a coat is twice as great as that of 10 yards of linen, then 20 yards of linen have the same amount of value as a coat. As values, a coat and linen are things of equal substance, objective expressions of similar labour. But tailoring and weaving are qualitatively different kinds of labour. Conditions of society, however, are found, wherein the very same person alternately tailors and weaves; and both these modes of labouring are therefore merely modifications of the labour of one and the same individual, and are not yet specific definite functions of different individuals: just as the coat which our tailor makes today, and the trousers which he is to make tomorrow only presuppose variations of the same individual labour. Appearance itself teaches, moreover, that in our capitalistic society a given portion of human labour is adduced alternately in the form of tailoring or in the form of weaving on each occasion in accordance with the shifting direction of the demand for labour. This changing of form which labour endures may occur not without friction – but it must occur. If one disregards the determinacy of productive activity and therefore disregards the useful character of labour, it remains true about it that it is an expenditure of human labour power. The labour of a tailor and weaving, although they are qualitatively different productive activities, are both productive expenditure of human brain, muscle, nerve, hand, etc., and are both in this sense human labour. They are merely two different forms of expending human labour power.

Admittedly, human labour itself has to be more or less developed in order to be expended in this or that form. The value of the commodities, however, represents human labour in the simplest form, the expenditure of human labour power in general. Now just as a general or a banker plays a big role in bourgeois society but the simple human being, on the other hand, plays a very shabby role, that is the way things stand here also in the case of human labour. It is the expenditure of simple labour power, which every normal human being possesses in his bodily organism, quite apart from any special elaboration.

[Take the labour-power of a farm labourer, for example, for simple labour-power, and take the expenditure of that labour-power consequently for simple labour or human labour without further adornment; but take the labour of tailoring, on the other hand, for the expenditure of more highly-developed labour-power. While the working-day of the farm labourer is represented consequently by the value expression ½w (say), the working-day of the tailor is represented by the value expression w. This difference, however, is merely quantitative. If the coat is the product of one working-day of the tailor, it has the same value as the product of two working-days of the farm labourer. In this way, however, the tailor’s work counts only on each occasion as multiplied farm-labourer’s work.]

The various proportions wherein differing species of labour are reduced to simple labour as their unit of measurement are established by a social process behind the back of the producers, and appear to them consequently as given by tradition. For purposes of simplification, every species of labour-power counts for us in the following immediately as simple labour-power, whereby we are only sparing ourselves the effort involved in the reduction to it.

Therefore, just as one is abstracting, in the case of the values of coat and linen, from the difference between their use-values, just so, in the case of the labour which these values represent, is one abstracting from the difference between the useful forms, wherein labour is on the one band tailoring-labour and on the other hand weaving. Just as the use-values coat and linen are connections of purposeful productive activities with cloth and yarn, whereas the values, coat and linen, on the other hand, are mere labour-precipitates of a similar species, just so does also the labour contained in these values count not on account of its productive relationship to cloth and yarn but only as expenditure of human labour-power. Tailoring and weaving are formative elements of the use-values coat and linen precisely by virtue of their different qualities; but they are only the substance of coat-value and linen-value insofar as there is an abstracting from their specific quality and both possess the same quality, the quality of human labour. Coat and linen, however, are not only values in general, but are values of definite magnitude and in accordance with our assumption the coat is worth twice as much as 10 yards of linen. What is the origin of this difference in their magnitudes of value? It is the fact that linen contains only half as much labour as the coat, so that labour power has to be expended for a period of twice the time taken for the production of the latter as for the production of the former.

If, therefore, with respect to the use-value, the labour contained in the commodity counts only qualitatively, with respect to the magnitude of exchange-value it counts only quantitatively, after being already reduced to human labour without further quality. In the former case, what is at issue is the how and what of labour; and in the latter case, what matters is its how much, its temporal duration. Since the quantity of exchange-value of a commodity measures only the quantum of the labour contained in it, hence commodities within a certain proportion to one another must always be equally large exchange-values.

If the productive power of (say) all the useful deployments of labour required for the production of a coat remains unchanged, then the magnitude of value of the coats rises along with their own quantity. If one coat represents x days of labour, then two coats represent 2x days of labour, etc. But now assume that the labour-time necessary for the production of a coat rises to twice as much, or falls to half as much. In the first instance, a coat has as much value as two coats had previously; and in the latter case, two coats have only just so much value as previously one had, although in both cases a coat performs the same tasks as before and the useful labour contained in it remains of the same beneficence as before. But the labour-quantum expended in its production has changed.

A larger quantum of use-value in and for itself forms larger material wealth, two coats being more than one. With two coats two human beings can be clad, and with one coat only one human being, etc. Nevertheless, a fall in the magnitude of value of material wealth may correspond contemporaneously to a rise in its mass. This contrary motion is produced by the two-sided specification of labour. Productive power is naturally always productive power of useful, concrete labour. Actually, it only expresses the level of efficacy of purposeful activity in a given extension of time. Useful labour becomes, therefore, a richer or poorer source of products in direct relationship to the rising or falling of its productive power. A change in the productive power, on the other hand, has in and for itself no effect whatsoever upon the labour represented in the value. Since the productive power belongs to the concrete, useful form of labour, it can naturally no longer influence labour, as soon as there is an abstracting from its concrete useful form. The very same labour, therefore, when it is represented in the same extensions of time, is also on all occasions represented in the same magnitude of value – however much the productive power may change. But it yields differing quanta of use values, within the same extension of time: more whenever the productive power rises; less, whenever it sinks. In the first case, it can happen that two coats contain less labour than one did previously. The very same change in productive power, which increases the fruitfulness of labour and hence the mass of use-values yielded by it, can therefore diminish the magnitude of value even of the increased total mass – namely whenever it shortens the labour-time necessary for its production. And vice versa.

It follows from the preceding not that there are two differing kinds of labour lurking in the commodity, but rather that the same labour is specified in differing and even contradictory manner – in accordance with whether it is related to the use-value of the commodity as labour’s product or related to the commodity-value as its merely objective expression. Just as the commodity must be above all else an object of use in order to be a value, just so does labour have to be before all else useful labour – purposeful, productive activity – in order to count as expenditure of human labour-power and hence as simple human labour.

Since up to now it has only been the substance of value and the magnitude of value which have been specified, let us now direct our attention to the analysis of the form of value.

First let us turn back to the first form of appearance of the value of the commodity.

We take two quanta of commodities which cost the same amount of labour-time for their production (and hence are equal magnitudes of value), and we have: 40 yards of linen are worth two coats. We observe that the value of the linen is expressed in a specific quantum of coats.

The value of a commodity is called its relative value, if it is represented in the use-value of another commodity in this fashion.

The relative value of a commodity can change, although its value remains constant. And, going the other way, its relative value can remain constant, although its value changes. The equation: 40 yards of linen = 2 coats presupposes after all that both commodities cost equally much labour. With every change in the productive power of the deployments of labour which produce them there is a change in the labour-time necessary for their production. Let us consider the influence of such changes upon relative value.

I. Let the value of the linen change, while the coat-value remains constant. If the labour-time expended in the production of linen doubles (perhaps as a consequence of increasing sterility of the soil employed in growing flax), then its value doubles. In place of: 40 yards of linen = 2 coats, we would have: 40 yards of linen = 4 coats, since 2 coats now contain only half as much labour-time as 40 yards of linen. If the labour-time necessary for the production of linen decreases by half, on the other hand (perhaps as a consequence of improved looms), in that case the linen-value sinks by half. In consideration of this we now have: 40 yards of linen = 1 coat. The relative value of commodity A (i.e. its value expressed in commodity B) rises and falls in direct ratio to the value of commodity A, while the value of commodity B remains equal.

II. Let the value of linen remain constant, while the coat-value changes. If the labour-time necessary for the production of the coat doubles under these conditions (perhaps as a consequence of a disappointing shearing of sheep), then we have instead of: 40 yards of linen = 2 coats, now: 40 yards of linen =1 coat. If the value of the coat falls by half, on the other hand, then: 40 yards of linen = 4 coats. Given a constant value for commodity A, its relative value (expressed in commodity B) falls or rises in inverse ratio to the change in value of B.

If one compares the different cases sub I and II, what emerges is that one and the same change of relative value can be initiated from completely opposite causes. The equation: 40 yards of linen = 2 coats becomes 1) the equation: 40 yards of linen = 4 coats, either because the value of linen doubles or the value of the coat falls by half, and 2) the equation: 40 yards of linen = 1 coat, either because the value of linen sinks by half or the value of the coat rises to twice as much.

III. Let the labour-quanta necessary for the production of linen and coat vary contemporaneously, in the same direction and same proportion. In this case, 40 yards of linen = 2 coats, the same as before, however their values may have changed. Their change of value becomes apparent as soon as one compares them with a third commodity, whose value remains constant. If the values of all commodities rose or fell contemporaneously and in the same proportion, then their relative values would remain unchanged. One would only detect their real change of value in the fact that in the same labour-time it would hold universally that a greater or smaller quantum of commodities was yielded than before.

IV. Let labour-times necessary for the production of linen and coat, respectively (and consequently their values) be assumed to change contemporaneously in the same direction, but to an unequal degree, or in opposite directions, etc. The influence of all such possible combinations upon the relative value of a commodity may be deduced simply by application of the cases I, II and III.

What we have investigated is how far change in the relative magnitude of value of a commodity (linen) reflects a change in its own magnitude of value and we have in general investigated relative value only in accordance with its quantitative side. We now turn to its form. If relative value is the form wherein value manifests itself, then the expression for the equivalence of two commodities (e.g., x of commodity A = y of commodity B, or 20 yards of linen = one coat) is the simple form of relative value.

I. First or simple form of relative value: 20 yards of linen = 1 coat (x of commodity A = y of commodity B). This form is rather difficult to analyse, because it is simple. The different specifications which are contained in it are veiled, undeveloped, abstract, and consequently only able to be distinguished and focused upon through the rather intense application of our power of abstraction. But at least this much becomes clear at a glance, that the form remains the same, whether 20 yards of linen = 1 coat, or 20 yards of linen = x coats.

Linen makes its earthly appearance in the shape of a use-value or useful thing. Its stiff-as-linen corporeality or natural form is consequently not its form of value, but its direct opposite. It reveals its own reality as value immediately by relating itself to another commodity (the coat) as equal to itself. If it were not itself value, then it could not relate itself to coat (as value) as its own sort of thing. It posits itself as qualitatively equal to the coat, by relating itself to it as objectification of human labour of the same species, i.e., of its own value-substance; and it posits itself as equal to only one coat instead of x coats, because it is not just value in general, but value of a specific magnitude – and a coat, however, contains precisely just so much labour as 20 yards of linen. By this relationship to the coat, linen swats different flies with one stroke. By equating the other commodity to itself as value, it relates itself to itself as value. By relating itself to itself as value, it distinguishes itself from itself as use-value, at the same time. By expressing its magnitude of value in the coat (and magnitude of value is both things: value in general, and quantitatively measured value), it endows its reality as value with a form of value which differs from its immediate existence. By revealing itself in this manner as a thing which is differentiated within itself, it reveals itself for the first time really as a commodity – a useful thing which is at the same time value. Insofar as linen is use-value, it is an independent thing. Its value appears, on the other hand only in relationship to another commodity (e.g., the coat), which a coat is, is qualitatively equated to it (the linen), and consequently in some specific quantity counts as equivalent to it, replaces it and is exchangeable for it. Hence, value only acquires an individual form which is different from use-value only through its manifestation as exchange-value.

The expression of the value of linen in the coat impresses a new form upon the coat itself. After all, what is the meaning of the value-form of linen? Evidently that the coat is exchangeable for it. Whatever else may happen to it, in its mundane reality it possesses in its natural form (coat) now the form of immediate exchangeability with another commodity, the form of an exchangeable use-value, or Equivalent. The specification of the Equivalent contains not only the fact that a commodity is value at all, but the fact that it in its corporeal shape (its use-value) counts as value for another commodity and consequently is immediately at hand as exchange-value for the other commodity.

As value, linen is composed exclusively of labour, and forms a transparently crystallized precipitate of labour. In reality this crystal is very murky, however. In so far as labour is detectable in it (and not every embodiment of commodity reveals the trace of labour), it is not some undifferentiated human labour, but rather: weaving, spinning, etc. – which, in addition, are by no means the only components of its substance but of course are leavened with matter derived from nature. In order to retain linen as a merely corporeal expression of human labour one has to abstract from all that which makes it to be really a thing. Any objectivity of human labour which is itself abstract (i.e., without any additional quality and content) is necessarily an abstract objectivity – a thing of thought. In that fashion, a web of flax turns into a chimera. But commodities are objects. They have to be what they are in an object-like way or else reveal it in their own object-like relationships. In the production of linen, a particular quantum of human labour exists in having been expended. The linen’s value is the merely objective reflection of the labour so expended, but it is not reflected in the body of the linen. It reveals itself (i.e., acquires a sensual expression) by its value-relationship to the coat. By the linen’s equating the coat to itself as value – while at the same time distinguishing itself from the coat as object of use – what happens is that the coat becomes the form of appearance of linen-value as opposed to linen-body: its value-form as distinguished from its natural form.

In the expression of relative value: 20 yards of linen = 1 coat (or, x linen is worth y of coat), one must admit that the coat counts only as value or coagulation of labour, but it is precisely through that fact that the coagulation of labour counts as coat, and coat as the form into which human labour flows in order to congeal. The use-value coat only becomes the form of appearance of linen-value because linen relates itself to the material of the coat as to an immediate materialization of abstract human labour, and thus to labour which is of the same kind as that which is objectified within the linen itself. The object, coat, counts for it as a sensually palpable objectification of human labour of the same kind, and consequently as value in natural form. Since it is, as value, of the same essence as the coat, the natural form coat thereby becomes the form of appearance of its own value. But the labour represented in the use-value, coat, is not simply human labour, but is rather a particular useful labour: tailoring. Simple human labour (expenditure of human labour-power) is capable of receiving each and every determination, it is true, but is undetermined just in and for itself. It can only realize and objectify itself as soon as human labour-power is expended in a determined form, as determined and specified labour; because it is only determined and specified labour which can be confronted by some natural entity – an external material in which labour objectifies itself. It is only the ‘concept’ in Hegel’s sense that manages to objectify itself without external material.[1]

Time cannot be related to the coat as value or incarnated human labour, without being related to tailoring-labour as the immediate manifestation-form of human labour. The aspect of the use value, coat, however, which is of interest to the linen is neither its woollen comfort, nor its buttoned-up essence nor any other useful quality which marks it out as a use-value. The coat is of service to the linen only in order to represent the linen’s value-objectivity as distinguished from its starchy use-objectivity. It could have attained the same purpose if it had expressed its value in assa foetida or cosmetics, or shoe polish. The tailoring labour, too, has value for the linen, consequently, not insofar as it is purposeful productive labour, but only insofar as it exists as determinate labour, form of realization, manner of objectification of human labour in general. If linen expressed its value in shoe polish rather than in the coat, then polish-making would count for it as the immediate form of realization of abstract human labour instead of tailoring. So a use-value or commodity-body only becomes a form of appearance of value or an Equivalent by another commodity’s relating itself to the concrete, useful species of labour contained in it, as the immediate form of realization of abstract human labour.

We stand here at the jumping-off point of all difficulties which hinder the understanding of value-form. It is relatively easy to distinguish the value of the commodity from its use-value, or the labour which forms the use-value from that same labour insofar as it is merely reckoned as the expenditure of human labour power in the commodity-value. If one considers commodity or labour in the one form, then one fails to consider it in the other, and vice versa. These abstract opposites fall apart on their own, and hence are easy to keep separate. It is different with the value-form which exists only in the relationship of commodity to commodity. The use-value or commodity-body is here playing a new role. It is turning into the form of appearance of the commodity-value, thus of its own opposite. Similarly, the concrete, useful labour contained in the use-value turns into its own opposite, to the mere form of realization of abstract human labour. Instead of falling apart, the opposing determinations of the commodity are reflected against one another. However incomprehensible this seems at first sight, it reveals itself upon further consideration to be necessary. The commodity is right from the start a dual thing, use-value and value, product of useful labour and abstract coagulate of labour. In order to manifest itself as what it is, it must therefore double its form. It possesses right from nature the form of a use-value. That is its natural form. It only earns a value form for itself for the first time in circulation with other commodities. But its value-form has then to be itself an objective form. The only objective forms of commodities are their use forms, their natural forms.

Now since the natural form of a commodity (e.g., linen) is the exact opposite of its value-form, it has to turn another natural form – the natural form of another commodity – into its commodity form. A thing that it cannot do immediately for itself it can do immediately for another commodity, and therefore by a detour for itself. It cannot express its value in its own body or in its own use-value, but it can relate itself to another use-value or commodity-body as an immediately existent value. It can relate itself not to the concrete labour contained in itself, but doubtless to that contained in another species of commodity as a mere form of realization of abstract human labour. For that, it only needs to equate the other commodity to itself as an Equivalent. The use-value of a commodity only exists at all for another commodity insofar as it serves in this fashion for the form of appearance of its value. If one considers only the quantitative relationship in the simple, relative value-expression: x commodity A = y commodity B, then one finds also only the laws developed above concerning the motion of relative value, which all rest upon the fact that the amount of value of commodities is determined by the labour-time required for their production. But if one considers the value relation of both commodities in their qualitative aspect, then one discovers in that simple expression of value the mystery of value form, and hence, in nuce[2] of money.[3]

Our analysis has revealed that the relative value-expression of a commodity includes two different value forms. The linen expresses its value and its determinate amount of value in the coat. It manifests its value in the value-relation to another commodity, and hence as exchange-value. On the other hand, the other commodity, the coat in which it expresses its value in a relative way, obtains precisely in that way the form of a use-value as an equivalent which is immediately exchangeable with it. Both forms, the relative value-form of the one commodity, equivalent form of the other, are forms of exchange-value. Both are actually only vectors – determinations conditioned reciprocally by each other – of the same relative value-expression, but divided like poles between the two commodity-extremes which have been set equal.

Quantitative determinacy is not included in the equivalent-form of a commodity. The determinate relationship (e.g., in which coat is the equivalent of linen) does not flow from its equivalent-form, the form of its immediate exchangeability with linen, but from the determination of the amount of value by labour-time. The linen is only able to represent its own value in coats, by relating itself to a determinate coat-quantum as a given quantum of crystallized human labour. If the coat-value changes, then this relationship also changes. But in order that relative value of linen may change, it has to be present, and it can only be formed upon given coat-value. Now, whether the linen represents its own value in 1, 2 or x coats depends (under this presupposition) completely upon the amount of value of a yard of linen and the number of yards whose value is supposed to be manifested in the form of coats. The amount of value of a commodity can only express it in the use-value of another commodity as relative value. A commodity only obtains the form of an immediately exchangeable use-value (which is what is meant by ‘equivalent’) on the other hand, only as the material in which the value of another commodity is expressed.

This distinction is obscured by a characteristic peculiarity of the relative value-expression in its simple or first form. The equation: 20 yards of linen = 1 coat (or 20 yards of linen are worth a coat) includes, after all, precisely the identical equation: 1 coat = 20 yards of linen (or one coat is worth 20 yards of linen). The relative value-expression of the linen, in which the coat figures as Equivalent, thus contains from the reverse the relative value-expression of the coat, in which the linen figures as Equivalent.

Although both determinations of the value form or both modes of manifestation of the commodity-value as exchange-value are only relative, they do not both appear relative to the same degree. In the relative value of the linen (20 yards of linen = 1 coat), the exchange-value of linen is expressly manifested as its relationship to another commodity. As far as the coat is concerned, it is admittedly an Equivalent insofar as linen is related to the coat as form of appearance of its own value, and hence as something immediately exchangeable with itself (the linen). Only within this relationship is the coat an Equivalent. But it conducts itself passively. It seizes no kind of initiative. It finds itself in relationship because things relate themselves to it. The character which is constituted for it out of its relationship with the linen thus does not appear as the result of its own relating, but as present without any additional activity of its own. In addition, the specific mode and manner in which the linen relates to the coat is exactly appropriate to the end of doing it to the coat, however modest it be and however far from being the product of a ‘tailor run mad with pride’. The linen, after all, relates itself to the coat as the sensually existing materialization of human labour in abstracto and hence as present value-body. It is this only because and insofar as the linen relates itself to the coat in this specific manner. Its status as an Equivalent is (so to speak) only a reflection-determination[4]of linen. But the situation seems just the reverse. On the one hand, the coat does not take the trouble to relate itself to anything. On the other hand, the linen relates itself to the coat, not in order to make it into something, but because it is something quite apart from anything the linen might do. The resultant product of the linen’s relating to the coat (its Equivalent-form, its determinacy as an immediately exchangeable use-value) appears to belong to the coat in a corporeal way even outside the relating to the linen, in just the same way as its property of being able to keep people warm (for example). In the first or simple form of relative value (20 yards of linen – one coat), this false seeming is not yet established, because this form expresses in an immediate way also the opposite, that the coat is an Equivalent of the linen, and that each of the two commodities only possesses this determination because and insofar as the other makes it into its own relative value-expression.[5]

In the simple form of relative value or the expression of the equivalence of two commodities, the development of the form of value is correspondent for both commodities, although in each case in the opposite direction. The relative value-expression is in addition identical with reference to each of both commodities, for the linen manifests its value in only one commodity (the coat) and vice versa, but this value expression is double for both commodities, different for each of the same. Finally, each of both commodities is only an Equivalent for the single other species of commodity, and thus only a single Equivalent.

Such an equation as ‘20 yards of linen = 1 coat’ (or twenty yards of linen are worth one coat) evidently expresses the value of the commodity in only a very limited and one-sided way. If I compare the linen, for example, with other commodities instead of coats, then I also obtain other relative value-expressions, other equations (like 20 yards of linen = u coffee; 20 yards of linen = v tea, etc.). The linen has just as many different relative value-expressions as there exist commodities different from it, and the number of its relative value-expressions constantly increases with the number of kinds of commodities which newly enter into existence.

The first form (20 yards of linen = 1 coat) yielded two relative expressions for the value of two commodities. This second form yields the most variegated mosaic of relative expressions for the value of the same commodity. In addition, there seems to be nothing gained either for the expression of the amount of value (for the amount of value of linen – which obviously remains the same in every expression – is just as exhaustively expressed in ‘20 yards of linen = 1 coat’ as in ‘20 yards of linen = u coffee, etc.’), the coffee and the etcetera are only single Equivalents, just as the coat was.

Nevertheless, this second form contains within itself an essential development of form. For latent in it is, after all, not only the fact that linen happens to express its value at one time in coats, and at another in coffee, etc., but the fact that it expresses its value as much in coats as in coffee, etc.: either in this commodity or that or the third, etc. The continuing determination is revealed as soon as this second or developed form of the relative value-expression is manifested in its connection. We obtain then:

II. Second or developed form of relative value: 20 yards of linen = one coat or = u coffee or = v tea or = x iron or = y wheat or etc., etc. z commodity A = u commodity B or = v commodity C or = w commodity D = x commodity E or = y commodity F or = etc.

The first thing is obviously that the first form constitutes the basic element of the second, for the latter consists of many simple relative value-expressions, as ‘20 yards of linen = one coat’, ‘20 yards of linen u coffee’, etc.

In the first form (20 yards of linen = 1 coat) it may appear like an accidental fact that these two commodities are exchangeable in this specific quantitative relationship. In the second form, however, a background which is essentially different from and determinant of the accidental appearance immediately shines through. The value of the linen remains equally large, whether expressed in coat, or coffee, or iron, etc., in innumerably different commodities belonging to the most different possessors. The accidental relationship of two individual possessors of commodities falls away. It becomes clear that it is not the exchange which regulates the amount of value of the commodity, but in the opposite way the amount of value of the commodity which regulates its relationships of exchange.

In the expression ‘20 yards of linen = 1 coat’, the coat counted as the form of appearance of the work objectified in the linen. In that way the labour contained in the linen was equated to the labour contained in the coat, and was thereby determined as comparable human labour. This determination did not, however, reveal itself expressly. At the level of immediacy, the first form equates the labour contained in the linen only to the labour of tailoring. Otherwise with the second form. In the indefinite, constantly extendable series of its relative value-expressions, the linen relates itself to all possible commodity-bodies as mere form of appearance of the labour which is contained in itself. Consequently it is at this point that the linen value is for the first time really manifested as value, i.e., or crystal of human labour in general. The second form consists of a sum of the familiar equations of the first form. Each of these equations (like ‘20 yards of linen = 1 coat’,) contains also the reciprocal ‘1 coat – 20 yards of linen’, in which case the coat manifests its value in the linen and precisely thereby manifests the linen as an Equivalent. Now, since this holds of each of the innumerable relative value-expressions of linen, we obtain:

III. Third, reversed or reciprocal second form of relative value:

1 coat= 20 yards of linen

u coffee= "

v tea= "

x iron= "

y wheat etc.= "

The relative value-expression returns at this point to its original form: 1 coat = 20 yards of linen. Now, however, this simple equation is further developed. Originally it only contained the fact that the value of the coat obtains through its expression in another commodity a form which is different from and independent of the exchange-value coat or even the body of the coat. Now the very same form manifests the coat with respect to all other commodities whatsoever as value. Not only the coat, but also coffee, iron, wheat, in a word, all other commodities express their value in the material, linen. In this way, all manifest themselves to one another as the same materialization of human labour. They are henceforward only quantitatively different, which is the reason why one coat, u coffee, x iron, etc. – i.e., different quanta of these different things – equal 20 yards of linen (equal to the same quantum of objectified human labour). It is through their common value-expression in the material, linen, therefore, that all commodities differ as exchange-values from their own use-values and relate at the same time to one another as amounts of value, equate themselves qualitatively to one another, and compare themselves quantitatively. Only in this unified relative value-expression do they all appear for the first time as values for one another, and their value consequently obtains for the first time its corresponding form of appearance as exchange-value. As opposed to the developed form of relative value (form II) which manifests the value of a commodity in the environment of all other commodities, we call this unified value-expression the universal relative form of value.

In form II (20 yards of linen = 1 coat or = u coffee, or v tea or x iron, etc.), the form in which the linen develops its relative value-expression, it relates itself to each individual commodity (coat, coffee, etc.) as a specific Equivalent, and to all of them together as to the environment of its specific forms of the Equivalent. No individual species of commodity counts any longer with respect to the linen as simple Equivalent, as in the particular Equivalent, but only as specific Equivalent whereby the one Equivalent excludes the other. In form III (which is the reciprocal second form, and is therefore contained in it), the linen appears on the other hand as the general form of the Equivalent for all other commodities. It is as if alongside and external to lions, tigers, rabbits, and all other actual animals, which form when grouped together the various kinds, species, subspecies, families etc. of the animal kingdom, there existed also in addition the animal, the individual incarnation of the entire animal kingdom. Such a particular which contains within itself all really present species of the same entity is a universal (like animal, god, etc.). Just as linen consequently became an individual Equivalent by the fact that one other commodity related itself to it as form of appearance of value, that is the way linen becomes – as the form of appearance of value common to all commodities – the universal Equivalent universal value-body, universal materialization of abstract human labour. The specific labour materialized in it now thereby counts as universal form of realization of human labour, as universal labour.

During the process in which the value of commodity A is displayed in commodity B (whereby commodity B becomes a single Equivalent), it was indifferent of what specific type commodity B happened to be. The corporeality of commodity B only had to be of a different species than that of commodity A, and therefore had also to be a product of other useful labour. By the coat’s displaying its value in linen, it related itself to linen as the realized human labour, and precisely thereby related itself to linen-weaving as the realization-form of human labour, but the specific determinacy which distinguishes linen-weaving from other kinds of labour was completely indifferent. It only had to be of another kind than tailoring and in any case had to be a specific kind of labour. It is otherwise as soon as linen becomes a universal Equivalent. This use-value – in its special determinacy through which it is linen as opposed to all other kinds of commodities (coffee, iron, etc.) – now becomes the universal form of value of all other commodities and hence a universal Equivalent. The particular useful kind of labour manifested in it therefore now counts as universal form of realization of human labour, as universal labour precisely insofar as it is labour of particular determinacy: linen weaving as opposed, not only to tailoring, but to coffee growing, mining, and all other kinds of labour. On the other hand, all other kinds of labour count (in the relative value-expression of linen – the universal Equivalent: form II), henceforth only as particular forms of realization of human labour.

As values the commodities are expressions of the same unity, of abstract human labour. In the form of exchange value they appear to one another as values and relate themselves to one another as values. They thereby relate themselves at the same time to abstract human labour as their common social substance. Their social relationship consists exclusively in counting with respect to one another as expressions of this social substance of theirs which differs only quantitatively, but which is qualitatively equal and hence replaceable and interchangeable with one another. As a useful thing, a commodity possesses social determinacy insofar as it is use-value for people other than its possessor, and hence satisfies social needs. But it is indifferent just whose needs the commodity’s useful properties relate it to. The commodity nevertheless can only become through these properties in all cases only an object related to human needs, but not a commodity for other commodities. It is only the kind of thing that can turn mere objects of use into commodities and hence set into social rapport. But this is just what value is. The form in which the commodities count to one another as values – as coagulations of human labour – is consequently their social form. Social form of the commodity and value-form or form of exchangeability are thus one and the same thing. If the natural form of a commodity is at the same time its value-form, then the commodity possesses the form of immediate exchangeability with other commodities and consequently an immediately social form.

The simple relative value form (form I) ‘One coat = 20 yards of linen’, differs from the universal relative value-form, ‘One coat = 20 yards linen’ only by the fact that this equation now forms a member in the series:

1 coat = 20 yards of linen

u coffee=

v tea=

etc=

In actuality, it differs thus only in the fact that the linen has continued its development from a singular to a universal Equivalent. Thus if in the simple relative expression of value it is not that commodity which expresses its amount of value, but rather that commodity in which the amount of value is expressed which is the one that obtains the form of immediate exchangeability (equivalent form: hence, immediately social form), the same thing holds true for the universal relative value expression. But in the simple relative form of value this distinction is merely formal and evanescent. If the coat expresses its value in a relative way (that is, in linen) in the equation ‘One coat = 20 yards of linen’, and the linen acquires thereby the form of Equivalent, then the very same equation includes immediately the reciprocity ‘20 yards of linen – one coat’, in which it is the coat that acquires the form of Equivalent and the value of the linen is expressed in a relative way. This constant and correlative development of the value-form of both commodities as relative value and as Equivalent no longer takes place. If the universal relative value-form, ‘One coat = 20 yards of linen’, (where the linen is universal Equivalent) is turned around into ‘20 yards of linen = one coat’, the coat does not thereby become universal Equivalent for all other commodities, but only a particular Equivalent of the linen. The relative value-form of the coat is only universal because it is the relative value-form of all other commodities at the same time. What holds true of the coat, holds true of coffee, etc. It follows, therefore, that the universal relative value-form of commodities excludes these very commodities from the universal form of Equivalent. On the other hand, a commodity like linen is excluded from the universal relative value-form as soon as it possesses the universal form of Equivalent. The universal relative value form of linen, unified with the other commodities, would be ‘20 yards of linen = 20 yards of linen’. But this is a tautology which does not express the amount of value of this commodity, which is situated in a universal form of Equivalent – and thereby in perpetually exchangeable form. Rather, it is the developed relative value-form (20 yards of linen = one coat or u coffee or = v tea or = etc.) that now becomes the specific relative value-expression of the universal Equivalent.

Every commodity (coat, coffee, tea, etc.) possesses in the universal relative value-expression of commodities a value-form which is different from its natural form – namely, the form: linen. And it is precisely in this form that they relate themselves to one another as exchangeables and exchangeables in relationships which are quantitatively determined, since, if one coat = 20 yards of linen, u coffee = 20 yards of linen, etc., then it is also true that one coat = u coffee, etc. All commodities by mirroring themselves in one and the same commodity as quantities of value, reflect themselves reciprocally as quantities of value. But the natural forms which they possess as objects of use count for them reciprocally as forms of appearance of value only over this detour, and consequently not in an immediate way. They are not for that reason immediately exchangeable just because of the way they immediately are. Thus they do not possess the form of immediate exchangeability for one another; i.e., their socially valid form is a mediated one. It is the other way around. It is through the fact that all other commodities relate themselves to linen as form of appearance of value, that the natural form of linen becomes the form of its immediate exchangeability with all commodities – and consequently its universal social form in an immediate way.

A commodity only acquires the universal Equivalent-form because and insofar as it serves all other commodities in the manifesting of their universal relative (and hence not immediate) value-form. Commodities, however, have to endow themselves with relative value-form in general, because their natural-forms are only their forms of use-value, and they have to endow themselves with unified (and hence universal) relative value-forms in order for all of them to relate to one another as values, as homogeneous coagulations of human labour. A single commodity, therefore, only finds itself in the form of immediate exchangeability with all other commodities, and therefore in immediately social form, because and insofar as all other commodities do not find themselves therein, or because the commodity by its very nature does not in general find itself in an immediately exchangeable or social form, by virtue of the fact that its immediate form is the form of its use-value, not of its value.

One does not by any means actually detect in the form of universal immediate exchangeability that it is a contradictory form of commodity: just as inseparable from the form of not immediate exchangeability as the positivity of one pole of a magnet is from the negativity of the other. Consequently, one can imagine that one could impress the mark of immediate exchangeability on all commodities at the same time, just as one can also imagine that one could make all workers into capitalists. Actually, however, universal relative value-form and universal Equivalent-form are the contradictory, reciprocally-presupposing and reciprocally repelling poles of the very same social form of commodities.

As immediate social materialization of labour, linen is (as the universal Equivalent) materialization of immediately social labour, while other bodies of commodities, which represent their value in linen, are materializations of not-immediately social labours.

Actually, all use-values are only commodities because they are products of private labours which are independent of one another private labours which, however, depend materially upon one another as particular members (even though rendered self-sufficient) of the primordial system of division of labour. In this fashion, they hang together socially precisely through their differentiation, their particular usefulness. That is exactly the reason why they produce qualitatively differing use-values.

If they did not, then these use-values would not become commodities for one another. On the other hand, this differing useful quality does not yet make products into commodities. If a peasant family produces coat, linen and wheat for its own consumption, then these things confront the family as differing products of their family labour, but do not confront one another reciprocally as commodities. If the commodity were immediately social (i.e., common) labour, then the products would acquire the immediately social character of a common product for its producers, but not the character of commodities for one another. Nevertheless, we do not have far to seek, in this case, for that in which the social form of the private labours consists, which are contained in the commodities and are independent of one another. It already yielded itself out of the analysis of the commodity. The commodities’ social form is their relationship to one another as equal labour; hence – since the equality of toto coelo [utterly] different labours can only consist in an abstraction from their inequality their relationship to one another as human labour in general: expenditures of human labour-power, which is what all human labours – whatever their content and their mode of operation – actually are. In each social form of labour, the labours of different individuals are related to one another as human labours too, but in this case this relating itself counts as the specifically social form of the labours. Now none of these private labours in its natural form possesses this specifically social form of abstract human labour, just as little as the commodity in its natural form possesses the social form of mere coagulation of labour, or value. However, through the fact that the natural form of a commodity (linen, in this case) becomes a universal Equivalent-form because all other commodities relate themselves to this natural form as the appearance-form of their own value, hence linen-weaving also turns into a universal form of realization of abstract human labour or into labour of immediately social form. The standard of ‘socialness’ must be borrowed from the nature of those relationships which are proper to each mode of production, and not from conceptions which are foreign to it. Just as we demonstrated earlier that the commodity naturally excludes the immediate form of universal exchange-ability and that the universal Equivalent-form consequently can only develop in a contradictory way, so the same thing holds for the private labours lurking in the commodities. Since they are not-immediately social labour, in the first place the social form is a form which differs from the natural forms of the real, useful labours and is foreign to them and abstract; and in the second place, all kinds of private labour obtain their social character only In a contradictory way, by all being equated to one exclusive kind of private labour (linen-weaving, in this case). This latter thereby becomes the immediate and universal form of appearance of abstract human labour and thereby labour in immediately social form. It manifests itself consequently also in a product which is socially valid and universally exchangeable.

The illusion as if the equivalent-form of a commodity resulted from its own corporeal nature instead of being a mere reflex of the relationships of other commodities: this illusion strengthens itself with the continuing development of the singular Equivalent to the universal, because the contradictory vectors of the value-form no longer develop equally for the commodities which are related to one another, because the universal Equivalent-form separates a commodity off as something totally secluded from all other commodities, and finally because this (the commodity’s form) is actually no longer the product of the relationship of any singular commodity.

From our present standpoint the universal Equivalent has not yet by any means ossified, however. What was the way in which linen was metamorphosed into the universal Equivalent, actually? By the fact that it displayed its value, first in one single commodity (form I), then in all other commodities in order in a relative way (form II), and thereby all other commodities reflexively displayed their values in it in a relative way (form III). The simple relative value-expression was the seed out of which the universal Equivalent-form of linen developed. It changes its role within this development. It begins by displaying its amount of value in one other commodity and ends by serving as material for the value-expression of all other commodities. What holds for linen holds for every commodity. In its developed relative value-expression (form II) – which only consists of its many, simple value-expressions – the linen does not yet figure as universal Equivalent. Rather, every other commodity-body forms in this case linen’s Equivalent , is thereby immediately exchangeable with it and is therefore able to change places with it.

So we obtain finally:

Form IV:

20 yards of linen= one coat or = u coffee or v tea or = x iron or = y wheat or etc.

One coat= 20 yards of linen or u coffee or = v tea or = x iron or = y wheat or = etc.

u coffee= 20 yards of linen or = one coat or v tea or x iron or y wheat or v tea or = etc.

v tea= etc.

But each of these equations reflexively yields coat, coffee, tea, etc. as universal Equivalent and consequently yields value-expression in coat, coffee, tea, etc. as universal relative value-form of all other commodities. It is only in its opposition to other commodities that a commodity turns into the universal Equivalent-form; but every commodity turns into the universal Equivalent-form in its opposition to all other commodities. If every commodity confronts all other commodities with its own natural form as universal Equivalent-form, the result is that all commodities exclude themselves from the socially valid displaying of their amounts of value.

Obviously, the analysis of the commodity yields all essential determinations of the value-form and the value-form itself in its contradictory vectors, yields the universal relative value-form, the universal Equivalent-form, and finally the never-ending sequence of simple relative value-expressions – which sequence forms at first a transitional phase in the development of the value-form, in order finally to suddenly shift into the specifically relative value-form of the universal Equivalent. But the analysis of the commodity yielded these forms as commodity-forms in general (which thus also apply to each and every commodity) in a contradictory manner, so that if commodity A finds itself to be in one of the contradictory form-determinations, then commodities B, C, etc. adopt the other in opposition to it. What was decisively important, however, was to discover the inner, necessary connection between value-form, value-substance, and value-amount; i.e., expressed conceptually, to prove that the value form arises out of the value-concept.

A commodity seems at first glance to be a self-evident, trivial thing. The analysis of it yields the insight that it is a very vexatious thing, full of metaphysical subtlety and theological perversities. As mere use-value, it is a sensual thing in which there is nothing portentous, whether I happen to consider it from the viewpoint that its attributes satisfy human needs or that it obtains these attributes only as product of human labour. There is absolutely nothing of a riddle in the fact that man changes by his activity the forms of natural matter in a way which is useful to him. The form of wood, for example, is changed if one makes a table out of it. Nevertheless, the table remains wood, an ordinary, sensual thing. But as soon as it steps out as commodity, it metamorphoses itself into a sensually supersensual thing. It does not only stand with its feet on the ground, but it confronts all other commodities on its head, and develops out of its wooden head caprices which are much more wondrous than if it all of a sudden began to dance.

The mystical character of the commodity thus does not arise in its use-value. It arises just as little out of the value-determinations, considered in themselves. For in the first place, however different the useful labours or productive activities may be, it is a physiological truth that they are functions of a specifically human organism as distinguished from other organisms, and that every such function, whatever its content and its form, is essentially expenditure of human brain, nerve, muscle, organ of perception, etc. In the second place, if we consider that which lies at the basis of the determination of the amount of value (the duration of time of that expenditure, or the quantity of labour), it is clear that the quantity is distinguishable from the quality of labour in a way which is even perceptible with the naked eye. In all conditions, it was the time of labour which the production of necessities costs that had to be of concern to man, although not to the same degree at different levels of development. Finally, as soon as men work for one another in any manner, their labour acquires in addition a social form.

Let us take Robinson Crusoe on his island. Modest as he naturally is, nevertheless he has various needs to satisfy and must therefore perform useful labours of various sorts, make tools, build furniture, tame llamas, fish, hunt etc. We do not refer at this time to praying and other such activities, since our Robinson derives enjoyment from them and regards such activity as recreation. Despite the variety of his productive functions, he knows that they are only various forms of activity of one and the same Robinson, and thus are only different modes of human labour. Necessity itself compels him to divide his time exactly between his various functions. Whether the one takes more space and the other takes less in the totality of his activity depends upon the greater or lesser difficulty which must be overcome for the attainment of the intended useful effect. Experience teaches him that much, and our Robinson who saved watch, diary, ink and pen from the shipwreck begins to keep a set of books about himself like a good Englishman. His inventory contains a list of the objects of use which he possesses, of the various operations which are required for their production, and finally of the labour-time which particular quanta of these various products cost him on the average. All relationships between Robinson and the things which form his self-made wealth are here so simple and transparent that even Mr. Wirth[6] can understand them without particular mental exertion. And nevertheless all essential determinations of value are contained therein.

If we now put an organization of free men in Robinson’s place, who work with common means of production and expend their many individual labour-powers consciously as one social labour-power, all the determinations of Robinson’s labour are repeated: but in a social rather than an individual way. Nevertheless, an essential difference emerges. All Robinson’s products were his exclusively personal pro- duct, and were thereby immediately objects of use for him. The total product of the organization is a social product. One part of this product serves again as means of production. It remains social. But another part is used up by the members of the organization as necessities. This part must be divided up among them. The manner of this division will change with the particular manner of the social production-organism itself and the comparable historical level of development of the producers. Only for the sake of the parallel with commodity-production do we presuppose that each producer’s share of necessities of life is determined by his labour-time. In such a case, the labour-time would play a dual role. Its socially planned distribution controls the correct proportion of the various labour-functions to the various needs. On the other hand, the labour-time serves at the same time as the measure of the individual share of the producer in the common labour, and thereby also in the part of the common product which can be used up by individuals. The social relationships of men to their labour and their products of labour remained transparently simple in this case, in production as well as in distribution.

Whence comes the puzzling character of the labour-product as soon as it assumes the form of commodity?

If men relate their products to one another as values insofar as these objects count as merely objectified husks of homogeneous human labour, there lies at the same time in that relationship the reverse, that their various labours only count as homogeneous human labour when under objectified husk. They relate their various labours to one another as human labour by relating their products to one another as values. The personal relationship is concealed by the objectified form. So just what a value is does not stand written on its forehead. In order to relate their products to one another as commodities, men are compelled to equate their various labours to abstract human labour. They do not know it, but they do it, by reducing the material thing to the abstraction, value. This is a primordial and hence unconsciously instinctive operation of their brain, which necessarily grows out of the particular manner of their material production and the relationships into which this production sets them. First their relationship exists in a practical mode. Second, however, their relationship exists as relationship for them. The way in which it exists for them or is reflected in their brain arises from the very nature of the relationship. Later, they attempt to get behind the mystery of their own social product by the aid of science, for the determination of a thing as value is their product, just as much as speech. Now as far as concerns the amount of value, we note that the private labours which are plied independently of one another (but because they are members of the primordial division of labour are dependent upon one another) on all sides are constantly reduced to their socially proportional measure by the fact that in the accidental and perpetually shifting exchange relationships of their products the labour-time which is socially necessary for their production forcibly obtrudes itself as a regulating natural-law, just as the law of gravity does, for example, when the house falls down on one’s head. The determination of the amount of value by the labour-time is consequently the mystery lurking under the apparent motions of the relative commodity-values. The producers’ own social movement possesses for them the form of a motion of objects under the control of which the producers lie instead of controlling the motion. As far as concerns the value-form finally, we note that it is just exactly this form which objectively veils the social relationships of private workers and consequently the social determinations of private labours, instead of laying them bare. If I say that coat, boots, etc. relate themselves to linen as universal materialization of abstract human labour, the insanity in such a way of putting things leaps into view. But if the producers of coat, boots, etc. relate these commodities to linen as universal Equivalent, then the social relatedness of their private labours appears to them in exactly this insane form.

Such forms as these constitute precisely the categories of bourgeois economy. They are the socially valid – thus objective – forms of thought, for relationships of production of this particular historically determined social mode of production.

The private producers only enter into social contact for the first time through their private products: objects. The social relationships of their labours are and appear consequently not as immediately social relationships of persons in their labours, but as objectified relationships of persons, or social relationships of objects. The first and most universal manifestation of the object as a social thing, however, is the metamorphosis of the product of labour into a commodity. The mysticism of the commodity arises, therefore, from the fact that the social determinations of the private labours of the private producers appear to them as social natural determinations of products of labour; from the fact, that is, that the social relationships of production of persons appear as social relationships of objects to one another and to the persons involved. The relationships of the private workers to the totality of social labour objectify themselves over against them and exist, consequently, for them in the forms of objects. To a society of commodity producers whose universally social relationship of production consists in their behaving toward their products as commodities (hence as values) and their relating their private labours to one another in this objective form as equal human labour, it is Christianity that is the most appropriate form of religion, with its cult of the abstract man – especially in its bourgeois development, Protestantism, Deism, etc. In the ancient Asian, antique, etc. modes of production, the metamorphosis of the product into a commodity and accordingly the existence of man as commodity-producer plays a subordinate role, which, however, becomes greater the more the communities enter upon the stage of their decline. Genuine commercial people only exist in the interstices of the ancient world, like the gods of Epicurus or like the Jews in the pores of Polish society. Those ancient social organisms of production are extraordinarily much more simple and transparent than the bourgeois organism, but they are based either on the immaturity of the individual man who has not yet torn himself free of the umbilicus of the natural species-connection with other men or are based upon immediate master and slave relationships. They are conditioned by a low level of development of the productive powers of labour by correspondingly restricted relationships of men within their material process of the constitution of life, and consequently to one another and to nature. This actual restrictedness reflects itself in an idealist mode in the ancient natural and popular religions. The religious reflection of the real world can only disappear as soon as the relationships of practical work-a-day life represent for men daily transparently reasonable relationships to one another and to nature. But relationships can only represent themselves as what they are. The form of the social process of life (i.e., of the material process of production) will only cast off its mystic veil of fog once it stands as a product of freely socialized men under their conscious, planned control. For that to happen, however, a material basis of society is demanded or a row of material conditions of existence which are themselves again the primordial product of a long and painful history of development.

Political economy has by now, to be sure, analysed value and amount of value, even if incompletely. It has never even so much as posed the question: Why does labour manifest itself in value and the measure of labour by its temporal duration manifest itself in amount of value? Forms upon whose foreheads it is written that they belong to a social formation wherein the process of production masters men but not yet does man master the process of production – such forms count for their bourgeois consciousness as just such a self-evident natural necessity as productive labour itself. Pre-bourgeois forms of the social productive organism are accordingly treated by Political Economy roughly like pre-Christian religions are treated by the Fathers of the Church.

Just how drastically a section of the economists is deceived by the fetishism which sticks to the world of commodities (or by the objective illusion of the social determinations of labour) is proved among other things by the tediously pointless contention about the role of nature in the formation of exchange-value. Since exchange-value is a determinate social style of expressing the labour which has been applied to a thing, it can no more contain natural matter than the rate of exchange, for example.

The commodity form was still relatively easy to see through as the most universal and most undeveloped form of bourgeois production, which for that reason appears even in earlier periods of production, although not in the same prevailing (and hence characteristic) way. But as for more concrete forms like Capital, for example? The fetishism of classical economics here becomes palpable.

In order not to anticipate, however, let another example concerning the commodity-form itself suffice. It has been observed that in the relationship of commodity to commodity (e.g., of shoe to shoe-shine boy) the use-value of the shoe-shine boy (i.e., the utility of his real, material properties) is completely irrelevant to the shoe. The shoeshine boy is of interest to the commodity, shoe, only as form of appearance of its own value. So if commodities could speak, they would say: ‘Our use-value may be of interest to a man. But it does not inhere in us insofar as we are things. It is our exchange-value that inheres in us as things. Our own circulation as commodity-things proves that. It is only as exchange-values that we relate ourselves to one another.’ Now just listen to how the economists speak forth from the very soul of the commodity: ‘Value (exchange-value) is a property of things, riches (use-value) of man. Value, in this sense, necessarily implies exchanges, riches do not.’ (Anonymous, 1821) ‘Riches (use-value) are the attribute of man; value is the attribute of commodities. A man or a community is rich; a pearl or a diamond is valuable . . . A pearl or a diamond is valuable as a pearl or diamond .’ (S. Bailey) Up to now, no chemist has discovered exchange-value in pearl or diamond. Our authors, who lay claim to special critical depth find, nevertheless, that use-value inheres in objects independently of their material properties, but their exchange-value on the other hand inheres in them as objects. The remarkable circumstance that the use-value of things realizes itself for men without exchange (thus, in the immediate relationship between thing and man), but their value on the other hand realizes itself only in exchange (that is, in a social process) is what strengthens them in their belief. Who is not reminded here of that excellent Dogberry who teaches the night-watchman Seacoal, ‘To be a well-favoured man is the gift of Fortune, but to write and read comes by Nature.’ (Much Ado About Nothing, Act III, Scene 3.)

The commodity is immediate unity of use-value and exchange-value, thus of two opposed entities. Thus it is an immediate contradiction. This contradiction must enter upon a development just as soon as it is no longer considered as hitherto in an analytic manner (at one time from the viewpoint of use-value and at another from the viewpoint of exchange-value) but is really related to other commodities as a totality. The real relating of commodities to one another, however, is their process of exchange.

1. ‘The concept, which is only subjective at first, marches ahead in accordance with its own proper activity to objectify itself, without needing any external material or stuff for the purpose.’ Hegel, Logik, p. 367, Encyclopaedia I.

2. ‘In a nut-shell’; that is, potentially. – A.D.

3. It is scarcely surprising that economists have overlooked the form-content of the relative value-expression (subjected as they are to the influence of material interests), if professional logicians before Hegel even overlooked the content of form in the paradigms of judgments and conclusions.

4. Hegelian term, including Identity, Difference, Contradiction. – A.D.

5. There is something special about such reflection-determinations. This man here is (e.g.) only King, because other men behave towards him like subjects. They believe, however, that they are subjects because he is King.

6. Hack economist of Marx’s day.

Karl Marx. Capital Volume One

## Chapter Two: Exchange

It is plain that commodities cannot go to market and
make exchanges of their own account. We must, therefore, have recourse
to their guardians, who are also their owners. Commodities are things, and
therefore without power of resistance against man. If they are wanting
in docility he can use force; in other words, he can take possession of
them. [1] In order that these objects may enter into
relation with each other as commodities, their guardians must place themselves
in relation to one another, as persons whose will resides in those objects,
and must behave in such a way that each does not appropriate the commodity
of the other, and part with his own, except by means of an act done by
mutual consent. They must therefore, mutually recognise in each other the
rights of private proprietors. This juridical relation, which thus expresses
itself in a contract, whether such contract be part of a developed legal
system or not, is a relation between two wills, and is but the reflex of
the real economic relation between the two. It is this economic relation
that determines the subject-matter comprised in each such juridical act.[2]

The persons exist for one another merely as representatives of, and,
therefore. as owners of, commodities. In the course of our investigation
we shall find, in general, that the characters who appear on the economic
stage are but the personifications of the economic relations that exist
between them.

What chiefly distinguishes a commodity from its owner is the fact,
that it looks upon every other commodity as but the form of appearance
of its own value. A born leveller and a cynic, it is always ready to exchange
not only soul, but body, with any and every other commodity, be the same
more repulsive than Maritornes herself. The owner makes up for this lack
in the commodity of a sense of the concrete, by his own five and more senses.
His commodity possesses for himself no immediate use-value. Otherwise,
he would not bring it to the market. It has use-value for others; but for
himself its only direct use-value is that of being a depository of exchange-value,
and, consequently, a means of exchange.[3] Therefore,
he makes up his mind to part with it for commodities whose value in use
is of service to him. All commodities are non-use-values for their owners,
and use-values for their non-owners. Consequently, they must all change
hands. But this change of hands is what constitutes their exchange, and
the latter puts them in relation with each other as values, and realises
them as values. Hence commodities must be realised as values before they
can be realised as use-values.

On the other hand, they must show that they are use-values before
they can be realised as values. For the labour spent upon them counts effectively,
only in so far as it is spent in a form that is useful for others. Whether
that labour is useful for others, and its product consequently capable
of satisfying the wants of others, can be proved only by the act of exchange.

Every owner of a commodity wishes to part with it in exchange
only for those commodities whose use-value satisfies some want of his.
Looked at in this way, exchange is for him simply a private transaction.
On the other hand, he desires to realise the value of his commodity, to
convert it into any other suitable commodity of equal value, irrespective
of whether his own commodity has or has not any use-value for the owner
of the other. From this point of view, exchange is for him a social transaction
of a general character. But one and the same set of transactions cannot
be simultaneously for all owners of commodities both exclusively private
and exclusively social and general.

Let us look at the matter a little closer. To the owner of a commodity,
every other commodity is, in regard to his own, a particular equivalent,
and consequently his own commodity is the universal equivalent for all
the others. But since this applies to every owner, there is, in fact, no
commodity acting as universal equivalent, and the relative value of commodities
possesses no general form under which they can be equated as values and
have the magnitude of their values compared. So far, therefore, they do
not confront each other as commodities, but only as products or use-values.
In their difficulties our commodity owners think like Faust: “Im Anfang
war die Tat.” [“In the beginning was the deed.” – Goethe, Faust.]
They therefore acted and transacted before they thought.
Instinctively they conform to the laws imposed by the nature of commodities.
They cannot bring their commodities into relation as values, and therefore
as commodities, except by comparing them with some one other commodity
as the universal equivalent. That we saw from the analysis of a commodity.
But a particular commodity cannot become the universal equivalent except
by a social act. The social action therefore of all other commodities,
sets apart the particular commodity in which they all represent their values.
Thereby the bodily form of this commodity becomes the form of the socially
recognised universal equivalent. To be the universal equivalent, becomes,
by this social process, the specific function of the commodity thus excluded
by the rest. Thus it becomes – money. “Illi unum consilium habent et virtutem
et potestatem suam bestiae tradunt. Et ne quis possit emere aut vendere,
nisi qui habet characterem aut nomen bestiae aut numerum nominis ejus.” [“These have one mind, and shall give their power and strength unto the beast.” Revelations, 17:13; “And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.” Revelations, 13:17.]
(Apocalypse.)

Money is a crystal formed of necessity in the course of the exchanges,
whereby different products of labour are practically equated to one another
and thus by practice converted into commodities. The historical progress
and extension of exchanges develops the contrast, latent in commodities,
between use-value and value. The necessity for giving an external expression
to this contrast for the purposes of commercial intercourse, urges on the
establishment of an independent form of value, and finds no rest until
it is once for all satisfied by the differentiation of commodities into
commodities and money. At the same rate, then, as the conversion of products
into commodities is being accomplished, so also is the conversion of one
special commodity into money.[4]

The direct barter of products attains the elementary form of the
relative expression of value in one respect, but not in another. That form
is x Commodity A = y Commodity B. The form of direct barter is x use-value
A = y use-value B.[5] The articles A and B in this case
are not as yet commodities, but become so only by the act of barter. The
first step made by an object of utility towards acquiring exchange-value
is when it forms a non-use-value for its owner, and that happens when it
forms a superfluous portion of some article required for his immediate
wants. Objects in themselves are external to man, and consequently alienable
by him. In order that this alienation may be reciprocal, it is only necessary
for men, by a tacit understanding, to treat each other as private owners
of those alienable objects, and by implication as independent individuals.
But such a state of reciprocal independence has no existence in a primitive
society based on property in common, whether such a society takes the form
of a patriarchal family, an ancient Indian community, or a Peruvian Inca
State. The exchange of commodities, therefore, first begins on the boundaries
of such communities, at their points of contact with other similar communities,
or with members of the latter. So soon, however, as products once become
commodities in the external relations of a community, they also, by reaction,
become so in its internal intercourse. The proportions in which they are
exchangeable are at first quite a matter of chance. What makes them exchangeable
is the mutual desire of their owners to alienate them. Meantime the need
for foreign objects of utility gradually establishes itself. The constant
repetition of exchange makes it a normal social act. In the course of time,
therefore, some portion at least of the products of labour must be produced
with a special view to exchange. From that moment the distinction becomes
firmly established between the utility of an object for the purposes of
consumption, and its utility for the purposes of exchange. Its use-value
becomes distinguished from its exchange-value. On the other hand, the quantitative
proportion in which the articles are exchangeable, becomes dependent on
their production itself. Custom stamps them as values with definite magnitudes.

In the direct barter of products, each commodity is directly a
means of exchange to its owner, and to all other persons an equivalent,
but that only in so far as it has use-value for them. At this stage, therefore,
the articles exchanged do not acquire a value-form independent of their
own use-value, or of the individual needs of the exchangers. The necessity
for a value-form grows with the increasing number and variety of the commodities
exchanged. The problem and the means of solution arise simultaneously.
Commodity-owners never equate their own commodities to those of others,
and exchange them on a large scale, without different kinds of commodities
belonging to different owners being exchangeable for, and equated as values
to, one and the same special article. Such last-mentioned article, by becoming
the equivalent of various other commodities, acquires at once, though within
narrow limits, the character of a general social equivalent. This character
comes and goes with the momentary social acts that called it into life.
In turns and transiently it attaches itself first to this and then to that
commodity. But with the development of exchange it fixes itself firmly
and exclusively to particular sorts of commodities, and becomes crystallised
by assuming the money-form. The particular kind of commodity to which it
sticks is at first a matter of accident. Nevertheless there are two circumstances
whose influence is decisive. The money-form attaches itself either to the
most important articles of exchange from outside, and these in fact are
primitive and natural forms in which the exchange-value of home products
finds expression; or else it attaches itself to the object of utility that
forms, like cattle, the chief portion of indigenous alienable wealth. Nomad
races are the first to develop the money-form, because all their worldly
goods consist of moveable objects and are therefore directly alienable;
and because their mode of life, by continually bringing them into contact
with foreign communities, solicits the exchange of products. Man has often
made man himself, under the form of slaves, serve as the primitive material
of money, but has never used land for that purpose. Such an idea could
only spring up in a bourgeois society already well developed. It dates
from the last third of the 17th century, and the first attempt to put it
in practice on a national scale was made a century afterwards, during the
French bourgeois revolution.

In proportion as exchange bursts its local bonds, and the value
of commodities more and more expands into an embodiment of human labour
in the abstract, in the same proportion the character of money attaches
itself to commodities that are by Nature fitted to perform the social function
of a universal equivalent. Those commodities are the precious metals.

The truth of the proposition that, “although gold and silver are
not by Nature money, money is by Nature gold and silver,”[6]
is shown by the fitness of the physical properties of these metals for
the functions of money.[7] Up to this point, however,
we are acquainted only with one function of money, namely, to serve as
the form of manifestation of the value of commodities, or as the material
in which the magnitudes of their values are socially expressed. An adequate
form of manifestation of value, a fit embodiment of abstract, undifferentiated,
and therefore equal human labour, that material alone can be whose every
sample exhibits the same uniform qualities. On the other hand, since the
difference between the magnitudes of value is purely quantitative, the
money commodity must be susceptible of merely quantitative differences,
must therefore be divisible at will, and equally capable of being reunited.
Gold and silver possess these properties by Nature.

The use-value of the money-commodity becomes two-fold. In addition
to its special use-value as a commodity (gold, for instance, serving to
stop teeth, to form the raw material of articles of luxury, &c.), it
acquires a formal use-value, originating in its specific social function.

Since all commodities are merely particular equivalents of money,
the latter being their universal equivalent, they, with regard to the latter
as the universal commodity, play the parts of particular commodities. [8]

We have seen that the money-form is but the reflex, thrown upon
one single commodity, of the value relations between all the rest. That
money is a commodity [9] is therefore a new discovery
only for those who, when they analyse it, start from its fully developed
shape. The act of exchange gives to the commodity converted into money,
not its value, but its specific value-form. By confounding these two distinct
things some writers have been led to hold that the value of gold and silver
is imaginary. [10] The fact that money can, in certain
functions, be replaced by mere symbols of itself, gave rise to that other
mistaken notion, that it is itself a mere symbol. Nevertheless under this
error lurked a presentiment that the money-form of an object is not an
inseparable part of that object, but is simply the form under which certain
social relations manifest themselves. In this sense every commodity is
a symbol, since, in so far as it is value, it is only the material envelope
of the human labour spent upon it.[11] But if it be
declared that the social characters assumed by objects, or the material
forms assumed by the social qualities of labour under the régime
of a definite mode of production, are mere symbols, it is in the same breath
also declared that these characteristics are arbitrary fictions sanctioned
by the so-called universal consent of mankind. This suited the mode of
explanation in favour during the 18th century. Unable to account for the
origin of the puzzling forms assumed by social relations between man and
man, people sought to denude them of their strange appearance by ascribing
to them a conventional origin.

It has already been remarked above that the equivalent form of
a commodity does not imply the determination of the magnitude of its value.
Therefore, although we may be aware that gold is money, and consequently
directly exchangeable for all other commodities, yet that fact by no means
tells how much 10 lbs., for instance, of gold is worth. Money, like every
other commodity, cannot express the magnitude of its value except relatively
in other commodities. This value is determined by the labour-time required
for its production, and is expressed by the quantity of any other commodity
that costs the same amount of labour-time. [12] Such
quantitative determination of its relative value takes place at the source
of its production by means of barter. When it steps into circulation as
money, its value is already given. In the last decades of the 17th century
it had already been shown that money is a commodity, but this step marks
only the infancy of the analysis. The difficulty lies, not in comprehending
that money is a commodity, but in discovering how, why, and by what means
a commodity becomes money. [13]

We have already seen, from the most elementary expression of value,
x commodity A = y commodity B, that the object in which the magnitude of
the value of another object is represented, appears to have the equivalent
form independently of this relation, as a social property given to it by
Nature. We followed up this false appearance to its final establishment,
which is complete so soon as the universal equivalent form becomes identified
with the bodily form of a particular commodity, and thus crystallised into
the money-form. What appears to happen is, not that gold becomes money,
in consequence of all other commodities expressing their values in it,
but, on the contrary, that all other commodities universally express their
values in gold, because it is money. The intermediate steps of the process
vanish in the result and leave no trace behind. Commodities find their
own value already completely represented, without any initiative on their
part, in another commodity existing in company with them. These objects,
gold and silver, just as they come out of the bowels of the earth, are
forthwith the direct incarnation of all human labour. Hence the magic of
money. In the form of society now under consideration, the behaviour of
men in the social process of production is purely atomic. Hence their relations
to each other in production assume a material character independent of
their control and conscious individual action. These facts manifest themselves
at first by products as a general rule taking the form of commodities.
We have seen how the progressive development of a society of commodity-producers
stamps one privileged commodity with the character of money. Hence the
riddle presented by money is but the riddle presented by commodities; only
it now strikes us in its most glaring form.

Footnotes

1. In the 12th century, so renowned for its
piety, they included amongst commodities some very delicate things. Thus
a French poet of the period enumerates amongst the goods to be found in
the market of Landit, not only clothing, shoes, leather, agricultural implements,
&c., but also “femmes folles de leur corps.”

2. Proudhon begins by taking his ideal
of Justice, of “justice éternelle,” from the juridical relations
that correspond to the production of commodities: thereby, it may be noted,
he proves, to the consolation of all good citizens, that the production
of commodities is a form of production as everlasting as justice. Then
he turns round and seeks to reform the actual production of commodities,
and the actual legal system corresponding thereto, in accordance with this
ideal. What opinion should we have of a chemist, who, instead of studying
the actual laws of the molecular changes in the composition and decomposition
of matter, and on that foundation solving definite problems, claimed to
regulate the composition and decomposition of matter by means of the “eternal
ideas,” of “naturalité” and “affinité”? Do we really know
any more about “usury,” when we say it contradicts “justice éternelle,”
équité éternelle,” “mutualité éternelle,”
and other vérités éternelles” than the fathers of the
church did when they said it was incompatible with “grâce éternelle,”
“foi éternelle,” and “la volonté éternelle de Dieu”?

3. “For two-fold is the use of every
object.... The one is peculiar to the object as such, the other is not,
as a sandal which may be worn, and is also exchangeable. Both are uses
of the sandal, for even he who exchanges the sandal for the money or food
he is in want of, makes use of the sandal as a sandal. But not in its natural
way. For it has not been made for the sake of being exchanged.” (Aristoteles,
“De Rep.” l. i. c. 9.)

4. From this we may form an estimate
of the shrewdness of the petit-bourgeois socialism, which, while perpetuating
the production of commodities, aims at abolishing the “antagonism” between
money and commodities, and consequently, since money exists only by virtue
of this antagonism, at abolishing money itself. We might just as well try
to retain Catholicism without the Pope. For more on this point see my work,
“Zur Kritik der Pol. Oekon.,” p. 61, sq.

5. So long as, instead of two distinct
use-values being exchanged, a chaotic mass of articles are offered as the
equivalent of a single article, which is often the case with savages, even
the direct barter of products is in its first infancy.

6. Karl Marx, l.c., p. 135. “I metalli
... naturalmente moneta.” [“The metals ... are by their nature money.”] (Galiani, “Della moneta” in Custodi’s Collection:
Parte Moderna t. iii.)

7. For further details on this subject
see in my work cited above, the chapter on “The precious metals.”

8. “Il danaro è la merce universale"(Verri,
l.c., p. 16).

9. “Silver and gold themselves (which
we may call by the general name of bullion) are ... commodities ... rising
and falling in ... value ... Bullion, then, may be reckoned to be of higher
value where the smaller weight will purchase the greater quantity of the
product or manufacture of the countrey,” &c. (“A Discourse of the General
Notions of Money, Trade, and Exchanges, as They Stand in Relation each
to other.” By a Merchant. Lond., 1695, p. 7.) “Silver and gold, coined
or uncoined, though they are used for a measure of all other things, are
no less a commodity than wine, oil, tobacco, cloth, or stuffs.” (“A Discourse
concerning Trade, and that in particular of the East Indies,” &c. London,
1689, p. 2.) “The stock and riches of the kingdom cannot properly be confined
to money, nor ought gold and silver to be excluded from being merchandise.”
("The East-India Trade a Most Profitable Trade.” London, 1677, p. 4.)

10. “L’oro e l’argento hanno valore
come metalli anteriore all’esser moneta.” [“Gold and silver have value as metals before they are money”] (Galiani, l.c.) Locke says,
“The universal consent of mankind gave to silver, on account of its qualities
which made it suitable for money, an imaginary value.” Law, on the other
hand. “How could different nations give an imaginary value to any single
thing... or how could this imaginary value have maintained itself?” But
the following shows how little he himself understood about the matter:
“Silver was exchanged in proportion to the value in use it possessed, consequently
in proportion to its real value. By its adoption as money it received an
additional value (une valeur additionnelle).” (Jean Law: “Considérations
sur le numéraire et le commerce” in E. Daire’s Edit. of “Economistes
Financiers du XVIII siècle,” p. 470.)

11. “L’Argent en (des denrées) est le signe.” [“Money is their (the commodities’) symbol”] (V. de Forbonnais: “Eléments du Commerce, Nouv. Edit. Leyde, 1766,” t. II., p. 143.) “Comme signe il est attiré par les denrées.” [“As a symbol it is attracted by the commodities”] (l.c., p. 155.) “L’argent est un signe d’une chose et la représente.” [“Money is a symbol of a thing and represents it”] (Montesquieu: “Esprit des Lois,” (Oeuvres, Lond. 1767, t. II, p. 2.) “L’argent n’est pas simple signe, car il est lui-même richesse, il ne représente pas les valeurs, il les équivaut.” [“Money is not a mere symbol, for it is itself wealth; it does not represent the values, it is their equivalents”] (Le Trosne, l.c., p. 910.) “The notion of value contemplates the valuable article as a mere symbol - the article counts not for what it is, but for what it is worth.” (Hegel, l.c., p. 100.) Lawyers started long before economists the idea that money is a mere symbol, and that the value of the precious metals is purely imaginary. This they did in the sycophantic service of the crowned heads, supporting the right of the latter to debase the coinage, during the whole of the middle ages, by the traditions of the Roman Empire and the conceptions of money to be found in the Pandects. “Qu’aucun puisse ni doive faire doute,” [“Let no one call into question,”] says an apt scholar of theirs, Philip of Valois, in a decree of 1346, “que à nous et à notre majesté royale n’appartiennent seulement ... le mestier, le fait, l’état, la provision et toute l’ordonnance des monnaies, de donner tel cours, et pour tel prix comme il nous plait et bon nous semble.” [“that the trade, the composition, the supply and the power of issuing ordinances on the currency ... belongs exclusively to us and to our royal majesty, to fix such a rate and at such price as it shall please us and seem good to us”] It was a maxim of the Roman Law that the value of money was fixed by decree of the emperor. It was expressly forbidden to treat money as a commodity. “Pecunias vero nulli emere fas erit, nam in usu publico constitutas oportet non esse mercem.” [“However, it shall not be lawful to anyone to buy money, for, as it was created for public use, it is not permissible for it to be a commodity”] Some good work on this question has been done by G. F. Pagnini: “Saggio sopra il giusto pregio delle cose, 1751”; Custodi “Parte Moderna,” t. II. In the second part of his work Pagnini directs his polemics especially against the lawyers.

12. “If a man can bring to London an
ounce of Silver out of the Earth in Peru, in the same time that he can
produce a bushel of Corn, then the one is the natural price of the other;
now, if by reason of new or more easier mines a man can procure two ounces
of silver as easily as he formerly did one, the corn will be as cheap at
ten shillings the bushel as it was before at five shillings, caeteris paribus.”
William Petty. “A Treatise of Taxes and Contributions.” Lond., 1667, p.
32.

13. The learned Professor Roscher, after
first informing us that “the false definitions of money may be divided
into two main groups: those which make it more, and those which make it
less, than a commodity,” gives us a long and very mixed catalogue of works
on the nature of money, from which it appears that he has not the remotest
idea of the real history of the theory; and then he moralises thus: “For
the rest, it is not to be denied that most of the later economists do not
bear sufficiently in mind the peculiarities that distinguish money from
other commodities” (it is then, after all, either more or less than a commodity!)...
“So far, the semi-mercantilist reaction of Ganilh is not altogether without
foundation.” (Wilhelm Roscher: “Die Grundlagen der Nationaloekonomie,”
3rd Edn. 1858, pp. 207-210.) More! less! not sufficiently! so far! not
altogether! What clearness and precision of ideas and language! And such
eclectic professorial twaddle is modestly baptised by Mr. Roscher, “the
anatomico-physiological method” of Political Economy! One discovery however,
he must have credit for, namely, that money is “a pleasant commodity.”

Karl Marx. Capital Volume One

## Chapter Three: Money, Or the Circulation of Commodities

Contents

Section 1 — The Measure of Values

Section 2 — The Medium of Circulation

A. The Metamorphosis of Commodities

B. The Currency of Money

C. Coin and Symbols of Value

Section 3 — Money

A. Hoarding

B. Means of Payment

C. Universal Money

### SECTION 1

THE MEASURE OF VALUES

Throughout this work, I assume, for the sake of simplicity,
gold as the money-commodity.

The first chief function of money is to supply commodities with
the material for the expression of their values, or to represent their
values as magnitudes of the same denomination, qualitatively equal, and
quantitatively comparable. It thus serves as a universal measure of
value. And only by virtue of this function does gold, the equivalent
commodity par excellence, become money.

It is not money that renders commodities commensurable. Just the
contrary. It is because all commodities, as values, are realised human
labour, and therefore commensurable, that their values can be measured
by one and the same special commodity, and the latter be converted into
the common measure of their values, i.e., into money. Money as a
measure of value, is the phenomenal form that must of necessity be assumed
by that measure of value which is immanent in commodities, labour-time.[1]

The expression of the value of a commodity in gold — x
commodity A = y money-commodity — is its money-form or price. A
single equation, such as 1 ton of iron = 2 ounces of gold, now suffices
to express the value of the iron in a socially valid manner. There is no
longer any need for this equation to figure as a link in the chain of equations
that express the values of all other commodities, because the equivalent
commodity, gold, now has the character of money. The general form of relative
value has resumed its original shape of simple or isolated relative value.
On the other hand, the expanded expression of relative value, the endless
series of equations, has now become the form peculiar to the relative value
of the money-commodity. The series itself, too, is now given, and has social
recognition in the prices of actual commodities. We have only to read the
quotations of a price-list backwards, to find the magnitude of the value
of money expressed in all sorts of commodities. But money itself has no
price. In order to put it on an equal footing with all other commodities
in this respect, we should be obliged to equate it to itself as its own
equivalent.

The price or money-form of commodities is, like their form of
value generally, a form quite distinct from their palpable bodily form;
it is, therefore, a purely ideal or mental form. Although invisible, the
value of iron, linen and corn has actual existence in these very articles:
it is ideally made perceptible by their equality with gold, a relation
that, so to say, exists only in their own heads. Their owner must, therefore,
lend them his tongue, or hang a ticket on them, before their prices can
be communicated to the outside world. [2]
Since the expression of the value of commodities in gold is a merely ideal act, we may use for
this purpose imaginary or ideal money. Every trader knows, that he is far
from having turned his goods into money, when he has expressed their value
in a price or in imaginary money, and that it does not require the least
bit of real gold, to estimate in that metal millions of pounds’ worth of
goods. When, therefore, money serves as a measure of value, it is employed
only as imaginary or ideal money. This circumstance has given rise to the
wildest theories. [3] But, although the money that performs
the functions of a measure of value is only ideal money, price depends
entirely upon the actual substance that is money. The value, or in other
words, the quantity of human labour contained in a ton of iron, is expressed
in imagination by such a quantity of the money-commodity as contains the
same amount of labour as the iron. According, therefore, as the measure
of value is gold, silver, or copper, the value of the ton of iron will
be expressed by very different prices, or will be represented by very different
quantities of those metals respectively.

If, therefore, two different commodities, such as gold and silver,
are simultaneously measures of value, all commodities have two prices —
one a gold-price, the other a silver-price. These exist quietly side by
side, so long as the ratio of the value of silver to that of gold remains
unchanged, say, at 15:1. Every change in their ratio disturbs the ratio
which exists between the gold-prices and the silver-prices of commodities,
and thus proves, by facts, that a double standard of value is inconsistent
with the functions of a standard. [4]

Commodities with definite prices present themselves under
the form: a commodity A = x gold; b commodity B = z gold;
c commodity C = y gold, &c., where a, b,
c, represent definite quantities of the commodities A, B, C and
x, z, y, definite quantities of gold. The values of these commodities are,
therefore, changed in imagination into so many different quantities of
gold. Hence, in spite of the confusing variety of the commodities themselves,
their values become magnitudes of the same denomination, gold-magnitudes.
They are now capable of being compared with each other and measured, and
the want becomes technically felt of comparing them with some fixed quantity
of gold as a unit measure. This unit, by subsequent division into aliquot
parts, becomes itself the standard or scale. Before they become money,
gold, silver, and copper already possess such standard measures in their
standards of weight, so that, for example, a pound weight, while serving
as the unit, is, on the one hand, divisible into ounces, and, on the other,
may be combined to make up hundredweights. [5] It is
owing to this that, in all metallic currencies, the names given to the
standards of money or of price were originally taken from the pre-existing
names of the standards of weight.

As measure of Value, and as standard of price, money
has two entirely distinct functions to perform. It is the measure of value
inasmuch as it is the socially recognised incarnation of human labour;
it is the standard of price inasmuch as it is a fixed weight of metal.
As the measure of value it serves to convert the values of all the manifold
commodities into prices, into imaginary quantities of gold; as the standard
of price it measures those quantities of gold. The measure of values measures
commodities considered as values; the standard of price measures, on the
contrary, quantities of gold by a unit quantity of gold, not the value
of one quantity of gold by the weight of another. In order to make gold
a standard of price, a certain weight must be fixed upon as the unit. In
this case, as in all cases of measuring quantities of the same denomination,
the establishment of an unvarying unit of measure is all-important. Hence,
the less the unit is subject to variation, so much the better does the
standard of price fulfil its office. But only in so far as it is
itself a product of labour, and, therefore, potentially variable in value,
can gold serve as a measure of value. [6]

It is, in the first place, quite clear that a change in the value
of gold does not, in any way, affect its function as a standard of price.
No matter how this value varies, the proportions between the values of
different quantities of the metal remain constant. However great the fall
in its value, 12 ounces of gold still have 12 times the value of 1 ounce;
and in prices, the only thing considered is the relation between different
quantities of gold. Since, on the other hand, no rise or fall in the value
of an ounce of gold can alter its weight, no alteration can take place
in the weight of its aliquot parts. Thus gold always renders the same service
as an invariable standard of price, however much its value may vary.

In the second place, a change in the value of gold does not interfere
with its functions as a measure of value. The change affects all commodities
simultaneously, and, therefore, caeteris paribus, leaves their relative
values inter se, unaltered, although those values are now expressed
in higher or lower gold-prices.

Just as when we estimate the value of any commodity by a definite
quantity of the use-value of some other commodity, so in estimating the
value of the former in gold, we assume nothing more than that the production
of a given quantity of gold costs, at the given period, a given amount
of labour. As regards the fluctuations of prices generally, they are subject
to the laws of elementary relative value investigated in a former chapter.

A general rise in the prices of commodities can result only, either
from a rise in their values — the value of money remaining constant —
or from a fall in the value of money, the values of commodities remaining
constant. On the other hand, a general fall in prices can result only,
either from a fall in the values of commodities — the value of money remaining
constant — or from a rise in the value of money, the values of commodities
remaining constant. It therefore by no means follows, that a rise in the
value of money necessarily implies a proportional fall in the prices of
commodities; or that a fall in the value of money implies a proportional
rise in prices. Such change of price holds good only in the case of commodities
whose value remains constant. With those, for example, whose value rises,
simultaneously with, and proportionally to, that of money, there is no
alteration in price. And if their value rise either slower or faster than
that of money, the fall or rise in their prices will be determined
by the difference between the change in their value and that of money;
and so on.

Let us now go back to the consideration of the price-form.

By degrees there arises a discrepancy between the current money-names
of the various weights of the precious metal figuring as money, and the
actual weights which those names originally represented. This discrepancy
is the result of historical causes, among which the chief are: — (1) The
importation of foreign money into an imperfectly developed community. This
happened in Rome in its early days, where gold and silver coins circulated
at first as foreign commodities. The names of these foreign coins never
coincide with those of the indigenous weights. (2) As wealth increases,
the less precious metal is thrust out by the more precious from its place
as a measure of value, copper by silver, silver by gold, however much this
order of sequence may be in contradiction with poetical chronology. [7]
The word pound, for instance, was the money-name given to an actual pound
weight of silver. When gold replaced silver as a measure of value, the
same name was applied according to the ratio between the values of silver
and gold, to perhaps 1-15th of a pound of gold. The word pound, as a money-name,
thus becomes differentiated from the same word as a weight-name. [8]
(3) The debasing of money carried on for centuries by kings and princes
to such an extent that, of the original weights of the coins, nothing in
fact remained but the names. [9]

These historical causes convert the separation of the money-name
from the weight-name into an established habit with the community. Since
the standard of money is on the one hand purely conventional, and must
on the other hand find general acceptance, it is in the end regulated by
law. A given weight of one of the precious metals, an ounce of gold, for
instance, becomes officially divided into aliquot parts, with legally bestowed
names, such as pound, dollar, &c. These aliquot parts, which thenceforth
serve as units of money, are then subdivided into other aliquot parts with
legal names, such as shilling, penny, &c. [10] But, both
before and after these divisions are made, a definite weight of metal is
the standard of metallic money. The sole alteration consists in the subdivision
and denomination.

The prices, or quantities of gold, into which the values of commodities
are ideally changed, are therefore now expressed in the names of coins,
or in the legally valid names of the subdivisions of the gold standard.
Hence, instead of saying: A quarter of wheat is worth an ounce of gold;
we say, it is worth £3 17s. 10 1/2d. In this way commodities express
by their prices how much they are worth, and money serves as money of
account whenever it is a question of fixing the value of an article
in its money-form. [11]

The name of a thing is something distinct from the qualities of
that thing. I know nothing of a man, by knowing that his name is Jacob.
In the same way with regard to money, every trace of a value-relation disappears
in the names pound, dollar, franc, ducat, &c. The confusion caused
by attributing a hidden meaning to these cabalistic signs is all the greater,
because these money-names express both the values of commodities, and,
at the same time, aliquot parts of the weight of the metal that is the
standard of money. [12] On the other hand, it is absolutely
necessary that value, in order that it may be distinguished from the varied
bodily forms of commodities, should assume this material and unmeaning,
but, at the same time, purely social form. [13]

Price is the money-name of the labour realised in a commodity.
Hence the expression of the equivalence of a commodity with the sum of
money constituting its price, is a tautology, [14]
just as in general the expression of the relative value of a commodity
is a statement of the equivalence of two commodities. But although price,
being the exponent of the magnitude of a commodity’s value, is the exponent
of its exchange-ratio with money, it does not follow that the exponent
of this exchange-ratio is necessarily the exponent of the magnitude of
the commodity’s value. Suppose two equal quantities of socially necessary
labour to be respectively represented by 1 quarter of wheat and £2
(nearly 1/2 oz. of gold), £2 is the expression in money of the magnitude
of the value of the quarter of wheat, or is its price. If now circumstances
allow of this price being raised to £3, or compel it to be reduced
to £1, then although £1 and £3 may be too small or too
great properly to express the magnitude of the wheat’s value; nevertheless
they are its prices, for they are, in the first place, the form under which
its value appears, i.e., money; and in the second place, the exponents
of its exchange-ratio with money. If the conditions of production, in other
words, if the productive power of labour remain constant, the same amount
of social labour-time must, both before and after the change in price,
be expended in the reproduction of a quarter of wheat. This circumstance
depends, neither on the will of the wheat producer, nor on that of the
owners of other commodities.

Magnitude of value expresses a relation of social production,
it expresses the connexion that necessarily exists between a certain article
and the portion of the total labour-time of society required to produce
it. As soon as magnitude of value is converted into price, the above necessary
relation takes the shape of a more or less accidental exchange-ratio between
a single commodity and another, the money-commodity. But this exchange-ratio
may express either the real magnitude of that commodity’s value, or the
quantity of gold deviating from that value, for which, according to circumstances,
it may be parted with. The possibility, therefore, of quantitative incongruity
between price and magnitude of value, or the deviation of the former from
the latter, is inherent in the price-form itself. This is no defect, but,
on the contrary, admirably adapts the price-form to a mode of production
whose inherent laws impose themselves only as the mean of apparently lawless
irregularities that compensate one another.

The price-form, however, is not only compatible with the possibility
of a quantitative incongruity between magnitude of value and price, i.e.,
between the former and its expression in money, but it may also conceal
a qualitative inconsistency, so much so, that, although money is nothing
but the value-form of commodities, price ceases altogether to express value.
Objects that in themselves are no commodities, such as conscience, honour,
&c., are capable of being offered for sale by their holders, and of
thus acquiring, through their price, the form of commodities. Hence an
object may have a price without having value. The price in that case is
imaginary, like certain quantities in mathematics. On the other hand, the
imaginary price-form may sometimes conceal either a direct or indirect
real value-relation; for instance, the price of uncultivated land, which
is without value, because no human labour has been incorporated in it.

Price, like relative value in general, expresses the value of
a commodity (e.g., a ton of iron), by stating that a given quantity
of the equivalent (e.g., an ounce of gold), is directly exchangeable
for iron. But it by no means states the converse, that iron is directly
exchangeable for gold. In order, therefore, that a commodity may in practice
act effectively as exchange-value, it must quit its bodily shape, must
transform itself from mere imaginary into real gold, although to the commodity
such transubstantiation may be more difficult than to the Hegelian “concept,”
the transition from “necessity” to “freedom,” or to a lobster the casting
of his shell, or to Saint Jerome the putting off of the old Adam. [15]
Though a commodity may, side by side with its actual form (iron, for instance),
take in our imagination the form of gold, yet it cannot at one and the
same time actually be both iron and gold. To fix its price, it suffices
to equate it to gold in imagination. But to enable it to render to its
owner the service of a universal equivalent, it must be actually replaced
by gold. If the owner of the iron were to go to the owner of some other
commodity offered for exchange, and were to refer him to the price of the
iron as proof that it was already money, he would get the same answer as
St. Peter gave in heaven to Dante, when the latter recited the creed —

“Assai bene è trascorsa

d’esta moneta già la lega e ’l peso,

ma dimmi se tu l’hai ne la tua borsa.”

A price therefore implies both that a commodity is exchangeable for money,
and also that it must be so exchanged. On the other hand, gold serves as
an ideal measure of value, only because it has already, in the process
of exchange, established itself as the money-commodity. Under the ideal
measure of values there lurks the hard cash.

### SECTION 2

THE MEDIUM OF CIRCULATION

### A. The Metamorphosis of Commodities

We saw in a former chapter that the exchange of
commodities implies contradictory and mutually exclusive conditions. The
differentiation of commodities into commodities and money does not sweep
away these inconsistencies, but develops a modus vivendi, a form
in which they can exist side by side. This is generally the way in which
real contradictions are reconciled. For instance, it is a contradiction
to depict one body as constantly falling towards another, and as, at the
same time, constantly flying away from it. The ellipse is a form of motion
which, while allowing this contradiction to go on, at the same time reconciles
it.

In so far as exchange is a process, by which commodities are transferred
from hands in which they are non-use-values, to hands in which they become
use-values, it is a social circulation of matter. The product of one form
of useful labour replaces that of another. When once a commodity has found
a resting-place, where it can serve as a use-value, it falls out of the
sphere of exchange into that of consumption. But the former sphere alone
interests us at present. We have, therefore, now to consider exchange from
a formal point of view; to investigate the change of form or metamorphosis
of commodities which effectuates the social circulation of matter.

The comprehension of this change of form is, as a rule, very imperfect.
The cause of this imperfection is, apart from indistinct notions of value
itself, that every change of form in a commodity results from the exchange
of two commodities, an ordinary one and the money-commodity. If we keep
in view the material fact alone that a commodity has been exchanged for
gold, we overlook the very thing that we ought to observe — namely, what
has happened to the form of the commodity. We overlook the facts that gold,
when a mere commodity, is not money, and that when other commodities express
their prices in gold, this gold is but the money-form of those commodities
themselves.

Commodities, first of all, enter into the process of exchange
just as they are. The process then differentiates them into commodities
and money, and thus produces an external opposition corresponding to the
internal opposition inherent in them, as being at once use-values and values.
Commodities as use-values now stand opposed to money as exchange-value.
On the other hand, both opposing sides are commodities, unities of
use-value and value. But this unity of differences manifests itself at
two opposite poles, and at each pole in an opposite way. Being poles they
are as necessarily opposite as they are connected. On the one side of the
equation we have an ordinary commodity, which is in reality a use-value.
Its value is expressed only ideally in its price, by which it is equated
to its opponent, the gold, as to the real embodiment of its value. On the
other hand, the gold, in its metallic reality, ranks as the embodiment
of value, as money. Gold, as gold, is exchange-value itself. As to its
use-value, that has only an ideal existence, represented by the series
of expressions of relative value in which it stands face to face with all
other commodities, the sum of whose uses makes up the sum of the various
uses of gold. These antagonistic forms of commodities are the real forms
in which the process of their exchange moves and takes place.

Let us now accompany the owner of some commodity — say, our old
friend the weaver of linen — to the scene of action, the market. His 20
yards of linen has a definite price, £2. He exchanges it for the
£2, and then, like a man of the good old stamp that he is, he parts
with the £2 for a family Bible of the same price. The linen, which
in his eyes is a mere commodity, a depository of value, he alienates in
exchange for gold, which is the linen’s value-form, and this form he again
parts with for another commodity, the Bible, which is destined to enter
his house as an object of utility and of edification to its inmates. The
exchange becomes an accomplished fact by two metamorphoses of opposite
yet supplementary character — the conversion of the commodity into money,
and the re-conversion of the money into a commodity. [16]
The two phases of this metamorphosis are both of them distinct transactions
of the weaver — selling, or the exchange of the commodity for money; buying,
or the exchange of the money for a commodity; and, the unity of the two
acts, selling in order to buy.

The result of the whole transaction, as regards the weaver, is
this, that instead of being in possession of the linen, he now has the
Bible; instead of his original commodity, he now possesses another of the
same value but of different utility. In like manner he procures his other
means of subsistence and means of production. From his point of view, the
whole process effectuates nothing more than the exchange of the product
of his labour for the product of some one else’s, nothing more than an
exchange of products.

The exchange of commodities is therefore accompanied by
the following changes in their form:

Commodity — Money — Commodity.

C——— M ———C.

The result of the whole process is, so far as concerns the objects themselves,
C — C, the exchange of one commodity for another, the circulation of materialised
social labour. When this result is attained, the process is at an end.

C — M. First metamorphosis, or sale

The leap taken by value from the body of the commodity, into the body
of the gold, is, as I have elsewhere called it, the salto mortale of the
commodity. If it falls short, then, although the commodity itself is not
harmed, its owner decidedly is. The social division of labour causes his
labour to be as one-sided as his wants are many-sided. This is precisely
the reason why the product of his labour serves him solely as exchange-value.
But it cannot acquire the properties of a socially recognised universal
equivalent, except by being converted into money. That money, however,
is in some one else’s pocket. In order to entice the money out of that
pocket, our friend’s commodity must, above all things, be a use-value to
the owner of the money. For this, it is necessary that the labour expended
upon it, be of a kind that is socially useful, of a kind that constitutes
a branch of the social division of labour. But division of labour is a
system of production which has grown up spontaneously and continues to
grow behind the backs of the producers. The commodity to be exchanged may
possibly be the product of some new kind of labour, that pretends to satisfy
newly arisen requirements, or even to give rise itself to new requirements.
A particular operation, though yesterday, perhaps, forming one out of the
many operations conducted by one producer in creating a given commodity,
may to-day separate itself from this connexion, may establish itself as
an independent branch of labour and send its incomplete product to market
as an independent commodity. The circumstances may or may not be ripe for
such a separation. To-day the product satisfies a social want. Tomorrow
the article may, either altogether or partially, be superseded by some
other appropriate product. Moreover, although our weaver’s labour may be
a recognised branch of the social division of labour, yet that fact is
by no means sufficient to guarantee the utility of his 20 yards of linen.
If the community’s want of linen, and such a want has a limit like every
other want, should already be saturated by the products of rival weavers,
our friend’s product is superfluous, redundant, and consequently
useless. Although people do not look a gift-horse in the mouth, our friend
does not frequent the market for the purpose of making presents. But suppose
his product turn out a real use-value, and thereby attracts money? The
question arises, how much will it attract? No doubt the answer is already
anticipated in the price of the article, in the exponent of the magnitude
of its value. We leave out of consideration here any accidental miscalculation
of value by our friend, a mistake that is soon rectified in the market.
We suppose him to have spent on his product only that amount of labour-time
that is on an average socially necessary. The price then, is merely the
money-name of the quantity of social labour realised in his commodity. But
without the leave, and behind the back, of our weaver, the old-fashioned
mode of weaving undergoes a change. The labour-time that yesterday was
without doubt socially necessary to the production of a yard of linen,
ceases to be so to-day, a fact which the owner of the money is only too
eager to prove from the prices quoted by our friend’s competitors. Unluckily
for him, weavers are not few and far between. Lastly, suppose that every
piece of linen in the market contains no more labour-time than is socially
necessary. In spite of this, all these pieces taken as a whole, may have
had superfluous labour-time spent upon them. If the market cannot stomach
the whole quantity at the normal price of 2 shillings a yard, this proves
that too great a portion of the total labour of the community has been
expended in the form of weaving. The effect is the same as if each individual
weaver had expended more labour-time upon his particular product than is
socially necessary. Here we may say, with the German proverb: caught together,
hung together. All the linen in the market counts but as one article of
commerce, of which each piece is only an aliquot part. And as a matter
of fact, the value also of each single yard is but the materialised form
of the same definite and socially fixed quantity of homogeneous human labour.[17]

We see then, commodities are in love with money, but “the course
of true love never did run smooth.” The quantitative division of labour
is brought about in exactly the same spontaneous and accidental manner
as its qualitative division. The owners of commodities therefore find out,
that the same division of labour that turns them into independent private
producers, also frees the social process of production and the relations
of the individual producers to each other within that process, from all
dependence on the will of those producers, and that the seeming mutual
independence of the individuals is supplemented by a system of general
and mutual dependence through or by means of the products.

The division of labour converts the product of labour into a commodity,
and thereby makes necessary its further conversion into money. At the same
time it also makes the accomplishment of this transubstantiation quite
accidental. Here, however, we are only concerned with the phenomenon in
its integrity, and we therefore assume its progress to be normal. Moreover,
if the conversion take place at all, that is, if the commodity be not absolutely
unsaleable, its metamorphosis does take place although the price realised
may be abnormally above or below the value.

The seller has his commodity replaced by gold, the buyer has his
gold replaced by a commodity. The fact which here stares us in the face
is, that a commodity and gold, 20 yards of linen and £2, have changed
hands and places, in other words, that they have been exchanged. But for
what is the commodity exchanged? For the shape assumed by its own value,
for the universal equivalent. And for what is the gold exchanged? For a
particular form of its own use-value. Why does gold take the form of money
face to face with the linen? Because the linen’s price of £2, its
denomination in money, has already equated the linen to gold in its character
of money. A commodity strips off its original commodity-form on being alienated,
i.e., on the instant its use-value actually attracts the gold, that
before existed only ideally in its price. The realisation of a commodity’s
price, or of its ideal value-form, is therefore at the same time the realisation
of the ideal use-value of money; the conversion of a commodity into money,
is the simultaneous conversion of money into a commodity. The apparently
single process is in reality a double one. From the pole of the commodity-owner
it is a sale, from the opposite pole of the money-owner, it is a purchase.
In other words, a sale is a purchase, C—M is also M—C. [18]

Up to this point we have considered men in only one economic capacity,
that of owners of commodities, a capacity in which they appropriate the
produce of the labour of others, by alienating that of their own labour.
Hence, for one commodity-owner to meet with another who has money, it is
necessary, either, that the product of the labour of the latter person,
the buyer, should be in itself money, should be gold, the material of which
money consists, or that his product should already have changed its skin
and have stripped off its original form of a useful object. In order that
it may play the part of money, gold must of course enter the market at
some point or other. This point is to be found at the source of production
of the metal, at which place gold is bartered, as the immediate product
of labour, for some other product of equal value. From that moment it always
represents the realised price of some commodity. [19]
Apart from its exchange for other commodities at the source of its production,
gold, in whose-so-ever hands it may be, is the transformed shape of some
commodity alienated by its owner; it is the product of a sale or of the
first metamorphosis C—M. [20] Gold, as we saw, became
ideal money, or a measure of values, in consequence of all commodities
measuring their values by it, and thus contrasting it ideally with their
natural shape as useful objects, and making it the shape of their value.
It became real money, by the general alienation of commodities, by actually
changing places with their natural forms as useful objects, and thus becoming
in reality the embodiment of their values. When they assume this money-shape,
commodities strip off every trace of their natural use-value, and of the
particular kind of labour to which they owe their creation, in order to
transform themselves into the uniform, socially recognised incarnation
of homogeneous human labour. We cannot tell from the mere look of a piece
of money, for what particular commodity it has been exchanged. Under their
money-form all commodities look alike. Hence, money may be dirt, although
dirt is not money. We will assume that the two gold pieces, in consideration
of which our weaver has parted with his linen, are the metamorphosed shape
of a quarter of wheat. The sale of the linen, C—M, is at the same time
its purchase, M—C. But the sale is the first act of a process that ends
with a transaction of an opposite nature, namely, the purchase of a Bible;
the purchase of the linen, on the other hand, ends a movement that began
with a transaction of an opposite nature, namely, with the sale of the
wheat. C—M (linen—money), which is the first phase of C—M—C (linen—money—Bible),
is also M—C (money—linen), the last phase of another movement C—M—C
(wheat—money—linen). The first metamorphosis of one commodity, its
transformation from a commodity into money, is therefore also invariably
the second metamorphosis of some other commodity, the retransformation
of the latter from money into a commodity. [21]

M—C, or purchase.

The second and concluding metamorphosis of a commodity

Because money is the metamorphosed shape of all other commodities, the
result of their general alienation, for this reason it is alienable itself
without restriction or condition. It reads all prices backwards, and thus,
so to say, depicts itself in the bodies of all other commodities, which
offer to it the material for the realisation of its own use-value. At the
same time the prices, wooing glances cast at money by commodities, define
the limits of its convertibility, by pointing to its quantity. Since every
commodity, on becoming money, disappears as a commodity, it is impossible
to tell from the money itself, how it got into the hands of its possessor,
or what article has been changed into it. Non olet, from whatever source
it may come. Representing on the one hand a sold commodity, it represents
on the other a commodity to be bought. [22]

M—C, a purchase, is, at the same time, C—M, a sale; the concluding
metamorphosis of one commodity is the first metamorphosis of another. With
regard to our weaver, the life of his commodity ends with the Bible, into
which he has reconverted his £2. But suppose the seller of the Bible
turns the £2 set free by the weaver into brandy M—C, the concluding
phase of C—M—C (linen—money—Bible), is also C—M, the first phase
of C—M—C (Bible—money—brandy). The producer of a particular commodity
has that one article alone to offer; this he sells very often in large
quantities, but his many and various wants compel him to split up the price
realised, the sum of money set free, into numerous purchases. Hence a sale
leads to many purchases of various articles. The concluding metamorphosis
of a commodity thus constitutes an aggregation of first metamorphoses of
various other commodities.

If we now consider the completed metamorphosis of a commodity,
as a whole, it appears in the first place, that it is made up of two opposite
and complementary movements, C—M and M—C. These two antithetical transmutations
of a commodity are brought about by two antithetical social acts on the
part of the owner, and these acts in their turn stamp the character of
the economic parts played by him. As the person who makes a sale, he is
a seller; as the person who makes a purchase, he is a buyer. But just as,
upon every such transmutation of a commodity, its two forms, commodity-form
and money-form, exist simultaneously but at opposite poles, so every seller
has a buyer opposed to him, and every buyer a seller. While one particular
commodity is going through its two transmutations in succession, from a
commodity into money and from money into another commodity,
the owner of the commodity changes in succession his part from that of
seller to that of buyer. These characters of seller and buyer are therefore
not permanent, but attach themselves in turns to the various persons engaged
in the circulation of commodities.

The complete metamorphosis of a commodity, in its simplest form,
implies four extremes, and three dramatic personae. First, a commodity
comes face to face with money; the latter is the form taken by the value
of the former, and exists in all its hard reality, in the pocket of the
buyer. A commodity-owner is thus brought into contact with a possessor
of money. So soon, now, as the commodity has been changed into money, the
money becomes its transient equivalent-form, the use-value of which equivalent-form
is to be found in the bodies of other commodities. Money, the final term
of the first transmutation, is at the same time the starting-point for
the second. The person who is a seller in the first transaction thus becomes
a buyer in the second, in which a third commodity-owner appears on the
scene as a seller. [23]

The two phases, each inverse to the other, that make up the metamorphosis
of a commodity constitute together a circular movement, a circuit: commodity-form,
stripping off of this form, and return to the commodity-form. No doubt,
the commodity appears here under two different aspects. At the starting-point
it is not a use-value to its owner; at the finishing point it is. So, too,
the money appears in the first phase as a solid crystal of value, a crystal
into which the commodity eagerly solidifies, and in the second, dissolves
into the mere transient equivalent-form destined to be replaced by a use-value.

The two metamorphoses constituting the circuit are at the same
time two inverse partial metamorphoses of two other commodities. One and
the same commodity, the linen, opens the series of its own metamorphoses,
and completes the metamorphosis of another (the wheat). In the first phase
or sale, the linen plays these two parts in its own person. But, then,
changed into gold, it completes its own second and final metamorphosis,
and helps at the same time to accomplish the first metamorphosis of a third
commodity. Hence the circuit made by one commodity in the course of its
metamorphoses is inextricably mixed up with the circuits of other commodities.
The total of all the different circuits constitutes the circulation
of commodities.

The circulation of commodities differs from the direct exchange
of products (barter), not only in form, but in substance. Only consider
the course of events. The weaver has, as a matter of fact, exchanged his
linen for a Bible, his own commodity for that of some one else. But this
is true only so far as he himself is concerned. The seller of the Bible,
who prefers something to warm his inside, no more thought of exchanging
his Bible for linen than our weaver knew that wheat had been exchanged
for his linen. B’s commodity replaces that of A, but A and B do not mutually
exchange those commodities. It may, of course, happen that A and B make
simultaneous purchases, the one from the other; but such exceptional transactions
are by no means the necessary result of the general conditions of the circulation
of commodities. We see here, on the one hand, how the exchange of commodities
breaks through all local and personal bounds inseparable from direct barter,
and develops the circulation of the products of social labour; and on the
other hand, how it develops a whole network of social relations spontaneous
in their growth and entirely beyond the control of the actors. It is only
because the farmer has sold his wheat that the weaver is enabled to sell
his linen, only because the weaver has sold his linen that our Hotspur
is enabled to sell his Bible, and only because the latter has sold the
water of everlasting life that the distiller is enabled to sell his eau-de-vie,
and so on.

The process of circulation, therefore, does not, like direct barter
of products, become extinguished upon the use-values changing places and
hands. The money does not vanish on dropping out of the circuit of the
metamorphosis of a given commodity. It is constantly being precipitated
into new places in the arena of circulation vacated by other commodities.
In the complete metamorphosis of the linen, for example, linen — money
— Bible, the linen first falls out of circulation, and money steps into
its place. Then the Bible falls out of circulation, and again money takes
its place. When one commodity replaces another, the money-commodity always
sticks to the hands of some third person. [24] Circulation sweats money from every pore.

Nothing can be more childish than the dogma, that because every
sale is a purchase, and every purchase a sale, therefore the circulation
of commodities necessarily implies an equilibrium of sales and purchases.
If this means that the number of actual sales is equal to the number of
purchases, it is mere tautology. But its real purport is to prove that
every seller brings his buyer to market with him. Nothing of the kind.
The sale and the purchase constitute one identical act, an exchange between
a commodity-owner and an owner of money, between two persons as opposed
to each other as the two poles of a magnet. They form two distinct acts,
of polar and opposite characters, when performed by one single
person. Hence the identity of sale and purchase implies that the commodity
is useless, if, on being thrown into the alchemistical retort of circulation,
it does not come out again in the shape of money; if, in other words, it
cannot be sold by its owner, and therefore be bought by the owner of the
money. That identity further implies that the exchange, if it does take place,
constitutes a period of rest, an interval, long or short, in the life of
the commodity. Since the first metamorphosis of a commodity is at once
a sale and a purchase, it is also an independent process in itself. The
purchaser has the commodity, the seller has the money, i.e., a commodity
ready to go into circulation at any time. No one can sell unless some one
else purchases. But no one is forthwith bound to purchase, because he has
just sold. Circulation bursts through all restrictions as to time, place,
and individuals, imposed by direct barter, and this it effects by splitting
up, into the antithesis of a sale and a purchase, the direct identity that
in barter does exist between the alienation of one’s own and the acquisition
of some other man’s product. To say that these two independent and antithetical
acts have an intrinsic unity, are essentially one, is the same as to say
that this intrinsic oneness expresses itself in an external antithesis.
If the interval in time between the two complementary phases of the complete
metamorphosis of a commodity become too great, if the split between the
sale and the purchase become too pronounced, the intimate connexion between
them, their oneness, asserts itself by producing — a crisis. The antithesis,
use-value and value; the contradictions that private labour is bound to
manifest itself as direct social labour, that a particularised concrete
kind of labour has to pass for abstract human labour; the contradiction
between the personification of objects and the representation of persons
by things; all these antitheses and contradictions, which are immanent
in commodities, assert themselves, and develop their modes of motion, in
the antithetical phases of the metamorphosis of a commodity. These modes
therefore imply the possibility, and no more than the possibility, of crises.
The conversion of this mere possibility into a reality is the result of
a long series of relations, that, from our present standpoint of simple
circulation, have as yet no existence. [25]

### B. The currency [26] of money

The change of form, C—M—C, by which the circulation of the material
products of labour is brought about, requires that a given value in the
shape of a commodity shall begin the process, and shall, also in the shape
of a commodity, end it. The movement of the commodity is therefore a circuit.
On the other hand, the form of this movement precludes a circuit from being
made by the money. The result is not the return of the money, but its continued
removal further and further away from its starting-point. So long as the
seller sticks fast to his money, which is the transformed shape of his
commodity, that commodity is still in the first phase of its metamorphosis,
and has completed only half its course. But so soon as he completes the
process, so soon as he supplements his sale by a purchase, the money again
leaves the hands of its possessor. It is true that if the weaver, after
buying the Bible, sell more linen, money comes back into his hands. But
this return is not owing to the circulation of the first 20 yards of linen;
that circulation resulted in the money getting into the hands of the seller
of the Bible. The return of money into the hands of the weaver is brought
about only by the renewal or repetition of the process of circulation with
a fresh commodity, which renewed process ends with the same result as its
predecessor did. Hence the movement directly imparted to money by the circulation
of commodities takes the form of a constant motion away from its starting-point,
of a course from the hands of one commodity-owner into those of another.
This course constitutes its currency (cours de la monnaie).

The currency of money is the constant and monotonous repetition
of the same process. The commodity is always in the hands of the seller;
the money, as a means of purchase, always in the hands of the buyer. And
money serves as a means of purchase by realising the price of the commodity.
This realisation transfers the commodity from the seller to the buyer and
removes the money from the hands of the buyer into those of the seller,
where it again goes through the same process with another commodity. That
this one-sided character of the money’s motion arises out of the two-sided
character of the commodity’s motion, is a circumstance that is veiled over.
The very nature of the circulation of commodities begets the
opposite appearance. The first metamorphosis of a commodity is visibly,
not only the money’s movement, but also that of the commodity itself; in
the second metamorphosis, on the contrary, the movement appears to us as
the movement of the money alone. In the first phase of its circulation
the commodity changes place with the money. Thereupon the commodity, under
its aspect of a useful object, falls out of circulation into consumption.
[27] In its stead we have its value-shape — the money.

It then goes through the second phase of its circulation, not under its
own natural shape, but under the shape of money. The continuity of the
movement is therefore kept up by the money alone, and the same movement
that as regards the commodity consists of two processes of an antithetical
character, is, when considered as the movement of the money, always one
and the same process, a continued change of places with ever fresh commodities.
Hence the result brought about by the circulation of commodities, namely,
the replacing of one commodity by another, takes the appearance of having
been effected not by means of the change of form of the commodities but
rather by the money acting as a medium of circulation, by an action that
circulates commodities, to all appearance motionless in themselves, and
transfers them from hands in which they are non-use-values, to hands in
which they are use-values; and that in a direction constantly opposed to
the direction of the money. The latter is continually withdrawing commodities
from circulation and stepping into their places, and in thus way continually
moving further and further from its starting-point. Hence although the movement
of the money is merely the expression of the circulation of commodities,
yet the contrary appears to be the actual fact, and the circulation of
commodities seems to be the result of the movement of the money. [28]

Again, money functions as a means of circulation only because
in it the values of commodities have independent reality. Hence its movement,
as the medium of circulation, is, in fact, merely the movement of commodities
while changing their forms. This fact must therefore make itself plainly
visible in the currency of money. Thus the linen for instance, first of
all changes its commodity-form into its money-form. The second term of its
first metamorphosis, C—M, the money form, then becomes the
first term of its final metamorphosis, M—C, its re-conversion into the
Bible. But each of these two changes of form is accomplished by an exchange
between commodity and money, by their reciprocal displacement. The
same pieces of coin come into the seller’s hand as the alienated
form of the commodity and leave it as the absolutely alienable form
of the commodity. They are displaced twice. The first metamorphosis
of the linen puts these coins into the weaver’s pocket, the second draws
them out of it. The two inverse changes undergone by the same commodity
are reflected in the displacement, twice repeated, but in opposite directions,
of the same pieces of coin.

If, on the contrary, only one phase of the metamorphosis is gone
through, if there are only sales or only purchases, then a given piece
of money changes its place only once. Its second change of place always
expresses the second metamorphosis of the commodity, its re-conversion
from money. The frequent repetition of the displacement of the same coins
reflects not only the series of metamorphoses that a single commodity has
gone through, but also the intertwining of the innumerable metamorphoses
in the world of commodities in general. It is a matter of course, that
all this is applicable to the simple circulation of commodities alone,
the only form that we are now considering.

Every commodity, when it first steps into circulation, and undergoes
its first change of form, does so only to fall out of circulation again
and to be replaced by other commodities. Money, on the contrary, as the
medium of circulation, keeps continually within the sphere of circulation,
and moves about in it. The question therefore arises, how much money this
sphere constantly absorbs?

In a given country there take place every day at the same time,
but in different localities, numerous one-sided metamorphoses of commodities,
or, in other words, numerous sales and numerous purchases. The commodities
are equated beforehand in imagination, by their prices, to definite quantities
of money. And since, in the form of circulation now under consideration,
money and commodities always come bodily face to face, one at the positive
pole of purchase, the other at the negative pole of sale, it is clear that
the amount of the means of circulation required, is determined beforehand
by the sum of the prices of all these commodities. As a matter of fact,
the money in reality represents the quantity or sum of gold ideally expressed
beforehand by the sum of the prices of the commodities. The equality of
these two sums is therefore self-evident. We know, however, that, the values
of commodities remaining constant, their prices vary with the value of
gold (the material of money), rising in proportion as it falls, and falling
in proportion as it rises. Now if, in consequence of such a rise or fall
in the value of gold, the sum of the prices of commodities fall or rise,
the quantity of money in currency must fall or rise to the same
extent. The change in the quantity of the circulating medium is, in this
case, it is true, caused by the money itself, yet not in virtue of its
function as a medium of circulation, but of its function as a measure of
value. First, the price of the commodities varies inversely as the value
of the money, and then the quantity of the medium of circulation varies
directly as the price of the commodities. Exactly the same thing would
happen if, for instance, instead of the value of gold falling, gold were
replaced by silver as the measure of value, or if, instead of the value
of silver rising, gold were to thrust silver out from being the measure
of value. In the one case, more silver would be current than gold was before;
in the other case, less gold would be current than silver was before. In
each case the value of the material of money, i.e., the value of
the commodity that serves as the measure of value, would have undergone
a change, and therefore so, too, would the prices of commodities which
express their values in money, and so, too, would the quantity of money
current whose function it is to realise those prices. We have already seen,
that the sphere of circulation has an opening through which gold (or the
material of money generally) enters into it as a commodity with a given
value. Hence, when money enters on its functions as a measure of value,
when it expresses prices, its value is already determined. If now its value
fall, this fact is first evidenced by a change in the prices of those commodities
that are directly bartered for the precious metals at the sources of their
production. The greater part of all other commodities, especially in the
imperfectly developed stages of civil society, will continue for a long
time to be estimated by the former antiquated and illusory value of the
measure of value. Nevertheless, one commodity infects another through their
common value-relation, so that their prices, expressed in gold or in silver,
gradually settle down into the proportions determined by their comparative
values, until finally the values of all commodities are estimated in terms
of the new value of the metal that constitutes money. This process is accompanied
by the continued increase in the quantity of the precious metals, an increase
caused by their streaming in to replace the articles directly bartered
for them at their sources of production. In proportion therefore as commodities
in general acquire their true prices, in proportion as their values become
estimated according to the fallen value of the precious metal, in the same
proportion the quantity of that metal necessary for realising those new
prices is provided beforehand. A one-sided observation of the results that
followed upon the discovery of fresh supplies of gold and silver, led some
economists in the 17th, and particularly in the 18th century, to the false
conclusion, that the prices of commodities had gone up in consequence of
the increased quantity of gold and silver serving as means of circulation.
Henceforth we shall consider the value of gold to be given, as, in fact,
it is momentarily, whenever we estimate the price of a commodity.

On this supposition then, the quantity of the medium of circulation is
determined by the sum of the prices that have to be realised. If now we
further suppose the price of each commodity to be given, the sum of the
prices clearly depends on the mass of commodities in circulation. It requires
but little racking of brains to comprehend that if one quarter of wheat
costs £2,100 quarters will cost £200, 200 quarters £400,
and so on, that consequently the quantity of money that changes place with
the wheat, when sold, must increase with the quantity of that wheat.

If the mass of commodities remain constant, the quantity of circulating
money varies with the fluctuations in the prices of those commodities.
It increases and diminishes because the sum of the prices increases or
diminishes in consequence of the change of price. To produce this effect,
it is by no means requisite that the prices of all commodities should rise
or fall simultaneously. A rise or a fall in the prices of a number of leading
articles, is sufficient in the one case to increase, in the other to diminish,
the sum of the prices of all commodities, and, therefore, to put more or
less money in circulation. Whether the change in the price correspond to
an actual change of value in the commodities, or whether it be the result
of mere fluctuations in market-prices, the effect on the quantity of the
medium of circulation remains the same. Suppose the following articles
to be sold or partially metamorphosed simultaneously in different localities:
say, one quarter of wheat, 20 yards of linen, one Bible, and 4 gallons
of brandy. If the price of each article be £2, and the sum of the
prices to be realised be consequently £8, it follows that £8
in money must go into circulation. If, on the other hand, these same articles
are links in the following chain of
metamorphoses: 1 quarter of wheat — £2 — 20 yards of linen — £2
— 1 Bible — £2 — 4 gallons of brandy — £2, a chain that
is already well known to us, in that case the £2 cause the different
commodities to circulate one after the other, and after realising their
prices successively, and therefore the sum of those prices, £8, they
come to rest at last in the pocket of the distiller. The £2 thus
make four moves. This repeated change of place of the same pieces of money
corresponds to the double change in form of the commodities, to their motion
in opposite directions through two stages of circulation, and to the interlacing
of the metamorphoses of different commodities. [29]
These antithetic and complementary phases, of which the process
of metamorphosis consists, are gone through, not simultaneously, but successively.
Time is therefore required for the completion of the series. Hence the
velocity of the currency of money is measured by the number of moves made
by a given piece of money in a given time. Suppose the circulation of the
4 articles takes a day. The sum of the prices to be realised in the day
is £8, the number of moves of the two pieces of money is four, and
the quantity of money circulating is £2. Hence, for a given interval
of time during the process of circulation, we have the following relation:
the quantity of money functioning as the circulating medium is equal to
the sum of the prices of the commodities divided by the number of moves
made by coins of the same denomination. This law holds generally.

The total circulation of commodities in a given country during
a given period is made up on the one hand of numerous isolated and simultaneous
partial metamorphoses, sales which are at the same time purchases, in which
each coin changes its place only once, or makes only one move; on the other
hand, of numerous distinct series of metamorphoses partly running side
by side, and partly coalescing with each other, in each of which series
each coin makes a number of moves, the number being greater or less according
to circumstances. The total number of moves made by all the circulating
coins of one denomination being given, we can arrive at the average number
of moves made by a single coin of that denomination, or at the average
velocity of the currency of money. The quantity of money thrown into the
circulation at the beginning of each day is of course determined by the
sum of the prices of all the commodities circulating simultaneously side
by side. But once in circulation, coins are, so to say, made responsible
for one another. If the one increase its velocity, the other either retards
its own, or altogether falls out of circulation; for the circulation can
absorb only such a quantity of gold as when multiplied by the mean number
of moves made by one single coin or element, is equal to the sum of the
prices to be realised. Hence if the number of moves made by the separate
pieces increase, the total number of those pieces in circulation diminishes.
If the number of the moves diminish, the total number of pieces increases.
Since the quantity of money capable of being absorbed by the circulation
is given for a given mean velocity of currency, all that is necessary in
order to abstract a given number of sovereigns from the circulation is
to throw the same number of one-pound notes into it, a trick well known
to all bankers.

Just as the currency of money, generally considered, is but a
reflex of the circulation of commodities, or of the antithetical metamorphoses
they undergo, so, too, the velocity of that currency reflects the rapidity
with which commodities change their forms, the continued interlacing of
one series of metamorphoses with another, the hurried social interchange
of matter, the rapid disappearance of commodities from the sphere of circulation,
and the equally rapid substitution of fresh ones in their places. Hence,
in the velocity of the currency we have the fluent unity of the antithetical
and complementary phases, the unity of the conversion of the useful aspect
of commodities into their value-aspect, and their re-conversion from the
latter aspect to the former, or the unity of the two processes of sale
and purchase. On the other hand, the retardation of the currency reflects
the separation of these two processes into isolated antithetical phases,
reflects the stagnation in the change of form, and therefore, in the social
interchange of matter. The circulation itself, of course, gives no clue
to the origin of this stagnation; it merely puts in evidence the phenomenon
itself. The general public, who, simultaneously with the retardation of
the currency, see money appear and disappear less frequently at the periphery
of circulation, naturally attribute this retardation to a quantitative
deficiency in the circulating medium. [30]

The total quantity of money functioning during a given period
as the circulating medium, is determined, on the one hand, by the sum of
the prices of the circulating commodities, and on the other hand, by the
rapidity with which the antithetical phases of the metamorphoses follow
one another. On this rapidity depends what proportion of the sum
of the prices can, on the average, be realised by each single coin. But
the sum of the prices of the circulating commodities depends on the quantity,
as well as on the prices, of the commodities. These three factors, however,
state of prices, quantity of circulating commodities, and velocity of money-currency,
are all variable. Hence, the sum of the prices to be realised, and consequently
the quantity of the circulating medium depending on that sum, will vary
with the numerous variations of these three factors in combination. Of
these variations we shall consider those alone that have been the most
important in the history of prices.

While prices remain constant, the quantity of the circulating
medium may increase owing to the number of circulating commodities increasing,
or to the velocity of currency decreasing, or to a combination of the two.
On the other hand the quantity of the circulating medium may decrease with
a decreasing number of commodities, or with an increasing rapidity of their
circulation.

With a general rise in the prices of commodities, the quantity
of the circulating medium will remain constant, provided the number of
commodities in circulation decrease proportionally to the increase in their
prices, or provided the velocity of currency increase at the same rate
as prices rise, the number of commodities in circulation remaining constant.
The quantity of the circulating medium may decrease, owing to the number
of commodities decreasing more rapidly; or to the velocity of currency increasing more rapidly, than prices rise.

With a general fall in the prices of commodities, the quantity
of the circulating medium will remain constant, provided the number of
commodities increase proportionally to their fall in price, or provided
the velocity of currency decrease in the same proportion. The quantity
of the circulating medium will increase, provided the number of commodities
increase quicker, or the rapidity of circulation decrease quicker, than
the prices fall.

The variations of the different factors may mutually compensate
each other, so that notwithstanding their continued instability, the sum
of the prices to be realised and the quantity of money in circulation remain
constant; consequently, we find, especially if we take long periods into
consideration, that the deviations from the average level, of the quantity
of money current in any country, are much smaller than we should at first
sight expect, apart of course from excessive perturbations periodically
arising from industrial and commercial crises, or less frequently, from
fluctuations in the value of money.

The law, that the quantity of the circulating medium is determined
by the sum of the prices of the commodities circulating, and the average
velocity of currency [31]
may also be stated as follows: given the sum of the values of commodities,
and the average rapidity of their metamorphoses, the quantity of precious
metal current as money depends on the value of that precious metal. The
erroneous opinion that it is, on the contrary, prices that are determined
by the quantity of the circulating medium, and that the latter depends
on the quantity of the precious metals in a country; [32]
this opinion was based by those who first held it, on the absurd hypothesis
that commodities are without a price, and money without a value, when they
first enter into circulation, and that, once in the circulation,
an aliquot part of the medley of commodities is exchanged for an aliquot
part of the heap of precious metals. [33]

### C. Coin and symbols of value

That money takes the shape of coin, springs from its function as the
circulating medium. The weight of gold represented in imagination by the
prices or money-names of commodities, must confront those commodities,
within the circulation, in the shape of coins or pieces of gold of a given
denomination. Coining, like the establishment of a standard of prices,
is the business of the State. The different national uniforms worn at home
by gold and silver as coins, and doffed again in the market of the world,
indicate the separation between the internal or national spheres of the
circulation of commodities, and their universal sphere.

The only difference, therefore, between coin and bullion,
is one of shape, and gold can at any time pass from one form to the other.
[34] But no sooner does coin leave the mint, than it
immediately finds itself on the high-road to the melting pot. During their
currency, coins wear away, some more, others less. Name and substance,
nominal weight and real weight, begin their process of separation. Coins
of the same denomination become different in value, because they are different
in weight. The weight of gold fixed upon as the standard of prices, deviates
from the weight that serves as the circulating medium, and the latter thereby
ceases any longer to be a real equivalent of the commodities whose prices
it realises. The history of coinage during the middle ages and down into
the 18th century, records the ever renewed confusion arising from this
cause. The natural tendency of circulation to convert coins into a mere
semblance of what they profess to be, into a symbol of the weight of metal
they are officially supposed to contain, is recognised by modern legislation,
which fixes the loss of weight sufficient to demonetise a gold coin, or
to make it no longer legal tender.

The fact that the currency of coins itself effects a separation
between their nominal and their real weight, creating a distinction between
them as mere pieces of metal on the one hand, and as coins with a definite
function on the other — this fact implies the latent possibility of replacing
metallic coins by tokens of some other material, by symbols serving the
same purposes as coins. The practical difficulties in the way of coining
extremely minute quantities of gold or silver, and the circumstance that
at first the less precious metal is used as a measure of value instead
of the-more precious, copper instead of silver, silver instead of gold,
and that the less precious circulates as money until dethroned by the more
precious — all these facts explain the parts historically played by silver
and copper tokens as substitutes for gold coins. Silver and copper tokens
take the place of gold in those regions of the circulation where
coins pass from hand to hand most rapidly, and are subject to the maximum
amount of wear and tear. This occurs where sales and purchases on a very
small scale are continually happening. In order to prevent these satellites
from establishing themselves permanently in the place of gold, positive
enactments determine the extent to which they must be compulsorily received
as payment instead of gold. The particular tracks pursued by the different
species of coin in currency, run naturally into each other. The tokens
keep company with gold, to pay fractional parts of the smallest gold coin;
gold is, on the one hand, constantly pouring into retail circulation, and
on the other hand is as constantly being thrown out again by being changed
into tokens. [35]

The weight of metal in the silver and copper tokens is arbitrarily
fixed by law. When in currency, they wear away even more rapidly than gold
coins. Hence their functions are totally independent of their weight, and
consequently of all value. The function of gold as coin becomes completely
independent of the metallic value of that gold. Therefore things that are
relatively without value, such as paper notes, can serve as coins in its
place. This purely symbolic character is to a certain extent masked in
metal tokens. In paper money it stands out plainly. In fact, ce n’est que
le premier pas qui coûte.

We allude here only to inconvertible paper money issued by the
State and having compulsory circulation. It has its immediate origin in
the metallic currency. Money based upon credit implies on the other hand
conditions, which, from our standpoint of the simple circulation of commodities,
are as yet totally unknown to us. But we may affirm this much, that just
as true paper money takes its rise in the function of money as the circulating
medium, so money based upon credit takes root spontaneously in the function
of money as the means of payment. [36]

The State puts in circulation bits of paper on which their
various denominations, say £1, £5, &c., are printed. In
so far as they actually take the place of gold to the same amount, their
movement is subject to the laws that regulate the currency of money itself.
A law peculiar to the circulation of paper money can spring up only from
the proportion in which that paper money represents gold. Such a law exists;
stated simply, it is as follows: the issue of paper money must not exceed
in amount the gold (or silver as the case may be) which would actually
circulate if not replaced by symbols. Now the quantity of gold which the
circulation can absorb, constantly fluctuates about a given level. Still,
the mass of the circulating medium in a given country never sinks below
a certain minimum easily ascertained by actual experience. The fact that
this minimum mass continually undergoes changes in its constituent parts,
or that the pieces of gold of which it consists are being constantly replaced
by fresh ones, causes of course no change either in its amount or in the
continuity of its circulation. It can therefore be replaced by paper symbols.
If, on the other hand, all the conduits of circulation were to-day filled
with paper money to the full extent of their capacity for absorbing money,
they might to-morrow be overflowing in consequence of a fluctuation in
the circulation of commodities. There would no longer be any standard.
If the paper money exceed its proper limit, which is the amount in gold
coins of the like denomination that can actually be current, it would,
apart from the danger of falling into general disrepute, represent only
that quantity of gold, which, in accordance with the laws of the circulation
of commodities, is required, and is alone capable of being represented
by paper. If the quantity of paper money issued be double what it ought
to be, then, as a matter of fact, £1 would be the money-name not
of 1/4 of an ounce, but of 1/8 of an ounce of gold. The effect would be
the same as if an alteration had taken place in the function of gold as
a standard of prices. Those values that were previously expressed by the
price of £1 would now be expressed by the price of £2.

Paper money is a token representing gold or money. The relation
between it and the values of commodities is this, that the latter are ideally
expressed in the same quantities of gold that are symbolically represented
by the paper. Only in so far as paper money represents gold, which like
all other commodities has value, is it a symbol of value. [37]

Finally, some one may ask why gold is capable of being replaced
by tokens that have no value? But, as we have already seen, it is capable
of being so replaced only in so far as it functions exclusively as coin,
or as the circulating medium, and as nothing else. Now, money has other
functions besides this one, and the isolated function of serving as the
mere circulating medium is not necessarily the only one attached to gold
coin, although this is the case with those abraded coins that continue
to circulate. Each piece of money is a mere coin, or means of circulation,
only so long as it actually circulates. But this is just the case with
that minimum mass of gold, which is capable of being replaced by paper
money. That mass remains constantly within the sphere of circulation, continually
functions as a circulating medium, and exists exclusively for that purpose.
Its movement therefore represents nothing but the continued alternation
of the inverse phases of the metamorphosis C—M—C, phases in which commodities
confront their value-forms, only to disappear again immediately. The independent
existence of the exchange-value of a commodity is here a transient apparition,
by means of which the commodity is immediately replaced by another commodity.
Hence, in this process which continually makes money pass from hand to
hand, the mere symbolical existence of money suffices. Its functional existence
absorbs, so to say, its material existence. Being a transient and objective
reflex of the prices of commodities, it serves only as a symbol of itself,
and is therefore capable of being replaced by a token. [38]
One thing is, however, requisite; this token must have an objective
social validity of its own, and this the paper symbol acquires by its forced
currency. This compulsory action of the State can take effect only within
that inner sphere of circulation which is coterminous with the territories
of the community, but it is also only within that sphere that money completely
responds to its function of being the circulating medium, or becomes coin.

### SECTION 3

MONEY

The commodity that functions as a measure of value,
and, either in its own person or by a representative, as the medium of
circulation, is money. Gold (or silver) is therefore money. It functions
as money, on the one hand, when it has to be present in its own golden
person. It is then the money-commodity, neither merely ideal, as in its
function of a measure of value, nor capable of being represented, as in
its function of circulating medium. On the other hand, it also functions
as money, when by virtue of its function, whether that function be performed
in person or by representative, it congeals into the sole form of value,
the only adequate form of existence of exchange-value, in opposition to
use-value, represented by all other commodities.

### A. Hoarding

The continual movement in circuits of the two antithetical metamorphoses
of commodities, or the never ceasing alternation of sale and purchase,
is reflected in the restless currency of money, or in the function that
money performs of a perpetuum mobile of circulation. But so soon
as the series of metamorphoses is interrupted, so soon as sales are not
supplemented by subsequent purchases, money ceases to be mobilised; it
is transformed, as Boisguillebert says, from “meuble” into “immeuble,”
from movable into immovable, from coin into money.

With the very earliest development of the circulation of commodities,
there is also developed the necessity, and the passionate desire, to hold
fast the product of the first metamorphosis. This product is the transformed
shape of the commodity, or its gold-chrysalis. [39]
Commodities are thus sold not for the purpose of buying others, but in
order to replace their commodity-form by their money-form. From being the
mere means of effecting the circulation of commodities, this change of
form becomes the end and aim. The changed form of the commodity is thus
prevented from functioning as its unconditionally alienable form, or as
its merely transient money-form. The money becomes petrified into a hoard,
and the seller becomes a hoarder of money.

In the early stages of the circulation of commodities, it is the
surplus use-values alone that are converted into money. Gold and silver
thus become of themselves social expressions for superfluity or wealth.
This naive form of hoarding becomes perpetuated in those communities in
which the traditional mode of production is carried on for the supply of
a fixed and limited circle of home wants. It is thus with the people of
Asia, and particularly of the East Indies. Vanderlint, who fancies that
the prices of commodities in a country are determined by the quantity of
gold and silver to be found in it, asks himself why Indian commodities
are so cheap. Answer: Because the Hindus bury their money. From 1602 to
1734, he remarks, they buried 150 millions of pounds sterling of silver,
which originally came from America to Europe. [40] In
the 10 years from 1856 to 1866, England exported to India and China £120,000,000
in silver, which had been received in exchange for Australian gold. Most
of the silver exported to China makes its way to India.

As the production of commodities further develops, every producer
of commodities is compelled to make sure of the nexus rerum or the social
pledge. [41] His wants are constantly making themselves
felt, and necessitate the continual purchase of other people’s commodities,
while the production and sale of his own goods require time, and depend
upon circumstances. In order then to be able to buy without selling, he
must have sold previously without buying. This operation, conducted on
a general scale, appears to imply a contradiction. But the precious metals
at the sources of their production are directly exchanged for other commodities.
And here we have sales (by the owners of commodities) without purchases
(by the owners of gold or silver). [42] And subsequent
sales, by other producers, unfollowed by purchases, merely bring about
the distribution of the newly produced precious metals among all the owners
of commodities. In this way, all along the line of exchange, hoards of
gold and silver of varied extent are accumulated. With the possibility
of holding and storing up exchange-value in the shape of a particular commodity,
arises also the greed for gold. Along with the extension of
circulation, increases the power of money, that absolutely social form
of wealth ever ready for use. “Gold is a wonderful thing! Whoever possesses
it is lord of all he wants. By means of gold one can even get souls into
Paradise.” (Columbus in his letter from Jamaica, 1503.) Since gold does
not disclose what has been transformed into it, everything, commodity or
not, is convertible into gold. Everything becomes saleable and buyable.
The circulation becomes the great social retort into which everything is
thrown, to come out again as a gold-crystal. Not even are the bones of
saints, and still less are more delicate res sacrosanctae, extra commercium
hominum able to withstand this alchemy. [43] Just as
every qualitative difference between commodities is extinguished in money,
so money, on its side, like the radical leveller that it is, does away
with all distinctions. [43a] But money itself is a
commodity, an external object, capable of becoming the private property
of any individual. Thus social power becomes the private power of private
persons. The ancients therefore denounced money as subversive of the economic
and moral order of things. [43b] Modern society, which,
soon after its birth, pulled Plutus by the hair of his head from the bowels
of the earth, [44] greets gold as its Holy Grail, as
the glittering incarnation of the very principle of its own life.

A commodity, in its capacity of a use-value, satisfies a particular
want, and is a particular element of material wealth. But the value of
a commodity measures the degree of its attraction for all other elements
of material wealth, and therefore measures the social wealth of its owner.
To a barbarian owner of commodities, and even to a West-European peasant,
value is the same as value-form, and therefore to him the increase in
his hoard of gold and silver is an increase in value. It is true that the
value of money varies, at one time in consequence of a variation in its
own value, at another, in consequence of a change in the values of commodities.
But this, on the one hand, does not prevent 200 ounces of gold from still
containing more value than 100 ounces, nor, on the other hand, does it
hinder the actual metallic form of this article from continuing to be the
universal equivalent form of all other commodities, and the immediate social
incarnation of all human labour. The desire after hoarding is in its very
nature unsatiable. In its qualitative aspect, or formally considered, money
has no bounds to its efficacy, i.e., it is the universal representative
of material wealth, because it is directly convertible into any other commodity.
But, at the same time, every actual sum of money is limited in amount,
and, therefore, as a means of purchasing, has only a limited efficacy.
This antagonism between the quantitative limits of money and its qualitative
boundlessness, continually acts as a spur to the hoarder in his Sisyphus-like
labour of accumulating. It is with him as it is with a conqueror who sees
in every new country annexed, only a new boundary.

In order that gold may be held as money, and made to form a hoard,
it must be prevented from circulating, or from transforming itself into
a means of enjoyment. The hoarder, therefore, makes a sacrifice of the
lusts of the flesh to his gold fetish. He acts in earnest up to the Gospel
of abstention. On the other hand, he can withdraw from circulation no more
than what he has thrown into it in the shape of commodities. The more he
produces, the more he is able to sell. Hard work, saving, and avarice are,
therefore, his three cardinal virtues, and to sell much and buy little
the sum of his political economy. [45]

By the side of the gross form of a hoard, we find also its aesthetic
form in the possession of gold and silver articles. This grows with the
wealth of civil society. “Soyons riches ou paraissons riches” (Diderot).

In this way there is created, on the one hand, a constantly
extending market for gold and silver, unconnected with their functions
as money, and, on the other hand, a latent source of supply, to which recourse
is had principally in times of crisis and social disturbance.

Hoarding serves various purposes in the economy of the metallic
circulation. Its first function arises out of the conditions to which the
currency of gold and silver coins is subject. We have seen how, along with
the continual fluctuations in the extent and rapidity of the circulation
of commodities and in their prices, the quantity of money current unceasingly
ebbs and flows. This mass must, therefore, be capable of expansion and
contraction. At one time money must be attracted in order to act as circulating
coin, at another, circulating coin must be repelled in order to act again
as more or less stagnant money. In order that the mass of money, actually
current, may constantly saturate the absorbing power of the circulation,
it is necessary that the quantity of gold and silver in a country be greater
than the quantity required to function as coin. This condition is fulfilled
by money taking the form of hoards. These reserves serve as conduits for
the supply or withdrawal of money to or from the circulation, which in
this way never overflows its banks. [46]

### B. Means of Payment

In the simple form of the circulation of commodities hitherto considered,
we found a given value always presented to us in a double shape, as a commodity
at one pole, as money at the opposite pole. The owners of commodities came
therefore into contact as the respective representatives of what were already
equivalents. But with the development of circulation, conditions arise
under which the alienation of commodities becomes separated, by an interval
of time, from the realisation of their prices. It will be sufficient
to indicate the most simple of these conditions. One sort of article requires
a longer, another a shorter time for its production. Again, the production
of different commodities depends on different seasons of the year. One
sort of commodity may be born on its own market place, another has to make
a long journey to market. Commodity-owner No. 1, may therefore be ready
to sell, before No. 2 is ready to buy. When the same transactions are continually
repeated between the same persons, the conditions of sale are regulated
in accordance with the conditions of production. On the other hand, the
use of a given commodity, of a house, for instance, is sold (in common
parlance, let) for a definite period. Here, it is only at the end of the
term that the buyer has actually received the use-value of the commodity.
He therefore buys it before he pays for it. The vendor sells an existing
commodity, the purchaser buys as the mere representative of money, or rather
of future money. The vendor becomes a creditor, the purchaser becomes a
debtor. Since the metamorphosis of commodities, or the development of their
value-form, appears here under a new aspect, money also acquires a fresh
function; it becomes the means of payment.

The character of creditor, or of debtor, results here from the
simple circulation. The change in the form of that circulation stamps buyer
and seller with this new die. At first, therefore, these new parts are
just as transient and alternating as those of seller and buyer, and are
in turns played by the same actors. But the opposition is not nearly so
pleasant, and is far more capable of crystallisation. [47]
The same characters can, however, be assumed independently of the circulation
of commodities. The class-struggles of the ancient world took the form
chiefly of a contest between debtors and creditors, which in Rome ended
in the ruin of the plebeian debtors. They were displaced by slaves. In
the middle ages the contest ended with the ruin of the feudal debtors,
who lost their political power together with the economic basis on which
it was established. Nevertheless, the money relation of debtor and creditor
that existed at these two periods reflected only the deeper-lying antagonism
between the general economic conditions of existence of the classes in
question.

Let us return to the circulation of commodities. The appearance
of the two equivalents, commodities and money, at the two poles of the
process of sale, has ceased to be simultaneous. The money functions now,
first as a measure of value in the determination of the price of the commodity
sold; the price fixed by the contract measures the obligation of the debtor,
or the sum of money that he has to pay at a fixed date. Secondly, it serves
as an ideal means of purchase. Although existing only in the promise of
the buyer to pay, it causes the commodity to change hands. It is not before
the day fixed for payment that the means of payment actually steps into
circulation, leaves the hand of the buyer for that of the seller. The circulating
medium was transformed into a hoard, because the process stopped short
after the first phase, because the converted shape of the commodity, viz.,
the money, was withdrawn from circulation. The means of payment enters
the circulation, but only after the commodity has left it. The money is
no longer the means that brings about the process. It only brings it to
a close, by stepping in as the absolute form of existence of exchange-value,
or as the universal commodity. The seller turned his commodity into money,
in order thereby to satisfy some want, the hoarder did the same in order
to keep his commodity in its money-shape, and the debtor in order to be
able to pay; if he do not pay, his goods will be sold by the sheriff. The
value-form of commodities, money, is therefore now the end and aim of a
sale, and that owing to a social necessity springing out of the process
of circulation itself.

The buyer converts money back into commodities before he has turned
commodities into money: in other words, he achieves the second metamorphosis
of commodities before the first. The seller’s commodity circulates, and
realises its price, but only in the shape of a legal claim upon money.
It is converted into a use-value before it has been converted into money.
The completion of its first metamorphosis follows only at a later period.[48]

The obligations falling due within a given period, represent the
sum of the prices of the commodities, the sale of which gave rise to those
obligations. The quantity of gold necessary to realise this sum, depends,
in the first instance, on the rapidity of currency of the means of payment.
That quantity is conditioned by two circumstances: first the relations
between debtors and creditors form a sort of chain, in such a way that
A, when he receives money from his debtor B, straightway hands it over to
C his creditor, and so on; the second circumstance is the length of the
intervals between the different due-days of the obligations. The continuous
chain of payments, or retarded first metamorphoses, is essentially different
from that interlacing of the series of metamorphoses which we considered
on a former page. By the currency of the circulating medium, the connexion
between buyers and sellers, is not merely expressed. This connexion is
originated by, and exists in, the circulation alone. Contrariwise, the
movement of the means of payment expresses a social relation that was in
existence long before.

The fact that a number of sales take place simultaneously, and
side by side, limits the extent to which coin can be replaced by the rapidity
of currency. On the other hand, this fact is a new lever in economising
the means of payment. In proportion as payments are concentrated at one
spot, special institutions and methods are developed for their liquidation.
Such in the middle ages were the virements at Lyons. The debts due
to A from B, to B from C, to C from A, and so on, have only to be confronted
with each other, in order to annul each other to a certain extent like
positive and negative quantities. There thus remains only a single balance
to pay. The greater the amount of the payments concentrated, the less is
this balance relatively to that amount, and the less is the mass of the
means of payment in circulation.

The function of money as the means of payment implies a contradiction
without a terminus medius. In so far as the payments balance one another,
money functions only ideally as money of account, as a measure of value.
In so far as actual payments have to be made, money does not serve as a
circulating medium, as a mere transient agent in the interchange of products,
but as the individual incarnation of social labour, as the independent
form of existence of exchange-value, as the universal commodity. This contradiction
comes to a head in those phases of industrial and commercial crises which
are known as monetary crises. [49] Such a crisis occurs
only where the ever-lengthening chain of payments, and an artificial system
of settling them, has been fully developed. Whenever there is a general
and extensive disturbance of this mechanism, no matter what its cause,
money becomes suddenly and immediately transformed, from its merely ideal
shape of money of account, into hard cash. Profane commodities can no longer
replace it. The use-value of commodities becomes valueless, and their value vanishes
in the presence of its own independent form. On the eve of the crisis,
the bourgeois, with the self-sufficiency that springs from intoxicating
prosperity, declares money to be a vain imagination. Commodities alone
are money. But now the cry is everywhere: money alone is a commodity! As
the hart pants after fresh water, so pants his soul after money, the only
wealth. [50] In a crisis, the antithesis between commodities
and their value-form, money, becomes heightened into an absolute contradiction.
Hence, in such events, the form under which money appears is of no importance.
The money famine continues, whether payments have to be made in gold or
in credit money such as bank-notes. [51]

If we now consider the sum total of the money current during a
given period, we shall find that, given the rapidity of currency of the
circulating medium and of the means of payment, it is equal to the sum
of the prices to be realised, plus the sum of the payments falling due,
minus the payments that balance each other, minus finally the number of
circuits in which the same piece of coin serves in turn as means of circulation
and of payment. Hence, even when prices, rapidity of currency, and the
extent of the economy in payments, are given, the quantity of money current
and the mass of commodities circulating during a given period, such as
a day, no longer correspond. Money that represents commodities long withdrawn
from circulation, continues to be current. Commodities circulate, whose
equivalent in money will not appear on the scene till some future day.
Moreover, the debts contracted each day, and the payments falling due on
the same day, are quite incommensurable quantities. [52]

Credit-money springs directly out of the function of money
as a means of payment. Certificates of the debts owing for the purchased
commodities circulate for the purpose of transferring those debts to others.
On the other hand, to the same extent as the system of credit is extended,
so is the function of money as a means of payment. In that character it
takes various forms peculiar to itself under which it makes itself at home
in the sphere of great commercial transactions. Gold and silver coin, on
the other hand, are mostly relegated to the sphere of retail trade. [53]

When the production of commodities has sufficiently extended itself,
money begins to serve as the means of payment beyond the sphere of the
circulation of commodities. It becomes the commodity that is the universal
subject-matter of all contracts. [54] Rents, taxes,
and such like payments are transformed from payments in kind into money
payments. To what extent this transformation depends upon the general conditions of
production, is shown, to take one example, by the fact that the Roman Empire
twice failed in its attempt to levy all contributions in money. The unspeakable
misery of the French agricultural population under Louis XIV., a misery
so eloquently denounced by Boisguillebert, Marshal Vauban, and others,
was due not only to the weight of the taxes, but also to the conversion
of taxes in kind into money taxes. [55] In Asia, on
the other hand, the fact that state taxes are chiefly composed of rents
payable in kind, depends on conditions of production that are reproduced
with the regularity of natural phenomena. And this mode of payment tends
in its turn to maintain the ancient form of production. It is one of the
secrets of the conservation of the Ottoman Empire. If the foreign trade,
forced upon Japan by Europeans, should lead to the substitution of money
rents for rents in kind, it will be all up with the exemplary agriculture
of that country. The narrow economic conditions under which that agriculture
is carried on, will be swept away.

In every country, certain days of the year become by habit recognised
settling days for various large and recurrent payments. These dates depend,
apart from other revolutions in the wheel of reproduction, on conditions
closely connected with the seasons. They also regulate the dates for payments
that have no direct connexion with the circulation of commodities such
as taxes, rents, and so on. The quantity of money requisite to make the payments,
falling due on those dates all over the country, causes periodical, though
merely superficial, perturbations in the economy of the medium of payment.[56]

From the law of the rapidity of currency of the
means of payment, it follows that the quantity of the means of payment
required for all periodical payments, whatever their source,
is in inverse [57] proportion to the length of their
periods. [58]

The development of money into a medium of payment makes it necessary
to accumulate money against the dates fixed for the payment of the sums
owing. While hoarding, as a distinct mode of acquiring riches, vanishes
with the progress of civil society, the formation of reserves of the means
of payment grows with that progress.

### C. Universal Money

When money leaves the home sphere of circulation, it strips off the
local garbs which it there assumes, of a standard of prices, of coin, of
tokens, and of a symbol of value, and returns to its original form of bullion.
In the trade between the markets of the world, the value of commodities
is expressed so as to be universally recognised. Hence their independent
value-form also, in these cases, confronts them under the shape of universal
money. It is only in the markets of the world that money acquires to the
full extent the character of the commodity whose bodily form is also the
immediate social incarnation of human labour in the abstract. Its real
mode of existence in this sphere adequately corresponds to its ideal concept.

Within the sphere of home circulation, there can be but one commodity
which, by serving as a measure of value, becomes money. In the markets
of the world a double measure of value holds sway, gold and silver. [59]

Money of the world serves as the universal medium of payment,
as the universal means of purchasing, and as the universally recognised
embodiment of all wealth. Its function as a means of payment in the settling
of international balances is its chief one. Hence the watchword of the
mercantilists, balance of trade. [60] Gold and silver
serve as international means of purchasing chiefly and necessarily
in those periods when the customary equilibrium in the interchange of products
between different nations is suddenly disturbed. And lastly, it serves
as the universally recognised embodiment of social wealth, whenever the
question is not of buying or paying, but of transferring wealth from one
country to another, and whenever this transference in the form of commodities
is rendered impossible, either by special conjunctures in the markets or
by the purpose itself that is intended. [61]

Just as every country needs a reserve of money for its home circulation
so, too, it requires one for external circulation in the markets of the
world. The functions of hoards, therefore, arise in part out of the function
of money, as the medium of the home circulation and home payments, and
in part out of its function of money of the world. [62]
For this latter function, the genuine money-commodity, actual gold and
silver, is necessary. On that account, Sir James Steuart, in order to distinguish
them from their purely local substitutes, calls gold and silver “money
of the world.”

The current of the stream of gold and silver is a double one.
On the one hand, it spreads itself from its sources over all the markets
of the world, in order to become absorbed, to various extents, into the
different national spheres of circulation, to fill the conduits of currency,
to replace abraded gold and silver coins, to supply the material of articles
of luxury, and to petrify into hoards. [63]
This first current is started by the countries that exchange their labour,
realised in commodities, for the labour embodied in the precious metals
by gold and silver-producing countries. On the other hand, there is a continual
flowing backwards and forwards of gold and silver between the different
national spheres of circulation, a current whose motion depends on the
ceaseless fluctuations in the course of exchange. [64]

Countries in which the bourgeois form of production is developed
to a certain extent, limit the hoards concentrated in the strong rooms
of the banks to the minimum required for the proper performance of their
peculiar functions. [65] Whenever these hoards are strikingly
above their average level, it is, with some exceptions, an indication of
stagnation in the circulation of commodities, of an interruption in the
even flow of their metamorphoses. [66]

Footnotes

1. The question — Why does not money directly represent labour-time, so that a piece of paper may represent, for instance,
x hours’ labour, is at bottom the same as the question why, given the production
of commodities, must products take the form of commodities? This is evident,
since their taking the form of commodities implies their differentiation
into commodities and money. Or, why cannot private labour — labour for
the account of private individuals — be treated as its opposite, immediate
social labour? I have elsewhere examined thoroughly the Utopian idea of
“labour-money” in a society founded on the production of commodities (l.
c., p. 61, seq.). On this point I will only say further, that Owen’s “labour-money,” for instance, is no more “money” than a ticket for the theatre. Owen pre-supposes
directly associated labour, a form of production that is entirely inconsistent
with the production of commodities. The certificate of labour is merely
evidence of the part taken by the individual in the common labour, and
of his right to a certain portion of the common produce destined for consumption.
But it never enters into Owen’s head to pre-suppose the production of commodities,
and at the same time, by juggling with money, to try to evade the necessary
conditions of that production.

2. Savages and half-civilised races use
the tongue differently. Captain Parry says of the inhabitants on the west
coast of Baffin’s Bay: “In this case (he refers to barter) they licked
it (the thing represented to them) twice to their tongues, after which
they seemed to consider the bargain satisfactorily concluded.” In the same
way, the Eastern Esquimaux licked the articles they received in exchange.
If the tongue is thus used in the North as the organ of appropriation,
no wonder that, in the South, the stomach serves as the organ of accumulated
property, and that a Kaffir estimates the wealth of a man by the size of
his belly. That the Kaffirs know what they are about is shown by the following:
at the same time that the official British Health Report of 1864 disclosed
the deficiency of fat-forming food among a large part of the working-class,
a certain Dr. Harvey (not, however, the celebrated discoverer of the circulation
of the blood), made a good thing by advertising recipes for reducing the
superfluous fat of the bourgeoisie and aristocracy.

3. See Karl Marx: “Zur Kritik, &c.” “Theorien von der Masseinheit des Geldes,” p. 53, seq.

4. “Wherever gold and silver have by
law been made to perform the function of money or of a measure of value
side by side, it has always been tried, but in vain, to treat them as one
and the same material. To assume that there is an invariable ratio between
the quantities of gold and silver in which a given quantity of labour-time
is incorporated, is to assume in fact, that gold and silver are of one
and the same material, and that a given mass of the less valuable metal,
silver, is a constant fraction of a given mass of gold. From the reign
of Edward III. to the time of George II., the history of money in England
consists of one long series of perturbations caused by the clashing of
the legally fixed ratio between the values of gold and silver, with the
fluctuations in their real values. At one time gold was too high, at another,
silver. The metal that for the time being was estimated below its value,
was withdrawn from circulation, melted and exported. The ratio between the
two metals was then again altered by law, but the new nominal ratio soon
came into conflict again with the real one. In our own times, the slight
and transient fall in the value of gold compared with silver, which was
a consequence of the Indo-Chinese demand for silver, produced on a far
more extended scale in France the same phenomena, export of silver, and
its expulsion from circulation by gold. During the years 1855, 1856 and
1857, the excess in France of gold-imports over gold-exports amounted to
£41,580,000, while the excess of silver-exports over silver-imports
was £14,704,000. In fact, in those countries in which both metals
are legally measures of value, and therefore both legal tender, so that
everyone has the option of paying in either metal, the metal that rises
in value is at a premium, and, like every other commodity, measures its
price in the over-estimated metal which alone serves in reality as the standard
of value. The result of all experience and history with regard to this
equation is simply that, where two commodities perform by law the functions
of a measure of value, in practice one alone maintains that position.”
(Karl Marx, l.c., pp. 52, 53.)

5. The peculiar circumstance, that while
the ounce of gold serves in England as the unit of the standard of money,
the pound sterling does not form an aliquot part of it, has been explained
as follows: “Our coinage was originally adapted to the employment of silver
only, hence, an ounce of silver can always be divided into a certain adequate
number of pieces of coin, but as gold was introduced at a later period
into a coinage adapted only to silver, an ounce of gold cannot be coined
into an aliquot number of pieces.” Maclaren, “A Sketch of the History of
the Currency.” London, 1858, p. 16.

6. With English writers the confusion
between measure of value and standard of price (standard of value) is indescribable.
Their functions, as well as their names, are constantly interchanged.

7. Moreover, it has not general historical
validity.

8. It is thus that the pound sterling
in English denotes less than one-third of its original weight; the pound
Scot, before the union, only 1-36th; the French livre, 1-74th; the Spanish
maravedi, less than 1-1,000th; and the Portuguese rei a still smaller fraction.

9. “Le monete le quali oggi sono ideal,
sono le piû antiche d’ogni nazione, e tutte furono un tempo real, e perche erano reali con esse si contava” [“The coins which today are ideal are the oldest coins of every nation, and all of them were once real, and precisely because they were real they were used for calculation”] (Galiani: Della moneta, l.c., p. 153.)

10. David Urquhart remarks in his “Familiar Words” on the monstrosity (!) that now-a-days a pound (sterling), which
is the unit of the English standard of money, is equal to about a quarter
of an ounce of gold. “This is falsifying a measure, not establishing a
standard.” He sees in this “false denomination” of the weight of gold,
as in everything else, the falsifying hand of civilisation.

11. When Anacharsis was asked for what
purposes the Greeks used money, he replied, “For reckoning.” (Ashen. Deipn.
1. iv. 49 v. 2. ed. Schweighauser, 1802.)

12. “Owing to the fact that money, when
serving as the standard of price, appears under the same reckoning names
as do the prices of commodities, and that therefore the sum of £3
17s. 10 1/2d. may signify on the one hand an ounce weight of gold, and
on the other, the value of a ton of iron, this reckoning name of money
has been called its mint-price. Hence there sprang up the extraordinary
notion, that the value of gold is estimated in its own material, and that,
in contradistinction to all other commodities, its price is fixed by the
State. It was erroneously thought that the giving of reckoning names to
definite weights of gold, is the same thing as fixing the value of those
weights.” (Karl Marx, l.c., p. 52.)

13. See “Theorien von der Masseinheit
des Geldes” in “Zur Kritik der Poll Oekon. &c.,” p. 53, seq. The fantastic
notions about raising or lowering the mint-price of money by transferring
to greater or smaller weights of gold or silver, the names already legally
appropriated to fixed weights of those metals; such notions, at least in
those cases in which they aim, not at clumsy financial operations against
creditors, both public and private but at economic quack remedies, have
been so exhaustively treated by Wm. Petty in his “Quantulumcunque concerning
money: To the Lord Marquis of Halifax, 1682,” that even his immediate followers,
Sir Dudley North and John Locke, not to mention later ones, could only
dilute him. “If the wealth of a nation” he remarks, “could be decupled
by a proclamation, it were strange that such proclamations have not long
since been made by our Governors.” (l.c., p. 36.)

14. “Ou bien, il faut consentir à dire qu’une valeur d’un million en argent vaut plus qu’une valeur égale en marchandises.” [“Or indeed it must be admitted that a million in money is worth more than an equal value in commodities”] (Le Trosne, l.c., p. 919), which amounts to saying “qu’une valeur vaut plus qu’une valeur égale.” [“that one value is worth more than another value which is equal to it.”]

15. Jerome had to wrestle hard, not
only in his youth with the bodily flesh, as is shown by his fight in the
desert with the handsome women of his imagination, but also in his old
age with the spiritual flesh. “I thought,” he says, “I was in the spirit
before the Judge of the Universe.” “Who art thou?” asked a voice. “I am
a Christian.” “Thou liest,” thundered back the great Judge, “thou art nought
but a Ciceronian.”

16. “ec se tou ... puros t’antameeibesqai panta, jhsin d’Hracleitos, cai pur apantwn, woper crusou crhmata cai crhmatwn crusos.” [“As Heraclitus says, all things are exchanged for fire and fire for all things, as wares are exchanged for gold and gold for wares.”] (F. Lassalle: “Die Philosophie Herakleitos des Dunkeln.” Berlin, 1858, Vol. I, p. 222.) Lassalle in his note on this passage, p. 224, n. 3., erroneously makes gold a mere symbol of value.

17. Note by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism in the Russian edition. — In his letter of November 28, 1878, to N.
F. Danielson (Nikolai-on) Marx proposed that this sentence be corrected
to read as follows: “And, as a matter of fact, the value of each single
yard is but the materialised form of a part of the social labour expended
on the whole number of yards.” An analogous correction was made in a copy
of the second German edition of the first volume of “Capital” belonging
to Marx; however, not in his handwriting.

18. “Toute vente est achat.” [“Every sale is a purchase.”] (Dr. Quesnay: “Dialogues sur le Commerce et les Travaux des Artisans.” Physiocrates ed. Daire I. Partie, Paris, 1846, p. 170), or as Quesnay in his “Maximes générales” puts it, “Vendre est acheter.” [“To sell is to buy.”]

19. “Le prix d’une marchandise ne pouvant
être payé que par le prix d’une autre marchandise” (Mercier
de la Rivière: “L’Ordre naturel et essentiel des sociétés
politiques.” [“The price of one commodity can only be paid by the price of another commodity”] Physiocrates, ed. Daire II. Partie, p. 554.)

20. “Pour avoir cet argent, il faut
avoir vendu,” [“In order to have this money, one must have made a sale,”] l.c., p. 543.

21. As before remarked, the actual producer
of gold or silver forms an exception. He exchanges his product directly
for another commodity, without having first sold it.

22. “Si l’argent représente, dans nos mains, les choses que nous pouvons désirer d’acheter, il y représente aussi les choses que nous avons vendues pour cet argent.” [“If money represents, in our hands, the things we can wish to buy, it also represents the things we have sold to obtain that money”] (Mercier de la Rivière, l.c., p. 586.)

23. “Il y a donc ... quatre termes et
trois contractants, dont l’un intervient deux fois” [“There are therefore ... four terms and three contracting parties, one of whom intervenes twice”] (Le Trosne, l.c., p. 909.)

24. Self-evident as this may be, it
is nevertheless for the most part unobserved by political economists, and
especially by the “Free-trader Vulgaris.”

25. See my observations on James Mill
in “Zur Kritik, &c.,” pp. 74-76. With regard to this subject, we may
notice two methods characteristic of apologetic economy. The first is the
identification of the circulation of commodities with the direct barter
of products, by simple abstraction from their points of difference; the
second is, the attempt to explain away the contradictions of capitalist
production, by reducing the relations between the persons engaged in that
mode of production, to the simple relations arising out of the circulation
of commodities. The production and circulation of commodities are however,
phenomena that occur to a greater or less extent in modes of production
the most diverse. If we are acquainted with nothing but the abstract categories
of circulation, which are common to all these modes of production, we cannot
possibly know anything of the specific points of difference of those modes,
nor pronounce any judgment upon them. In no science is such a big fuss
made with commonplace truisms as in Political Economy. For instance, J.
B. Say sets himself up as a judge of crises, because, forsooth, he knows
that a commodity is a product.

26. Translator’s note. — This word is here used in its original signification of the course or track
pursued by money as it changes from hand to hand, a course which essentially
differs from circulation.

27. Even when the commodity is sold
over and over again, a phenomenon that at present has no existence for
us, it falls, when definitely sold for the last time, out of the sphere
of circulation into that of consumption, where it serves either as means
of subsistence or means of production.

28. “Il (l’argent) n’a d’autre mouvement que celui qui lui est imprimé par les productions.” [“It” (money) “has no other motion than that imparted to it by the products”] (Le Trosne, l.c., p. 885.)

29. “Ce sont les productions qui le
(l’argent) mettent en mouvement et le font circuler ... La célérité
de son mouvement (c. de l’argent) supplée à sa quantité.
Lorsqu’il en est besoin il ne fait que glisser d’une main dans l’autre
sans s’arrêter un instant.” [“It is products which set it” (money) “in motion and make it circulate ... The velocity of its” (money’s) “motion supplements its quantity. When necessary, it does nothing but slide from hand to hand, without stopping for a moment”] (Le Trosne, l.c.. pp. 915, 916.)

30. “Money being ... the common measure
of buying and selling, everybody who hath anything to sell, and cannot
procure chapmen for it, is presently apt to think, that want of money in
the kingdom, or country, is the cause why his goods do not go off; and
so, want of money is the common cry; which is a great mistake... What do
these people want, who cry out for money? ... The farmer complains ...
he thinks that were more money in the country; he should have a price for
his goods. Then it seems money is not his want, but a price for his corn
and cattel, which he would sell, but cannot... Why cannot he get a price?
... (1) Either there is too much corn and cattel in the country, so that
most who come to market have need of selling, as he hath, and few of buying;
or (2) There wants the usual vent abroad by transportation..., or (3) The
consumption fails, as when men, by reason of poverty, do not spend so much
in their houses as formerly they did; wherefore it is not the increase
of specific money, which would at all advance the farmer’s goods, but the
removal of any of these three causes, which do truly keep down the market...
The merchant and shopkeeper want money in the same manner, that is, they
want a vent for the goods they deal in, by reason that the markets fail” ...
[A nation] “never thrives better, than when riches are tost from hand to
hand.” (Sir Dudley North: “Discourses upon Trade,” Lond. 1691, pp. 11-15,
passim.) Herrenschwand’s fanciful notions amount merely to this, that the
antagonism, which has its origin in the nature of commodities, and is reproduced
in their circulation, can be removed by increasing the circulating medium.
But if, on the one hand, it is a popular delusion to ascribe stagnation
in production and circulation to insufficiency of the circulating medium,
it by no means follows, on the other hand, that an actual paucity of the
medium in consequence, e.g., of bungling legislative interference
with the regulation of currency, may not give rise to such stagnation.

31. “There is a certain measure and
proportion of money requisite to drive the trade of a nation, more or less
than which would prejudice the same. Just as there is a certain proportion
of farthings necessary in a small retail trade, to change silver money,
and to even such reckonings as cannot be adjusted with the smallest silver
pieces.... Now, as the proportion of the number of farthings requisite
in commerce is to be taken from the number of people, the frequency of
their exchanges: as also, and principally, from the value of the smallest
silver pieces of money; so in like manner, the proportion of money [gold
and silver specie] requisite in our trade, is to be likewise taken from
the frequency of commutations, and from the bigness of the payments.” (William
Petty, “A Treatise of Taxes and Contributions.” Lond. 1667, p. 17.) The
Theory of Hume was defended against the attacks of J. Steuart and others,
by A. Young, in his “Political Arithmetic,” Lond. 1774, in which work there
is a special chapter entitled “Prices depend on quantity of money, at p.
112, sqq. I have stated in “Zur Kritik, &c.,” p. 149: “He (Adam Smith)
passes over without remark the question as to the quantity of coin in circulation,
and treats money quite wrongly as a mere commodity.” This statement applies
only in so far as Adam Smith, ex officio, treats of money. Now and then,
however, as in his criticism of the earlier systems of Political Economy,
he takes the right view. “The quantity of coin in every country is regulated
by the value of the commodities which are to be circulated by It.... The
value of the goods annually bought and sold in any country requires a certain
quantity of money to circulate and distribute them to their proper consumers,
and can give employment to no more. The channel of circulation necessarily
draws to itself a sum sufficient to fill it, and never admits any more.”
(“Wealth of Nations.” Bk. IV., ch. 1.) In like manner, ex officio, he opens
his work with an apotheosis on the division of labour. Afterwards, in the
last book which treats of the sources of public revenue, he occasionally
repeats the denunciations of the division of labour made by his teacher,
A. Ferguson.

32. “The prices of things will certainly rise in every nation, as the gold and silver increase amongst the people,
and consequently, where the gold and silver decrease in any nation, the
prices of all things must fall proportionately to such decrease of money.”
(Jacob Vanderlint: “Money Answers all Things.” Lond. 1734, p. 5.) A careful
comparison of this book with Hume’s “Essays,” proves to my mind without
doubt that Hume was acquainted with and made use of Vanderlint’s work,
which is certainly an important one. The opinion that prices are determined
by the quantity of the circulating medium, was also held by Barbon and
other much earlier writers. “No inconvenience,” says Vanderlint, “can arise
by an unrestrained trade, but very great advantage; since, if the cash
of the nation be decreased by it, which prohibitions are designed to prevent,
those nations that get the cash will certainly find everything advance
in price, as the cash increases amongst them. And ... our manufactures,
and everything else, will soon become so moderate as to turn the balance
of trade in our favour, and thereby fetch the money back again.” (l.c..
pp. 43, 44.)

33. That the price of each single kind
of commodity forms a part of the sum of the prices of all the commodities
in circulation, is a self-evident proposition. But how use-values which
are incommensurable with regard to each other, are to be exchanged, en
masse for the total sum of gold and silver in a country, is quite incomprehensible.
If we start from the notion that all commodities together form one single
commodity, of which each is but an aliquot part, we get the following beautiful
result: The total commodity = x cwt. of gold; commodity A = an aliquot
part of the total commodity = the same aliquot part of x cwt. of gold. This
is stated in all seriousness by Montesquieu: “Si l’on compare la masse
de l’or et de l’argent qui est dans le monde avec la somme des marchandises
qui s’y vend il est certain que chaque denrée ou marchandise, en particulier,
pourra être comparée à une certaine portion de la masse
entière. Supposons qu’il n’y ait qu’une seule denrée ou marchandise
dans le monde, ou qu’il n’y ait qu’une seule qui s’achète, et qu’elle se divise comme l’argent: Cette partie de cette marchandise répondra
à une partie de la masse de l’argent; la moitié du total
de l’une à la moitié du total de l’autre, &c.... L’établissement
du prix des choses dépend toujours fondamentalement de la raison
du total des choses au total des signes.” [“If one compares the amount of gold and silver in the world with the sum of the commodities available, it is certain that each product or commodity, taken in isolation, could be compared with a certain portion of the total amount of money. Let us suppose that there is only one product, or commodity, in the world, or only one that can be purchased, and that it can be divided in the same way as money: a certain part of this commodity would then correspond to a part of the total amount of money; half the total of the one would correspond to half the total of the other &c. ... the determination of the prices of things always depends, fundamentally, on the relation between the total amount of things and the total amount of their monetary symbols”] (Montesquieu, l.c. t. III, pp.
12, 13.) As to the further development of this theory by Ricardo and his
disciples, James Mill, Lord Overstone, and others, see “Zur Kritik, &c.,”
pp. 140-146, and p. 150, sqq. John Stuart Mill, with his usual eclectic
logic, understands how to hold at the same time the view of his father,
James Mill, and the opposite view. On a comparison of the text of his compendium,
“Principles of Pol. Econ.,” with his preface to the first edition, in which
preface he announces himself as the Adam Smith of his day — we do not
know whether to admire more the simplicity of the man, or that of the public,
who took him, in good faith, for the Adam Smith he announced himself to
be, although he bears about as much resemblance to Adam Smith as say General
Williams, of Kars, to the Duke of Wellington. The original researches of
Mr. J. S. Mill which are neither extensive nor profound, in the domain
of Political Economy, will be found mustered in rank and file in his little
work, “Some Unsettled Questions of Political Economy,” which appeared in
1844. Locke asserts point blank the connexion between the absence of value
in gold and silver, and the determination of their values by quantity alone.
“Mankind having consented to put an imaginary value upon gold and silver
... the intrinsic value, regarded in these metals, is nothing but the quantity."
(“Some Considerations,” &c., 1691, Works Ed. 1777, Vol. II.,
p. 15.)

34. It lies of course, entirely beyond
my purpose to take into consideration such details as the seigniorage on
minting. I will, however, cite for the benefit of the romantic sycophant,
Adam Muller, who admires the “generous liberality” with which the English
Government coins gratuitously, the following opinion of Sir Dudley North:
“Silver and gold, like other commodities, have their ebbings and flowings.
Upon the arrival of quantities from Spain ... it is carried into the Tower,
and coined. Not long after there will come a demand for bullion to be exported
again. If there is none, but all happens to be in coin, what then? Melt
it down again; there’s no loss in it, for the coining costs the owner nothing.
Thus the nation has been abused, and made to pay for the twisting of straw
for asses to eat. If the merchant were made to pay the price of the coinage,
he would not have sent his silver to the Tower without consideration, and
coined money would always keep a value above uncoined silver.” (North,
l.c., p. 18.) North was himself one of the foremost merchants in the reign
of Charles II.

35. “If silver never exceed what is
wanted for the smaller payments it cannot be collected in sufficient quantities
for the larger payments ... the use of gold in the main payments necessarily
implies also its use in the retail trade: those who have gold coin
offering them for small purchases, and receiving with the commodity purchased
a balance of silver in return; by which means the surplus of silver that
would otherwise encumber the retail dealer, is drawn off and dispersed
into general circulation. But if there is as much silver as will transact
the small payments independent of gold, the retail trader must then receive
silver for small purchases, and it must of necessity accumulate in his
hands.” (David Buchanan; “Inquiry into the Taxation and Commercial Policy
of Great Britain.” Edinburgh, 1844, pp. 248, 249.)

36. The mandarin Wan-mao-in, the Chinese
Chancellor of the Exchequer, took it into his head one day to lay before
the Son of Heaven a proposal that secretly aimed at converting the assignats
of the empire into convertible bank-notes. The assignats Committee, in
its report of April, 1854, gives him a severe snubbing. Whether he also
received the traditional drubbing with bamboos is not stated. The concluding
part of the report is as follows: — “The Committee has carefully examined
his proposal and finds that it is entirely in favour of the merchants,
and that no advantage will result to the crown.” (“Arbeiten der Kaiserlich
Russischen Gesandtschaft zu Peking über China.” Aus dem Russischen
von Dr. K. Abel und F. A. Mecklenburg. Erster Band. Berlin, 1858, p. 47
sq.) In his evidence before the Committee of the House of Lords on the
Bank Acts, a governor of the Bank of England says, with regard to the abrasion
of gold coins during currency: “Every year a fresh class of sovereigns
becomes too light. The class which one year passes with full weight, loses
enough by wear and tear to draw the scales next year against it.” (House
of Lords’ Committee, 1848, n. 429.)

37. The following passage from Fullarton
shows the want of clearness on the part of even the best writers on money,
in their comprehension of its various functions: “That, as far as concerns
our domestic exchanges, all the monetary functions which are usually performed
by gold and silver coins, may be performed as effectually by a circulation
of inconvertible notes, having no value but that factitious and conventional
value they derive from the law, is a fact which admits, I conceive, of no
denial. Value of this description may be made to answer all the purposes
of intrinsic value, and supersede even the necessity for a standard, provided
only the quantity of the issues be kept under due limitation.” (Fullarton:
“Regulation of Currencies,” London, 1845, p. 21.) Because the commodity
that serves as money is capable of being replaced in circulation by mere
symbols of value, therefore its functions as a measure of value and a standard
of prices are declared to be superfluous!

38. From the fact that gold and silver,
so far as they are coins, or exclusively serve as the medium of circulation,
become mere tokens of themselves, Nicholas Barbon deduces the right of
Governments “to raise money,” that is, to give to the weight of silver
that is called a shilling the name of a greater weight, such as a crown;
and so to pay creditors shillings, instead of crowns. “Money does wear
and grow lighter by often telling over... It is the denomination and currency
of the money that men regard in bargaining, and not the quantity of silver...’Tis
the public authority upon the metal that makes it money.” (N. Barbon, l.c., pp. 29, 30, 25.)

39. “Une richesse en argent n’est que ... richesse en productions, converties en argent.” [“Monetary wealth is nothing but ... wealth in products, transformed into money”] (Mercier de la Rivière,
l.c.) “Une valeur en productions n’a fait que changer de forme.” [“A value in the form of products, which has merely changed its form.”] (Id., p. 486.)

40. “’Tis by this practice’ they keep all their goods and manufactures at such low rates.” (Vanderlint, l.c.,
pp. 95, 96.)

41. “Money ... is a pledge.” (John Bellers: “Essays about the Poor, Manufactures, Trade, Plantations, and Immorality,” Lond., 1699, p. 13.)

42. A purchase in a “categorical” sense,
implies that gold and silver are already the converted form of commodities,
or the product of a sale.

43. Henry III., most Christian king
of France, robbed cloisters of their relics, and turned them into money.
It is well known what part the despoiling of the Delphic Temple, by the
Phocians, played in the history of Greece. Temples with the ancients served
as the dwellings of the gods of commodities. They were “sacred banks.”
With the Phoenicians, a trading people par excellence, money was the transmuted
shape of everything. It was, therefore, quite in order that the virgins,
who, at the feast of the Goddess of Love, gave themselves up to strangers,
should offer to the goddess the piece of money they received.

43a.

“Gold, yellow, glittering, precious gold!

Thus much of this, will make black white; foul, fair;

Wrong, right; base, noble; old, young; coward, valiant.

... What this, you gods? Why, this

Will lug your priests and servants from your sides;

Pluck stout men’s pillows from below their heads;

This yellow slave

Will knit and break religions; bless the accurs’d;

Make the hoar leprosy ador’d; place thieves,

And give them title, knee and approbation,

With senators on the bench; this is it,

That makes the wappen’d widow wed again:

... Come damned earth,

Though common whore of mankind.”

(Shakespeare: Timon of Athens.)

43b.

Money! Nothing worse

in our lives, so current, rampant, so corrupting.

Money — you demolish cities, root men from their homes,

you train and twist good minds and set them on

to the most atrocious schemes. No limit,

you make them adept at every kind of outrage,

every godless crimes — money!”

(Sophocles, Antigone.)

44. “The desire of avarice to draw Pluto himself out of the bowels of the earth.” (The Deipnosophists, VI, 23, Athenaeus)

45. “Accrescere quanto più si può il numero de’venditori d’ogni merce, diminuere quanto più si puo il numero dei compratori, questi sono i cardini sui quali si raggirano tutte le operazioni di economia politica.” [“These are the pivots around which all the measures of political economy turn: the maximum possible increase in the number of sellers of each commodity, and the maximum possible decrease in the number of buyers”] (Verri, l.c., p. 52.)

46. “There is required for carrying
on the trade of the nation a determinate sum of specifick money which varies,
and is sometimes more, sometimes less, as the circumstances we are in require....
This ebbing and flowing of money supplies and accommodates itself, without
any aid of Politicians.... The buckets work alternately; when money is
scarce, bullion is coined; when bullion is scarce, money is melted.” (Sir
D. North, l.c., Postscript, p. 3.) John Stuart Mill, who for a long time
was an official of the East India Company, confirms the fact that in India
silver ornaments still continue to perform directly the functions of a
hoard. The silver ornaments are brought out and coined when there is a
high rate of interest, and go back again when the rate of interest falls.
(1. S. Mill’s Evidence “Reports on Bank Acts,” 1857, 2084.) According to
a Parliamentary document of 1864 on the gold and silver import and export
of India, the import of gold and silver in 1863 exceeded the export by
£19,367,764. During the 8 years immediately preceding 1864, the excess
of imports over exports of the precious metals amounted to £109,652,917.
During this century far more than £200,000,000 has been coined in
India.

47. The following shows the debtor and
creditor relations existing between English traders at the beginning of
the 18th century. “Such a spirit of crudity reigns here in England among
the men of trade, that is not to be met with in any other society of men,
nor in any other kingdom of the world.” (“An Essay on Credit and the Bankrupt
Act,” Lond., 1707, p. 2.)

48. It will be seen from the following
quotation from my book which appeared in 1859, why I take no notice in
the text of an opposite form: “Contrariwise, in the process in M—C, the
money can be alienated as a real means of purchase, and in that way, the
price of the commodity can be realised before the use-value of the money
is realised and the commodity actually delivered. This occurs constantly
under the every-day form of prepayments. And it is under this form, that
the English government purchases opium from the ryots of India.... In these
cases, however, the money always acts as a means of purchase.... Of course
capital also is advanced in the shape of money.... This point of view,
however, does not fall within the horizon of simple circulation.” (“Zur
Kritik, &c.,” pp. 119, 120.)

49. The monetary crisis referred to
in the text, being a phase of every crisis, must be clearly distinguished
from that particular form of crisis, which also is called a monetary crisis,
but which may be produced by itself as an independent phenomenon in such
a way as to react only indirectly on industry and commerce. The pivot of
these crises is to be found in moneyed capital, and their sphere of direct
action is therefore the sphere of that capital, viz., banking, the stock
exchange, and finance.

50. “The sudden reversion from a system
of credit to a system of hard cash heaps theoretical fright on top of the
practical panic; and the dealers by whose agency circulation is affected,
shudder before the impenetrable mystery in which their own economic relations
are involved” (Karl Marx, l.c., p. 126.) “The poor stand still, because
the rich have no money to employ them, though they have the same land and
hands to provide victuals and clothes, as ever they had; ...which is the true riches of a nation, and not the money.” John Bellers, Proposals for Raising a College of Industry, London, 1696, p3.

51. The following shows how such times
are exploited by the “amis du commerce.” “On one occasion (1839) an old
grasping banker (in the city) in his private room raised the lid of the
desk he sat over, and displayed to a friend rolls of bank-notes, saying
with intense glee there were £600,000 of them, they were held to
make money tight, and would all be let out after three o’clock on the same
day.” (“The Theory of Exchanges. The Bank Charter Act of 1844.” Lond. 1864,
p. 81). The Observer, a semi-official government organ, contained
the following paragraph on 24th April, 1864: “Some very curious rumours
are current of the means which have been resorted to in order to create
a scarcity of banknotes.... Questionable as it would seem, to suppose that
any trick of the kind would be adopted, the report has been so universal
that it really deserves mention.”

52. “The amount of purchases or contracts entered upon during the course of any given day, will not affect the quantity
of money afloat on that particular day, but, in the vast majority of cases,
will resolve themselves into multifarious drafts upon the quantity of money
which may be afloat at subsequent dates more or less distant.... The bills
granted or credits opened, to-day, need have no resemblance whatever, either
in quantity, amount or duration, to those granted or entered upon to-morrow
or next day, nay, many of today’s bills, and credits, when due, fall in
with a mass of liabilities whose origins traverse a range of antecedent
dates altogether indefinite, bills at 12, 6, 3 months or 1 often aggregating
together to swell the common liabilities of one particular day....” (“The
Currency Theory Reviewed; in a Letter to the Scottish People.” By a Banker
in England. Edinburgh, 1845, pp. 29, 30 passim.)

53. As an example of how little ready
money is required in true commercial operations, I give below a statement
by one of the largest London houses of its yearly receipts and payments.
Its transactions during the year 1856, extending to many millions of pounds
sterling, are here reduced to the scale of one million.

Receipts.Payments.

Bankers’ and Merchants’£533,596Bills payable after date£302,674

Cheques on Bankers, &c. payable on demand357,715Cheques on London Bankers663,672

Country Notes9,627Bank of England Notes22,743

Bank of England Notes68,554Gold9,427

Gold28,089Silver and Copper1,484

Silver and Copper1,486

Post Office Orders933

Total £1,000,000Total £1,000,000

“Report from the Select Committee on the Bank Acts, July, 1858,” p. lxxi.

54. “The course of trade being thus
turned, from exchanging of goods for goods, or delivering and taking, to
selling and paying, all the bargains ... are now stated upon the foot of
a Price in money.” (“An Essay upon Publick Credit.” 3rd Ed. Lond., 1710,
p. 8.)

55. “L’argent ... est devenu le bourreau de toutes choses.” Finance is the “alambic, qui a fait évaporer
une quantité effroyable de biens et de denrées pour faire ce fatal
précis.” “L’argent déclare la guerre à tout le genre
humain.” [“Money ... has become the executioner of all things.” Finance is the “alembic that evaporates a frightful quantity of goods and commodities in order to obtain this fatal extract.” “Money [...] declares war [...] on the whole human race”] (Boisguillebert: “Dissertation sur la nature des richesses, de l’argent et des tributs.” Edit. Daire. Economistes financiers. Paris, 1843, t. i., pp. 413, 419, 417.)

56. “On Whitsuntide, 1824,” says Mr. Craig before the Commons’ Committee of 1826, “there was such an immense
demand for notes upon the banks of Edinburgh, that by 11 o’clock they had
not a note left in their custody. They sent round to all the different
banks to borrow, but could not get them, and many of the transactions were
adjusted by slips of paper only; yet by three o’clock the whole of the
notes were returned into the banks from which they had issued! It was a
mere transfer from hand to hand. “Although the average effective circulation
of bank-notes in Scotland is less than three millions sterling, yet on
certain pay days in the year, every single note in the possession of the
bankers, amounting in the whole to about £7,000,000, is called into
activity. On these occasions the notes have a single and specific function
to perform, and so soon as they have performed it, they flow back into the
various banks from which they issued. (See John Fullarton, “Regulation
of Currencies.” Lond. 1845, p. 86, note.) In explanation it should be stated,
that in Scotland, at the date of Fullarton’s work, notes and not cheques
were used to withdraw deposits.

57. Note by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism in the Russian edition: Apparently a slip of the pen. When writing
inverse the author evidently meant direct.

58. To the question, “If there were
occasion to raise 40 millions p. a., whether the same 6 millions (gold)
... would suffice for such revolutions and circulations thereof, as trade
requires,” Petty replies in his usual masterly manner, “I answer yes: for
the expense being 40 millions, if the revolutions were in such short circles,
viz., weekly, as happens among poor artisans and labourers, who receive
and pay every Saturday, then 40/52 parts of 1 million of money would answer
these ends, but if the circles be quarterly, according to our custom of
paying rent, and gathering taxes, then 10 millions were requisite. Wherefore,
supposing payments in general to be of a mixed circle between one week
and 13, then add 10 millions to 40/52, the half of which will be 5 1/2,
so as if we have 5 1/2 millions we have enough.” (William Petty: “Political
Anatomy of Ireland.” 1672, Edit.: Lond. 1691, pp. 13, 14.)

59. Hence the absurdity of every law
prescribing that the banks of a country shall form reserves of that precious
metal alone which circulates at home. The “pleasant difficulties” thus
self-created by the Bank of England, are well known. On the subject of
the great epochs in the history of the changes in the relative value of
gold and silver, see Karl Marx, l.c., p. 136 sq. Sir Robert Peel, by his
Bank Act of 1844, sought to tide over the difficulty, by allowing the Bank
of England to issue notes against silver bullion, on condition that the
reserve of silver should never exceed more than one-fourth of the reserve
of gold. The value of silver being for that purpose estimated at its price
in the London market.

[Added in the 4th German edition. — We find ourselves once
more in a period of serious change in the relative values of gold and silver.
About 25 years ago the ratio expressing the relative value of gold and
silver was 15-1/2:1; now it is approximately 22:1, and silver is still
constantly falling as against gold. This is essentially the result of a
revolution in the mode of production of both metals. Formerly gold was
obtained almost exclusively by washing it out from gold-bearing alluvial
deposits, products of the weathering of auriferous rocks. Now this method
has become inadequate and has been forced into the background by the processing
of the quartz lodes themselves, a way of extraction which formerly was
only of secondary importance, although well known to the ancients (Diodorus,
III, 12-14) (Diodor’s v. Sicilien “Historische Bibliothek,” book III, 12-14.
Stuttgart 1828, pp. 258-261). Moreover, not only were new huge silver deposits
discovered in North America, in the Western part of the Rocky Mountains,
but these and the Mexican silver mines were really opened up by the laying
of railways, which made possible the shipment of modern machinery and fuel
and in consequence the mining of silver on a very large scale at a low
cost. However there is a great difference in the way the two metals occur
in the quartz lodes. The gold is mostly native, but disseminated throughout
the quartz in minute quantities. The whole mass of the vein must therefore
be crushed and the gold either washed out or extracted by means of mercury.
Often 1,000,000 grammes of quartz barely yield 1-3 and very seldom 30-60
grammes of gold. Silver is seldom found native, however it occurs in special
quartz that is separated from the lode with comparative ease and contains
mostly 40-90% silver; or it is contained, in smaller quantities, in copper,
lead and other ores which in themselves are worthwhile working. From this
alone it is apparent that the labour expended on the production of gold
is rather increasing while that expended on silver production has decidedly
decreased, which quite naturally explains the drop in the value of the
latter. This fall in value would express itself in a still greater fall
in price if the price of silver were not pegged even to-day by artificial
means. But America’s rich silver deposits have so far barely been tapped,
and thus the prospects are that the value of this metal will keep on dropping
for rather a long time to come. A still greater contributing factor here
is the relative decrease in the requirement of silver for articles of general
use and for luxuries, that is its replacement by plated goods, aluminium,
etc. One may thus gauge the utopianism of the bimetallist idea that compulsory
international quotation will raise silver again to the old value ratio
of 1:15-1/2. It is more likely that silver will forfeit its money function
more and more in the markets of the world. — F E.]

60. The opponents, themselves, of the
mercantile system, a system which considered the settlement of surplus
trade balances in gold and silver as the aim of international trade, entirely
misconceived the functions of money of the world. I have shown by the example
of Ricardo in what way their false conception of the laws that regulate
the quantity of the circulating medium, is reflected in their equally false
conception of the international movement of the precious metals (l.c.,
pp. 150 sq.). His erroneous dogma: “An unfavourable balance of trade never
arises but from a redundant currency.... The exportation of the coin is
caused by its cheapness, and is not the effect, but the cause of an unfavourable
balance,” already occurs in Barbon: “The Balance of Trade, if there be
one, is not the cause of sending away the money out of a nation; but that
proceeds from the difference of the value of bullion in every country.”
(N. Barbon; l.c., pp. 59, 60.) MacCulloch in “The Literature of Political
Economy, a classified catalogue, Lond. 1845,” praises Barbon for this anticipation,
but prudently passes over the naive forms, in which Barbon clothes the
absurd supposition on which the “currency principle” is based. The absence
of real criticism and even of honesty, in that catalogue culminates in
the sections devoted to the history of the theory of money; the reason
is that MacCulloch in this part of the work is flattering Lord Overstone
whom he calls “facile princeps argentanorum.”

61. For instance, in subsidies, money
loans for carrying on wars or for enabling banks to resume cash payments,
&c., it is the money-form, and no other, of value that may be wanted.

62. “I would desire, indeed, no more
convincing evidence of the competency of the machinery of the hoards in
specie-paying countries to perform every necessary office of international
adjustment, without any sensible aid from the general circulation, than
the facility with which France, when but just recovering from the shock
of a destructive foreign invasion, completed within the space of 27 months
the payment of her forced contribution of nearly 20 millions to the allied
powers, and a considerable proportion of the sum in specie, without any
perceptible contraction or derangement of her domestic currency, or even
any alarming fluctuation of her exchanges.” (Fullerton, l.c., p. 141.)
[Added in the 4th German edition. — We have a still more striking
example in the facility with which the same France was able in 1871-73
to pay off within 30 months a forced contribution more than ten times as
great, a considerable part of it likewise in specie. — F. E.]

63. “L’argent se partage entre les nations relativement au besoin qu’elles en ont ... étant toujours attiré
par les productions.” [“Money is shared among the nations in accordance with their need for it ... as it is always attracted by the products”] (Le Trosne, l.c., p. 916.) “The mines which are continually giving gold and silver, do give sufficient to supply such a needful balance to every nation.” (J. Vanderlint, l.c., p. 40.)

64. “Exchanges rise and fall every week, and at some particular times in the year run high against a nation, and
at other times run as high on the contrary.” (N. Barbon, l.c., p. 39)

65. These various functions are liable
to come into dangerous conflict with one another whenever gold and silver
have also to serve as a fund for the conversion of bank-notes.

66. “What money is more than of absolute
necessity for a Home Trade, is dead stock ... and brings no profit to that
country it’s kept in, but as it is transported in trade, as well as imported.”
(John Bellers, “Essays,” p. 13.) “What if we have too much coin? We may
melt down the heaviest and turn it into the splendour of plate, vessels
or utensils of gold or silver, or send it out as a commodity, where the
same is wanted or desired; or let it out at interest, where interest is
high.” (W. Petty: “Quantulumcunque,” p. 39.) “Money is but the fat of the
Body Politick, whereof too much doth as often hinder its agility, as too
little makes it sick ... as fat lubricates the motion of the muscles, feeds
in want of victuals, fills up the uneven cavities, and beautifies the body;
so doth money in the state quicken its action, feeds from abroad in time
of dearth at home, evens accounts ... and beautifies the whole; altho more
especially the particular persons that have it in plenty.” (W. Petty, “Political
Anatomy of Ireland,” p. 14.)

Karl Marx. Capital Volume One

## Part II: The Transformation of Money into Capital

## Chapter Four: The General Formula for Capital

The circulation of commodities is the starting-point
of capital. The production of commodities, their circulation, and that
more developed form of their circulation called commerce, these form the
historical ground-work from which it rises. The modern history of capital
dates from the creation in the 16th century of a world-embracing commerce
and a world-embracing market.

If we abstract from the material substance of the circulation
of commodities, that is, from the exchange of the various use-values, and
consider only the economic forms produced by this process of circulation,
we find its final result to be money: this final product of the circulation
of commodities is the first form in which capital appears.

As a matter of history, capital, as opposed to landed property,
invariably takes the form at first of money; it appears as moneyed wealth,
as the capital of the merchant and of the usurer. [1]
But we have no need to refer to the origin of capital in order to discover
that the first form of appearance of capital is money. We can see it daily
under our very eyes. All new capital, to commence with, comes on the stage,
that is, on the market, whether of commodities, labour, or money, even
in our days, in the shape of money that by a definite process has to be
transformed into capital.

The first distinction we notice between money that is money only,
and money that is capital, is nothing more than a difference in their form
of circulation.

The simplest form of the circulation of commodities is C—M—C,
the transformation of commodities into money, and the change of the money
back again into commodities; or selling in order to buy. But alongside
of this form we find another specifically different form: M—C—M, the transformation
of money into commodities, and the change of commodities back again into
money; or buying in order to sell. Money that circulates in the latter
manner is thereby transformed into, becomes capital, and is already potentially
capital.

Now let us examine the circuit M—C—M a little closer. It consists,
like the other, of two antithetical phases. In the first phase, M—C, or
the purchase, the money is changed into a commodity. In the second phase,
C—M, or the sale, the commodity is changed back again into money. The combination
of these two phases constitutes the single movement whereby money is exchanged
for a commodity, and the same commodity is again exchanged for money; whereby
a commodity is bought in order to be sold, or, neglecting the distinction
in form between buying and selling, whereby a commodity is bought with
money, and then money is bought with a commodity. [2]
The result, in which the phases of the process vanish, is the exchange
of money for money, M—M. If I purchase 2,000 lbs. of cotton for £100,
and resell the 2,000 lbs. of cotton for £110, I have, in fact, exchanged
£100 for £110, money for money.

Now it is evident that the circuit M—C—M would be absurd and without
meaning if the intention were to exchange by this means two equal sums
of money, £100 for £100. The miser’s plan would be far simpler
and surer; he sticks to his £100 instead of exposing it to the dangers
of circulation. And yet, whether the merchant who has paid £100 for
his cotton sells it for £110, or lets it go for £100, or even
£50, his money has, at all events, gone through a characteristic
and original movement, quite different in kind from that which it goes
through in the hands of the peasant who sells corn, and with the money
thus set free buys clothes. We have therefore to examine first the distinguishing
characteristics of the forms of the circuits M—C—M and C—M—C, and in doing
this the real difference that underlies the mere difference of form will
reveal itself.

Let us see, in the first place, what the two forms have in common.

Both circuits are resolvable into the same two antithetical phases,
C—M, a sale, and M—C, a purchase. In each of these phases the same material
elements - a commodity, and money, and the same economic dramatis
personae, a buyer and a seller - confront one another. Each circuit is
the unity of the same two antithetical phases, and in each case this unity
is brought about by the intervention of three contracting parties, of whom
one only sells, another only buys, while the third both buys and sells.

What, however, first and foremost distinguishes the circuit C—M—C
from the circuit M—C—M, is the inverted order of succession of the two
phases. The simple circulation of commodities begins with a sale and ends
with a purchase, while the circulation of money as capital begins with
a purchase and ends with a sale. In the one case both the starting-point
and the goal are commodities, in the other they are money. In the first
form the movement is brought about by the intervention of money, in the
second by that of a commodity.

In the circulation C—M—C, the money is in the end converted into
a commodity, that serves as a use-value; it is spent once for all. In the
inverted form, M—C—M, on the contrary, the buyer lays out money in order
that, as a seller, he may recover money. By the purchase of his commodity
he throws money into circulation, in order to withdraw it again by the
sale of the same commodity. He lets the money go, but only with the sly
intention of getting it back again. The money, therefore, is not spent,
it is merely advanced. [3]

In the circuit C—M—C, the same piece of money changes its place
twice. The seller gets it from the buyer and pays it away to another seller.
The complete circulation, which begins with the receipt, concludes with
the payment, of money for commodities. It is the very contrary in the circuit
M—C—M. Here it is not the piece of money that changes its place twice,
but the commodity. The buyer takes it from the hands of the seller and
passes it into the hands of another buyer. Just as in the simple circulation
of commodities the double change of place of the same piece of money effects
its passage from one hand into another, so here the double change of place
of the same commodity brings about the reflux of the money to its point
of departure.

Such reflux is not dependent on the commodity being sold for more
than was paid for it. This circumstance influences only the amount of the
money that comes back. The reflux itself takes place, so soon as the purchased
commodity is resold, in other words, so soon as the circuit M—C—M is completed.
We have here, therefore, a palpable difference between the circulation
of money as capital, and its circulation as mere money.

The circuit C—M—C comes completely to an end, so soon as
the money brought in by the sale of one commodity is abstracted again by
the purchase of another.

If, nevertheless, there follows a reflux of money to its starting-point,
this can only happen through a renewal or repetition of the operation.
If I sell a quarter of corn for £3, and with this £3 buy clothes,
the money, so far as I am concerned, is spent and done with. It belongs
to the clothes merchant. If I now sell a second quarter of corn, money
indeed flows back to me, not however as a sequel to the first transaction,
but in consequence of its repetition. The money again leaves me, so soon
as I complete this second transaction by a fresh purchase. Therefore, in
the circuit C—M—C, the expenditure of money has nothing to do with its
reflux. On the other hand, in M—C—M, the reflux of the money is conditioned
by the very mode of its expenditure. Without this reflux, the operation
fails, or the process is interrupted and incomplete, owing to the absence
of its complementary and final phase, the sale.

The circuit C—M—C starts with one commodity, and finishes with
another, which falls out of circulation and into consumption. Consumption,
the satisfaction of wants, in one word, use-value, is its end and aim.
The circuit M—C—M, on the contrary, commences with money and ends with
money. Its leading motive, and the goal that attracts it, is therefore
mere exchange-value.

In the simple circulation of commodities, the two extremes of
the circuit have the same economic form. They are both commodities, and
commodities of equal value. But they are also use-values differing in their
qualities, as, for example, corn and clothes. The exchange of products,
of the different materials in which the labour of society is embodied,
forms here the basis of the movement. It is otherwise in the circulation
M—C—M, which at first sight appears purposeless, because tautological.
Both extremes have the same economic form. They are both money, and therefore
are not qualitatively different use-values; for money is but the converted
form of commodities, in which their particular use-values vanish. To exchange
£100 for cotton, and then this same cotton again for £100,
is merely a roundabout way of exchanging money for money, the same for
the same, and appears to be an operation just as purposeless as it is absurd.
[4] One sum of money is distinguishable from
another only by its amount. The character and tendency of the process M—C—M,
is therefore not due to any qualitative difference between its extremes,
both being money, but solely to their quantitative difference. More money
is withdrawn from circulation at the finish than was thrown into it at
the start. The cotton that was bought for £100 is perhaps resold
for £100 + £10 or £110. The exact form of this process
is therefore M—C—M′, where M′ = M + ∆ M = the original sum advanced,
plus an increment. This increment or excess over the original value I call
“surplus-value.” The value originally advanced, therefore, not only remains
intact while in circulation, but adds to itself a surplus-value or expands
itself. It is this movement that converts it into capital.

Of course, it is also possible, that in C—M—C, the two extremes
C—C, say corn and clothes, may represent different quantities of value.
The farmer may sell his corn above its value, or may buy the clothes at
less than their value. He may, on the other hand, “be done” by the clothes
merchant. Yet, in the form of circulation now under consideration, such
differences in value are purely accidental. The fact that the corn and
the clothes are equivalents, does not deprive the process of all meaning,
as it does in M—C—M. The equivalence of their values is rather a necessary
condition to its normal course.

The repetition or renewal of the act of selling in order to buy,
is kept within bounds by the very object it aims at, namely, consumption
or the satisfaction of definite wants, an aim that lies altogether outside
the sphere of circulation. But when we buy in order to sell, we, on the
contrary, begin and end with the same thing, money, exchange-value; and
thereby the movement becomes interminable. No doubt, M becomes M + ∆ M,
£100 become £110. But when viewed in their qualitative aspect
alone, £110 are the same as £100, namely money; and considered
quantitatively, £110 is, like £100, a sum of definite and limited
value. If now, the £110 be spent as money, they cease to play their
part. They are no longer capital. Withdrawn from circulation,
they become petrified into a hoard, and though they remained in that state
till doomsday, not a single farthing would accrue to them. If, then, the
expansion of value is once aimed at, there is just the same inducement
to augment the value of the £110 as that of the £100; for both
are but limited expressions for exchange-value, and therefore both have
the same vocation to approach, by quantitative increase, as near as possible
to absolute wealth. Momentarily, indeed, the value originally advanced,
the £100 is distinguishable from the surplus-value of £10 that
is annexed to it during circulation; but the distinction vanishes immediately.
At the end of the process, we do not receive with one hand the original
£100, and with the other, the surplus-value of £10. We simply
get a value of £110, which is in exactly the same condition and fitness
for commencing the expanding process, as the original £100 was. Money
ends the movement only to begin it again. [5] Therefore,
the final result of every separate circuit, in which a purchase and consequent
sale are completed, forms of itself the starting-point of a new circuit.
The simple circulation of commodities - selling in order to buy - is a
means of carrying out a purpose unconnected with circulation, namely, the
appropriation of use-values, the satisfaction of wants. The circulation
of money as capital is, on the contrary, an end in itself, for the expansion
of value takes place only within this constantly renewed movement. The
circulation of capital has therefore no limits. [6]

As the conscious representative of this movement, the possessor
of money becomes a capitalist. His person, or rather his pocket, is the
point from which the money starts and to which it returns. The expansion
of value, which is the objective basis or main-spring of the circulation
M—C—M, becomes his subjective aim, and it is only in so far as the appropriation
of ever more and more wealth in the abstract becomes the sole motive of
his operations, that he functions as a capitalist, that is, as capital
personified and endowed with consciousness and a will. Use-values must
therefore never be looked upon as the real aim of the capitalist; [7]
neither must the profit on any single transaction. The restless never-ending
process of profit-making alone is what he aims at. [8]
This boundless greed after riches, this passionate chase after exchange-value
[9], is common to the capitalist and the miser; but while
the miser is merely a capitalist gone mad, the capitalist is a rational
miser. The never-ending augmentation of exchange-value, which the miser
strives after, by seeking to save [10] his money from
circulation, is attained by the more acute capitalist, by constantly throwing
it afresh into circulation. [11]

The independent form, i.e., the money-form, which the value
of commodities assumes in the case of simple circulation, serves only one
purpose, namely, their exchange, and vanishes in the final result of the
movement. On the other hand, in the circulation M—C—M, both the money
and the commodity represent only different modes of existence of value
itself, the money its general mode, and the commodity its particular, or,
so to say, disguised mode. [12] It is constantly changing
from one form to the other without thereby becoming lost, and thus assumes
an automatically active character. If now we take in turn each of the two
different forms which self-expanding value successively assumes in the
course of its life, we then arrive at these two propositions: Capital is
money: Capital is commodities. [13] In truth, however,
value is here the active factor in a process, in which, while constantly
assuming the form in turn of money and commodities, it at the same time
changes in magnitude, differentiates itself by throwing off surplus-value
from itself; the original value, in other words, expands spontaneously.
For the movement, in the course of which it adds surplus-value, is its
own movement, its expansion, therefore, is automatic expansion. Because
it is value, it has acquired the occult quality of being able to add value
to itself. It brings forth living offspring, or, at the least, lays golden
eggs.

Value, therefore, being the active factor in such a process, and
assuming at one time the form of money, at another that of commodities,
but through all these changes preserving itself and expanding, it requires
some independent form, by means of which its identity may at any time be
established. And this form it possesses only in the shape of money. It
is under the form of money that value begins and ends, and begins again,
every act of its own spontaneous generation. It began by being £100,
it is now £110, and so on. But the money itself is only one of the
two forms of value. Unless it takes the form of some commodity, it does
not become capital. There is here no antagonism, as in the case of hoarding,
between the money and commodities. The capitalist knows that all commodities,
however scurvy they may look, or however badly they may smell, are in faith
and in truth money, inwardly circumcised Jews, and what is more, a wonderful
means whereby out of money to make more money.

In simple circulation, C—M—C, the value of commodities attained
at the most a form independent of their use-values, i.e., the form
of money; but that same value now in the circulation M—C—M, or the circulation
of capital, suddenly presents itself as an independent substance, endowed
with a motion of its own, passing through a life-process of its own, in
which money and commodities are mere forms which it assumes
and casts off in turn. Nay, more: instead of simply representing the relations
of commodities, it enters now, so to say, into private relations with itself.
It differentiates itself as original value from itself as surplus-value;
as the father differentiates himself from himself qua the son, yet
both are one and of one age: for only by the surplus-value of £10
does the £100 originally advanced become capital, and so soon as
this takes place, so soon as the son, and by the son, the father, is begotten,
so soon does their difference vanish, and they again become one, £110.

Value therefore now becomes value in process, money in process,
and, as such, capital. It comes out of circulation, enters into it again,
preserves and multiplies itself within its circuit, comes back out of it
with expanded bulk, and begins the same round ever afresh. [14]
M—M′, money which begets money, such is the description of Capital from
the mouths of its first interpreters, the Mercantilists.

Buying in order to sell, or, more accurately, buying in order
to sell dearer, M—C—M′, appears certainly to be a form peculiar to one
kind of capital alone, namely, merchants’ capital. But industrial capital
too is money, that is changed into commodities, and by the sale of these
commodities, is re-converted into more money. The events that take place
outside the sphere of circulation, in the interval between the buying and
selling, do not affect the form of this movement. Lastly, in the case of
interest-bearing capital, the circulation M—C—M′ appears abridged. We have
its result without the intermediate stage, in the form M—M′, “en style
lapidaire” so to say, money that is worth more money, value that is greater
than itself.

M—C—M′ is therefore in reality the general formula of capital
as it appears prima facie within the sphere of circulation.

Footnotes

1. The contrast between the power, based on the personal relations of dominion and servitude, that is conferred by
landed property, and the impersonal power that is given by money, is well expressed by the two French proverbs, “Nulle terre sans seigneur,” and
“L’argent n’a pas de maître,” – “No land without its lord,” and “Money has no master.”

2. “Avec de l’argent on achète
des marchandises et avec des marchandises on achète de l’argent.” [“With money one buys commodities, and with commodities one buys money”] (Mercier de la Rivière: “L’ordre naturel et essentiel des sociétés
politiques,” p. 543.)

3. “When a thing is bought in order to be sold again, the sum employed is called money advanced; when it is bought not to be sold, it may be said to be expended.” — (James Steuart: “Works,” &c. Edited by Gen. Sir James Steuart, his son. Lond., 1805, V. I., p. 274.)

4. “On n’échange pas de l’argent contre de l’argent,” [“One does not exchange money for money,”] says Mercier de la Rivière to the Mercantilists (l.c., p. 486.) In a work, which, ex professo treats of “trade” and “speculation,” occurs the following: “All trade consists in the exchange of things of different kinds; and the advantage” (to the merchant?) “arises out of this difference. To exchange a pound of bread against a pound of bread ... would be attended with no advantage; ... Hence trade is advantageously contrasted with gambling, which consists in a mere exchange of money for money.” (Th. Corbet, “An Inquiry into the Causes and Modes of the Wealth of Individuals; or the Principles of Trade and Speculation Explained.” London, 1841, p. 5.) Although Corbet does not see that M—M, the exchange of money for money, is the characteristic form of circulation, not only of merchants’ capital but of all capital, yet at least he acknowledges that this form is common to gambling and to one species of trade, viz., speculation: but then comes MacCulloch and makes out, that to buy in order to sell, is to speculate, and thus the difference between Speculation and Trade vanishes. “Every transaction in which an individual buys produce in order to sell it again, is, in fact, a speculation.” (MacCulloch: “A Dictionary Practical, &c., of Commerce.” Lond., 1847, p. 1009.) With much more naiveté, Pinto, the Pindar of the Amsterdam Stock Exchange, remarks, “Le commerce est un jeu: (taken from Locke) et ce n’est pas avec des gueux qu’on peut gagner. Si l’on gagnait longtemps en tout avec tous, il faudrait rendre de bon accord les plus grandes parties du profit pour recommencer le jeu.” [“Trade is a game, and nothing can be won from beggars. If one won everything from everybody all the time, it would be necessary to give back the greater part of the profit voluntarily, in order to begin the game again”] (Pinto: “Traité de la Circulation et du Crédit.” Amsterdam, 1771. p. 231.)

5. “Capital is divisible ... into the
original capital and the profit, the increment to the capital ... although in practice this profit is immediately turned into capital, and set in motion with the original.” (F. Engels, “Umrisse zu einer Kritik der Nationalökonomie, in: Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, herausgegeben von Arnold Ruge und Karl Marx.” Paris, 1844, p. 99.)

6. Aristotle opposes Œconomic to Chrematistic. He starts from the former. So far as it is the art of gaining a livelihood,
it is limited to procuring those articles that are necessary to existence,
and useful either to a household or the state. “True wealth (ὁ
ἀληθινὸς πλοῦτος) consists of such values in use; for the quantity of
possessions of this kind, capable of making life pleasant, is not unlimited.
There is, however, a second mode of acquiring things, to which we may by
preference and with correctness give the name of Chrematistic, and in this
case there appear to be no limits to riches and possessions. Trade (ἡ καπηλικὴ is literally retail trade, and Aristotle takes this kind because
in it values in use predominate) does not in its nature belong to Chrematistic,
for here the exchange has reference only to what is necessary to themselves
(the buyer or seller).” Therefore, as he goes on to show, the original
form of trade was barter, but with the extension of the latter, there arose
the necessity for money. On the discovery of money, barter of necessity
developed into καπηλικὴ, into trading in commodities, and this
again, in opposition to its original tendency, grew into Chrematistic,
into the art of making money. Now Chrematistic is distinguishable from
Œconomic in this way, that “in the case of Chrematistic circulation is
the source of riches (ποιητικὴ χρημάτων ... διὰ χρημάτων μεταβολῆς).
And it appears to revolve about money, for money is the beginning and end
of this kind of exchange (τὸ γὰρ νόμισμα στοιχεῖον καὶ πέρας τῆς ἀλλαγῆς ἐστίν).
Therefore also riches, such as Chrematistic strives for, are unlimited.
Just as every art that is not a means to an end, but an end in itself,
has no limit to its aims, because it seeks constantly to approach nearer
and nearer to that end, while those arts that pursue means to an end, are
not boundless, since the goal itself imposes a limit upon them, so with
Chrematistic, there are no bounds to its aims, these aims being absolute
wealth. Œconomic not Chrematistic has a limit ... the object of the former
is something different from money, of the latter the augmentation of money. ...
By confounding these two forms, which overlap each other, some people have
been led to look upon the preservation and increase of money ad infinitum
as the end and aim of Œconomic.” (Aristoteles, De Rep. edit. Bekker,
lib. I, c. 8, 9. passim.)

7. “Commodities (here used in the sense
of use-values) are not the terminating object of the trading capitalist, money is his terminating object.” (Th. Chalmers, On Pol. Econ. &c., 2nd Ed., Glasgow, 1832, pp. 165, 166.)

8. “Il mercante non conta quasi per niente il lucro fatto, ma mira sempre al futuro.” [“The merchant counts the money he has made as almost nothing; he always looks to the future.”] (A. Genovesi, Lezioni di Economia
Civile (1765), Custodi’s edit. of Italian Economists. Parte Moderna t.
viii, p. 139.)

9. “The inextinguishable passion for
gain, the auri sacra fames, will always lead capitalists.” (MacCulloch: “The Principles of Polit. Econ.” London, 1830, p. 179.) This view, of course, does not prevent the same MacCulloch and others of his kidney, when in theoretical difficulties, such, for example, as the question of over-production, from transforming the same capitalist into a moral citizen, whose sole concern is for use-values, and who even develops an insatiable hunger for boots, hats, eggs, calico, and other extremely familiar sorts of use-values.

10. Σὠξειν is a characteristic Greek expression for hoarding. So in English to save has the same two meanings:
sauver and épargner.

11. “Questo infinito che le cose non
hanno in progresso, hanno in giro.” [“That infinity which things do not possess, they possess in circulation.”] (Galiani.)

12. “Ce n’est pas la matière qui fait le capital, mais la valeur de ces matières.” [“It is not matter which makes capital, but the value of that matter.”] (J. B. Say: “Traité d’Econ. Polit.” 3ème éd. Paris, 1817, t. II., p. 429.)

13. “Currency (!) employed in producing articles ... is capital.” (Macleod: “The Theory and Practice of Banking.”
London, 1855, v. 1, ch. i, p. 55.) “Capital is commodities.” (James Mill: “Elements of Pol. Econ.” Lond., 1821, p. 74.)

14. Capital: “portion fructifiante de
la richesse accumulée ... valeur permanente, multipliante.” (Sismondi:
“Nouveaux Principes d’Econ. Polit.,” t. i., p. 88, 89.)

Karl Marx. Capital Volume One

## Chapter Five: Contradictions in the General Formula of Capital

The form which circulation takes when money
becomes capital, is opposed to all the laws we have hitherto investigated
bearing on the nature of commodities, value and money, and even of circulation
itself. What distinguishes this form from that of the simple circulation
of commodities, is the inverted order of succession of the two antithetical
processes, sale and purchase. How can this purely formal distinction between
these processes change their character as it were by magic?

But that is not all. This inversion has no existence for two out
of the three persons who transact business together. As capitalist, I buy
commodities from A and sell them again to B, but as a simple owner of commodities,
I sell them to B and then purchase fresh ones from A. A and B see no difference
between the two sets of transactions. They are merely buyers or sellers.
And I on each occasion meet them as a mere owner of either money or commodities,
as a buyer or a seller, and, what is more, in both sets of transactions,
I am opposed to A only as a buyer and to B only as a seller, to the one
only as money, to the other only as commodities, and to neither of them
as capital or a capitalist, or as representative of anything that is more
than money or commodities, or that can produce any effect beyond what money
and commodities can. For me the purchase from A and the sale to B are part
of a series. But the connexion between the two acts exists for me alone.
A does not trouble himself about my transaction with B, nor does B about
my business with A. And if I offered to explain to them the meritorious
nature of my action in inverting the order of succession, they would probably
point out to me that I was mistaken as to that order of succession, and
that the whole transaction, instead of beginning with a purchase and ending
with a sale, began, on the contrary, with a sale and was concluded
with a purchase. In truth, my first act, the purchase, was from the standpoint
of A, a sale, and my second act, the sale, was from the standpoint of B,
a purchase. Not content with that, A and B would declare that the whole
series was superfluous and nothing but Hokus Pokus; that for the future
A would buy direct from B, and B sell direct to A. Thus the whole transaction
would be reduced to a single act forming an isolated, non-complemented
phase in the ordinary circulation of commodities, a mere sale from A’s
point of view, and from B’s, a mere purchase. The inversion, therefore,
of the order of succession, does not take us outside the sphere of the
simple circulation of commodities, and we must rather look, whether there
is in this simple circulation anything permitting an expansion of the value
that enters into circulation, and, consequently, a creation of surplus-value.

Let us take the process of circulation in a form under which it
presents itself as a simple and direct exchange of commodities. This is
always the case when two owners of commodities buy from each other, and
on the settling day the amounts mutually owing are equal and cancel each
other. The money in this case is money of account and serves to express
the value of the commodities by their prices, but is not, itself, in the
shape of hard cash, confronted with them. So far as regards use-values,
it is clear that both parties may gain some advantage. Both part with goods
that, as use-values, are of no service to them, and receive others that
they can make use of. And there may also be a further gain. A, who sells
wine and buys corn, possibly produces more wine, with given labour-time,
than farmer B could, and B on the other hand, more corn than wine-grower
A could. A, therefore, may get, for the same exchange-value, more corn,
and B more wine, than each would respectively get without any exchange
by producing his own corn and wine. With reference, therefore, to use-value,
there is good ground for saying that “exchange is a transaction by which
both sides gain.” [1] It is otherwise with exchange-value.

“A man who has plenty of wine and no corn treats with a man who has plenty
of corn and no wine; an exchange takes place between them of corn to the
value of 50, for wine of the same value.This act produces no increase of
exchange-value either for the one or the other; for each of them already
possessed, before the exchange, a value equal to that which he acquired
by means of that operation.” [2] The result is not altered
by introducing money, as a medium of circulation, between the commodities,
and making the sale and the purchase two distinct acts. [3]
The value of a commodity is expressed in its price before it goes into
circulation, and is therefore a precedent condition of circulation, not
its result. [4]

Abstractedly considered, that is, apart from circumstances not
immediately flowing from the laws of the simple circulation of commodities,
there is in an exchange nothing (if we except the replacing of one use-value
by another) but a metamorphosis, a mere change in the form of the commodity.
The same exchange-value, i.e., the same quantity of incorporated social
labour, remains throughout in the hands of the owner of the commodity,
first in the shape of his own commodity, then in the form of the money
for which he exchanged it, and lastly, in the shape of the commodity he
buys with that money. This change of form does not imply a change in the
magnitude of the value. But the change, which the value of the commodity
undergoes in this process, is limited to a change in its money-form. This
form exists first as the price of the commodity offered for sale, then
as an actual sum of money, which, however,
was already expressed in the
price, and lastly, as the price of an equivalent commodity. This change
of form no more implies, taken alone, a change in the quantity of value,
than does the change of a £5 note into sovereigns, half sovereigns
and shillings. So far therefore as the circulation of commodities effects
a change in the form alone of their values, and is free from disturbing
influences, it must be the exchange of equivalents. Little as Vulgar-Economy
knows about the nature of value, yet whenever it wishes to consider the
phenomena of circulation in their purity, it assumes that supply and demand
are equal, which amounts to this, that their effect is nil. If therefore,
as regards the use-values exchanged, both buyer and seller may possibly
gain something, this is not the case as regards the exchange-values. Here
we must rather say, “Where equality exists there can be no gain.” [5]
It is true, commodities may be sold at prices deviating from their values,
but these deviations are to be considered as infractions of the laws of
the exchange of commodities [6], which in its normal
state is an exchange of equivalents, consequently, no method for increasing
value. [7]

Hence, we see that behind all attempts to represent the
circulation of commodities as a source of surplus-value, there lurks a
quid pro quo, a mixing up of use-value and exchange-value. For instance,
Condillac says: “It is not true that on an exchange of commodities we give
value for value. On the contrary, each of the two contracting parties in
every case, gives a less for a greater value. ... If we really exchanged
equal values, neither party could make a profit. And yet, they both gain,
or ought to gain. Why? The value of a thing consists solely in its relation
to our wants. What is more to the one is less to the other, and vice
versâ. ... It is not to be assumed that we offer for sale articles
required for our own consumption. ... We wish to part with a useless thing,
in order to get one that we need; we want to give less for more. ... It
was natural to think that, in an exchange, value was given for value, whenever
each of the articles exchanged was of equal value with the same quantity
of gold. ... But there is another point to be considered in our calculation.
The question is, whether we both exchange something superfluous for something
necessary.” [8] We see in this passage, how Condillac
not only confuses use-value with exchange-value, but in a really childish
manner assumes, that in a society, in which the production of commodities
is well developed, each producer produces his own means of subsistence,
and throws into circulation only the excess over his own requirements.
[9] Still, Condillac’s argument is frequently used by
modern economists, more especially when the point is to show, that the exchange
of commodities in its developed form, commerce, is productive of surplus-value.
For instance, “Commerce ... adds value to products, for the same products
in the hands of consumers, are worth more than in the hands of producers,
and it may strictly be considered an act of production.” [10]
But commodities are not paid for twice over, once on account of their use-value,
and again on account of their value. And though the use-value of a commodity
is more serviceable to the buyer than to the seller, its money-form is
more serviceable to the seller. Would he otherwise sell it? We might therefore
just as well say that the buyer performs "strictly an act of
production,” by converting stockings, for example, into money.

If commodities, or commodities and money, of equal exchange-value,
and consequently equivalents, are exchanged, it is plain that no one abstracts
more value from, than he throws into, circulation. There is no creation
of surplus-value. And, in its normal form, the circulation of commodities
demands the exchange of equivalents. But in actual practice, the process
does not retain its normal form. Let us, therefore, assume an exchange
of non-equivalents.

In any case the market for commodities is only frequented by owners
of commodities, and the power which these persons exercise over each other,
is no other than the power of their commodities. The material variety of
these commodities is the material incentive to the act of exchange, and
makes buyers and sellers mutually dependent, because none of them possesses
the object of his own wants, and each holds in his hand the object of another’s
wants. Besides these material differences of their use-values, there is
only one other difference between commodities, namely, that between their
bodily form and the form into which they are converted by sale, the difference
between commodities and money. And consequently the owners of commodities
are distinguishable only as sellers, those who own commodities, and buyers,
those who own money.

Suppose then, that by some inexplicable privilege, the seller
is enabled to sell his commodities above their value, what is worth 100
for 110, in which case the price is nominally raised 10%. The seller therefore
pockets a surplus-value of 10. But after he has sold he becomes a buyer.
A third owner of commodities comes to him now as seller, who in this capacity
also enjoys the privilege of selling his commodities 10% too dear. Our
friend gained 10 as a seller only to lose it again as a buyer. [11]
The net result is, that all owners of commodities sell their goods to one
another at 10% above their value, which comes precisely to the same as
if they sold them at their true value. Such a general and nominal rise
of prices has the same effect as if the values had been expressed in weight
of silver instead of in weight of gold. The nominal prices of commodities
would rise, but the real relation between their values would remain unchanged.

Let us make the opposite assumption, that the buyer has the privilege
of purchasing commodities under their value. In this case it is no longer
necessary to bear in mind that he in his turn will become a seller. He was
so before he became buyer; he had already lost 10% in selling before he
gained 10% as buyer. [12] Everything is just as it was.

The creation of surplus-value, and therefore the conversion of
money into capital, can consequently be explained neither on the assumption
that commodities are sold above their value, nor that they are bought below
their value. [13]

The problem is in no way simplified by introducing irrelevant
matters after the manner of Col. Torrens: “Effectual demand consists in
the power and inclination (!), on the part of consumers, to give for commodities,
either by immediate or circuitous barter, some greater portion of ... capital
than their production costs.” [14] In relation to circulation,
producers and consumers meet only as buyers and sellers. To assert that
the surplus-value acquired by the producer has its origin in the fact that
consumers pay for commodities more than their value, is only to say in
other words: The owner of commodities possesses, as a seller, the privilege
of selling too dear. The seller has himself produced the commodities or
represents their producer, but the buyer has to no less extent produced
the commodities represented by his money, or represents their producer.
The distinction between them is, that one buys and the other sells. The
fact that the owner of the commodities, under the designation of producer,
sells them over their value, and under the designation of consumer, pays
too much for them, does not carry us a single step further. [15]

To be consistent therefore, the upholders of the delusion that
surplus-value has its origin in a nominal rise of prices or in the privilege
which the seller has of selling too dear, must assume the existence of
a class that only buys and does not sell, i.e., only consumes and does
not produce. The existence of such a class is inexplicable from the standpoint
we have so far reached, viz., that of simple circulation. But let us anticipate.
The money with which such a class is constantly making purchases, must
constantly flow into their pockets, without any exchange, gratis, by might
or right, from the pockets of the commodity-owners themselves. To
sell commodities above their value to such a class, is only to crib back
again a part of the money previously given to it. [16]
The towns of Asia Minor thus paid a yearly money tribute to ancient Rome.
With this money Rome purchased from them commodities, and purchased them
too dear. The provincials cheated the Romans, and thus got back from their
conquerors, in the course of trade, a portion of the tribute. Yet, for
all that, the conquered were the really cheated. Their goods were still
paid for with their own money. That is not the way to get rich or to create
surplus-value.

Let us therefore keep within the bounds of exchange where sellers
are also buyers, and buyers, sellers. Our difficulty may perhaps have arisen
from treating the actors as personifications instead of as individuals.

A may be clever enough to get the advantage of B or C without
their being able to retaliate. A sells wine worth £40 to B, and obtains
from him in exchange corn to the value of £50. A has converted his
£40 into £50, has made more money out of less, and has converted
his commodities into capital. Let us examine this a little more closely.
Before the exchange we had £40 worth of wine in the hands of A, and
£50 worth of corn in those of B, a total value of £90. After
the exchange we have still the same total value of £90. The value
in circulation has not increased by one iota, it is only distributed differently
between A and B. What is a loss of value to B is surplus-value to A; what
is “minus” to one is “plus” to the other. The same change would have taken
place, if A, without the formality of an exchange, had directly stolen
the £10 from B. The sum of the values in circulation can clearly
not be augmented by any change in their distribution, any more than the
quantity of the precious metals in a country by a Jew selling a Queen Anne’s
farthing for a guinea. The capitalist class, as a whole, in any country,
cannot over-reach themselves. [17]

Turn and twist then as we may, the fact remains unaltered. If
equivalents are exchanged, no surplus-value results, and if non-equivalents are
exchanged, still no surplus-value. [18] Circulation,
or the exchange of commodities, begets no value. [19]

The reason is now therefore plain why, in analysing the standard
form of capital, the form under which it determines the economic organisation
of modern society, we entirely left out of consideration its most popular,
and, so to say, antediluvian forms, merchants’ capital and money-lenders’
capital.

The circuit M-C-M, buying in order to sell dearer, is seen most
clearly in genuine merchants’ capital. But the movement takes place entirely
within the sphere of circulation. Since, however, it is impossible, by
circulation alone, to account for the conversion of money into capital,
for the formation of surplus-value, it would appear, that merchants’ capital
is an impossibility, so long as equivalents are exchanged; [20]
that, therefore, it can only have its origin in the two-fold advantage
gained, over both the selling and the buying producers, by the merchant
who parasitically shoves himself in between them. It is in this sense that
Franklin says, “war is robbery, commerce is generally cheating.” [21]
If the transformation of merchants’ money into capital is to be explained
otherwise than by the producers being simply cheated, a long series of
intermediate steps would be necessary, which, at present, when the simple
circulation of commodities forms our only assumption, are entirely wanting.

What we have said with reference to merchants’ capital, applies
still more to money-lenders’ capital. In merchants’ capital, the two extremes,
the money that is thrown upon the market, and the augmented money that
is withdrawn from the market, are at least connected by a purchase and
a sale, in other words by the movement of the circulation. In money-lenders’
capital the form M-C-M is reduced to the two extremes without a mean, M-M
, money exchanged for more money, a form that is incompatible with the
nature of money, and therefore remains inexplicable from the standpoint
of the circulation of commodities. Hence Aristotle: “since chrematistic
is a double science, one part belonging to commerce, the other to economic,
the latter being necessary and praiseworthy, the former based on circulation
and with justice disapproved (for it is not based on Nature, but on mutual
cheating), therefore the usurer is most rightly hated, because money itself
is the source of his gain, and is not used for the purposes for which it
was invented. For it originated for the exchange of commodities, but interest
makes out of money, more money. Hence its name ([greek: tokos] interest
and offspring). For the begotten are like those who beget them. But interest
is money of money, so that of all modes of making a living, this is the
most contrary to Nature.” [22]

In the course of our investigation, we shall find that both merchants’
capital and interest-bearing capital are derivative forms, and at the same
time it will become clear, why these two forms appear in the course of
history before the modern standard form of capital.

We have shown that surplus-value cannot be created by circulation,
and, therefore, that in its formation, something must take place in the
background, which is not apparent in the circulation itself. [23]
But can surplus-value possibly originate anywhere else than in circulation,
which is the sum total of all the mutual relations of commodity-owners,
as far as they are determined by their commodities? Apart from circulation,
the commodity-owner is in relation only with his own commodity. So far
as regards value, that relation is limited to this, that the commodity
contains a quantity of his own labour, that quantity being measured by
a definite social standard. This quantity is expressed by the value of
the commodity, and since the value is reckoned in money of account, this
quantity is also expressed by the price, which we will suppose to be £10.
But his labour is not represented both by the value of the commodity, and
by a surplus over that value, not by a price of 10 that is also a price
of 11, not by a value that is greater than itself. The commodity owner
can, by his labour, create value, but not self-expanding value. He can
increase the value of his commodity, by adding fresh labour, and therefore
more value to the value in hand, by making, for instance, leather into
boots. The same material has now more value, because it contains
a greater quantity of labour. The boots have therefore more value than
the leather, but the value of the leather remains what it was; it has not
expanded itself, has not, during the making of the boots, annexed surplus-value.
It is therefore impossible that outside the sphere of circulation, a producer
of commodities can, without coming into contact with other commodity-owners,
expand value, and consequently convert money or commodities into capital.

It is therefore impossible for capital to be produced by circulation,
and it is equally impossible for it to originate apart from circulation.
It must have its origin both in circulation and yet not in circulation.

We have, therefore, got a double result.

The conversion of money into capital has to be explained on the
basis of the laws that regulate the exchange of commodities, in such a
way that the starting-point is the exchange of equivalents. [24]
Our friend, Moneybags, who as yet is only an embryo capitalist, must buy
his commodities at their value, must sell them at their value, and yet
at the end of the process must withdraw more value from circulation than
he threw into it at starting. His development into a full-grown capitalist
must take place, both within the sphere of circulation and without it.
These are the conditions of the problem. Hic Rhodus, hic salta!25]

Footnotes

1. “L’échange est une transaction admirable dans laquelle les deux contractants gagnent - toujours (!)” [“Exchange is a transaction in which the two contracting parties always gain, both of them (!)”] (Destutt de
Tracy: “Traité de la Volonté et de ses effets.” Paris, 1826, p. 68.) This work appeared afterwards as “Traité d’Econ. Polit.”

2. “Mercier de la Rivière,” l.
c., p. 544.

3. “Que l’une de ces deux valeurs soit
argent, ou qu’elles soient toutes deux marchandises usuelles, rien de plus
indifférent en soi.” [“Whether one of those two values is money, or they are both ordinary commodities, is in itself a matter of complete indifference.”] (“Mercier de la Rivière,” l.c., p. 543.)

4. “Ce ne sont pas les contractants qui
prononcent sur la valeur; elle est décidée avant la convention.” [“It is not the parties to a contract who decide on the value; that has been decided before the contract.”]
(Le Trosne, p. 906.)

5. “Dove è egualità non
è lucro.” (Galiani, “Della Moneta in Custodi, Parte Moderna,” t. iv., p. 244.)

6. “L’échange devient désavantageux pour l’une des parties, lorsque quelque chose étrangère vient diminuer ou exagérer le prix; alors l’égalité est blessée, mais la lésion procède de cette cause et non de l’échange.” [“The exchange becomes unfavourable for one of the parties when some external circumstance comes to lessen or increase the price; then equality is infringed, but this infringement arises from that cause and not from the exchange itself.”] (Le Trosne, l.c., p. 904.)

7. “L’échange est de sa nature
un contrat d’égalité qui se fait de valeur pour valeur égale.
Il n’est donc pas un moyen de s’enrichir, puisque l’on donne autant que
l’on reçoit.” [“Exchange is by its nature a contract which rests on equality, i.e., it takes place between two equal values, and it is not a means of self-enrichment, since as much is given as is received.”] (Le Trosne, l.c., p. 903.)

8. Condillac: “Le Commerce et le Gouvernement”
(1776). Edit. Daire et Molinari in the “Mélanges d’Econ. Polit.” Paris, 1847, pp. 267, 291.

9. Le Trosne, therefore, answers his friend Condillac with justice as follows: “Dans une ... société formée il n’y a pas de surabondant en aucun genre.” [“In a developed society absolutely nothing is superfluous.”] At the same time, in a bantering way, he remarks: “If both the persons who exchange receive more to an equal amount, and part with less to an equal amount, they both get the same.” It is because Condillac has not the remotest idea of the nature of exchange-value that he has been chosen by Herr Professor Wilhelm Roscher as a proper person to answer for the soundness of his own childish notions. See Roscher’s “Die Grundlagen der Nationalökonomie, Dritte Auflage,” 1858.

10. S. P. Newman: “Elements of Polit.
Econ.” Andover and New York, 1835, p. 175.

11. “By the augmentation of the nominal value of the produce... sellers not enriched... since what they gain as sellers, they precisely expend in the quality of buyers.” (“The Essential Principles of the Wealth of Nations.” &c., London, 1797, p. 66.)

12. “Si l’on est forcé de donner pour 18 livres une quantité de telle production qui en valait 24, lorsqu’on employera ce même argent à acheter, on aura également pour 18 l. ce que l’on payait 24.” [“If one is compelled to sell a quantity of a certain product for 18 livres when it has a value of 24 livres, when one employs the same amount of money in buying, one will receive for 18 livres the same quantity of the product as 24 livres would have bought otherwise.”] (Le Trosne, I. c., p. 897.)

13. “Chaque vendeur ne peut donc parvenir à renchérir habituellement ses marchandises, qu’en se soumettant aussi à payer habituellement plus cher les marchandises des autres vendeurs; et par la même raison, chaque consommateur ne peut payer habituellement moins cher ce qu’il achète, qu’en se soumettant aussi à une diminution semblable sur le prix des choses qu’il vend.” [“A seller can normally only succeed in raising the prices of his commodities if he agrees to pay, by and large, more for the commodities of the other sellers; and for the same reason a consumer can normally only pay less for his purchases if he submits to a similar reduction in the prices of the things he sells.”] (Mercier de la Rivière, l.c., p. 555.)

14. Torrens. “An Essay on the Production
of Wealth.” London, 1821, p. 349.

15. “The idea of profits being paid by
the consumers, is, assuredly, very absurd. Who are the consumers?” (G. Ramsay: “An Essay on the Distribution of Wealth.” Edinburgh, 1836, p. 183.)

16. “When a man is in want of a demand, does Mr. Malthus recommend him to pay some other person to take off his goods?” is a question put by an angry disciple of Ricardo to Malthus, who, like his disciple, Parson Chalmers, economically glorifies this class of simple buyers or consumers. (See “An Inquiry into those Principles Respecting the Nature of Demand and the Necessity of Consumption, lately advocated by Mr. Malthus,” &c. Lond., 1821, p. 55.)

17. Destutt de Tracy, although, or perhaps
because, he was a member of the Institute, held the opposite view. He says, industrial capitalists make profits because “they all sell for more than it has cost to produce. And to whom do they sell? In the first instance to one another.” (I. c., p. 239.)

18. “L’échange qui se fait de deux valeurs égales n’augmente ni ne diminue la masse des valeurs subsistantes dans la société. L’échange de deux valeurs inégales ... ne change rien non plus à la somme des valeurs sociales, bien qu’il ajoute à la fortune de l’un ce qu’il ôte de la fortune de l’autre.” [“The exchange of two equal values neither increases nor diminishes the amount of the values available in society. Nor does the exchange of two unequal values ... change anything in the sum of social values, although it adds to the wealth of one person what it removes from the wealth of another.”] (J. B. Say, l.c., t. II, pp. 443, 444.) Say, not in the least troubled as to the consequences of this statement, borrows it, almost word for word, from the Physiocrats. The following example will show how Monsieur Say turned to account the writings of the Physiocrats, in his day quite forgotten, for the purpose of expanding the “value” of his own. His most celebrated saying, “On n’achète des produits qu’avec des produits” [“Products can only be bought with products.”](l.c., t. II. p. 441.) runs as follows in the original physiocratic work: “Les productions ne se paient qu’avec des productions.” [“Products can only be paid for with products.”] (Le Trosne, l.c., p. 899.)

19. “Exchange confers no value at all
upon products.” (F. Wayland: “The Elements of Political Economy.” Boston, 1843, p. 169.)

20. Under the rule of invariable equivalents
commerce would be impossible. (G. Opdyke: “A Treatise on Polit. Economy.” New York, 1851, pp. 66-69.) “The difference between real value and exchange-value is based upon this fact, namely, that the value of a thing is different from the so-called equivalent given for it in trade, i.e., that this equivalent is no equivalent.” (F. Engels, l.c., p. 96).

21. Benjamin Franklin: Works, Vol. II,
edit. Sparks in “Positions to be examined concerning National Wealth,” p. 376.

22. Aristotle, I. c., c. 10.

23. “Profit, in the usual condition
of the market, is not made by exchanging. Had it not existed before, neither could it after that transaction.” (Ramsay, l.c., p. 184.)

24. From the foregoing investigation,
the reader will see that this statement only means that the formation of
capital must be possible even though the price and value of a commodity
be the same; for its formation cannot be attributed to any deviation of
the one from the other. If prices actually differ from values, we must,
first of all, reduce the former to the latter, in other words, treat the
difference as accidental in order that the phenomena may be observed in
their purity, and our observations not interfered with by disturbing circumstances
that have nothing to do with the process in question. We know, moreover,
that this reduction is no mere scientific process. The continual oscillations
in prices, their rising and falling, compensate each other, and reduce
themselves to an average price, which is their hidden regulator. It forms
the guiding star of the merchant or the manufacturer in every undertaking
that requires time. He knows that when a long period of time is taken,
commodities are sold neither over nor under, but at their average price.
If therefore he thought about the matter at all, he would formulate the
problem of the formation of capital as follows: How can we account for
the origin of capital on the supposition that prices are regulated by the
average price, i. e., ultimately by the value of the commodities? I say
“ultimately,” because average prices do not directly coincide with the
values of commodities, as Adam Smith, Ricardo, and others believe.

25. See MIA Glossary.

Karl Marx. Capital Volume One

## Chapter Six: The Buying and Selling of Labour-Power

The change of value that occurs in the case
of money intended to be converted into capital, cannot take place in the
money itself, since in its function of means of purchase and of payment,
it does no more than realise the price of the commodity it buys or pays
for; and, as hard cash, it is value petrified, never varying. [1] Just as little can it originate in the second act of circulation, the re-sale of the commodity, which does no more than transform the article from its
bodily form back again into its money-form. The change must, therefore,
take place in the commodity bought by the first act, M-C, but not in its
value, for equivalents are exchanged, and the commodity is paid for at
its full value. We are, therefore, forced to the conclusion that the change
originates in the use-value, as such, of the commodity, i.e., in its consumption.
In order to be able to extract value from the consumption of a commodity,
our friend, Moneybags, must be so lucky as to find, within the sphere of
circulation, in the market, a commodity, whose use-value possesses the
peculiar property of being a source of value, whose actual consumption,
therefore, is itself an embodiment of labour, and, consequently, a creation
of value. The possessor of money does find on the market such a special
commodity in capacity for labour or labour-power.

By labour-power or capacity for labour is to be understood the
aggregate of those mental and physical capabilities existing in a human
being, which he exercises whenever he produces a use-value of any description.

But in order that our owner of money may be able to find labour-power
offered for sale as a commodity, various conditions must first be
fulfilled. The exchange of commodities of itself implies no other relations
of dependence than those which result from its own nature. On this assumption,
labour-power can appear upon the market as a commodity, only if, and so
far as, its possessor, the individual whose labour-power it is, offers
it for sale, or sells it, as a commodity. In order that he may be able
to do this, he must have it at his disposal, must be the untrammelled owner
of his capacity for labour, i.e., of his person. [2]
He and the owner of money meet in the market, and deal with each other
as on the basis of equal rights, with this difference alone, that one is
buyer, the other seller; both, therefore, equal in the eyes of the law.
The continuance of this relation demands that the owner of the labour-power
should sell it only for a definite period, for if he were to sell it rump
and stump, once for all, he would be selling himself, converting himself
from a free man into a slave, from an owner of a commodity into a commodity.
He must constantly look upon his labour-power as his own property, his
own commodity, and this he can only do by placing it at the disposal of
the buyer temporarily, for a definite period of time. By this means alone
can he avoid renouncing his rights of ownership over it. [3]

The second essential condition to the owner of money finding labour-power
in the market as a commodity is this — that the labourer instead of being
in the position to sell commodities in which his labour is incorporated,
must be obliged to offer for sale as a commodity that very labour-power,
which exists only in his living self.

In order that a man may be able to sell commodities other than
labour-power, he must of course have the means of production, as raw material,
implements, &c. No boots can be made without leather. He requires also
the means of subsistence. Nobody — not even “a musician of the future”
— can live upon future products, or upon use-values in an unfinished state;
and ever since the first moment of his appearance on the world’s stage,
man always has been, and must still be a consumer, both before and while
he is producing. In a society where all products assume the form of commodities,
these commodities must be sold after they have been produced, it is only
after their sale that they can serve in satisfying the requirements of
their producer. The time necessary for their sale is superadded to that
necessary for their production.

For the conversion of his money into capital, therefore, the owner
of money must meet in the market with the free labourer, free in the double
sense, that as a free man he can dispose of his labour-power as his own
commodity, and that on the other hand he has no other commodity for sale,
is short of everything necessary for the realisation of his labour-power.

The question why this free labourer confronts him in the market,
has no interest for the owner of money, who regards the labour-market as
a branch of the general market for commodities. And for the present it
interests us just as little. We cling to the fact theoretically, as he
does practically. One thing, however, is clear — Nature does not produce
on the one side owners of money or commodities, and on the other men possessing
nothing but their own labour-power. This relation has no natural basis,
neither is its social basis one that is common to all historical periods.
It is clearly the result of a past historical development, the product
of many economic revolutions, of the extinction of a whole series of older
forms of social production.

So, too, the economic categories, already discussed by us, bear
the stamp of history. Definite historical conditions are necessary that
a product may become a commodity. It must not be produced as the immediate
means of subsistence of the producer himself. Had we gone further, and
inquired under what circumstances all, or even the majority of products
take the form of commodities, we should have found that this can only happen
with production of a very specific kind, capitalist production. Such an
inquiry, however, would have been foreign to the analysis of commodities.
Production and circulation of commodities can take place, although the
great mass of the objects produced are intended for the immediate requirements
of their producers, are not turned into commodities, and consequently social
production is not yet by a long way dominated in its length and breadth
by exchange-value. The appearance of products as commodities pre-supposes
such a development of the social division of labour, that the separation
of use-value from exchange-value, a separation which first begins with barter,
must already have been completed. But such a degree of development is common
to many forms of society, which in other respects present the most varying
historical features. On the other hand, if we consider money, its existence
implies a definite stage in the exchange of commodities. The particular
functions of money which it performs, either as the mere equivalent of
commodities, or as means of circulation, or means of payment, as hoard
or as universal money, point, according to the extent and relative preponderance
of the one function or the other, to very different stages in the process
of social production. Yet we know by experience that a circulation of commodities
relatively primitive, suffices for the production of all these forms. Otherwise
with capital. The historical conditions of its existence are by no means
given with the mere circulation of money and commodities. It can spring
into life, only when the owner of the means of production and subsistence
meets in the market with the free labourer selling his labour-power. And
this one historical condition comprises a world’s history. Capital, therefore,
announces from its first appearance a new epoch in the process of social
production. [4]

We must now examine more closely this peculiar commodity, labour-power.
Like all others it has a value. [5] How is that value
determined?

The value of labour-power is determined, as in the case of every
other commodity, by the labour-time necessary for the production, and consequently
also the reproduction, of this special article. So far as it has value,
it represents no more than a definite quantity of the average labour of
society incorporated in it. Labour-power exists only as a capacity, or
power of the living individual. Its production consequently pre-supposes
his existence. Given the individual, the production of labour-power consists
in his reproduction of himself or his maintenance. For his maintenance
he requires a given quantity of the means of subsistence. Therefore the
labour-time requisite for the production of labour-power reduces itself
to that necessary for the production of those means of subsistence; in
other words, the value of labour-power is the value of the means of subsistence
necessary for the maintenance of the labourer. Labour-power, however, becomes
a reality only by its exercise; it sets itself in action only by working.
But thereby a definite quantity of human muscle, nerve, brain, &c.,
is wasted, and these require to be restored. This increased
expenditure demands a larger income. [6] If the owner
of labour-power works to-day, to-morrow he must again be able to repeat
the same process in the same conditions as regards health and strength.
His means of subsistence must therefore be sufficient to maintain him in
his normal state as a labouring individual. His natural wants, such as
food, clothing, fuel, and housing, vary according to the climatic and other
physical conditions of his country. On the other hand, the number and extent
of his so-called necessary wants, as also the modes of satisfying them,
are themselves the product of historical development, and depend therefore
to a great extent on the degree of civilisation of a country, more particularly
on the conditions under which, and consequently on the habits and degree
of comfort in which, the class of free labourers has been formed. [7]
In contradistinction therefore to the case of other commodities, there
enters into the determination of the value of labour-power a historical
and moral element. Nevertheless, in a given country, at a given period,
the average quantity of the means of subsistence necessary for the labourer
is practically known.

The owner of labour-power is mortal. If then his appearance in
the market is to be continuous, and the continuous conversion of money
into capital assumes this, the seller of labour-power must perpetuate himself,
“in the way that every living individual perpetuates himself, by procreation.”
[8] The labour-power withdrawn from the market by wear
and tear and death, must be continually replaced by, at the very least,
an equal amount of fresh labour-power. Hence the sum of the means of subsistence
necessary for the production of labour-power must include the means necessary
for the labourer’s substitutes, i.e., his children, in order that this
race of peculiar commodity-owners may perpetuate its appearance in the
market. [9]

In order to modify the human organism, so that it may acquire
skill and handiness in a given branch of industry, and become labour-power
of a special kind, a special education or training is requisite, and this,
on its part, costs an equivalent in commodities of a greater or less amount.
This amount varies according to the more or less complicated character
of the labour-power. The expenses of this education (excessively small in
the case of ordinary labour-power), enter pro tanto into the total value
spent in its production.

The value of labour-power resolves itself into the value of a
definite quantity of the means of subsistence. It therefore varies with
the value of these means or with the quantity of labour requisite for their
production.

Some of the means of subsistence, such as food and fuel, are consumed
daily, and a fresh supply must be provided daily. Others such as clothes
and furniture last for longer periods and require to be replaced only at
longer intervals. One article must be bought or paid for daily, another
weekly, another quarterly, and so on. But in whatever way the sum total
of these outlays may be spread over the year, they must be covered by the
average income, taking one day with another. If the total of the commodities
required daily for the production of labour-power = A, and those required
weekly = B, and those required quarterly = C, and so on, the daily average
of these commodities = (365A + 52B + 4C + &c) / 365. Suppose that in
this mass of commodities requisite for the average day there are embodied
6 hours of social labour, then there is incorporated daily in labour-power
half a day’s average social labour, in other words, half a day’s labour
is requisite for the daily production of labour-power. This quantity of
labour forms the value of a day’s labour-power or the value of the labour-power
daily reproduced. If half a day’s average social labour is incorporated
in three shillings, then three shillings is the price corresponding to
the value of a day’s labour-power. If its owner therefore offers it for
sale at three shillings a day, its selling price is equal to its value,
and according to our supposition, our friend Moneybags, who is intent upon
converting his three shillings into capital, pays this value.

The minimum limit of the value of labour-power is determined by
the value of the commodities, without the daily supply of which the labourer
cannot renew his vital energy, consequently by the value of those means
of subsistence that are physically indispensable. If the price of labour-power
fall to this minimum, it falls below its value, since under such circumstances
it can be maintained and developed only in a crippled state. But the value
of every commodity is determined by the labour-time requisite to turn it
out so as to be of normal quality.

It is a very cheap sort of sentimentality which declares this
method of determining the value of labour-power, a method prescribed by
the very nature of the case, to be a brutal method, and which wails with
Rossi that, “To comprehend capacity for labour (puissance de travail) at
the same time that we make abstraction from the means of subsistence
of the labourers during the process of production, is to comprehend a phantom
(être de raison). When we speak of labour, or capacity for labour,
we speak at the same time of the labourer and his means of subsistence,
of labourer and wages.” [10] When we speak of capacity for labour, we do not speak of labour, any more than when we speak of capacity
for digestion, we speak of digestion. The latter process requires something
more than a good stomach. When we speak of capacity for labour, we do not
abstract from the necessary means of subsistence. On the contrary, their
value is expressed in its value. If his capacity for labour remains unsold,
the labourer derives no benefit from it, but rather he will feel it to
be a cruel nature-imposed necessity that this capacity has cost for its
production a definite amount of the means of subsistence and that it will
continue to do so for its reproduction. He will then agree with Sismondi:
“that capacity for labour ... is nothing unless it is sold.” [11]

One consequence of the peculiar nature of labour-power as a commodity
is, that its use-value does not, on the conclusion of the contract between
the buyer and seller, immediately pass into the hands of the former. Its
value, like that of every other commodity, is already fixed before it goes
into circulation, since a definite quantity of social labour has been spent
upon it; but its use-value consists in the subsequent exercise of its force.
The alienation of labour-power and its actual appropriation by the buyer,
its employment as a use-value, are separated by an interval of time. But
in those cases in which the formal alienation by sale of the use-value
of a commodity, is not simultaneous with its actual delivery to the buyer,
the money of the latter usually functions as means of payment. [12]
In every country in which the capitalist mode of production reigns, it
is the custom not to pay for labour-power before it has been exercised
for the period fixed by the contract, as for example, the end of each week.
In all cases, therefore, the use-value of the labour-power is advanced
to the capitalist: the labourer allows the buyer to consume it before he
receives payment of the price; he everywhere gives credit to the capitalist.
That this credit is no mere fiction, is shown not only by the occasional
loss of wages on the bankruptcy of the capitalist, [13]
but also by a series of more enduring consequences. [14]
Nevertheless, whether money serves as a means of purchase or as a means
of payment, this makes no alteration in the nature of the exchange of commodities.
The price of the labour-power is fixed by the contract, although it is
not realised till later, like the rent of a house. The labour-power is
sold, although it is only paid for at a later period. It will, therefore,
be useful, for a clear comprehension of the relation of the parties, to
assume provisionally, that the possessor of labour-power, on the occasion
of each sale, immediately receives the price stipulated to be paid for
it.

We now know how the value paid by the purchaser to the possessor
of this peculiar commodity, labour-power, is determined. The use-value
which the former gets in exchange, manifests itself only in the actual
utilisation, in the consumption of the labour-power. The money-owner buys
everything necessary for this purpose, such as raw material, in the market,
and pays for it at its full value. The consumption of labour-power is at
one and the same time the production of commodities and of surplus-value.
The consumption of labour-power is completed, as in the case of every other
commodity, outside the limits of the market or of the sphere of circulation.
Accompanied by Mr. Moneybags and by the possessor of labour-power, we therefore
take leave for a time of this noisy sphere, where everything takes place
on the surface and in view of all men, and follow them both into the hidden
abode of production, on whose threshold there stares us in the face “No
admittance except on business.” Here we shall see, not only how capital
produces, but how capital is produced. We shall at last force the secret
of profit making.

This sphere that we are deserting, within whose boundaries the
sale and purchase of labour-power goes on, is in fact a very Eden of the
innate rights of man. There alone rule Freedom, Equality, Property and
Bentham. Freedom, because both buyer and seller of a commodity, say of
labour-power, are constrained only by their own free will. They contract
as free agents, and the agreement they come to, is but the form in which
they give legal expression to their common will. Equality, because each
enters into relation with the other, as with a simple owner of commodities,
and they exchange equivalent for equivalent. Property, because each disposes
only of what is his own. And Bentham, because each looks only to himself.
The only force that brings them together and puts them in relation with
each other, is the selfishness, the gain and the private interests of each.
Each looks to himself only, and no one troubles himself about the rest,
and just because they do so, do they all, in accordance with the pre-established
harmony of things, or under the auspices of an all-shrewd providence, work
together to their mutual advantage, for the common weal and in the interest
of all.

On leaving this sphere of simple circulation or of exchange of
commodities, which furnishes the “Free-trader Vulgaris” with his views
and ideas, and with the standard by which he judges a society based on
capital and wages, we think we can perceive a change in the physiognomy
of our dramatis personae. He, who before was the money-owner, now strides
in front as capitalist; the possessor of labour-power follows as his labourer.
The one with an air of importance, smirking, intent on business; the other,
timid and holding back, like one who is bringing his own hide to market
and has nothing to expect but — a hiding.

Footnotes

1. “In the form of money ... capital is productive of no profit.” (Ricardo: “Princ. of Pol. Econ.,” p. 267.)

2. In encyclopaedias of classical antiquities
we find such nonsense as this — that in the ancient world capital was fully developed, “except that the free labourer and a system of credit was wanting.” Mommsen also, in his “History of Rome,” commits, in this respect, one blunder after another.

3. Hence legislation in various countries
fixes a maximum for labour-contracts. Wherever free labour is the rule,
the laws regulate the mode of terminating this contract. In some States,
particularly in Mexico (before the American Civil War, also in the territories
taken from Mexico, and also, as a matter of fact, in the Danubian provinces
till the revolution effected by Kusa), slavery is hidden under the form
of peonage. By means of advances, repayable in labour, which are
handed down from generation to generation, not only the individual labourer,
but his family, become, de facto, the property of other persons
and their families. Juarez abolished peonage. The so-called Emperor
Maximilian re-established it by a decree, which, in the House of Representatives
at Washington, was aptly denounced as a decree for the re-introduction
of slavery into Mexico. “I may make over to another the use, for a limited
time, of my particular bodily and mental aptitudes and capabilities; because
in consequence of this restriction, they are impressed with a character
of alienation with regard to me as a whole. But by the alienation of all
my labour-time and the whole of my work, I should be converting the substance
itself, in other words, my general activity and reality, my person, into
the property of another.” (Hegel, “Philosophie des Rechts.” Berlin, 1840,
p. 104, § 67.)

4. The capitalist epoch is therefore
characterised by this, that labour-power takes in the eyes of the labourer
himself the form of a commodity which is his property; his labour consequently
becomes wage-labour. On the other hand, it is only from this moment that
the produce of labour universally becomes a commodity.

5. “The value or worth of a man, is as
of all other things his price — that is to say, so much as would be given
for the use of his power.” (Th. Hobbes: “Leviathan” in Works, Ed. Molesworth.
Lond. 1839-44, v. iii. p. 76.)

6. Hence the Roman Villicus, as overlooker
of the agricultural slaves, received “more meagre fare than working slaves,
because his work was lighter.” (Th. Mommsen, Röm. Geschichte, 1856, p. 810.)

7. Compare W. Th. Thornton: “Over-population
and its Remedy,” Lond., 1846.

8. Petty.

9. “Its (labour’s) natural price ...
consists in such a quantity of necessaries and comforts of life, as, from
the nature of the climate, and the habits of the country, are necessary
to support the labourer, and to enable him to rear such a family as may
preserve, in the market, an undiminished supply of labour.” (R. Torrens:
“An Essay on the External Corn Trade.” Lond. 1815, p. 62.) The word labour
is here wrongly used for labour-power.

10. Rossi: “Cours d’Econ. Polit.,” Bruxelles, 1842, p. 370.

11. Sismondi: “Nouv. Princ. etc.,” t.
I, p. 112.

12. “All labour is paid after it has
ceased.” (“An Inquiry into those Principles Respecting the Nature of Demand,”
&c., p. 104.) Le crédit commercial a dû commencer au moment
où l’ouvrier, premier artisan de la production, a pu, au moyen de
ses économies, attendre le salaire de son travail jusqu’à
la fin de la semaine, de la quinzaine, du mois, du trimestre, &c.” [“The system of commercial credit had to start at the moment when the labourer, the prime creator of products, could, thanks to his savings, wait for his wages until the end of the week.”]
(Ch. Ganilh: “Des Systèmes d’Econ. Polit.” 2éme édit.
Paris, 1821, t. II, p. 150.)

13. “L’ouvrier prête son industrie,”
but adds Storch slyly: he “risks nothing” except “de perdre son salaire ... l’ouvrier ne transmet rien de matériel.” [“The labourer lends his industry ... the loss of his wages ... the labourer does not hand over anything of a material nature.”] (Storch: “Cours d’Econ. Polit.” Pétersbourg, 1815, t. II., p. 37.)

14. One example. In London there are
two sorts of bakers, the “full priced,” who sell bread at its full value,
and the “undersellers,” who sell it under its value. The latter class comprises
more than three-fourths of the total number of bakers. (p. xxxii in the
Report of H. S. Tremenheere, commissioner to examine into “the grievances
complained of by the journeymen bakers,” &c., Lond. 1862.) The undersellers,
almost without exception, sell bread adulterated with alum, soap, pearl
ashes, chalk, Derbyshire stone-dust, and such like agreeable nourishing
and wholesome ingredients. (See the above cited Blue book, as also the
report of “the committee of 1855 on the adulteration of bread,” and Dr.
Hassall’s “Adulterations Detected,” 2nd Ed. Lond. 1861.) Sir John Gordon
stated before the committee of 1855, that “in consequence of these adulterations,
the poor man, who lives on two pounds of bread a day, does not now get
one fourth part of nourishing matter, let alone the deleterious effects
on his health.” Tremenheere states (l.c., p. xlviii), as the reason, why
a very large part of the working-class, although well aware of this adulteration,
nevertheless accept the alum, stone-dust, &c., as part of their purchase:
that it is for them “a matter of necessity to take from their baker or
from the chandler’s shop, such bread as they choose to supply.” As they
are not paid their wages before the end of the week, they in their turn
are unable “to pay for the bread consumed by their families, during the
week, before the end of the week,” and Tremenheere adds on the evidence
of witnesses, “it is notorious that bread composed of those mixtures, is
made expressly for sale in this manner.” In many English and still more
Scotch agricultural districts, wages are paid fortnightly and even monthly;
with such long intervals between the payments, the agricultural labourer
is obliged to buy on credit.... He must pay higher prices, and is in fact
tied to the shop which gives him credit. Thus at Horningham in Wilts, for
example, where the wages are monthly, the same flour that he could buy
elsewhere at 1s 10d per stone, costs him 2s 4d per stone. (“Sixth Report”
on “Public Health” by “The Medical Officer of the Privy Council, &c.,
1864,” p.264.) “The block printers of Paisley and Kilmarnock enforced,
by a strike, fortnightly, instead of monthly payment of wages.” (“Reports
of the Inspectors of Factories for 31st Oct., 1853,” p. 34.) As a further
pretty result of the credit given by the workmen to the capitalist, we
may refer to the method current in many English coal mines, where the labourer
is not paid till the end of the month, and in the meantime, receives sums
on account from the capitalist, often in goods for which the miner is obliged
to pay more than the market price (Truck-system). “It is a common practice
with the coal masters to pay once a month, and advance cash to their workmen
at the end of each intermediate week. The cash is given in the shop” (i.e.,
the Tommy shop which belongs to the master); “the men take it on one side
and lay it out on the other.” (“Children’s Employment Commission, III.
Report,” Lond. 1864, p. 38, n. 192.)

Karl Marx. Capital Volume One

## Part III: The Production of Absolute Surplus-Value

## Chapter Seven: The Labour-Process and the Process of Producing Surplus-Value

Contents

Section 1 - The Labour-Process or the Production
of Use-Values

Section 2 - The Production of Surplus-Value

### SECTION 1.

THE LABOUR-PROCESS OR THE PRODUCTION OF USE-VALUES

The capitalist buys labour-power in order to use it;
and labour-power in use is labour itself. The purchaser of labour-power
consumes it by setting the seller of it to work. By working, the latter
becomes actually, what before he only was potentially, labour-power in
action, a labourer. In order that his labour may re-appear in a commodity,
he must, before all things, expend it on something useful, on something
capable of satisfying a want of some sort. Hence, what the capitalist sets
the labourer to produce, is a particular use-value, a specified article.
The fact that the production of use-values, or goods, is carried on under
the control of a capitalist and on his behalf, does not alter the general
character of that production. We shall, therefore, in the first place,
have to consider the labour-process independently of the particular form
it assumes under given social conditions.

Labour is, in the first place, a process in which both man and
Nature participate, and in which man of his own accord starts, regulates,
and controls the material re-actions between himself and Nature. He opposes
himself to Nature as one of her own forces, setting in motion arms and
legs, head and hands, the natural forces of his body, in order to appropriate
Nature’s productions in a form adapted to his own wants. By thus acting
on the external world and changing it, he at the same time changes his
own nature. He develops his slumbering powers and compels them to act in
obedience to his sway. We are not now dealing with those primitive instinctive
forms of labour that remind us of the mere animal. An immeasurable interval
of time separates the state of things in which a man brings
his labour-power to market for sale as a commodity, from that state in
which human labour was still in its first instinctive stage. We pre-suppose
labour in a form that stamps it as exclusively human. A spider conducts
operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many
an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the
worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises
his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end
of every labour-process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination
of the labourer at its commencement. He not only effects a change of form
in the material on which he works, but he also realises a purpose of his
own that gives the law to his modus operandi, and to which he must subordinate
his will. And this subordination is no mere momentary act. Besides the
exertion of the bodily organs, the process demands that, during the whole
operation, the workman’s will be steadily in consonance with his purpose.
This means close attention. The less he is attracted by the nature of the
work, and the mode in which it is carried on, and the less, therefore,
he enjoys it as something which gives play to his bodily and mental powers,
the more close his attention is forced to be.

The elementary factors of the labour-process are 1, the personal
activity of man, i.e., work itself, 2, the subject of that work,
and 3, its instruments.

The soil (and this, economically speaking, includes water) in
the virgin state in which it supplies [1] man with necessaries
or the means of subsistence ready to hand, exists independently of him,
and is the universal subject of human labour. All those things which labour
merely separates from immediate connexion with their environment, are subjects
of labour spontaneously provided by Nature. Such are fish which we catch
and take from their element, water, timber which we fell in the virgin
forest, and ores which we extract from their veins. If, on the other hand,
the subject of labour has, so to say, been filtered through previous labour,
we call it raw material; such is ore already extracted and ready for washing.
All raw material is the subject of labour, but not every subject of labour
is raw material: it can only become so, after it has undergone some alteration
by means of labour.

An instrument of labour is a thing, or a complex of things, which
the labourer interposes between himself and the subject of his labour,
and which serves as the conductor of his activity. He makes use of the mechanical,
physical, and chemical properties of some substances in order to make other
substances subservient to his aims. [2] Leaving out of
consideration such ready-made means of subsistence as fruits, in gathering
which a man’s own limbs serve as the instruments of his labour, the first
thing of which the labourer possesses himself is not the subject of labour
but its instrument. Thus Nature becomes one of the organs of his activity,
one that he annexes to his own bodily organs, adding stature to himself
in spite of the Bible. As the earth is his original larder, so too it is
his original tool house. It supplies him, for instance, with stones for
throwing, grinding, pressing, cutting, &c. The earth itself is an instrument
of labour, but when used as such in agriculture implies a whole series
of other instruments and a comparatively high development of labour. [3]
No sooner does labour undergo the least development, than it requires specially
prepared instruments. Thus in the oldest caves we find stone implements
and weapons. In the earliest period of human history domesticated animals,
i.e., animals which have been bred for the purpose, and have undergone
modifications by means of labour, play the chief part as instruments of
labour along with specially prepared stones, wood, bones, and shells. [4]
The use and fabrication of instruments of labour, although existing in
the germ among certain species of animals, is specifically characteristic
of the human labour-process, and Franklin therefore defines man as a tool-making
animal. Relics of bygone instruments of labour possess the same importance
for the investigation of extinct economic forms of society, as do fossil
bones for the determination of extinct species of animals. It is not the
articles made, but how they are made, and by what instruments, that enables
us to distinguish different economic epochs. [5] Instruments
of labour not only supply a standard of the degree of development
to which human labour has attained, but they are also indicators of the
social conditions under which that labour is carried on. Among the instruments
of labour, those of a mechanical nature, which, taken as a whole, we may
call the bone and muscles of production, offer much more decided characteristics
of a given epoch of production, than those which, like pipes, tubs, baskets,
jars, &c., serve only to hold the materials for labour, which latter
class, we may in a general way, call the vascular system of production.
The latter first begins to play an important part in the chemical industries.

In a wider sense we may include among the instruments of labour,
in addition to those things that are used for directly transferring labour
to its subject, and which therefore, in one way or another, serve as conductors
of activity, all such objects as are necessary for carrying on the labour-process.
These do not enter directly into the process, but without them it is either
impossible for it to take place at all, or possible only to a partial extent.
Once more we find the earth to be a universal instrument of this sort,
for it furnishes a locus standi to the labourer and a field of employment
for his activity. Among instruments that are the result of previous labour
and also belong to this class, we find workshops, canals, roads, and so
forth.

In the labour-process, therefore, man’s activity, with the help
of the instruments of labour, effects an alteration, designed from the
commencement, in the material worked upon. The process disappears in the
product, the latter is a use-value, Nature’s material adapted by a change
of form to the wants of man. Labour has incorporated itself with its subject:
the former is materialised, the latter transformed. That which in the labourer
appeared as movement, now appears in the product as a fixed quality without
motion. The blacksmith forges and the product is a forging.

If we examine the whole process from the point of view of its
result, the product, it is plain that both the instruments and the subject
of labour, are means of production, [6] and that the
labour itself is productive labour. [7]

Though a use-value, in the form of a product, issues from the
labour-process, yet other use-values, products of previous labour, enter
into it as means of production. The same use-value is both the product
of a previous process, and a means of production in a later process. Products
are therefore not only results, but also essential conditions of labour.

With the exception of the extractive industries, in which the
material for labour is provided immediately by Nature, such as mining,
hunting, fishing, and agriculture (so far as the latter is confined to
breaking up virgin soil), all branches of industry manipulate raw material,
objects already filtered through labour, already products of labour. Such
is seed in agriculture. Animals and plants, which we are accustomed to
consider as products of Nature, are in their present form, not only products
of, say last year’s labour, but the result of a gradual transformation,
continued through many generations, under man’s superintendence, and by
means of his labour. But in the great majority of cases, instruments of
labour show even to the most superficial observer, traces of the labour
of past ages.

Raw material may either form the principal substance of a product,
or it may enter into its formation only as an accessory. An accessory may
be consumed by the instruments of labour, as coal under a boiler, oil by
a wheel, hay by draft-horses, or it may be mixed with the raw material
in order to produce some modification thereof, as chlorine into unbleached
linen, coal with iron, dye-stuff with wool, or again, it may help to carry
on the work itself, as in the case of the materials used for heating and
lighting workshops. The distinction between principal substance and accessory
vanishes in the true chemical industries, because there none of the raw
material re-appears, in its original composition, in the substance of the
product. [8]

Every object possesses various properties, and is thus capable
of being applied to different uses. One and the same product may therefore
serve as raw material in very different processes. Corn, for example, is
a raw material for millers, starch-manufacturers, distillers, and cattlebreeders.
It also enters as raw material into its own production in the shape of
seed; coal, too, is at the same time the product of, and a means of production
in, coal-mining.

Again, a particular product may be used in one and the same process,
both as an instrument of labour and as raw material. Take, for instance,
the fattening of cattle, where the animal is the raw material, and at the
same time an instrument for the production of manure.

A product, though ready for immediate consumption, may yet serve
as raw material for a further product, as grapes when they become the raw
material for wine. On the other hand, labour may give us its product in
such a form, that we can use it only as raw material, as is the case with cotton,
thread, and yarn. Such a raw material, though itself a product, may have
to go through a whole series of different processes: in each of these in
turn, it serves, with constantly varying form, as raw material, until the
last process of the series leaves it a perfect product, ready for individual
consumption, or for use as an instrument of labour.

Hence we see, that whether a use-value is to be regarded as raw
material, as instrument of labour, or as product, this is determined entirely
by its function in the labour-process, by the position it there occupies:
as this varies, so does its character.

Whenever therefore a product enters as a means of production into
a new labour-process, it thereby loses its character of product, and becomes
a mere factor in the process. A spinner treats spindles only as implements
for spinning, and flax only as the material that he spins. Of course it
is impossible to spin without material and spindles; and therefore the
existence of these things as products, at the commencement of the spinning
operation, must be presumed: but in the process itself, the fact that they
are products of previous labour, is a matter of utter indifference; just
as in the digestive process, it is of no importance whatever, that bread
is the produce of the previous labour of the farmer, the miller, and the
baker. On the contrary, it is generally by their imperfections as products,
that the means of production in any process assert themselves in their
character of products. A blunt knife or weak thread forcibly remind us
of Mr. A., the cutler, or Mr. B., the spinner. In the finished product
the labour by means of which it has acquired its useful qualities is not
palpable, has apparently vanished.

A machine which does not serve the purposes of labour, is useless.
In addition, it falls a prey to the destructive influence of natural forces.
Iron rusts and wood rots. Yarn with which we neither weave nor knit, is
cotton wasted. Living labour must seize upon these things and rouse them
from their death-sleep, change them from mere possible use-values into
real and effective ones. Bathed in the fire of labour, appropriated as
part and parcel of labour’s organism, and, as it were, made alive for the
performance of their functions in the process, they are in truth consumed,
but consumed with a purpose, as elementary constituents of new use-values,
of new products, ever ready as means of subsistence for individual consumption,
or as means of production for some new labour-process.

If then, on the one hand, finished products are not only results,
but also necessary conditions, of the labour-process, on the other hand,
their assumption into that process, their contact with living labour, is
the sole means by which they can be made to retain their character of use-values,
and be utilised.

Labour uses up its material factors, its subject and its
instruments, consumes them, and is therefore a process of consumption.
Such productive consumption is distinguished from individual consumption
by this, that the latter uses up products, as means of subsistence for
the living individual; the former, as means whereby alone, labour, the
labour-power of the living individual, is enabled to act. The product,
therefore, of individual consumption, is the consumer himself; the result
of productive consumption, is a product distinct from the consumer.

In so far then, as its instruments and subjects are themselves
products, labour consumes products in order to create products, or in other
words, consumes one set of products by turning them into means of production
for another set. But, just as in the beginning, the only participators
in the labour-process were man and the earth, which latter exists independently
of man, so even now we still employ in the process many means of production,
provided directly by Nature, that do not represent any combination of natural
substances with human labour.

The labour-process, resolved as above into its simple elementary
factors, is human action with a view to the production of use-values, appropriation
of natural substances to human requirements; it is the necessary condition
for effecting exchange of matter between man and Nature; it is the everlasting
Nature-imposed condition of human existence, and therefore is independent
of every social phase of that existence, or rather, is common to every
such phase. It was, therefore, not necessary to represent our labourer
in connexion with other labourers; man and his labour on one side, Nature
and its materials on the other, sufficed. As the taste of the porridge
does not tell you who grew the oats, no more does this simple process tell
you of itself what are the social conditions under which it is taking place,
whether under the slave-owner’s brutal lash, or the anxious eye of the
capitalist, whether Cincinnatus carries it on in tilling his modest farm
or a savage in killing wild animals with stones. [9]

Let us now return to our would-be capitalist. We left him just
after he had purchased, in the open market, all the necessary factors of
the labour process; its objective factors, the means of production, as
well as its subjective factor, labour-power. With the keen eye of an expert,
he has selected the means of production and the kind of labour-power best
adapted to his particular trade, be it spinning, bootmaking, or any
other kind. He then proceeds to consume the commodity, the labour-power
that he has just bought, by causing the labourer, the impersonation of
that labour-power, to consume the means of production by his labour. The
general character of the labour-process is evidently not changed by the
fact, that the labourer works for the capitalist instead of for himself;
moreover, the particular methods and operations employed in bootmaking
or spinning are not immediately changed by the intervention of the capitalist.
He must begin by taking the labour-power as he finds it in the market,
and consequently be satisfied with labour of such a kind as would be found
in the period immediately preceding the rise of capitalists. Changes in
the methods of production by the subordination of labour to capital, can
take place only at a later period, and therefore will have to be treated
of in a later chapter.

The labour-process, turned into the process by which the capitalist
consumes labour-power, exhibits two characteristic phenomena. First, the
labourer works under the control of the capitalist to whom his labour belongs;
the capitalist taking good care that the work is done in a proper manner,
and that the means of production are used with intelligence, so that there
is no unnecessary waste of raw material, and no wear and tear of the implements
beyond what is necessarily caused by the work.

Secondly, the product is the property of the capitalist and not
that of the labourer, its immediate producer. Suppose that a capitalist
pays for a day’s labour-power at its value; then the right to use that
power for a day belongs to him, just as much as the right to use any other
commodity, such as a horse that he has hired for the day. To the purchaser
of a commodity belongs its use, and the seller of labour-power, by giving
his labour, does no more, in reality, than part with the use-value that
he has sold. From the instant he steps into the workshop, the use-value
of his labour-power, and therefore also its use, which is labour, belongs
to the capitalist. By the purchase of labour-power, the capitalist incorporates
labour, as a living ferment, with the lifeless constituents of the product.
From his point of view, the labour-process is nothing more than the consumption
of the commodity purchased, i. e., of labour-power; but this consumption
cannot be effected except by supplying the labour-power with the means
of production. The labour-process is a process between things that the
capitalist has purchased, things that have become his property. The product
of this process belongs, therefore, to him, just as much as does the wine
which is the product of a process of fermentation completed in his cellar.

### SECTION 2.

THE PRODUCTION OF SURPLUS-VALUE

The product appropriated by the capitalist is a use-value, as yarn, for
example, or boots. But, although boots are, in one sense, the basis of
all social progress, and our capitalist is a decided “progressist,” yet
he does not manufacture boots for their own sake. Use-value is, by no means,
the thing “qu’on aime pour lui-même” in the production of commodities.
Use-values are only produced by capitalists, because, and in so far as,
they are the material substratum, the depositories of exchange-value. Our
capitalist has two objects in view: in the first place, he wants to produce
a use-value that has a value in exchange, that is to say, an article destined
to be sold, a commodity; and secondly, he desires to produce a commodity
whose value shall be greater than the sum of the values of the commodities
used in its production, that is, of the means of production and the labour-power,
that he purchased with his good money in the open market. His aim is to
produce not only a use-value, but a commodity also; not only use-value,
but value; not only value, but at the same time surplus-value.

It must be borne in mind, that we are now dealing with the production
of commodities, and that, up to this point, we have only considered one
aspect of the process. Just as commodities are, at the same time, use-values
and values, so the process of producing them must be a labour-process,
and at the same time, a process of creating value. [11]

Let us now examine production as a creation of value.

We know that the value of each commodity is determined by the
quantity of labour expended on and materialised in it, by the working-time
necessary, under given social conditions, for its production. This rule
also holds good in the case of the product that accrued to our capitalist,
as the result of the labour-process carried on for him. Assuming this product
to be 10 lbs. of yarn, our first step is to calculate the quantity of labour
realised in it.

For spinning the yarn, raw material is required; suppose in this
case 10 lbs. of cotton. We have no need at present to investigate the value
of this cotton, for our capitalist has, we will assume, bought it at its
full value, say of ten shillings. In this price the labour required for
the production of the cotton is already expressed in terms of the average
labour of society. We will further assume that the wear and tear of the
spindle, which, for our present purpose, may represent all other instruments
of labour employed, amounts to the value of 2s. If, then, twenty-four hours’
labour, or two working-days, are required to produce the quantity of gold
represented by twelve shillings, we have here, to begin with, two days’
labour already incorporated in the yarn.

We must not let ourselves be misled by the circumstance that the
cotton has taken a new shape while the substance of the spindle has to
a certain extent been used up. By the general law of value, if the value
of 40 lbs. of yarn = the value of 40 lbs. of cotton + the value of a whole
spindle, i. e., if the same working-time is required to produce
the commodities on either side of this equation, then 10 lbs. of yarn are
an equivalent for 10 lbs. of cotton, together with one-fourth of a spindle.
In the case we are considering the same working-time is materialised in
the 10 lbs. of yarn on the one hand, and in the 10 lbs. of cotton and the
fraction of a spindle on the other. Therefore, whether value appears in
cotton, in a spindle, or in yarn, makes no difference in the amount of
that value. The spindle and cotton, instead of resting quietly side by
side, join together in the process, their forms are altered, and they are
turned into yarn; but their value is no more affected by this fact than
it would be if they had been simply exchanged for their equivalent in yarn.

The labour required for the production of the cotton, the raw
material of the yarn, is part of the labour necessary to produce the yarn,
and is therefore contained in the yarn. The same applies to the labour
embodied in the spindle, without whose wear and tear the cotton could not
be spun.

Hence, in determining the value of the yarn, or the labour-time
required for its production, all the special processes carried on at various
times and in different places, which were necessary, first to produce the
cotton and the wasted portion of the spindle, and then with the cotton
and spindle to spin the yarn, may together be looked on as different and
successive phases of one and the same process. The whole of the labour
in the yarn is past labour; and it is a matter of no importance that the
operations necessary for the production of its constituent elements were
carried on at times which, referred to the present, are more remote than
the final operation of spinning. If a definite quantity of labour,
say thirty days, is requisite to build a house, the total amount of labour
incorporated in it is not altered by the fact that the work of the last
day is done twenty-nine days later than that of the first. Therefore the
labour contained in the raw material and the instruments of labour can
be treated just as if it were labour expended in an earlier stage of the
spinning process, before the labour of actual spinning commenced.

The values of the means of production, i. e., the cotton
and the spindle, which values are expressed in the price of twelve shillings,
are therefore constituent parts of the value of the yarn, or, in other
words, of the value of the product.

Two conditions must nevertheless be fulfilled. First, the cotton
and spindle must concur in the production of a use-value; they must in
the present case become yarn. Value is independent of the particular use-value
by which it is borne, but it must be embodied in a use-value of some kind.
Secondly, the time occupied in the labour of production must not exceed
the time really necessary under the given social conditions of the case.
Therefore, if no more than 1 lb. of cotton be requisite to spin 1 lb.
of yarn, care must be taken that no more than this weight of cotton is
consumed in the production of 1 lb. of yarn; and similarly with regard
to the spindle. Though the capitalist have a hobby, and use a gold instead
of a steel spindle, yet the only labour that counts for anything in the
value of the yarn is that which would be required to produce a steel spindle,
because no more is necessary under the given social conditions.

We now know what portion of the value of the yarn is owing to
the cotton and the spindle. It amounts to twelve shillings or the value
of two days’ work. The next point for our consideration is, what portion
of the value of the yarn is added to the cotton by the labour of the spinner.

We have now to consider this labour under a very different aspect
from that which it had during the labour-process; there, we viewed it solely
as that particular kind of human activity which changes cotton into yarn;
there, the more the labour was suited to the work, the better the yarn,
other circumstances remaining the same. The labour of the spinner was then
viewed as specifically different from other kinds of productive labour,
different on the one hand in its special aim, viz., spinning, different,
on the other hand, in the special character of its operations, in the special
nature of its means of production and in the special use-value of its product.
For the operation of spinning, cotton and spindles are a necessity, but
for making rifled cannon they would be of no use whatever. Here, on the
contrary, where we consider the labour of the spinner only so far as it
is value-creating, i.e., a source of value, his labour differs
in no respect from the labour of the man who bores cannon, or (what
here more nearly concerns us), from the labour of the cotton-planter and
spindle-maker incorporated in the means of production. It is solely by
reason of this identity, that cotton planting, spindle making and spinning,
are capable of forming the component parts differing only quantitatively
from each other, of one whole, namely, the value of the yarn. Here, we
have nothing more to do with the quality, the nature and the specific character
of the labour, but merely with its quantity. And this simply requires to
be calculated. We proceed upon the assumption that spinning is simple,
unskilled labour, the average labour of a given state of society. Hereafter
we shall see that the contrary assumption would make no difference.

While the labourer is at work, his labour constantly undergoes
a transformation: from being motion, it becomes an object without motion;
from being the labourer working, it becomes the thing produced. At the
end of one hour’s spinning, that act is represented by a definite quantity
of yarn; in other words, a definite quantity of labour, namely that of
one hour, has become embodied in the cotton. We say labour, i.e.,
the expenditure of his vital force by the spinner, and not spinning labour,
because the special work of spinning counts here, only so far as it is
the expenditure of labour-power in general, and not in so far as it is
the specific work of the spinner.

In the process we are now considering it is of extreme importance,
that no more time be consumed in the work of transforming the cotton into
yarn than is necessary under the given social conditions. If under normal,
i.e., average social conditions of production, a pounds of
cotton ought to be made into b pounds of yarn by one hour’s labour,
then a day’s labour does not count as 12 hours’ labour unless 12 a
pounds of cotton have been made into 12 b pounds of yarn; for in
the creation of value, the time that is socially necessary alone counts.

Not only the labour, but also the raw material and the product
now appear in quite a new light, very different from that in which we viewed
them in the labour-process pure and simple. The raw material serves now
merely as an absorbent of a definite quantity of labour. By this absorption
it is in fact changed into yarn, because it is spun, because labour-power
in the form of spinning is added to it; but the product, the yarn, is now
nothing more than a measure of the labour absorbed by the cotton. If in
one hour 1 2/3 lbs. of cotton can be spun into 1 2/3 lbs. of yarn, then
10 lbs. of yarn indicate the absorption of 6 hours’ labour. Definite quantities
of product, these quantities being determined by experience, now represent
nothing but definite quantities of labour, definite masses of crystallised
labour-time. They are nothing more than the materialisation
of so many hours or so many days of social labour.

We are here no more concerned about the facts, that the labour
is the specific work of spinning, that its subject is cotton and its product
yarn, than we are about the fact that the subject itself is already a product
and therefore raw material. If the spinner, instead of spinning, were working
in a coal mine, the subject of his labour, the coal, would be supplied
by Nature; nevertheless, a definite quantity of extracted coal, a hundredweight
for example, would represent a definite quantity of absorbed labour.

We assumed, on the occasion of its sale, that the value of a day’s
labour-power is three shillings, and that six hours’ labour is incorporated
in that sum; and consequently that this amount of labour is requisite to
produce the necessaries of life daily required on an average by the labourer.
If now our spinner by working for one hour, can convert 1 2/3 lbs. of cotton
into 1 2/3 lbs. of yarn, [12] it follows that in six
hours he will convert 10 lbs. of cotton into 10 lbs. of yarn. Hence, during
the spinning process, the cotton absorbs six hours’ labour. The same quantity
of labour is also embodied in a piece of gold of the value of three shillings.
Consequently by the mere labour of spinning, a value of three shillings
is added to the cotton.

Let us now consider the total value of the product, the 10 lbs.
of yarn. Two and a half days’ labour has been embodied in it, of which
two days were contained in the cotton and in the substance of the spindle
worn away, and half a day was absorbed during the process of spinning.
This two and a half days’ labour is also represented by a piece of gold
of the value of fifteen shillings. Hence, fifteen shillings is an adequate
price for the 10 lbs. of yarn, or the price of one pound is eighteenpence.

Our capitalist stares in astonishment. The value of the product
is exactly equal to the value of the capital advanced. The value so advanced
has not expanded, no surplus-value has been created, and consequently money
has not been converted into capital. The price of the yarn is fifteen shillings,
and fifteen shillings were spent in the open market upon the constituent
elements of the product, or, what amounts to the same thing, upon the factors
of the labour-process; ten shillings were paid for the cotton, two shillings
for the substance of the spindle worn away, and three shillings for the
labour-power. The swollen value of the yarn is of no avail, for it is merely
the sum of the values formerly existing in the cotton, the spindle, and
the labour-power: out of such a simple addition of existing
values, no surplus-value can possibly arise. [13] These separate values are now all concentrated in one thing; but so they were
also in the sum of fifteen shillings, before it was split up into three
parts, by the purchase of the commodities.

There is in reality nothing very strange in this result. The value
of one pound of yarn being eighteenpence, if our capitalist buys 10 lbs.
of yarn in the market, he must pay fifteen shillings for them. It is clear
that, whether a man buys his house ready built, or gets it built for him,
in neither case will the mode of acquisition increase the amount of money
laid out on the house.

Our capitalist, who is at home in his vulgar economy, exclaims:
“Oh! but I advanced my money for the express purpose of making more
money.” The way to Hell is paved with good intentions, and he might
just as easily have intended to make money, without producing at all. [14]
He threatens all sorts of things. He won’t be caught napping again. In
future he will buy the commodities in the market, instead of manufacturing
them himself. But if all his brother capitalists were to do the same, where
would he find his commodities in the market? And his money he cannot eat.
He tries persuasion. “Consider my abstinence; I might have played ducks
and drakes with the 15 shillings; but instead of that I consumed it productively,
and made yarn with it.” Very well, and by way of reward he is now in
possession of good yarn instead of a bad conscience; and as for playing
the part of a miser, it would never do for him to relapse into such bad
ways as that; we have seen before to what results such asceticism leads.
Besides, where nothing is, the king has lost his rights; whatever may be
the merit of his abstinence, there is nothing wherewith specially to remunerate
it, because the value of the product is merely the sum of the values of
the commodities that were thrown into the process of production. Let him
therefore console himself with the reflection that virtue is its own reward.
But no, he becomes importunate. He says: “The yarn is of no use to me:
I produced it for sale.”
In that case let him sell it, or, still better,
let him for the future produce only things for satisfying his
personal wants, a remedy that his physician MacCulloch has already prescribed
as infallible against an epidemic of over-production. He now gets obstinate.
“Can the labourer,” he asks, “merely with his arms and legs, produce
commodities out of nothing? Did I not supply him with the materials, by
means of which, and in which alone, his labour could be embodied? And as
the greater part of society consists of such ne’er-do-wells, have I not
rendered society incalculable service by my instruments of production,
my cotton and my spindle, and not only society, but the labourer also,
whom in addition I have provided with the necessaries of life? And am I
to be allowed nothing in return for all this service?” Well, but has
not the labourer rendered him the equivalent service of changing his cotton
and spindle into yarn? Moreover, there is here no question of service.
[15] A service is nothing more than the useful effect
of a use-value, be it of a commodity, or be it of labour. [16]
But here we are dealing with exchange-value. The capitalist paid to the
labourer a value of 3 shillings, and the labourer gave him back an exact
equivalent in the value of 3 shillings, added by him to the cotton: he
gave him value for value. Our friend, up to this time so purse-proud, suddenly
assumes the modest demeanour of his own workman, and exclaims: “Have
I myself not worked? Have I not performed the labour of superintendence
and of overlooking the spinner? And does not this labour, too, create value?”
His overlooker and his manager try to hide their smiles. Meanwhile, after
a hearty laugh, he re-assumes his usual mien. Though he chanted to us the
whole creed of the economists, in reality, he says, he would not give a
brass farthing for it. He leaves this and all such like subterfuges and
juggling tricks to the professors of Political Economy, who are paid for
it. He himself is a practical man; and though he does not always consider
what he says outside his business, yet in his business he knows what he
is about.

Let us examine the matter more closely. The value of a day’s labour-power
amounts to 3 shillings, because on our assumption half a day’s labour is
embodied in that quantity of labour-power, i.e., because the means
of subsistence that are daily required for the production of labour-power,
cost half a day’s labour. But the past labour that is embodied in the labour-power,
and the living labour that it can call into action; the daily cost of maintaining
it, and its daily expenditure in work, are two totally different things.
The former determines the exchange-value of the labour-power, the latter
is its use-value. The fact that half a day’s labour is necessary to keep
the labourer alive during 24 hours, does not in any way prevent him from
working a whole day. Therefore, the value of labour-power, and the value
which that labour-power creates in the labour-process, are two entirely
different magnitudes; and this difference of the two values was what the
capitalist had in view, when he was purchasing the labour-power. The useful
qualities that labour-power possesses, and by virtue of which it makes
yarn or boots, were to him nothing more than a conditio sine qua non; for
in order to create value, labour must be expended in a useful manner. What
really influenced him was the specific use-value which this commodity possesses
of being a source not only of value, but of more value than it has itself.
This is the special service that the capitalist expects from labour-power,
and in this transaction he acts in accordance with the “eternal laws” of
the exchange of commodities. The seller of labour-power, like the seller
of any other commodity, realises its exchange-value, and parts with its
use-value. He cannot take the one without giving the other. The use-value
of labour-power, or in other words, labour, belongs just as little to its
seller, as the use-value of oil after it has been sold belongs to the dealer
who has sold it. The owner of the money has paid the value of a day’s labour-power;
his, therefore, is the use of it for a day; a day’s labour belongs to him.
The circumstance, that on the one hand the daily sustenance of labour-power
costs only half a day’s labour, while on the other hand the very same labour-power
can work during a whole day, that consequently the value which its use
during one day creates, is double what he pays for that use, this circumstance
is, without doubt, a piece of good luck for the buyer, but by no means
an injury to the seller.

Our capitalist foresaw this state of things, and that was the
cause of his laughter. The labourer therefore finds, in the workshop, the
means of production necessary for working, not only during six, but during
twelve hours. Just as during the six hours’ process our 10 lbs. of cotton
absorbed six hours’ labour, and became 10 lbs. of yarn, so now, 20 lbs.
of cotton will absorb 12 hours’ labour and be changed into 20 lbs. of yarn.
Let us now examine the product of this prolonged process. There is now
materialised in this 20 lbs. of yarn the labour of five days, of which
four days are due to the cotton and the lost steel of the spindle, the
remaining day having been absorbed by the cotton during the spinning process.
Expressed in gold, the labour of five days is thirty shillings. This is
therefore the price of the 20 lbs. of yarn, giving, as before, eighteenpence
as the price of a pound. But the sum of the values of the commodities that
entered into the process amounts to 27 shillings. The value of the yarn
is 30 shillings. Therefore the value of the product is 1/9 greater than
the value advanced for its production; 27 shillings have been transformed
into 30 shillings; a surplus-value of 3 shillings has been created. The
trick has at last succeeded; money has been converted into capital.

Every condition of the problem is satisfied, while the laws that
regulate the exchange of commodities, have been in no way violated. Equivalent
has been exchanged for equivalent. For the capitalist as buyer paid for
each commodity, for the cotton, the spindle and the labour-power, its full
value. He then did what is done by every purchaser of commodities; he consumed
their use-value. The consumption of the labour-power, which was also the
process of producing commodities, resulted in 20 lbs. of yarn, having a
value of 30 shillings. The capitalist, formerly a buyer, now returns to
market as a seller, of commodities. He sells his yarn at eighteenpence
a pound, which is its exact value. Yet for all that he withdraws 3 shillings
more from circulation than he originally threw into it. This metamorphosis,
this conversion of money into capital, takes place both within the sphere
of circulation and also outside it; within the circulation, because conditioned
by the purchase of the labour-power in the market; outside the circulation,
because what is done within it is only a stepping-stone to the production
of surplus-value, a process which is entirely confined to the sphere of
production. Thus “tout est pour le mieux dans le meilleur des mondes possibles.” [“Everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.” – Voltaire, Candide]

By turning his money into commodities that serve as the material
elements of a new product, and as factors in the labour-process, by incorporating
living labour with their dead substance, the capitalist at the same time
converts value, i.e., past, materialised, and dead labour into capital,
into value big with value, a live monster that is fruitful and multiplies.

If we now compare the two processes of producing value and of
creating surplus-value, we see that the latter is nothing but the continuation
of the former beyond a definite point. If on the one hand the process be
not carried beyond the point, where the value paid by the capitalist for
the labour-power is replaced by an exact equivalent, it is simply a process
of producing value; if, on the other hand, it be continued beyond
that point, it becomes a process of creating surplus-value.

If we proceed further, and compare the process of producing value
with the labour-process, pure and simple, we find that the latter consists
of the useful labour, the work, that produces use-values. Here we contemplate
the labour as producing a particular article; we view it under its qualitative
aspect alone, with regard to its end and aim. But viewed as a value-creating
process, the same labour-process presents itself under its quantitative
aspect alone. Here it is a question merely of the time occupied by the
labourer in doing the work; of the period during which the labour-power
is usefully expended. Here, the commodities that take part in the process,
do not count any longer as necessary adjuncts of labour-power in the production
of a definite, useful object. They count merely as depositories of so much
absorbed or materialised labour; that labour, whether previously embodied
in the means of production, or incorporated in them for the first time
during the process by the action of labour-power, counts in either case
only according to its duration; it amounts to so many hours or days as
the case may be.

Moreover, only so much of the time spent in the production of
any article is counted, as, under the given social conditions, is necessary.
The consequences of this are various. In the first place, it becomes necessary
that the labour should be carried on under normal conditions. If a self-acting
mule is the implement in general use for spinning, it would be absurd to
supply the spinner with a distaff and spinning wheel. The cotton too must
not be such rubbish as to cause extra waste in being worked, but must be
of suitable quality. Otherwise the spinner would be found to spend more
time in producing a pound of yarn than is socially necessary, in which
case the excess of time would create neither value nor money. But whether
the material factors of the process are of normal quality or not, depends
not upon the labourer, but entirely upon the capitalist. Then again, the
labour-power itself must be of average efficacy. In the trade in which
it is being employed, it must possess the average skill, handiness and
quickness prevalent in that trade, and our capitalist took good care to
buy labour-power of such normal goodness. This power must be applied with
the average amount of exertion and with the usual degree of intensity;
and the capitalist is as careful to see that this is done, as that his
workmen are not idle for a single moment. He has bought the use of the
labour-power for a definite period, and he insists upon his rights. He
has no intention of being robbed. Lastly, and for this purpose our friend
has a penal code of his own, all wasteful consumption of raw material or
instruments of labour is strictly forbidden, because what is so wasted,
represents labour superfluously expended, labour that does not
count in the product or enter into its value. [17]

We now see, that the difference between labour, considered on
the one hand as producing utilities, and on the other hand, as creating
value, a difference which we discovered by our analysis of a commodity,
resolves itself into a distinction between two aspects of the process of
production.

The process of production, considered on the one hand as the unity
of the labour-process and the process of creating value, is production
of commodities; considered on the other hand as the unity of the labour-process
and the process of producing surplus-value, it is the capitalist process
of production, or capitalist production of commodities.

We stated, on a previous page, that in the creation of surplus-value
it does not in the least matter, whether the labour appropriated by the
capitalist be simple unskilled labour of average quality or more complicated
skilled labour. All labour of a higher or more complicated character than
average labour is expenditure of labour-power of a more costly kind, labour-power
whose production has cost more time and labour, and which therefore has
a higher value, than unskilled or simple labour-power. This
power being higher-value, its consumption is labour of a higher class,
labour that creates in equal times proportionally higher values than unskilled
labour does. Whatever difference in skill there may be between the labour
of a spinner and that of a jeweller, the portion of his labour by which
the jeweller merely replaces the value of his own labour-power, does not
in any way differ in quality from the additional portion by which he creates
surplus-value. In the making of jewellery, just as in spinning, the surplus-value
results only from a quantitative excess of labour, from a lengthening-out
of one and the same labour-process, in the one case, of the process of
making jewels, in the other of the process of making yarn. [18]

But on the other hand, in every process of creating value, the
reduction of skilled labour to average social labour, e.g., one
day of skilled to six days of unskilled labour, is unavoidable. [19]
We therefore save ourselves a superfluous operation, and simplify our analysis,
by the assumption, that the labour of the workman employed by the capitalist
is unskilled average labour.

Footnotes

1. “The earth’s spontaneous productions being in small quantity, and quite independent of man, appear, as it were, to
be furnished by Nature, in the same way as a small sum is given to a young
man, in order to put him in a way of industry, and of making his fortune.”
(James Steuart: “Principles of Polit. Econ.” edit. Dublin, 1770, v. I,
p.116.)

2. “Reason is just as cunning as she
is powerful. Her cunning consists principally in her mediating activity,
which, by causing objects to act and re-act on each other in accordance
with their own nature, in this way, without any direct interference in
the process, carries out reason’s intentions.” (Hegel: “Enzyklopädie,
Erster Theil, Die Logik,” Berlin, 1840, p. 382.)

3. In his otherwise miserable work (“Théorie de l’Econ. Polit.” Paris, 1815), Ganilh enumerates in a striking manner
in opposition to the “Physiocrats” the long series of previous processes
necessary before agriculture properly so called can commence.

4. Turgot in his “Réflexions sur
la Formation et la Distribution des Richesses” (1766) brings well into
prominence the importance of domesticated animals to early civilisation.

5. The least important commodities of
all for the technological comparison of different epochs of production
are articles of luxury, in the strict meaning of the term. However little
our written histories up to this time notice the development of material
production, which is the basis of all social life, and therefore of all
real history, yet prehistoric times have been classified in accordance
with the results, not of so-called historical, but of materialistic investigations.
These periods have been divided, to correspond with the materials from
which their implements and weapons were made, viz., into the stone, the
bronze, and the iron ages.

6. It appears paradoxical to assert,
that uncaught fish, for instance, are a means of production in the fishing
industry. But hitherto no one has discovered the art of catching fish in
waters that contain none.

7. This method of determining, from the
standpoint of the labour-process alone, what is productive labour, is by
no means directly applicable to the case of the capitalist process of production.

8. Storch calls true raw materials “matières,” and accessory material “matériaux.” Cherbuliez describes accessories
as “matières instrumentales.”

9. By a wonderful feat of logical acumen,
Colonel Torrens has discovered, in this stone of the savage the origin
of capital. “In the first stone which he [the savage] flings at the wild
animal he pursues, in the first stick that he seizes to strike down the
fruit which hangs above his reach, we see the appropriation of one article
for the purpose of aiding in the acquisition of another, and thus discover
the origin of capital.” (R. Torrens: “An Essay on the Production of Wealth,”
&c., pp. 70-71.)

10. “Products are appropriated before they are converted into capital; this conversion does not secure them from
such appropriation.” (Cheibuliez: “Richesse ou Pauvreté,” edit.
Paris, 1841, p. 54.) “The Proletarian, by selling his labour for a definite
quantity of the necessaries of life, renounces all claim to a share in
the product. The mode of appropriation of the products remains the same
as before; it is in no way altered by the bargain we have mentioned. The
product belongs exclusively to the capitalist, who supplied the raw material
and the necessaries of life; and this is a rigorous consequence of the
law of appropriation, a law whose fundamental principle was the very opposite,
namely, that every labourer has an exclusive right to the ownership of
what he produces.” (l.c., p. 58.) “When the labourers receive wages for
their labour ... the capitalist is then the owner not of the capital only”
(he means the means of production) “but of the labour also. If what is
paid as wages is included, as it commonly is, in the term capital, it is
absurd to talk of labour separately from capital. The word capital as thus
employed includes labour and capital both.” (James Mill: “Elements of Pol.
Econ.,” &c., Ed. 1821, pp. 70, 71.)

11. As has been stated in a previous
note, the English language has two different expressions for these two
different aspects of labour: in the Simple Labour-process, the process
of producing Use-Values, it is Work; in the process of creation
of Value, it is Labour, taking the term in its strictly economic
sense. — F. E.

12. These figures are quite arbitrary.

13. This is the fundamental proposition
on which is based the doctrine of the Physiocrats as to the unproductiveness
of all labour that is not agriculture: it is irrefutable for the orthodox
economist. “Cette façon d’imputer à une seule chose la valeur
de plusieurs autres” (par exemple au lin la consommation du tisserand),
“d’appliquer, pour ainsi dire, couche sur couche, plusieurs valeurs sur
une seule, fait que celle-ci grossit d’autant.... Le terme d’addition peint
trés bien la maniere dont se forme le prix des ouvrages de main d’oeuvre;
ce prix n’est qu’un total de plusieurs valeurs consommées et additionnées
ensemble; or, additionner n’est pas multiplier.” [“This method of adding to one particular object the value of a number of others,” (for example, adding the living costs of the weaver to the flax), “of as it were heaping up various values in layers on top of one single value, has the result that this value grows to the same extent ... The expression ‘addition’ gives a very clear picture of the way in which the price of a manufactured product is formed; this price is only the sum of a number of values which have been consumed, and it is arrived at by adding them together; however, addition is not the same as multiplication.”] (“Mercier de la Rivière,” l.c., p. 599.)

14. Thus from 1844-47 he withdrew part
of his capital from productive employment, in order to throw it away in
railway speculations; and so also, during the American Civil War, he closed
his factory, and turned his work-people into the streets, in order to gamble
on the Liverpool cotton exchange.

15. “Extol thyself, put on finery and
adorn thyself ... but whoever takes more or better than he gives, that
is usury, and is not service, but wrong done to his neighbour, as when
one steals and robs. All is not service and benefit to a neighbour that
is called service and benefit. For an adulteress and adulterer do one another
great service and pleasure. A horseman does an incendiary a great service,
by helping him to rob on the highway, and pillage land and houses. The
papists do ours a great service, in that they don’t drown, burn, murder
all of them, or let them all rot in prison; but let some live, and only
drive them out, or take from them what they have. The devil himself does
his servants inestimable service.... To sum up, the world is full of great,
excellent, and daily service and benefit.” (Martin Luther: “An die Pfarrherrn
wider den Wucher zu predigen,” Wittenberg, 1540.)

16. In “Zur Kritik der Pol. Oek.,” p. 14, I make the following remark on this point — “It is not difficult to
understand what ‘service’ the category ‘service’ must render to a class
of economists like J. B. Say and F. Bastiat.”

17. This is one of the circumstances
that makes production by slave labour such a costly process. The labourer
here is, to use a striking expression of the ancients, distinguishable
only as instrumentum vocale, from an animal as instrumentum semi-vocale,
and from an implement as instrumentum mutum. But he himself takes care
to let both beast and implement feel that he is none of them, but is a
man. He convinces himself with immense satisfaction, that he is a different
being, by treating the one unmercifully and damaging the other con amore.
Hence the principle, universally applied in this method of production,
only to employ the rudest and heaviest implements and such as are difficult
to damage owing to their sheer clumsiness. In the slave-states bordering
on the Gulf of Mexico, down to the date of the civil war, ploughs constructed
on old Chinese models, which turned up the soil like a hog or a mole, instead
of making furrows, were alone to be found. Conf. J. E. Cairnes. “The Slave
Power,” London, 1862, p. 46 sqq. In his “Sea Board Slave States,” Olmsted
tells us: “I am here shown tools that no man in his senses, with us, would
allow a labourcr, for whom he was paying wages, to be encumbered with;
and the excessive weight and clumsiness of which, I would judge, would
make work at least ten per cent greater than with those ordinarily used
with us. And I am assured that, in the careless and clumsy way they must
be used by the slaves, anything lighter or less rude could not be furnished
them with good economy, and that such tools as we constantly give our labourers
and find our profit in giving them, would not last out a day in a Virginia
cornfield – much lighter and more free from stones though it be than ours.
So, too, when I ask why mules are so universally substituted for horses
on the farm, the first reason given, and confessedly the most conclusive
one, is that horses cannot bear the treatment that they always must get
from negroes; horses are always soon foundered or crippled by them, while
mules will bear cudgelling, or lose a meal or two now and then, and not
be materially injured, and they do not take cold or get sick, if neglected
or overworked. But I do not need to go further than to the window of the
room in which I am writing, to see at almost any time, treatment of cattle
that would ensure the immediate discharge of the driver by almost any farmer
owning them in the North.”

18. The distinction between skilled
and unskilled labour rests in part on pure illusion, or, to say the least,
on distinctions that have long since ceased to be real, and that survive
only by virtue of a traditional convention; in part on the helpless condition
of some groups of the working-class, a condition that prevents them from
exacting equally with the rest the value of their labour-power. Accidental
circumstances here play so great a part, that these two forms of labour
sometimes change places. Where, for instance, the physique of the working-class
has deteriorated, and is, relatively speaking, exhausted, which is the
case in all countries with a well developed capitalist production, the
lower forms of labour, which demand great expenditure of muscle, are in
general considered as skilled, compared with much more delicate forms of
labour; the latter sink down to the level of unskilled labour. Take as
an example the labour of a bricklayer, which in England occupies a much
higher level than that of a damask-weaver. Again, although the labour of
a fustian cutter demands great bodily exertion, and is at the same time
unhealthy, yet it counts only as unskilled labour. And then, we must not
forget, that the so-called skilled labour does not occupy a large space
in the field of national labour. Laing estimates that in England (and Wales)
the livelihood of 11,300,000 people depends on unskilled labour. If from
the total population of 18,000,000 living at the time when he wrote, we
deduct 1,000,000 for the “genteel population,” and 1,500,000 for paupers,
vagrants, criminals, prostitutes, &c., and 4,650,000 who compose the
middle-class, there remain the above mentioned 11,000,000. But in his middle-class
he includes people that live on the interest of small investments, officials,
men of letters, artists, schoolmasters and the like, and in order to swell
the number he also includes in these 4,650,000 the better paid portion
of the factory operatives! The bricklayers, too, figure amongst them. (S.
Laing: “National Distress,” &c., London, 1844). “The great class who
have nothing to give for food but ordinary labour, are the great bulk of
the people.” (James Mill, in art.: “Colony,” Supplement to the Encyclop.
Brit., 1831.)

19. “Where reference is made to labour
as a measure of value, it necessarily implies labour of one particular
kind ... the proportion which the other kinds bear to it being easily ascertained.”
(“Outlines of Pol. Econ.,” Lond., 1832, pp. 22 and 23.)

Karl Marx. Capital Volume One

## Chapter Eight: Constant Capital and Variable Capital

The various factors of the labour-process play different
parts in forming the value of the product.

The labourer adds fresh value to the subject of his labour by
expending upon it a given amount of additional labour, no matter what the
specific character and utility of that labour may be. On the other hand,
the values of the means of production used up in the process are preserved,
and present themselves afresh as constituent parts of the value of the
product; the values of the cotton and the spindle, for instance, re-appear
again in the value of the yarn. The value of the means of production is
therefore preserved, by being transferred to the product. This transfer
takes place during the conversion of those means into a product, or in
other words, during the labour-process. It is brought about by labour;
but how?

The labourer does not perform two operations at once, one in order
to add value to the cotton, the other in order to preserve the value of
the means of production, or, what amounts to the same thing, to transfer
to the yarn, to the product, the value of the cotton on which he works,
and part of the value of the spindle with which he works. But, by the very
act of adding new value, he preserves their former values. Since, however,
the addition of new value to the subject of his labour, and the preservation
of its former value, are two entirely distinct results, produced simultaneously
by the labourer, during one operation, it is plain that this two-fold nature
of the result can be explained only by the two-fold nature of his labour;
at one and the same time, it must in one character create value, and in
another character preserve or transfer value.

Now, in what manner does every labourer add new labour and consequently
new value? Evidently, only by labouring productively in a particular
way; the spinner by spinning, the weaver by weaving, the smith by forging.
But, while thus incorporating labour generally, that is value, it is by
the particular form alone of the labour, by the spinning, the weaving and
the forging respectively, that the means of production, the cotton and
spindle, the yarn and loom, and the iron and anvil become constituent
elements of the product, of a new use-value. [1] Each
use-value disappears, but only to re-appear under a new form in a new use-value.
Now, we saw, when we were considering the process of creating value, that,
if a use-value be effectively consumed in the production of a new use-value,
the quantity of labour expended in the production of the consumed article,
forms a portion of the quantity of labour necessary to produce the new
use-value; this portion is therefore labour transferred from the means
of production to the new product. Hence, the labourer preserves the values
of the consumed means of production, or transfers them as portions of its
value to the product, not by virtue of his additional labour, abstractedly
considered, but by virtue of the particular useful character of that labour,
by virtue of its special productive form. In so far then as labour is such
specific productive activity, in so far as it is spinning, weaving, or
forging, it raises, by mere contact, the means of production from the
dead, makes them living factors of the labour-process, and combines with
them to form the new products.

If the special productive labour of the workman were not spinning,
he could not convert the cotton into yarn, and therefore could not transfer
the values of the cotton and spindle to the yarn. Suppose the same workman
were to change his occupation to that of a joiner, he would still by a
day’s labour add value to the material he works upon. Consequently, we
see, first, that the addition of new value takes place not by virtue of
his labour being spinning in particular, or joinering in particular, but
because it is labour in the abstract, a portion of the total labour of
society; and we see next, that the value added is of a given definite amount,
not because his labour has a special utility, but because it is exerted
for a definite time. On the one hand, then, it is by virtue of its general
character, as being expenditure of human labour-power in the abstract,
that spinning adds new value to the values of the cotton and the spindle;
and on the other hand, it is by virtue of its special character, as being
a concrete, useful process, that the same labour of spinning both transfers
the values of the means of production to the product, and preserves them
in the product. Hence at one and the same time there is produced a two-fold
result.

By the simple addition of a certain quantity of labour,
new value is added, and by the quality of this added labour, the original
values of the means of production are preserved in the product. This two-fold
effect, resulting from the two-fold character of labour, may be traced
in various phenomena.

Let us assume, that some invention enables the spinner to spin
as much cotton in 6 hours as he was able to spin before in 36 hours. His
labour is now six times as effective as it was, for the purposes of useful
production. The product of 6 hours’ work has increased six-fold, from 6
lbs. to 36 lbs. But now the 36 lbs. of cotton absorb only the same amount
of labour as formerly did the 6 lbs. One-sixth as much new labour is absorbed
by each pound of cotton, and consequently, the value added by the labour
to each pound is only one-sixth of what it formerly was. On the other hand,
in the product, in the 36 lbs. of yarn, the value transferred from the
cotton is six times as great as before. By the 6 hours’ spinning, the value
of the raw material preserved and transferred to the product is six times
as great as before, although the new value added by the labour of the spinner
to each pound of the very same raw material is one-sixth what it was formerly.
This shows that the two properties of labour, by virtue of which it is
enabled in one case to preserve value, and in the other to create value,
are essentially different. On the one hand, the longer the time necessary
to spin a given weight of cotton into yarn, the greater is the new value
added to the material; on the other hand, the greater the weight of the
cotton spun in a given time, the greater is the value preserved, by being
transferred from it to the product.

Let us now assume, that the productiveness of the spinner’s labour,
instead of varying, remains constant, that he therefore requires the same
time as he formerly did, to convert one pound of cotton into yarn, but
that the exchange-value of the cotton varies, either by rising to six times
its former value or falling to one-sixth of that value. In both these cases,
the spinner puts the same quantity of labour into a pound of cotton, and
therefore adds as much value, as he did before the change in the value:
he also produces a given weight of yarn in the same time as he did before.
Nevertheless, the value that he transfers from the cotton to the yarn is
either one-sixth of what it was before the variation, or, as the case may
be, six times as much as before. The same result occurs when the value
of the instruments of labour rises or falls, while their useful efficacy
in the process remains unaltered.

Again, if the technical conditions of the spinning process remain
unchanged, and no change of value takes place in the means of production,
the spinner continues to consume in equal working-times equal quantities
of raw material, and equal quantities of machinery of unvarying value.
The value that he preserves in the product is directly proportional
to the new value that he adds to the product. In two weeks he incorporates
twice as much labour, and therefore twice as much value, as in one week,
and during the same time he consumes twice as much material, and wears
out twice as much machinery, of double the value in each case: he therefore
preserves, in the product of two weeks, twice as much value as in the product
of one week. So long as the conditions of production remain the same, the
more value the labourer adds by fresh labour, the more value he transfers
and preserves; but he does so merely because this addition of new value
takes place under conditions that have not varied and are independent of
his own labour. Of course, it may be said in one sense, that the labourer
preserves old value always in proportion to the quantity of new value that
he adds. Whether the value of cotton rise from one shilling to two shillings,
or fall to sixpence, the workman invariably preserves in the product of
one hour only one half as much value as he preserves in two hours. In like
manner, if the productiveness of his own labour varies by rising or falling,
he will in one hour spin either more or less cotton, as the case may be,
than he did before, and will consequently preserve in the product of one
hour, more or less value of cotton; but, all the same, he will preserve
by two hours’ labour twice as much value as he will by one.

Value exists only in articles of utility, in objects: we leave
out of consideration its purely symbolical representation by tokens. (Man
himself, viewed as the impersonation of labour-power, is a natural object,
a thing, although a living conscious thing, and labour is the manifestation
of this power residing in him.) If therefore an article loses its utility,
it also loses its value. The reason why means of production do not lose
their value, at the same time that they lose their use-value, is this:
they lose in the labour-process the original form of their use-value, only
to assume in the product the form of a new use-value. But, however important
it may be to value, that it should have some object of utility to embody
itself in, yet it is a matter of complete indifference what particular
object serves this purpose; this we saw when treating of the metamorphosis
of commodities. Hence it follows that in the labour-process the means of
production transfer their value to the product only so far as along with
their use-value they lose also their exchange-value. They give up to the
product that value alone which they themselves lose as means of production.
But in this respect the material factors of the labour-process do not all
behave alike.

The coal burnt under the boiler vanishes without leaving a trace;
so, too, the tallow with which the axles of wheels are greased. Dye stuffs
and other auxiliary substances also vanish but re-appear as properties
of the product. Raw material forms the substance of the product, but only
after it has changed its form. Hence raw material and auxiliary substances
lose the characteristic form with which they are clothed on entering the
labour-process. It is otherwise with the instruments of labour. Tools,
machines, workshops, and vessels, are of use in the labour-process, only
so long as they retain their original shape, and are ready each morning
to renew the process with their shape unchanged. And just as during their
lifetime, that is to say, during the continued labour-process in which
they serve, they retain their shape independent of the product, so, too,
they do after their death. The corpses of machines, tools, workshops, &c.,
are always separate and distinct from the product they helped to turn out.
If we now consider the case of any instrument of labour during the whole
period of its service, from the day of its entry into the workshop, till
the day of its banishment into the lumber room, we find that during this
period its use-value has been completely consumed, and therefore its exchange-value
completely transferred to the product. For instance, if a spinning machine
lasts for 10 years, it is plain that during that working period its total
value is gradually transferred to the product of the 10 years. The lifetime
of an instrument of labour, therefore, is spent in the repetition of a
greater or less number of similar operations. Its life may be compared
with that of a human being. Every day brings a man 24 hours nearer to his
grave: but how many days he has still to travel on that road, no man can
tell accurately by merely looking at him. This difficulty, however, does
not prevent life insurance offices from drawing, by means of the theory
of averages, very accurate, and at the same time very profitable conclusions.
So it is with the instruments of labour. It is known by experience how
long on the average a machine of a particular kind will last. Suppose its
use-value in the labour-process to last only six days. Then, on the average,
it loses each day one-sixth of its use-value, and therefore parts with
one-sixth of its value to the daily product. The wear and tear of all instruments,
their daily loss of use-value, and the corresponding quantity of value
they part with to the product, are accordingly calculated upon this basis.

It is thus strikingly clear, that means of production never transfer
more value to the product than they themselves lose during the labour-process
by the destruction of their own use-value. If such an instrument has no
value to lose, if, in other words, it is not the product of human labour,
it transfers no value to the product. It helps to create use-value without
contributing to the formation of exchange-value. In this class are included
all means of production supplied by Nature without human assistance, such
as land, wind, water, metals in situ, and timber in virgin forests.

Yet another interesting phenomenon here presents itself. Suppose
a machine to be worth £1,000, and to wear out in 1,000 days. Then
one thousandth part of the value of the machine is daily transferred to
the day’s product. At the same time, though with diminishing
vitality, the machine as a whole continues to take part in the labour-process.
Thus it appears, that one factor of the labour-process, a means of production,
continually enters as a whole into that process, while it enters into the
process of the formation of value by fractions only. The difference between
the two processes is here reflected in their material factors, by the same
instrument of production taking part as a whole in the labour-process,
while at the same time as an element in the formation of value, it enters
only by fractions. [2]

On the other hand, a means of production may take part as a whole
in the formation of value, while into the labour-process it enters only
bit by bit. Suppose that in spinning cotton, the waste for every 115 lbs.
used amounts to 15 lbs., which is converted, not into yarn, but into “devil’s
dust.” Now, although this 15 lbs. of cotton never becomes a constituent
element of the yarn, yet assuming this amount of waste to be normal and
inevitable under average conditions of spinning, its value is just as surely
transferred to the value of the yarn, as is the value of the 100 lbs. that
form the substance of the yarn. The use-value of 15 lbs. of cotton must
vanish into dust, before 100 lbs. of yarn can be made. The destruction
of this cotton is therefore a necessary condition in the production of
the yarn. And because it is a necessary condition, and for no other reason,
the value of that cotton is transferred to the product. The same holds
good for every kind of refuse resulting from a labour-process, so far at
least as such refuse cannot be further employed as a means in the production
of new and independent use-values. Such an employment of refuse
may be seen in the large machine works at Manchester, where mountains of
iron turnings are carted away to the foundry in the evening, in order the
next morning to re-appear in the workshops as solid masses of iron.

We have seen that the means of production transfer value to the
new product, so far only as during the labour-process they lose value in
the shape of their old use-value. The maximum loss of value that they can
suffer in the process, is plainly limited by the amount of the original
value with which they came into the process, or in other words, by the
labour-time necessary for their production. Therefore, the means of production
can never add more value to the product than they themselves possess independently
of the process in which they assist. However useful a given kind of raw
material, or a machine, or other means of production may be, though it
may cost £150, or, say, 500 days’ labour, yet it cannot, under any
circumstances, add to the value of the product more than £150. Its
value is determined not by the labour-process into which it enters as a
means of production, but by that out of which it has issued as a product.
In the labour-process it only serves as a mere use-value, a thing with
useful properties, and could not, therefore, transfer any value to the
product, unless it possessed such value previously. [3]

While productive labour is changing the means of production into
constituent elements of a new product, their value undergoes a metempsychosis.
It deserts the consumed body, to occupy the newly created one. But this
transmigration takes place, as it were, behind the back of the labourer.
He is unable to add new labour, to create new value, without
at the same time preserving old values, and this, because the labour he
adds must be of a specific useful kind; and he cannot do work of a useful
kind, without employing products as the means of production of a new product,
and thereby transferring their value to the new product. The property therefore
which labour-power in action, living labour, possesses of preserving value,
at the same time that it adds it, is a gift of Nature which costs the labourer
nothing, but which is very advantageous to the capitalist inasmuch as it
preserves the existing value of his capital. [4] So long
as trade is good, the capitalist is too much absorbed in money-grubbing
to take notice of this gratuitous gift of labour. A violent interruption
of the labour-process by a crisis, makes him sensitively aware of it. [5]

As regards the means of production, what is really consumed is
their use-value, and the consumption of this use-value by labour results
in the product. There is no consumption of their value, [6]
and it would therefore be inaccurate to say that it is reproduced. It is
rather preserved; not by reason of any operation it undergoes itself in
the process; but because the article in which it originally exists, vanishes,
it is true, but vanishes into some other article. Hence, in the value of
the product, there is a reappearance of the value of the means of production,
but there is, strictly speaking, no reproduction of that value. That which
is produced is a new use-value in which the old exchange-value reappears.

It is otherwise with the subjective factor of the labour-process,
with labour-power in action. While the labourer, by virtue of his labour
being of a specialised kind that has a special object, preserves and transfers
to the product the value of the means of production, he at the same time,
by the mere act of working, creates each instant an additional or new value.
Suppose the process of production to be stopped just when the workman has
produced an equivalent for the value of his own labour-power, when, for
example, by six hours’ labour, he has added a value of three shillings.
This value is the surplus, of the total value of the product, over the
portion of its value that is due to the means of production. It is the
only original bit of value formed during this process, the only portion
of the value of the product created by this process. Of course, we do not
forget that this new value only replaces the money advanced by the capitalist
in the purchase of the labour-power, and spent by the labourer on the necessaries
of life. With regard to the money spent, the new value is merely a reproduction;
but, nevertheless, it is an actual, and not, as in the case of the value
of the means of production, only an apparent, reproduction. The substitution
of one value for another, is here effected by the creation of new value.

We know, however, from what has gone before, that the labour-process
may continue beyond the time necessary to reproduce and incorporate in
the product a mere equivalent for the value of the labour-power. Instead
of the six hours that are sufficient for the latter purpose, the process
may continue for twelve hours. The action of labour-power, therefore, not
only reproduces its own value, but produces value over and above it. This
surplus-value is the difference between the value of the product and the
value of the elements consumed in the formation of that product, in other
words, of the means of production and the labour-power.

By our explanation of the different parts played by the various
factors of the labour-process in the formation of the product’s value,
we have, in fact, disclosed the characters of the different
functions allotted to the different elements of capital in the process
of expanding its own value. The surplus of the total value of the product,
over the sum of the values of its constituent factors, is the surplus of
the expanded capital over the capital originally advanced. The means of
production on the one hand, labour-power on the other, are merely the different
modes of existence which the value of the original capital assumed when
from being money it was transformed into the various factors of the labour-process.
That part of capital then, which is represented by the means of production,
by the raw material, auxiliary material and the instruments of labour does
not, in the process of production, undergo any quantitative alteration
of value. I therefore call it the constant part of capital, or, more shortly,
constant capital.

On the other hand, that part of capital, represented by labour-power,
does, in the process of production, undergo an alteration of value. It
both reproduces the equivalent of its own value, and also produces an excess,
a surplus-value, which may itself vary, may be more or less according to
circumstances. This part of capital is continually being transformed from
a constant into a variable magnitude. I therefore call it the variable
part of capital, or, shortly, variable capital. The same elements
of capital which, from the point of view of the labour-process, present
themselves respectively as the objective and subjective factors, as means
of production and labour-power, present themselves, from the point of view
of the process of creating surplus-value, as constant and variable capital.

The definition of constant capital given above by no means excludes
the possibility of a change of value in its elements. Suppose the price
of cotton to be one day sixpence a pound, and the next day, in consequence
of a failure of the cotton crop, a shilling a pound. Each pound of the
cotton bought at sixpence, and worked up after the rise in value, transfers
to the product a value of one shilling; and the cotton already spun before
the rise, and perhaps circulating in the market as yarn, likewise transfers
to the product twice its original value. It is plain, however, that these
changes of value are independent of the increment or surplus-value added
to the value of the cotton by the spinning itself. If the old cotton had
never been spun, it could, after the rise, be resold at a shilling a pound
instead of at sixpence. Further, the fewer the processes the cotton has
gone through, the more certain is this result. We therefore find that speculators
make it a rule when such sudden changes in value occur, to speculate in
that material on which the least possible quantity of labour has been spent:
to speculate, therefore, in yarn rather than in cloth, in cotton itself,
rather than in yarn. The change of value in the case we have been considering,
originates, not in the process in which the cotton plays the
part of a means of production, and in which it therefore functions as constant
capital, but in the process in which the cotton itself is produced. The
value of a commodity, it is true, is determined by the quantity of labour
contained in it, but this quantity is itself limited by social conditions.
If the time socially necessary for the production of any commodity alters
— and a given weight of cotton represents, after a bad harvest, more labour
than after a good one — all previously existing commodities of the same
class are affected, because they are, as it were, only individuals of the
species, [8] and their value at any given time is measured
by the labour socially necessary, i.e., by the labour necessary
for their production under the then existing social conditions.

As the value of the raw material may change, so, too, may that
of the instruments of labour, of the machinery, &c., employed in the
process; and consequently that portion of the value of the product transferred
to it from them, may also change. If in consequence of a new invention,
machinery of a particular kind can be produced by a diminished expenditure
of labour, the old machinery becomes depreciated more or less, and consequently
transfers so much less value to the product. But here again, the change
in value originates outside the process in which the machine is acting
as a means of production. Once engaged in this process, the machine cannot
transfer more value than it possesses apart from the process.

Just as a change in the value of the means of production, even
after they have commenced to take a part in the labour-process, does not
alter their character as constant capital, so, too, a change in the proportion
of constant to variable capital does not affect the respective functions
of these two kinds of capital. The technical conditions of the labour-process
may be revolutionised to such an extent, that where formerly ten men using
ten implements of small value worked up a relatively small quantity of
raw material, one man may now, with the aid of one expensive machine, work
up one hundred times as much raw material. In the latter case we have an
enormous increase in the constant capital, that is represented by the total
value of the means of production used, and at the same time a great reduction
in the variable capital, invested in labour-power. Such a revolution, however,
alters only the quantitative relation between the constant and the variable
capital, or the proportions in which the total capital is split up into
its constant and variable constituents; it has not in the least degree
affected the essential difference between the two.

Footnotes

1. “Labour gives a new creation for one extinguished.” (“An Essay on the Polit. Econ. of Nations,” London, 1821, p. 13.)

2. The subject of repairs of the implements
of labour does not concern us here. A machine that is undergoing repair,
no longer plays the part of an instrument, but that of a subject of labour.
Work is no longer done with it, but upon it. It is quite permissible for
our purpose to assume, that the labour expended on the repairs of instruments
is included in the labour necessary for their original production. But
in the text we deal with that wear and tear, which no doctor can cure,
and which little by little brings about death, with “that kind of wear
which cannot be repaired from time to time, and which, in the case of a
knife, would ultimately reduce it to a state in which the cutler would
say of it, it is not worth a new blade.” We have shewn in the text, that
a machine takes part in every labour-process as an integral machine, but
that into the simultaneous process of creating value it enters only bit
by bit. How great then is the confusion of ideas exhibited in the following
extract! “Mr. Ricardo says a portion of the labour of the engineer in making
[stocking] machines” is contained for example in the value of a pair of
stockings. “Yet the total labour, that produced each single pair of stockings
... includes the whole labour of the engineer, not a portion; for one machine
makes many pairs, and none of those pairs could have been done without
any part of the machine.” “Obs. on Certain Verbal Disputes in Pol. Econ.,
Particularly Relating to Value,” p. 54. The author, an uncommonly self-satisfied
wiseacre, is right in his confusion and therefore in his contention, to
this extent only, that neither Ricardo nor any other economist, before
or since him, has accurately distinguished the two aspects of labour, and
still less, therefore, the part played by it under each of these aspects
in the formation of value.

3. From this we may judge of the absurdity
of J. B. Say, who pretends to account for surplus-value (Interest, Profit,
Rent), by the “services productifs” which the means of production, soil,
instruments, and raw material, render in the labour-process by means of
their use-values. Mr. Wm. Roscher who seldom loses an occasion of registering,
in black and white, ingenious apologetic fancies, records the following
specimen: - “J. B. Say (Traité, t. 1, ch. 4) very truly remarks:
the value produced by an oil mill, after deduction of all costs, is something
new, something quite different from the labour by which the oil mill itself
was erected.” (l.c., p. 82, note.) Very true, Mr. Professor! the oil produced
by the oil mill is indeed something very different from the labour expended
in constructing the mill! By value, Mr. Roscher understands such stuff
as “oil,” because oil has value, notwithstanding that “Nature” produces
petroleum, though relatively “in small quantities,” a fact to which he
seems to refer in his further observation: “It (Nature) produces scarcely
any exchange-value.” Mr. Roscher’s “Nature” and the exchange-value it produces
are rather like the foolish virgin who admitted indeed that she had had
a child, but “it was such a little one.” This “savant sérieux” in
continuation remarks: “Ricardo’s school is in the habit of including capital
as accumulated labour under the head of labour. This is unskilful work,
because, indeed, the owner of capital, after all, does something more than
the merely creating and preserving of the same: namely, the abstention
from the enjoyment of it, for which he demands, e.g., interest.”
(l.c.) How very “skilful” is this “anatomico-physiological method” of
Political Economy, which, “indeed,” converts a mere desire “after all”
into a source of value.

4. “Of all the instruments of the farmers’
trade, the labour of man ... is that on which he is most to rely for the
repayment of his capital. The other two ... the working stock of the cattle
and the ... carts, ploughs, spades, and so forth, without a given portion
of the first, are nothing at all.” (Edmund Burke: “Thoughts and Details
on Scarcity, originally presented to the Right Hon. W. Pitt, in the month
of November 1795,” Edit. London, 1800, p. 10.)

5. In The Times of 26th November,
1862, a manufacturer, whose mill employed 800 hands, and consumed, on the
average, 150 bales of East Indian, or 130 bales of American cotton, complains,
in doleful manner, of the standing expenses of his factory when not working.
He estimates them at £6,000 a year. Among them are a number of items
that do not concern us here, such as rent, rates, and taxes, insurance,
salaries of the manager, book-keeper, engineer, and others. Then he reckons
£150 for coal used to heat the mill occasionally, and run the engine
now and then. Besides this, he includes the wages of the people employed
at odd times to keep the machinery in working order. Lastly, he puts down
£1,200 for depreciation of machinery, because “the weather and the
natural principle of decay do not suspend their operations because the
steam-engine ceases to revolve.” He says, emphatically, he does not estimate
his depreciation at more than the small sum of £1,200, because his
machinery is already nearly worn out.

6. “Productive consumption ... where
the consumption of a commodity is a part of the process of production.
... In these instances there is no consumption of value.” (S. P. Newman,
l.c., p. 296.)

7. In an American compendium that has
gone through, perhaps, 20 editions, this passage occurs: “It matters not
in what form capital re-appears;” then after a lengthy enumeration of all
the possible ingredients of production whose value re-appears in the product,
the passage concludes thus: “The various kinds of food, clothing, and shelter,
necessary for the existence and comfort of the human being, are also changed.
They are consumed from time to time, and their value re-appears in that
new vigour imparted to his body and mind, forming fresh capital, to be
employed again in the work of production.” (F. Wayland, l.c., pp. 31,
32.) Without noticing any other oddities, it suffices to observe, that
what re-appears in the fresh vigour, is not the bread’s price, but its
bloodforming substances. What, on the other hand, re-appears in the value
of that vigour, is not the means of subsistence, but their value. The same
necessaries of life, at half the price, would form just as much muscle
and bone, just as much vigour, but not vigour of the same value. This confusion
of “value” and “vigour” coupled with our author’s pharisaical indefiniteness, mark an attempt, futile for all that, to thrash out an explanation of surplus-value
from a mere re-appearance of pre-existing values.

8. “Toutes les productions d’un même genre ne forment proprement qu’une masse, dont le prix se détermine
en général et sans égard aux circonstances particulières.”
(Le Trosne, l.c., p. 893.) [“Properly speaking, all products of the same kind form a single mass, and their price is determined in general and without regard to particular circumstances.”]

Karl Marx. Capital Volume One

## Chapter Nine: The Rate of Surplus-Value

Contents

Section 1 - The Degree of Exploitation of Labour-Power

Section 2 - The Representation of the Components of the Value of the Product by Corresponding Proportional Parts of the Product itself

Section 3 - Senior’s “Last Hour”

Section 4 - Surplus-Produce

### SECTION 1.

THE DEGREE OF EXPLOITATION OF LABOUR-POWER

The surplus-value generated in the process of production
by C, the capital advanced, or in other words, the self-expansion of the
value of the capital C, presents itself for our consideration, in the first
place, as a surplus, as the amount by which the value of the product exceeds
the value of its constituent elements.

The capital C is made up of two components, one, the sum of money
c laid out upon the means of production, and the other, the sum of money
v expended upon the labour-power; c represents the portion that has become
constant capital, and v the portion that has become variable capital. At
first then, C = c + v: for example, if £500 is the capital advanced,
its components may be such that the £500 = £410 const. + £90
var. When the process of production is finished, we get a commodity whose
value = (c + v) + s, where s is the surplus-value; or taking our
former figures, the value of this commodity may be (£410 const. +
£90 var.) + £90 surpl. The original capital has now changed
from C to C', from £500 to £590. The difference is s
or a surplus-value of £90. Since the value of the constituent elements
of the product is equal to the value of the advanced capital, it is mere
tautology to say, that the excess of the value of the product over the
value of its constituent elements, is equal to the expansion of the capital
advanced or to the surplus-value produced.

Nevertheless, we must examine this tautology a little more closely.
The two things compared are, the value of the product and the value of
its constituents consumed in the process of production. Now we have seen
how that portion of the constant capital which consists of the instruments
of labour, transfers to the production only a fraction of its value, while
the remainder of that value continues to reside in those instruments.
Since this remainder plays no part in the formation of value, we may at
present leave it on one side. To introduce it into the calculation would
make no difference. For instance, taking our former example, c = £410:
suppose this sum to consist of £312 value of raw material, £44
value of auxiliary material, and £54 value of the machinery worn
away in the process; and suppose that the total value of the machinery
employed is £1,054. Out of this latter sum, then, we reckon as advanced
for the purpose of turning out the product, the sum of £54 alone,
which the machinery loses by wear and tear in the process; for this is
all it parts with to the product. Now if we also reckon the remaining £1,000,
which still continues in the machinery, as transferred to the product,
we ought also to reckon it as part of the value advanced, and thus make
it appear on both sides of our calculation. [1] We should, in this way, get £1,500 on one side and £1,590 on the other.
The difference of these two sums, or the surplus-value, would still be
£90. Throughout this Book therefore, by constant capital advanced
for the production of value, we always mean, unless the context is repugnant
thereto, the value of the means of production actually consumed in the
process, and that value alone.

This being so, let us return to the formula C = c + v, which we
saw was transformed into C' = (c + v) + s, C becoming C'. We know that
the value of the constant capital is transferred to, and merely re-appears
in the product. The new value actually created in the process, the value
produced, or value-product, is therefore not the same as the value of the
product; it is not, as it would at first sight appear (c + v) + s or £410
const. + £90 var. + £90 surpl.; but v + s or £90 var.
+ £90 surpl., not £590 but £180. If c = 0, or in other
words, if there were branches of industry in which the capitalist could
dispense with all means of production made by previous labour, whether
they be raw material, auxiliary material, or instruments of labour, employing
only labour-power and materials supplied by Nature, in that case, there
would be no constant capital to transfer to the product. This component
of the value of the product, i.e., the £410 in our example,
would be eliminated, but the sum of £180, the amount of new value
created, or the value produced, which contains £90 of surplus-value,
would remain just as great as if c represented the highest value imaginable.
We should have C = (0 + v) = v or C' the expanded capital = v + s and therefore C'
- C = s as before. On the other hand, if s = 0, or in other words, if the
labour-power, whose value is advanced in the form of variable capital,
were to produce only its equivalent, we should have C = c + v or C' the
value of the product = (c + v) + 0 or C = C'. The capital advanced would,
in this case, not have expanded its value.

From what has gone before, we know that surplus-value is purely
the result of a variation in the value of v, of that portion of the capital
which is transformed into labour-power; consequently, v + s = v + v', or
v plus an increment of v. But the fact that it is v alone that varies,
and the conditions of that variation, are obscured by the circumstance
that in consequence of the increase in the variable component of the capital,
there is also an increase in the sum total of the advanced capital. It
was originally £500 and becomes £590. Therefore in order that
our investigation may lead to accurate results, we must make abstraction
from that portion of the value of the product, in which constant capital
alone appears, and consequently must equate the constant capital to zero
or make c = 0. This is merely an application of a mathematical rule, employed
whenever we operate with constant and variable magnitudes, related to each
other by the symbols of addition and subtraction only.

A further difficulty is caused by the original form of the variable
capital. In our example, C' = £410 const. + £90 var. + £90
surpl.; but £90 is a given and therefore a constant quantity; hence
it appears absurd to treat it as variable. But in fact, the term £90
var. is here merely a symbol to show that this value undergoes a process.
The portion of the capital invested in the purchase of labour-power is
a definite quantity of materialised labour, a constant value like the value
of the labour-power purchased. But in the process of production the place
of the £90 is taken by the labour-power in action, dead labour is
replaced by living labour, something stagnant by something flowing, a constant
by a variable. The result is the reproduction of v plus an increment of
v. From the point of view then of capitalist production, the whole process
appears as the spontaneous variation of the originally constant value,
which is transformed into labour-power. Both the process and its result,
appear to be owing to this value. If, therefore, such expressions as “£90
variable capital,” or “so much self-expanding value,” appear contradictory,
this is only because they bring to the surface a contradiction immanent
in capitalist production.

At first sight it appears a strange proceeding, to equate the
constant capital to zero. Yet it is what we do every day. If, for example,
we wish to calculate the amount of England’s profits from the cotton industry,
we first of all deduct the sums paid for cotton to the United States, India,
Egypt and other countries; in other words, the value of the capital that
merely re-appears in the value of the product, is put = 0.

Of course the ratio of surplus-value not only to that portion
of the capital from which it immediately springs, and whose change of value
it represents, but also to the sum total of the capital advanced is economically
of very great importance. We shall, therefore, in the third book, treat
of this ratio exhaustively. In order to enable one portion of a capital
to expand its value by being converted into labour-power, it is necessary
that another portion be converted into means of production. In order that
variable capital may perform its function, constant capital must be advanced
in proper proportion, a proportion given by the special technical conditions
of each labour-process. The circumstance, however, that retorts and other
vessels, are necessary to a chemical process, does not compel the chemist
to notice them in the result of his analysis. If we look at the means of
production, in their relation to the creation of value, and to the variation
in the quantity of value, apart from anything else, they appear simply
as the material in which labour-power, the value-creator, incorporates
itself. Neither the nature, nor the value of this material is of any importance.
The only requisite is that there be a sufficient supply to absorb the labour
expended in the process of production. That supply once given, the material
may rise or fall in value, or even be, as land and the sea, without any
value in itself; but this will have no influence on the creation of value
or on the variation in the quantity of value. [2]

In the first place then we equate the constant capital to zero.
The capital advanced is consequently reduced from c + v to v, and instead
of the value of the product (c + v) + s we have now the value produced
(v + s). Given the new value produced = £180, which sum consequently
represents the whole labour expended during the process, then subtracting
from it £90 the value of the variable capital, we have remaining
£90, the amount of the surplus-value. This sum of £90 or s
expresses the absolute quantity of surplus-value produced. The relative
quantity produced, or the increase per cent of the variable capital, is
determined, it is plain, by the ratio of the surplus-value to the variable
capital, or is expressed by s/v. In our example this ratio is 90/90, which
gives an increase of 100%. This relative increase in the value of the variable
capital, or the relative magnitude of the surplus-value, I call, “The rate
of surplus-value.” [3]

We have seen that the labourer, during one portion of the
labour-process, produces only the value of his labour-power, that is, the
value of his means of subsistence. Now since his work forms part of a system,
based on the social division of labour, he does not directly produce the
actual necessaries which he himself consumes; he produces instead a particular
commodity, yarn for example, whose value is equal to the value of those
necessaries or of the money with which they can be bought. The portion
of his day’s labour devoted to this purpose, will be greater or less, in
proportion to the value of the necessaries that he daily requires on an
average, or, what amounts to the same thing, in proportion to the labour-time
required on an average to produce them. If the value of those necessaries
represent on an average the expenditure of six hours’ labour, the workman
must on an average work for six hours to produce that value. If instead
of working for the capitalist, he worked independently on his own account,
he would, other things being equal, still be obliged to labour for the
same number of hours, in order to produce the value of his labour-power,
and thereby to gain the means of subsistence necessary for his conservation
or continued reproduction. But as we have seen, during that portion of
his day’s labour in which he produces the value of his labour-power, say
three shillings, he produces only an equivalent for the value of his labour-power
already advanced [4] by the capitalist; the new value
created only replaces the variable capital advanced. It is owing to this
fact, that the production of the new value of three shillings takes the
semblance of a mere reproduction. That portion of the working-day, then,
during which this reproduction takes place, I call “necessary” labour time,
and the labour expended during that time I call “necessary” labour.
[5] Necessary, as regards the labourer, because independent of the particular social form of his labour; necessary, as regards capital, and the world of capitalists, because on the continued existence
of the labourer depends their existence also.

During the second period of the labour-process, that in
which his labour is no longer necessary labour, the workman, it is true,
labours, expends labour-power; but his labour, being no longer necessary
labour, he creates no value for himself. He creates surplus-value which,
for the capitalist, has all the charms of a creation out of nothing. This
portion of the working-day, I name surplus labour-time, and to the labour
expended during that time, I give the name of surplus-labour. It is every
bit as important, for a correct understanding of surplus-value, to conceive
it as a mere congelation of surplus labour-time, as nothing but materialised
surplus-labour, as it is, for a proper comprehension of value, to conceive
it as a mere congelation of so many hours of labour, as nothing but materialised
labour. The essential difference between the various economic forms of
society, between, for instance, a society based on slave-labour, and one
based on wage-labour, lies only in the mode in which this surplus-labour
is in each case extracted from the actual producer, the labourer. [6]

Since, on the one hand, the values of the variable capital and
of the labour-power purchased by that capital are equal, and the value
of this labour-power determines the necessary portion of the working-day;
and since, on the other hand, the surplus-value is determined by the surplus
portion of the working-day, it follows that surplus-value bears the same
ratio to variable capital, that surplus-labour does to necessary labour,
or in other words, the rate of surplus-value, s/v = (surplus labour)/(necessary labour). Both ratios, s/v and (surplus labour)/(necessary labour), express the same
thing in different ways; in the one case by reference to materialised,
incorporated labour, in the other by reference to living, fluent labour.

The rate of surplus-value is therefore an exact expression for
the degree of exploitation of labour-power by capital, or of the labourer
by the capitalist. [7]

We assumed in our example, that the value of the product =
£410 const. + £90 var. + £90 surpl., and that the capital
advanced = £500. Since the surplus-value = £90, and the advanced
capital = £500, we should, according to the usual way of reckoning,
get as the rate of surplus-value (generally confounded with rate of profits)
18%, a rate so low as possibly to cause a pleasant surprise to Mr. Carey
and other harmonisers. But in truth, the rate of surplus-value is not equal
to s/C or s/(c+v), but to s/v: thus it is not 90/500 but 90/90 or 100%, which is more
than five times the apparent degree of exploitation. Although, in the case
we have supposed, we are ignorant of the actual length of the working-day,
and of the duration in days or weeks of the labour-process, as also of
the number of labourers employed, yet the rate of surplus-value s/v accurately
discloses to us, by means of its equivalent expression, surplus-labour/necessary
labour the relation between the two parts of the working-day. This relation
is here one of equality, the rate being 100%. Hence, it is plain, the labourer,
in our example, works one half of the day for himself, the other half for
the capitalist.

The method of calculating the rate of surplus-value is therefore,
shortly, as follows. We take the total value of the product and put the
constant capital which merely re-appears in it, equal to zero. What remains,
is the only value that has, in the process of producing the commodity,
been actually created. If the amount of surplus-value be given, we have
only to deduct it from this remainder, to find the variable capital. And
vice versâ, if the latter be given, and we require to find
the surplus-value. If both be given, we have only to perform the concluding
operation, viz., to calculate s/v, the ratio of the surplus-value to the
variable capital.

Though the method is so simple, yet it may not be amiss, by means
of a few examples, to exercise the reader in the application of the novel
principles underlying it.

First we will take the case of a spinning mill containing 10,000
mule spindles, spinning No. 32 yarn from American cotton, and producing
1 lb. of yarn weekly per spindle. We assume the waste to be 6%: under these
circumstances 10,600 lbs. of cotton are consumed weekly, of which 600 lbs.
go to waste. The price of the cotton in April, 1871, was 7¾d. per lb.;
the raw material therefore costs in round numbers £342. The
10,000 spindles, including preparation-machinery, and motive power, cost,
we will assume, £1 per spindle, amounting to a total of £10,000.
The wear and tear we put at 10%, or £1,000 yearly = £20 weekly.
The rent of the building we suppose to be £300 a year, or £6
a week. Coal consumed (for 100 horse-power indicated, at 4 lbs. of coal
per horse-power per hour during 60 hours, and inclusive of that consumed
in heating the mill), 11 tons a week at 8s. 6d. a ton, amounts to about
£4½ a week: gas, £1 a week, oil, &c., £4½ a
week. Total cost of the above auxiliary materials, £10 weekly. Therefore
the constant portion of the value of the week’s product is £378.
Wages amount to £52 a week. The price of the yarn is 12¼d. per.
lb. which gives for the value of 10,000 lbs. the sum of £510. The
surplus-value is therefore in this case £510 - £430 = £80.
We put the constant part of the value of the product = 0, as it plays no
part in the creation of value. There remains £132 as the weekly value
created, which = £52 var. + £80 surpl. The rate of surplus-value
is therefore 80/52 = 153 11/13%. In a working-day of 10 hours with average
labour the result is: necessary labour = 3 31/33 hours, and surplus-labour
= 6 2/33. [8]

One more example. Jacob gives the following calculation for the
year 1815. Owing to the previous adjustment of several items it is very
imperfect; nevertheless for our purpose it is sufficient. In it he assumes
the price of wheat to be 8s. a quarter, and the average yield per acre
to be 22 bushels.

VALUE PRODUCED PER ACRE

Seed
£1 9s. 0d.
Tithes, Rates,

and taxes,
£1 1s. 0d.

Manure
£2 10s. 0d.
Rent
£1 8s. 0d.

Wages
£3 10s. 0d.
Farmer’s Profit

and Interest

£1 2s. 0d.

TOTAL
£7 9s. 0d.
TOTAL
£3 11s 0d.

Assuming that the price of the product is the same as its value, we here
find the surplus-value distributed under the various heads of profit, interest,
rent, &c. We have nothing to do with these in detail; we simply add
them together, and the sum is a surplus-value of £3 11s. 0d. The
sum of £3 19s. 0d., paid for seed and manure, is constant capital,
and we put it equal to zero. There is left the sum of £3
10s. 0d., which is the variable capital advanced: and we see that a new
value of £3 10s. 0d + £3 11s. 0d. has been produced in its
place. Therefore s/v = £3 11s. 0d. / £3 10s. 0d., giving
a rate of surplus-value of more than 100%. The labourer employs more than
one half of his working-day in producing the surplus-value, which different
persons, under different pretexts, share amongst themselves. [9]

### SECTION 2.

THE REPRESENTATION OF THE COMPONENTS OF THE VALUE OF THE PRODUCT BY CORRESPONDING PROPORTIONAL PARTS OF THE PRODUCT ITSELF

Let us now return to the example by which we were
shown how the capitalist converts money into capital.

The product of a working-day of 12 hours is 20 lbs. of yarn, having
a value of 30s. No less than 8/10ths of this value, or 24s., is due to
mere re-appearance in it, of the value of the means of production (20 lbs.
of cotton, value 20s., and spindle worn away, 4s.): it is therefore constant
capital. The remaining 2/10ths or 6s. is the new value created during the
spinning process: of this one half replaces the value of the day’s labour-power,
or the variable capital, the remaining half constitutes a surplus-value
of 3s. The total value then of the 20 lbs. of yarn is made up as follows:

30s. value of yarn = 24s. const. + 3s. var. + 3s. surpl.

Since the whole of this value is contained in the 20 lbs. of yarn
produced, it follows that the various component parts of this value, can
be represented as being contained respectively in corresponding parts of
the product.

If the value of 30s. is contained in 20 lbs. of yarn, then 8/10ths
of this value, or the 24s. that form its constant part, is contained in
8/10ths of the product or in 16 lbs. of yarn. Of the latter 13 1/3 lbs.
represent the value of the raw material, the 20s. worth of cotton spun,
and 2 2/3 lbs. represent the 4s. worth of spindle, &c., worn away in
the process.

Hence the whole of the cotton used up in spinning the 20 lbs.
of yarn, is represented by 13 1/3 lbs. of yarn. This latter
weight of yarn contains, it is true, by weight, no more than 13 1/3 lbs.
of cotton, worth 13 1/3 shillings; but the 6 2/3 shillings additional value
contained in it, are the equivalent for the cotton consumed in spinning
the remaining 6 2/3 lbs. of yarn. The effect is the same as if these 6
2/3 lbs. of yarn contained no cotton at all, and the whole 20 lbs. of cotton
were concentrated in the 13 1/3 lbs. of yarn. The latter weight, on the
other hand, does not contain an atom either of the value of the auxiliary
materials and implements, or of the value newly created in the process.

In the same way, the 2 2/3 lbs. of yarn, in which the 4s., the
remainder of the constant capital, is embodied, represents nothing but
the value of the auxiliary materials and instruments of labour consumed
in producing the 20 lbs. of yarn.

We have, therefore, arrived at this result: although eight-tenths
of the product, or 16 lbs. of yarn, is, in its character of an article
of utility, just as much the fabric of the spinner’s labour, as the remainder
of the same product, yet when viewed in this connexion, it does not contain,
and has not absorbed any labour expended during the process of spinning.
It is just as if the cotton had converted itself into yarn, without help;
as if the shape it had assumed was mere trickery and deceit: for so soon
as our capitalist sells it for 24s., and with the money replaces his means
of production, it becomes evident that this 16 lbs. of yarn is nothing
more than so much cotton and spindle-waste in disguise.

On the other hand, the remaining 2/10ths of the product, or 4
lbs of yarn, represent nothing but the new value of 6s., created during
the 12 hours’ spinning process. All the value transferred to those 4 lbs,
from the raw material and instruments of labour consumed, was, so to say,
intercepted in order to be incorporated in the 16 lbs. first spun. In this
case, it is as if the spinner had spun 4 lbs. of yarn out of air, or, as
if he had spun them with the aid of cotton and spindles, that, being the
spontaneous gift of Nature, transferred no value to the product.

Of this 4 lbs. of yarn, in which the whole of the value newly
created during the process, is condensed, one half represents the equivalent
for the value of the labour consumed, or the 3s. variable capital, the
other half represents the 3s. surplus-value.

Since 12 working-hours of the spinner are embodied in 6s., it
follows that in yarn of the value of 30s., there must be embodied 60 working-hours.
And this quantity of labour-time does in fact exist in the 20 lbs of yarn;
for in 8/10ths or 16 lbs there are materialised the 48 hours of labour
expended, before the commencement of the spinning process, on the means
of production; and in the remaining 2/10ths or 4 lbs there are materialised
the 12 hours’ work done during the process itself.

On a former page we saw that the value of the yarn is equal to
the sum of the new value created during the production of that yarn plus
the value previously existing in the means of production.

It has now been shown how the various component parts of the value
of the product, parts that differ functionally from each other, may be
represented by corresponding proportional parts of the product itself.

To split up in this manner the product into different parts, of
which one represents only the labour previously spent on the means of production,
or the constant capital, another, only the necessary labour spent during
the process of production, or the variable capital, and another and last
part, only the surplus-labour expended during the same process, or the
surplus-value; to do this, is, as will be seen later on from its application
to complicated and hitherto unsolved problems, no less important than it
is simple.

In the preceding investigation we have treated the total product
as the final result, ready for use, of a working-day of 12 hours. We can
however follow this total product through all the stages of its production;
and in this way we shall arrive at the same result as before, if we represent
the partial products, given off at the different stages, as functionally
different parts of the final or total product.

The spinner produces in 12 hours 20 lbs. of yarn, or in 1 hour
1⅔ lbs; consequently he produces in 8 hours 13⅔ lbs., or a partial
product equal in value to all the cotton that is spun in a whole day. In
like manner the partial product of the next period of 1 hour and 36 minutes,
is 2⅔ lbs. of yarn: this represents the value of the instruments of
labour that are consumed in 12 hours. In the following hour and 12 minutes,
the spinner produces 2 lbs. of yarn worth 3 shillings, a value equal to
the whole value he creates in his 6 hours’ necessary labour. Finally, in
the last hour and 12 minutes he produces another 2 lbs. of yarn, whose
value is equal to the surplus-value, created by his surplus-labour during
half a day. This method of calculation serves the English manufacturer
for every-day use; it shows, he will say, that in the first 8 hours, or
⅔ of the working-day, he gets back the value of his cotton; and so on
for the remaining hours. It is also a perfectly correct method: being in
fact the first method given above with this difference, that instead of
being applied to space, in which the different parts of the completed product
lie side by side, it deals with time, in which those parts are successively
produced. But it can also be accompanied by very barbarian notions, more
especially in the heads of those who are as much interested, practically,
in the process of making value beget value, as they are in misunderstanding
that process theoretically. Such people may get the notion into their heads,
that our spinner, for example, produces or replaces in the first 8 hours
of his working-day the value of the cotton; in the following hour
and 36 minutes the value of the instruments of labour worn away;
in the next hour and 12 minutes the value of the wages; and that
he devotes to the production of surplus-value for the manufacturer, only
that well known “last hour.” In this way the poor spinner is made to perform
the two-fold miracle not only of producing cotton, spindles, steam-engine,
coal, oil, &c., at the same time that he spins with them, but also
of turning one working-day into five; for, in the example we are considering,
the production of the raw material and instruments of labour demands four
working-days of twelve hours each, and their conversion into yarn requires
another such day. That the love of lucre induces an easy belief in such
miracles, and that sycophant doctrinaires are never wanting to prove them,
is vouched for by the following incident of historical celebrity.

### SECTION 3.

SENIOR’S “LAST HOUR”

One fine morning, in the year 1836, Nassau W. Senior,
who may be called the bel-esprit of English economists, well known, alike
for his economic “science,” and for his beautiful style, was summoned from
Oxford to Manchester, to learn in the latter place, the Political Economy
that he taught in the former. The manufacturers elected him as their champion,
not only against the newly passed Factory Act, but against the still more
menacing Ten-hours’ agitation. With their usual practical acuteness, they
had found out that the learned Professor “wanted a good deal of finishing;”
it was this discovery that caused them to write for him. On his side the
Professor has embodied the lecture he received from the Manchester manufacturers,
in a pamphlet, entitled: “Letters on the Factory Act, as it affects the
cotton manufacture.” London, 1837. Here we find, amongst others, the following
edifying passage:

“Under the present law, no mill in which persons under
18 years of age are employed, ... can be worked more than 11½ hours
a day, that is, 12 hours for 5 days in the week, and nine on Saturday.

“Now the following analysis (!) will show that in a mill so worked,
the whole net profit is derived from the last hour. I will suppose
a manufacturer to invest £100,000: — £80,000 in his mill and
machinery, and £20,000 in raw material and wages. The annual return
of that mill, supposing the capital to be turned once a year,
and gross profits to be 15 per cent., ought to be goods worth £115,000....
Of this £115,000, each of the twenty-three half-hours of work produces
5-115ths or one twenty-third. Of these 23-23rds (constituting the whole
£115,000) twenty, that is to say £100,000 out of the
£115,000, simply replace the capital; — one twenty-third (or £5,000
out of the £115,000) makes up for the deterioration of the mill and
machinery. The remaining 2-23rds, that is, the last two of the twenty-three
half-hours of every day, produce the net profit of 10 per cent. If, therefore
(prices remaining the same), the factory could be kept at work thirteen
hours instead of eleven and a half, with an addition of about £2,600
to the circulating capital, the net profit would be more than doubled.
On the other hand, if the hours of working were reduced by one hour per
day (prices remaining the same), the net profit would be destroyed
— if they were reduced by one hour and a half, even the gross profit
would be destroyed.”[10]

And the Professor calls this an “analysis!” If, giving credence
to the out-cries of the manufacturers, he believed that the workmen spend
the best part of the day in the production, i.e., the reproduction or replacement
of the value of the buildings, machinery, cotton, coal, &c., then his
analysis was superfluous. His answer would simply have been: — Gentlemen!
if you work your mills for 10 hours instead of 11½, then,
other things being equal, the daily consumption of cotton, machinery, &c.,
will decrease in proportion. You gain just as much as you lose. Your work-people
will in future spend one hour and a half less time in reproducing or replacing
the capital that has been advanced. — If, on the other hand, he did not
believe them without further inquiry, but, as being an expert in such matters,
deemed an analysis necessary, then he ought, in a question that is concerned
exclusively with the relations of net profit to the length of the working-day,
before all things to have asked the manufacturers, to be careful not to
lump together machinery, workshops, raw material, and labour, but to be
good enough to place the constant capital, invested in buildings, machinery,
raw material, &c., on one side of the account, and the capital advanced
in wages on the other side. If the Professor then found, that in accordance
with the calculation of the manufacturers, the workman reproduced or replaced
his wages in 2 half-hours, in that case, he should have continued his analysis
thus:

According to your figures, the workman in the last hour but one
produces his wages, and in the last hour your surplus-value or net profit.
Now, since in equal periods he produces equal values, the produce of the
last hour but one, must have the same value as that of the last hour. Further,
it is only while he labours that he produces any value at all, and the
amount of his labour is measured by his labour-time. This you say, amounts
to 11½ hours a day. He employs one portion of these 11½ hours, in
producing or replacing his wages, and the remaining portion in producing
your net profit. Beyond this he does absolutely nothing. But since, on
your assumption, his wages, and the surplus-value he yields, are of equal
value, it is clear that he produces his wages in 5¾ hours, and your
net profit in the other 5¾ hours. Again, since the value of the yarn
produced in 2 hours, is equal to the sum of the values of his wages and
of your net profit, the measure of the value of this yarn must be 11½
working-hours, of which 5¾ hours measure the value of the yarn produced
in the last hour but one, and 5¾, the value of the yarn produced in
the last hour. We now come to a ticklish point; therefore, attention! The
last working-hour but one is, like the first, an ordinary working-hour,
neither more nor less. How then can the spinner produce in one hour, in
the shape of yarn, a value that embodies 5¾ hours’ labour? The truth
is that he performs no such miracle. The use-value produced by him in one
hour, is a definite quantity of yarn. The value of this yarn is measured
by 5¾ working-hours, of which 4¾ were, without any assistance
from him, previously embodied in the means of production, in the cotton,
the machinery, and so on; the remaining one hour alone is added by him.
Therefore since his wages are produced in 5¾ hours, and the yarn produced
in one hour also contains 5¾ hours’ work, there is no witchcraft in
the result, that the value created by his 5¾ hours’ spinning, is equal
to the value of the product spun in one hour. You are altogether on the
wrong track, if you think that he loses a single moment of his working-day,
in reproducing or replacing the values of the cotton, the machinery, and
so on. On the contrary, it is because his labour converts the cotton and
spindles into yarn, because he spins, that the values of the cotton and
spindles go over to the yarn of their own accord. This result is owing
to the quality of his labour, not to its quantity. It is true, he will
in one hour transfer to the yarn more value, in the shape of cotton, than
he will in half an hour; but that is only because in one hour he spins
up more cotton than in half an hour. You see then, your assertion, that
the workman produces, in the last hour but one, the value of his wages,
and in the last hour your net profit, amounts to no more than this, that
in the yarn produced by him in 2 working-hours, whether they are the 2
first or the 2 last hours of the working-day, in that yarn, there are incorporated
11½ working-hours, or just a whole day’s work, i.e., two hours
of his own work and 9½ hours of other people’s. And my assertion that,
in the first 5¾ hours, he produces his wages, and in the last 5¾
hours your net profit, amounts only to this, that you pay him for the former,
but not for the latter. In speaking of payment of labour, instead of payment
of labour-power, I only talk your own slang. Now, gentlemen, if you compare
the working-time you pay for, with that which you do not pay for, you will
find that they are to one another, as half a day is to half a day; this
gives a rate of 100%, and a very pretty percentage it is. Further, there
is not the least doubt, that if you make your “hands” toil for 13 hours,
instead of 11½, and, as may be expected from you, treat the work done
in that extra one hour and a half, as pure surplus-labour, then the latter
will be increased from 5¾ hours’ labour to 7¼ hours’ labour, and
the rate of surplus-value from 100% to 126 2/23%. So that you are altogether
too sanguine, in expecting that by such an addition of 1½ hours to the
working-day, the rate will rise from 100% to 200% and more, in other words
that it will be “more than doubled.” On the other hand — man’s heart is a
wonderful thing, especially when carried in the purse — you take too pessimist
a view, when you fear, that with a reduction of the hours of labour from
11½ to 10, the whole of your net profit will go to the dogs. Not at
all. All other conditions remaining the same, the surplus-labour will fall
from 5¾ hours to 4¾ hours, a period that still gives a very profitable
rate of surplus-value, namely 82 14/23%. But this dreadful “last hour,”
about which you have invented more stories than have the millenarians about
the day of judgment, is “all bosh.” If it goes, it will cost neither you,
your net profit, nor the boys and girls whom you employ, their “purity
of mind.” [11] Whenever your “last hour” strikes in earnest, think
of the Oxford Professor. And now, gentlemen, “farewell, and may we meet
again in yonder better world, but not before.”

Senior invented the battle cry of the “last hour” in 1836. [12]
In the London Economist of the 15th April, 1848, the same cry was
again raised by James Wilson, an economic mandarin of high standing: this
time in opposition to the 10 hours’ bill.

### SECTION 4.

SURPLUS-PRODUCE

The portion of the product that represents the
surplus-value, (one tenth of the 20 lbs., or 2 lbs. of yarn, in the example
given in Sec. 2) we call “surplus-produce.” Just as the rate of surplus-value
is determined by its relation, not to the sum total of the capital, but
to its variable part; in like manner, the relative quantity of surplus-produce
is determined by the ratio that this produce bears, not to the remaining
part of the total product, but to that part of it in which is incorporated
the necessary labour. Since the production of surplus-value is the chief
end and aim of capitalist production, it is clear, that the greatness of
a man’s or a nation’s wealth should be measured, not by the absolute quantity
produced, but by the relative magnitude of the surplus-produce. [13]

The sum of the necessary labour and the surplus-labour,
i.e., of the periods of time during which the workman replaces the value
of his labour-power, and produces the surplus-value, this sum constitutes
the actual time during which he works, i.e., the working-day.

Footnotes

1. “If we reckon the value of the fixed capital
employed as a part of the advances, we must reckon the remaining value
of such capital at the end of the year as a part of the annual returns.”
(Malthus, “Princ. of Pol. Econ.” 2nd. ed., Lond., 1836, p. 269.)

2. What Lucretius says is self-evident;
“nil posse creari de nihilo,” out of nothing, nothing can be created. Creation
of value is transformation of labour-power into labour. Labour-power itself
is energy transferred to a human organism by means of nourishing matter.

3. In the same way that the English use
the terms “rate of profit,” “rate of interest.” We shall see, in Book III,
that the rate of profit is no mystery, so soon as we know the laws of surplus-value.
If we reverse the process, we cannot comprehend either the one or the other.

4. Note added in the 3rd German edition.
— The author resorts here to the economic language in current use. It
will be remembered that on p. 182 (present edition, p. 174) it was shown
that in reality the labourer “advances” to the capitalist and not the capitalist
to the labourer. — F. E.

5. In this work, we have, up to now,
employed the term “necessary labour-time,” to designate the time necessary
under given social conditions for the production of any commodity. Henceforward
we use it to designate also the time necessary for the production of the
particular commodity labour-power. The use of one and the same technical
term in different senses is inconvenient, but in no science can it be altogether
avoided. Compare, for instance, the higher with the lower branches of mathematics.

6. Herr Wilhelm Thucydides Roscher has
found a mare’s nest. He has made the important discovery that if, on the
one hand, the formation of surplus-value, or surplus-produce, and the consequent
accumulation of capital, is now-a-days due to the thrift of the capitalist,
on the other hand, in the lowest stages of civilisation it is the strong
who compel the weak to economise. (l.c., p. 78.) To economise what? Labour?
Or superfluous wealth that does not exist? What is it that makes such men
as Roscher account for the origin of surplus-value, by a mere rechauffé
of the more or less plausible excuses by the capitalist, for his appropriation
of surplus-value? It is, besides their real ignorance, their apologetic
dread of a scientific analysis of value and surplus-value, and of obtaining
a result, possibly not altogether palatable to the powers that be.

7. Although the rate of surplus-value
is an exact expression for the degree of exploitation of labour-power,
it is, in no sense, an expression for the absolute amount of exploitation.
For example, if the necessary labour = 5 hours and the surplus-labour = 5
hours, the degree of exploitation is 100%. The amount of exploitation is
here measured by 5 hours. If, on the other hand, the necessary labour =
6 hours and the surplus-labour = 6 hours, the degree of exploitation remains,
as before, 100%, while the actual amount of exploitation has increased
20%, namely from five hours to six.

8. The above data, which may be relied
upon, were given me by a Manchester spinner. In England the horse-power
of an engine was formerly calculated from the diameter of its cylinder,
now the actual horse-power shown by the indicator is taken.

9. The calculations given in the text
are intended merely as illustrations. We have in fact. assumed that prices
= values. We shall, however, see, in Book III., that even in the case of
average prices the assumption cannot be made in this very simple manner.

10. Senior, l.c., pp. 12, 13. We let
pass such extraordinary notions as are of no importance for our purpose;
for instance, the assertion, that manufacturers reckon as part of their
profit, gross or net, the amount required to make good wear and tear of
machinery, or in other words, to replace a part of the capital. So, too,
we pass over any question as to the accuracy of his figures. Leonard Horner
has shown in “A Letter to Mr. Senior,” &c., London, 1837, that they
are worth no more than so-called “Analysis.” Leonard Horner was one of
the Factory Inquiry Commissioners in 1833, and Inspector, or rather Censor
of Factories till 1859. He rendered undying service to the English working-class.
He carried on a life-long contest, not only with the embittered manufacturers,
but also with the Cabinet, to whom the number of votes given by the masters
in the Lower House, was a matter of far greater importance than the number
of hours worked by the “hands” in the mills.

Apart from efforts in principle, Senior’s statement is confused.
What he really intended to say was this: The manufacturer employs the workman
for 11½ hours or for 23 half-hours daily. As the working-day, so, too,
the working year, may be conceived to consist of 11½ hours or 23 half-hours,
but each multiplied by the number of working-days in the year. On this
supposition, the 23 half-hours yield an annual product of £115,000;
one half-hour yields 1/23 × £115,000; 20 half-hours yield 20/23 ×
£115,000 = £100,000, i.e., they replace no more than
the capital advanced. There remain 3 half-hours, which yield 3/23 × £115,000
= £15,000 or the gross profit. Of these 3 half-hours, one yields 1/23
× £115,000 = £5,000; i.e., it makes up for the wear
and tear of the machinery; the remaining 2 half-hours, i.e., the
last hour, yield 2/23 × £115,000 = £10,000 or the net profit.
In the text Senior converts the last 2/23 of the product into portions
of the working-day itself.

11. If, on the one hand, Senior proved
that the net profit of the manufacturer, the existence of the English cotton
industry, and England’s command of the markets of the world, depend on
“the last working-hour,” on the other hand, Dr. Andrew Ure showed, that
if children and young persons under 18 years of age, instead of being kept
the full 12 hours in the warm and pure moral atmosphere of the factory,
are turned out an hour sooner into the heartless and frivolous outer world,
they will be deprived, by idleness and vice, of all hope of salvation for
their souls. Since 1848, the factory inspectors have never tired of twitting
the masters with this “last,” this “fatal hour.” Thus Mr. Hovell in his
report of the 21st May, 1855: “Had the following ingenious calculation
(he quotes Senior) been correct, every cotton factory in the United Kingdom
would have been working at a loss since the year 1850.” (Reports of the
Insp. of Fact., for the half-year, ending 30th April, 1855, pp. 19, 20.)
In the year 1848, after the passing of the 10 hours’ bill, the masters
of some flax spinning mills, scattered, few and far between, over the country
on the borders of Dorset and Somerset, foisted a petition against the bill
on to the shoulders of a few of their work-people. One of the clauses of
this petition is as follows: “Your petitioners, as parents, conceive that
an additional hour of leisure will tend more to demoralise the children
than otherwise, believing that idleness is the parent of vice.” On this
the factory report of 31st Oct., 1848, says: The atmosphere of the flax
mills, in which the children of these virtuous and tender parents work,
is so loaded with dust and fibre from the raw material, that it is exceptionally
unpleasant to stand even 10 minutes in the spinning rooms: for you are
unable to do so without the most painful sensation, owing to the eyes,
the ears, the nostrils, and mouth, being immediately filled by the clouds
of flax dust from which there is no escape. The labour itself, owing to
the feverish haste of the machinery, demands unceasing application of skill
and movement, under the control of a watchfulness that never tires, and
it seems somewhat hard, to let parents apply the term “idling” to their
own children, who, after allowing for meal-times, are fettered for 10 whole
hours to such an occupation, in such an atmosphere.... These children work
longer than the labourers in the neighbouring villages.... Such cruel talk
about “idleness and vice” ought to be branded as the purest cant, and the
most shameless hypocrisy.... That portion of the public, who, about 12
years ago, were struck by the assurance with which, under the sanction
of high authority, it was publicly and most earnestly proclaimed, that
the whole net profit of the manufacturer flows from the labour of the last
hour, and that, therefore, the reduction of the working-day by one hour,
would destroy his net profit, that portion of the public, we say, will
hardly believe its own eyes, when it now finds, that the original discovery
of the virtues of “the last hour” has since been so far improved, as to
include morals as well as profit; so that, if the duration of the labour
of children, is reduced to a full 10 hours, their morals, together with
the net profits of their employers, will vanish, both being dependent on
this last, this fatal hour. (See Repts., Insp. of Fact., for 31st Oct.,
1848, p. 101.) The same report then gives some examples of the morality
and virtue of these same pure-minded manufacturers, of the tricks, the
artifices, the cajoling, the threats, and the falsifications, they made
use of, in order, first, to compel a few defenceless workmen to sign petitions
of such a kind, and then to impose them upon Parliament as the petitions
of a whole branch of industry, or a whole country. It is highly characteristic
of the present status of so-called economic science, that neither Senior
himself, who, at a later period, to his honour be it said, energetically
supported the factory legislation, nor his opponents, from first to last,
have ever been able to explain the false conclusions of the “original discovery.”
They appeal to actual experience, but the why and wherefore remains a mystery.

12. Nevertheless, the learned professor
was not without some benefit from his journey to Manchester. In the “Letters
on the Factory Act,” he makes the whole net gains including “profit” and
“interests” and even “something more,” depend upon a single unpaid hour’s
work of the labourer. One year previously, in his “Outlines of Political
Economy,” written for the instruction of Oxford students and cultivated
Philistines, he had also “discovered, in opposition to Ricardo’s determination
of value by labour, that profit is derived from the labour of the capitalist,
and interest from his asceticism, in other words, from his abstinence.”
The dodge was an old one, but the word “abstinence” was new. Herr Roscher
translates it rightly by “Enthaltung.” Some of his countrymen, the Browns,
Jones, and Robinsons, of Germany, not so well versed in Latin as he, have,
monk-like, rendered it by “Entsagung” (renunciation).

13. “To an individual with a capital
of £20,000, whose profits were £2,000 per annum, it would be
a matter quite indifferent whether his capital would employ a 100 or 1,000
men, whether the commodity produced sold for £10,000 or £20,000,
provided, in all cases, his profit were not diminished below £2,000.
Is not the real interest of the nation similar? Provided its net real income,
its rent and profits, be the same, it is of no importance whether the nation
consists of 10 or of 12 millions of inhabitants.” (Ric. l.c.,.p. 416.)
Long before Ricardo, Arthur Young, a fanatical upholder of surplus-produce,
for the rest, a rambling, uncritical writer, whose reputation is in the
inverse ratio of his merit, says, “Of what use, in a modern kingdom, would
be a whole province thus divided [in the old Roman manner, by small independent
peasants], however well cultivated, except for the mere purpose of breeding
men, which taken singly is a most useless purpose?” (Arthur Young: “Political
Arithmetic, &c.” London, 1774, p. 47.)

Very curious is “the strong inclination... to represent net wealth
as beneficial to the labouring class... though it is evidently not on account
of being net.” (Th . Hopkins, “On Rent of Land, &c.” London, 1828,
p. 126.)

Karl Marx. Capital Volume One

## Chapter Ten: The Working-Day

Contents

Section 1 - The Limits of the Working-Day

Section 2 - The Greed for Surplus-Labour. Manufacturer and Boyard

Section 3 - Branches of English Industry without Legal Limits to Exploitation

Section 4 - Day and Night Work. The Relay System

Section 5 - The Struggle for a Normal Working-Day. Compulsory Laws for the Extension of the Working-Day from the Middle of the 14th to the End of the 17th Century

Section 6 - The Struggle for the Normal Working-Day. Compulsory Limitation by Law of the Working-Time. The English Factory Acts, 1833 to 1864

Section 7 - The Struggle for the Normal Working-Day. Reaction of the English Factory Acts on Other Countries

### SECTION 1

THE LIMITS OF THE WORKING-DAY

We started with the supposition that labour-power
is bought and sold at its value. Its value, like that of all other commodities,
is determined by the working-time necessary to its production. If the production
of the average daily means of subsistence of the labourer takes up 6 hours,
he must work, on the average, 6 hours every day, to produce his daily labour-power,
or to reproduce the value received as the result of its sale. The necessary
part of his working-day amounts to 6 hours, and is, therefore, caeteris
paribus [other things being equal], a given quantity. But with this, the extent of the working-day itself is not yet given.

Let us assume that the line A–––B represents the length of the necessary working-time, say 6 hours. If the labour be prolonged 1, 3, or 6 hours beyond A—–B, we have 3 other lines:

Working-day I.Working-day II.Working-day III.

A–––B–C.A–––B––C.A–––B–––C.

representing 3 different working-days of 7, 9, and 12 hours. The extension
B—–C of the line A—–B represents the length of the surplus-labour. As
the working-day is A—–B + B—–C or A—–C, it varies with the variable
quantity B—–C. Since A—–B is constant, the ratio of B—–C to A—–B can
always be calculated. In working-day I, it is 1/6, in working-day II, 3/6,
in working day III 6/6 of A—–B. Since further the ratio (surplus working-time)/(necessary working-time), determines the rate of the surplus-value, the latter is given by the ratio
of B—-C to A—-B. It amounts in the 3 different working-days respectively
to 16 2/3, 50 and 100 per cent. On the other hand, the rate of surplus-value
alone would not give us the extent of the working-day. If this rate, e.g., were
100 per cent., the working-day might be of 8, 10, 12, or more hours. It
would indicate that the 2 constituent parts of the working-day, necessary-labour
and surplus-labour time, were equal in extent, but not how long each of
these two constituent parts was.

The working-day is thus not a constant, but a variable quantity.
One of its parts, certainly, is determined by the working-time required
for the reproduction of the labour-power of the labourer himself. But its
total amount varies with the duration of the surplus-labour. The working-day
is, therefore, determinable, but is, per se, indeterminate. [1]

Although the working-day is not a fixed, but a fluent quantity,
it can, on the other hand, only vary within certain limits. The minimum
limit is, however, not determinable; of course, if we make the extension
line B—‑C or the surplus-labour = 0, we have a minimum limit, i.e.,
the part of the day which the labourer must necessarily work for his own
maintenance. On the basis of capitalist production, however, this necessary
labour can form a part only of the working-day; the working-day itself
can never be reduced to this minimum. On the other hand, the working-day
has a maximum limit. It cannot be prolonged beyond a certain point. This
maximum limit is conditioned by two things. First, by the physical bounds
of labour-power. Within the 24 hours of the natural day a man can expend
only a definite quantity of his vital force. A horse, in like manner, can
only work from day to day, 8 hours. During part of the day this force must
rest, sleep; during another part the man has to satisfy other physical
needs, to feed, wash, and clothe himself. Besides these purely physical
limitations, the extension of the working-day encounters moral ones. The
labourer needs time for satisfying his intellectual and social wants, the
extent and number of which are conditioned by the general state of social
advancement. The variation of the working-day fluctuates, therefore, within
physical and social bounds. But both these limiting conditions are of a
very elastic nature, and allow the greatest latitude. So we find working-days
of 8, 10, 12, 14, 16, 18 hours, i.e., of the most different lengths.

The capitalist has bought the labour-power at its day-rate. To
him its use-value belongs during one working-day. He has thus acquired
the right to make the labourer work for him during one day. But, what is
a working-day? [2]

At all events, less than a natural day. By how much? The
capitalist has his own views of this ultima Thule [the outermost limit], the necessary
limit of the working-day. As capitalist, he is only capital personified.
His soul is the soul of capital. But capital has one single life impulse,
the tendency to create value and surplus-value, to make its constant factor,
the means of production, absorb the greatest possible amount of surplus-labour.

Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking
living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks. The time during
which the labourer works, is the time during which the capitalist consumes
the labour-power he has purchased of him. [4]

If the labourer consumes his disposable time for himself, he robs
the capitalist. [5]

The capitalist then takes his stand on the law of the exchange
of commodities. He, like all other buyers, seeks to get the greatest possible
benefit out of the use-value of his commodity. Suddenly the voice of the
labourer, which had been stifled in the storm and stress of the process
of production, rises:

The commodity that I have sold to you differs from the crowd of
other commodities, in that its use creates value, and a value greater than
its own. That is why you bought it. That which on your side appears a spontaneous
expansion of capital, is on mine extra expenditure of labour-power. You
and I know on the market only one law, that of the exchange of commodities.
And the consumption of the commodity belongs not to the seller who parts
with it, but to the buyer, who acquires it. To you, therefore, belongs
the use of my daily labour-power. But by means of the price that you pay
for it each day, I must be able to reproduce it daily, and to sell it again.
Apart from natural exhaustion through age, &c., I must be able on the
morrow to work with the same normal amount of force, health and freshness
as to-day. You preach to me constantly the gospel of “saving” and “abstinence.”
Good! I will, like a sensible saving owner, husband my sole wealth, labour-power,
and abstain from all foolish waste of it. I will each day spend, set in
motion, put into action only as much of it as is compatible with its
normal duration, and healthy development. By an unlimited extension of
the working-day, you may in one day use up a quantity of labour-power greater
than I can restore in three. What you gain in labour I lose in substance.
The use of my labour-power and the spoliation of it are quite different
things. If the average time that (doing a reasonable amount of work) an
average labourer can live, is 30 years, the value of my labour-power, which
you pay me from day to day is 1/(365×30) or 1/10950 of its total value.
But if you consume it in 10 years, you pay me daily 1/10950 instead of
1/3650 of its total value, i.e., only 1/3 of its daily value,
and you rob me, therefore, every day of 2/3 of the value of my commodity.
You pay me for one day’s labour-power, whilst you use that of 3 days. That
is against our contract and the law of exchanges. I demand, therefore,
a working-day of normal length, and I demand it without any appeal to your
heart, for in money matters sentiment is out of place. You may be a model
citizen, perhaps a member of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty
to Animals, and in the odour of sanctity to boot; but the thing that you
represent face to face with me has no heart in its breast. That which seems
to throb there is my own heart-beating. I demand the normal working-day
because I, like every other seller, demand the value of my commodity. [6]

We see then, that, apart from extremely elastic bounds, the nature
of the exchange of commodities itself imposes no limit to the working-day,
no limit to surplus-labour. The capitalist maintains his rights as a purchaser
when he tries to make the working-day as long as possible, and to make,
whenever possible, two working-days out of one. On the other hand, the
peculiar nature of the commodity sold implies a limit to its consumption
by the purchaser, and the labourer maintains his right as seller when he
wishes to reduce the working-day to one of definite normal duration. There
is here, therefore, an antinomy, right against right, both equally bearing
the seal of the law of exchanges. Between equal rights force decides. Hence
is it that in the history of capitalist production, the determination of
what is a working-day, presents itself as the result of a struggle, a struggle
between collective capital, i.e., the class of capitalists, and
collective labour, i.e., the working-class.

### SECTION 2

THE GREED FOR SURPLUS-LABOUR. MANUFACTURER AND BOYARD

Capital has not invented surplus-labour. Wherever
a part of society possesses the monopoly of the means of production, the
labourer, free or not free, must add to the working-time necessary for
his own maintenance an extra working-time in order to produce the means
of subsistence for the owners of the means of production, [7] whether this proprietor be the Athenian caloς cagaqoς [well-to-do man], Etruscan theocrat, civis Romanus [Roman citizen], Norman baron, American slave-owner, Wallachian Boyard, modern landlord or capitalist. [8] It is, however, clear that in any given economic formation of society, where not the exchange-value
but the use-value of the product predominates, surplus-labour will be limited
by a given set of wants which may be greater or less, and that here no
boundless thirst for surplus-labour arises from the nature of the production
itself. Hence in antiquity over-work becomes horrible only when the object
is to obtain exchange-value in its specific independent money-form; in
the production of gold and silver. Compulsory working to death is here
the recognised form of over-work. Only read Diodorus Siculus. [9] Still these are exceptions in antiquity. But as soon as people, whose
production still moves within the lower forms of slave-labour, corvée-labour,
&c., are drawn into the whirlpool of an international market dominated
by the capitalistic mode of production, the sale of their products for
export becoming their principal interest, the civilised horrors of over-work
are grafted on the barbaric horrors of slavery, serfdom, &c. Hence
the negro labour in the Southern States of the American Union preserved
something of a patriarchal character, so long as production was chiefly
directed to immediate local consumption. But in proportion, as the export
of cotton became of vital interest to these states, the over-working of
the negro and sometimes the using up of his life in 7 years of labour became
a factor in a calculated and calculating system. It was no longer a question
of obtaining from him a certain quantity of useful products. It was now
a question of production of surplus-labour itself: So was it
also with the corvée, e.g., in the Danubian Principalities (now
Roumania).

The comparison of the greed for surplus-labour in the Danubian
Principalities with the same greed in English factories has a special interest,
because surplus-labour in the corvée has an independent and palpable
form.

Suppose the working-day consists of 6 hours of necessary labour,
and 6 hours of surplus-labour. Then the free labourer gives the capitalist
every week 6 x 6 or 36 hours of surplus-labour. It is the same as if he
worked 3 days in the week for himself, and 3 days in the week gratis for
the capitalist. But this is not evident on the surface. Surplus-labour
and necessary labour glide one into the other. I can, therefore, express
the same relationship by saying, e.g., that the labourer in every minute
works 30 seconds for himself, and 30 for the capitalist, etc. It is otherwise
with the corvée. The necessary labour which the Wallachian peasant
does for his own maintenance is distinctly marked off from his surplus-labour
on behalf of the Boyard. The one he does on his own field, the other on
the seignorial estate. Both parts of the labour-time exist, therefore,
independently, side by side one with the other. In the corvée the
surplus-labour is accurately marked off from the necessary labour. This,
however, can make no difference with regard to the quantitative relation
of surplus-labour to necessary labour. Three days’ surplus-labour in the
week remain three days that yield no equivalent to the labourer himself,
whether it be called corvée or wage-labour. But in the capitalist
the greed for surplus-labour appears in the straining after an unlimited
extension of the working-day, in the Boyard more simply in a direct hunting
after days of corvée. [10]

In the Danubian Principalities the corvée was mixed up
with rents in kind and other appurtenances of bondage, but it formed the
most important tribute paid to the ruling class. Where this was the case,
the corvée rarely arose from serfdom; serfdom much more frequently
on the other hand took origin from the corvée. [11] This is what took place in the Roumanian provinces. Their original
mode of production was based on community of the soil, but not in the Slavonic
or Indian form. Part of the land was cultivated in severalty as freehold
by the members of the community, another part — ager publicus —
was cultivated by them in common. The products of this common labour served
partly as a reserve fund against bad harvests and other accidents, partly
as a public store for providing the costs of war, religion, and other common
expenses. In course of time military and clerical dignitaries usurped,
along with the common land, the labour spent upon it. The labour of the
free peasants on their common land was transformed into corvée for
the thieves of the common land. This corvée soon developed into
a servile relationship existing in point of fact, not in point of law,
until Russia, the liberator of the world, made it legal under presence
of abolishing serfdom. The code of the corvée, which the Russian
General Kisseleff proclaimed in 1831, was of course dictated by the Boyards
themselves. Thus Russia conquered with one blow the magnates of the Danubian
provinces, and the applause of liberal cretins throughout Europe.

According to the “Règlement organique,” as this code of
the corvée is called, every Wallachian peasant owes to the so-called
landlord, besides a mass of detailed payments in kind: (1), 12 days
of general labour; (2), one day of field labour; (3), one
day of wood carrying. In all, 14 days in the year. With deep insight into
Political Economy, however, the working-day is not taken in its ordinary
sense, but as the working-day necessary to the production of an average
daily product; and that average daily product is determined in so crafty
a way that no Cyclops would be done with it in 24 hours. In dry words,
the Réglement itself declares with true Russian irony that by 12
working-days one must understand the product of the manual labour of 36
days, by 1 day of field labour 3 days, and by 1 day of wood carrying in
like manner three times as much. In all, 42 corvée days. To this
had to be added the so-called jobagie, service due to the lord for extraordinary
occasions. In proportion to the size of its population, every village has
to furnish annually a definite contingent to the jobagie. This additional
corvée is estimated at 14 days for each Wallachian peasant. Thus
the prescribed corvée amounts to 56 working-days yearly. But the
agricultural year in Wallachia numbers in consequence of the severe climate
only 210 days, of which 40 for Sundays and holidays, 30 on an average for
bad weather, together 70 days, do not count. 140 working-days remain. The
ratio of the corvée to the necessary labour 56/84 or 66 2/3 % gives
a much smaller rate of surplus-value than that which regulates the labour
of the English agricultural or factory labourer. This is, however, only
the legally prescribed corvée. And in a spirit yet more “liberal”
than the English Factory Acts, the “Règlement organique”
has known how to facilitate its own evasion. After it has made 56 days
out of 12, the nominal day’s work of each of the 56 corvée days
is again so arranged that a portion of it must fall on the ensuing day.
In one day, e.g., must be weeded an extent of land, which, for this work,
especially in maize plantations, needs twice as much time. The legal day’s
work for some kinds of agricultural labour is interpretable in such a way
that the day begins in May and ends in October. In Moldavia conditions
are still harder.

“The 12 corvée days of the ‘Règlement organique’
cried a Boyard drunk with victory, amount to 365 days in the year.” [12]

If the Règlement organique of the Danubian provinces was
a positive expression of the greed for surplus-labour which every paragraph
legalised, the English Factory Acts are the negative expression of the
same greed. These acts curb the passion of capital for a limitless draining
of labour-power, by forcibly limiting the working-day by state regulations,
made by a state that is ruled by capitalist-and landlord. Apart from the
working-class movement that daily grew more threatening, the limiting of
factory labour was dictated by the same necessity which spread guano over
the English fields. The same blind eagerness for plunder that in the one
case exhausted the soil, had, in the other, torn up by the roots the living
force of the nation. Periodical epidemics speak on this point as clearly
as the diminishing military standard in Germany and France. [13]

The Factory Act of 1850 now in force (1867) allows for the average
working-day 10 hours, i.e., for the first 5 days 12 hours from 6 a.m. to
6 p.m., including ½ an hour for breakfast, and an hour for dinner, and
thus leaving 10½ working-hours, and 8 hours for Saturday, from 6 a.m.
to 2 p.m., of which ½ an hour is subtracted for breakfast. 60 working-hours
are left, 10½ for each of the first 5 days, 7½ for the last. [14]

Certain guardians of these laws are appointed, Factory Inspectors,
directly under the Home Secretary, whose reports are published half-yearly,
by order of Parliament. They give regular and official statistics of the
capitalistic greed for surplus-labour.

Let us listen, for a moment, to the Factory Inspectors. [15]

“The fraudulent mill-owner begins work a quarter of an hour (sometimes
more, sometimes less) before 6 a.m., and leaves off a quarter of an hour
(sometimes more, sometimes less) after 6 p.m. He takes 5 minutes from the
beginning and from the end of the half hour nominally allowed for breakfast,
and 10 minutes at the beginning and end of the hour nominally allowed for
dinner. He works for a quarter of an hour (sometimes more, sometimes less)
after 2 p.m. on Saturday. Thus his gain is —

Before 6 a.m.,15 minutes.

After 6 p.m., 15 "

At breakfast time, 10 "

At dinner time, 20 "

Five days — 300 minutes,60 "

On Saturday before 6 a.m., 15 minutes.

At breakfast time, 10 "

After 2 p.m., 15 "

40 minutes.

Total weekly, 340 minutes.

Or 5 hours and 40 minutes weekly, which multiplied by 50 working
weeks in the year (allowing two for holidays and occasional stoppages)
is equal to 27 working-days.” [16]

“Five minutes a day’s increased work, multiplied by weeks, are
equal to two and a half days of produce in the year.” [17]

“An additional hour a day gained by small instalments before 6
a.m., after 6 p.m., and at the beginning and end of the times nominally
fixed for meals, is nearly equivalent to working 13 months in the year.”

Crises during which production is interrupted and the factories
work “short time,” i.e., for only a part of the week, naturally do not
affect the tendency to extend the working-day. The less business there
is, the more profit has to be made on the business done. The less time
spent in work, the more of that time has to be turned into surplus labour-time.

Thus the Factory Inspector’s report on the period of the crisis
from 1857 to 1858:

“It may seem inconsistent that there should be any overworking
at a time when trade is so bad; but that very badness leads to the transgression
by unscrupulous men, they get the extra profit of it. ... In the last half
year, says Leonard Horner, 122 mills in my district have been given up;
143 were found standing,” yet, over-work is continued beyond the legal
hours. [19]

“For a great part of the time,” says Mr. Howell, “owing to the
depression of trade, many factories were altogether closed, and a still
greater number were working short time. I continue, however, to receive
about the usual number of complaints that half, or three-quarters of an
hour in the day, are snatched from the workers by encroaching upon the
times professedly allowed for rest and refreshment.” [20]

The same phenomenon was reproduced on a smaller scale during the frightful cotton-crises from 1861 to 1865. [21]

“It is sometimes advanced by way of excuse, when persons are found at work in a factory,
either at a meal hour, or at some illegal time, that they will not leave
the mill at the appointed hour, and that compulsion is necessary to force
them to cease work [cleaning their machinery, &c.], especially on Saturday
afternoons. But, if the hands remain in a factory after the machinery has
ceased to revolve ... they would not have been so employed if sufficient
time had been set apart specially for cleaning, &c., either before
6 a.m. [sic.!] or before 2 p.m. on Saturday afternoons.” [22]

“The profit to be gained by it (over-working in violation of the
Act) appears to be, to many, a greater temptation than they can resist;
they calculate upon the chance of not being found out; and when they see
the small amount of penalty and costs, which those who have been convicted
have had to pay, they find that if they should be detected there will still
be a considerable balance of gain.... [23] In cases
where the additional time is gained by a multiplication of small thefts
in the course of the day, there are insuperable difficulties to the inspectors
making out a case.” [24]

These “small thefts” of capital from the labourer’s meal and recreation
time, the factory inspectors also designate as “petty pilferings of minutes,”
[25] “snatching a few minutes,” [26] or, as the labourers technically called them, “nibbling and cribbling at meal-times.” [27]

It is evident that in this atmosphere the formation of surplus-value
by surplus-labour, is no secret.

“If you allow me,” said a highly respectable
master to me, “to work only ten minutes in the day over-time, you put one
thousand a year in my pocket.” [28] “Moments are the
elements of profit.” [29]

Nothing is from this point of view more characteristic than the
designation of the workers who work full time as “full-timers,” and the
children under 13 who are only allowed to work 6 hours as “half-timers.”
The worker is here nothing more than personified labour-time. All individual
distinctions are merged in those of “full-timers” and “half-timers.” [30]

### SECTION 3

BRANCHES OF ENGLISH INDUSTRY WITHOUT LEGAL LIMITS TO EXPLOITATION

We have hitherto considered the tendency to the extension
of the working-day, the were-wolf’s hunger for surplus-labour in a department
where the monstrous exactions, not surpassed, says an English bourgeois
economist, by the cruelties of the Spaniards to the American red-skins,
[31] caused capital at last to be bound by the chains
of legal regulations. Now, let us cast a glance at certain branches of
production in which the exploitation of labour is either free from fetters
to this day, or was so yesterday.

Mr. Broughton Charlton, county magistrate, declared, as chairman
of a meeting held at the Assembly Rooms, Nottingham, on the 14th January,
1860, “that there was an amount of privation and suffering among that portion
of the population connected with the lace trade, unknown in other parts
of the kingdom, indeed, in the civilised world .... Children of nine or
ten years are dragged from their squalid beds at two, three, or four o’clock
in the morning and compelled to work for a bare subsistence until ten,
eleven, or twelve at night, their limbs wearing away, their frames dwindling,
their faces whitening, and their humanity absolutely sinking into a stone-like
torpor, utterly horrible to contemplate.... We are not surprised that Mr.
Mallett, or any other manufacturer, should stand forward and protest against
discussion.... The system, as the Rev. Montagu Valpy describes it, is one
of unmitigated slavery, socially, physically, morally, and spiritually....
What can be thought of a town which holds a public meeting to petition
that the period of labour for men shall be diminished to eighteen hours
a day? .... We declaim against the Virginian and Carolinian cotton-planters.
Is their black-market, their lash, and their barter of human flesh more
detestable than this slow sacrifice of humanity which takes place in order
that veils and collars may be fabricated for the benefit of capitalists?”

The potteries of Staffordshire have, during the last 22 years,
been the subject of three parliamentary inquiries. The result is embodied
in Mr. Scriven’s Report of 1841 to the “
Children’s Employment Commissioners,”
in the report of Dr. Greenhow of 1860 published by order of the medical
officer of the Privy Council (Public Health, 3rd Report, 112-113), lastly,
in the report of Mr. Longe of 1862 in the “First Report of the Children’s
Employment Commission, of the 13th June, 1863.” For my purpose it is enough
to take, from the reports of 1860 and 1863, some depositions of the exploited
children themselves. From the children we may form an opinion as to the
adults, especially the girls and women, and that in a branch of industry
by the side of which cotton-spinning appears an agreeable and healthful
occupation. [33]

William Wood, 9 years old, was 7 years and 10 months when he began
to work. He “ran moulds” (carried ready-moulded articles into the drying-room,
afterwards bringing back the empty mould) from the beginning. He came to
work every day in the week at 6 a.m., and left off about 9 p.m. “I work
till 9 o’clock at night six days in the week. I have done so seven or eight
weeks.”

Fifteen hours of labour for a child 7 years old! J. Murray, 12
years of age, says: “I turn jigger, and run moulds. I come at 6. Sometimes
I come at 4. I worked all night last night, till 6 o’clock this morning.
I have not been in bed since the night before last. There were eight or
nine other boys working last night. All but one have come this morning.
I get 3 shillings and sixpence. I do not get any more for working at night.
I worked two nights last week.”

Fernyhough, a boy of ten:

“I have not always an hour (for dinner). I have only half an hour sometimes; on Thursday,
Friday, and Saturday.” [34]

Dr. Greenhow states that the average duration of life in the pottery
districts of Stoke-on-Trent, and Wolstanton is extraordinarily short. Although
in the district of Stoke, only 36.6% and in Wolstanton only 30.4%
of the adult male population above 20 are employed in the potteries, among
the men of that age in the first district more than half, in the second,
nearly 2/5 of the whole deaths are the result of pulmonary diseases among
the potters. Dr. Boothroyd, a medical practitioner at Hanley, says:

“Each
successive generation of potters is more dwarfed and less robust than the
preceding one.”

In like manner another doctor, Mr. M’Bean:

“Since he began
to practice among the potters 25 years ago, he had observed a marked degeneration
especially shown in diminution of stature and breadth.”

These statements are taken from the report of Dr. Greenhow in 1860. [35]

From the report of the Commissioners in 1863, the following: Dr.
J. T. Arledge, senior physician of the North Staffordshire Infirmary, says:

“The potters as a class, both men and women, represent a degenerated population,
both physically and morally. They are, as a rule, stunted in growth, ill-shaped,
and frequently ill-formed in the chest; they become prematurely old, and
are certainly short-lived; they are phlegmatic and bloodless, and exhibit
their debility of constitution by obstinate attacks of dyspepsia, and disorders
of the liver and kidneys, and by rheumatism. But of all diseases they are
especially prone to chest-disease, to pneumonia, phthisis, bronchitis,
and asthma. One form would appear peculiar to them, and is known as potter’s
asthma, or potter’s consumption. Scrofula attacking the glands, or bones,
or other parts of the body, is a disease of two-thirds or more of the potters
.... That the ‘degenerescence’ of the population of this district is not
even greater than it is, is due to the constant recruiting from the adjacent
country, and intermarriages with more healthy races.” [36]

Mr. Charles Parsons, late house surgeon of the same institution,
writes in a letter to Commissioner Longe, amongst other things:

“I can only speak from personal observation and not from statistical data, but
I do not hesitate to assert that my indignation has been aroused again
and again at the sight of poor children whose health has been sacrificed
to gratify the avarice of either parents or employers.” He enumerates the
causes of the diseases of the potters, and sums them up in the phrase,
“long hours.” The report of the Commission trusts that “a manufacture which
has assumed so prominent a place in the whole world, will not long be subject
to the remark that its great success is accompanied with the physical deterioration,
widespread bodily suffering, and early death of the workpeople ... by whose
labour and skill such great results have been achieved.”

And all that holds of the potteries in England is true of those in Scotland. [38]

The manufacture of lucifer matches dates from 1833, from the discovery
of the method of applying phosphorus to the match itself. Since 1845 this
manufacture has rapidly developed in England, and has extended especially
amongst the thickly populated parts of London as well as in Manchester,
Birmingham, Liverpool, Bristol, Norwich, Newcastle and Glasgow. With it
has spread the form of lockjaw, which a Vienna physician in 1845 discovered
to be a disease peculiar to lucifer-matchmakers. Half the workers are children
under thirteen, and young persons under eighteen. The manufacture is on
account of its unhealthiness and unpleasantness in such bad odour that
only the most miserable part of the labouring class, half-starved widows
and so forth, deliver up their children to it, “the ragged, half-starved,
untaught children.” [39]

Of the witnesses that Commissioner White examined (1863), 270
were under 18, 50 under 10, 10 only 8, and 5 only 6 years old. A range
of the working-day from 12 to 14 or 15 hours, night-labour, irregular meal-times,
meals for the most part taken in the very workrooms that are pestilent
with phosphorus. Dante would have found the worst horrors of his Inferno
surpassed in this manufacture.

In the manufacture of paper-hangings the coarser sorts are printed
by machine; the finer by hand (block-printing). The most active business
months are from the beginning of October to the end of April. During this
time the work goes on fast and furious without intermission from 6 a.m.
to 10 p.m. or further into the night.

J. Leach deposes:

“Last winter six out of nineteen girls were
away from ill-health at one time from over-work. I have to bawl at them
to keep them awake.” W. Duffy: “I have seen when the children could none
of them keep their eyes open for the work; indeed, none of us could.” J.
Lightbourne: “Am 13 ... We worked last winter till 9 (evening), and the winter
before till 10. I used to cry with sore feet every night last winter.”
G. Apsden: “That boy of mine when he was 7 years old I used to carry him
on my back to and fro through the snow, and he used to have 16 hours a
day ... I have often knelt down to feed him as he stood by the machine,
for he could not leave it or stop.” Smith, the managing partner of a Manchester
factory: “We (he means his “hands” who work for “us”) work on with no stoppage
for meals, so that day’s work of 10½ hours is finished by 4.30 p.m.,
and all after that is over-time.” [40] (Does this Mr. Smith take no meals himself during 10½ hours?) “We (this same Smith) seldom leave off working before 6 p.m.
(he means leave off the consumption
of “our” labour-power machines), so that we (iterum Crispinus) are really
working over-time the whole year round. For all these, children and adults
alike (152 children and young persons and 140 adults), the average work
for the last 18 months has been at the very least 7 days, 5 hours, or 78
1/2 hours a week. For the six weeks ending May 2nd this year (1862), the
average was higher — 8 days or 84 hours a week.”

Still this same Mr. Smith, who is so extremely devoted to the pluralis majestatis
[the Royal “we,” i.e., speaking on behalf of his subjects], adds with
a smile, "Machine-work is not great.” So the employers in the block-printing
say: “Hand labour is more healthy than machine work.” On the whole, manufacturers
declare with indignation against the proposal “to stop the machines at
least during meal-times.”

“A clause,” says Mr. Otley, manager of a wall-paper
factory in the Borough, “which allowed work between, say 6 a.m. and 9 p.m.
in would suit us (!) very well, but the factory hours, 6 a.m. to 6 p.m.,
are not suitable. Our machine is always stopped for dinner. (What generosity!)
There is no waste of paper and colour to speak of. But,” he adds sympathetically,
“I can understand the loss of time not being liked.”

The report of the Commission opines with naïveté that the fear of some “leading firms”
of losing time, i.e., the time for appropriating the labour of others,
and thence losing profit is not a sufficient reason for allowing children
under 13, and young persons under 18, working 12 to 16 hours per day, to
lose their dinner, nor for giving it to them as coal and water are supplied
to the steam-engine, soap to wool, oil to the wheel — as merely auxiliary
material to the instruments of labour, during the process of production
itself. [41]

No branch of industry in England (we do not take into account
the making of bread by machinery recently introduced) has preserved up
to the present day a method of production so archaic, so — as we see from
the poets of the Roman Empire — pre-christian, as baking. But capital,
as was said earlier, is at first indifferent as to the technical
character of the labour-process; it begins by taking it just as it finds
it.

The incredible adulteration of bread, especially in London, was
first revealed by the House of Commons Committee “on the adulteration of
articles of food” (1855-56), and Dr. Hassall’s work, “Adulterations detected.”
[42] The consequence of these revelations was the Act
of August 6th, 1860, “for preventing the adulteration of articles of food
and drink,” an inoperative law, as it naturally shows the tenderest consideration
for every Free-trader who determines by the buying or selling of adulterated
commodities “to turn an honest penny.” [43] The Committee itself formulated more or less naïvely its conviction that Free-trade
meant essentially trade with adulterated, or as the English ingeniously
put it, “sophisticated” goods. In fact this kind of sophistry knows better
than Protagoras how to make white black, and black white, and better than
the Eleatics how to demonstrate ad oculos [before your own eyes] that everything is only
appearance. [44]

At all events the Committee had directed the attention of the
public to its “daily bread,” and therefore to the baking trade. At the
same time in public meetings and in petitions to Parliament rose the cry
of the London journeymen bakers against their over-work, &c. The cry
was so urgent that Mr. H. S. Tremenheere, also a member of the Commission
of 1863 several times mentioned, was appointed Royal Commissioner of Inquiry.
His report, [45] together with the evidence given, roused not the heart of the public but its stomach. Englishmen, always well up in the Bible, knew well enough that man, unless by elective grace a capitalist, or landlord, or sinecurist, is commanded to eat his bread in the sweat
of his brow, but they did not know that he had to eat daily
in his bread a certain quantity of human perspiration mixed with the discharge
of abscesses, cobwebs, dead black-beetles, and putrid German yeast, without
counting alum, sand, and other agreeable mineral ingredients. Without any
regard to his holiness, Free-trade, the free baking-trade was therefore
placed under the supervision of the State inspectors (Close of the Parliamentary
session of 1863), and by the same Act of Parliament, work from 9 in the
evening to 5 in the morning was forbidden for journeymen bakers under 18.
The last clause speaks volumes as to the over-work in this old-fashioned,
homely line of business.

“The work of a London journeyman baker begins, as a rule, at about
eleven at night. At that hour he ‘makes the dough,’ — a laborious process,
which lasts from half an hour to three quarters of an hour, according to
the size of the batch or the labour bestowed upon it. He then lies down
upon the kneading-board, which is also the covering of the trough in which
the dough is ‘made’; and with a sack under him, and another rolled up as
a pillow, he sleeps for about a couple of hours. He is then engaged in
a rapid and continuous labour for about five hours — throwing out the
dough, ‘scaling it off,’ moulding it, putting it into the oven, preparing
and baking rolls and fancy bread, taking the batch bread out of the oven,
and up into the shop, &c., &c. The temperature of a bakehouse ranges
from about 75 to upwards of 90 degrees, and in the smaller bakehouses approximates
usually to the higher rather than to the lower degree of heat. When the
business of making the bread, rolls, &c., is over, that of its distribution
begins, and a considerable proportion of the journeymen in the trade, after
working hard in the manner described during the night, are upon their legs
for many hours during the day, carrying baskets, or wheeling hand-carts,
and sometimes again in the bakehouse, leaving off work at various hours
between 1 and 6 p.m. according to the season of the year, or the amount
and nature of their master’s business; while others are again engaged in
the bakehouse in ‘bringing out’ more batches until late in the afternoon.
[46] ... During what is called ‘the London season,’
the operatives belonging to the ‘full-priced’ bakers at the West End of
the town, generally begin work at 11 p.m., and are engaged in making the
bread, with one or two short (sometimes very short) intervals of rest,
up to 8 o’clock the next morning. They are then engaged all day long, up
to 4, 5, 6, and as late as 7 o’clock in the evening carrying out bread,
or sometimes in the afternoon in the bakehouse again, assisting in the
biscuit-baking. They may have, after they have done their work, sometimes
five or six, sometimes only four or five hours’ sleep before they begin
again. On Fridays they always begin sooner, some about ten o’clock,
and continue in some cases, at work, either in making or delivering the
bread up to 8 p.m. on Saturday night, but more generally up to 4 or 5 o’clock,
Sunday morning. On Sundays the men must attend twice or three times during
the day for an hour or two to make preparations for the next day’s bread....
The men employed by the underselling masters (who sell their bread under
the ‘full price,’ and who, as already pointed out, comprise three-fourths
of the London bakers) have not only to work on the average longer hours,
but their work is almost entirely confined to the bakehouse. The underselling
masters generally sell their bread... in the shop. If they send it out,
which is not common, except as supplying chandlers’ shops, they usually
employ other hands for that purpose. It is not their practice to deliver
bread from house to house. Towards the end of the week ... the men begin
on Thursday night at 10 o’clock, and continue on with only slight intermission
until late on Saturday evening.” [47]

Even the bourgeois intellect understands the position of the “underselling”
masters. “The unpaid labour of the men was made the source whereby the
competition was carried on.” [48] And the “full-priced” baker denounces his underselling competitors to the Commission of Inquiry
as thieves of foreign labour and adulterators.

“They only exist now by
first defrauding the public, and next getting 18 hours’ work out of their
men for 12 hours’ wages.” [49]

The adulteration of bread and the formation of a class of bakers
that sells the bread below the full price, date from the beginning of the
18th century, from the time when the corporate character of the trade was
lost, and the capitalist in the form of the miller or flour-factor, rises
behind the nominal master baker.[50] Thus was laid the foundation of capitalistic production in this trade, of the unlimited extension
of the working-day and of night-labour, although the latter only since
1824 gained a serious footing, even in London. [51]

After what has just been said, it will be understood that the
Report of the Commission classes journeymen bakers among the short-lived labourers,
who, having by good luck escaped the normal decimation of the children
of the working-class, rarely reach the age of 42. Nevertheless, the baking
trade is always overwhelmed with applicants. The sources of the supply
of these labour-powers to London are Scotland, the western agricultural
districts of England, and Germany.

In the years 1858-60, the journeymen bakers in Ireland organised
at their own expense great meetings to agitate against night and Sunday
work. The public — e.g., at the Dublin meeting in May, 1860 — took their
part with Irish warmth. As a result of this movement, day-labour alone
was successfully established in Wexford, Kilkenny, Clonmel, Waterford,
&c.

“In Limerick, where the grievances of the journeymen are demonstrated
to be excessive, the movement has been defeated by the opposition of the
master bakers, the miller bakers being the greatest opponents. The example
of Limerick led to a retrogression in Ennis and Tipperary. In Cork, where
the strongest possible demonstration of feeling took place, the masters,
by exercising their power of turning the men out of employment, have defeated
the movement. In Dublin, the master bakers have offered the most determined
opposition to the movement, and by discountenancing as much as possible
the journeymen promoting it, have succeeded in leading the men into acquiescence
in Sunday work and night-work, contrary to the convictions of the men.”

The Committee of the English Government, which Government, in
Ireland, is armed to the teeth, and generally knows how to show it, remonstrates
in mild, though funereal, tones with the implacable master bakers of Dublin,
Limerick, Cork, &c.:

“The Committee believe that the hours of labour
are limited by natural laws, which cannot be violated with impunity. That
for master bakers to induce their workmen, by the fear of losing employment,
to violate their religious convictions and their better feelings, to disobey
the laws of the land, and to disregard public opinion (this all refers
to Sunday labour), is calculated to provoke ill-feeling between workmen
and masters, ... and affords an example dangerous to religion, morality,
and social order.... The Committee believe that any constant work beyond
12 hours a-day encroaches on the domestic and private life of the working-man,
and so leads to disastrous moral results, interfering with each man’s home,
and the discharge of his family duties as a son, a brother, a husband,
a father. That work beyond 12 hours has a tendency to undermine the health
of the workingman, and so leads to premature old age and death, to the
great injury of families of working-men, thus deprived of the care and
support of the head of the family when most required.” [53]

So far, we have dealt with Ireland. On the other side of
the channel, in Scotland, the agricultural labourer, the ploughman, protests
against his 13-14 hours’ work in the most inclement climate, with 4 hours’
additional work on Sunday (in this land of Sabbatarians!), [54] whilst, at the same time, three railway men are standing before a London coroner’s jury — a guard, an engine-driver, a signalman. A tremendous
railway accident has hurried hundreds of passengers into another world.
The negligence of the employee is the cause of the misfortune. They declare
with one voice before the jury that ten or twelve years before, their labour
only lasted eight hours a-day. During the last five or six years it had
been screwed up to 14, 18, and 20 hours, and under a specially severe pressure
of holiday-makers, at times of excursion trains, it often lasted for 40
or 50 hours without a break. They were ordinary men, not Cyclops. At a
certain point their labour-power failed. Torpor seized them. Their brain
ceased to think, their eyes to see. The thoroughly “respectable” British
jurymen answered by a verdict that sent them to the next assizes on a charge
of manslaughter, and, in a gentle “rider” to their verdict, expressed the
pious hope that the capitalistic magnates of the railways would, in future,
be more extravagant in the purchase of a sufficient quantity of labour-power,
and more “abstemious,” more “self-denying,” more “thrifty,” in the draining
of paid labour-power. [55]

From the motley crowd of labourers of all callings, ages,
sexes, that press on us more busily than the souls of the slain on Ulysses,
on whom — without referring to the Blue books under their arms — we see
at a glance the mark of over-work, let us take two more figures whose striking
contrast proves that before capital all men are alike — a milliner and
a blacksmith.

In the last week of June, 1863, all the London daily papers published
a paragraph with the “sensational” heading, “Death from simple over-work.”
It dealt with the death of the milliner, Mary Anne Walkley, 20 years of
age, employed in a highly-respectable dressmaking establishment, exploited
by a lady with the pleasant name of Elise. The old, often-told story, [56] was once more recounted. This girl worked, on an average, 16½ hours, during the season often 30 hours, without a break, whilst her failing labour-power
was revived by occasional supplies of sherry, port, or coffee. It was just
now the height of the season. It was necessary to conjure up in the twinkling
of an eye the gorgeous dresses for the noble ladies bidden to the ball
in honour of the newly-imported Princess of Wales. Mary Anne Walkley had
worked without intermission for 26½ hours, with 60 other girls, 30 in
one room, that only afforded 1/3 of the cubic feet of air required for them.
At night, they slept in pairs in one of the stifling holes into which the
bedroom was divided by partitions of board. [57] And
this was one of the best millinery establishments in London. Mary
Anne Walkley fell ill on the Friday, died on Sunday, without, to the astonishment
of Madame Elise, having previously completed the work in hand. The doctor,
Mr. Keys, called too late to the death-bed, duly bore witness before the
coroner’s jury that

“Mary Anne Walkley had died from long hours of work
in an over-crowded work-room, and a too small and badly ventilated bedroom.”

In order to give the doctor a lesson in good manners, the coroner’s jury
thereupon brought in a verdict that

“the deceased had died of apoplexy,
but there was reason to fear that her death had been accelerated by over-work
in an over-crowded workroom, &c.”

“Our white slaves,” cried the Morning
Star, the organ of the Free-traders, Cobden and Bright, “our white
slaves, who are toiled into the grave, for the most part silently pine
and die.” [58]

“It is not in dressmakers’ rooms that working to death is the
order of the day, but in a thousand other places; in every place I had
almost said, where ‘a thriving business’ has to be done.... We will take
the blacksmith as a type. If the poets were true, there is no man so hearty,
so merry, as the blacksmith; he rises early and strikes his sparks before
the sun; he eats and drinks and sleeps as no other man. Working in moderation,
he is, in fact, in one of the best of human positions, physically speaking.
But we follow him into the city or town, and we see the stress of work
on that strong man, and what then is his position in the death-rate of
his country. In Marylebone, blacksmiths die at the rate of 31 per thousand
per annum, or 11 above the mean of the male adults of the country
in its entirety. The occupation, instinctive almost as a portion of human
art, unobjectionable as a branch of human industry, is made by mere excess
of work, the destroyer of the man. He can strike so many blows per day,
walk so many steps, breathe so many breaths, produce so much work, and
live an average, say of fifty years; he is made to strike so many more
blows, to walk so many more steps, to breathe so many more breaths per
day, and to increase altogether a fourth of his life. He meets the effort;
the result is, that producing for a limited time a fourth more work, he
dies at 37 for 50.” [59]

### SECTION 4

DAY AND NIGHT WORK. THE RELAY SYSTEM.

Constant capital, the means of production, considered
from the standpoint of the creation of surplus-value, only exist to absorb
labour, and with every drop of labour a proportional quantity of surplus-labour.
While they fail to do this, their mere existence causes a relative loss
to the capitalist, for they represent during the time they lie fallow,
a useless advance of capital. And this loss becomes positive and absolute
as soon as the intermission of their employment necessitates additional
outlay at the recommencement of work. The prolongation of the working-day
beyond the limits of the natural day, into the night, only acts as a palliative.
It quenches only in a slight degree the vampire thirst for the living blood
of labour. To appropriate labour during all the 24 hours of the day is,
therefore, the inherent tendency of capitalist production. But as it is
physically impossible to exploit the same individual labour-power constantly
during the night as well as the day, to overcome this physical hindrance,
an alternation becomes necessary between the workpeople whose powers are
exhausted by day, and those who are used up by night. This alternation
may be effected in various ways; e.g., it may be so arranged that part
of the workers are one week employed on day-work, the next week on night-work.
It is well known that this relay system, this alternation of two sets of
workers, held full sway in the full-blooded youth-time of the English cotton
manufacture, and that at the present time it still flourishes, among others,
in the cotton spinning of the Moscow district. This 24 hours’ process of
production exists to-day as a system in many of the branches of industry
of Great Britain that are still “free,” in the blast-furnaces, forges,
plate-rolling mills, and other metallurgical establishments in England,
Wales, and Scotland. The working-time here includes, besides the 24 hours
of the 6 working-days, a great part also of the 24 hours of Sunday. The
workers consist of men and women, adults and children of both
sexes. The ages of the children and young persons run through all intermediate
grades, from 8 (in some cases from 6) to 18. [60]

In some branches of industry, the girls and women work through
the night together with the males. [61]

Placing on one side the generally injurious influence of night-labour,
[62] the duration of the process of production, unbroken during the 24 hours, offers very welcome opportunities of exceeding the
limits of the normal working-day, e.g., in the branches of industry already
mentioned, which are of an exceedingly fatiguing nature; the official working-day
means for each worker usually 12 hours by night or day. But the over-work
beyond this amount is in many cases, to use the words of the English official
report, “truly fearful.” [63]

“It is impossible,” the report continues, “for any mind to realise
the amount of work described in the following passages as being performed
by boys of from 9 to 12 years of age ... without coming irresistibly to
the conclusion that such abuses of the power of parents and of employers
can no longer be allowed to exist.” [64]

"The practice of boys working at all by day and night turns
either in the usual course of things, or at pressing times, seems inevitably
to open the door to their not unfrequently working unduly long hours. These
hours are, indeed, in some cases, not only cruelly but even incredibly
long for children. Amongst a number of boys it will, of course, not unfrequently
happen that one or more are from some cause absent. When this happens,
their place is made up by one or more boys, who work in the other turn.
That this is a well understood system is plain ... from the answer of the
manager of some large rolling-mills, who, when I asked him how the place
of the boys absent from their turn was made up, ‘I daresay, sir, you know
that as well as I do,’ and admitted the fact.” [65]

“At a rolling-mill where the proper hours were from 6 a.m. to
5½ p.m., a boy worked about four nights every week till 8½ p.m. at
least ... and this for six months. Another, at 9 years old, sometimes made
three 12-hour shifts running, and, when 10, has made two days and two nights
running.” A third, “now 10 ... worked from 6 a.m. till 12 p.m. three nights,
and till 9 p.m. the other nights.” “Another, now 13, ... worked from 6
p.m. till 12 noon next day, for a week together, and sometimes for three
shifts together, e.g., from Monday morning till Tuesday night.” “Another,
now 12, has worked in an iron foundry at Stavely from 6 a.m. till 12 p.m.
for a fortnight on end; could not do it any more.” “George Allinsworth,
age 9, came here as cellar-boy last Friday; next morning we had to begin
at 3, so I stopped here all night. Live five miles off. Slept on the floor
of the furnace, over head, with an apron under me, and a bit of a jacket
over me. The two other days I have been here at 6 a.m. Aye! it is
hot in here. Before I came here I was nearly a year at the same work at
some works in the country. Began there, too, at 3 on Saturday morning —
always did, but was very gain [near] home, and could sleep at home. Other
days I began at 6 in the morning, and gi’en over at 6 or 7 in the evening,”
&c. [66]

Let us now hear how capital itself regards this 24 hours’
system. The extreme forms of the system, its abuse in the “cruel and incredible”
extension of the working-day are naturally passed over in silence. Capital
only speaks of the system in its “normal” form.

Messrs. Naylor & Vickers, steel manufacturers, who employ
between 600 and 700 persons, among whom only 10 per cent are under 18,
and of those, only 20 boys under 18 work in night sets, thus express themselves:

“The boys do not suffer from the heat. The temperature is probably from
86° to 90°.... At the forges and in the rolling mills the hands
work night and day, in relays, but all the other parts of the work are
day-work, i.e., from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. In the forge the hours are
from 12 to 12. Some of the hands always work in the night, without any
alternation of day and night work.... We do not find any difference in
the health of those who work regularly by night and those who work by day,
and probably people can sleep better if they have the same period of rest
than if it is changed.... About 20 of the boys under the age of 18 work
in the night sets.... We could not well do without lads under 18 working
by night. The objection would be the increase in the cost of production....
Skilled hands and the heads in every department are difficult to get, but
of lads we could get any number.... But from the small proportion of boys
that we employ, the subject (i.e., of restrictions on
night-work) is of little importance or interest to us.” [67]

Mr. J. Ellis, one of the firm of Messrs. John Brown & Co.,
steel and iron works, employing about 3,000 men and boys, part of whose
operations, namely, iron and heavier steel work, goes on night and day
by relays, states “that in the heavier steel work one or two boys are employed
to a score or two men.” Their concern employs upwards of 500 boys under
18, of whom about 1/3 or 170 are under the age of 13. With reference to
the proposed alteration of the law, Mr. Ellis says:

“I do not think it would be very objectionable to require that no person under the age of
18 should work more than 12 hours in the 24. But we do not think that any
line could be drawn over the age of 12, at which boys could be dispensed
with for night-work. But we would sooner be prevented from employing boys
under the age of 13, or even so high as 14, at all, than not be allowed
to employ boys that we do have at night. Those boys who work in the day
sets must take their turn in the night sets also, because the men could
not work in the night sets only; it would ruin their health.... We think,
however, that night-work in alternate weeks is no harm.”

(Messrs. Naylor & Vickers, on the other hand, in conformity with the interest of their
business, considered that periodically changed night-labour might possibly
do more harm than continual night-labour.)

“We find the men who do it, as
well as the others who do other work only by day.... Our objections to
not allowing boys under 18 to work at night, would be on account of the
increase of expense, but this is the only reason.”

(What cynical naïveté!)
“We think that the increase would be more than the trade, with due regard
to its being successfully carried out, could fairly bear. (What mealy-mouthed
phraseology!) Labour is scarce here, and might fall short if there were
such a regulation.” (i.e., Ellis Brown & Co. might fall into
the fatal perplexity of being obliged to pay labour-power its full value.)

The “Cyclops Steel and Iron Works,” of Messrs. Cammell & Co.,
are concocted on the same large scale as those of the above-mentioned John
Brown & Co. The managing director had handed in his evidence to the
Government Commissioner, Mr. White, in writing. Later he found it convenient
to suppress the MS. when it had been returned to him for revision. Mr.
White, however, has a good memory. He remembered quite clearly that for
the Messrs. Cyclops the forbidding of the night-labour of children and
young persons “would be impossible, it would be tantamount to stopping
their works,” and yet their business employs little more than
6% of boys under 18, and less than 1% under 13. [69]

On the same subject Mr. E. F. Sanderson, of the firm of Sanderson,
Bros., & Co., steel rolling-mills and forges, Attercliffe, says:

“Great difficulty would be caused by preventing boys under 18 from working at
night. The chief would be the increase of cost from employing men instead
of boys. I cannot say what this would be, but probably it would not be
enough to enable the manufacturers to raise the price of steel, and consequently
it would fall on them, as of course the men (what queer-headed folk!) would
refuse to pay it.”

Mr. Sanderson does not know how much he pays the children,
but

“perhaps the younger boys get from 4s. to 5s. a week.... The boys’
work is of a kind for which the strength of the boys is generally (‘generally,’
of course not always) quite sufficient, and consequently there would be
no gain in the greater strength of the men to counterbalance the loss,
or it would be only in the few cases in which the metal is heavy. The men
would not like so well not to have boys under them, as men would be less
obedient. Besides, boys must begin young to learn the trade. Leaving day-work
alone open to boys would not answer this purpose.”

And why not? Why could
not boys learn their handicraft in the day-time? Your reason?

“Owing to the men working days and nights in alternate weeks, the men would be separated
half the time from their boys, and would lose half the profit which they
make from them. The training which they give to an apprentice is considered
as part of the return for the boys’ labour, and thus enables the man to
get it at a cheaper rate. Each man would want half of this profit.”

In other words, Messrs. Sanderson would have to pay part of the wages of the
adult men out of their own pockets instead of by the night-work of the
boys. Messrs. Sanderson’s profit would thus fall to some extent, and this
is the good Sandersonian reason why boys cannot learn their handicraft
in the day. [70] In addition to this, it would throw
night-labour on those who worked instead of the boys, which they would
not be able to stand. The difficulties in fact would be so great that they
would very likely lead to the giving up of night-work altogether, and “as
far as the work itself is concerned,” says E. F. Sanderson, “this would
suit as well, but —” But Messrs. Sanderson have something else to make
besides steel. Steel-making is simply a pretext for surplus-value making.
The smelting furnaces, rolling-mills, &c., the buildings, machinery,
iron, coal, &c., have something more to do than transform themselves
into steel. They are there to absorb surplus-labour, and naturally absorb
more in 24 hours than in 12. In fact they give, by grace of
God and law, the Sandersons a cheque on the working-time of a certain number
of hands for all the 24 hours of the day, and they lose their character
as capital, are therefore a pure loss for the Sandersons, as soon as their
function of absorbing labour is interrupted.

“But then there would be the
loss from so much expensive machinery, lying idle half the time, and to
get through the amount of work which we are able to do on the present system,
we should have to double our premises and plant, which would double the
outlay.”

But why should these Sandersons pretend to a privilege not enjoyed
by the other capitalists who only work during the day, and whose buildings,
machinery, raw material, therefore lie “idle” during the night? E. F. Sanderson
answers in the name of all the Sandersons:

“It is true that there is this
loss from machinery lying idle in those manufactories in which work only
goes on by day. But the use of furnaces would involve a further loss in
our case. If they were kept up there would be a waste of fuel (instead
of, as now, a waste of the living substance of the workers), and if they
were not, there would be loss of time in laying the fires and getting the
heat up (whilst the loss of sleeping time, even to children of 8 is a gain
of working-time for the Sanderson tribe), and the furnaces themselves would
suffer from the changes of temperature.” (Whilst those same furnaces suffer
nothing from the day and night change of labour.) [71]

### SECTION 5

THE STRUGGLE FOR A NORMAL WORKING-DAY.

COMPULSORY LAWS FOR THE EXTENSION OF THE WORKING-DAY FROM THE MIDDLE OF THE 14TH TO THE END OF THE 17TH CENTURY

“What is a working-day? What is the length of time
during which capital may consume the labour-power whose daily value it
buys? How far may the working-day be extended beyond the working-time necessary
for the reproduction of labour-power itself?” It has been seen that to
these questions capital replies: the working-day contains the full 24 hours,
with the deduction of the few hours of repose without which labour-power
absolutely refuses its services again. Hence it is self-evident that the
labourer is nothing else, his whole life through, than labour-power, that
therefore all his disposable time is by nature and law labour-time, to
be devoted to the self-expansion of capital. Time for education, for intellectual
development, for the fulfilling of social functions and for social intercourse,
for the free-play of his bodily and mental activity, even the rest time
of Sunday (and that in a country of Sabbatarians!) [72]
— moonshine! But in its blind unrestrainable passion, its were-wolf hunger
for surplus-labour, capital oversteps not only the moral, but even the
merely physical maximum bounds of the working-day. It usurps the time for
growth, development, and healthy maintenance of the body. It steals the
time required for the consumption of fresh air and sunlight. It higgles
over a meal-time, incorporating it where possible with the process of production
itself, so that food is given to the labourer as to a mere means of production,
as coal is supplied to the boiler, grease and oil to the machinery. It
reduces the sound sleep needed for the restoration, reparation, refreshment
of the bodily powers to just so many hours of torpor as the revival of
an organism, absolutely exhausted, renders essential. It is not the normal
maintenance of the labour-power which is to determine the limits of the
working-day; it is the greatest possible daily expenditure of labour-power,
no matter how diseased, compulsory, and painful it may be, which is to
determine the limits of the labourers’ period of repose. Capital cares
nothing for the length of life of labour-power. All that concerns it is
simply and solely the maximum of labour-power, that can be rendered fluent
in a working-day. It attains this end by shortening the extent of the labourer’s
life, as a greedy farmer snatches increased produce from the soil by robbing
it of its fertility.

The capitalistic mode of production (essentially the production
of surplus-value, the absorption of surplus-labour), produces thus, with
the extension of the working-day, not only the deterioration of human labour-power
by robbing it of its normal, moral and physical, conditions of development
and function. It produces also the premature exhaustion and death of this
labour-power itself. [73] It extends the labourer’s
time of production during a given period by shortening his actual life-time.

But the value of the labour-power includes the value of the commodities
necessary for the reproduction of the worker, or for the keeping up of
the working-class. If then the unnatural extension of the working-day,
that capital necessarily strives after in its unmeasured passion for self-expansion,
shortens the length of life of the individual labourer, and therefore the
duration of his labour-power, the forces used up have to be replaced at
a more rapid rate and the sum of the expenses for the reproduction of labour-power
will be greater; just as in a machine the part of its value to be reproduced
every day is greater the more rapidly the machine is worn out. It would
seem therefore that the interest of capital itself points in the direction
of a normal working-day.

The slave-owner buys his labourer as he buys his horse. If he
loses his slave, he loses capital that can only be restored by new outlay
in the slave-mart.

But “the rice-grounds of Georgia, or the swamps of the
Mississippi may be fatally injurious to the human constitution; but the
waste of human life which the cultivation of these districts necessitates,
is not so great that it cannot be repaired from the teeming preserves of
Virginia and Kentucky. Considerations of economy, moreover, which, under
a natural system, afford some security for humane treatment by identifying
the master’s interest with the slave’s preservation, when once trading
in slaves is practiced, become reasons for racking to the uttermost the
toil of the slave; for, when his place can at once be supplied from foreign
preserves, the duration of his life becomes a matter of less moment than
its productiveness while it lasts. It is accordingly a maxim of slave management,
in slave-importing countries, that the most effective economy is that which
takes out of the human chattel in the shortest space of time the utmost
amount of exertion it is capable of putting forth. It is in tropical culture,
where annual profits often equal the whole capital of plantations, that
negro life is most recklessly sacrificed. It is the agriculture of the
West Indies, which has been for centuries prolific of fabulous wealth,
that has engulfed millions of the African race. It is in Cuba, at this
day, whose revenues are reckoned by millions, and whose planters are princes,
that we see in the servile class, the coarsest fare, the most exhausting
and unremitting toil, and even the absolute destruction of a portion of
its numbers every year.” [74]

Mutato nomine de te fabula narratur
[It is of you that the story is told – Horace]. For slave-trade read
labour-market, for Kentucky and Virginia, Ireland and the agricultural
districts of England, Scotland, and Wales, for Africa, Germany. We heard
how over-work thinned the ranks of the bakers in London. Nevertheless,
the London labour-market is always over-stocked with German and other candidates
for death in the bakeries. Pottery, as we saw, is one of the shortest-lived
industries. Is there any want therefore of potters? Josiah Wedgwood, the
inventor of modern pottery, himself originally a common workman, said in
1785 before the House of Commons that the whole trade employed from 15,000
to 20,000 people. [75] In the year 1861 the population
alone of the town centres of this industry in Great Britain numbered 101,302.

“The cotton trade has existed for ninety years.... It has existed for three
generations of the English race, and I believe I may safely say that during
that period it has destroyed nine generations of factory operatives.” [76]

No doubt in certain epochs of feverish activity the labour-market
shows significant gaps. In 1834, e.g. But then the manufacturers
proposed to the Poor Law Commissioners that they should send the “surplus-population”
of the agricultural districts to the north, with the explanation “that
the manufacturers would absorb and use it up.” [77]

Agents were appointed with the consent of the Poor Law Commissioners. ...
An office was set up in Manchester, to which lists were sent of
those workpeople in the agricultural districts wanting employment, and
their names were registered in books. The manufacturers attended at these
offices, and selected such persons as they chose; when they had selected
such persons as their ‘wants required’, they gave instructions to have
them forwarded to Manchester, and they were sent, ticketed like bales of
goods, by canals, or with carriers, others tramping on the road, and many
of them were found on the way lost and half-starved. This system had grown
up unto a regular trade. This House will hardly believe it, but I tell
them, that this traffic in human flesh was as well kept up, they were in
effect as regularly sold to these [Manchester] manufacturers as slaves
are sold to the cotton-grower in the United States.... In 1860, ‘the cotton
trade was at its zenith.’ ... The manufacturers again found that they were
short of hands.... They applied to the ‘flesh agents, as they are called.
Those agents sent to the southern downs of England, to the pastures of
Dorsetshire, to the glades of Devonshire, to the people tending kine in
Wiltshire, but they sought in vain. The surplus-population was ‘absorbed.’”

The Bury Guardian said, on the completion of the French treaty,
that “10,000 additional hands could be absorbed by Lancashire, and that
30,000 or 40,000 will be needed.” After the “flesh agents and sub-agents”
had in vain sought through the agricultural districts,

“a deputation came
up to London, and waited on the right hon. gentleman [Mr. Villiers, President
of the Poor Law Board] with a view of obtaining poor children from certain
union houses for the mills of Lancashire.” [78]

What experience shows to the capitalist generally is a constant
excess of population, i.e., an excess in relation to the momentary requirements
of surplus-labour-absorbing capital, although this excess is made up of
generations of human beings stunted, short-lived, swiftly replacing each
other, plucked, so to say, before maturity. [79] And,
indeed, experience shows to the intelligent observer with what swiftness
and grip the capitalist mode of production, dating, historically speaking,
only from yesterday, has seized the vital power of the people by the very
root — shows how the degeneration of the industrial population is only
retarded by the constant absorption of primitive and physically uncorrupted
elements from the country — shows how even the country labourers, in spite
of fresh air and the principle of natural selection, that works so powerfully
amongst them, and only permits the survival of the strongest, are already
beginning to die off. [80] Capital that has such good
reasons for denying the sufferings of the legions of workers that surround
it, is in practice moved as much and as little by the sight of the coming
degradation and final depopulation of the human race, as by
the probable fall of the earth into the sun. In every stockjobbing swindle
every one knows that some time or other the crash must come, but every
one hopes that it may fall on the head of his neighbour, after he himself
has caught the shower of gold and placed it in safety. Après
moi le déluge! [After me, the flood] is the watchword of every capitalist and of every
capitalist nation. Hence Capital is reckless of the health or length of
life of the labourer, unless under compulsion from society. [81]
To the out-cry as to the physical and mental degradation, the premature
death, the torture of over-work, it answers: Ought these to trouble us
since they increase our profits? But looking at things as a whole, all
this does not, indeed, depend on the good or ill will of the individual
capitalist. Free competition brings out the inherent laws of capitalist
production, in the shape of external coercive laws having power over every
individual capitalist. [82]
The establishment of a normal working-day is the result of centuries
of struggle between capitalist and labourer. The history of this
struggle shows two opposed tendencies. Compare, e.g., the English factory
legislation of our time with the English labour Statutes from the 14th
century to well into the middle of the 18th. [83] Whilst the modern Factory Acts compulsorily shortened the working-day, the earlier
statutes tried to lengthen it by compulsion. Of course the pretensions
of capital in embryo — when, beginning to grow, it secures the right of
absorbing a quantum sufficit [sufficient quantity] of surplus-labour, not merely by the
force of economic relations, but by the help of the State — appear very
modest when put face to face with the concessions that, growling and struggling,
it has to make in its adult condition. It takes centuries ere the “free”
labourer, thanks to the development of capitalistic production, agrees,
i.e., is compelled by social conditions, to sell the whole of his
active life, his very capacity for work, for the price of the necessaries
of life, his birth-right for a mess of pottage. Hence it is natural that
the lengthening of the working-day, which capital, from the middle of the
14th to the end of the 17th century, tries to impose by State-measures
on adult labourers, approximately coincides with the shortening of the
working-day which, in the second half of the 19th century, has here and
there been effected by the State to prevent the coining of children’s blood
into capital. That which to-day, e.g., in the State of Massachusetts,
until recently the freest State of the North-American Republic, has been
proclaimed as the statutory limit of the labour of children under 12, was
in England, even in the middle of the 17th century, the normal working-day
of able-bodied artisans, robust labourers, athletic blacksmiths. [84]

The first “Statute of Labourers” (23 Edward III., 1349) found
its immediate pretext (not its cause, for legislation of this kind lasts
centuries after the pretext for it has disappeared) in the great plague
that decimated the people, so that, as a Tory writer says, “The difficulty
of getting men to work on reasonable terms (i.e., at a price that
left their employers a reasonable quantity of surplus-labour) grew to such
a height as to be quite intolerable.” [85] Reasonable
wages were, therefore, fixed by law as well as the limits of
the working-day. The latter point, the only one that here interests us,
is repeated in the Statute of 1496 (Henry VII.). The working-day for all
artificers and field labourers from March to September ought, according
to this statute (which, however, could not be enforced), to last from 5
in the morning to between 7 and 8 in the evening. But the meal-times consist
of 1 hour for breakfast, 1½ hours for dinner, and ½ an hour for “noon-meate,”
i.e., exactly twice as much as under the factory acts now in force. [86] In winter, work was to last from 5 in the morning until dark, with the
same intervals. A statute of Elizabeth of 1562 leaves the length of the
working-day for all labourers “hired for daily or weekly wage” untouched,
but aims at limiting the intervals to 2½ hours in the summer, or to
2 in the winter. Dinner is only to last 1 hour, and the “afternoon-sleep
of half an hour” is only allowed between the middle of May and the middle
of August. For every hour of absence 1d. is to be subtracted from the wage.
In practice, however, the conditions were much more favourable to the labourers
than in the statute-book. William Petty, the father of Political Economy,
and to some extent the founder of Statistics, says in a work that he published
in the last third of the 17th century:

“Labouring-men (then meaning field-labourers)
work 10 hours per diem, and make 20 meals per week, viz., 3 a day for working-days,
and 2 on Sundays; whereby it is plain, that if they could fast on Friday
nights, and dine in one hour and an half, whereas they take two, from eleven
to one; thereby thus working 1/20 more, and spending 1/20 less, the above-mentioned
(tax) might be raised.” [87]

Was not Dr. Andrew Ure
right in crying down the 12 hours’ bill of 1833 as a retrogression to the
times of the dark ages? It is true these regulations contained in the statute
mentioned by Petty, apply also to apprentices. But the condition of child-labour,
even at the end of the 17th century, is seen from the following complaint:

“’Tis not their practice (in Germany) as with us in this kingdom, to bind
an apprentice for seven years; three or four is their common
standard: and the reason is, because they are educated from their cradle
to something of employment, which renders them the more apt and docile,
and consequently the more capable of attaining to a ripeness and quicker
proficiency in business. Whereas our youth, here in England, being bred
to nothing before they come to be apprentices, make a very slow progress
and require much longer time wherein to reach the perfection of accomplished
artists.” [88]

Still, during the greater part of the 18th century, up to the
epoch of Modern Industry and machinism, capital in England had not succeeded
in seizing for itself, by the payment of the weekly value of labour-power,
the whole week of the labourer, with the exception, however, of the agricultural
labourers. The fact that they could live for a whole week on the wage of
four days, did not appear to the labourers a sufficient reason that they
should work the other two days for the capitalist. One party of English
economists, in the interest of capital, denounces this obstinacy in the
most violent manner, another party defends the labourers. Let us listen,
e.g., to the contest between Postlethwayt whose Dictionary of Trade
then had the same reputation as the kindred works of MacCulloch and MacGregor
to-day, and the author (already quoted) of the “Essay on Trade and Commerce.”

Postlethwayt says among other things:

“We cannot put an end to those few observations, without noticing that trite remark in the
mouth of too many; that if the industrious poor can obtain enough to maintain
themselves in five days, they will not work the whole six. Whence they
infer the necessity of even the necessaries of life being made dear by
taxes, or any other means, to compel the working artisan and manufacturer
to labour the whole six days in the week, without ceasing. I must beg leave
to differ in sentiment from those great politicians, who contend for the
perpetual slavery of the working people of this kingdom; they forget the
vulgar adage, all work and no play. Have not the English boasted of the
ingenuity and dexterity of her working artists and manufacturers which
have heretofore given credit and reputation to British wares in general?
What has this been owing to? To nothing more probably than the relaxation
of the working people in their own way. Were they obliged to toil the year
round, the whole six days in the week, in a repetition of the same work,
might it not blunt their ingenuity, and render them stupid instead of alert
and dexterous; and might not our workmen lose their reputation instead
of maintaining it by such eternal slavery? ... And what sort of workmanship
could we expect from such hard-driven animals? ... Many of them will execute
as much work in four days as a Frenchman will in five or six. But if Englishmen
are to be eternal drudges, ‘tis to be feared they will degenerate below
the Frenchmen. As our people are famed for bravery in war, do we not say
that it is owing to good English roast beef and pudding in their bellies,
as well as their constitutional spirit of liberty? And why may not the
superior ingenuity and dexterity of, our artists and manufacturers, be
owing to that freedom and liberty to direct themselves in their own way,
and I hope we shall never have them deprived of such privileges and that
good living from whence their ingenuity no less than their courage may
proceed.”[90]

Thereupon the author of the “Essay on Trade and Commerce” replies:

“If the making of every seventh day an holiday is supposed to be of divine institution, as it implies the appropriating the other six days to labour” (he means capital as we shall soon see) “surely it will not be thought cruel to enforce
it .... That mankind in general, are naturally inclined to ease and indolence,
we fatally experience to be true, from the conduct of our manufacturing
populace, who do not labour, upon an average, above four days in a week,
unless provisions happen to be very dear.... Put all the necessaries of the poor under one denomination; for instance, call them all wheat, or
suppose that ... the bushel of wheat shall cost five shillings and that
he (a manufacturer) earns a shilling by his labour, he then would be obliged
to work five days only in a week. If the bushel of wheat should cost but
four shillings, he would be obliged to work but four days; but as wages
in this kingdom are much higher in proportion to the price of necessaries
... the manufacturer, who labours four days, has a surplus of money to
live idle with the rest of the week . ... I hope I have said enough to
make it appear that the moderate labour of six days in a week is no slavery.
Our labouring people do this, and to all appearance are the happiest of
all our labouring poor, [91] but the Dutch do this in
manufactures, and appear to be a very happy people. The French do so, when
holidays do not intervene. [92] But our populace have
adopted a notion, that as Englishmen they enjoy a birthright privilege
of being more free and independent than in any country in Europe. Now this idea, as far as it may affect the bravery of our troops, may be of some
use; but the less the manufacturing poor have of it, certainly the better
for themselves and for the State. The labouring people should never think
themselves independent of their superiors.... It is extremely dangerous
to encourage mobs in a commercial state like ours, where, perhaps, seven
parts out of eight of the whole, are people with little or no property.
The cure will not be perfect, till our manufacturing poor are contented
to labour six days for the same sum which they now earn in four days.”

To this end, and for “extirpating idleness debauchery and excess,” promoting a spirit of industry, “lowering the price of labour
in our manufactories, and easing the lands of the heavy burden of poor’s
rates,” our “faithful Eckart” of capital proposes this approved device:
to shut up such labourers as become dependent on public support,
in a word, paupers, in “an ideal workhouse.” Such ideal workhouse
must be made a “House of Terror,” and not an asylum for the poor, “where
they are to be plentifully fed, warmly and decently clothed, and where
they do but little work.” [94] In this “House of Terror,” this “ideal workhouse, the poor shall work 14 hours in a day, allowing
proper time for meals, in such manner that there shall remain 12 hours
of neat-labour.” [95]

Twelve working-hours daily in the Ideal Workhouse, in the “House
of Terror” of 1770! 63 years later, in 1833, when the English Parliament
reduced the working-day for children of 13 to 18, in four branches of industry
to 12 full hours, the judgment day of English Industry had dawned! In 1852,
when Louis Bonaparte sought to secure his position with the bourgeoisie
by tampering with the legal working-day, the French working people cried
out with one voice “the law that limits the working-day to 12 hours is
the one good that has remained to us of the legislation of the Republic!”
[96] At Zürich the work of children over 10, is limited to 12 hours; in Aargau in 1862, the work of children between 13
and 16, was reduced from 12½ to 12 hours; in Austria in 1860, for children
between 14 and 16, the same reduction was made. [97] “What a progress,” since 1770! Macaulay would shout with exultation!

The “House of Terror” for paupers of which the capitalistic soul
of 1770 only dreamed, was realised a few years later in the shape of a
gigantic “Workhouse” for the industrial worker himself. It is called the
Factory. And the ideal this time fades before the reality.

## SECTION 6. THE STRUGGLE FOR THE NORMAL WORKING-DAY. COMPULSORY LIMITATION BY LAW OF THE WORKING-TIME. THE ENGLISH FACTORY ACTS, 1833 TO 1864

After capital had taken centuries in extending the
working-day to its normal maximum limit, and then beyond this to the limit
of the natural day of 12 hours, [98] there followed
on the birth of machinism and modern industry in the last third of the
18th century, a violent encroachment like that of an avalanche in its intensity
and extent. All bounds of morals and nature, age and sex, day and night,
were broken down. Even the ideas of day and night, of rustic simplicity
in the old statutes, became so confused that an English judge, as late
as 1860, needed a quite Talmudic sagacity to explain “judicially” what
was day and what was night. [99] Capital celebrated
its orgies.

As soon as the working-class, stunned at first by the noise and
turmoil of the new system of production, recovered, in some measure, its
senses, its resistance began, and first in the native land of machinism,
in England. For 30 years, however, the concessions conquered by the workpeople
were purely nominal. Parliament passed 5 labour Laws between 1802 and 1833,
but was shrewd enough not to vote a penny for their carrying out, for the
requisite officials, &c. [100]

They remained a dead letter. “The fact is, that prior to the Act
of 1833, young persons and children were worked all night, all day, or
both ad libitum.” [101]

A normal working-day for modern industry only dates from
the Factory Act of 1833, which included cotton, wool, flax, and silk factories.
Nothing is more characteristic of the spirit of capital than the history
of the English Factory Acts from 1833 to 1864.

The Act of 1833 declares the ordinary factory working-day to be
from half-past five in the morning to half-past eight in the evening and
within these limits, a period of 15 hours, it is lawful to employ young
persons (i.e., persons between 13 and 18 years of age), at any time
of the day, provided no one individual young person should work more than
12 hours in any one day, except in certain cases especially provided for.
The 6th section of the Act provided. “That there shall be allowed in the
course of every day not less than one and a half hours for meals to every
such person restricted as hereinbefore provided.” The employment of children
under 9, with exceptions mentioned later was forbidden; the work of children
between 9 and 13 was limited to 8 hours a day, night-work, i.e.,
according to this Act, work between 8:30 p.m. and 5:30 a.m., was forbidden
for all persons between 9 and 18.

The law-makers were so far from wishing to trench on the freedom
of capital to exploit adult labour-power, or, as they called it, “the freedom
of labour,” that they created a special system in order to prevent the
Factory Acts from having a consequence so outrageous.

“The great evil of the factory system as at present conducted,”
says the first report of the Central Board of the Commission of June 28th
1833, “has appeared to us to be that it entails the necessity of continuing
the labour of children to the utmost length of that of the adults. The
only remedy for this evil, short of the limitation of the labour of adults
which would, in our opinion, create an evil greater than that which is
sought to be remedied, appears to be the plan of working double sets of
children.”

... Under the name of System of Relays, this “plan” was therefore
carried out, so that, e.g., from 5.30 a.m. until 1.30 in the afternoon,
one set of children between 9 and 13, and from 1.30 p.m. to 8.30 in the
evening another set were “put to,” &c.

In order to reward the manufacturers for having, in the most barefaced
way, ignored all the Acts as to children’s labour passed during the last
twenty-two years, the pill was yet further gilded for them. Parliament
decreed that after March 1st, 1834, no child under 11, after March 1st
1835, no child under 12, and after March 1st, 1836, no child under 13 was
to work more than eight hours in a factory. This “liberalism,” so full
of consideration for “capital,” was the more noteworthy as. Dr. Farre,
Sir A. Carlisle, Sir B. Brodie, Sir C. Bell, Mr. Guthrie, &c., in a
word, the most distinguished physicians and surgeons in London, had declared
in their evidence before the House of Commons, that there was danger in
delay. Dr. Farre expressed himself still more coarsely.

“Legislation is necessary for the prevention of death, in any form in which it can be
prematurely inflicted, and certainly this (i.e., the factory method) must
be viewed as a most cruel mode of inflicting it.”

That same “reformed” Parliament, which in its delicate consideration
for the manufacturers, condemned children under 13, for years to come,
to 72 hours of work per week in the Factory Hell, on the other hand, in
the Emancipation Act, which also administered freedom drop by drop, forbade
the planters, from the outset, to work any negro slave more than 45 hours
a week.

But in no wise conciliated, capital now began a noisy agitation
that went on for several years. It turned chiefly on the age of those who,
under the name of children, were limited to 8 hours’ work, and were subject
to a certain amount of compulsory education. According to capitalistic
anthropology, the age of childhood ended at 10, or at the outside, at 11.
The more nearly the time approached for the coming into full force of the
Factory Act, the fatal year 1836, the more wildly raged the mob of manufacturers.
They managed, in fact, to intimidate the government to such an extent that
in 1835 it proposed to lower the limit of the age of childhood from 13
to 12. In the meantime the pressure from without grew more threatening.
Courage failed the House of Commons. It refused to throw children of 13
under the Juggernaut Car of capital for more than 8 hours a day, and the
Act of 1833 came into full operation. It remained unaltered until June,
1844.

In the ten years during which it regulated factory work, first
in part, and then entirely, the official reports of the factory inspectors
teem with complaints as to the impossibility of putting the Act into force.
As the law of 1833 left it optional with the lords of capital during the
15 hours, from 5.30 a.m. to 8.30 p.m., to make every “young person,” and
“every child” begin, break off, resume, or end his 12 or 8 hours at any
moment they liked, and also permitted them to assign to different persons,
different times for meals, these gentlemen soon discovered a new “system
of relays,” by which the labour-horses were not changed at fixed stations,
but were constantly re-harnessed at changing stations. We do not pause
longer on the beauty of this system, as we shall have to return to it later.
But this much is clear at the first glance: that this system annulled the
whole Factory Act, not only in the spirit, but in the letter. How could
factory inspectors, with this complex bookkeeping in respect to each individual
child or young person, enforce the legally determined work-time and the
granting of the legal mealtimes? In a great many of the factories, the
old brutalities soon blossomed out again unpunished. In an interview with
the Home Secretary (1844), the factory inspectors demonstrated the impossibility
of any control under the newly invented relay system. [102] In the meantime, however, circumstances had greatly changed. The factory hands, especially since 1838, had made the Ten Hours’ Bill their economic,
as they had made the Charter their political, election-cry. Some of the manufacturers, even, who had managed their factories in conformity with the Act of 1833, overwhelmed Parliament with memorials on the immoral competition
of their false brethren whom greater impudence, or more fortunate local
circumstances, enabled to break the law. Moreover, however much the individual
manufacturer might give the rein to his old lust for gain, the spokesmen
and political leaders of the manufacturing class ordered a change of front
and of speech towards the workpeople. They had entered upon the contest
for the repeal of the Corn Laws, and needed the workers to help them to
victory. They promised therefore, not only a double-sized loaf of bread,
but the enactment of the Ten Hours’ Bill in the Free-trade millennium.
[103] Thus they still less dared to oppose a measure intended only to make the law of 1833 a reality. Threatened in their holiest
interest, the rent of land, the Tories thundered with philanthropic indignation
against the “nefarious practices” [104] of their foes.

This was the origin of the additional Factory Act of June 7th,
1844. It came into effect on September 10th, 1844. It places under protection
a new category of workers, viz., the women over 18. They were placed in
every respect on the same footing as the young persons, their work time
limited to twelve hours, their night-labour forbidden, &c. For the
first time, legislation saw itself compelled to control directly and officially
the labour of adults. In the Factory Report of 1844-1845, it is said with
irony:

“No instances have come to my knowledge of adult women having expressed
any regret at their rights being thus far interfered with.” [105] The working-time of children under 13 was reduced to 6½, and in certain circumstances to 7 hours a-day. [106]

To get rid of the abuses of the “spurious relay system,” the law
established besides others the following important regulations: —

“That
the hours of work of children and young persons shall be reckoned from
the time when any child or young person shall begin to work in the morning.”

So that if A, e.g., begins work at 8 in the morning, and B at
10, B’s work-day must nevertheless end at the same hour as A’s. “The time
shall be regulated by a public clock,” for example, the nearest railway
clock, by which the factory clock is to be set. The occupier is to hang
up a “legible” printed notice stating the hours for the beginning and ending
of work and the times allowed for the several meals. Children beginning
work before 12 noon may not be again employed after 1 p.m. The afternoon
shift must therefore consist of other children than those employed in the
morning. Of the hour and a half for meal-times,

“one hour thereof at the
least shall be given before three of the clock in the afternoon ... and
at the same period of the day. No child or young person shall be employed
more than five hours before 1 p.m. without an interval for meal-time of
at least 30 minutes. No child or young person [or female] shall be employed
or allowed to remain in any room in which any manufacturing process is
then [i.e., at mealtimes] carried on,” &c.

It has been seen that these minutiae, which, with military uniformity,
regulate by stroke of the clock the times, limits, pauses of the work were
not at all the products of Parliamentary fancy. They developed gradually
out of circumstances as natural laws of the modern mode of production.
Their formulation, official recognition, and proclamation by the State,
were the result of a long struggle of classes. One of their first consequences
was that in practice the working-day of the adult males in factories became
subject to the same limitations, since in most processes of production
the co-operation of the children. young persons, and women is indispensable.
On the whole, therefore, during the period from 1844 to 1847, the 12 hours’
working-day became general and uniform in all branches of industry under
the Factory Act.

The manufacturers, however, did not allow this “progress” without
a compensating “retrogression.” At their instigation the House of Commons
reduced the minimum age for exploitable children from 9 to 8, in order
to assure that additional supply of factory children which is due to capitalists,
according to divine and human law. [107]

The years 1846-47 are epoch-making in the economic history of
England. The Repeal of the Corn Laws, and of the duties on cotton and other
raw material; Free-trade proclaimed as the guiding star of legislation;
in a word, the arrival of the millennium. On the other hand, in the same
years, the Chartist movement and the 10 hours’ agitation reached their
highest point. They found allies in the Tories panting for revenge.
Despite the fanatical opposition of the army of perjured Free-traders,
with Bright and Cobden at their head, the Ten Hours’ Bill, struggled for
so long, went through Parliament.

The new Factory Act of June 8th, 1847, enacted that on July 1st,
1847, there should be a preliminary shortening of the working-day for “young
persons” (from 13 to 18), and all females to 11 hours, but that on May
1st, 1848, there should be a definite limitation of the working-day to
10 hours. In other respects, the Act only amended and completed the Acts
of 1833 and 1844.

Capital now entered upon a preliminary campaign in order to hinder
the Act from coming into full force on May 1st, 1848. And the workers themselves,
under the presence that they had been taught by experience, were to help
in the destruction of their own work. The moment was cleverly chosen.

“It must be remembered, too, that there has been more than two years of great
suffering (in consequence of the terrible crisis of 1846-47) among the
factory operatives, from many mills having worked short time, and many
being altogether closed. A considerable number of the operatives must therefore
be in very narrow circumstances many, it is to be feared, in debt; so that
it might fairly have been presumed that at the present time they would
prefer working the longer time, in order to make up for past losses, perhaps
to pay off debts, or get their furniture out of pawn, or replace that sold,
or to get a new supply of clothes for themselves and their families.” [108]

The manufacturers tried to aggravate the natural effect of these
circumstances by a general reduction of wages by 10%. This was done so
to say, to celebrate the inauguration of the new Free-trade era. Then followed
a further reduction of 8 1/3% as soon as the working-day was shortened
to 11, and a reduction of double that amount as soon as it was finally
shortened to 10 hours. Wherever, therefore, circumstances allowed it, a
reduction of wages of at least 25% took place. [109]
Under such favourably prepared conditions the agitation among the factory
workers for the repeal of the Act of 1847 was begun. Neither lies, bribery,
nor threats were spared in this attempt. But all was in vain. Concerning
the half-dozen petitions in which workpeople were made to complain of “their
oppression by the Act,” the petitioners themselves declared under oral
examination, that their signatures had been extorted from them. “They felt
themselves oppressed, but not exactly by the Factory Act.”
[110] But if the manufacturers did not succeed in making the workpeople speak as they wished, they themselves shrieked all the louder in press and Parliament in the name of the workpeople. They denounced the Factory Inspectors as a kind of revolutionary commissioners like those
of the French National Convention ruthlessly sacrificing the unhappy factory
workers to their humanitarian crotchet. This manoeuvre also failed. Factory
Inspector Leonard Horner conducted in his own person, and through his sub-inspectors,
many examinations of witnesses in the factories of Lancashire. About 70%
of the workpeople examined declared in favour of 10 hours, a much smaller
percentage in favour of 11, and an altogether insignificant minority for
the old 12 hours. [111]

Another “friendly” dodge was to make the adult males work 12 to
15 hours, and then to blazon abroad this fact as the best proof of what
the proletariat desired in its heart of hearts. But the “ruthless” Factory
Inspector Leonard Horner was again to the fore. The majority of the “over-times”
declared:

“They would much prefer working ten hours for less wages, but
that they had no choice; that so many were out of employment (so many spinners
getting very low wages by having to work as piecers, being unable to do
better), that if they refused to work the longer time, others would immediately
get their places, so that it was a question with them of agreeing to work
the longer time, or of being thrown out of employment altogether.” [112]

The preliminary campaign of capital thus came to grief, and the
Ten Hours’ Act came into force May 1st, 1848. But meanwhile the fiasco
of the Chartist party whose leaders were imprisoned, and whose organisation
was dismembered, had shaken the confidence of the English working-class
in its own strength. Soon after this the June insurrection in Paris and
its bloody suppression united, in England as on the Continent, all fractions
of the ruling classes, landlords and capitalists, stock-exchange wolves
and shop-keepers, Protectionists and Freetraders, government and opposition,
priests and freethinkers, young whores and old nuns, under the common cry
for the salvation of Property, Religion, the Family and Society.
The working-class was everywhere proclaimed, placed under a ban, under
a virtual law of suspects. The manufacturers had no need any longer to
restrain themselves. They broke out in open revolt not only against the
Ten Hours’ Act, but against the whole of the legislation that since 1833
had aimed at restricting in some measure the “free” exploitation of labour-power.
It was a pro-slavery rebellion in miniature, carried on for over two years
with a cynical recklessness, a terrorist energy all the cheaper because
the rebel capitalist risked nothing except the skin of his “hands.”

To understand that which follows we must remember that the Factory
Acts of 1833, 1844, and 1847 were all three in force so far as the one
did not amend the other: that not one of these limited the working-day
of the male worker over 18, and that since 1833 the 15 hours from 5.30
a.m. to 8.30 p.m. had remained the legal “day,” within the limits of which
at first the 12, and later the 10 hours’ labour of young persons and women
had to be performed under the prescribed conditions.

The manufacturers began by here and there discharging a part of,
in many cases half of the young persons and women employed by them, and
then, for the adult males, restoring the almost obsolete night-work. The
Ten Hours’ Act, they cried, leaves no other alternative. [113]

Their second step dealt with the legal pauses for meals. Let us
hear the Factory Inspectors.

“Since the restriction of the hours of work
to ten, the factory occupiers maintain, although they have not yet practically
gone the whole length, that supposing the hours of work to be from 9 a.m.
to 7 p.m. they fulfil the provisions of the statutes by allowing an hour
before 9 a.m. and half an hour after 7 p.m. [for meals]. In some cases
they now allow an hour, or half an hour for dinner, insisting at the same
time, that they are not bound to allow any part of the hour and a half
in the course of the factory working-day.” [114] The
manufacturers maintained therefore that the scrupulously strict provisions
of the Act of 1844 with regard to meal-times only gave the operatives permission
to eat and drink before coming into, and after leaving the factory — i.e.,
at home. And why should not the workpeople eat their dinner before 9 in
the morning? The crown lawyers, however, decided that the prescribed meal-times

“must be in the interval during the working-hours, and that it will not
be lawful to work for 10 hours continuously, from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m., without
any interval.” [115]

After these pleasant demonstrations, Capital preluded its revolt
by a step which agreed with the letter of the law of 1844, and
was therefore legal.

The Act of 1844 certainly prohibited the employment after 1 p.m.
of such children, from 8 to 13, as had been employed before noon. But it
did not regulate in any way the 6½ hours’ work of the children whose
work-time began at 12 midday or later. Children of 8 might, if they began
work at noon, be employed from 12 to 1, 1 hour; from 2 to 4 in the afternoon,
2 hours; from 5 to 8.30 in the evening, 3½ hours; in all, the legal
6½ hours. Or better still. In order to make their work coincide with
that of the adult male labourers up to 8.30 p.m., the manufacturers only
had to give them no work till 2 in the afternoon, they could then keep
them in the factory without intermission till 8.30 in the evening.

“And it is now expressly admitted that the practice exists in England from the
desire of mill-owners to have their machinery at work for more than 10
hours a-day, to keep the children at work with male adults after all the
young persons and women have left, and until 8.30 p.m. if the factory-owners
choose.” [116]

Workmen and factory inspectors protested on hygienic and moral grounds, but Capital answered:

“My deeds upon my head! I crave the law,

The penalty and forfeit of my bond.”

In fact, according to statistics laid before the House of Commons on July
26th, 1850, in spite of all protests, on July 15th, 1850, 3,742 children
were subjected to this “practice” in 257 factories. [117] Still, this was not enough. The Lynx eye of Capital discovered that the Act of 1844 did not allow 5 hours’ work before mid-day without a pause
of at least 30 minutes for refreshment, but prescribed nothing of the kind
for work after mid-day. Therefore, it claimed and obtained the enjoyment
not only of making children of 8 drudge without intermission from 2 to
8.30 p.m., but also of making them hunger during that time.

“Ay, his heart.

So says the bond.”

This Shylock-clinging [118]
to the letter of the law of 1844, so far as it regulated children’s labour, was but to lead up to an open revolt against the same law, so far as it regulated the labour of “young persons and women.” It will be remembered that the abolition of the “false relay system” was
the chief aim and object of that law. The masters began their revolt with
the simple declaration that the sections of the Act of 1844 which prohibited
the ad libitum use of young persons and women in such short fractions
of the day of 15 hours as the employer chose, were “comparatively harmless”
so long as the work-time was fixed at 12 hours. But under the Ten Hours’
Act they were a “grievous hardship.” [119] They informed the inspectors in the coolest manner that they should place themselves above the letter of the law, and re-introduce the old system on their own account. [120] They were acting in the interests of the ill-advised operatives themselves, “in order to be able to pay them higher wages.”

"This was the only possible plan by which to maintain, under the Ten Hours’ Act, the industrial supremacy of Great Britain.” “Perhaps it may be a little difficult to detect irregularities under the relay system;
but what of that? Is the great manufacturing interest of this country to
be treated as a secondary matter in order to save some little trouble to
Inspectors and Sub-Inspectors of Factories?” [121]

All these shifts naturally were of no avail. The Factory Inspectors
appealed to the Law Courts. But soon such a cloud of dust in the way of
petitions from the masters overwhelmed the Home Secretary, Sir George Grey,
that in a circular of August 5th, 1848, he recommends the inspectors not

“to lay informations against mill-owners for a breach of the letter of
the Act, or for employment of young persons by relays in cases in which
there is no reason to believe that such young persons have been actually
employed for a longer period than that sanctioned by law.” Hereupon, Factory
Inspector J. Stuart allowed the so-called relay system during the 15 hours
of the factory day throughout Scotland, where it soon flourished again
as of old. The English Factory Inspectors, on the other hand, declared
that the Home Secretary had no power dictatorially to suspend the law,
and continued their legal proceedings against the pro-slavery rebellion.

But what was the good of summoning the capitalists when
the Courts in this case the county magistrates — Cobbett’s “Great Unpaid”
— acquitted them? In these tribunals, the masters sat in judgment on themselves
An example. One Eskrigge, cotton-spinner, of the firm of Kershaw, Leese,
& Co., had laid before the Factory Inspector of his district the scheme
of a relay system intended for his mill. Receiving a refusal, he at first kept quiet. A few months later, an individual named Robinson, also a cotton-spinner, and if not his Man Friday, at all events related to Eskrigge, appeared before the borough magistrates of Stockport on a charge of introducing
the identical plan of relays invented by Eskrigge. Four Justices sat, among
them three cottonspinners, at their head this same inevitable Eskrigge.
Eskrigge acquitted Robinson, and now was of opinion that what was right
for Robinson was fair for Eskrigge. Supported by his own legal decision,
he introduced the system at once into his own factory. [122] Of course, the composition of this tribunal was in itself a violation of the law. [123]

These judicial farces, exclaims Inspector Howell, “urgently call for a remedy — either that the law should be so altered as to be made to conform to these decisions, or that it should
be administered by a less fallible tribunal, whose decisions would conform
to the law ... when these cases are brought forward. I long for a stipendiary
magistrate.” [124]

The crown lawyers declared the masters’ interpretation of the
Act of 1848 absurd. But the Saviours of Society would not allow themselves
to be turned from their purpose. Leonard Horner reports,

“Having endeavoured
to enforce the Act ... by ten prosecutions in seven magisterial divisions,
and having been supported by the magistrates in one case only ... I considered
it useless to prosecute more for this evasion of the law. That part of
the Act of 1848 which was framed for securing uniformity in the hours of
work, ... is thus no longer in force in my district (Lancashire). Neither
have the sub-inspectors or myself any means of satisfying ourselves, when
we inspect a mill working by shifts, that the young persons and women are
not working more than 10 hours a-day.... In a return of the 30th April,
... of millowners working by shifts, the number amounts to 114, and has
been for some time rapidly increasing. In general, the time of working
the mill is extended to 13½ hours’ from 6 a.m. to 7½ p.m., .... in
some instances it amounts to 15 hours, from 5½ a.m. to 8½ p.m.”

Already, in December, 1848, Leonard Horner had
a list of 65 manufacturers and 29 overlookers who unanimously declared
that no system of supervision could, under this relay system, prevent enormous
over-work. [126] Now, the same children and young persons were shifted from the spinning-room to the weaving-room, now, during 15
hours, from one factory to another. [127] How was it
possible to control a system which,

“under the guise of relays, is some
one of the many plans for shuffling ‘the hands’ about in endless variety,
and shifting the hours of work and of rest for different individuals throughout
the day, so that you may never have one complete set of hands working together
in the same room at the same time.” [128]

But altogether independently of actual over-work, this so-called
relay system was an offspring of capitalistic fantasy, such as Fourier,
in his humorous sketches of “Courtes Seances,” has never surpassed, except
that the “attraction of labour” was changed into the attraction of capital.
Look, for example, at those schemes of the masters which the “respectable”
press praised as models of “what a reasonable degree of care and method
can accomplish.” The personnel of the workpeople was sometimes divided
into from 12 to 14 categories, which themselves constantly changed and
recharged their constituent parts. During the 15 hours of the factory day,
capital dragged in the labourer now for 30 minutes, now for an hour, and
then pushed him out again, to drag him into the factory and to thrust him
out afresh, hounding him hither and thither, in scattered shreds of time,
without ever losing hold of him until the full 10 hours’ work was done.
As on the stage, the same persons had to appear in turns in the different
scenes of the different acts. But as an actor during the whole course of
the play belongs to the stage, so the operatives, during 15 hours, belonged
to the factory, without reckoning the time for going and coming. Thus the
hours of rest were turned into hours of enforced idleness, which drove
the youths to the pot-house, and the girls to the brothel. At every new
trick that the capitalist, from day to day, hit upon for keeping his machinery
going 12 or 15 hours without increasing the number of his hands, the worker
had to swallow his meals now in this fragment of time, now in that. At
the time of the 10 hours’ agitation, the masters cried out that the working
mob petitioned in the hope of obtaining 12 hours’ wages for 10 hours’ work.
Now they reversed the medal. They paid 10 hours’ wages for 12 or 15 hours’ lordship over labour-power. [129] This
was the gist of the matter, this the masters’ interpretation of the 10
hours’ law! These were the same unctuous Free-traders, perspiring with
the love of humanity, who for full 10 years, during the Anti-Corn Law agitation,
had preached to the operatives, by a reckoning of pounds, shillings, and
pence, that with free importation of corn, and with the means possessed
by English industry, 10 hours’ labour would be quite enough to enrich the
capitalists. [130] This revolt of capital, after two
years was at last crowned with victory by a decision of one of the four
highest Courts of Justice in England, the Court of Exchequer, which in
a case brought before it on February 8th, 1850, decided that the manufacturers
were certainly acting against the sense of the Act of 1844, but that this
Act itself contained certain words that rendered it meaningless. “By this
decision, the Ten Hours’ Act was abolished.” [131]
A crowd of masters, who until then had been afraid of using the relay system
for young persons and women, now took it up heart and soul. [132]

But on this apparently decisive victory of capital, followed at
once a revulsion. The workpeople had hitherto offered a passive, although
inflexible and unremitting resistance. They now protested in Lancashire
and Yorkshire in threatening meetings. The pretended Ten Hours’ Act was
thus simple humbug, parliamentary cheating, had never existed! The Factory
Inspectors urgently warned the Government that the antagonism of classes
had arrived at an incredible tension. Some of the masters themselves murmured:

“On account of the contradictory decisions of the magistrates, a condition
of things altogether abnormal and anarchical obtains. One law holds in
Yorkshire, another in Lancashire, one law in one parish of Lancashire,
another in its immediate neighbourhood. The manufacturer in large towns
could evade the law, the manufacturer in country districts could not find
the people necessary for the relay system, still less for the shifting
of hands from one factory to another,” &c.

And the first birthright
of capital is equal exploitation of labour-power by all capitalists.

Under these circumstances a compromise between masters and men was
effected that received the seal of Parliament in the additional Factory
Act of August 5th, 1850. The working-day for “young persons and women,”
was raised from 10 to 10 — hours for the first five days of the week,
and shortened to 7½ on the Saturday. The work was to go on between 6
a.m. and 6 p.m., [133] with pauses of not less than
1½ hours for meal-times, these meal-times to be allowed at one and the
same time for all, and conformably to the conditions of 1844. By this an
end was put to the relay system once for all. [134]
For children’s labour, the Act of 1844 remained in force.

One set of masters, this time as before, secured to itself special
seigneurial rights over the children of the proletariat. These were the
silk manufacturers. In 1833 they had howled out in threatening fashion,
“if the liberty of working children of any age for 10 hours a day were
taken away, it would stop their works.” [135] It would be impossible for them to buy a sufficient number of children over 13.
They extorted the privilege they desired. The pretext was shown on subsequent
investigation to be a deliberate lie. [136] It did
not, however, prevent them, during 10 years, from spinning silk 10 hours
a day out of the blood of little children who had to be placed upon stools
for the performance of their work. [137] The Act of
1844 certainly “robbed” them of the “liberty” of employing children under
11 longer than 6½ hours a day. But it secured to them, on the other
hand, the privilege of working children between 11 and 13, 10 hours a day,
and of annulling in their case the education made compulsory for all other
factory children. This time the pretext was

“the delicate texture of the
fabric in which they were employed, requiring a lightness of touch, only
to be acquired by their early introduction to these factories.” [138]

The children were slaughtered out-and-out for the sake of their delicate fingers, as in Southern Russia the horned cattle for the sake of their
hide and tallow. At length, in 1850, the privilege granted in 1844, was
limited to the departments of silk-twisting and silk-winding. But here,
to make amends to capital bereft of its “freedom,” the work-time for children
from 11 to 13 was raised from 10 to 10½ hours. Pretext: “Labour
in silk mills was lighter than in mills
for other fabrics, and less likely in other respects also to be
prejudicial to health.” [139] Official medical inquiries proved afterwards that, on the contrary,

“the average death-rate is exceedingly
high in the silk districts and amongst the female part of the population
is higher even than it is in the cotton districts of Lancashire.” [140]

Despite the protests of the Factory Inspector, renewed every 6 months, the mischief continues to this hour. [141]

The Act of 1850 changed the 15 hours’ time from 6 a.m. to 8.30
p.m., into the 12 hours from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. for “young persons and women”
only. It did not, therefore, affect children who could always be employed
for half an hour before and 2½ hours after this period, provided the whole
of their labour did not exceed 6½ hours. Whilst the bill was under discussion,
the Factory Inspectors laid before Parliament statistics of the infamous
abuses due to this anomaly. To no purpose. In the background lurked the
intention of screwing up, during prosperous years, the working-day of adult
males to 15 hours by the aid of the children. The experience of the three
following years showed that such an attempt must come to grief against
the resistance of the adult male operatives. The Act of 1850 was therefore
finally completed in 1853 by forbidding the “employment of children in
the morning before and in the evening after young persons and women.” Henceforth
with a few exceptions the Factory Act of 1850 regulated the working-day
of all workers in the branches of industry that come under it. [142] Since the passing of the first Factory Act half a century had elapsed. [143]

Factory legislation for the first time went beyond its original
sphere in the “Printworks’ Act of 1845.” The displeasure with which capital
received this new “extravagance” speaks through every line of the Act.
It limits the working-day for children from 8 to 13, and for women to 16
hours, between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m., without any legal pause for meal-times.
It allows males over 13 to be worked at will day and night. [144] It is a Parliamentary abortion. [145]

However, the principle had triumphed with its victory in those
great branches of industry which form the most characteristic creation
of the modern mode of production. Their wonderful development from 1853
to 1860, hand-in-hand with the physical and moral regeneration of the factory
workers, struck the most purblind. The masters from whom the legal
limitation and regulation had been wrung step by step after a civil war
of half a century, themselves referred ostentatiously to the contrast with
the branches of exploitation still “free.” [146] The
Pharisees of “Political Economy” now proclaimed the discernment of the
necessity of a legally fixed working-day as a characteristic new discovery
of their “science.” [147] It will be easily understood that after the factory magnates had resigned themselves and become reconciled
to the inevitable, the power of resistance of capital gradually weakened,
whilst at the same time the power of attack of the working-class grew with
the number of its allies in the classes of society not immediately interested
in the question. Hence the comparatively rapid advance since 1860.

The dye-works and bleach-works all came under the Factory Act
of 1850 in 1860; [148] lace and stocking manufactures in 1861.

In consequence of the first report of the Commission on the employment
of children (1863) the same fate was shared by the manufacturers of all
earthenwares (not merely pottery), Lucifer-matches, percussion caps, cartridges,
carpets, fustian-cutting, and many processes included under the name of
“finishing.” In the year 1863 bleaching in the open air [149] and baking were placed under special Acts, by which, in the former, the labour of young persons and women during the night-time (from 8 in the evening to 6 in the morning), and in the latter, the employment of journeymen
bakers under 18, between 9 in the evening and 5 in the morning were forbidden.
We shall return to the later proposals of the same Commission, which threatened
to deprive of their “freedom” all the important branches of English Industry,
with the exception of agriculture, mines, and the means of transport. [150]

## SECTION 7. THE STRUGGLE FOR THE NORMAL WORKING-DAY. RE-ACTION OF THE ENGLISH FACTORY ACTS ON OTHER COUNTRIES

The reader will bear in mind that the production of
surplus-value, or the extraction of surplus-labour, is the specific end
and aim, the sum and substance, of capitalist production, quite apart from
any changes in the mode of production, which may arise from
the subordination of labour to capital. He will remember that as far as
we have at present gone only the independent labourer, and therefore only
the labourer legally qualified to act for himself, enters as a vendor of
a commodity into a contract with the capitalist. If, therefore, in our
historical sketch, on the one hand, modern industry, on the other, the
labour of those who are physically and legally minors, play important parts,
the former was to us only a special department, and the latter only a specially
striking example of labour exploitation. Without, however, anticipating
the subsequent development of our inquiry, from the mere connexion of the
historic facts before us it follows:

First. The passion of capital for an unlimited and reckless
extension of the working-day, is first gratified in the industries earliest
revolutionised by water-power, steam, and machinery, in those first creations
of the modern mode of production, cotton, wool, flax, and silk spinning,
and weaving. The changes in the material mode of production, and the corresponding
changes in the social relations of the producers [151] gave rise first to an extravagance beyond all bounds, and then in opposition to this, called forth a control on the part of Society which legally limits,
regulates, and makes uniform the working-day and its pauses. This control
appears, therefore, during the first half of the nineteenth century simply
as exceptional legislation. [152] As soon as this primitive dominion of the new mode of production was conquered, it was found that,
in the meantime, not only had many other branches of production been made
to adopt the same factory system, but that manufactures with more or less
obsolete methods, such as potteries, glass-making, &c., that old-fashioned
handicrafts, like baking, and, finally, even that the so-called domestic
industries, such as nail-making, [153] had long since fallen as completely under capitalist exploitation as the factories themselves.
Legislation was, therefore, compelled to gradually get rid of its exceptional
character, or where, as in England, it proceeds after the manner of the
Roman Casuists, to declare any house in which work was done to be a factory.

Second. The history of the regulation of the working-day
in certain branches of production, and the struggle still going on in others
in regard to this regulation, prove conclusively that the isolated labourer,
the labourer as “free” vendor of his labour-power, when capitalist production
has once attained a certain stage, succumbs without any power of resistance.
The creation of a normal working-day is, therefore, the product of a protracted
civil war, more or less dissembled, between the capitalist class and the
working-class. As the contest takes place in the arena of modern industry,
it first breaks out in the home of that industry — England. [155] The English factory workers were the champions, not only of the English, but of the modern working-class generally, as their theorists were the
first to throw down the gauntlet to the theory of capital. [156] Hence, the philosopher of the Factory, Ure, denounces as an ineffable disgrace to the English working-class that they inscribed “the slavery of the Factory
Acts” on the banner which they bore against capital, manfully striving
for “perfect freedom of labour.” [157]

France limps slowly behind England. The February revolution was
necessary to bring into the world the 12 hours’ law, [158] which is much more deficient than its English original. For all that, the French revolutionary method has its special advantages. It
once for all commands the same limit to the working-day in all shops and
factories without distinction, whilst English legislation reluctantly yields
to the pressure of circumstances, now on this point, now on that, and is
getting lost in a hopelessly bewildering tangle of contradictory enactments.
[159] On the other hand, the French law proclaims as
a principle that which in England was only won in the name of children,
minors, and women, and has been only recently for the first time claimed
as a general right. [160]

In the United States of North America, every independent movement
of the workers was paralysed so long as slavery disfigured a part of the
Republic. Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the
black it is branded. But out of the death of slavery a new life at once
arose. The first fruit of the Civil War was the eight hours’ agitation,
that ran with the seven-leagued boots of the locomotive from the Atlantic
to the Pacific, from New England to California. The General Congress of
labour at Baltimore (August 16th, 1866) declared:

“The first and great
necessity of the present, to free the labour of this country from capitalistic
slavery, is the passing of a law by which eight hours shall be the normal
working-day in all States of the American Union. We are resolved to put
forth all our strength until this glorious result is attained.” [161]

At the same time, the Congress of the International Working Men’s Association at Geneva, on the proposition of the London General Council, resolved that “the limitation of the working-day is a preliminary condition
without which all further attempts at improvement and emancipation must
prove abortive... the Congress proposes eight hours as the legal limit
of the working-day.”

Thus the movement of the working-class on both sides of the Atlantic,
that had grown instinctively out of the conditions of production themselves,
endorsed the words of the English Factory Inspector, R. J. Saunders

“Further
steps towards a reformation of society can never be carried out with any
hope of success, unless the hours of labour be limited, and the prescribed
limit strictly enforced.” [162]

It must be acknowledged that our labourer comes out of the process
of production other than he entered. In the market he stood as owner of
the commodity “labour-power” face to face with other owners of commodities,
dealer against dealer. The contract by which he sold to the capitalist
his labour-power proved, so to say, in black and white that he disposed
of himself freely. The bargain concluded, it is discovered that he was
no “free agent,” that the time for which he is free to sell his labour-power
is the time for which he is forced to sell it, [163]
that in fact the vampire will not lose its hold on him “so long as there
is a muscle, a nerve, a drop of blood to be exploited.” [164] For “protection” against “the serpent of their agonies,” the labourers must put their heads together, and, as a class, compel the passing of a
law, an all-powerful social barrier that shall prevent the very workers
from selling, by voluntary contract with capital, themselves and their
families into slavery and death. [165] In place of
the pompous catalogue of the “inalienable rights of man” comes
the modest Magna Charta of a legally limited working-day, which shall make
clear “when the time which the worker sells is ended, and when his own
begins.” Quantum mutatus ab illo! [What a great change from that time! – Virgil] [166]

Footnotes

1. “A day’s labour is vague, it may be long
or short.” (“An Essay on Trade and Commerce, Containing Observations on
Taxes, &c.” London. 1770, p. 73.)

2. This question is far more important
than the celebrated question of Sir Robert Peel to the Birmingham Chamber
of Commerce: What is a pound? A question that could only have been proposed,
because Peel was as much in the dark as to the nature of money as the “little
shilling men” of Birmingham.

3. “It is the aim of the capitalist to
obtain with his expended capital the greatest possible quantity of labour
(d’obtenir du capital dépense la plus forte somme de travail possible).”
J. G. Courcelle-Seneuil. “Traité théorique et pratique des
entreprises industrielles.” 2nd ed. Paris, 1857, p. 63.

4. “An hour’s labour lost in a day is
a prodigious injury to a commercial State.... There is a very great consumption
of luxuries among the labouring poor of this kingdom: particularly among
the manufacturing populace, by which they also consume their time, the
most fatal of consumptions.” “An Essay on Trade and Commerce, &c.,”
p. 47, and 153.

5. “Si le manouvrier libre prend un instant
de repos, l’économie sordide qui le suit des yeux avec inquiétude,
prétend qu’il la vole.” [If the free labourer allows himself an instant of rest, the base and petty management, which follows him with wary eyes, claims he is stealing from it.] N. Linguet, “Théorie des Lois Civiles.
&c.” London, 1767, t. II., p. 466.

6. During the great strike of the London
builders, 1860-61, for the reduction of the working-day to 9 hours, their
Committee published a manifesto that contained, to some extent, the plea
of our worker. The manifesto alludes, not without irony, to the fact, that
the greatest profit-monger amongst the building masters, a certain Sir
M. Peto, was in the odour of sanctity (This same Peto, after 1867, came
to an end a la Strousberg.)

7. “Those who labour ... in reality feed
both the pensioners ... [called the rich] and themselves.” (Edmund Burke,
l.c., p. 2.)

8. Niebuhr in his “Roman History” says
very naively: “It is evident that works like the Etruscan, which in their
ruins astound us, pre-suppose in little (!) states lords and vassals.”
Sismondi says far more to the purpose that “Brussels lace” pre-supposes
wage-lords and wage-slaves.

9. “One cannot see these unfortunates
(in the gold mines between Egypt, Ethiopia, and Arabia) who cannot even
have their bodies clean, or their nakedness clothed, without pitying their
miserable lot. There is no indulgence, no forbearance for the sick, the
feeble, the aged, for woman’s weakness. All must, forced by blows, work
on until death puts an end to their sufferings and their distress.” (“Diod.
Sic. Bibl. Hist.,” lib. 2, c. 13.)

10. That which follows refers to the
situation in the Rumanian provinces before the change effected since the
Crimean war.

11. This holds likewise for Germany,
and especially for Prussia east of the Elbe. In the 15th century the German
peasant was nearly everywhere a man, who, whilst subject to certain rents
paid in produce and labour was otherwise at least practically free. The
German colonists in Brandenburg, Pomerania, Silesia, and Eastern Prussia,
were even legally acknowledged as free men. The victory of the nobility
in the peasants’ war put an end to that. Not only were the conquered South
German peasants again enslaved. From the middle of the 16th century the
peasants of Eastern Prussia, Brandenburg, Pomerania, and Silesia, and soon
after the free peasants of Schleswig-Holstein were degraded to the condition
of serfs. (Maurer, Fronhöfe iv. vol., — Meitzen, “Der Boden des preussischen
Staats” — Hanssen, “Leibeigenschaft in Schleswig-Holstein.” — F.
E.)

12. Further details are to be found in E.
Regnault’s “Histoire politique et sociale des Principautés Danubiennes,”
Paris, 1855.

13. “In general and within certain limits,
exceeding the medium size of their kind, is evidence of the prosperity
of organic beings. As to man, his bodily height lessens if his due growth
is interfered with, either by physical or local conditions. In all European
countries in which the conscription holds, since its introduction, the
medium height of adult men, and generally their fitness for military service,
has diminished. Before the revolution (1789), the minimum for the infantry
in France was 165 centimetres; in 1818 (law of March 10th), 157; by the
law of March 21, 1832, 156 cm.; on the average in France more than half
are rejected on account of deficient height or bodily weakness. The military
standard in Saxony was in 1780, 178 cm. It is now 155. In Prussia it
is 157. According to the statement of Dr. Meyer in the Bavarian Gazette,
May 9th, 1862, the result of an average of 9 years is, that in Prussia
out of 1,000 conscripts 716 were unfit for military service, 317 because
of deficiency in height, and 399 because of bodily defects.... Berlin in
1858 could not provide its contingent of recruits, it was 156 men short.”
J. von Liebig: “Die Chemie in ihrer Anwendung auf Agrikultur und Physiologie.
1862,” 7th Ed., vol. 1, pp. 117, 118.

14. The history of the Factory Act of
1850 will be found in the course of this chapter.

15. I only touch here and there on the
period from the beginning of modern industry in England to 1845. For this
period I refer the reader to “Die Lage der arbeitenden Klasse in England,”
[Condition of the Working Class in England]
von Friedrich Engels, Leipzig, 1845. How completely Engels understood the
nature of the capitalist mode of production is shown by the Factory Reports,
Reports on Mines, &c., that have appeared since 1845, and how wonderfully
he painted the circumstances in detail is seen on the most superficial
comparison of his work with the official reports of the Children’s Employment
Commission, published 18 to 20 years later (1863-1867). These deal especially
with the branches of industry in which the Factory Acts had not, up to
1862, been introduced, in fact are not yet introduced. Here, then, little
or no alteration had been enforced, by authority, in the conditions painted
by Engels. I borrow my examples chiefly from the Free-trade period after
1848, that age of paradise, of which the commercial travellers for the
great firm of Free-trade, blatant as ignorant, tell such fabulous tales.
For the rest England figures here in the foreground because she is the
classic representative of capitalist production, and she alone has a continuous
set of official statistics of the things we are considering.

16. “Suggestions, &c. by Mr. L.
Horner, Inspector of Factories,” in Factories Regulation Acts. Ordered by
the House of Commons to be printed, 9th August, 1859, pp. 4, 5.

17. Reports of the Inspector of Factories
for the half year. October, 1856, p. 35.

18. Reports, &c., 30th April, 1858,
p. 9.

19. Reports, &c., l.c., p. 10.

20. Reports &c., l.c., p. 25.

21. Reports &c., for the half year
ending 30th April, 1861. See Appendix No. 2; Reports, &c., 31st October,
1862, pp. 7, 52, 53. The violations of the Acts became more numerous during
the last half year 1863. Cf Reports, &c., ending 31st October, 1863,
p. 7.

22. Reports, &c., October 31st,
1860, p. 23. With what fanaticism, according to the evidence of manufacturers
given in courts of law, their hands set themselves against every interruption
in factory labour, the following curious circumstance shows. In the beginning
of June, 1836, information reached the magistrates of Dewsbury (Yorkshire)
that the owners of 8 large mills in the neighbourhood of Batley had violated
the Factory Acts. Some of these gentlemen were accused of having kept at
work 5 boys between 12 and 15 years of age, from 6 a.m. on Friday to 4
p.m. on the following Saturday, not allowing them any respite except for
meals and one hour for sleep at midnight. And these children had to do
this ceaseless labour of 30 hours in the “shoddyhole,” as the hole is called,
in which the woollen rags are pulled in pieces, and where a dense atmosphere
of dust, shreds, &c., forces even the adult workman to cover his mouth
continually with handkerchiefs for the protection of his lungs! The accused
gentlemen affirm in lieu of taking an oath — as quakers they were too
scrupulously religious to take an oath — that they had, in their great
compassion for the unhappy children, allowed them four hours for sleep,
but the obstinate children absolutely would not go to bed. The quaker gentlemen
were mulcted in £20. Dryden anticipated these gentry:

Fox full fraught in seeming sanctity,

That feared an oath, but like the devil would lie,

That look’d like Lent, and had the holy leer,

And durst not sin! before he said his prayer!”

23. Rep., 31st Oct., 1856, p. 34.

24. l.c., p. 35.

25. l.c., p. 48.

26. l.c., p. 48.

27. l.c., p. 48.

28. l.c., p. 48.

29. Report of the Insp. &c., 30th
April 1860, p. 56.

30. This is the official expression
both in the factories and in the reports.

31. “The cupidity of mill-owners whose
cruelties in the pursuit of gain have hardly been exceeded by those perpetrated
by the Spaniards on the conquest of America in the pursuit of gold.” John
Wade, “History of the Middle and Working Classes,” 3rd Ed. London, 1835,
p. 114. The theoretical part of this book, a kind of hand-book of Political
Economy, is, considering the time of its publication, original in some
parts, e.g., on commercial crises. The historical part is, to a
great extent, a shameless plagiarism of Sir F. M. Eden’s “The State of
the Poor,” London, 1797.

32. Daily Telegraph, 17th January,
1860.

33. Cf. F. Engels “Lage, etc.” pp. 249-51.

34. Children’s Employment Commission.
First report., etc., 1863. Evidence. pp. 16, 19, 18.

35. Public Health, 3rd report, etc.,
pp. 102, 104, 105.

36. Child. Empl. Comm. I. Report, p.
24.

37. Children’s Employment Commission,
p. 22, and xi.

38. l.c., p. xlviii.

39. l.c., p. liv.

40. This is not to be taken in the same
sense as our surplus-labour time. These gentlemen consider 10½ hours
of labour as the normal working-day, which includes of course the normal
surplus-labour. After this begins “overtime” which is paid a little better.
It will be seen later that the labour expended during the so-called normal
day is paid below its value, so that the overtime is simply a capitalist
trick in order to extort more surplus-labour, which it would still be,
even if the labour-power expended during the normal working-day were properly
paid.

41. l.c., Evidence, pp. 123, 124, 125,
140, and 54.

42. Alum finely powdered, or mixed with
salt, is a normal article of commerce bearing the significant name of “bakers’
stuff.”

43. Soot is a well-known and very energetic
form of carbon, and forms a manure that capitalistic chimney-sweeps sell
to English farmers. Now in 1862 the British juryman had in a law-suit to
decide whether soot, with which, unknown to the buyer, 90% of dust and
sand are mixed, is genuine soot in the commercial sense or adulterated
soot in the legal sense. The “amis du commerce” [friends of commerce] decided it to be genuine
commercial soot, and non-suited the plaintiff farmer, who had in addition
to pay the costs of the suit.

44. The French chemist, Chevallier,
in his treatise on the “sophistications” of commodities, enumerates for
many of the 600 or more articles which he passes in review, 10, 20, 30
different methods of adulteration. He adds that he does not know all the
methods and does not mention all that he knows. He gives 6 kinds of adulteration
of sugar, 9 of olive oil, 10 of butter, 12 of salt, 19 of milk, 20 of bread,
23 of brandy, 24 of meal, 28 of chocolate, 30 of wine, 32 of coffee, etc.
Even God Almighty does not escape this fate. See Rouard de Card, “On the
Falsifications of the materials of the Sacrament.” (“De la falsification
des substances sacramentelles,” Paris, 1856.)

45. “Report, &c., relative to the
grievances complained of by the journeymen bakers, &c., London, 1862,”
and “Second Report, &c., London, 1863.”

46. l.c., First Report, &c., p.
vi.

47. l.c., p. lxxi.

48. George Read, “The History of Baking,”
London, 1848, p. 16.

49. Report (First) &c. Evidence
of the “full-priced” baker Cheeseman, p. 108.

50. George Read, l.c. At the end of
the 17th and the beginning of the 18th centuries the factors (agents) that
crowded into every possible trade were still denounced as “public nuisances.”
Thus the Grand Jury at the quarter session of the Justices of the Peace
for the County of Somerset, addressed a presentment to the Lower House
which, among other things, states, “that these factors of Blackwell Hall
are a Public Nuisance and Prejudice to the Clothing Trade, and ought to
be put down as a Nuisance.” “The Case of our English Wool., &c.,” London,
1685, pp. 6, 7.

51. First Report, &c.

52. Report of Committee on the Baking
Trade in Ireland for 1861.

53. l.c.

54. Public meeting of agricultural labourers
at Lasswade, near Edinburgh, January 5th, 1866. (See Workman’s Advocate,
January 13th, 1866.) The formation since the close of 1865 of a Trades’
Union among the agricultural labourers at first in Scotland is a historic
event. In one of the most oppressed agricultural districts of England,
Buckinghamshire, the labourers, in March, 1867, made a great strike for
the raising of their weekly wage from 9-10 shillings to 12 shillings. (It
will be seen from the preceding passage that the movement of the English
agricultural proletariat, entirely crushed since the suppression of its
violent manifestations after 1830, and especially since the introduction
of the new Poor Laws, begins again in the sixties, until it becomes finally
epoch-making in 1872. I return to this in the 2nd volume, as well as to
the Blue books that have appeared since 1867 on the position of the English
land labourers. Addendum to the 3rd ed.)

55. Reynolds’ Newspaper, January,
1866. — Every week this same paper has, under the sensational headings,
“Fearful and fatal accidents,” “Appalling tragedies,” &c., a whole
list of fresh railway catastrophes. On these an employee on the North Staffordshire
line comments: “Everyone knows the consequences that may occur if the driver
and fireman of a locomotive engine are not continually on the look-out.
How can that be expected from a man who has been at such work for 29 or
30 hours, exposed to the weather, and without rest. The following is an
example which is of very frequent occurrence: — One fireman commenced
work on the Monday morning at a very early hour. When he had finished what
is called a day’s work, he had been on duty 14 hours 50 minutes. Before
he had time to get his tea, he was again called on for duty.... The next
time he finished he had been on duty 14 hours 25 minutes, making a total
of 29 hours 15 minutes without intermission. The rest of the week’s work
was made up as follows: — Wednesday, 15 hours; Thursday, 15 hours 35 minutes;
Friday, 14½ hours; Saturday, 14 hours 10 minutes, making a total for the
week of 88 hours 30 minutes. Now, sir, fancy his astonishment on being
paid 6 1/4 days for the whole. Thinking it was a mistake, he applied to
the time-keeper,... and inquired what they considered a day’s work, and
was told 13 hours for a goods man (i.e., 78 hours).... He then asked
for what he had made over and above the 78 hours per week, but was refused.
However, he was at last told they would give him another quarter, i.e.,
10d.,” l.c., 4th February. 1866.

56. Cf F. Engels, l.c., pp. 253, 254.

57. Dr. Letheby, Consulting Physician
of the Board of Health, declared: “The minimum of air for each adult ought
to be in a sleeping room 300, and in a dwelling room 500 cubic feet.” Dr.
Richardson, Senior Physician to one of the London Hospitals: “With needlewomen
of all kinds, including milliners, dressmakers, and ordinary seamstresses,
there are three miseries — over-work, deficient air, and either deficient
food or deficient digestion.... Needlework, in the main, ... is infinitely
better adapted to women than to men. But the mischiefs of the trade, in
the metropolis especially, are that it is monopolised by some twenty-six
capitalists, who, under the advantages that spring from capital, can bring
in capital to force economy out of labour. This power tells throughout
the whole class. If a dressmaker can get a little circle of customers,
such is the competition that, in her home, she must work to the death to
hold together, and this same over-work she must of necessity inflict on
any who may assist her. If she fail, or do not try independently, she must
join an establishment, where her labour is not less, but where her money
is safe. Placed thus, she becomes a mere slave, tossed about with the variations
of society. Now at home, in one room, starving, or near to it, then engaged
15, 16, aye, even 18 hours out of the 24, in an air that is scarcely tolerable,
and on food which, even if it be good, cannot be digested in the absence
of pure air. On these victims, consumption, which is purely a disease of
bad air, feeds.” Dr. Richardson: “Work and Over-work,” in “Social Science
Review,” 18th July, 1863.

58. Morning Star, 23rd June,
1863. — The Times made use of the circumstance to defend the American
slave-owners against Bright, &c. “Very many of us think,” says a leader
of July 2nd, 1863, “that, while we work our own young women to death, using
the scourge of starvation, instead of the crack of the whip, as the instrument
of compulsion, we have scarcely a right to hound on fire and slaughter
against families who were born slave-owners, and who, at least, feed their
slaves well, and work them lightly.” In the same manner, the Standard,
a Tory organ, fell foul of the Rev. Newman Hall: “He excommunicated
the slave-owners, but prays with the fine folk who, without remorse, make
the omnibus drivers and conductors of London, &c., work 16 hours a-day
for the wages of a dog.” Finally, spake the oracle, Thomas Carlyle, of
whom I wrote, in 1850, “Zum Teufel ist der Genius, der Kultus ist geblieben.”
[“In the cult of genius ... The cult remains,” paraphrasing Schiller]
In a short parable, he reduces the one great event of contemporary history,
the American Civil War, to this level, that the Peter of the North wants
to break the head of the Paul of the South with all his might, because
the Peter of the North hires his labour by the day, and the Paul of the
South hires his by the life. (Macmillan’s Magazine. Ilias Americana in
nuce. August, 1863.) Thus, the bubble of Tory sympathy for the urban workers
— by no means for the rural — has burst at last. The sum of all is —
slavery!

59. Dr. Richardson, l.c.

60. Children’s Employment Commission.
Third Report. London, 1864, pp. iv., v., vi.

61. “Both in Staffordshire and in South
Wales young girls and women are employed on the pit banks and on the coke
heaps, not only by day but also by night. This practice has been often
noticed in Reports presented to Parliament, as being attended with great
and notorious evils. These females employed with the men, hardly distinguished
from them in their dress, and begrimed with dirt and smoke, are exposed
to the deterioration of character, arising from the loss of self-respect,
which can hardly fail to follow from their unfeminine occupation.” (l.
c., 194, p. xxvi. Cf. Fourth Report (1865), 61, p. xiii.) It is the same
in glass-works.

62. A steel manufacturer who employs
children in night-labour remarked: “It seems but natural that boys who
work at night cannot sleep and get proper rest by day, but will be running
about.” (l.c., Fourth Report, 63, p. xiii.) On the importance of sunlight
for the maintenance and growth of the body, a physician writes: “Light
also acts upon the tissues of the body directly in hardening them and supporting
their elasticity. The muscles of animals, when they are deprived of a proper
amount of light, become soft and inelastic, the nervous power loses its
tone from defective stimulation, and the elaboration of all growth seems
to be perverted.... In the case of children, constant access to plenty
of light during the day, and to the direct rays of the sun for a part of
it, is most essential to health. Light assists in the elaboration of good
plastic blood, and hardens the fibre after it has been laid down. It also
acts as a stimulus upon the organs of sight, and by this means brings about
more activity in the various cerebral functions.” Dr. W. Strange, Senior
Physician of the Worcester General Hospital, from whose work on “Health”
(1864) this passage is taken, writes in a letter to Mr. White, one of the
commissioners: “I have had opportunities formerly, when in Lancashire,
of observing the effects of nightwork upon children, and I have no hesitation
in saying, contrary to what some employers were fond of asserting, those
children who were subjected to it soon suffered in their health.” (l.c.,
284., p. 55.) That such a question should furnish the material of serious
controversy, shows plainly how capitalist production acts on the brain-functions
of capitalists and their retainers.

63. l.c., 57, p. xii.

64. l.c.. Fourth Report (1865). 58.
p. xii.

65. l.c.

66. l.c., p. xiii. The degree of culture
of these “labour-powers” must naturally be such as appears in the following
dialogues with one of the commissioners: Jeremiah Haynes, age 12 — “Four
times four is 8; 4 fours are 16. A king is him that has all the money and
gold. We have a king (told it is a Queen), they call her the Princess
Alexandra. Told that she married the Queen’s son. The Queen’s son is the
Princess Alexandra. A Princess is a man.” William Turner, age 12 — “Don’t
live in England. Think it is a country, but didn’t know before.” John Morris,
age 14 — “Have heard say that God made the world, and that all the people
was drownded but one, heard say that one was a little bird.” William Smith
age 15 — “God made man, man made woman.” Edward Taylor, age 15 — “Do
not know of London.” Henry Matthewman, age 17 — “Had been to chapel, but
missed a good many times lately. One name that they preached about was
Jesus Christ, but I cannot say any others, and I cannot tell anything about
him. He was not killed, but died like other people. He was not the same
as other people in some ways, because he was religious in some ways and
others isn’t.” (l.c., p. xv.) “The devil is a good person. I don’t know
where he lives.” “Christ was a wicked man.” “This girl spelt God as dog,
and did not know the name of the queen.” (“Ch. Employment Comm. V. Report,
1866” p. 55, n. 278.) The same system obtains in the glass and paper works
as in the metallurgical, already cited. In the paper factories, where the
paper is made by machinery, night-work is the rule for all processes, except
rag-sorting. In some cases night-work, by relays, is carried on incessantly
through the whole week, usually from Sunday night until midnight of the following
Saturday. Those who are on day-work work 5 days of 12, and 1 day of 18
hours; those on night-work 5 nights of 12, and 1 of 6 hours in each week.
In other cases each set works 24 hours consecutively on alternate days,
one set working 6 hours on Monday, and 18 on Saturday to make up the 24
hours. In other cases an intermediate system prevails, by which all employed
on the paper-making machinery work 15 or 16 hours every day in the week.
This system, says Commissioner Lord, “seems to combine all the evils of
both the 12 hours’ and the 24 hours’ relays.” Children under 13, young
persons under 18, and women, work under this night system. Sometimes under
the 12 hours’ system they are obliged, on account of the non-appearance
of those that ought to relieve them, to work a double turn of 24 hours.
The evidence proves that boys and girls very often work overtime, which,
not unfrequently, extends to 24 or even 36 hours of uninterrupted toil.
In the continuous and unvarying process of glazing are found girls of 12
who work the whole month 14 hours a day, “without any regular relief or
cessation beyond 2 or, at most, 3 breaks of half an hour each for meals.”
In some mills, where regular night-work has been entirely given up, over-work
goes on to a terrible extent, “and that often in the dirtiest, and in the
hottest, and in the most monotonous of the various processes.” (“Ch. Employment
Comm. Report IV., 1865,” p. xxxviii, and xxxix.)

67. Fourth Report, &c.. 1865, 79,
p. xvi.

68. l.c., 80. p. xvi.

69. l.c., 82. p. xvii.

70. In our reflecting and reasoning
age a man is not worth much who cannot give a good reason for everything,
no matter how bad or how crazy. Everything in the world that has been done
wrong has been done wrong for the very best of reasons. (Hegel, l.c.,
p. 249 )

71. l.c., 85, p. xvii. To similar tender
scruples of the glass manufacturers that regular meal-times for the children
are impossible because as a consequence a certain quantity of heat, radiated
by the furnaces, would be “a pure loss” or “wasted,” Commissioner White
makes answer. His answer is unlike that of Ure, Senior, &c., and their
puny German plagiarists à la Roscher who are touched by the “abstinence,”
“self-denial,” “saving,” of the capitalists in the expenditure of their
gold, and by their Timur-Tamerlanish prodigality of human life! “A certain
amount of heat beyond what is usual at present might also be going to waste,
if meal-times were secured in these cases, but it seems likely not equal
in money-value to the waste of animal power now going on in glass-houses
throughout the kingdom from growing boys not having enough quiet time to
eat their meals at ease, with a little rest afterwards for digestion.”
(l.c., p. xiv.) And this in the year of progress 1865! Without considering
the expenditure of strength in lifting and carrying, such a child, in the
sheds where bottle and flint glass are made, walks during the performance
of his work 15-20 miles in every 6 hours! And the work often lasts 14 or
15 hours! In many of these glass works, as in the Moscow spinning mills,
the system of 6 hours’ relays is in force. “During the working part of
the week six hours is the utmost unbroken period ever attained at any one
time for rest, and out of this has to come the time spent in coming and
going to and from work, washing, dressing, and meals, leaving a very short
period indeed for rest, and none for fresh air and play, unless at the
expense of the sleep necessary for young boys, especially at such hot and
fatiguing work.... Even the short sleep is obviously liable to be broken
by a boy having to wake himself if it is night, or by the noise, if it
is day.” Mr. White gives cases where a boy worked 36 consecutive hours;
others where boys of 12 drudged on until 2 in the morning, and then slept
in the works till 5 a.m. (3 hours!) only to resume their work. “The amount
of work,” say Tremenheere and Tufnell, who drafted the general report,
“done by boys, youths, girls, and women, in the course of their daily or
nightly spell of labour, is certainly extraordinary.” (l.c., xliii. and
xliv.) Meanwhile, late by night, self-denying Mr. Glass-Capital, primed
with port-wine, reels out of his club homeward droning out idiotically.
“Britons never, never shall be slaves!”

72. In England even now occasionally
in rural districts a labourer is condemned to imprisonment for desecrating
the Sabbath, by working in his front garden. The same labourer is punished
for breach of contract if he remains away from his metal, paper, or glass
works on the Sunday, even if it be from a religious whim. The orthodox
Parliament will hear nothing of Sabbath-breaking if it occurs in the process
of expanding capital. A memorial (August 1863), in which the London day-labourers
in fish and poultry shops asked for the abolition of Sunday labour, states
that their work lasts for the first 6 days of the week on an average 15
hours a-day, and on Sunday 8-10 hours. From this same memorial we learn
also that the delicate gourmands among the aristocratic hypocrites of Exeter
Hall, especially encourage this “Sunday labour.” These “holy ones,” so
zealous in cute curanda [in attending to their bodily pleasures],
show their Christianity by the humility
with which they bear the overwork, the privations, and the hunger of others.
Obsequium ventris istis (the labourers) perniciosius est
[Gluttony is more ruinous to their stomachs – paraphrase of Horace].

73. “We have given in our previous reports
the statements of several experienced manufacturers to the effect that
over-hours ... certainly tend prematurely to exhaust the working power
of the men.” (l.c., 64. p. xiii.)

74. Cairnes, “The Slave Power,” pp.
110. 111.

75. John Ward: “The Borough of Stoke-upon-Trent,”
London, 1843, p. 42.

76. Ferrand’s Speech in the House of
Commons, 27th April, 1863.

77. “Those were the very words used by
the cotton manufacturers.” l.c.

78. l.c. Mr. Villiers, despite the
best of intentions on his part, was “legally” obliged to refuse the requests
of the manufacturers. These gentlemen, however, attained their end through
the obliging nature of the local poor law boards. Mr. A. Redgrave, Inspector
of Factories, asserts that this time the system under which orphans and
pauper children were treated “legally” as apprentices “was not accompanied
with the old abuses” (on these “abuses” see Engels, l.c.), although in
one case there certainly was “abuse of this system in respect to a number
of girls and young women brought from the agricultural districts of Scotland
into Lancashire and Cheshire.” Under this system the manufacturer entered
into a contract with the workhouse authorities for a certain period. He
fed, clothed and lodged the children, and gave them a small allowance of
money. A remark of Mr. Redgrave to be quoted directly seems strange, especially
if we consider that even among the years of prosperity of the English cotton
trade, the year 1860 stands unparalleled, and that, besides, wages were
exceptionally high. For this extraordinary demand for work had to contend
with the depopulation of Ireland, with unexampled emigration from the English
and Scotch agricultural districts to Australia and America, with an actual
diminution of the population in some of the English agricultural districts,
in consequence partly of an actual breakdown of the vital force of the
labourers, partly of the already effected dispersion of the disposable
population through the dealers in human flesh. Despite all this Mr. Redgrave
says: “This kind of labour, however, would only be sought after when none
other could be procured, for it is a high-priced labour. The ordinary wages
of a boy of 13 would be about 4s. per week, but to lodge, to clothe, to
feed, and to provide medical attendance and proper superintendence for
50 or 100 of these boys, and to set aside some remuneration for them, could
not be accomplished for 4s. a-head per week.” (Report of the Inspector
of Factories for 30th April, 1860, p. 27.) Mr. Redgrave forgets to tell
us how the labourer himself can do all this for his children out of their
4s. a-week wages, when the manufacturer cannot do it for the 50 or 100
children lodged, boarded, superintended all together. To guard against
false conclusions from the text, I ought here to remark that the English
cotton industry, since it was placed under the Factory Act of 1850 with
its regulations of labour-time, &c., must be regarded as the model
industry of England. The English cotton operative is in every respect better
off than his Continental companion in misery. “The Prussian factory operative
labours at least ten hours per week more than his English competitor, and
if employed at his own loom in his own house, his labour is not restricted
to even those additional hours. (“Rep. of Insp. of Fact.,” 31st October,
1855, p. 103.) Redgrave, the Factory Inspector mentioned above, after the
Industrial Exhibition in 1851, travelled on the Continent, especially in
France and Germany, for the purpose of inquiring into the conditions of
the factories. Of the Prussian operative he says: “He receives a remuneration
sufficient to procure the simple fare, and to supply the slender comforts
to which he has been accustomed ... he lives upon his coarse fare, and
works hard, wherein his position is subordinate to that of the English
operative.” (“Rep. of Insp. of Fact.” 31st Oct., 1855, p. 85.)

79. The over-worked “die off with strange
rapidity; but the places of those who perish are instantly filled, and
a frequent change of persons makes no alteration in the scene.” (“England
and America.” London, 1833, vol. I, p. 55. By E. G. Wakefield.)

80. See “Public Health. Sixth Report
of the Medical Officer of the Privy Council, 1863.” Published in London
1864. This report deals especially with the agricultural labourers. “Sutherland
... is commonly represented as a highly improved county ... but ... recent
inquiry has discovered that even there, in districts once famous for fine
men and gallant soldiers, the inhabitants have degenerated into a meagre
and stunted race. In the healthiest situations, on hill sides fronting
the sea, the faces of their famished children are as pale as they could
be in the foul atmosphere of a London alley.” (W. Th. Thornton. “Overpopulation
and its Remedy.” l.c., pp. 74, 75.) They resemble in fact the 30,000 “gallant
Highlanders” whom Glasgow pigs together in its wynds and closes, with prostitutes
and thieves.

81. “But though the health of a population
is so important a fact of the national capital, we are afraid it must be
said that the class of employers of labour have not been the most forward
to guard and cherish this treasure.... The consideration of the health
of the operatives was forced upon the mill-owners.” (Times, November
5th, 1861.) “The men of the West Riding became the clothiers of mankind
... the health of the workpeople was sacrificed, and the lace in a few generations
must have degenerated. But a reaction set in. Lord Shaftesbury’s Bill limited
the hours of children’s labour,” &c. (“Report of the Registrar-General,”
for October 1861.)

82. We, therefore, find, e.g., that
in the beginning of 1863, 26 firms owning extensive potteries in Staffordshire,
amongst others, Josiah Wedgwood, & Sons, petition in a memorial for
“some legislative enactment.” Competition with other capitalists permits
them no voluntary limitation of working-time for children, &c. “Much
as we deplore the evils before mentioned, it would not be possible to prevent
them by any scheme of agreement between the manufacturers. ... Taking all
these points into consideration, we have come to the conviction that some
legislative enactment is wanted.” (“Children’s Employment Comm.” Rep. I,
1863, p. 322.) Most recently a much more striking example offers. The rise
in the price of cotton during a period of feverish activity, had induced
the manufacturers in Blackburn to shorten, by mutual consent, the working-time
in their mills during a certain fixed period. This period terminated about
the end of November, 1871. Meanwhile, the wealthier manufacturers, who
combined spinning with weaving, used the diminution of production resulting
from this agreement, to extend their own business and thus to make great
profits at the expense of the small employers. The latter thereupon turned
in their extremity to the operatives, urged them earnestly to agitate for
the 9 hours’ system, and promised contributions in money to this end.

83. The labour Statutes, the like of
which were enacted at the same time in France, the Netherlands, and elsewhere,
were first formally repealed in England in 1813, long after the changes
in methods of production had rendered them obsolete.

84. “No child under 12 years of age
shall be employed in any manufacturing establishment more than 10 hours
in one day.” General Statutes of Massachusetts, 63, ch. 12. (The various
Statutes were passed between 1836 and 1858.) “Labour performed during a
period of 10 hours on any day in all cotton, woollen, silk, paper, glass,
and flax factories, or in manufactories of iron and brass, shall be considered
a legal day’s labour. And be it enacted, that hereafter no minor engaged
in any factory shall be holden or required to work more than 10 hours in
any day,or 60 hours in any week; and that hereafter no minor shall be admitted
as a worker under the age of 10 years in any factory within this State.”
State of New Jersey. An Act to limit the hours of labour, &c., §
1 and 2. (Law of 18th March, 1851.) “No minor who has attained the age
of 12 years, and is under the age of 15 years, shall be employed in any
manufacturing establishment more than 11 hours in any one day, nor before
5 o’clock in the morning, nor after 7.30 in the evening.” (“Revised Statutes
of the State of Rhode Island,” &c., ch. 139, § 23, 1st July, 1857.)

85. “Sophisms of Free Trade.” 7th Ed.
London, 1850, p. 205, 9th Ed., p. 253. This same Tory, moreover, admits
that “Acts of Parliament regulating wages, but against the labourer and
in favour of the master, lasted for the long period of 464 years. Population
grew. These laws were then found, and really became, unnecessary and burdensome.”
(l.c., p. 206.)

86. In reference to this statute, J.
Wade with truth remarks: “From the statement above (i.e., with regard to
the statute) it appears that in 1496 the diet was considered equivalent
to one-third of the income of an artificer and one-half the income of a
labourer, which indicates a greater degree of independence among the working-classes
than prevails at present; for the board, both of labourers and artificers,
would now be reckoned at a much higher proportion of their wages.” (J.
Wade, “History of the Middle and Working Classes,” pp. 24, 25, and 577.)
The opinion that this difference is due to the difference in the price-relations
between food and clothing then and now is refuted by the most cursory glance
at “Chronicon Preciosum, &c.” By Bishop Fleetwood. 1st Ed., London, 1707;
2nd Ed., London, 1745.

87. W. Petty. “Political Anatomy of
Ireland, Verbum Sapienti,” 1672, Ed. 1691, p. 10.

88. “A Discourse on the necessity of
encouraging Mechanick Industry,” London, 1690, p. 13. Macaulay, who has
falsified English history in the interests of the Whigs and the bourgeoisie,
declares as follows: “The practice of setting children prematurely to work
... prevailed in the 17th century to an extent which, when compared with
the extent of the manufacturing system, seems almost incredible. At Norwich,
the chief seat of the clothing trade, a little creature of six years old
was thought fit for labour. Several writers of that time, and among them
some who were considered as eminently benevolent, mention with exultation
the fact that in that single city, boys and girls of very tender age create
wealth exceeding what was necessary for their own subsistence by twelve
thousand pounds a year. The more carefully we examine the history of the
past, the more reason shall we find to dissent from those who imagine that
our age has been fruitful of new social evils.... That which is new is
the intelligence and the humanity which remedies them.” (“History of England,”
vol. 1., p. 417.) Macaulay might have reported further that “extremely
well-disposed” amis du commerce in the 17th century, narrate with
“exultation” how in a poorhouse in Holland a child of four was employed,
and that this example of “vertu mise en pratique” [applied virtue]
passes muster in all the humanitarian works, à la Macaulay, to the time of Adam
Smith. It is true that with the substitution of manufacture for handicrafts,
traces of the exploitation of children begin to appear. This exploitation
existed always to a certain extent among peasants, and was the more developed,
the heavier the yoke pressing on the husbandman. The tendency of capital
is there unmistakably; but the facts themselves are still as isolated as
the phenomena of two-headed children. Hence they were noted “with exultation”
as especially worthy of remark and as wonders by the far-seeing “amis
du commerce,” and recommended as models for their own time and for posterity.
This same Scotch sycophant and fine talker, Macaulay, says: “We hear to-day
only of retrogression and see only progress.” What eyes, and especially
what ears!

89. Among the accusers of the workpeople,
the most angry is the anonymous author quoted in the text of “An Essay
on Trade and Commerce, containing Observations on Taxes, &c.,” London,
1770. He had already dealt with this subject in his earlier work: “Considerations
on Taxes.” London, 1765. On the same side follows Polonius Arthur Young,
the unutterable statistical prattler. Among the defenders of the working-classes
the foremost are: Jacob Vanderlint, in: “Money Answers all Things.” London,
1734 the Rev. Nathaniel Forster, D. D., in “An Enquiry into the Causes
of the Present High Price of Provisions,” London, 1767; Dr. Price, and
especially Postlethwayt, as well in the supplement to his “Universal Dictionary
of Trade and Commerce,” as in his “Great Britain’s Commercial Interest explained
and improved.” 2nd Edition, 1755. The facts themselves are confirmed by
many other writers of the time, among others by Josiah Tucker.

90. Postlethwayt, l.c., “First Preliminary
Discourse,” p. 14.

91. “An Essay,” &c. He himself relates
on p. 96 wherein the “happiness” of the English agricultural labourer already
in 1770 consisted. “Their powers are always upon the stretch, they cannot
live cheaper than they do, nor work harder.”

92. Protestantism, by changing almost
all the traditional holidays into workdays, plays an important part in the
genesis of capital.

93. “An Essay,” 4c., pp. 15, 41, 96,
97, 55, 57, 69. — Jacob Vanderlint, as early as 1734, declared that the
secret of the out-cry of the capitalists as to the laziness of the working
people was simply that they claimed for the same wages 6 days’ labour instead
of 4.

94. l.c., p. 242.

95. l.c. “The French,” he says, “laugh
at our enthusiastic ideas of liberty.” l.c., p. 78.

96. “They especially objected to work
beyond the 12 hours per day, because the law which fixed those hours, is
the only good which remains to them of the legislation of the Republic.”
(“Rep. of Insp. of Fact.”, 31 st October, 1856, p. 80.) The French Twelve
Hours’ Bill of September 5th, 1850, a bourgeois edition of the decree of
the Provisional Government of March 2nd, 1848, holds in all workshops without
exceptions. Before this law the working-day in France was without definite
limit. It lasted in the factories 14, 15, or more hours. See “Des
classes ouvrières en France, pendant l’année 1848. Par M. Blanqui.” M.
Blanqui the economist, not the Revolutionist, had been entrusted by the
Government with an inquiry into the condition of the working-class.

97. Belgium is the model bourgeois state
in regard to the regulation of the working-day. Lord Howard of Welden,
English Plenipotentiary at Brussels, reports to the Foreign Office May
12th, 1862: “M. Rogier, the minister, informed me that children’s labour
is limited neither by a general law nor by any local regulations; that
the Government, during the last three years, intended in every session
to propose a bill on the subject, but always found an insuperable obstacle
in the jealous opposition to any legislation in contradiction with the
principle of perfect freedom of labour.”

98. “It is certainly much to be regretted
that any class of persons should toil 12 hours a day, which, including
the time for their meals and for going to and returning from their work,
amounts, in fact, to 14 of the 24 hours.... Without entering into the question
of health, no one will hesitate, I think, to admit that, in a moral
point of view, so entire an absorption of the time of the working-classes,
without intermission, from the early age of 13, and in trades not subject
to restriction, much younger, must be extremely prejudicial, and is an
evil greatly to be deplored.... For the sake, therefore, of public morals,
of bringing up an orderly population, and of giving the great body of the
people a reasonable enjoyment of life, it is much to be desired that in
all trades some portion of every working-day should be reserved for rest
and leisure.” (Leonard Horner in “Reports of Insp. of Fact. for 31st Dec.,
1841.”)

99. See “Judgment of Mr. J. H. Otway,
Belfast. Hilary Sessions, County Antrim, 1860.”

100. It is very characteristic of the
regime of Louis Philippe, the bourgeois king, that the one Factory Act
passed during his reign, that of March 22nd, 1841, was never put in force.
And this law only dealt with child-labour. It fixed 8 hours a day for children
between 8 and 12, 12 hours for children between 12 and 16, &c., with
many exceptions which allow night-work even for children 8 years old. The
supervision and enforcement of this law are, in a country where every mouse
is under police administration, left to the good-will of the amis du
commerce. Only since 1853, in one single department — the Departement
du Nord — has a paid government inspector been appointed. Not less characteristic
of the development of French society, generally, is the fact, that Louis
Philippe’s law stood solitary among the all-embracing mass of French laws,
till the Revolution of 1848.

101. “Report of Insp. of Fact.” 30th
April, 1860, p. 50.

102. “Rept. of Insp. of Fact.,” 31st
October, 1849, p. 6.

103. “Rept. of Insp. of Fact.,” 31st
October, 1848, p. 98.

104. Leonard Horner uses the expression
“nefarious practices” in his official reports. (“Report of Insp. of Fact.,”
31st October, 1859, p. 7.)

105. “Rept.,” &c., 30th Sept.,
1844, p. 15.

106. The Act allows children to be
employed for 10 hours if they do not work day after day, but only on alternate
days. In the main, this clause remained inoperative.

107. “As a reduction in their hours
of work would cause a larger number (of children) to be employed, it was
thought that the additional supply of children from 8 to 9 years of age
would meet the increased demand” (l.c., p. 13 ).

108. “Rep. of Insp. of Fact.,” 31st
Oct., 1848, p. 16.

109. “I found that men who had been
getting 10s. a week, had had 1s. taken off for a reduction in the rate
of 10 per cent, and 1s. 6d. off the remaining 9s. for the reduction in
time, together 2s. 6d.. and notwithstanding this, many of them said they
would rather work 10 hours.” l.c.

110. “‘Though I signed it [the petition],
I said at the time I was putting my hand to a wrong thing.’ ‘Then why did
you put your hand to it?’ ‘Because I should have been turned off if I had
refused.’ Whence it would appear that this petitioner felt himself ‘oppressed,’
but not exactly by the Factory Act.” l.c., p. 102.

111. p. 17, l.c. In Mr. Horner’s district
10,270 adult male labourers were thus examined in 181 factories. Their
evidence is to be found in the appendix to the Factory Reports for the
half-year ending October 1848. These examinations furnish valuable material
in other connexions also.

112. l.c. See the evidence collected
by Leonard Horner himself, Nos. 69, 70, 71, 72, 92, 93, and that collected
by Sub-Inspector A., Nos. 51, 52, 58, 59, 62, 70, of the Appendix. One
manufacturer, too, tells the plain truth. See No. 14, and No. 265, l.c.

113. Reports, &c., for 31st October,
1848, pp. 133, 134.

114. Reports, &c., for 30th April,
1848, p. 47.

115. Reports, &c., for 31st October,
1848, p. 130.

116. Reports, &c., l.c., p. 142.

117. Reports &c., for 31st October,
1850, pp. 5, 6.

118. The nature of capital remains
the same in its developed as in its undeveloped form. In the code which
the influence of the slave-owners, shortly before the outbreak of the American
Civil War, imposed on the territory of New Mexico, it is said that the
labourer, in as much as the capitalist has bought his labour-power, “is
his (the capitalist’s) money.” The same view was current among the Roman
patricians. The money they had advanced to the plebeian debtor had been
transformed via the means of subsistence into the flesh and blood of the
debtor. This “flesh and blood” were, therefore, “their money.” Hence,
the Shylock-law of the Ten Tables. Linguet’s hypothesis that the patrician
creditors from time to time prepared, beyond the Tiber, banquets of debtors’
flesh, may remain as undecided as that of Daumer on the Christian Eucharist.

119. Reports, &c.. for 30th April,
1848, p. 28.

120. Thus, among others, Philanthropist
Ashworth to Leonard Horner, in a disgusting Quaker letter. (Reports, &c.,
April, 1849, p. 4.)

121. l.c., p. 140.

122. Reports, &c., for 30th April,
1849, pp. 21, 22. Cf like examples ibid., pp. 4, 5.

123. By I. and II. Will. IV., ch. 24,
s. 10, known as Sir John Hobhouse’s Factory Act, it was forbidden to any
owner of a cotton-spinning or weaving mill, or the father, son, or brother
of such owner, to act as Justice of the Peace in any inquiries that concerned
the Factory Act.

124. l.c.

125. Reports, &c., for 30th April,
1849, p. 5.

126. Reports, &c., for 31st October,
1849, p. 6.

127. Reports, &c., for 30th April,
1849, p. 21.

128. Reports, &c., for 31st October,
1848, p. 95.

129. See Reports, &c., for 30th
April, 1849, p. 6, and the detailed explanation of the “shifting system,”
by Factory Inspectors Howell and Saunders, in “Reports, &c., for 31st
October, 1848.” See also the petition to the Queen from the clergy of Ashton
and vicinity, in the spring of 1849, against the “shift system.”

130. Cf. for example, “The
Factory Question and the Ten Hours’ Bill.”, By R. H. Greg, 1837.

131. F. Engels: “The English Ten Hours’
Bill.” (In the “Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Politisch-oekonomische Revue.”
Edited by K. Marx. April number, 1850, p. 13.) The same “high” Court of
Justice discovered, during the American Civil War, a verbal ambiguity which
exactly reversed the meaning of the law against the arming of pirate ships.

132. Rep., &c., for 30th April,
1850.

133. In winter, from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m.
may be substituted.

134. “The present law (of 1850) was
a compromise whereby the employed surrendered the benefit of the Ten Hours’
Act for the advantage of one uniform period for the commencement and termination
of the labour of those whose labour is restricted.” (Reports, &c.,
for 30th April, 1852, p. 14.)

135. Reports, &c., for Sept., 1844,
p. 13.

136. l.c.

137. l.c.

138. “Reports, &c., for 31st Oct.,
1846,” p. 20.

139. Reports, &c., for 31st Oct.,
1861, p. 26.

140. l.c.,p. 27. On the whole the
working population, subject to the Factory Act, has greatly improved physically.
All medical testimony agrees on this point, and personal observation at
different times has convinced me of it. Nevertheless, and exclusive of
the terrible death-rate of children in the first years of their life, the
official reports of Dr. Greenhow show the unfavourable health condition
of the manufacturing districts as compared with “agricultural districts
of normal health.” As evidence, take the following table from his 1861
report: —

Pecentage of Adult

Males Engaged

in Manufactures

14.9

42.6

37.3

41.9

31.0

14.9

36.6

30.4

—

Death-rate from

Pulmonary Affections

per 100,000 Males

598

708

547

611

691

588

721

726

305

Name of

District

Wigan

Blackburn

Halifax

Bradford

Maccles-

field

Leek

Stoke-

upon-Trent

Woolstanton

Eight healthy

agricultural

districts

Death-rate from

Pulmonary Affections

per 100,000 Females

644

734

564

603

804

705

665

727

340

Pecentage of Adult

Females Engaged

in Manufactures

18.0

34.9

20.4

30.0

26.0

17.2

19.3

13.9

—

Kind of

Female

Occupation

Cotton

Do.

Worsted

Do.

Silk

Do.

Earthenware

Do.

—

141. It is well known with what reluctance the English “Free-traders” gave up the protective duty on the silk manufacture. Instead of the protection against French importation, the absence of protection
to English factory children now serves their turn.

142. During 1859 and 1860, the zenith
years of the English cotton industry, some manufacturers tried, by the
decoy bait of higher wages for over-time, to reconcile the adult male operatives
to an extension of the working-day. The hand-mule spinners and self-actor
mincers put an end to the experiment by a petition to their employers in
which they say, “Plainly speaking, our lives are to us a burthen; and,
while we are confined to the mills nearly two days a week more than
the other operatives of the country, we feel like helots in the land, and
that we are perpetuating a system injurious to ourselves and future generations....
This, therefore, is to give you most respectful notice that when we commence
work again after the Christmas and New Year’s holidays, we shall work 60
hours per week, and no more, or from six to six, with one hour and a half
out.” (Reports, &c., for 30th April, 1860, p. 30.)

143. On the means that the wording
of this Act afforded for its violation of the Parliamentary Return “Factories
Regulation Act” (6th August, 1859), and in it Leonard Horner’s “Suggestions
for amending the Factory Acts to enable the Inspectors to prevent illegal
working, now becoming very prevalent.”

144. “Children of the age of 8 years
and upwards, have, indeed, been employed from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. during the
last half year in my district.” (Reports, &c., for 31st October, 1857,
p. 39.)

145. “The Printworks’ Act is admitted
to be a failure both with reference to its educational and protective provisions.”
(Reports, &c., for 31st October, 1862, p. 52.)

146. Thus, e.g., E. Potter in
a letter to the Times of March 24th, 1863. The Times reminded
him of the manufacturers’ revolt against the Ten Hours’ Bill.

147. Thus, among others, Mr. W. Newmarch,
collaborator and editor of Tooke’s “History of Prices.” Is it a scientific
advance to make cowardly concessions to public opinion?

148. The Act passed in 1860, determined
that, in regard to dye and bleachworks, the working-day should be fixed
on August 1st, 1861, provisionally at 12 hours, and definitely on August
1st, 1862, at 10 hours, i.e., at 10½ hours for ordinary days,
and 7½ for Saturday. Now, when the fatal year, 1862, came, the old farce
was repeated. Besides, the manufacturers petitioned Parliament to allow
the employment of young persons and women for 12 hours during one year
longer. “In the existing condition of the trade (the time of the cotton
famine), it was greatly to the advantage of the operatives to work 12 hours
per day, and make wages when they could.” A bill to this effect had been
brought in, “and it was mainly due to the action of the operative bleachers
in Scotland that the bill was abandoned.” (Reports, &c., for 31st
October, 1862, pp. 14-15.) Thus defeated by the very workpeople, in whose
name it pretended to speak, Capital discovered, with the help of lawyer
spectacles, that the Act of 1860, drawn up, like all the Acts of Parliament
for the “protection of labour,” in equivocal phrases, gave them a pretext
to exclude from its working the calenderers and finishers. English jurisprudence,
ever the faithful servant of capital, sanctioned in the Court of Common
Pleas this piece of pettifogging. “The operatives have been greatly disappointed
... they have complained of over-work, and it is greatly to be regretted
that the clear intention of the legislature should have failed by reason
of a faulty definition.” (l.c., p. 18.)

149. The “open-air bleachers” had evaded
the law of 1860, by means of the lie that no women worked at it in the
night. The lie was exposed by the Factory Inspectors, and at the same time
Parliament was, by petitions from the operatives, bereft of its notions
as to the cool meadow-fragrance, in which bleaching in the open-air was
reported to take place. In this aerial bleaching, drying-rooms were used
at temperatures of from 90° to 100° Fahrenheit, in which the work
was done for the most part by girls. “Cooling” is the technical expression
for their occasional escape from the drying-rooms into the fresh air. “Fifteen
girls in stoves. Heat from 80° to 90° for linens, and 100°
and upwards for cambrics. Twelve girls ironing and doing-up in a small
room about 10 feet square, in the centre of which is a close stove. The
girls stand round the stove, which throws out a terrific heat, and dries
the cambrics rapidly for the ironers. The hours of work for these hands
are unlimited. If busy, they work till 9 or 12 at night for successive
nights.” (Reports, &c., for 31st October, 1862, p. 56.) A medical man
states: “No special hours are allowed for cooling, but if the temperature
gets too high, or the workers’ hands get soiled from perspiration, they
are allowed to go out for a few minutes.... My experience, which is considerable,
in treating the diseases of stove workers, compels me to express the opinion
that their sanitary condition is by no means so high as that of the operatives
in a spinning factory (and Capital, in its memorials to Parliament, had
painted them as floridly healthy after the manner of Rubens.) The diseases
most observable amongst them are phthisis, bronchitis, irregularity of
uterine functions, hysteria in its most aggravated forms, and rheumatism.
All of these, I believe, are either directly or indirectly induced by the
impure, overheated air of the apartments in which the hands are employed
and the want of sufficient comfortable clothing to protect them from the
cold, damp atmosphere, in winter, when going to their homes.” (l.c., pp.
56-57.) The Factory Inspectors remarked on the supplementary law of 1860,
torn from these open-air bleachers: “The Act has not only failed to afford
that protection to the workers which it appears to offer, but contains
a clause ... apparently so worded that, unless persons are detected working
after 8 o’clock at night they appear to come under no protective provisions
at all, and if they do so work the mode of proof is so doubtful that a
conviction can scarcely follow.” (l.c., p. 52.) “To all intents and purposes,
therefore, as an Act for any benevolent or educational purpose, it is a
failure; since it can scarcely be called benevolent to permit, which is
tantamount to compelling, women and children to work 14 hours a day with
or without meals, as the case may be, and perhaps for longer hours than
these, without limit as to age, without reference to sex, and without regard
to the social habits of the families of the neighbourhood, in which such
works (bleaching and dyeing) are situated.” (Reports, &c., for 30th
April, 1863, p. 40.)

150. Note to the 2nd Ed. Since
1866, when I wrote the above passages, a reaction has again set in.

151. “The conduct of each of these
classes (capitalists and workmen) has been the result of the relative situation
in which they have been placed.” (Reports, &c., for 31st October, 1848,
p. 113.)

152. “The employments, placed under
restriction, were connected with the manufacture of textile fabrics by
the aid of steam or water-power There were two conditions to which an employment
must be subject to cause it to be inspected, viz., the use of steam or
waterpower, and the manufacture of certain specified fibre.” (Reports,
&c., for 31st October, 1864, p. 8.)

153. On the condition of so-called
domestic industries, specially valuable materials are to be found in the
latest reports of the Children’s Employment Commission.

154. “The Acts of last Session (1864)
... embrace a diversity of occupations, the customs in which differ greatly,
and the use of mechanical power to give motion to machinery is no longer
one of the elements necessary, as formerly, to constitute, in legal phrase,
a ‘Factory.’” (Reports, &c., for 31st Octaber, 1864, p. 8.)

155. Belgium, the paradise of Continental
Liberalism, shows no trace of this movement. Even in the coal and metal
mines labourers of both sexes, and all ages, are consumed, in perfect “freedom”
at any period and through any length of time. Of every 1,000 persons employed
there, 733 are men, 88 women, 135 boys, and 44 girls under 16; in the blast
furnaces, &c., of every 1,000, 668 are men, 149 women, 98 boys, and
85 girls under 16. Add to this the low wages for the enormous exploitation
of mature and immature labour-power. The average daily pay for a man is
2s. 8d., for a woman, 1s. 8d., for a boy, 1s. 2½d. As a result, Belgium
had in 1863, as compared with 1850, nearly doubled both the amount and
the value of its exports of coal, iron, &c.

156. Robert Owen, soon after 1810,
not only maintained the necessity of a limitation of the working-day in
theory, but actually introduced the 10 hours’ day into his factory at New
Lanark. This was laughed at as a communistic Utopia; so were his “Combination
of children’s education with productive labour and the Co-operative Societies
of workingmen, first called into being by him. To-day, the first Utopia
is a Factory Act, the second figures as an official phrase in all Factory
Acts, the third is already being used as a cloak for reactionary humbug.

157. Ure: “French translation, Philosophie
des Manufactures.” Paris, 1836, Vol. II, pp. 39, 40, 67, 77, &c.

158. In the Compte Rendu of the International
Statistical Congress at Paris, 1855, it is stated: “The French law, which
limits the length of daily labour in factories and workshops to 12 hours,
does not confine this work to definite fixed hours. For children’s labour
only the work-time is prescribed as between 5 a.m. and 9 p.m. Therefore,
some of the masters use the right which this fatal silence gives them to
keep their works going, without intermission, day in, day out, possibly
with the exception of Sunday. For this purpose they use two different sets
of workers, of whom neither is in the workshop more than 12 hours at a
time, but the work of the establishment lasts day and night. The law is
satisfied, but is humanity?” Besides “the destructive influence or night-labour
on the human organism,” stress is also laid upon “the fatal influence of
the association of the two sexes by night in the same badly-lighted workshops.”

159. “For instance, there is within
my district one occupier who, within the same curtilage, is at the same
time a bleacher and dyer under the Bleaching and Dyeing Works Act, a printer
under the Print Works Act, and a finisher under the Factory Act.” (Report
of Mr. Baker, in Reports, l.c., for October 31st, 1861, p. 20.) After enumerating
the different provisions of these Acts, and the complications arising from
them, Mr. Baker says: “It will hence appear that it must be very difficult
to secure the execution of these three Acts of Parliament where the occupier
chooses to evade the law.” But what is assured to the lawyers by this is
law-suits.

160. Thus the Factory Inspectors at
last venture to say: “These objections (of capital to the legal limitation
of the working-day) must succumb before the broad principle of the rights
of labour.... There is a time when the master’s right in his workman’s
labour ceases, and his time becomes his own, even if there were no exhaustion
in the question.” (Reports, 8cc., for 31 st Oct., 1862, p. 54.)

161. “We, the workers of Dunkirk, declare
that the length of time of labour required under the present system is
too great, and that, far from leaving the worker time for rest and education,
it plunges him into a condition of servitude but little better than slavery.
That is why we decide that 8 hours are enough for a working-day, and ought
to be legally recognised as enough; why we call to our help that powerful
lever, the press; ... and why we shall consider all those that refuse us
this help as enemies of the reform of labour and of the rights of the labourer.”
(Resolution of the Working Men of Dunkirk, New York State, 1866.)

162. Reports, &c., for Oct., 1848,
p. 112.

163. “The proceedings (the manoeuvres
of capital, e.g., from 1848-50) have afforded, moreover, incontrovertible
proof of the fallacy of the assertion so often advanced, that operatives
need no protection, but may be considered as free agents in the disposal
of the only property which they possess — the labour of their hands and
the sweat of their brows.” (Reports, &c., for April 30th, 1850, p.
45.) “Free labour (if so it may be termed) even in a free country, requires
the strong arm of the law to protect it.” (Reports, &c., for October 31st,
1864, p. 34.) “To permit, which is tantamount to compelling ... to work
14 hours a day with or without meals,” &c. (Repts., &c., for April
30th, 1863, p. 40.)

164. Friedrich Engels, l.c., p. 5.

165. The 10 Hours’ Act has, in the
branches of industry that come under it, “put an end to the premature decrepitude
of the former long-hour workers.” (Reports, &c., for 31st Oct., 1859,
p. 47.) “Capital (in factories) can never be employed in keeping the machinery
in motion beyond a limited time, without certain injury to the health and
morals of the labourers employed; and they are not in a position to protect
themselves.” l.c., p. 8)

166. “A still greater boon is the distinction
at last made clear between the worker’s own time and his master’s. The
worker knows now when that which he sells is ended, and when his own begins;
and by possessing a sure foreknowledge of this, is enabled to prearrange
his own minutes for his own purposes.” (l.c., p. 52.) “By making them
masters of their own time (the Factory Acts) have given them a moral energy
which is directing them to the eventual possession of political power”
(l.c., p. 47). With suppressed irony, and in very well weighed words,
the Factory Inspectors hint that the actual law also frees the capitalist
from some of the brutality natural to a man who is a mere embodiment of
capital, and that it has given him time for a little “culture.” “Formerly
the master had no time for anything but money; the servant had no time
for anything but labour” (l.c., p. 48).

## Chapter Eleven: Rate and Mass of Surplus Value

In this chapter, as hitherto, the value of labour-power,
and therefore the part of the working day necessary for the reproduction
or maintenance of that labour-power, are supposed to be given, constant
magnitudes.

This premised, with the rate, the mass is at the same time given
of the surplus-value that the individual labourer furnishes to the capitalist
in a definite period of time. If, e.g., the necessary labour amounts
to 6 hours daily, expressed in a quantum of gold = 3 shillings, then 3s.
is the daily value of one labour-power or the value of the capital advanced
in the buying of one labour-power. If, further, the rate of surplus-value
be = 100%, this variable capital of 3s. produces a mass of surplus-value
of 3s., or the labourer supplies daily a mass of surplus labour equal to
6 hours.

But the variable capital of a capitalist is the expression in
money of the total value of all the labour-powers that he employs simultaneously.
Its value is, therefore, equal to the average value of one labour-power,
multiplied by the number of labour-powers employed. With a given value
of labour-power, therefore, the magnitude of the variable capital varies
directly as the number of labourers employed simultaneously. If the daily
value of one labour-power = 3s., then a capital of 300s. must be advanced
in order to exploit daily 100 labour-powers, of n times 3s., in order to
exploit daily n labour-powers.

In the same way, if a variable capital of 3s., being the daily
value of one labour-power, produce a daily surplus-value of 3s., a variable
capital of 300s. will produce a daily surplus-value of 300s., and one of
n times 3s. a daily surplus-value of n × 3s. The mass of the surplus-value
produced is therefore equal to the surplus-value which the working day of
one labourer supplies multiplied by the number of labourers employed. But
as further the mass of surplus-value which a single labourer produces, the
value of labour-power being given, is determined by the rate of the surplus-value,
this law follows: the mass of the surplus-value produced is equal
to the amount of the variable capital advanced, multiplied by the rate
of surplus-value, in other words: it is determined by the compound ratio
between the number of labour-powers exploited simultaneously by the same
capitalist and the degree of exploitation of each individual labour-power.

Let the mass of the surplus-value be S, the surplus-value supplied
by the individual labourer in the average day s the variable capital daily
advanced in the purchase of one individual labour-power v, the sum total
of the variable capital V, the value of an average labour-power P, its
degree of exploitation (a'/a) (surplus-labour/necessary-labour) and the number of labourers employed n; we have:

S =

{

(s/v) × V

P × (a'/a) × n

It is always supposed, not only that the value of an average labour-power
is constant, but that the labourers employed by a capitalist are reduced
to average labourers. There are exceptional cases in which the surplus-value
produced does not increase in proportion to the number of labourers exploited,
but then the value of the labour-power does not remain constant.

In the production of a definite mass of surplus-value, therefore
the decrease of one factor may be compensated by the increase of the other.
If the variable capital diminishes, and at the same time the rate of surplus-value
increases in the same ratio, the mass of surplus-value produced remains
unaltered. If on our earlier assumption the capitalist must advance 300s.,
in order to exploit 100 labourers a day, and if the rate of surplus-value
amounts to 50%, this variable capital of 300s. yields a surplus-value of
150s. or of 100 × 3 workinghours. If the rate of surplus-value doubles,
or the working day, instead of being extended from 6 to 9, is extended from
6 to 12 hours and at the same time variable capital is lessened by half,
and reduced to 150s., it yields also a surplus-value of 150s. or 50 × 6
workinghours. Diminution of the variable capital may therefore be compensated
by a proportionate rise in the degree of exploitation of labour-power,
or the decrease in the number of the labourers employed by a proportionate
extension of the working day. Within certain limits therefore the supply
of labour exploitable by capital is independent of the supply of labourers.
[1] On the contrary, a fall in the rate of surplus-value leaves unaltered the mass of the surplus-value produced, if the amount
of the variable capital, or number of the labourers employed, increases
in the same proportion.

Nevertheless, the compensation of a decrease in the number of
labourers employed, or of the amount of variable capital advanced by a
rise in the rate of surplus-value, or by the lengthening of the working-day,
has impassable limits. Whatever the value of labour-power may be, whether
the workingtime necessary for the maintenance of the labourer is 2 or 10
hours, the total value that a labourer can produce, day in, day out, is
always less than the value in which 24 hours of labour are embodied, less
than 12s., if 12s. is the money expression for 24 hours of realised labour.
In our former assumption, according to which 6 workinghours are daily necessary
in order to reproduce the labour-power itself or to replace the value of
the capital advanced in its purchase, a variable capital of 1,500s., that
employs 500 labourers at a rate of surplus-value of 100% with a 12 hours’
working day, produces daily a surplus-value of 1,500s. or of 6 × 500 workinghours.
A capital of 300s. that employs 100 labourers a day with a rate of surplus-value
of 200% or with a working day of 18 hours, produces only a mass of surplus-value
of 600s. or 12 × 100 workinghours; and its total value-product, the equivalent
of the variable capital advanced plus the surplus-value, can, day in, day
out, never reach the sum of 1,200s. or 24 × 100 workinghours. The absolute
limit of the average working day — this being by nature always less than
24 hours — sets an absolute limit to the compensation of a reduction of
variable capital by a higher rate of surplus-value, or of the decrease of
the number of labourers exploited by a higher degree of exploitation of
labour-power. This palpable law is of importance for the clearing up of
many phenomena, arising from a tendency (to be worked out later on) of
capital to reduce as much as possible the number of labourers employed
by it, or its variable constituent transformed into labour-power, in contradiction
to its other tendency to produce the greatest possible mass of surplus-value.
On the other hand, if the mass of labour-power employed, or the amount
of variable capital, increases, but not in proportion to the fall in the
rate of surplus-value, the mass of the surplus-value produced, falls.

A third law results from the determination, of the mass of the
surplus-value produced, by the two factors: rate of surplus-value and amount
of variable capital advanced. The rate of surplus-value, or the degree of
exploitation of labour-power, and the value of labour-power, or the amount
of necessary workingtime being given, it is selfevident that the greater
the variable capital, the greater would be the mass of the value produced
and of the surplus-value. If the limit of the working-day is given, and
also the limit of its necessary constituent, the mass of value
and surplus-value that an individual capitalist produces, is clearly exclusively
dependent on the mass of labour that he sets in motion. But this, under
the conditions supposed above, depends on the mass of labour-power, or
the number of labourers whom he exploits, and this number in its turn is
determined by the amount of the variable capital advanced. With a given
rate of surplus-value, and a given value of labour-power, therefore, the
masses of surplus-value produced vary directly as the amounts of the variable
capitals advanced. Now we know that the capitalist divides his capital
into two parts. One part he lays out in means of production. This is the
constant part of his capital. The other part he lays out in living labour-power.
This part forms his variable capital. On the basis of the same mode of
social production, the division of capital into constant and variable differs
in different branches of production, and within the same branch of production,
too, this relation changes with changes in the technical conditions and
in the social combinations of the processes of production. But in whatever
proportion a given capital breaks up into a constant and a variable part,
whether the latter is to the former as 1:2 or 1:10 or 1:x, the law just
laid down is not affected by this. For, according to our previous analysis,
the value of the constant capital reappears in the value of the product,
but does not enter into the newly produced value, the newly created value product.
To employ 1,000 spinners, more raw material, spindles, &c., are, of
course, required, than to employ 100. The value of these additional means
of production however may rise, fall, remain unaltered, be large or small;
it has no influence on the process of creation of surplus-value by means
of the labour-powers that put them in motion. The law demonstrated above
now, therefore, takes this form: the masses of value and of surplus-value
produced by different capitals — the value of labour-power being given
and its degree of exploitation being equal — vary directly as the amounts
of the variable constituents of these capitals, i.e., as their constituents
transformed into living labour-power.

This law clearly contradicts all experience based on appearance.
Everyone knows that a cotton spinner, who, reckoning the percentage on
the whole of his applied capital, employs much constant and little variable
capital, does not, on account of this, pocket less profit or surplus-value
than a baker, who relatively sets in motion much variable and little constant
capital. For the solution of this apparent contradiction, many intermediate
terms are as yet wanted, as from the standpoint of elementary algebra many
intermediate terms are wanted to understand that 0/0 may represent an actual
magnitude. Classical economy, although not formulating the law, holds instinctively
to it, because it is a necessary consequence of the general law of value.
It tries to rescue the law from collision with contradictory
phenomena by a violent abstraction. It will be seen later[2] how the school of Ricardo has come to grief over this stumbling block. Vulgar economy which, indeed, “has really learnt nothing,” here as everywhere
sticks to appearances in opposition to the law which regulates and explains
them. In opposition to Spinoza, it believes that “ignorance is a sufficient
reason.”

The labour which is set in motion by the total capital of a society,
day in, day out, may be regarded as a single collective working day. If,
e.g., the number of labourers is a million, and the average working-day
of a labourer is 10 hours, the social working day consists of ten million
hours. With a given length of this working day, whether its limits are fixed
physically or socially, the mass of surplus-value can only be increased
by increasing the number of labourers, i.e., of the labouring population.
The growth of population here forms the mathematical limit to the production
of surplus-value by the total social capital. On the contrary, with a given
amount of population, this limit is formed by the possible lengthening
of the working day.[3] It will, however, be seen in the following chapter that this law only holds for the form of surplus-value dealt with up to the present.

From the treatment of the production of surplus-value, so far,
it follows that not every sum of money, or of value, is at pleasure transformable
into capital. To effect this transformation, in fact, a certain minimum
of money or of exchange-value must be presupposed in the hands of the individual
possessor of money or commodities. The minimum of variable capital is the
cost price of a single labour-power, employed the whole year through, day
in, day out, for the production of surplus-value. If this labourer were
in possession of his own means of production, and were satisfied to live
as a labourer, he need not work beyond the time necessary for the reproduction
of his means of subsistence, say 8 hours a day. He would, besides, only
require the means of production sufficient for 8 working-hours. The capitalist,
on the other hand, who makes him do, besides these 8 hours, say 4 hours’
surplus-labour, requires an additional sum of money for furnishing the
additional means of production. On our supposition, however, he would have
to employ two labourers in order to live, on the surplus-value appropriated
daily, as well as, and no better than a labourer, i.e., to be able to satisfy
his necessary wants. In this case the mere maintenance of life would be
the end of his production, not the increase of wealth; but this latter
is implied in capitalist production. That he may live only twice as well as an ordinary labourer, and besides turn half of the surplus-value produced
into capital, he would have to raise, with the number of labourers, the
minimum of the capital advanced 8 times. Of course he can, like his labourer,
take to work himself, participate directly in the process of production,
but he is then only a hybrid between capitalist and labourer, a “small
master.” A certain stage of capitalist production necessitates that the
capitalist be able to devote the whole of the time during which he functions
as a capitalist, i.e., as personified capital, to the appropriation
and therefore control of the labour of others, and to the selling of the
products of this labour.[4] The guilds of the middle
ages therefore tried to prevent by force the transformation of the master
of a trade into a capitalist, by limiting the number of labourers that
could be employed by one master within a very small maximum. The possessor
of money or commodities actually turns into a capitalist in such cases
only where the minimum sum advanced for production greatly exceeds the
maximum of the middle ages. Here, as in natural science, is shown the correctness
of the law discovered by Hegel (in his “Logic”), that merely quantitative
differences beyond a certain point pass into qualitative changes.[5]

The minimum of the sum of value that the individual possessor
of money or commodities must command, in order to metamorphose himself
into a capitalist, changes with the different stages of development of
capitalist production, and is at given stages different in different spheres
of production, according to their special and technical conditions. Certain
spheres of production demand, even at the very outset of capitalist production,
a minimum of capital that is not as yet found in the hands of single individuals.
This gives rise partly to state subsidies to private persons, as in France
in the time of Clobber, and as in many German states up to our own epoch,
partly to the formation of societies with legal monopoly for the exploitation
of certain branches of industry and commerce, the forerunners of our modern
joint stock companies.[6]

Within the process of production, as we have seen, capital acquired
the command over labour, i.e., over functioning labour-power or
the labourer himself. Personified capital, the capitalist takes care that
the labourer does his work regularly and with the proper degree of intensity.

Capital further developed into a coercive relation, which compels
the working class to do more work than the narrow round of its own life-wants
prescribes. As a producer of the activity of others, as a pumper-out of
surplus labour and exploiter of labour-power, it surpasses in energy, disregard
of bounds, recklessness and efficiency, all earlier systems of production
based on directly compulsory labour.

At first, capital subordinates labour on the basis of the technical
conditions in which it historically finds it. It does not, therefore, change
immediately the mode of production. The production of surplus-value — in
the form hitherto considered by us — by means of simple extension of the
working day, proved, therefore, to be independent of any change in the mode
of production itself. It was not less active in the old-fashioned bakeries
than in the modern cotton factories.

If we consider the process of production from the point of view
of the simple labour process, the labourer stands in relation to the means
of production, not in their quality as capital, but as the mere means and
material of his own intelligent productive activity. In tanning, e.g.,
he deals with the skins as his simple object of labour. It is not the capitalist
whose skin he tans. But it is different as soon as we deal with the process
of production from the point of view of the process of creation of surplus-value.
The means of production are at once changed into means for the absorption
of the labour of others. It is now no longer the labourer that employs
the means of production, but the means of production that employ
the labourer. Instead of being consumed by him as material elements of
his productive activity, they consume him as the ferment necessary to their
own life-process, and the life-process of capital consists only in its movement
as value constantly expanding, constantly multiplying itself. Furnaces
and workshops that stand idle by night, and absorb no living labour, are
“a mere loss” to the capitalist. Hence, furnaces and workshops constitute
lawful claims upon the night-labour of the work-people. The simple transformation
of money into the material factors of the process of production, into means
of production, transforms the latter into a title and a right to the labour
and surpluslabour of others. An example will show, in conclusion, how this
sophistication, peculiar to and characteristic of capitalist production,
this complete inversion of the relation between dead and living labour,
between value and the force that creates value, mirrors itself in the consciousness
of capitalists. During the revolt of the English factory lords between
1848 and 1850, “the head of one of the oldest and most respectable houses
in the West of Scotland, Messrs. Carlile Sons & Co., of the linen and
cotton thread factory at Paisley, a company which has now existed for about
a century, which was in operation in 1752, and four generations of the
same family have conducted it” ... this “very intelligent gentleman” then
wrote a letter[7] in the Glasgow Daily Mail of April 25th, 1849, with the title, “The relay system,” in which among other
things the following grotesquely naïve passage occurs: “Let us now
... see what evils will attend the limiting to 10 hours the working of
the factory.... They amount to the most serious damage to the millowner’s
prospects and property. If he (i.e., his “hands”) worked 12 hours before, and
is limited to 10, then every 12 machines or spindles in his establishment
shrink to 10, and should the works be disposed of, they will be valued
only as 10, so that a sixth part would thus be deducted from the value
of every factory in the country.”[8]

To this West of Scotland bourgeois brain, inheriting the accumulated
capitalistic qualities of “four generations,” the value of the means of
production, spindles, &c., is so inseparably mixed up with their property,
as capital, to expand their own value, and to swallow up daily a
definite quantity of the unpaid labour of others, that the head of the
firm of Carlile & Co. actually imagines that if he sells his factory,
not only will the value of the spindles be paid to him, but, in addition,
their power of annexing surplus-value, not only the labour which is embodied
in them, and is necessary to the production of spindles of this kind, but
also the surpluslabour which they help to pump out daily from the brave
Scots of Paisley, and for that very reason he thinks that with the shortening
of the working day by 2 hours, the selling-price of 12 spinning machines
dwindles to that of 10!

Footnotes

1. This elementary law appears to be unknown to the vulgar economists, who, upside-down Archimedes, in the determination
of the market-price of labour by supply and demand, imagine they have found the fulcrum by means of which, not to move the world, but to stop its motion.

2. Further particulars will be given in Book IV.

3. “The Labour, that is the economic time, of society, is a given portion, say ten hours a day of a million of people, or ten million hours.... Capital has its boundary of increase. This boundary may, at any given period, be attained in the actual extent of economic time employed.” (“An Essay on the Political Economy of Nations.” London, 1821, pp. 47, 49.)

4. “The farmer cannot rely on his own labour, and if he does, I will maintain that he is a loser by it. His employment
should be a general attention to the whole: his thresher must be watched,
or he will soon lose his wages in corn not threshed out, his mowers, reapers,
&c., must be looked after; he must constantly go round his fences;
he must see there is no neglect; which would be the case if he was confined
to any one spot.” (“An Inquiry into the Connexion between the Present
Price of Provisions and the Size of Farms, &c. By a Farmer.” London,
1773, p. 12.) This book is very interesting. In it the genesis of the “capitalist
farmer” or “merchant farmer,” as he is explicitly called, may be studied,
and his self-glorification at the expense of the small farmer who has only
to do with bare subsistence, be noted. “The class of capitalists are from
the first partially, and they become ultimately completely, discharged
from the necessity of the manual labour.” (“Textbook of Lectures on the
Political Economy of Nations. By the Rev. Richard Jones.” Hertford 1852.
Lecture III., p. 39.)

5. The molecular theory of modern chemistry first scientifically worked out by Laurent and Gerhardt rests on no other law. (Addition to 3rd Edition.) For the explanation of this statement, which is not very clear to non-chemists, we remark that the author speaks here of the homologous series of carbon compounds, first so named by C. Gerhardt in 1843, each series of which has its own general algebraic formula.
Thus the series of paraffins: CnH2n+2, that of the normal alcohols: CnH2n+2O;
of the normal fatty acids: CnH2nO2 and many others. In the above examples, by the simply quantitative addition of CH2 to the molecular formula, a qualitatively different body is each time formed. On the share (overestimated
by Marx) of Laurent and Gerhardt in the determination of this important fact see Kopp, “Entwicklung der Chemie.” Munchen, 1873, pp. 709, 716, and Schorkmmer, “The Rise and Development of Organic Chemistry.” London, 1879, p. 54. — F. E.. See Letter from Marx to Engels, 22 June 1867

For Hegel’s formulation of the idea in the Logic, see Remark: Examples of Such Nodal Lines; the Maxim, ‘Nature Does Not Make Leaps’.

6. Martin Luther calls these kinds of institutions: “The Company Monopolia.”

7. Reports of Insp. of Fact., April 30th, 1849, p. 59.

8. l.c., p. 60. Factory Inspector Stuart, himself a Scotchman, and in contrast to the English Factory Inspectors,
quite taken captive by the capitalistic method of thinking, remarks expressly
on this letter which he incorporates in his report that it is “the most
useful of the communications which any of the factory-owners working with
relays have given to those engaged in the same trade, and which is the
most calculated to remove the prejudices of such of them as have scruples
respecting any change of the arrangement of the hours of work.”

## Part IV: Production of Relative Surplus Value

## Chapter Twelve: The Concept of Relative Surplus Value

That portion of the working day which merely produces
an equivalent for the value paid by the capitalist for his labour-power,
has, up to this point, been treated by us as a constant magnitude, and
such in fact it is, under given conditions of production and at a given
stage in the economic development of society. Beyond this, his necessary
labour-time, the labourer, we saw, could continue to work for 2, 3, 4,
6, &c., hours. The rate of surplus-value and the length of the working day
depended on the magnitude of this prolongation. Though the necessary labour-time
was constant, we saw, on the other hand, that the total working day was
variable. Now suppose we have a working day whose length, and whose apportionment
between necessary labour and surplus-labour, are given. Let the whole line
a c, a—b—c represent, for example, a working day of 12 hours; the portion
of a b 10 hours of necessary labour, and the portion b c 2 hours of surplus-labour.
How now can the production of surplus-value be increased, i.e., how can
the surplus-labour be prolonged, without, or independently of, any prolongation
of a c?

Although the length of a c is given, b c appears to be capable
of prolongation, if not by extension beyond its end c, which is also the
end of the working day a c, yet, at all events, by pushing back its starting-point
b in the direction of a. Assume that b'—b in the line ab'bc is equal to
half of b c

a——b'—b—c

or to one hour’s labour-time. If now, in a c, the working day
of 12 hours, we move the point b to b', b c becomes b' c; the surplus-labour
increases by one half, from 2 hours to 3 hours, although the working day
remains as before at 12 hours. This extension of the surplus labour-time
from b c to b' c, from 2 hours to 3 hours, is, however, evidently impossible,
without a simultaneous contraction of the necessary labour-time from
a b into a b', from 10 hours to 9 hours. The prolongation of the surplus-labour
would correspond to a shortening of the necessary labour; or a portion
of the labour-time previously consumed, in reality, for the labourer’s
own benefit, would be converted into labour-time for the benefit of the
capitalist. There would be an alteration, not in the length of the working day,
but in its division into necessary labour-time and surplus labour-time.

On the other hand, it is evident that the duration of the surplus-labour
is given, when the length of the working day, and the value of labour-power,
are given. The value of labour-power, i.e., the labour-time requisite to
produce labour-power, determines the labour-time necessary for the reproduction
of that value. If one working-hour be embodied in sixpence, and the value
of a day’s labour-power be five shillings, the labourer must work 10 hours
a day, in order to replace the value paid by capital for his labour-power,
or to produce an equivalent for the value of his daily necessary means
of subsistence. Given the value of these means of subsistence, the value
of his labour-power is given; [1] and given the value
of his labour-power, the duration of his necessary labour-time is given.
The duration of the surplus-labour, however, is arrived at, by subtracting
the necessary labour-time from the total working day. Ten hours subtracted
from twelve, leave two, and it is not easy to see, how, under the given
conditions, the surplus-labour can possibly be prolonged beyond two hours.
No doubt, the capitalist can, instead of five shillings, pay the labourer
four shillings and sixpence or even less. For the reproduction of this
value of four shillings and sixpence, nine hours’ labour-time would suffice;
and consequently three hours of surplus-labour, instead of two, would accrue
to the capitalist, and the surplus-value would rise from one shilling to
eighteen-pence. This result, however, would be obtained only by lowering
the wages of the labourer below the value of his labour-power. With the
four shillings and sixpence which he produces in nine hours, he commands
one-tenth less of the necessaries of life than before, and consequently
the proper reproduction of his labour-power is crippled. The surplus-labour
would in this case be prolonged only by an overstepping of its normal limits;
its domain would be extended only by a usurpation of part of the domain
of necessary labour-time. Despite the important part which this method
plays in actual practice, we are excluded from considering it in this place,
by our assumption, that all commodities, including labour-power, are bought
and sold at their full value. Granted this, it follows that the labour-time
necessary for the production of labour-power, or for the reproduction of
its value, cannot be lessened by a fall in the labourer’s wages below the
value of his labour-power, but only by a fall in this value itself. Given
the length of the working day, the prolongation of the surplus-labour must
of necessity originate in the curtailment of the necessary labour-time;
the latter cannot arise from the former. In the example we have taken,
it is necessary that the value of labour-power should actually fall by
one-tenth, in order that the necessary labour-time may be diminished by
one-tenth, i.e., from ten hours to nine, and in order that the surplus
labour may consequently be prolonged from two hours to three.

Such a fall in the value of labour-power implies, however, that
the same necessaries of life which were formerly produced in ten hours,
can now be produced in nine hours. But this is impossible without an increase
in the productiveness of labour. For example, suppose a shoe-maker, with
given tools, makes in one working day of twelve hours, one pair of boots.
If he must make two pairs in the same time, the productiveness of his labour
must be doubled; and this cannot be done, except by an alteration in his
tools or in his mode of working, or in both. Hence, the conditions of production,
i.e., his mode of production, and the labour-process itself, must be revolutionised.
By increase in the productiveness of labour, we mean, generally, an alteration
in the labour-process, of such a kind as to shorten the labour-time socially
necessary for the production of a commodity, and to endow a given quantity
of labour with the power of producing a greater quantity of use-value.
[2] Hitherto in treating of surplus-value, arising from a simple prolongation of the working day, we have assumed the mode of production
to be given and invariable. But when surplus-value has to be produced by
the conversion of necessary labour into surplus-labour, it by no means
suffices for capital to take over the labour-process in the form under
which it has been historically handed down, and then simply to prolong
the duration of that process. The technical and social conditions of the
process, and consequently the very mode of production must be revolutionised,
before the productiveness of labour can be increased. By that means alone
can the value of labour-power be made to sink, and the portion of the working day
necessary for the reproduction of that value, be shortened.

The surplus-value produced by prolongation of the working day,
I call absolute surplus-value. On the other hand, the surplus-value
arising from the curtailment of the necessary labour-time, and from the
corresponding alteration in the respective lengths of the two components
of the working day, I call relative surplus-value.

In order to effect a fall in the value of labour-power, the increase
in the productiveness of labour must seize upon those branches of industry
whose products determine the value of labour-power, and consequently either
belong to the class of customary means of subsistence, or are capable of
supplying the place of those means. But the value of a commodity is determined,
not only by the quantity of labour which the labourer directly bestows
upon that commodity, but also by the labour contained in the means of production.
For instance, the value of a pair of boots depends not only on the cobbler’s
labour, but also on the value of the leather, wax, thread, &c. Hence,
a fall in the value of labour-power is also brought about by an increase
in the productiveness of labour, and by a corresponding cheapening of commodities
in those industries which supply the instruments of labour and the raw
material, that form the material elements of the constant capital required
for producing the necessaries of life. But an increase in the productiveness
of labour in those branches of industry which supply neither the necessaries
of life, nor the means of production for such necessaries, leaves the value
of labour-power undisturbed.

The cheapened commodity, of course, causes only a pro tanto fall
in the value of labour-power, a fall proportional to the extent of that
commodity’s employment in the reproduction of labour-power. Shirts, for
instance, are a necessary means of subsistence, but are only one out of
many. The totality of the necessaries of life consists, however, of various
commodities, each the product of a distinct industry; and the value of
each of those commodities enters as a component part into the value of
labour-power. This latter value decreases with the decrease of the labour-time
necessary for its reproduction; the total decrease being the sum of all
the different curtailments of labour-time effected in those various and
distinct industries. This general result is treated, here, as if it were
the immediate result directly aimed at in each individual case. Whenever
an individual capitalist cheapens shirts, for instance, by increasing the
productiveness of labour he by no means necessarily aims at reducing the
value of labour-power and shortening, pro tanto the necessary labour-time.
But it is only in so far as he ultimately contributes to this result, that
he assists in raising the general rate of surplus-value. [3] The general and necessary tendencies of capital must be distinguished from their forms of manifestation.

It is not our intention to consider, here, the way in which the
laws, immanent in capitalist production, manifest themselves in the movements
of individual masses of capital, where they assert themselves as coercive
laws of competition, and are brought home to the mind and consciousness
of the individual capitalist as the directing motives of his operations.
But this much is clear; a scientific analysis of competition is not possible,
before we have a conception of the inner nature of capital, just as the
apparent motions of the heavenly bodies are not intelligible to any but
him, who is acquainted with their real motions, motions which are not directly
perceptible by the senses. Nevertheless, for the better comprehension of
the production of relative surplus-value, we may add the following remarks,
in which we assume nothing more than the results we have already obtained.

If one hour’s labour is embodied in sixpence, a value of six shillings
will be produced in a working day of 12 hours. Suppose, that with the prevailing
productiveness of labour, 12 articles are produced in these 12 hours. Let
the value of the means of production used up in each article be sixpence.
Under these circumstances, each article costs one shilling: sixpence for
the value of the means of production, and sixpence for the value newly
added in working with those means. Now let some one capitalist contrive
to double the productiveness of labour, and to produce in the working day
of 12 hours, 24 instead of 12 such articles. The value of the means of
production remaining the same, the value of each article will fall to ninepence,
made up of sixpence for the value of the means of production and threepence
for the value newly added by the labour. Despite the doubled productiveness
of labour, the day’s labour creates, as before, a new value of six shillings
and no more, which, however, is now spread over twice as many articles.
Of this value each article now has embodied in it 1/24th, instead of 1/12th,
threepence instead of sixpence; or, what amounts to the same thing, only
half an hour’s instead of a whole hour’s labour-time, is now added to the
means of production while they are being transformed into each article.
The individual value of these articles is now below their social value;
in other words, they have cost less labour-time than the great bulk of
the same article produced under the average social conditions. Each article
costs, on an average, one shilling, and represents 2 hours of social labour;
but under the altered mode of production it costs only ninepence, or contains
only 1½ hours’ labour. The real value of a commodity is, however,
not its individual value, but its social value; that is to say, the real
value is not measured by the labour-time that the article in each individual
case costs the producer, but by the labour-time socially required for its
production. If therefore, the capitalist who applies the new method, sells
his commodity at its social value of one shilling, he sells it for threepence
above its individual value, and thus realises an extra surplus-value of
threepence. On the other hand, the working day of 12 hours is, as regards
him, now represented by 24 articles instead of 12. Hence, in order to get
rid of the product of one working day, the demand must be double what it
was, i.e., the market must become twice as extensive. Other things being
equal, his commodities can command a more extended market only by a diminution
of their prices. He will therefore sell them above their individual but
under their social value, say at tenpence each. By this means he still
squeezes an extra surplus-value of one penny out of each. This augmentation
of surplus-value is pocketed by him, whether his commodities belong or
not to the class of necessary means of subsistence that participate in
determining the general value of labour-power. Hence, independently of
this latter circumstance, there is a motive for each individual capitalist
to cheapen his commodities, by increasing the productiveness of labour.

Nevertheless, even in this case, the increased production of surplus-value
arises from the curtailment of the necessary labour-time, and from the
corresponding prolongation of the surplus-labour. [4]
Let the necessary labour-time amount to 10 hours, the value of a day’s
labour-power to five shillings, the surplus labour-time to 2 hours, and
the daily surplus-value to one shilling. But the capitalist now produces
24 articles, which he sells at tenpence a-piece, making twenty shillings
in all. Since the value of the means of production is twelve shillings,
14 2/5 of these articles merely replace the constant capital advanced.
The labour of the 12 hours’ working day is represented by the remaining
9 3/5 articles. Since the price of the labour-power is five shillings,
6 articles represent the necessary labour-time, and 3 3/5 articles the
surplus-labour. The ratio of the necessary labour to the surplus-labour,
which under average social conditions was 5:1, is now only 5:3. The same
result may be arrived at in the following way. The value of the product
of the working day of 12 hours is twenty shillings. Of this sum, twelve
shillings belong to the value of the means of production, a value that
merely re-appears. There remain eight shillings, which are the expression
in money, of the value newly created during the working day. This sum is
greater than the sum in which average social labour of the same kind is
expressed: twelve hours of the latter labour are expressed by six shillings
only. The exceptionally productive labour operates as intensified labour;
it creates in equal periods of time greater values than average social
labour of the same kind. (See Ch.
I. Sect 2. p. 44.) But our capitalist still continues to pay as before
only five shillings as the value of a day’s labour-power. Hence, instead
of 10 hours, the labourer need now work only 7½ hours, in order
to reproduce this value. His surplus-labour is, therefore, increased by
2½ hours, and the surplus-value he produces grows from one, into
three shillings. Hence, the capitalist who applies the improved method
of production, appropriates to surplus-labour a greater portion of the
working day, than the other capitalists in the same trade. He does individually,
what the whole body of capitalists engaged in producing relative surplus-value,
do collectively. On the other hand, however, this extra surplus-value vanishes,
so soon as the new method of production has become general, and has consequently
caused the difference between the individual value of the cheapened commodity
and its social value to vanish. The law of the determination of value by
labour-time, a law which brings under its sway the individual capitalist
who applies the new method of production, by compelling him to sell his
goods under their social value, this same law, acting as a coercive law
of competition, forces his competitors to adopt the new method. [5] The general rate of surplus-value is, therefore, ultimately affected by
the whole process, only when the increase in the productiveness of labour,
has seized upon those branches of production that are connected with,
and has cheapened those commodities that form part of, the necessary means
of subsistence, and are therefore elements of the value of labour-power.

The value of commodities is in inverse ratio to the productiveness
of labour. And so, too, is the value of labour-power, because it depends
on the values of commodities. Relative surplus-value is, on the contrary,
directly proportional to that productiveness. It rises with rising and
falls with falling productiveness. The value of money being assumed to
be constant, an average social working day of 12 hours always produces
the same new value, six shillings, no matter how this sum may be apportioned
between surplus-value and wages. But if, in consequence of increased productiveness,
the value of the necessaries of life fall, and the value of a day’s labour-power
be thereby reduced from five shillings to three, the surplus-value increases
from one shilling to three. Ten hours were necessary for the reproduction
of the value of the labour-power; now only six are required. Four hours
have been set free, and can be annexed to the domain of surplus-labour.
Hence there is immanent in capital an inclination and constant tendency,
to heighten the productiveness of labour, in order to cheapen commodities,
and by such cheapening to cheapen the labourer himself. [6]

The value of a commodity is, in itself, of no interest to the
capitalist. What alone interests him, is the surplus-value that dwells
in it, and is realisable by sale. Realisation of the surplus-value necessarily
carries with it the refunding of the value that was advanced. Now, since
relative surplus-value increases in direct proportion to the development
of the productiveness of labour, while, on the other hand, the value of
commodities diminishes in the same proportion; since one and the same process
cheapens commodities, and augments the surplus-value contained in them;
we have here the solution of the riddle: why does the capitalist, whose
sole concern is the production of exchange-value, continually strive to
depress the exchange-value of commodities? A riddle with which Quesnay,
one of the founders of Political Economy, tormented his opponents, and
to which they could give him no answer.

“You acknowledge,” he says,
“that the more expenses and the cost of labour can, in the manufacture
of industrial products, be reduced without injury to production, the more
advantageous is such reduction, because it diminishes the price of the
finished article. And yet, you believe that the production of wealth, which
arises from the labour of the workpeople, consists in the augmentation
of the exchange-value of their products.” [7]

The shortening of the working day is, therefore, by no means what
is aimed at, in capitalist production, when labour is economised by increasing
its productiveness. [8] It is only the shortening of
the labour-time, necessary for the production of a definite quantity of
commodities, that is aimed at. The fact that the workman, when the productiveness
of his labour has been increased, produces, say 10 times as many commodities
as before, and thus spends one-tenth as much labour-time on each, by no
means prevents him from continuing to work 12 hours as before, nor from
producing in those 12 hours 1,200 articles instead of 120. Nay, more, his
working day may be prolonged at the same time, so as to make him produce,
say 1,400 articles in 14 hours. In the treatises, therefore, of economists
of the stamp of MacCulloch, Ure, Senior, and tutti quanti [the like], we may read
upon one page, that the labourer owes a debt of gratitude to capital for
developing his productiveness, because the necessary labour-time is thereby
shortened, and on the next page, that he must prove his gratitude by working
in future for 15 hours instead of 10. The object of all development of
the productiveness of labour, within the limits of capitalist production,
is to shorten that part of the working day, during which the workman must
labour for his own benefit, and by that very shortening, to lengthen the
other part of the day, during which he is at liberty to work gratis for
the capitalist. How far this result is also attainable, without cheapening
commodities, will appear from an examination of the particular modes of
producing relative surplus-value, to which examination we now proceed.

Footnotes

1. The value of his average daily wages is determined by what the labourer requires “so as to live, labour, and generate.” (Wm. Petty: “Political Anatomy of Ireland,” 1672, p. 64.) “The price of Labour is always constituted of the price of necessaries ... whenever ... the labouring man’s wages will not, suitably to his low rank and station, as a labouring man, support such a family as is often the lot of many of them to have,” he does not receive proper wages. (J. Vanderlint, l.c., p. 15.) “Le simple ouvrier, qui n’a que ses bras et son industrie, n’a rien qu’autant qu’il parvient à vendre à d’autres sa peine... En tout genre de travail il doit arriver, et il arrive en effet, que le salaire de l’ouvrier se borne à ce qui lui est nécessaire
pour lui procurer sa subsistance.” [The mere workman, who has only his arms and his industry, has nothing unless he succeeds in selling his labour to others ... In every kind of work it cannot fail to happen, as a matter of fact it does happen, that the wages of the workman are limited to what is necessary to procure him his subsistence.] (Turgot, “Réflexions, &c.,” Oeuvres, éd. Daire t. I, p. 10.) “The price of the necessaries of
life is, in fact, the cost of producing labour.” (Malthus, “Inquiry into, &c., Rent,” London, 1815, p. 48, note.)

2. “Quando si perfezionano le arti, che non è altro che la scoperta di nuove vie, onde si possa compiere una manufattura con meno gente o (che è lo stesso) in minor tempo di prima.” (Galiani, l.c., p. 159.) “L’économie sur les frais de production ne peut donc être autre chose que l’économie sur la quantité de travail employé pour produire.” [Perfection of the crafts means nothing other than the discovery of new ways of making a product with fewer people, or (which is the same thing) in less time than previously] (Sismondi, “Études,” t. I. p. 22.)

3. “Let us suppose ... the products ... of the manufacturer are doubled by improvement in machinery ... he will
be able to clothe his workmen by means of a smaller proportion of the entire
return ... and thus his profit will be raised. But in no other way will
it be influenced.” (Ramsay, l.c., pp. 168, 169.)

4. “A man’s profit does not depend upon his command of the produce of other men’s labour, but upon his command
of labour itself. If he can sell his goods at a higher price, while his
workmen’s wages remain unaltered, he is clearly benefited.... A smaller
proportion of what he produces is sufficient to put that labour into motion,
and a larger proportion consequently remains for himself.” (“Outlines of
Pol. Econ.” London, 1832, pp. 49, 50.)

5. “If my neighbour by doing much with little labour, can sell cheap, I must contrive to sell as cheap as he.
So that every art, trade, or engine, doing work with labour of fewer hands,
and consequently cheaper, begets in others a kind of necessity and emulation,
either of using the same art, trade, or engine, or of inventing something
like it, that every man may be upon the square, that no man may be able
to undersell his neighbour.” (“The Advantages of the East India Trade to
England,” London, 1720, p. 67.)

6. “In whatever proportion the expenses of a labourer are diminished, in the same proportion will his wages be
diminished, if the restraints upon industry are at the same time taken
off.” (“Considerations Concerning Taking off the Bounty on Corn Exported,”
&c., London, 1753, p. 7.) “The interest of trade requires, that corn
and all provisions should be as cheap as possible; for whatever makes them
dear, must make labour dear also ... in all countries, where industry is
not restrained, the price of provisions must affect the price of labour.
This will always be diminished when the necessaries of life grow cheaper.”
(I. c., p. 3.) “Wages are decreased in the same proportion as the powers
of production increase. Machinery, it is true, cheapens the necessaries
of life, but it also cheapens the labourer.” (“A Prize Essay on the Comparative
Merits of Competition and Co-operation.” London, 1834, p. 27.)

7. “Ils conviennent que plus on peut, sans préjudice, épargner de frais ou de travaux dispendieux dans la fabrication des ouvrages des artisans, plus cette épargne est profitable par la diminution des prix de ces ouvrages. Cependant ils croient que la production de richesse qui résulte des travaux des artisans consiste dans l’augmentation de la valeur vénale de leurs ouvrages.” (Quesnay: “Dialogues sur le Commerce et les Travaux des Artisans.”
pp. 188, 189.)

8. “Ces spéculateurs si économes du travail des ouvriers qu’il faudrait qu’ils payassent.” [These speculators, who are so economical of the labour of workers they would have to pay] (J. N. Bidaut: “Du Monopole qui s’établit dans les arts industriels et le commerce.” Paris, 1828, p. 13.) “The employer will be always on the stretch to economise time and labour.” (Dugald Stewart: Works ed. by Sir W. Hamilton, Edinburgh, v., viii., 1855. “Lectures on Polit. Econ.,” p. 318.) “Their (the capitalists’) interest is that the productive powers of the labourers they employ should be the greatest possible. On promoting that power their attention is fixed and almost exclusively fixed.” (R. Jones: l.c., Lecture III.)

## Chapter Thirteen: Co-operation

Capitalist production only then really begins, as
we have already seen, when each individual capital employs simultaneously
a comparatively large number of labourers; when consequently the labour-process
is carried on on an extensive scale and yields, relatively, large quantities
of products. A greater number of labourers working together, at the same
time, in one place (or, if you will, in the same field of labour), in order
to produce the same sort of commodity under the mastership of one capitalist,
constitutes, both historically and logically, the starting-point of capitalist
production. With regard to the mode of production itself, manufacture,
in its strict meaning, is hardly to be distinguished, in its earliest stages,
from the handicraft trades of the guilds, otherwise than by the greater
number of workmen simultaneously employed by one and the same individual
capital. The workshop of the medieval master handicraftsman is simply enlarged.

At first, therefore, the difference is purely quantitative. We
have shown that the surplus-value produced by a given capital is equal
to the surplus-value produced by each workman multiplied by the number
of workmen simultaneously employed. The number of workmen in itself does
not affect, either the rate of surplus-value, or the degree of exploitation
of labour-power. If a working-day of 12 hours be embodied in six shillings,
1,200 such days will be embodied in 1,200 times 6 shillings. In one case
12 × 1,200 working-hours, and in the other 12 such hours are incorporated
in the product. In the production of value a number of workmen rank merely
as so many individual workmen; and it therefore makes no difference in
the value produced whether the 1,200 men work separately, or united under
the control of one capitalist.

Nevertheless, within certain limits, a modification takes place.
The labour realised in value, is labour of an average social quality; is
consequently the expenditure of average labour-power. Any average magnitude,
however, is merely the average of a number of separate magnitudes
all of one kind, but differing as to quantity. In every industry, each
individual labourer, be he Peter or Paul, differs from the average labourer.
These individual differences, or “errors” as they are called in mathematics,
compensate one another, and vanish, whenever a certain minimum number of
workmen are employed together. The celebrated sophist and sycophant, Edmund
Burke, goes so far as to make the following assertion, based on his practical
observations as a farmer; viz., that “in so small a platoon” as that of
five farm labourers, all individual differences in the labour vanish, and
that consequently any given five adult farm labourers taken together, will
in the same time do as much work as any other five. [1] But, however that may be, it is clear, that the collective working-day
of a large number of workmen simultaneously employed, divided by the number
of these workmen, gives one day of average social labour. For example,
let the working-day of each individual be 12 hours. Then the collective
working-day of 12 men simultaneously employed, consists of 144 hours; and
although the labour of each of the dozen men may deviate more or less from
average social labour, each of them requiring a different time for the
same operation, yet since the working-day of each is one-twelfth of the
collective working-day of 144 hours, it possesses the qualities of an average
social working-day. From the point of view, however, of the capitalist
who employs these 12 men, the working-day is that of the whole dozen. Each
individual man’s day is an aliquot part of the collective working-day,
no matter whether the 12 men assist one another in their work, or whether
the connexion between their operations consists merely in the fact, that
the men are all working for the same capitalist. But if the 12 men are
employed in six pairs, by as many different small masters, it will be quite
a matter of chance, whether each of these masters produces the same value,
and consequently whether he realises the general rate of surplus-value.
Deviations would occur in individual cases. If one workman required considerably
more time for the production of a commodity than is socially necessary,
the duration of the necessary labour-time would, in his case, sensibly
deviate from the labour-time socially necessary on an average; and consequently
his labour would not count as average labour, nor his labour-power
as average labour-power. It would either be not saleable at all, or only
at something below the average value of labour-power. A fixed minimum of
efficiency in all labour is therefore assumed, and we shall see, later
on, that capitalist production provides the means of fixing this minimum.
Nevertheless, this minimum deviates from the average, although on the other
hand the capitalist has to pay the average value of labour-power. Of the
six small masters, one would therefore squeeze out more than the average
rate of surplus-value, another less. The inequalities would be compensated
for the society at large, but not for the individual masters. Thus the
laws of the production of value are only fully realised for the individual
producer, when he produces as a capitalist, and employs a number of workmen
together, whose labour, by its collective nature, is at once stamped as
average social labour. [2]

Even without an alteration in the system of working, the simultaneous
employment of a large number of labourers effects a revolution in the material
conditions of the labour-process. The buildings in which they work, the
store-houses for the raw material, the implements and utensils used simultaneously
or in turns by the workmen; in short, a portion of the means of production,
are now consumed in common. On the one hand, the exchange-value of these
means of production is not increased; for the exchange-value of a commodity
is not raised by its use-value being consumed more thoroughly and to greater
advantage. On the other hand, they are used in common, and therefore on
a larger scale than before. A room where twenty weavers work at twenty
looms must be larger than the room of a single weaver with two assistants.
But it costs less labour to build one workshop for twenty persons than
to build ten to accommodate two weavers each; thus the value of the means
of production that are concentrated for use in common on a large scale
does not increase in direct proportion to the expansion and to the increased
useful effect of those means. When consumed in common, they give up a smaller
part of their value to each single product; partly because the total value
they part with is spread over a greater quantity of products, and partly
because their value, though absolutely greater, is, having regard to their
sphere of action in the process, relatively less than the value of isolated
means of production. Owing to this, the value of a part of the constant
capital falls, and in proportion to the magnitude of the fall, the total
value of the commodity also falls. The effect is the same as if the means
of production had cost less. The economy in their application is
entirely owing to their being consumed in common by a large number of workmen.
Moreover, this character of being necessary conditions of social labour,
a character that distinguishes them from the dispersed and relatively more
costly means of production of isolated, independent labourers, or small
masters, is acquired even when the numerous workmen assembled together
do not assist one another, but merely work side by side. A portion of the
instruments of labour acquires this social character before the labour-process
itself does so.

Economy in the use of the means of production has to be considered
under two aspects. First, as cheapening commodities, and thereby bringing
about a fall in the value of labour-power. Secondly, as altering the ratio
of the surplus-value to the total capital advanced, i.e., to the sum of
the values of the constant and variable capital. The latter aspect will
not be considered until we come to the third book, to which, with the object
of treating them in their proper connexion, we also relegate many other
points that relate to the present question. The march of our analysis compels
this splitting up of the subject-matter, a splitting up that is quite in
keeping with the spirit of capitalist production. For since, in this mode
of production, the workman finds the instruments of labour existing independently
of him as another man’s property, economy in their use appears, with regard
to him, to be a distinct operation, one that does not concern him, and
which, therefore, has no connexion with the methods by which his own personal
productiveness is increased.

When numerous labourers work together side by side, whether in
one and the same process, or in different but connected processes, they
are said to co-operate, or to work in co-operation. [3]

Just as the offensive power of a squadron of cavalry, or the defensive
power of a regiment of infantry is essentially different from the sum of
the offensive or defensive powers of the individual cavalry or infantry
soldiers taken separately, so the sum total of the mechanical forces exerted
by isolated workmen differs from the social force that is developed, when
many hands take part simultaneously in one and the same undivided operation,
such as raising a heavy weight, turning a winch, or removing an obstacle.
[4] In such cases the effect of the combined labour could either not be produced at all by isolated individual labour, or it
could only be produced by a great expenditure of time, or on a very dwarfed
scale. Not only have we here an increase in the productive power of the
individual, by means of co-operation, but the creation of a new power,
namely, the collective power of masses. [5]

Apart from the new power that arises from the fusion of many forces
into one single force, mere social contact begets in most industries an
emulation and a stimulation of the animal spirits that heighten the efficiency
of each individual workman. Hence it is that a dozen persons working together
will, in their collective working-day of 144 hours, produce far more than
twelve isolated men each working 12 hours, or than one man who works twelve
days in succession. [6] The reason of this is that man is, if not as Aristotle contends, a political, [7] at all events a social animal.

Although a number of men may be occupied together at the same
time on the same, or the same kind of work, yet the labour of each, as
a part of the collective labour, may correspond to a distinct phase of
the labour-process, through all whose phases, in consequence of co-operation,
the subject of their labour passes with greater speed. For instance, if
a dozen masons place themselves in a row, so as to pass stones from the
foot of a ladder to its summit, each of them does the same thing; nevertheless,
their separate acts form connected parts of one total operation; they are
particular phases, which must be gone through by each stone; and the stones
are thus carried up quicker by the 24 hands of the row of men than they
could be if each man went separately up and down the ladder with his burden.
[8] The object is carried over the same distance in a shorter time. Again, a combination of labour occurs whenever a building,
for instance, is taken in hand on different sides simultaneously; although
here also the co-operating masons are doing the same, or the same kind
of work. The 12 masons, in their collective working-day of 144 hours, make
much more progress with the building than one mason could make working
for 12 days, or 144 hours. The reason is, that a body of men working in
concert has hands and eyes both before and behind, and is, to a certain
degree, omnipresent. The various parts of the work progress simultaneously.

In the above instances we have laid stress upon the point that
the men do the same, or the same kind of work, because this, the most simple
form of labour in common, plays a great part in co-operation, even in its
most fully developed stage. If the work be complicated, then the mere number
of the men who co-operate allows of the various operations being apportioned
to different hands, and, consequently, of being carried on simultaneously.
The time necessary for the completion of the whole work is thereby shortened.

In many industries, there are critical periods, determined by
the nature of the process, during which certain definite results must be
obtained. For instance, if a flock of sheep has to be shorn, or a field
of wheat to be cut and harvested, the quantity and quality of the product
depends on the work being begun and ended within a certain time. In these
cases, the time that ought to be taken by the process is prescribed, just
as it is in herring fishing. A single person cannot carve a working-day
of more than, say 12 hours, out of the natural day, but 100 men co-operating
extend the working-day to 1,200 hours. The shortness of the time allowed
for the work is compensated for by the large mass of labour thrown upon
the field of production at the decisive moment. The completion of the task
within the proper time depends on the simultaneous application of numerous
combined working-days; the amount of useful effect depends on the number
of labourers; this number, however, is always smaller than the number of
isolated labourers required to do the same amount of work in the same period.
[10] It is owing to the
absence of this kind of co-operation that, in the western part of the United States, quantities
of corn, and in those parts of East India where English rule has destroyed
the old communities, quantities of cotton, are yearly wasted. [11]

On the one hand, co-operation allows of the work being carried
on over an extended space; it is consequently imperatively called for in
certain undertakings, such as draining, constructing dykes, irrigation
works, and the making of canals, roads and railways. On the other hand,
while extending the scale of production, it renders possible a relative
contraction of the arena. This contraction of arena simultaneous with,
and arising from, extension of scale, whereby a number of useless expenses
are cut down, is owing to the conglomeration of labourers, to the aggregation
of various processes, and to the concentration of the means of production.

The combined working-day produces, relatively to an equal sum
of isolated working-days, a greater quantity of use-values, and, consequently,
diminishes the labour-time necessary for the production of a given useful
effect. Whether the combined working-day, in a given case, acquires this
increased productive power, because it heightens the mechanical force of
labour, or extends its sphere of action over a greater space, or contracts
the field of production relatively to the scale of production, or at the
critical moment sets large masses of labour to work, or excites emulation
between individuals and raises their animal spirits, or impresses on the
similar operations carried on by a number of men the stamp of continuity
and many-sidedness, or performs simultaneously different operations, or
economises the means of production by use in common, or lends to individual
labour the character of average social labour whichever of these
be the cause of the increase, the special productive power of the combined
working-day is, under all circumstances, the social productive power of
labour, or the productive power of social labour. This power is due to
co-operation itself. When the labourer co-operates systematically with
others, he strips off the fetters of his individuality, and develops the
capabilities of his species. [13]

As a general rule, labourers cannot co-operate without being brought
together: their assemblage in one place is a necessary condition of their
co-operation. Hence wage-labourers cannot co-operate, unless they are employed
simultaneously by the same capital, the same capitalist, and unless therefore
their labour-powers are bought simultaneously by him. The total value of
these labour-powers, or the amount of the wages of these labourers for
a day, or a week, as the case may be, must be ready in the pocket of the
capitalist, before the workmen are assembled for the process of production.
The payment of 300 workmen at once, though only for one day, requires a
greater outlay of capital, than does the payment of a smaller number of
men, week by week, during a whole year. Hence the number of the labourers
that co-operate, or the scale of co-operation, depends, in the first instance,
on the amount of capital that the individual capitalist can spare for the
purchase of labour-power; in other words, on the extent to which a single
capitalist has command over the means of subsistence of a number of labourers.

And as with the variable, so it is with the constant capital.
For example, the outlay on raw material is 30 times as great, for the capitalist
who employs 300 men, as it is for each of the 30 capitalists who employ
10 men. The value and quantity of the instruments of labour used in common
do not, it is true, increase at the same rate as the number of workmen,
but they do increase very considerably. Hence, concentration of large masses
of the means of production in the hands of individual capitalists, is a
material condition for the co-operation of wage-labourers, and the extent
of the co-operation or the scale of production, depends on the extent of
this concentration.

We saw in a former chapter, that a certain minimum amount of capital
was necessary, in order that the number of labourers simultaneously employed,
and, consequently, the amount of surplus-value produced, might suffice
to liberate the employer himself from manual labour, to convert him from
a small master into a capitalist, and thus formally to establish capitalist
production. We now see that a certain minimum amount is a necessary condition
for the conversion of numerous isolated and independent processes
into one combined social process.

We also saw that at first, the subjection of labour to capital
was only a formal result of the fact, that the labourer, instead of working
for himself, works for and consequently under the capitalist. By the co-operation
of numerous wage-labourers, the sway of capital develops into a requisite
for carrying on the labour-process itself, into a real requisite of production.
That a capitalist should command on the field of production, is now as
indispensable as that a general should command on the field of battle.

All combined labour on a large scale requires, more or less, a
directing authority, in order to secure the harmonious working of the individual
activities, and to perform the general functions that have their origin
in the action of the combined organism, as distinguished from the action
of its separate organs. A single violin player is his own conductor; an
orchestra requires a separate one. The work of directing, superintending,
and adjusting, becomes one of the functions of capital, from the moment
that the labour under the control of capital, becomes co-operative. Once
a function of capital, it acquires special characteristics.

The directing motive, the end and aim of capitalist production,
is to extract the greatest possible amount of surplus-value, [14] and consequently to exploit labour-power to the greatest possible extent. As the number of the co-operating labourers increases, so too does their
resistance to the domination of capital, and with it, the necessity for
capital to overcome this resistance by counterpressure. The control exercised
by the capitalist is not only a special function, due to the nature of
the social labour-process, and peculiar to that process, but it is, at
the same time, a function of the exploitation of a social labour-process,
and is consequently rooted in the unavoidable antagonism between the exploiter
and the living and labouring raw material he exploits.

Again, in proportion to the increasing mass of the means of production,
now no longer the property of the labourer, but of the capitalist, the
necessity increases for some effective control over the proper application
of those means. [15] Moreover, the co-operation of wage labourers is entirely brought about by the capital that employs them. Their union
into one single productive body and the establishment of a connexion between
their individual functions, are matters foreign and external to them, are
not their own act, but the act of the capital that brings and keeps them
together. Hence the connexion existing between their various labours appears
to them, ideally, in the shape of a preconceived plan of the capitalist,
and practically in the shape of the authority of the same capitalist, in
the shape of the powerful will of another, who subjects their activity
to his aims. If, then, the control of the capitalist is in substance two-fold
by reason of the two-fold nature of the process of production itself, which,
on the one hand, is a social process for producing use-values, on the other,
a process for creating surplus-value in form that control is despotic.
As co-operation extends its scale, this despotism takes forms peculiar
to itself. Just as at first the capitalist is relieved from actual labour
so soon as his capital has reached that minimum amount with which capitalist
production, as such, begins, so now, he hands over the work of direct and
constant supervision of the individual workmen, and groups of workmen,
to a special kind of wage-labourer. An industrial army of workmen, under
the command of a capitalist, requires, like a real army, officers (managers),
and sergeants (foremen, overlookers), who, while the work is being done, command in the name of the capitalist. The work of supervision becomes their established and exclusive function. When comparing the mode of production
of isolated peasants and artisans with production by slave-labour, the
political economist counts this labour of superintendence among the faux
frais of production. [16] But, when considering
the capitalist mode of production, he, on the contrary, treats the work
of control made necessary by the co-operative character of the labour-process
as identical with the different work of control, necessitated by the capitalist
character of that process and the antagonism of interests between capitalist
and labourer. [17] It is not because he is a leader
of industry that a man is a capitalist; on the contrary, he is a leader
of industry because he is a capitalist. The leadership of industry is an
attribute of capital, just as in feudal times the functions of general
and judge, were attributes of landed property. [18]

The labourer is the owner of his labour-power until he has done
bargaining for its sale with the capitalist; and he can sell no more than
what he has i.e., his individual, isolated labour-power. This state of
things is in no way altered by the fact that the capitalist, instead of
buying the labour-power of one man, buys that of 100, and enters into separate
contracts with 100 unconnected men instead of with one. He is at liberty
to set the 100 men to work, without letting them co-operate. He pays them
the value of 100 independent labour-powers, but he does not pay for the
combined labour-power of the hundred. Being independent of each other,
the labourers are isolated persons, who enter into relations with the capitalist,
but not with one another. This co-operation begins only with the labour-process,
but they have then ceased to belong to themselves. On entering that process,
they become incorporated with capital. As co-operators, as members of a
working organism, they are but special modes of existence of capital. Hence,
the productive power developed by the labourer when working in co-operation,
is the productive power of capital. This power is developed gratuitously,
whenever the workmen are placed under given conditions, and it is capital
that places them under such conditions. Because this power costs capital
nothing, and because, on the other hand, the labourer himself does not
develop it before his labour belongs to capital, it appears as a power
with which capital is endowed by Nature – a productive power that is immanent
in capital.

The colossal effects of simple co-operation are to be seen in
the gigantic structures of the ancient Asiatics, Egyptians, Etruscans,
&c.

“It has happened in times past that these Oriental States, after
supplying the expenses of their civil and military establishments, have
found themselves in possession of a surplus which they could apply to works
of magnificence or utility and in the construction of these their command
over the hands and arms of almost the entire non-agricultural population
has produced stupendous monuments which still indicate their power. The
teeming valley of the Nile ... produced food for a swarming non-agricultural
population, and this food, belonging to the monarch and the priesthood,
afforded the means of erecting the mighty monuments which filled the land....
In moving the colossal statues and vast masses of which the transport creates
wonder, human labour almost alone, was prodigally used.... The number of
the labourers and the concentration of their efforts sufficed. We see mighty
coral reefs rising from the depths of the ocean into islands and
firm land, yet each individual depositor is puny, weak, and contemptible.
The non-agricultural labourers of an Asiatic monarchy have little but their
individual bodily exertions to bring to the task, but their number is their
strength, and the power of directing these masses gave rise to the palaces
and temples, the pyramids, and the armies of gigantic statues of which
the remains astonish and perplex us. It is that confinement of the revenues
which feed them, to one or a few hands, which makes such undertakings possible.”

This power of Asiatic and Egyptian kings, Etruscan theocrats, &c., has in modern society been transferred to the capitalist,
whether he be an isolated, or as in joint-stock companies, a collective capitalist.

Co-operation, such as we find it at the dawn of human development,
among races who live by the chase, [20] or, say, in
the agriculture of Indian communities, is based, on the one hand, on ownership
in common of the means of production, and on the other hand, on the fact,
that in those cases, each individual has no more torn himself off from
the navel-string of his tribe or community, than each bee has freed itself
from connexion with the hive. Such co-operation is distinguished from capitalistic
co-operation by both of the above characteristics. The sporadic application
of co-operation on a large scale in ancient times, in the middle ages,
and in modern colonies, reposes on relations of dominion and servitude,
principally on slavery. The capitalistic form, on the contrary, pre-supposes
from first to last, the free wage-labourer, who sells his labour-power
to capital. Historically, however, this form is developed in opposition
to peasant agriculture and to the carrying on of independent handicrafts
whether in guilds or not. [21] From the standpoint of these, capitalistic co-operation does not manifest itself as a particular
historical form of co-operation, but co-operation itself appears to be
a historical form peculiar to, and specifically distinguishing, the capitalist
process of production.

Just as the social productive power of labour that is developed
by co-operation, appears to be the productive power of capital, so
co-operation itself, contrasted with the process of production carried
on by isolated independent labourers, or even by small employers, appears
to be a specific form of the capitalist process of production. It is the
first change experienced by the actual labour-process, when subjected to
capital. This change takes place spontaneously. The simultaneous employment
of a large number of wage-labourers, in one and the same process, which
is a necessary condition of this change, also forms the starting-point
of capitalist production. This point coincides with the birth of capital
itself. If then, on the one hand, the capitalist mode of production presents
itself to us historically, as a necessary condition to the transformation
of the labour-process into a social process, so, on the other hand, this
social form of the labour-process presents itself, as a method employed
by capital for the more profitable exploitation of labour, by increasing
that labour’s productiveness.

In the elementary form, under which we have hitherto viewed it,
co-operation is a necessary concomitant of all production on a large scale,
but it does not, in itself, represent a fixed form characteristic of a
particular epoch in the development of the capitalist mode of production.
At the most it appears to do so, and that only approximately, in the handicraft-like
beginnings of manufacture, [22] and in that kind of
agriculture on a large scale, which corresponds to the epoch of manufacture,
and is distinguished from peasant agriculture, mainly by the number of
the labourers simultaneously employed, and by the mass of the means of
production concentrated for their use. Simple co-operation is always the
prevailing form, in those branches of production in which capital operates
on a large scale, and division of labour and machinery play but a subordinate
part.

Co-operation ever constitutes the fundamental form of the capitalist
mode of production, nevertheless the elementary form of co-operation continues
to subsist as a particular form of capitalist production side by side with
the more developed forms of that mode of production.

Footnotes

1. “Unquestionably, there is a good deal of difference between the value of one man’s labour and that of another from
strength, dexterity, and honest application. But I am quite sure, from
my best observation, that any given five men will, in their total, afford
a proportion of labour equal to any other five within the periods of life
I have stated; that is, that among such five men there will be one possessing
all the qualifications of a good workman, one bad, and the other three
middling, and approximating to the first, and the last. So that in so small
a platoon as that of even five, you will find the full complement of all
that five men can earn.” (E. Burke, 1. c., pp. 15, 16.) Compare Quételet
on the average individual.

2. Professor Roscher claims to have discovered that one needlewoman employed by Mrs. Roscher during two days, does more
work than two needlewomen employed together during one day. The learned
professor should not study the capitalist process of production in the
nursery, nor under circumstances where the principal personage, the capitalist,
is wanting.

3. “Concours de forces.” (Destutt de Tracy, l.c., p. 80.)

4. “There are numerous operations of so simple a kind as not to admit a division into parts, which cannot be performed without the co-operation of many pairs of hands. I would instance the lifting of a large tree on to a wain ... everything, in short, which cannot be
done unless a great many pairs of hands help each other in the same undivided
employment and at the same time.” (E. G. Wakefield: “A View of the Art
of Colonisation.” London, 1849, p. 168.)

5. “As one man cannot, and ten men must strain to lift a ton of weight, yet 100 men can do it only by the strength
of a finger of each of them.” (John Betters: “Proposals for Raising a Colledge
of Industry.” London, 1696, p. 21.)

6. “There is also” (when the same number of men are employed by one farmer on 300 acres, instead of by ten farmers
with 30 acres a piece) “an advantage in the proportion of servants, which
will not so easily be understood but by practical men; for it is natural
to say, as 1 is to 4, so are 3 to 12; but this will not hold good in practice;
for in harvest time and many other operations which require that kind of
despatch by the throwing many hands together, the work is better and more
expeditiously done: f i. in harvest, 2 drivers, 2 loaders, 2 pitchers,
2 rakers, and the rest at the rick, or in the barn, will despatch double
the work that the same number of hands would do if divided into different
gangs on different farms.” (“An Inquiry into the Connexion between the
Present Price of Provisions and the Size of Farms.” By a Farmer. London,
1773, pp. 7, 8.)

7. Strictly, Aristotle’s definition is that man is by nature a town-citizen. This is quite as characteristic of
ancient classical society as Franklin’s definition of man, as a tool-making
animal, is characteristic of Yankeedom.

8. “On doit encore remarquer que cette division partielle de travail peut se faire quand même les ouvriers
sont occupés d’une même besogne. Des maçons par exemple, occupés
à faire passer de mains en mains des briques à un échafaudage
supérieur, font tous la même besogne, et pourtant il existe
parmi eux une espèce de division de travail, qui consiste en ce
que chacun d’eux fait passer la brique par un espace donné, et que
tous ensemble la font parvenir beaucoup plus promptement à l’endroit
marqué qu’ils ne le feraient si chacun d’eux portait sa brique séparément
jusqu’à l’échafaudage supérieur.” [It should be noted further that this partial division of labour can occur even when the workers are engaged in the same task. Masons, for example, engaged in passing bricks from hand to hand to a higher stage of the building, are all performing the same task, and yet there does exist amongst them a sort of division of labour. This consists in the fact that each of them passes the brick through a given space, and, taken together, they make it arrive much more quickly at the required spot than they would do if each of them carried his brick separately to the upper storey] (F. Skarbek: “Théorie des richesses sociales.” Paris, 1839, t. I, pp. 97, 98.)

9. “Est-il question d’exécuter un travail compliqué, plusieurs choses doivent être faites simultanément. L’un en fait une pendant que l’autre en fait une autre, et tous contribuent à l’effet qu’un seul homme n’aurait pu produire. L’un rame pendant que l’autre tient le gouvernail, et qu’un troisième jette le filet on harponne le poisson, et la pêche a un succès impossible sans ce concours.” [Is it a question of undertaking a complex piece of labour? Many things must be done simultaneously. One person does one thing, while another does something else, and they all contribute to an effect that a single man would be unable to produce. One rows while the other holds the rudder, and a third casts the net or harpoons the fish; in this way fishing enjoys a success that would be impossible without this cooperation] (Destutt de Tracy, l.c.)

10. “The doing of it (agricultural work) at the critical juncture is of so much the greater consequence.” (“An Inquiry into the Connexion between the Present Price,” &c., p. 9.) “In agriculture, there is no more important factor than that of time.” (Liebig: “Ueber Theorie und Praxis in der Landwirtschaft.” 1856, p. 23.)

11. “The next evil is one which one would scarcely expect to find in a country which exports more labour than
any other in the world, with the exception, perhaps, of China and England –
the impossibility of procuring a sufficient number of hands to clean the
cotton. The consequence of this is that large quantities of the crop are
left unpicked, while another portion is gathered from the ground when it
has fallen, and is of course discoloured and partially rotted, so that
for want of labour at the proper season the cultivator is actually forced
to submit to the loss of a large part of that crop for which England is
so anxiously looking.” (“Bengal Hurkaru.” Bi-Monthly Overland Summary of News, 22nd July, 1861.)

12. In the progress of culture “all, and perhaps more than all, the capital and labour which once loosely occupied
500 acres, are now concentrated for the more complete tillage of 100.”
Although “relatively to the amount of capital and labour employed, space
is concentrated, it is an enlarged sphere of production, as compared to
the sphere of production formerly occupied or worked upon by one single
independent agent of production.” (R. Jones: “An Essay on the Distribution
of Wealth,” part I. On Rent. London, 1831. p. 191.)

13. “La forza di ciascuno uomo è minima, ma la riunione delle minime forze forma una forza totale maggiore
anche della somma delle forze medesime fino a che le forze per essere riunite
possono diminuere il tempo ed accrescere lo spazio della loro azione.”
(G. R. Carli, Note to P. Verri, l.c., t. xv., p. 196.)

14. “Profits ... is the sole end of trade.” (J. Vanderlint, l.c., p. 11.)

15. That Philistine paper, the Spectator, states that after the introduction of a sort of partnership between capitalist and workmen in the “Wirework Company of Manchester,” “the first result was a sudden decrease in waste, the men not seeing why they should waste
their own property any more than any other master’s, and waste is, perhaps,
next to bad debts, the greatest source of manufacturing loss.” The same
paper finds that the main defect in the Rochdale co-operative experiments
is this: “They showed that associations of workmen could manage shops,
mills, and almost all forms of industry with success, and they immediately
improved the condition of the men; but then they did not leave a clear
place for masters.” Quelle horreur!

16. Professor Cairnes, after stating that the superintendence of labour is a leading feature of production by
slaves in the Southern States of North America, continues: “The peasant
proprietor (of the North), appropriating the whole produce of his toil,
needs no other stimulus to exertion. Superintendence is here completely
dispensed with.” (Cairnes, l.c., pp. 48, 49.)

17. Sir James Steuart, a writer altogether remarkable for his quick eye for the characteristic social distinctions
between different modes of production, says: “Why do large undertakings
in the manufacturing way ruin private industry, but by coming nearer to
the simplicity of slaves?” (“Prin. of Pol. Econ.,” London, 1767, v. I.,
pp. 167, 168.)

18. Auguste Comte and his school might therefore have shown that feudal lords are an eternal necessity in the
same way that they have done in the case of the lords of capital.

19. R. Jones. “Textbook of Lectures,” &c., pp. 77, 78. The ancient Assyrian, Egyptian, and other collections
in London, and in other European capitals, make us eye-witnesses of the
modes of carrying on that co-operative labour.

20. Linguet is improbably right, when in his “Théorie des Lois Civiles,” he declares hunting to be the
first form of co-operation, and man-hunting (war) one of the earliest forms
of hunting.

21. Peasant agriculture on a small scale, and the carrying on of independent handicrafts, which together form the
basis of the feudal mode of production, and after the dissolution of that
system, continue side by side with the capitalist mode, also form the economic
foundation of the classical communities at their best, after the primitive
form of ownership of land in common had disappeared, and before slavery
had seized on production in earnest.

22. “Whether the united skill, industry, and emulation of many together on the same work be not the way to advance
it? And whether it had been otherwise possible for England, to have carried
on her Woollen Manufacture to so great a perfection?” (Berkeley. “The Querist.” London, 1751, p. 56, par. 521.)

## Chapter Fourteen: Division of Labour and Manufacture

Contents

Section 1 - Two-fold Origin of Manufacture

Section 2 - The Detail Labourer and his Implements

Section 3 - The Two Fundamental Forms of Manufacture:
Heterogeneous Manufacture, Serial Manufacture

Section 4 - Division of Labour in Manufacture,
and Division of Labour in Society

Section 5 - The Capitalistic Character of Manufacture

## SECTION 1. TWO-FOLD ORIGIN OF MANUFACTURE

That co-operation which is based on division of labour,
assumes its typical form in manufacture, and is the prevalent characteristic
form of the capitalist process of production throughout the manufacturing
period properly so called. That period, roughly speaking, extends from
the middle of the 16th to the last third of the 18th century.

Manufacture takes its rise in two ways:

(1.) By the assemblage, in one workshop under the control of a single
capitalist, of labourers belonging to various independent handicrafts,
but through whose hands a given article must pass on its way to completion.
A carriage, for example, was formerly the product of the labour of a great
number of independent artificers, such as wheelwrights, harness-makers,
tailors, locksmiths, upholsterers, turners, fringe-makers, glaziers, painters,
polishers, gilders, &c. In the manufacture of carriages, however, all
these different artificers are assembled in one building where they work
into one another’s hands. It is true that a carriage cannot be gilt before
it has been made. But if a number of carriages are being made simultaneously,
some may be in the hands of the gilders while others are going through
an earlier process. So far, we are still in the domain of simple co-operation,
which finds its materials ready to hand in the shape of men and things.
But very soon an important change takes place. The tailor, the locksmith,
and the other artificers, being now exclusively occupied in carriage-making,
each gradually loses, through want of practice, the ability to carry on,
to its full extent, his old handicraft. But, on the other hand, his activity
now confined in one groove, assumes the form best adapted to the narrowed
sphere of action. At first, carriage manufacture is a combination of various
independent handicrafts. By degrees, it becomes the splitting up of carriage-making
into its various detail processes, each of which crystallises into
the exclusive function of a particular workman, the manufacture, as a whole,
being carried on by the men in conjunction. In the same way, cloth manufacture,
as also a whole series of other manufactures, arose by combining different
handicrafts together under the control of a single capitalist. [1]

(2.) Manufacture also arises in a way exactly the reverse of this –
namely, by one capitalist employing simultaneously in one workshop a number
of artificers, who all do the same, or the same kind of work, such as making
paper, type, or needles. This is co-operation in its most elementary form.
Each of these artificers (with the help, perhaps, of one or two apprentices),
makes the entire commodity, and he consequently performs in succession
all the operations necessary for its production. He still works in his
old handicraft-like way. But very soon external circumstances cause a different
use to be made of the concentration of the workmen on one spot, and of
the simultaneousness of their work. An increased quantity of the article
has perhaps to be delivered within a given time. The work is therefore
re-distributed. Instead of each man being allowed to perform all the various
operations in succession, these operations are changed into disconnected,
isolated ones, carried on side by side; each is assigned to a different
artificer, and the whole of them together are performed simultaneously
by the co-operating workmen. This accidental repartition gets repeated,
develops advantages of its own, and gradually ossifies into a systematic
division of labour. The commodity, from being the individual product of
an independent artificer, becomes the social product of a union of artificers,
each of whom performs one, and only one, of the constituent partial operations.
The same operations which, in the case of a papermaker belonging to a German
Guild, merged one into the other as the successive acts of one artificer,
became in the Dutch paper manufacture so many partial operations carried
on side by side by numerous co-operating labourers. The needlemaker of
the Nuremberg Guild was the cornerstone on which the English needle
manufacture was raised. But while in Nuremberg that single artificer performed
a series of perhaps 20 operations one after another, in England it was
not long before there were 20 needlemakers side by side, each performing
one alone of those 20 operations, and in consequence of further experience,
each of those 20 operations was again split up, isolated, and made the
exclusive function of a separate workman.

The mode in which manufacture arises, its growth out of handicrafts,
is therefore two-fold. On the one hand, it arises from the union of various
independent handicrafts, which become stripped of their independence and
specialised to such an extent as to be reduced to mere supplementary partial
processes in the production of one particular commodity. On the other hand,
it arises from the co-operation of artificers of one handicraft; it splits
up that particular handicraft into its various detail operations, isolating,
and making these operations independent of one another up to the point
where each becomes the exclusive function of a particular labourer. On
the one hand, therefore, manufacture either introduces division of labour
into a process of production, or further develops that division; on the
other hand, it unites together handicrafts that were formerly separate.
But whatever may have been its particular starting-point, its final form
is invariably the same – a productive mechanism whose parts are human beings.

For a proper understanding of the division of labour in manufacture,
it is essential that the following points be firmly grasped. First, the
decomposition of a process of production into its various successive steps
coincides, here, strictly with the resolution of a handicraft into its
successive manual operations. Whether complex or simple, each operation
has to be done by hand, retains the character of a handicraft, and is therefore
dependent on the strength, skill, quickness, and sureness, of the individual
workman in handling his tools. The handicraft continues to be the basis.
This narrow technical basis excludes a really scientific analysis of any
definite process of industrial production, since it is still a condition
that each detail process gone through by the product must be capable of
being done by hand and of forming, in its way, a separate handicraft. It
is just because handicraft skill continues, in this way, to be the foundation
of the process of production, that each workman becomes exclusively assigned
to a partial function, and that for the rest of his life, his labour-power
is turned into the organ of this detail function.

Secondly, this division of labour is a particular sort of co-operation,
and many of its advantages[*] spring from the general character of co-operation,
and not from this particular form of it.

## SECTION 2. THE DETAIL LABOURER AND HIS IMPLEMENTS

If we now go more into detail, it is, in the first
place, clear that a labourer who all his life performs one and the same
simple operation, converts his whole body into the automatic, specialised
implement of that operation. Consequently, he takes less time in doing
it, than the artificer who performs a whole series of operations in succession.
But the collective labourer, who constitutes the living mechanism of manufacture,
is made up solely of such specialised detail labourers. Hence, in comparison
with the independent handicraft, more is produced in a given time, or the
productive power of labour is increased. [2] Moreover, when once this fractional work is established as the exclusive function
of one person, the methods it employs become perfected. The workman’s continued
repetition of the same simple act, and the concentration of his attention
on it, teach him by experience how to attain the desired effect with the
minimum of exertion. But since there are always several generations of
labourers living at one time, and working together at the manufacture of
a given article, the technical skill, the tricks of the trade thus acquired,
become established, and are accumulated and handed down. [3]

Manufacture, in fact, produces the skill of the detail labourer,
by reproducing, and systematically driving to an extreme within the workshop,
the naturally developed differentiation of trades which it found ready
to hand in society at large. On the other hand, the conversion of fractional
work into the life-calling of one man, corresponds to the tendency shown
by earlier societies, to make trades hereditary; either to petrify them
into castes, or whenever definite historical conditions beget in the individual
a tendency to vary in a manner incompatible with the nature of castes,
to ossify them into guilds. Castes and guilds arise from the action of
the same natural law, that regulates the differentiation of plants and
animals into species and varieties, except that, when a certain degree
of development has been reached, the heredity of castes and the exclusiveness
of guilds are ordained as a law of society. [4]

“The muslins of Dakka in fineness, the calicoes and other
piece goods of Coromandel in brilliant and durable colours, have never
been surpassed. Yet they are produced without capital, machinery, division
of labour, or any of those means which give such facilities to the manufacturing
interest of Europe. The weaver is merely a detached individual, working
a web when ordered of a customer, and with a loom of the rudest construction,
consisting sometimes of a few branches or bars of wood, put roughly together.
There is even no expedient for rolling up the warp; the loom must therefore
be kept stretched to its full length, and becomes so inconveniently large,
that it cannot be contained within the hut of the manufacturer, who is
therefore compelled to ply his trade in the open air, where it is interrupted
by every vicissitude of the weather.” [5]

It is only the special skill accumulated from generation to generation, and transmitted
from father to son, that gives to the Hindu, as it does to the spider,
this proficiency. And yet the work of such a Hindu weaver is very complicated,
compared with that of a manufacturing labourer.

An artificer, who performs one after another the various fractional
operations in the production of a finished article, must at one time change
his place, at another his tools. The transition from one operation to another
interrupts the flow of his labour, and creates, so to say, gaps in his
working-day. These gaps close up so soon as he is tied to one and the same
operation all day long; they vanish in proportion as the changes in his
work diminish. The resulting increased productive power is owing either
to an increased expenditure of labour-power in a given time i.e., to increased
intensity of labour or to a decrease in the amount of labour-power unproductively
consumed. The extra expenditure of power, demanded by every transition
from rest to motion, is made up for by prolonging the duration of the normal
velocity when once acquired. On the other hand, constant labour of one
uniform kind disturbs the intensity and flow of a man’s animal spirits,
which find recreation and delight in mere change of activity.

The productiveness of labour depends not only on the proficiency
of the workman, but on the perfection of his tools. Tools of the same kind,
such as knives, drills, gimlets, hammers, &c., may be employed
in different processes; and the same tool may serve various purposes in
a single process. But so soon as the different operations of a labour-process
are disconnected the one from the other, and each fractional operation
acquires in the hands of the detail labourer a suitable and peculiar form,
alterations become necessary in the implements that previously served more
than one purpose. The direction taken by this change is determined by the
difficulties experienced in consequence of the unchanged form of the implement.
Manufacture is characterised by the differentiation of the instruments
of labour – a differentiation whereby implements of a given sort acquire
fixed shapes, adapted to each particular application, and by the specialisation
of those instruments, giving to each special implement its full play only
in the hands of a specific detail labourer. In Birmingham alone 500 varieties
of hammers are produced, and not only is each adapted to one particular
process, but several varieties often serve exclusively for the different
operations in one and the same process. The manufacturing period simplifies,
improves, and multiplies the implements of labour, by adapting them to
the exclusively special functions of each detail labourer. [6] It thus creates at the same time one of the material conditions for the
existence of machinery, which consists of a combination of simple instruments.

The detail labourer and his implements are the simplest elements
of manufacture. Let us now turn to its aspect as a whole.

## SECTION 3. THE TWO FUNDAMENTAL FORMS OF MANUFACTURE: HETEROGENEOUS MANUFACTURE, SERIAL MANUFACTURE

The organisation of manufacture has two fundamental
forms which, in spite of occasional blending, are essentially different
in kind, and, moreover, play very distinct parts in the subsequent transformation
of manufacture into modern industry carried on by machinery. This double
character arises from the nature of the article produced. This article
either results from the mere mechanical fitting together of partial products
made independently, or owes its completed shape to a series of connected
processes and manipulations.

A locomotive, for instance, consists of more than 5,000
independent parts. It cannot, however, serve as an example of the first
kind of genuine manufacture, for it is a structure produced by modern mechanical
industry. But a watch can; and William Petty used it to illustrate the
division of labour in manufacture. Formerly the individual work of a Nuremberg
artificer, the watch has been transformed into the social product of an
immense number of detail labourers, such as mainspring makers, dial makers,
spiral spring makers, jewelled hole makers, ruby lever makers, hand makers,
case makers, screw makers, gilders, with numerous subdivisions, such as
wheel makers (brass and steel separate), pin makers, movement makers, acheveur
de pignon (fixes the wheels on the axles, polishes the facets, &c.),
pivot makers, planteur de finissage (puts the wheels and springs in the
works), finisseur de barillet (cuts teeth in the wheels, makes the holes
of the right size, &c.), escapement makers, cylinder makers for cylinder
escapements, escapement wheel makers, balance wheel makers, raquette makers
(apparatus for regulating the watch), the planteur d’échappement
(escapement maker proper); then the repasseur de barillet (finishes the
box for the spring, &c.), steel polishers, wheel polishers, screw polishers,
figure painters, dial enamellers (melt the enamel on the copper), fabricant
de pendants (makes the ring by which the case is hung), finisseur de charnière
(puts the brass hinge in the cover, &c.), faiseur de secret (puts in
the springs that open the case), graveur, ciseleur, polisseur de boîte,
&c., &c., and last of all the repasseur, who fits together the
whole watch and hands it over in a going state. Only a few parts of the
watch pass through several hands; and all these membra disjecta come together
for the first time in the hand that binds them into one mechanical whole.
This external relation between the finished product, and its various and
diverse elements makes it, as well in this case as in the case of all similar
finished articles, a matter of chance whether the detail labourers are
brought together in one workshop or not. The detail operations may further
be carried on like so many independent handicrafts, as they are in the
Cantons of Vaud and Neufchâtel; while in Geneva there exist large
watch manufactories where the detail labourers directly co-operate under
the control of a single capitalist. And even in the latter case the dial, the springs, and the case, are seldom made in the factory itself. To carry
on the trade as a manufacture, with concentration of workmen, is, in the
watch trade, profitable only under exceptional conditions, because competition
is greater between the labourers who desire to work at home, and because
the splitting up of the work into a number of heterogeneous processes,
permits but little use of the instruments of labour in common, and the
capitalist, by scattering the work, saves the outlay on workshops,
&c. [7] Nevertheless the position of this detail
labourer who, though he works at home, does so for a capitalist (manufacturer,
établisseur), is very different from that of the independent artificer,
who works for his own customers. [8]

The second kind of manufacture, its perfected form, produces articles
that go through connected phases of development, through a series of processes
step by step, like the wire in the manufacture of needles, which passes
through the hands of 72 and sometimes even 92 different detail workmen.

In so far as such a manufacture, when first started, combines
scattered handicrafts, it lessens the space by which the various phases
of production are separated from each other. The time taken in passing
from one stage to another is shortened, so is the labour that effectuates
this passage. [9] In comparison with a handicraft, productive power is gained, and this gain is owing to the general co-operative character
of manufacture. On the other hand, division of labour, which is the distinguishing
principle of manufacture, requires the isolation of the various stages
of production and their independence of each other. The establishment and
maintenance of a connexion between the isolated functions necessitates
the incessant transport of the article from one hand to another, and from
one process to another. From the standpoint of modern mechanical industry,
this necessity stands forth as a characteristic and costly disadvantage,
and one that is immanent in the principle of manufacture. [10]

If we confine our attention to some particular lot of raw
materials, of rags, for instance, in paper manufacture, or of wire in needle
manufacture, we perceive that it passes in succession through a series
of stages in the hands of the various detail workmen until completion.
On the other hand, if we look at the workshop as a whole, we see the raw
material in all the stages of its production at the same time. The collective
labourer, with one set of his many hands armed with one kind of tools,
draws the wire, with another set, armed with different tools, he, at the
same time, straightens it, with another, he cuts it, with another, points
it, and so on. The different detail processes, which were successive in
time, have become simultaneous, go on side by side in space. Hence, production
of a greater quantum of finished commodities in a given time. [11] This simultaneity, it is true, is due to the general co-operative form of the process as a whole; but Manufacture not only finds the conditions
for co-operation ready to hand, it also, to some extent, creates them by
the sub-division of handicraft labour. On the other hand, it accomplishes
this social organisation of the labour-process only by riveting each labourer
to a single fractional detail.

Since the fractional product of each detail labourer is, at the
same time, only a particular stage in the development of one and the same
finished article, each labourer, or each group of labourers, prepares the
raw material for another labourer or group. The result of the labour of
the one is the starting-point for the labour of the other. The one workman
therefore gives occupation directly to the other. The labour-time necessary in each partial process, for attaining the desired effect, is learnt by
experience; and the mechanism of Manufacture, as a whole, is based on the
assumption that a given result will be obtained in a given time. It is
only on this assumption that the various supplementary labour-processes
can proceed uninterruptedly, simultaneously, and side by side. It is clear
that this direct dependence of the operations, and therefore of the labourers,
on each other, compels each one of them to spend on his work no more than
the necessary time, and thus a continuity, uniformity, regularity, order,
[12] and even intensity of labour, of quite a different kind, is begotten than is to be found in an independent handicraft
or even in simple co-operation. The rule, that the labour-time expended
on a commodity should not exceed that which is socially necessary for its
production, appears, in the production of commodities generally, to be
established by the mere effect of competition; since, to express ourselves
superficially, each single producer is obliged to sell his commodity at
its market-price. In Manufacture, on the contrary, the turning out of a
given quantum of product in a given time is a technical law of the process
of production itself. [13]

Different operations take, however, unequal periods, and yield
therefore, in equal times unequal quantities of fractional products. If,
therefore, the same labourer has, day after day, to perform the same operation,
there must be a different number of labourers for each operation; for instance,
in type manufacture, there are four founders and two breakers to one rubber:
the founder casts 2,000 type an hour, the breaker breaks up 4,000, and
the rubber polishes 8,000. Here we have again the principle of co-operation
in its simplest form, the simultaneous employment of many doing the same
thing; only now, this principle is the expression of an organic relation.
The division of labour, as carried out in Manufacture, not only simplifies
and multiplies the qualitatively different parts of the social collective
labourer, but also creates a fixed mathematical relation or ratio which
regulates the quantitative extent of those parts i.e., the relative number
of labourers, or the relative size of the group of labourers, for each
detail operation. It develops, along with the qualitative sub-division
of the social labour-process, a quantitative rule and proportionality for
that process.

When once the most fitting proportion has been experimentally
established for the numbers of the detail labourers in the various groups
when producing on a given scale, that scale can be extended only by employing
a multiple of each particular group. [14] There is this to boot, that the same individual can do certain kinds of work just as
well on a large as on a small scale; for instance, the labour of superintendence,
the carriage of the fractional product from one stage to the next, &c.
The isolation of such functions, their allotment to a particular labourer,
does not become advantageous till after an increase in the number
of labourers employed; but this increase must affect every group proportionally.

The isolated group of labourers to whom any particular detail
function is assigned, is made up of homogeneous elements, and is one of
the constituent parts of the total mechanism. In many manufactures, however,
the group itself is an organised body of labour, the total mechanism being
a repetition or multiplication of these elementary organisms. Take, for
instance, the manufacture of glass bottles. It may be resolved into three
essentially different stages. First, the preliminary stage, consisting
of the preparation of the components of the glass, mixing the sand and
lime, &c., and melting them into a fluid mass of glass. [15] Various detail labourers are employed in this first stage, as also in the final one of removing the bottles from the drying furnace, sorting and
packing them, &c. In the middle, between these two stages, comes the
glass melting proper, the manipulation of the fluid mass. At each mouth
of the furnace, there works a group, called “the hole,” consisting of one
bottlemaker or finisher, one blower, one gatherer, one putter-up or whetter-off,
and one taker-in. These five detail workers are so many special organs
of a single working organism that acts only as a whole, and therefore can
operate only by the direct co-operation of the whole five. The whole body
is paralysed if but one of its members be wanting. But a glass furnace
has several openings (in England from 4 to 6), each of which contains an
earthenware melting-pot full of molten glass, and employs a similar five-membered
group of workers. The organisation of each group is based on division of
labour, but the bond between the different groups is simple co-operation,
which, by using in common one of the means of production, the furnace,
causes it to be more economically consumed. Such a furnace, with its 4-6
groups, constitutes a glass house; and a glass manufactory comprises a
number of such glass houses, together with the apparatus and workmen requisite
for the preparatory and final stages.

Finally, just as Manufacture arises in part from the combination
of various handicrafts, so, too, it develops into a combination of various
manufactures. The larger English glass manufacturers, for instance, make
their own earthenware melting-pots, because, on the quality of these depends,
to a great extent, the success or failure of the process. The manufacture
of one of the means of production is here united with that of the product.
On the other hand, the manufacture of the product may be united with other
manufactures, of which that product is the raw material, or with the products
of which it is itself subsequently mixed. Thus, we find the manufacture
of flint glass combined with that of glass cutting and brass founding;
the latter for the metal settings of various articles of glass. The various
manufactures so combined form more or less separate departments of a larger
manufacture, but are at the same time independent processes, each with
its own division of labour. In spite of the many advantages offered by
this combination of manufactures, it never grows into a complete technical
system on its own foundation. That happens only on its transformation into
an industry carried on by machinery.

Early in the manufacturing period, the principle of lessening
the necessary labour-time in the production of commodities, [16] was accepted and formulated: and the use of machines, especially for certain simple first processes that have to be conducted on a very large scale,
and with the application of great force, sprang up here and there. Thus,
at an early period in paper manufacture, the tearing up of the rags was
done by paper-mills; and in metal works, the pounding of the ores was effected
by stamping mills. [17] The Roman Empire had handed
down the elementary form of all machinery in the water-wheel. [18]

The handicraft period bequeathed to us the great inventions of
the compass, of gunpowder, of type-printing, and of the automatic clock.
But, on the whole, machinery played that subordinate part which Adam Smith
assigns to it in comparison with division of labour. [19] The sporadic use of machinery in the 17th century was of the greatest importance, because it supplied the great mathematicians of that time with a practical
basis and stimulant to the creation of the science of mechanics.

The collective labourer, formed by the combination of a number
of detail labourers, is the machinery specially characteristic of the manufacturing
period. The various operations that are performed in turns by the producer
of a commodity, and coalesce one with another during the progress of production,
lay claim to him in various ways. In one operation he must exert more strength,
in another more skill, in another more attention; and the same individual
does not possess all these qualities in an equal degree. After Manufacture has once separated, made independent, and isolated the various operations, the labourers are divided, classified, and grouped according to their predominating
qualities. If their natural endowments are, on the one hand, the foundation
on which the division of labour is built up, on the other hand, Manufacture,
once introduced, develops in them new powers that are by nature fitted
only for limited and special functions. The collective labourer now possesses,
in an equal degree of excellence, all the qualities requisite for production,
and expends them in the most economical manner, by exclusively employing
all his organs, consisting of particular labourers, or groups of labourers,
in performing their special functions. [20] The one-sidedness and the deficiencies of the detail labourer become perfections when he
is a part of the collective labourer. [21] The habit
of doing only one thing converts him into a never failing instrument, while
his connexion with the whole mechanism compels him to work with the regularity
of the parts of a machine. [22]

Since the collective labourer has functions, both simple and complex,
both high and low, his members, the individual labour-powers, require different
degrees of training, and must therefore have different values. Manufacture,
therefore, develops a hierarchy of labour-powers, to which there corresponds
a scale of wages. If, on the one hand, the individual labourers are appropriated
and annexed for life by a limited function; on the other hand, the various
operations of the hierarchy are parcelled out among the labourers according
to both their natural and their acquired capabilities. [23] Every process of production, however, requires certain simple manipulations, which every man is capable of doing. They too are now severed from their connexion with the more pregnant moments of activity, and ossified into
exclusive functions of specially appointed labourers. Hence, Manufacture
begets, in every handicraft that it seizes upon, a class of so-called unskilled
labourers, a class which handicraft industry strictly excluded. If it develops
a one-sided speciality into a perfection, at the expense of the whole of
a man’s working capacity, it also begins to make a speciality of the absence
of all development. Alongside of the hierarchic gradation there steps the
simple separation of the labourers into skilled and unskilled. For the
latter, the cost of apprenticeship vanishes; for the former, it diminishes,
compared with that of artificers, in consequence of the functions being
simplified. In both cases the value of labour-power falls. [24] An exception to this law holds good whenever the decomposition of the labour-process begets new and comprehensive functions, that either had no place at all,
or only a very modest one, in handicrafts. The fall in the value of labour-power,
caused by the disappearance or diminution of the expenses of apprenticeship,
implies a direct increase of surplus-value for the benefit of capital;
for everything that shortens the necessary labour-time required for the
reproduction of labour-power, extends the domain of surplus-labour.

## SECTION 4. DIVISION OF LABOUR IN MANUFACTURE, AND DIVISION OF LABOUR IN SOCIETY

We first considered the origin of Manufacture, then
its simple elements, then the detail labourer and his implements, and finally,
the totality of the mechanism. We shall now lightly touch upon the relation
between the division of labour in manufacture, and the social division
of labour, which forms the foundation of all production of commodities.

If we keep labour alone in view, we may designate the separation
of social production into its main divisions or genera — viz.,
agriculture, industries, &c., as division of labour in general, and
the splitting up of these families into species and sub-species, as division
of labour in particular, and the division of labour within the workshop
as division of labour in singular or in detail. [25]

Division of labour in a society, and the corresponding tying down
of individuals to a particular calling, develops itself, just as does the
division of labour in manufacture, from opposite starting-points. Within
a family, [26] and after further development within
a tribe, there springs up naturally a division of labour, caused by differences
of sex and age, a division that is consequently based on a purely physiological
foundation, which division enlarges its materials by the expansion of the
community, by the increase of population, and more especially, by the conflicts
between different tribes, and the subjugation of one tribe by another.
On the other hand, as I have before remarked, the exchange of products
springs up at the points where different families, tribes, communities,
come in contact; for, in the beginning of civilisation, it is not private
individuals but families, tribes, &c., that meet on an independent
footing. Different communities find different means of production, and
different means of subsistence in their natural environment. Hence, their
modes of production, and of living, and their products are different. It
is this spontaneously developed difference which, when different communities
come in contact, calls forth the mutual exchange of products, and the consequent
gradual conversion of those products into commodities. Exchange does not
create the differences between the spheres of production, but brings what
are already different into relation, and thus converts them into more or
less inter-dependent branches of the collective production of an enlarged
society. In the latter case, the social division of labour arises from
the exchange between spheres of production, that are originally distinct
and independent of one another. In the former, where the physiological
division of labour is the starting-point, the particular organs of a compact
whole grow loose, and break off, principally owing to the exchange of commodities
with foreign communities, and then isolate themselves so far, that the
sole bond, still connecting the various kinds of work, is the exchange
of the products as commodities. In the one case, it is the making dependent
what was before independent; in the other case, the making independent
what was before dependent.

The foundation of every division of labour that is well developed,
and brought about by the exchange of commodities, is the separation between
town and country. [27] It may be said, that the whole economic history of society is summed up in the movement of this antithesis.
We pass it over, however, for the present.

Just as a certain number of simultaneously employed labourers
are the material pre-requisites for division of labour in manufacture,
so are the number and density of the population, which here correspond
to the agglomeration in one workshop, a necessary condition for the division
of labour in society. [28] Nevertheless, this density is more or less relative. A relatively thinly populated country, with well-developed
means of communication, has a denser population than a more numerously
populated country, with badly-developed means of communication; and in
this sense the Northern States of the American Union, for instance, are
more thickly populated than India. [29]

Since the production and the circulation of commodities are the
general pre-requisites of the capitalist mode of production, division of
labour in manufacture demands, that division of labour in society at large
should previously have attained a certain degree of development. Inversely,
the former division reacts upon and develops and multiplies the latter.
Simultaneously, with the differentiation of the instruments of labour,
the industries that produce these instruments, become more and more
differentiated.[30] If the manufacturing system seize upon an industry, which, previously, was carried on in connexion with others,
either as a chief or as a subordinate industry, and by one producer, these
industries immediately separate their connexion, and become independent.
If it seize upon a particular stage in the production of a commodity, the
other stages of its production become converted into so many independent
industries. It has already been stated, that where the finished article
consists merely of a number of parts fitted together, the detail operations
may re-establish themselves as genuine and separate handicrafts. In order
to carry out more perfectly the division of labour in manufacture, a single
branch of production is, according to the varieties of its raw material,
or the various forms that one and the same raw material may assume, split
up into numerous, and to some extent, entirely new manufactures. Accordingly,
in France alone, in the first half of the 18th century, over 100 different
kinds of silk stuffs were woven, and, in Avignon, it was law, that “every
apprentice should devote himself to only one sort of fabrication, and should
not learn the preparation of several kinds of stuff at once.” The territorial division of labour, which confines special branches of production to special districts of a country, acquires fresh stimulus from the manufacturing
system, which exploits every special advantage. [31]
The Colonial system and the opening out of the markets of the world, both
of which are included in the general conditions of existence of the manufacturing
period, furnish rich material for developing the division of labour in
society. It is not the place, here, to go on to show how division of labour
seizes upon, not only the economic, but every other sphere of society,
and everywhere lays the foundation of that all engrossing system of specialising
and sorting men, that development in a man of one single faculty at the
expense of all other faculties, which caused A. Ferguson, the master of
Adam Smith, to exclaim: “We make a nation of Helots, and have no free citizens.”

But, in spite of the numerous analogies and links connecting them,
division of labour in the interior of a society, and that in the interior
of a workshop, differ not only in degree, but also in kind. The analogy
appears most indisputable where there is an invisible bond uniting the
various branches of trade. For instance the cattle-breeder produces hides,
the tanner makes the hides into leather, and the shoemaker, the leather
into boots. Here the thing produced by each of them is but a step towards
the final form, which is the product of all their labours combined. There are, besides, all the various industries that supply the cattle-breeder, the tanner, and the shoemaker with the means of production. Now it is quite
possible to imagine, with Adam Smith, that the difference between the above
social division of labour, and the division in manufacture, is merely subjective,
exists merely for the observer, who, in a manufacture, can see with one
glance, all the numerous operations being performed on one spot, while
in the instance given above, the spreading out of the work over great areas,
and the great number of people employed in each branch of labour, obscure
the connexion. [33] But what is it that forms the bond between the independent labours of the cattle-breeder, the tanner, and
the shoemaker? It is the fact that their respective products are commodities.
What, on the other hand, characterises division of labour in manufactures?
The fact that the detail labourer produces no commodities. [34] It is only the common product of all the detail labourers that becomes a commodity. [35] Division of labour in society is brought about by the purchase and sale of the products of different
branches of industry, while the connexion between the detail operations
in a workshop, is due to the sale of the labour-power of several workmen
to one capitalist, who applies it as combined labour-power. The division
of labour in the workshop implies concentration of the means of production
in the hands of one capitalist; the division of labour in society implies
their dispersion among many independent producers of commodities. While
within the workshop, the iron law of proportionality subjects definite
numbers of workmen to definite functions, in the society outside the workshop,
chance and caprice have full play in distributing the producers and their
means of production among the various branches of industry. The different
spheres of production, it is true, constantly tend to an equilibrium: for,
on the one hand, while each producer of a commodity is bound to produce
a use-value, to satisfy a particular social want, and while the extent
of these wants differs quantitatively, still there exists an inner relation
which settles their proportions into a regular system, and that system
one of spontaneous growth; and, on the other hand, the law of the value
of commodities ultimately determines how much of its disposable working-time
society can expend on each particular class of commodities. But this constant
tendency to equilibrium, of the various spheres of production, is exercised,
only in the shape of a reaction against the constant upsetting of this
equilibrium. The a priori system on which the division of labour,
within the workshop, is regularly carried out, becomes in the division
of labour within the society, an a posteriori, nature-imposed necessity,
controlling the lawless caprice of the producers, and perceptible in the
barometrical fluctuations of the market-prices. Division of labour within
the workshop implies the undisputed authority of the capitalist over men,
that are but parts of a mechanism that belongs to him. The division of
labour within the society brings into contact independent commodity-producers,
who acknowledge no other authority but that of competition, of the coercion
exerted by the pressure of their mutual interests; just as in the animal
kingdom, the bellum omnium contra omnes
[war of all against all – Hobbes] more or less preserves the
conditions of existence of every species. The same bourgeois mind which
praises division of labour in the workshop, life-long annexation of the
labourer to a partial operation, and his complete subjection to capital,
as being an organisation of labour that increases its productiveness – that
same bourgeois mind denounces with equal vigour every conscious attempt
to socially control and regulate the process of production, as an
inroad upon such sacred things as the rights of property, freedom and unrestricted
play for the bent of the individual capitalist. It is very characteristic
that the enthusiastic apologists of the factory system have nothing more
damning to urge against a general organisation of the labour of society,
than that it would turn all society into one immense factory.

If, in a society with capitalist production, anarchy in the social
division of labour and despotism in that of the workshop are mutual conditions
the one of the other, we find, on the contrary, in those earlier forms
of society in which the separation of trades has been spontaneously developed,
then crystallised, and finally made permanent by law, on the one hand,
a specimen of the organisation of the labour of society, in accordance
with an approved and authoritative plan, and on the other, the entire exclusion
of division of labour in the workshop, or at all events a mere dwarflike
or sporadic and accidental development of the same. [36]

Those small and extremely ancient Indian communities, some of
which have continued down to this day, are based on possession in common
of the land, on the blending of agriculture and handicrafts, and on an
unalterable division of labour, which serves, whenever a new community
is started, as a plan and scheme ready cut and dried. Occupying areas of
from 100 up to several thousand acres, each forms a compact whole producing
all it requires. The chief part of the products is destined for direct
use by the community itself, and does not take the form of a commodity.
Hence, production here is independent of that division of labour brought
about, in Indian society as a whole, by means of the exchange of commodities.
It is the surplus alone that becomes a commodity, and a portion of even
that, not until it has reached the hands of the State, into whose hands
from time immemorial a certain quantity of these products has found its
way in the shape of rent in kind. The constitution of these communities
varies in different parts of India. In those of the simplest form, the
land is tilled in common, and the produce divided among the members. At
the same time, spinning and weaving are carried on in each family as subsidiary
industries. Side by side with the masses thus occupied with one and the
same work, we find the “chief inhabitant,” who is judge, police, and tax-gatherer
in one; the book-keeper, who keeps the accounts of the tillage and registers
everything relating thereto; another official, who prosecutes criminals,
protects strangers travelling through and escorts them to the next village;
the boundary man, who guards the boundaries against neighbouring communities;
the water-overseer, who distributes the water from the common tanks for
irrigation; the Brahmin, who conducts the religious services; the schoolmaster,
who on the sand teaches the children reading and writing; the calendar-Brahmin,
or astrologer, who makes known the lucky or unlucky days for seed-time
and harvest, and for every other kind of agricultural work; a smith and
a carpenter, who make and repair all the agricultural implements; the potter,
who makes all the pottery of the village; the barber, the washerman, who
washes clothes, the silversmith, here and there the poet, who in some communities
replaces the silversmith, in others the schoolmaster. This dozen of individuals
is maintained at the expense of the whole community. If the population increases, a new community is founded, on the pattern of the old one, on
unoccupied land. The whole mechanism discloses a systematic division of
labour; but a division like that in manufactures is impossible, since the
smith and the carpenter, &c., find an unchanging market, and at the
most there occur, according to the sizes of the villages, two or three
of each, instead of one. [37] The law that regulates
the division of labour in the community acts with the irresistible authority
of a law of Nature, at the same time that each individual artificer, the
smith, the carpenter, and so on, conducts in his workshop all the operations
of his handicraft in the traditional way, but independently, and without
recognising any authority over him. The simplicity of the organisation
for production in these self-sufficing communities that constantly reproduce
themselves in the same form, and when accidentally destroyed, spring up
again on the spot and with the same name [38] – this simplicity supplies the key to the secret of the unchangeableness of Asiatic societies,
an unchangeableness in such striking contrast with the constant dissolution
and refounding of Asiatic States, and the never-ceasing changes of dynasty.
The structure of the economic elements of society remains untouched
by the storm-clouds of the political sky.

The rules of the guilds, as I have said before, by limiting most
strictly the number of apprentices and journeymen that a single master
could employ, prevented him from becoming a capitalist. Moreover, he could
not employ his journeymen in many other handicrafts than the one in which
he was a master. The guilds zealously repelled every encroachment by the
capital of merchants, the only form of free capital with which they came
in contact. A merchant could buy every kind of commodity, but labour as
a commodity he could not buy. He existed only on sufferance, as a dealer
in the products of the handicrafts. If circumstances called for a further
division of labour, the existing guilds split themselves up into varieties,
or founded new guilds by the side of the old ones; all this, however, without
concentrating various handicrafts in a single workshop. Hence, the guild
organisation, however much it may have contributed by separating, isolating,
and perfecting the handicrafts, to create the material conditions for the
existence of manufacture, excluded division of labour in the workshop.
On the whole, the labourer and his means of production remained closely
united, like the snail with its shell, and thus there was wanting the principal
basis of manufacture, the separation of the labourer from his means of
production, and the conversion of these means into capital.

While division of labour in society at large, whether such division
be brought about or not by exchange of commodities, is common to economic
formations of society the most diverse, division of labour in the workshop,
as practised by manufacture, is a special creation of the capitalist mode
of production alone.

## SECTION 5. THE CAPITALISTIC CHARACTER OF MANUFACTURE

An increased number of labourers under the control
of one capitalist is the natural starting-point, as well of co-operation
generally, as of manufacture in particular. But the division of labour
in manufacture makes this increase in the number of workmen a technical
necessity. The minimum number that any given capitalist is bound to employ
is here prescribed by the previously established division of labour. On
the other hand, the advantages of further division are obtainable only
by adding to the number of workmen, and this can be done only by adding
multiples of the various detail groups. But an increase in the variable
component of the capital employed necessitates an increase in its constant
component, too, in the workshops, implements, &c., and, in particular,
in the raw material, the call for which grows quicker than the number
of workmen. The quantity of it consumed in a given time, by a given amount
of labour, increases in the same ratio as does the productive power of
that labour in consequence of its division. Hence, it is a law, based on
the very nature of manufacture, that the minimum amount of capital, which
is bound to be in the hands of each capitalist, must keep increasing; in
other words, that the transformation into capital of the social means of
production and subsistence must keep extending. [39]

In manufacture, as well as in simple co-operation, the collective
working organism is a form of existence of capital. The mechanism that
is made up of numerous individual detail labourers belongs to the capitalist.
Hence, the productive power resulting from a combination of labours appears
to be the productive power of capital. Manufacture proper not only subjects
the previously independent workman to the discipline and command of capital,
but, in addition, creates a hierarchic gradation of the workmen themselves.
While simple co-operation leaves the mode of working by the individual
for the most part unchanged, manufacture thoroughly revolutionises it,
and seizes labour-power by its very roots. It converts the labourer into a crippled monstrosity, by forcing his detail dexterity at the expense of a world of productive capabilities and instincts; just as in the States of La Plata they butcher a whole beast for the sake of his hide or his
tallow. Not only is the detail work distributed to the different individuals,
but the individual himself is made the automatic motor of a fractional
operation, [40] and the absurd fable of Menenius Agrippa, which makes man a mere fragment of his own body, becomes realised. [41] If, at first, the workman sells his labour-power to capital, because the material means of producing a commodity fail him, now his very labour-power
refuses its services unless it has been sold to capital. Its functions
can be exercised only in an environment that exists in the workshop of
the capitalist after the sale. By nature unfitted to make anything independently,
the manufacturing labourer develops productive activity as a mere
appendage of the capitalist’s workshop. [42] As the
chosen people bore in their features the sign manual of Jehovah, so division
of labour brands the manufacturing workman as the property of capital.

The knowledge, the judgement, and the will, which, though in ever
so small a degree, are practised by the independent peasant or handicraftsman,
in the same way as the savage makes the whole art of war consist in the
exercise of his personal cunning these faculties are now required only
for the workshop as a whole. Intelligence in production expands in one
direction, because it vanishes in many others. What is lost by the detail
labourers, is concentrated in the capital that employs them. [43] It is a result of the division of labour in manufactures, that the labourer is brought face to face with the intellectual potencies of the material
process of production, as the property of another, and as a ruling power.
This separation begins in simple co-operation, where the capitalist represents
to the single workman, the oneness and the will of the associated labour.
It is developed in manufacture which cuts down the labourer into a detail
labourer. It is completed in modern industry, which makes science a productive
force distinct from labour and presses it into the service of capital.

In manufacture, in order to make the collective labourer, and
through him capital, rich in social productive power, each labourer must
be made poor in individual productive powers.

“Ignorance is the mother
of industry as well as of superstition. Reflection and fancy are subject
to err; but a habit of moving the hand or the foot is independent of either.
Manufactures, accordingly, prosper most where the mind is least consulted,
and where the workshop may ... be considered as an engine, the parts of
which are men.” [45]

As a matter of fact, some few manufacturers in the middle of the 18th century preferred, for certain operations that
were trade secrets, to employ half-idiotic persons. [46]

“The understandings of the greater part of men,” says Adam
Smith, “are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments. The man whose
whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations ... has no occasion
to exert his understanding... He generally becomes as stupid and ignorant
as it is possible for a human creature to become.”

After describing the stupidity of the detail labourer he goes on:

“The uniformity of his stationary
life naturally corrupts the courage of his mind... It corrupts even the
activity of his body and renders him incapable of exerting his strength
with vigour and perseverance in any other employments than that to which
he has been bred. His dexterity at his own particular trade seems in this
manner to be acquired at the expense of his intellectual, social, and martial
virtues. But in every improved and civilised society, this is the state
into which the labouring poor, that is, the great body of the people, must
necessarily fall.” [47]

For preventing the complete deterioration of the great mass of the people by division of labour, A.
Smith recommends education of the people by the State, but prudently, and
in homeopathic doses. G. Garnier, his French translator and commentator,
who, under the first French Empire, quite naturally developed into a senator,
quite as naturally opposes him on this point. Education of the masses,
he urges, violates the first law of the division of labour, and with it

“our whole social system would be proscribed.” "Like all other divisions
of labour,” he says, “that between hand labour and head labour [48] is more pronounced and decided in proportion as society (he rightly uses this word, for capital, landed property and their State) becomes richer.
This division of labour, like every other, is an effect of past, and a
cause of future progress... ought the government then to work in opposition
to this division of labour, and to hinder its natural course? Ought it
to expend a part of the public money in the attempt to confound and blend
together two classes of labour, which are striving after division and separation?”

Some crippling of body and mind is inseparable even from division
of labour in society as a whole. Since, however, manufacture carries
this social separation of branches of labour much further, and also, by
its peculiar division, attacks the individual at the very roots of his
life, it is the first to afford the materials for, and to give a start
to, industrial pathology. [50]

“To subdivide a man is to execute him, if he deserves the sentence,
to assassinate him if he does not... The subdivision of labour is the assassination
of a people.” [51]

Co-operation based on division of labour, in other words, manufacture,
commences as a spontaneous formation. So soon as it attains some consistence
and extension, it becomes the recognised methodical and systematic form
of capitalist production. History shows how the division of labour peculiar
to manufacture, strictly so called, acquires the best adapted form at first
by experience, as it were behind the backs of the actors, and then, like
the guild handicrafts, strives to hold fast that form when once found,
and here and there succeeds in keeping it for centuries. Any alteration
in this form, except in trivial matters, is solely owing to a revolution
in the instruments of labour. Modern manufacture wherever it arises – I do
not here allude to modern industry based on machinery – either finds the
disjecta membra poetae ready to hand, and only waiting to be collected
together, as is the case in the manufacture of clothes in large towns,
or it can easily apply the principle of division, simply by exclusively
assigning the various operations of a handicraft (such as book-binding)
to particular men. In such cases, a week’s experience is enough to determine
the proportion between the numbers of the hands necessary for the various
functions. [52]

By decomposition of handicrafts, by specialisation of the
instruments of labour, by the formation of detail labourers, and by grouping
and combining the latter into a single mechanism, division of labour in
manufacture creates a qualitative gradation, and a quantitative proportion
in the social process of production; it consequently creates a definite
organisation of the labour of society, and thereby develops at the same
time new productive forces in the society. In its specific capitalist form –
and under the given conditions, it could take no other form than a capitalistic
one – manufacture is but a particular method of begetting relative surplus-value,
or of augmenting at the expense of the labourer the self-expansion of capital –
usually called social wealth, “Wealth of Nations,” &c. It increases
the social productive power of labour, not only for the benefit of the
capitalist instead of for that of the labourer, but it does this by crippling
the individual labourers. It creates new conditions for the lordship of
capital over labour. If, therefore, on the one hand, it presents itself
historically as a progress and as a necessary phase in the economic development
of society, on the other hand, it is a refined and civilised method of
exploitation.

Political Economy, which as an independent science, first sprang
into being during the period of manufacture, views the social division
of labour only from the standpoint of manufacture, [53] and sees in it only the means of producing more commodities with a given quantity of labour, and, consequently, of cheapening commodities and hurrying
on the accumulation of capital. In most striking contrast with this accentuation
of quantity and exchange-value, is the attitude of the writers of classical
antiquity, who hold exclusively by quality and use-value. [54] In consequence of the separation of the social branches of production, commodities are better made, the various bents and talents of men select
a suitable field, [55] and without some restraint no
important results can be obtained anywhere. [56] Hence both product and producer are improved by division of labour. If the growth of the quantity produced is occasionally mentioned, this is only done with reference to the greater abundance of use-values. There is not a word alluding to exchange-value or to the cheapening of commodities. This aspect, from the standpoint of use-value alone, is taken as well by
Plato, [57] who treats division of labour as the foundation on which the division of society into classes is based, as by Xenophon,
[58] who with characteristic bourgeois instinct, approaches more nearly to division of labour within the workshop. Plato’s
Republic, in so far as division of labour is treated in it, as the formative
principle of the State, is merely the Athenian idealisation of the Egyptian
system of castes, Egypt having served as the model of an industrial country
to many of his contemporaries also, amongst others to Isocrates, [59] and it continued to have this importance to the Greeks of the Roman Empire. [60]

During the manufacturing period proper, i.e., the period during
which manufacture is the predominant form taken by capitalist production,
many obstacles are opposed to the full development of the peculiar tendencies
of manufacture. Although manufacture creates, as we have already seen,
a simple separation of the labourers into skilled and unskilled, simultaneously
with their hierarchic arrangement in classes, yet the number of the unskilled
labourers, owing to the preponderating influence of the skilled, remains
very limited. Although it adapts the detail operations to the various degrees
of maturity, strength, and development of the living instruments of labour,
thus conducing to exploitation of women and children, yet this tendency
as a whole is wrecked on the habits and the resistance of the male labourers.
Although the splitting up of handicrafts lowers the cost of forming the
workman, and thereby lowers his value, yet for the more difficult detail
work, a longer apprenticeship is necessary, and, even where it would be
superfluous, is jealously insisted upon by the workmen. In England, for
instance, we find the laws of apprenticeship, with their seven years’ probation,
in full force down to the end of the manufacturing period; and they are
not thrown on one side till the advent of Modern Industry. Since handicraft
skill is the foundation of manufacture, and since the mechanism of manufacture
as a whole possesses no framework, apart from the labourers themselves,
capital is constantly compelled to wrestle with the insubordination of
the workmen.

“By the infirmity of human nature,” says friend Ure, “it happens that the more skilful the workman, the more self-willed and intractable he is apt to become, and of course the less fit a component of a mechanical
system in which ... he may do great damage to the whole.” [61]

Hence throughout the whole manufacturing period there runs the complaint of want of discipline among the workmen. [62] And had we not the testimony of contemporary writers, the simple facts, that during the period between the 16th century and the epoch of Modern Industry, capital
failed to become the master of the whole disposable working-time of the
manufacturing labourers, that manufactures are short-lived, and change
their locality from one country to another with the emigrating or immigrating
workmen, these facts would speak volumes. “Order must in one way or another
be established,” exclaims in 1770 the oft-cited author of the “Essay on
Trade and Commerce.” “Order,” re-echoes Dr. Andrew Ure 66 years later,
“Order” was wanting in manufacture based on “the scholastic dogma of division
of labour,” and “Arkwright created order.”

At the same time manufacture was unable, either to seize upon
the production of society to its full extent, or to revolutionise that
production to its very core. It towered up as an economic work of art,
on the broad foundation of the town handicrafts, and of the rural domestic
industries. At a given stage in its development, the narrow technical basis
on which manufacture rested, came into conflict with requirements of production
that were created by manufacture itself.

One of its most finished creations was the workshop for the production
of the instruments of labour themselves, including especially the complicated
mechanical apparatus then already employed.

A machine-factory, says Ure, “displayed the division of labour in manifold gradations – the file, the
drill, the lathe, having each its different workman in the order of skill.”
(P. 21.)

This workshop, the product of the division of labour in manufacture,
produced in its turn – machines. It is they that sweep away the handicraftsman’s
work as the regulating principle of social production. Thus, on the one
hand, the technical reason for the life-long annexation of the workman
to a detail function is removed. On the other hand, the fetters that this
same principle laid on the dominion of capital, fall away.

Footnotes

1. To give a more modern instance: The silk spinning and weaving of Lyon and Nîmes “est toute patriarcale; elle
emploie beaucoup de femmes et d’enfants, mais sans les épuiser ni
les corrompre; elle les laisse dans leur belles valises de la Drôme,
du Var, de l’Isère, de Vaucluse, pour y élever des vers et
dévider leurs cocons; jamais elle n’entre dans une véritable
fabrique. Pour être aussi bien observé ... le principe de la division
du travail s’y revêt d’un caractère spécial. Il y a
bien des dévideuses, des moulineurs, des teinturiers, des encolleurs,
puis des tisserands; mais ils ne sont pas réunis dans un même
établissement, ne dépendent pas d’un même maître,
tous ils sont indépendants” [... is entirely patriarchal; it employs a large number of women and children, but without exhausting or ruining them; it allows them to stay in their beautiful valleys of the Drôme, the Var, the Isère, the Vaucluse, cultuvating their silkworms and unwinding their cocoons; it never becomes a true factory industry. However, the principle of the division of labour takes on a special character here. There do indeed exist winders, throwsters. dyers, sizers, and finally weavers; but they are not assembled in the same workshop, nor are they dependent on a single master; they are all independent] (A. Blanqui: “Cours, d’Econ. Industrielle.”
Recueilli par A. Blaise. Paris, 1838-39, p. 79.) Since Blanqui wrote this,
the various independent labourers have, to some extent, been united in
factories. [And since Marx wrote the above, the power-loom has invaded
these factories, and is now 1886 rapidly superseding the hand-loom. (Added
in the 4th German edition. The Krefeld silk industry also has its tale
to tell anent this subject.) F. E.]

2. “The more any manufacture of much variety shall be distributed and assigned to different artists, the same must needs be better done and with greater expedition, with less loss of time and labour.” (“The Advantages of the East India Trade,” Lond., 1720, p. 71.)

3. “Easy labour is transmitted skill.” (Th. Hodgskin, “Popular Political Economy,” p. 48.)

4. “The arts also have ... in Egypt reached the requisite degree of perfection. For it is the only country where artificers
may not in any way meddle with the affairs of another class of citizens,
but must follow that calling alone which by law is hereditary in their
clan.... In other countries it is found that tradesmen divide their attention
between too many objects. At one time they try agriculture, at another
they take to commerce, at another they busy themselves with two or three
occupations at once. In free countries, they mostly frequent the assemblies
of the people.... In Egypt, on the contrary, every artificer is severely
punished if he meddles with affairs of State, or carries on several trades
at once. Thus there is nothing to disturb their application to their calling....
Moreover, since, they inherit from their forefathers numerous rules, they
are eager to discover fresh advantages” (Diodorus Siculus: Bibl. Hist.
I. 1. c., 74.)

5. “Historical and descriptive account of Brit. India, &c.,” by Hugh Murray and James Wilson, &c., Edinburgh
1832, v. II., p. 449. The Indian loom is upright, i.e., the warp is stretched
vertically.

6. Darwin in his epoch-making work on the origin of species, remarks, with reference to the natural organs of
plants and animals: “So long as one and the same organ has different kinds
of work to perform, a ground for its changeability may possibly be found
in this, that natural selection preserves or suppresses each small variation
of form less carefully than if that organ were destined for one special
purpose alone. Thus, knives that are adapted to cut all sorts of things,
may, on the whole, be of one shape; but an implement destined to be used
exclusively in one way must have a different shape for every different
use.”

7. In the year 1854 Geneva produced 80,000 watches, which is not one-fifth of the production in the Canton of Neufchâtel. La Chaux-de-Fond alone, which we may look upon as a huge watch manufactory,
produces yearly twice as many as Geneva. From 1850-61 Geneva produced 720,000
watches. See “Report from Geneva on the Watch Trade” in “Reports by H.
M.’s Secretaries of Embassy and Legation on the Manufactures, Commerce,
&c., No. 6, 1863.” The want of connexion alone, between the processes
into which the production of articles that merely consist of parts fitted
together is split up, makes it very difficult to convert such a manufacture
into a branch of modern industry carried on by machinery; but in the case
of a watch there are two other impediments in addition, the minuteness
and delicacy of its parts, and its character as an article of luxury. Hence
their variety, which is such, that in the best London houses scarcely a
dozen watches are made alike in the course of a year. The watch manufactory
of Messrs. Vacheron & Constantin, in which machinery has been employed
with success, produces at the most three or four different varieties of
size and form.

8. In watchmaking, that classical example of heterogeneous manufacture, we may study with great accuracy the above-mentioned differentiation and specialisation of the instruments of labour caused by the sub-division of handicrafts.

9. “In so close a cohabitation of the people, the carriage must needs be less.” (“The Advantages of the East
India Trade,” p. 106.)

10. “The isolation of the different stages of manufacture, consequent upon the employment of manual labour,
adds immensely to the cost of production, the loss mainly arising from
the mere removals from one process to another.” (“The Industry of Nations.”
Lond., 1855, Part II, p. 200.)

11. “It (the division of labour) produces also an economy of time by separating the work into its different branches,
all of which may be carried on into execution at the same moment.... By
carrying on all the different processes at once, which an individual must
have executed separately, it becomes possible to produce a multitude of
pins completely finished in the same time as a single pin might have been
either cut or pointed.” (Dugald Stewart, l.c., p. 319.)

12. “The more variety of artists to every manufacture... the greater the order and regularity of every work,
the same must needs be done in less time, the labour must be less.” (“The
Advantages,” &c., p. 68.)

13. Nevertheless, the manufacturing system, in many branches of industry, attains this result but very imperfectly,
because it knows not how to control with certainty the general chemical
and physical conditions of the process of production.

14. “When (from the peculiar nature of the produce of each manufactory), the number of processes into which
it is most advantageous to divide it is ascertained, as well as the number
of individuals to be employed, then all other manufactories which do not
employ a direct multiple of this number will produce the article at a greater
cost.... Hence arises one of the causes of the great size of manufacturing
establishments.” (C. Babbage. “On the Economy of Machinery,” 1st ed. London.
1832. Ch. xxi, pp. 172-73.)

15. In England, the melting-furnace is distinct from the glass-furnace in which the glass is manipulated. In
Belgium, one and the same furnace serves for both processes.

16. This can be seen from W. Petty, John Bellers, Andrew Yarranton, “The Advantages of the East India Trade,”
and J. Vanderlint, not to mention others.

17. Towards the end of the 16th century, mortars and sieves were still used in France for pounding and washing ores.

18. The whole history of the development of machinery can be traced in the history of the corn mill. The factory
in England is still a “mill.” In German technological works of the first
decade of this century, the term “Mühle” is still found in use, not
only for all machinery driven by the forces of Nature, but also for all
manufactures where apparatus in the nature of machinery is applied.

19. As will be seen more in detail in the fourth book of this work, Adam Smith has not established a single new
proposition relating to division of labour. What, however, characterises
him as the political economist par excellence of the period of Manufacture,
is the stress he lays on division of labour. The subordinate part which
he assigns to machinery gave occasion in the early days of modern mechanical
industry to the polemic of Lauderdale, and, at a later period, to that
of Ure. A. Smith also confounds differentiation of the instruments of labour,
in which the detail labourers themselves took an active part, with the
invention of machinery; in this latter, it is not the workmen in manufactories,
but learned men, handicraftsman, and even peasants (Brindley), who play
a part.

20. “The master manufacturer, by dividing the work to be executed into different processes, each requiring different degrees of skill or of force, can purchase exactly that precise quantity
of both which is necessary for each process; whereas, if the whole work
were executed by one workman, that person must possess sufficient skill
to perform the most difficult, and sufficient strength to execute the most
laborious of the operations into which the article is divided.” (Ch. Babbage,
l.c., ch. xix.)

21. For instance, abnormal development of some muscles, curvature of bones, &c.

22. The question put by one of the Inquiry Commissioners, How the young persons are kept steadily to their work, is
very correctly answered by Mr. Wm. Marshall, the general manager of a glass
manufactory: “They cannot well neglect their work; when they once begin,
they must go on; they are just the same as parts of a machine.” (“Children’s
Empl. Comm.,” 4th Rep., 1865, p. 247.)

23. Dr. Ure, in his apotheosis of Modern Mechanical Industry, brings out the peculiar character of manufacture more
sharply than previous economists, who had not his polemical interest in
the matter, and more sharply even than his contemporaries Babbage, e.g.,
who, though much his superior as a mathematician and mechanician, treated
mechanical industry from the standpoint of manufacture alone. Ure says,
“This appropriation ... to each, a workman of appropriate value and cost
was naturally assigned, forms the very essence of division of labour.”
On the other hand, he describes this division as “adaptation of labour
to the different talents of men,” and lastly, characterises the whole manufacturing
system as “a system for the division or gradation of labour,” as “the division
of labour into degrees of skill,” &c. (Ure, l.c., pp. 19-23 passim.)

24. “Each handicraftsman being ... enabled to perfect himself by practice in one point, became ... a cheaper workman.”
(Ure, l.c., p. 19.)

25. “Division of labour proceeds from the separation of professions the most widely different to that division,
where several labourers divide between them the preparation of one and
the same product, as in manufacture.” (Storch: “Cours d’Econ. Pol.,” Paris
Edn. t. I., p. 173.) “Nous rencontrons chez les peuples parvenus à
un certain degré de civilisation trois genres de divisions d’industrie:
la première, que nous nommerons générale, amène
la distinction des producteurs en agriculteurs, manufacturiers et commerçants,
elle se rapporte aux trois principales branches d’industrie nationale;
la seconde qu’on pourrait appeler spéciale, est la division de
chaque genre d’industrie en espèces ... la troisième division
d’industrie, celle enfin qu’on devrait qualifier de division de la besogne
on de travail proprement dit, est celle qui s’établit dans les arts
et les métiers séparés ... qui s’établit dans
la plupart des manufactures et des ateliers.” [Among peoples which have reached a certain level of civilisation, we meet with three kinds of division of labour: the first, which we shall call general, brings about the division of the producers into agriculturalists, manufacturers, and traders, it corresponds to the three main branches of the nation’s labour; the second, which one could call particular, is the division of labour of each branch into species. ... The third division of labour, which one could designate as a division of tasks, or of labour properly so called, is that which grows up in the individual crafts and trades ... which is established in the majority of the manufactories and workshops] (Skarbek, l.c., pp. 84,
85.)

26. Note to the third edition. Subsequent very searching study of the primitive condition of man, led
the author to the conclusion, that it was not the family that originally
developed into the tribe, but that, on the contrary, the tribe was the
primitive and spontaneously developed form of human association, on the
basis of blood relationship, and that out of the first incipient loosening
of the tribal bonds, the many and various forms of the family were afterwards
developed. [F. E.]

27. Sir James Steuart is the economist who has handled this subject best. How little his book, which appeared
ten years before the “Wealth of Nations,” is known, even at the present
time, may be judged from the fact that the admirers of Malthus do not even
know that the first edition of the latter’s work on population contains,
except in the purely declamatory part, very little but extracts from Steuart,
and in a less degree, from Wallace and Townsend.

28. “There is a certain density of population which is convenient, both for social intercourse, and for that combination
of powers by which the produce of labour is increased.” (James Mill, l.c., p. 50.) “As the number of labourers increases, the productive power of society augments in the compound ratio of that increase, multiplied by the effects of the division of labour.” (Th. Hodgskin, l.c., pp. 125, 126.)

29. In consequence of the great demand for cotton after 1861, the production of cotton, in some thickly populated
districts of India, was extended at the expense of rice cultivation. In
consequence there arose local famines, the defective means of communication
not permitting the failure of rice in one district to be compensated by
importation from another.

30. Thus the fabrication of shuttles formed as early as the 17th century, a special branch of industry in Holland.

31. Whether the woollen manufacture of England is not divided into several parts or branches appropriated to
particular places, where they are only or principally manufactured; fine
cloths in Somersetshire, coarse in Yorkshire, long ells at Exeter, soies
at Sudbury, crapes at Norwich, linseys at Kendal, blankets at Whitney,
and so forth.” (Berkeley: “The Querist,” 1751, § 520.)

32. A. Ferguson: “History of Civil Society.” Edinburgh, 1767; Part iv, sect. ii., p. 285.

33. In manufacture proper, he says, the division of labour appears to be greater, because “those employed in
every different branch of the work can often be collected into the same
workhouse, and placed at once under the view of the spectator. In those
great manufactures, (!) on the contrary, which are destined to supply the
great wants of the great body of the people, every different branch of
the work employs so great a number of workmen, that it is impossible to
collect them all into the same workhouse ... the division is not near so
obvious.” (A. Smith: “Wealth of Nations,” bk. i, ch. i.) The celebrated
passage in the same chapter that begins with the words, “Observe the accommodation
of the most common artificer or day-labourer in a civilised and thriving
country,” &c., and then proceeds to depict what an enormous number
and variety of industries contribute to the satisfaction of the wants of
an ordinary labourer, is copied almost word for word from B. de Mandeville’s
Remarks to his “Fable of the Bees, or Private Vices, Publick Benefits.”
(First ed., without the remarks, 1706; with the remarks, 1714.)

34. “There is no longer anything which we can call the natural reward of individual labour. Each labourer produces
only some part of a whole, and each part, having no value or utility in
itself, there is nothing on which the labourer can seize, and say: It is
my product, this I will keep to myself.” (“Labour Defended against the
Claims of Capital.” Lond., 1825, p. 25.) The author of this admirable work
is the Th. Hodgskin I have already cited.

35. This distinction between division of labour in society and in manufacture, was practically illustrated to
the Yankees. One of the new taxes devised at Washington during the civil
war, was the duty of 6% “on all industrial products.” Question: What is
an industrial product? Answer of the legislature: A thing is produced “when
it is made,” and it is made when it is ready for sale. Now, for one example
out of many. The New York and Philadelphia manufacturers had previously
been in the habit of “making” umbrellas with all their belongings. But
since an umbrella is a mixtum compositum of very heterogeneous parts,
by degrees these parts became the products of various separate industries,
carried on independently in different places. They entered as separate
commodities into the umbrella manufactory, where they were fitted together.
The Yankees have given to articles thus fitted together, the name of “assembled
articles,” a name they deserve, for being an assemblage of taxes. Thus
the umbrella “assembles,” first, 6% on the price of each of its elements,
and a further 6% on its own total price.

36. “On peut... établir en règle générale, que moins l’autorité préside à la division du travail dans l’intérieur de la société, plus la division du travail se développe dans l’intérieur
de l’atelier, et plus elle y est soumise à l’autorité d’un seul. Ainsi l’autorité dans l’atelier et celle dans la société, par rapport à la division du travail, sont en raison inverse l’une de l’autre.” [It can ... be laid down as a general rule that the less authority presides over the division of labour inside society, the more the division of labour develops inside the workshop, and the more it is subjected there to the authority of a single person. Thus authority in the workshop and authority in society in relation to the division of labour, are in inverse ratio to each other] (Karl Marx, “Misère,” &c., pp. 130-131.)

37. Lieut.-Col. Mark Wilks: “Historical Sketches of the South of India.” Lond., 1810-17, v. I., pp. 118-20. A good
description of the various forms of the Indian communities is to be found
in George Campbell’s “Modern India.” Lond., 1852.

38. “Under this simple form ... the inhabitants of the country have lived from time immemorial. The boundaries
of the villages have been but seldom altered; and though the villages themselves
have been sometimes injured, and even desolated by war, famine, and disease,
the same name, the same limits, the same interests, and even the same families,
have continued for ages. The inhabitants give themselves no trouble about
the breaking up and division of kingdoms; while the village remains entire,
they care not to what power it is transferred, or to what sovereign it
devolves; its internal economy remains unchanged.” (Th. Stamford Raffles,
late Lieut. Gov. of Java: “The History of Java.” Lond., 1817, Vol. I.,
p. 285.)

39. “It is not sufficient that the capital” (the writer should have said the necessary means of subsistence and of
production) “required for the subdivision of handicrafts should be in readiness
in the society: it must also be accumulated in the hands of the employers
in sufficiently large quantities to enable them to conduct their operations
on a large scale.... The more the division increases, the more does the
constant employment of a given number of labourers require a greater outlay
of capital in tools, raw material, &c.” (Storch: “Cours d’Econ. Polit.”
Paris Ed., t. I., pp. 250, 251.) “La concentration des instruments de production
et la division du travail sont aussi inséparables l’une de l’autre
que le sont, dans le régime politique, la concentration des pouvoirs
publics et la division des intérêts privés.” [The concentration of the instruments of production and the division of labour are as inseparable one from the other, as are, in the political sphere, the concentration of public powers and the division of private interests.] (Karl Marx, l.c., p. 134.)

40. Dugald Stewart calls manufacturing labourers “living automatons ... employed in the details of the work.” (I. c., p. 318.)

41. In corals, each individual is, in fact, the stomach of the whole group; but it supplies the group with nourishment, instead of, like the Roman patrician, withdrawing it.

42. “L’ouvrier qui porte dans ses bras tout un métier, peut aller partout exercer son industrie et trouver des moyens de subsister: l’autre (the manufacturing labourer) n’est qu’un accessoire qui, séparé de ses confrères, n’a plus ni capacité, ni indépendance, et qui se trouve force d’accepter la loi qu’on juge à propos de lui imposer.” [The worker who is the master of a whole craft can work and find the means of subsistence anywhere; the other (the manufacturing labourer) is only an appendage who, when he is separated from his fellows, possesses neither capability nor independence, and finds himself forced to accept any law it is thought fit to impose] (Storch, l.c., Petersb. edit., 1815, t. I., p. 204.)

43. A. Ferguson, l.c., p. 281: “The former may have gained what the other has lost.”

44. “The man of knowledge and the productive labourer come to be widely divided from each other, and knowledge, instead
of remaining the handmaid of labour in the hand of the labourer to increase
his productive powers ... has almost everywhere arrayed itself against
labour ... systematically deluding and leading them (the labourers) astray
in order to render their muscular powers entirely mechanical and obedient.”
(W. Thompson: “An Inquiry into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth.”
London, 1824, p. 274.)

45. A. Ferguson, l.c., p. 280.

46. J. D. Tuckett: “A History of the Past and Present State of the Labouring Population.” Lond., 1846.

47. A. Smith: “Wealth of Nations,” Bk. v., ch. i, art. ii. Being a pupil of A. Ferguson who showed the disadvantageous
effects of division of labour, Adam Smith was perfectly clear on this point.
In the introduction to his work, where he ex professo praises division
of labour, he indicates only in a cursory manner that it is the source
of social inequalities. It is not till the 5th Book, on the Revenue of
the State, that he reproduces Ferguson. In my “Misère de la Philosophie,”
I have sufficiently explained the historical connexion between Ferguson,
A. Smith, Lemontey, and Say, as regards their criticisms of Division of
Labour, and have shown, for the first time, that Division of Labour as
practised in manufactures, is a specific form of the capitalist mode of
production.

48. Ferguson had already said, l.c., p. 281: “And thinking itself, in this age of separations, may become a
peculiar craft.”

49. G. Garnier, vol. V. of his translation of A. Smith, pp. 4-5.

50. Ramazzini, professor of practical medicine at Padua, published in 1713 his work “De morbis artificum,” which
was translated into French 1781, reprinted 1841 in the “Encyclopédie
des Sciences Médicales. 7me Dis. Auteurs Classiques.” The period
of Modern Mechanical Industry has, of course, very much enlarged his catalogue
of labour’s diseases. See “Hygiène physique et morale de l’ouvrier
dans les grandes villes en général et dans la ville de Lyon
en particulier. Par le Dr. A. L. Fonteret, Paris, 1858,” and “Die Krankheiten,
welche verschiednen Ständen, Altern und Geschlechtern eigenthümlich
sind. 6 Vols. Ulm, 1860,” and others. In 1854 the Society of Arts appointed
a Commission of Inquiry into industrial pathology. The list of documents
collected by this commission is to be seen in the catalogue of the “Twickenham
Economic Museum.” Very important are the official “Reports on Public Health.”
See also Eduard Reich, M. D. “Ueber die Entartung des Menschen,” Erlangen,
1868.

51. (D. Urquhart: “Familiar Words.” Lond., 1855, p. 119.) Hegel held very heretical views on division of labour.
In his “Rechtsphilosophie” he says: “By well educated men we understand
in the first instance, those who can do everything that others do.”

52. The simple belief in the inventive genius exercised a priori by the individual capitalist in division of labour, exists now-a-days only among German professors, of the stamp of Herr Roscher, who, to recompense the capitalist from whose Jovian head division of labour sprang ready formed, dedicates to him “various wages” (diverse Arbeitslöhne). The more or less extensive application of division of labour depends on length of purse, not on greatness of genius.

53. The older writers, like Petty and the anonymous author of “Advantages of the East India Trade,” bring out the capitalist character of division of labour as applied in manufacture more than A. Smith does.

54. Amongst the moderns may be excepted a few writers of the 18th century, like Beccaria and James Harris, who
with regard to division of labour almost entirely follow the ancients.
Thus, Beccaria: “Ciascuno prova coll’esperienza, che applicando la mano
e l’ingegno sempre allo stesso genere di opere e di produtte, egli più
facili, più abbondanti e migliori ne traca risultati, di quello
che se ciascuno isolatamente le cose tutte a se necessarie soltanto facesse....
Dividendosi in tal maniera per la comune e privata utilità gli uomini
in varie classi e condizioni.” [Everyone knows from experience that if the hands and the intelligence are always applied to the same kind of work and the same products, these will be produced more easily, in greater abundance, and in higher quality, than if each individual makes for himself all the things he needs ... In this way, men are divided up into various classes and conditions, to their own advantage and to that of the commodity.](Cesare Beccaria: “Elementi di Econ: Pubblica,” ed. Custodi, Parte Moderna, t. xi, p. 29.) James Harris, afterwards Earl
of Malmesbury, celebrated for the “Diaries” of his embassy at St. Petersburg,
says in a note to his “Dialogue Concerning Happiness,” Lond., 1741, reprinted
afterwards in “Three Treatises, 3 Ed., Lond., 1772: “The whole argument
to prove society natural (i.e., by division of employments) ... is taken
from the second book of Plato’s Republic.”

55. Thus, in the Odyssey xiv., 228, [“Alloς gar talloisin aner epiterpetai ergoiς” For different men take joy in different works] and Archilochus in Sextus Empiricus, [“alloς allw ep ergo kardihn iainetai.” men differ as to things cheer their hearts]

56. [“Poll hpistaio erga, cacwς d hpistano panta.” He could do many works, but all of them badly – Homer] Every Athenian considered himself superior as a producer
of commodities to a Spartan; for the latter in time of war had men enough
at his disposal but could not command money, as Thucydides makes Pericles
say in the speech inciting the Athenians to the Peloponnesian war:
[“swmasi te etoimoteroi oi autonrgoi twn anthrwpwn h crhmasi polemein” people producing for their own consumption will rather let war have their bodies than their money] (Thuc.:
1, I. c. 41.) Nevertheless, even with regard to material production,
[autarceia self-sufficiency],
as opposed to division of labour remained their ideal,
[“parwn gar to, eu, para toutwn cai to autaresς.” For with the latter there is well-being, but with the former there is independence.] It should be mentioned
here that at the date of the fall of the 30 Tyrants there were still not
5,000 Athenians without landed property.

57. With Plato, division of labour within the community is a development from the multifarious requirements, and the limited capacities of individuals. The main point with him is, that the labourer must adapt himself to the work, not the work to the labourer; which latter is unavoidable, if he carries on several trades at once, thus making one or the other of them subordinate. [“Ou gar ethelei to
prattomenon ten tou prattonios scholen perimenein, all anagke ton prattonta
to prattomeno epakoloothein me en parergou merei. Anagke. Ek de touton
pleio te ekasta gignetai kai kallion kai raon, otan eis en kaia physin
kai en kairo scholen ton allon agon, pratte.”] [For the workman must wait upon the work; it will not wait upon his leisure and allow itself to be done in a spare moment. — Yes, he must,— So the conclusion is that more will be produced of every thing and the work will be more easily and better done, when every man is set free from all other occupations to do, at the right time, the one thing for which he is naturally fitted.] (Rep. 1. 2. Ed. Baiter,
Orelli, &c.) So in Thucydides, l.c., c. 142: “Seafaring is an art
like any other, and cannot, as circumstances require, be carried on as
a subsidiary occupation; nay, other subsidiary occupations cannot be carried
on alongside of this one.” If the work, says Plato, has to wait for the
labourer, the critical point in the process is missed and the article spoiled,
“ergou cairon diollutai.” [If someone lets slip ...] The same Platonic idea is found recurring in the protest of the English bleachers against the clause in the Factory
Act that provides fixed mealtimes for all operatives. Their business cannot
wait the convenience of the workmen, for “in the various operations of
singeing, washing, bleaching, mangling, calendering, and dyeing, none of
them can be stopped at a given moment without risk of damage ... to enforce
the same dinner hour for all the workpeople might occasionally subject
valuable goods to the risk of danger by incomplete operations.” Le platonisme
où va-t-il se nicher! [Where will Platonism be found next!]

58. Xenophon says, it is not only an honour to receive food from the table of the King of Persia, but such food
is much more tasty than other food. “And there is nothing wonderful in
this, for as the other arts are brought to special perfection in the great
towns, so the royal food is prepared in a special way. For in the small
towns the same man makes bedsteads, doors, ploughs, and tables: often,
too, he builds houses into the bargain, and is quite content if he finds
custom sufficient for his sustenance. It is altogether impossible for a
man who does so many things to do them all well. But in the great towns,
where each can find many buyers, one trade is sufficient to maintain the
man who carries it on. Nay, there is often not even need of one complete
trade, but one man makes shoes for men, another for women. Here and there
one man gets a living by sewing, another by cutting out shoes; one does
nothing but cut out clothes, another nothing but sew the pieces together.
It follows necessarily then, that he who does the simplest kind of work,
undoubtedly does it better than anyone else. So it is with the art of cooking.”
(Xen. Cyrop. I. viii., c. 2.) Xenophon here lays stress exclusively upon
the excellence to be attained in use-value, although he well knows that
the gradations of the division of labour depend on the extent of the market.

59. He (Busiris) divided them all into special castes ... commanded that the same individuals should always carry
on the same trade, for he knew that they who change their occupations become
skilled in none; but that those who constantly stick to one occupation
bring it to the highest perfection. In truth, we shall also find that in
relation to the arts and handicrafts, they have outstripped their rivals
more than a master does a bungler; and the contrivances for maintaining
the monarchy and the other institutions of their State are so admirable
that the most celebrated philosophers who treat of this subject praise
the constitution of the Egyptian State above all others. (Isocrates, Busiris,
c. 8.)

60. Cf. Diodorus Siculus.

61. Ure, l.c., p. 20.

62. This is more the case in England than in France, and more in France than in Holland.

* MECW and Progress Publishers’ editions have “disadvantages,” but the Ben Fowkes translation in the Penguin edition has “advantages.” The original German is “Endlich ist diese Teilung der Arbeit eine besondre Art der Kooperation, und manche ihrer Vorteile entspringen aus dem allgemeinen Wesen, nicht aus dieser besondren Form der Kooperation.” — M.I.A.

## Chapter Fifteen: Machinery and Modern Industry

Contents

Section 1 - The Development of Machinery

Section 2 - The Value Transferred by Machinery to the Product

Section 3 - The Proximate Effects of Machinery on the Workman

A. Appropriation of Supplementary Labour-Power by Capital. The Employment of Women and Children

B. Prolongation of the Working-Day

C. Intensification of Labour

Section 4 - The Factory

Section 5 - The Strife Between Workman and Machine

Section 6 - The Theory of Compensation as Regards the Workpeople Displaced by Machinery

Section 7 - Repulsion and Attraction of Workpeople by the Factory System. Crises in the Cotton Trade

Section 8 - Revolution Effected in Manufacture, Handicrafts, and Domestic Industry by Modern Industry

A. Overthrow of Co-operation Based on Handicraft and on the Division of Labour

B. Reaction of the Factory System on Manufacture and Domestic Industries

C. Modern Manufacture

D. Modern Domestic Industry

E. Passage of Modern Manufacture, and Domestic Industry into Modern Mechanical Industry. The Hastening of this Revolution by the Application of the Factory Acts to those Industries

Section 9 - The Factory Acts. Sanitary and Educational Clauses of the same. Their General Extension in England

Section 10 - Modern Industry and Agriculture

## SECTION 1. THE DEVELOPMENT OF MACHINERY

John Stuart Mill says in his “Principles of Political Economy”:

“It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made
have lightened the day’s toil of any human being.” [1]

That is, however, by no means the aim of the capitalistic application of machinery. Like every other increase in the productiveness of labour, machinery is intended to cheapen commodities, and, by shortening that portion of
the working-day, in which the labourer works for himself, to lengthen the
other portion that he gives, without an equivalent, to the capitalist.
In short, it is a means for producing surplus-value.

In manufacture, the revolution in the mode of production begins
with the labour-power, in modern industry it begins with the instruments
of labour. Our first inquiry then is, how the instruments of labour are
converted from tools into machines, or what is the difference between a
machine and the implements of a handicraft? We are only concerned here
with striking and general characteristics; for epochs in the history of
society are no more separated from each other by hard and fast lines of
demarcation, than are geological epochs.

Mathematicians and mechanicians, and in this they are followed
by a few English economists, call a tool a simple machine, and a machine
a complex tool. They see no essential difference between them, and even
give the name of machine to the simple mechanical powers, the lever, the
inclined plane, the screw, the wedge, &c. [2] As
a matter of fact, every machine is a combination of those simple powers,
no matter how they may be disguised. From the economic standpoint
this explanation is worth nothing, because the historical element is wanting.
Another explanation of the difference between tool and machine is that
in the case of a tool, man is the motive power, while the motive power
of a machine is something different from man, as, for instance, an animal,
water, wind, and so on.[3] According to this, a plough drawn by oxen, which is a contrivance common to the most different epochs,
would be a machine, while Claussen’s circular loom, which, worked by a
single labourer, weaves 96,000 picks per minute, would be a mere tool.
Nay, this very loom, though a tool when worked by hand, would, if worked
by steam, be a machine. And since the application of animal power is one
of man’s earliest inventions, production by machinery would have preceded
production by handicrafts. When in 1735, John Wyatt brought out his spinning
machine, and began the industrial revolution of the 18th century, not a
word did he say about an ass driving it instead of a man, and yet this
part fell to the ass. He described it as a machine “to spin without fingers.”

All fully developed machinery consists of three essentially different
parts, the motor mechanism, the transmitting mechanism, and finally the
tool or working machine. The motor mechanism is that which puts the
whole in motion. It either generates its own motive power, like the steam-engine,
the caloric engine, the electromagnetic machine, &c., or it receives
its impulse from some already existing natural force, like the water-wheel
from a head of water, the wind-mill from wind, &c. The transmitting
mechanism, composed of fly-wheels, shafting, toothed wheels, pullies, straps,
ropes, bands, pinions, and gearing of the most varied kinds, regulates
the motion, changes its form where necessary, as for instance, from linear
to circular, and divides and distributes it among the working machines.
These two first parts of the whole mechanism are there, solely for putting
the working machines in motion, by means of which motion the subject of
labour is seized upon and modified as desired. The tool or working machine
is that part of the machinery with which the industrial revolution of the
18th century started. And to this day it constantly serves as such a starting-point,
whenever a handicraft, or a manufacture, is turned into an industry carried
on by machinery.

On a closer examination of the working machine proper, we find
in it, as a general rule, though often, no doubt, under very altered forms,
the apparatus and tools used by the handicraftsman or manufacturing workman;
with this difference, that instead of being human implements, they are
the implements of a mechanism, or mechanical implements. Either the entire
machine is only a more or less altered mechanical edition of the old handicraft
tool, as, for instance, the power-loom,[5] or the working parts fitted in the frame of the machine are old acquaintances, as spindles
are in a mule, needles in a stocking-loom, saws in a sawing-machine, and
knives in a chopping machine. The distinction between these tools and the
body proper of the machine, exists from their very birth; for they continue
for the most part to be produced by handicraft, or by manufacture, and
are afterwards fitted into the body of the machine, which is the product
of machinery. [6] The machine proper is therefore a mechanism that, after being set in motion, performs with its tools the same operations
that were formerly done by the workman with similar tools. Whether the
motive power is derived from man, or from some other machine, makes no
difference in this respect. From the moment that the tool proper is taken
from man, and fitted into a mechanism, a machine takes the place
of a mere implement. The difference strikes one at once, even in those
cases where man himself continues to be the prime mover. The number of
implements that he himself can use simultaneously, is limited by the number
of his own natural instruments of production, by the number of his bodily
organs. In Germany, they tried at first to make one spinner work two spinning-wheels,
that is, to work simultaneously with both hands and both feet. This was
too difficult. Later, a treddle spinning-wheel with two spindles was invented,
but adepts in spinning, who could spin two threads at once, were almost
as scarce as two-headed men. The Jenny, on the other hand, even at its
very birth, spun with 12-18 spindles, and the stocking-loom knits with
many thousand needles at once. The number of tools that a machine can bring
into play simultaneously, is from the very first emancipated from the organic
limits that hedge in the tools of a handicraftsman.

In many manual implements the distinction between man as mere
motive power, and man as the workman or operator properly so called, is
brought into striking contrast. For instance, the foot is merely the prime
mover of the spinning-wheel, while the hand, working with the spindle,
and drawing and twisting, performs the real operation of spinning. It is
this last part of the handicraftsman’s implement that is first seized upon
by the industrial revolution, leaving to the workman, in addition to his
new labour of watching the machine with his eyes and correcting its mistakes
with his hands, the merely mechanical part of being the moving power. On
the other hand, implements, in regard to which man has always acted as
a simple motive power, as, for instance, by turning the crank of a mill,
[7] by pumping, by moving up and down the arm of a bellows, by pounding with a mortar, &c., such implements soon call for the application
of animals, water [8] and wind as motive powers. Here
and there, long before the period of manufacture, and also, to some extent,
during that period, these implements pass over into machines, but without
creating any revolution in the mode of production. It becomes
evident, in the period of modern industry, that these implements, even
under their form of manual tools, are already machines. For instance, the
pumps with which the Dutch, in 1836-7, emptied the Lake of Harlem, were
constructed on the principle of ordinary pumps; the only difference being,
that their pistons were driven by cyclopean steam-engines, instead of by
men. The common and very imperfect bellows of the blacksmith is, in England,
occasionally converted into a blowing-engine, by connecting its arm with
a steam-engine. The steam-engine itself, such as it was at its invention,
during the manufacturing period at the close of the 17th century, and such
as it continued to be down to 1780, [9] did not give
rise to any industrial revolution. It was, on the contrary, the invention
of machines that made a revolution in the form of steam-engines necessary.
As soon as man, instead of working with an implement on the subject of
his labour, becomes merely the motive power of an implement-machine, it
is a mere accident that motive power takes the disguise of human muscle;
and it may equally well take the form of wind, water or steam. Of course,
this does not prevent such a change of form from producing great technical
alterations in the mechanism that was originally constructed to be driven
by man alone. Now-a-days, all machines that have their way to make, such
as sewing-machines, bread-making machines, &c., are, unless from their
very nature their use on a small scale is excluded, constructed to be driven
both by human and by purely mechanical motive power.

The machine, which is the starting-point of the industrial revolution,
supersedes the workman, who handles a single tool, by a mechanism operating
with a number of similar tools, and set in motion by a single motive power,
whatever the form of that power may be. [10] Here we
have the machine, but only as an elementary factor of production by machinery.

Increase in the size of the machine, and in the number of its
working tools, calls for a more massive mechanism to drive it; and this
mechanism requires, in order to overcome its resistance, a mightier moving
power than that of man, apart from the fact that man is a very imperfect
instrument for producing uniform continued motion. But assuming that he
is acting simply as a motor, that a machine has taken the place of his
tool, it is evident that he can be replaced by natural forces. Of all the
great motors handed down from the manufacturing period, horse-power
is the worst, partly because a horse has a head of his own, partly because
he is costly, and the extent to which he is applicable in factories is
very restricted.[11] Nevertheless the horse was extensively used during the infancy of modern industry. This is proved, as well by
the complaints of contemporary agriculturists, as by the term “horse-power,”
which has survived to this day as an expression for mechanical force.

Wind was too inconstant and uncontrollable, and besides, in England,
the birthplace of modern industry, the use of water power preponderated
even during the manufacturing period. In the 17th century attempts had already been made to turn two pairs of millstones with a single water-wheel.
But the increased size of the gearing was too much for the water power,
which had now become insufficient, and this was one of the circumstances
that led to a more accurate investigation of the laws of friction. In the
same way the irregularity caused by the motive power in mills that were
put in motion by pushing and pulling a lever, led to the theory, and the
application, of the fly-wheel, which afterwards plays so important a part
in modern industry. [12] In this way, during the manufacturing period, were developed the first scientific and technical elements of Modern
Mechanical Industry. Arkwright’s throstle spinning mill was from the very
first turned by water. But for all that, the use of water, as the predominant
motive power, was beset with difficulties. It could not be increased at
will, it failed at certain seasons of the year, and, above all, it was
essentially local. [13] Not till the invention of Watt’s second and so-called double-acting steam-engine, was a prime mover
found, that begot its own force by the consumption of coal and water, whose
power was entirely under man’s control, that was mobile and a means of
locomotion, that was urban and not, like the waterwheel, rural, that permitted
production to be concentrated in towns instead of, like the water-wheels,
being scattered up and down the country, [14] that was of universal technical application, and, relatively speaking, little affected
in its choice of residence by local circumstances. The greatness of Watt’s
genius showed itself in the specification of the patent that he took out
in April, 1784. In that specification his steam-engine is described, not
as an invention for a specific purpose, but as an agent universally applicable
in Mechanical Industry. In it he points out applications, many of which,
as for instance, the steam-hammer, were not introduced till half a century
later. Nevertheless he doubted the use of steam-engines in navigation.
His successors, Boulton and Watt, sent to the exhibition of 1851 steam-engines
of colossal size for ocean steamers.

As soon as tools had been converted from being manual implements
of man into implements of a mechanical apparatus, of a machine, the motive
mechanism also acquired an independent form, entirely emancipated from
the restraints of human strength. Thereupon the individual machine, that
we have hitherto been considering, sinks into a mere factor in production
by machinery. One motive mechanism was now able to drive many machines
at once. The motive mechanism grows with the number of the machines that
are turned simultaneously, and the transmitting mechanism becomes a wide-spreading
apparatus.

We now proceed to distinguish the co-operation of a number of
machines of one kind from a complex system of machinery.

In the one case, the product is entirely made by a single machine,
which performs all the various operations previously done by one handicraftsman
with his tool; as, for instance, by a weaver with his loom; or by several
handicraftsman successively, either separately or as members of a system
of Manufacture. [15] For example, in the manufacture of envelopes, one man folded the paper with the folder, another laid on
the gum, a third turned the flap over, on which the device is impressed,
a fourth embossed the device, and so on; and for each of these operations
the envelope had to change hands. One single envelope machine now performs
all these operations at once, and makes more than 3,000 envelopes in an
hour. In the London exhibition of 1862, there was an American machine for
making paper cornets. It cut the paper, pasted, folded, and finished 300
in a minute. Here, the whole process, which, when carried on as Manufacture,
was split up into, and carried out by, a series of operations, is completed
by a single machine, working a combination of various tools. Now, whether
such a machine be merely a reproduction of a complicated manual implement,
or a combination of various simple implements specialised by Manufacture,
in either case, in the factory, i.e., in the workshop in which machinery
alone is used, we meet again with simple co-operation; and, leaving the
workman out of consideration for the moment, this co-operation presents
itself to us, in the first instance, as the conglomeration in one place
of similar and simultaneously acting machines. Thus, a weaving factory
is constituted of a number of power-looms, working side by side, and a
sewing factory of a number of sewing-machines all in the same building.
But there is here a technical oneness in the whole system, owing to all
the machines receiving their impulse simultaneously, and in an equal degree,
from the pulsations of the common prime mover, by the intermediary of the
transmitting mechanism; and this mechanism, to a certain extent, is also
common to them all, since only particular ramifications of it branch off
to each machine. Just as a number of tools, then, form the organs of a
machine, so a number of machines of one kind constitute the organs of the
motive mechanism.

A real machinery system, however, does not take the place of these
independent machines, until the subject of labour goes through a connected
series of detail processes, that are carried out by a chain of machines
of various kinds, the one supplementing the other. Here we have again the
co-operation by division of labour that characterises Manufacture; only
now, it is a combination of detail machines. The special tools of the various
detail workmen, such as those of the beaters, cambers, spinners, &c.,
in the woollen manufacture, are now transformed into the tools of specialised
machines, each machine constituting a special organ, with a
special function, in the system. In those branches of industry in which
the machinery system is first introduced, Manufacture itself furnishes,
in a general way, the natural basis for the division, and consequent organisation,
of the process of production. [16] Nevertheless an essential difference at once manifests itself. In Manufacture it is the workmen who, with their manual implements, must, either singly or in groups, carry on
each particular detail process. If, on the one hand, the workman becomes
adapted to the process, on the other, the process was previously made suitable
to the workman. This subjective principle of the division of labour no
longer exists in production by machinery. Here, the process as a whole
is examined objectively, in itself, that is to say, without regard to the
question of its execution by human hands, it is analysed into its constituent
phases; and the problem, how to execute each detail process, and bind them
all into a whole, is solved by the aid of machines, chemistry, &c.
[17] But, of course, in this case also, theory must
be perfected by accumulated experience on a large scale. Each detail machine
supplies raw material to the machine next in order; and since they are
all working at the same time, the product is always going through the various
stages of its fabrication, and is also constantly in a state of transition,
from one phase to another. Just as in Manufacture, the direct co-operation
of the detail labourers establishes a numerical proportion between the
special groups, so in an organised system of machinery, where one detail
machine is constantly kept employed by another, a fixed relation is established
between their numbers, their size, and their speed. The collective machine,
now an organised system of various kinds of single machines, and of groups
of single machines, becomes more and more perfect, the more
the process as a whole becomes a continuous one, i.e., the less the raw
material is interrupted in its passage from its first phase to its last;
in other words, the more its passage from one phase to another is effected,
not by the hand of man, but by the machinery itself. In Manufacture the
isolation of each detail process is a condition imposed by the nature of
division of labour, but in the fully developed factory the continuity of
those processes is, on the contrary, imperative.

A system of machinery, whether it reposes on the mere co-operation
of similar machines, as in weaving, or on a combination of different machines,
as in spinning, constitutes in itself a huge automaton, whenever it is
driven by a self-acting prime mover. But although the factory as a whole
be driven by its steam-engine, yet either some of the individual machines
may require the aid of the workman for some of their movements (such aid
was necessary for the running in of the mule carriage, before the invention
of the self-acting mule, and is still necessary in fine-spinning mills);
or, to enable a machine to do its work, certain parts of it may require
to be handled by the workman like a manual tool; this was the case in machine-makers’
workshops, before the conversion of the slide rest into a self-actor. As
soon as a machine executes, without man’s help, all the movements requisite
to elaborate the raw material, needing only attendance from him, we have
an automatic system of machinery, and one that is susceptible of constant
improvement in its details. Such improvements as the apparatus that stops
a drawing frame, whenever a sliver breaks, and the self-acting stop, that
stops the power-loom so soon as the shuttle bobbin is emptied of weft,
are quite modern inventions. As an example, both of continuity of production,
and of the carrying out of the automatic principle, we may take a modern
paper mill. In the paper industry generally, we may advantageously study
in detail not only the distinctions between modes of production based on
different means of production, but also the connexion of the social conditions
of production with those modes: for the old German paper-making furnishes
us with a sample of handicraft production; that of Holland in the 17th
and of France in the 18th century with a sample of manufacturing in the
strict sense; and that of modern England with a sample of automatic fabrication
of this article. Besides these, there still exist, in India and China,
two distinct antique Asiatic forms of the same industry.

An organised system of machines, to which motion is communicated
by the transmitting mechanism from a central automaton, is the most developed
form of production by machinery. Here we have, in the place of the isolated
machine, a mechanical monster whose body fills whole factories, and whose
demon power, at first veiled under the slow and measured motions
of his giant limbs, at length breaks out into the fast and furious whirl
of his countless working organs.

There were mules and steam-engines before there were any labourers,
whose exclusive occupation it was to make mules and steam-engines; just
as men wore clothes before there were such people as tailors. The inventions
of Vaucanson, Arkwright, Watt, and others, were, however, practicable,
only because those inventors found, ready to hand, a considerable number
of skilled mechanical workmen, placed at their disposal by the manufacturing
period. Some of these workmen were independent handicraftsman of various
trades, others were grouped together in manufactures, in which, as before-mentioned,
division of labour was strictly carried out. As inventions increased in
number, and the demand for the newly discovered machines grew larger, the
machine-making industry split up, more and more, into numerous independent
branches, and division of labour in these manufactures was more and more
developed. Here, then, we see in Manufacture the immediate technical foundation
of modern industry. Manufacture produced the machinery, by means of which
modern industry abolished the handicraft and manufacturing systems in those
spheres of production that it first seized upon. The factory system was
therefore raised, in the natural course of things, on an inadequate foundation.
When the system attained to a certain degree of development, it had to
root up this ready-made foundation, which in the meantime had been elaborated
on the old lines, and to build up for itself a basis that should correspond
to its methods of production. Just as the individual machine retains a
dwarfish character, so long as it is worked by the power of man alone,
and just as no system of machinery could be properly developed before the
steam-engine took the place of the earlier motive powers, animals, wind,
and even water; so, too, modern industry was crippled in its complete development,
so long as its characteristic instrument of production, the machine, owed
its existence to personal strength and personal skill, and depended on
the muscular development, the keenness of sight, and the cunning of hand,
with which the detail workmen in manufactures, and the manual labourers
in handicrafts, wielded their dwarfish implements. Thus, apart from the
dearness of the machines made in this way, a circumstance that is ever
present to the mind of the capitalist, the expansion of industries carried
on by means of machinery, and the invasion by machinery of fresh branches
of production, were dependent on the growth of a class of workmen, who,
owing to the almost artistic nature of their employment, could increase
their numbers only gradually, and not by leaps and bounds. But besides
this, at a certain stage of its development, modern industry became technologically
incompatible with the basis furnished for it by handicraft and Manufacture.
The increasing size of the prime movers, of the transmitting mechanism,
and of the machines proper, the greater complication, multiformity and
regularity of the details of these machines, as they more and more departed
from the model of those originally made by manual labour, and acquired
a form, untrammelled except by the conditions under which they worked,
[18] the perfecting of the automatic system, and the
use, every day more unavoidable, of a more refractory material, such as
iron instead of wood – the solution of all these problems, which sprang up
by the force of circumstances, everywhere met with a stumbling-block in
the personal restrictions, which even the collective labourer of Manufacture
could not break through, except to a limited extent. Such machines as the
modern hydraulic press, the modern power-loom, and the modern carding engine,
could never have been furnished by Manufacture.

A radical change in the mode of production in one sphere of industry
involves a similar change in other spheres. This happens at first in such
branches of industry as are connected together by being separate phases
of a process, and yet are isolated by the social division of labour, in
such a way, that each of them produces an independent commodity. Thus spinning
by machinery made weaving by machinery a necessity, and both together made
the mechanical and chemical revolution that took place in bleaching, printing,
and dyeing, imperative. So too, on the other hand, the revolution in cotton-spinning
called forth the invention of the gin, for separating the seeds from the
cotton fibre; it was only by means of this invention, that the production
of cotton became possible on the enormous scale at present required. [19] But more especially, the revolution in the modes of production of industry and agriculture made necessary a revolution in the general conditions of
the social process of production, i.e., in the means of communication and
of transport. In a society whose pivot, to use an expression of Fourier,
was agriculture on a small scale, with its subsidiary domestic
industries, and the urban handicrafts, the means of communication and transport
were so utterly inadequate to the productive requirements of the manufacturing
period, with its extended division of social labour, its concentration
of the instruments of labour, and of the workmen, and its colonial markets,
that they became in fact revolutionised. In the same way the means of communication
and transport handed down from the manufacturing period soon became unbearable
trammels on modern industry, with its feverish haste of production, its
enormous extent, its constant flinging of capital and labour from one sphere
of production into another, and its newly-created connexions with the markets
of the whole world. Hence, apart from the radical changes introduced in
the construction of sailing vessels, the means of communication and transport
became gradually adapted to the modes of production of mechanical industry,
by the creation of a system of river steamers, railways, ocean steamers,
and telegraphs. But the huge masses of iron that had now to be forged,
to be welded, to be cut, to be bored, and to be shaped, demanded, on their
part, cyclopean machines, for the construction of which the methods of
the manufacturing period were utterly inadequate.

Modern industry had therefore itself to take in hand the machine,
its characteristic instrument of production, and to construct machines
by machines. It was not till it did this, that it built up for itself a
fitting technical foundation, and stood on its own feet. Machinery, simultaneously
with the increasing use of it, in the first decades of this century, appropriated,
by degrees, the fabrication of machines proper. But it was only during
the decade preceding 1866, that the construction of railways and ocean
steamers on a stupendous scale called into existence the cyclopean machines
now employed in the construction of prime movers.

The most essential condition to the production of machines by
machines was a prime mover capable of exerting any amount of force, and
yet under perfect control. Such a condition was already supplied by the
steam-engine. But at the same time it was necessary to produce the geometrically
accurate straight lines, planes, circles, cylinders, cones, and spheres,
required in the detail parts of the machines. This problem Henry Maudsley
solved in the first decade of this century by the invention of the slide
rest, a tool that was soon made automatic, and in a modified form was applied
to other constructive machines besides the lathe, for which it was originally
intended. This mechanical appliance replaces, not some particular tool,
but the hand itself, which produces a given form by holding and guiding
the cutting tool along the iron or other material operated upon. Thus it
became possible to produce the forms of the individual parts of machinery

“with a degree of ease, accuracy, and speed, that no accumulated
experience of the hand of the most skilled workman could give.” [20]

If we now fix our attention on that portion of the machinery employed
in the construction of machines, which constitutes the operating tool,
we find the manual implements re-appearing, but on a cyclopean scale. The
operating part of the boring machine is an immense drill driven by a steam-engine;
without this machine, on the other hand, the cylinders of large steam-engines
and of hydraulic presses could not be made. The mechanical lathe is only
a cyclopean reproduction of the ordinary foot-lathe; the planing machine,
an iron carpenter, that works on iron with the same tools that the human
carpenter employs on wood; the instrument that, on the London wharves,
cuts the veneers, is a gigantic razor; the tool of the shearing machine,
which shears iron as easily as a tailor’s scissors cut cloth, is a monster
pair of scissors; and the steam-hammer works with an ordinary hammer head,
but of such a weight that not Thor himself could wield it. [21] These steam-hammers are an invention of Nasmyth, and there is one that weighs over 6 tons and strikes with a vertical fall of 7 feet, on an anvil
weighing 36 tons. It is mere child’s-play for it to crush a block of granite
into powder, yet it is no less capable of driving, with a succession of
light taps, a nail into a piece of soft wood. [22]

The implements of labour, in the form of machinery, necessitate
the substitution of natural forces for human force, and the conscious application
of science, instead of rule of thumb. In Manufacture, the organisation
of the social labour-process is purely subjective; it is a combination
of detail labourers; in its machinery system, modern industry has a productive
organism that is purely objective, in which the labourer becomes a mere
appendage to an already existing material condition of production. In simple
co-operation, and even in that founded on division of labour, the suppression
of the isolated, by the collective, workman still appears to be more or
less accidental. Machinery, with a few exceptions to be mentioned later,
operates only by means of associated labour, or labour in common.
Hence the co-operative character of the labour-process is, in the latter
case, a technical necessity dictated by the instrument of labour itself.

## SECTION 2. THE VALUE TRANSFERRED BY MACHINERY TO THE PRODUCT

We saw that the productive forces resulting from co-operation
and division of labour cost capital nothing. They are natural forces of
social labour. So also physical forces, like steam, water, &c., when
appropriated to productive processes, cost nothing. But just as a man requires
lungs to breathe with, so he requires something that is work of man’s hand,
in order to consume physical forces productively. A water-wheel is necessary
to exploit the force of water, and a steam-engine to exploit the elasticity
of steam. Once discovered, the law of the deviation of the magnetic needle
in the field of an electric current, or the law of the magnetisation of
iron, around which an electric current circulates, cost never a penny.
[23] But the exploitation of these laws for the purposes of telegraphy, &c., necessitates a costly and extensive apparatus.
The tool, as we have seen, is not exterminated by the machine. From being
a dwarf implement of the human organism, it expands and multiplies into
the implement of a mechanism created by man. Capital now sets the labourer
to work, not with a manual tool, but with a machine which itself handles
the tools. Although, therefore, it is clear at the first glance that, by
incorporating both stupendous physical forces, and the natural sciences,
with the process of production, modern industry raises the productiveness
of labour to an extraordinary degree, it is by no means equally clear,
that this increased productive force is not, on the other hand, purchased
by an increased expenditure of labour. Machinery, like every other component
of constant capital, creates no new value, but yields up its own value
to the product that it serves to beget. In so far as the machine has value,
and, in consequence, parts with value to the product, it forms an element
in the value of that product. Instead of being cheapened, the product is
made dearer in proportion to the value of the machine. And it is clear
as noon-day, that machines and systems of machinery, the characteristic
instruments of labour of Modern Industry, are incomparably more
loaded with value than the implements used in handicrafts and manufactures.

In the first place, it must be observed that the machinery, while
always entering as a whole into the labour-process, enters into the value-begetting
process only by bits. It never adds more value than it loses, on an average,
by wear and tear. Hence there is a great difference between the value of
a machine, and the value transferred in a given time by that machine to
the product. The longer the life of the machine in the labour-process,
the greater is that difference. It is true, no doubt, as we have already
seen, that every instrument of labour enters as a whole into the labour-process,
and only piece-meal, proportionally to its average daily loss by wear and
tear, into the value-begetting process. But this difference between the
instrument as a whole and its daily wear and tear, is much greater in a
machine than in a tool, because the machine, being made from more durable
material, has a longer life; because its employment, being regulated by
strictly scientific laws, allows of greater economy in the wear and tear
of its parts, and in the materials it consumes; and lastly, because its
field of production is incomparably larger than that of a tool. After making
allowance, both in the case of the machine and of the tool, for their average
daily cost, that is for the value they transmit to the product by their
average daily wear and tear, and for their consumption of auxiliary substance,
such as oil, coal, and so on, they each do their work gratuitously, just
like the forces furnished by Nature without the help of man. The greater
the productive power of the machinery compared with that of the tool, the
greater is the extent of its gratuitous service compared with that of the
tool. In modern industry man succeeded for the first time in making the
product of his past labour work on a large scale gratuitously, like the
forces of Nature. [24]

In treating of Co-operation and Manufacture, it was shown that
certain general factors of production, such as buildings, are, in comparison
with the scattered means of production of the isolated workman, economised
by being consumed in common, and that they therefore make the product cheaper.
In a system of machinery, not only is the framework of the machine consumed
in common by its numerous operating implements, but the prime
mover, together with a part of the transmitting mechanism, is consumed
in common by the numerous operative machines.

Given the difference between the value of the machinery, and the
value transferred by it in a day to the product, the extent to which this
latter value makes the product dearer, depends in the first instance, upon
the size of the product; so to say, upon its area. Mr. Baynes, of Blackburn,
in a lecture published in 1858, estimates that

“each real mechanical horse-power
[25] will drive 450 self-acting mule spindles, with
preparation, or 200 throstle spindles, or 15 looms for 40 inch cloth with
the appliances for warping, sizing, &c.”

In the first case, it is the day’s produce of 450 mule spindles, in the second, of 200 throstle spindles,
in the third, of 15 power-looms, over which the daily cost of one horse-power,
and the wear and tear of the machinery set in motion by that power, are
spread; so that only a very minute value is transferred by such wear and
tear to a pound of yarn or a yard of cloth. The same is the case with the
steam-hammer mentioned above. Since its daily wear and tear, its coal-consumption,
&c., are spread over the stupendous masses of iron hammered by it in
a day, only a small value is added to a hundred weight of iron; but that
value would be very great, if the cyclopean instrument were employed in
driving in nails.

Given a machine’s capacity for work, that is, the number of its
operating tools, or, where it is a question of force, their mass, the amount
of its product will depend on the velocity of its working parts, on the
speed, for instance, of the spindles, or on the number of blows given by
the hammer in a minute. Many of these colossal hammers strike seventy times
in a minute, and Ryder’s patent machine for forging spindles with small
hammers gives as many as 700 strokes per minute.

Given the rate at which machinery transfers its value to the product,
the amount of value so transferred depends on the total value of the machinery.
[26] The less labour it contains, the less value it
imparts to the product. The less value it gives up, so much the more productive
it is, and so much the more its services approximate to those of natural
forces. But the production of machinery by machinery lessens its value
relatively to its extension and efficacy.

An analysis and comparison of the prices of commodities produced
by handicrafts or manufactures, and of the prices of the same commodities
produced by machinery, shows generally, that, in the product of machinery,
the value due to the instruments of labour increases relatively, but decreases
absolutely. In other words, its absolute amount decreases, but its amount,
relatively to the total value of the product, of a pound of yarn, for instance,
increases. [27]

It is evident that whenever it costs as much labour to produce
a machine as is saved by the employment of that machine, there is nothing
but a transposition of labour; consequently the total labour required to produce
a commodity is not lessened or the productiveness of labour is not increased.
It is clear, however, that the difference between the labour a machine
costs, and the labour it saves, in other words, that the degree of its
productiveness does not depend on the difference between its own value
and the value of the implement it replaces. As long as the labour spent
on a machine, and consequently the portion of its value added to the product,
remains smaller than the value added by the workman to the product with
his tool, there is always a difference of labour saved in favour of the
machine. The productiveness of a machine is therefore measured by the human
labour-power it replaces. According to Mr. Baynes, 2½ operatives are required for the 450 mule spindles, inclusive of preparation machinery, [28] that are driven by one-horse power; each self-acting mule spindle, working ten hours, produces 13 ounces of yarn (average number of thickness); consequently 2½ operatives spin weekly 365 5/8 lbs. of yarn. Hence, leaving waste
on one side, 366 lbs. of cotton absorb, during their conversion into yarn,
only 150 hours’ labour, or fifteen days’ labour of ten hours each. But
with a spinning-wheel, supposing the hand-spinner to produce thirteen ounces
of yarn in sixty hours, the same weight of cotton would absorb 2,700 days’
labour of ten hours each, or 27,000 hours’ labour. [29] Where blockprinting, the old method of printing calico by hand, has been superseded by machine printing, a single machine prints, with the aid of
one man or boy, as much calico of four colours in one hour, as it formerly
took 200 men to do. [30] Before Eli Whitney invented
the cotton gin in 1793, the separation of the seed from a pound of cotton
cost an average day’s labour. By means of his invention one negress was
enabled to clean 100 lbs. daily; and since then, the efficacy of the gin
has been considerably increased. A pound of cotton wool, previously costing
50 cents to produce, included after that invention more unpaid labour,
and was consequently sold with greater profit, at 10 cents. In India they employ
for separating the wool from the seed, an instrument, half machine, half
tool, called a churka; with this one man and a woman can clean 28 lbs.
daily. With the churka invented some years ago by Dr. Forbes, one man and
a boy produce 250 lbs. daily. If oxen, steam, or water, be used for driving
it, only a few boys and girls as feeders are required. Sixteen of these
machines driven by oxen do as much work in a day as formerly 750 people
did on an average. [31]

As already stated, a steam-plough does as much work in one hour
at a cost of three-pence, as 66 men at a cost of 15 shillings. I return
to this example in order to clear up an erroneous notion. The 15 shillings
are by no means the expression in money of all the labour expended in one
hour by the 66 men. If the ratio of surplus-labour to necessary labour
were 100%, these 66 men would produce in one hour a value of 30 shillings,
although their wages, 15 shillings, represent only their labour for half
an hour. Suppose, then, a machine cost as much as the wages for a year
of the 150 men it displaces, say £3,000; this £3,000 is by
no means the expression in money of the labour added to the object produced
by these 150 men before the introduction of the machine, but only of that
portion of their year’s labour which was expended for themselves and represented
by their wages. On the other hand, the £3,000, the money-value of
the machine, expresses all the labour expended on its production, no matter
in what proportion this labour constitutes wages for the workman, and surplus-value
for the capitalist. Therefore, though a machine cost as much as the labour-power
displaced by it costs, yet the labour materialised in it is even then much
less than the living labour it replaces. [32]

The use of machinery for the exclusive purpose of cheapening the product,
is limited in this way, that less labour must be expended in producing
the machinery than is displaced by the employment of that machinery. For
the capitalist, however, this use is still more limited. Instead of paying
for the labour, he only pays the value of the labour-power employed; therefore,
the limit to his using a machine is fixed by the difference between the
value of the machine and the value of the labour-power replaced by it.
Since the division of the day’s work into necessary and surplus-labour
differs in different countries, and even in the same country at different
periods, or in different branches of industry; and further, since the actual
wage of the labourer at one time sinks below the value of his labour-power,
at another rises above it, it is possible for the difference between the
price of the machinery and the price of the labour-power replaced
by that machinery to vary very much, although the difference between the
quantity of labour requisite to produce the machine and the total quantity
replaced by it, remain constant. [33] But it is the
former difference alone that determines the cost, to the capitalist, of
producing a commodity, and, through the pressure of competition, influences
his action. Hence the invention now-a-days of machines in England that
are employed only in North America; just as in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, machines were invented in Germany to be used only in Holland,
and just as many a French invention of the eighteenth century was exploited
in England alone. In the older countries, machinery, when employed in some
branches of industry, creates such a redundancy of labour in other branches
that in these latter the fall of wages below the value of labour-power
impedes the use of machinery, and, from the standpoint of the capitalist,
whose profit comes, not from a diminution of the labour employed, but of
the labour paid for, renders that use superfluous and often impossible.
In some branches of the woollen manufacture in England the employment of
children has during recent years been considerably diminished, and in some
cases has been entirely abolished. Why? Because the Factory Acts made two
sets of children necessary, one working six hours, the other four, or each
working five hours. But the parents refused to sell the “half-timers” cheaper
than the “full-timers.” Hence the substitution of machinery for the “half-timers.” [34] Before the labour of women and of children under 10 years of age was forbidden in mines, capitalists considered the employment of naked women and girls, often in company with men, so far sanctioned by their moral code, and especially by their ledgers, that it was only after the passing of the Act that they had recourse to machinery. The Yankees
have invented a stone-breaking machine. The English do not make use of
it, because the “wretch” [35] who does this work gets paid for such a small portion of his labour, that machinery would
increase the cost of production to the capitalist. [36] In England women are still occasionally used instead of horses for hauling canal boats, [37] because the labour required to produce horses and machines is an accurately known quantity, while that required
to maintain the women of the surplus-population is below all calculation.
Hence nowhere do we find a more shameful squandering of human labour-power
for the most despicable purposes than in England, the land of machinery.

## SECTION 3. THE PROXIMATE EFFECTS OF MACHINERY ON THE WORKMAN

The starting-point of modern industry is, as we have
shown, the revolution in the instruments of labour, and this revolution
attains its most highly developed form in the organised system of machinery
in a factory. Before we inquire how human material is incorporated with
this objective organism, let us consider some general effects of this revolution
on the labourer himself.

### A. Appropriation of Supplementary Labour-power by Capital. The Employment of Women and Children

In so far as machinery dispenses with muscular power, it becomes a means
of employing labourers of slight muscular strength, and those whose bodily
development is incomplete, but whose limbs are all the more supple. The
labour of women and children was, therefore, the first thing sought for
by capitalists who used machinery. That mighty substitute for labour and
labourers was forthwith changed into a means for increasing the number
of wage-labourers by enrolling, under the direct sway of capital, every
member of the workman’s family, without distinction of age or sex. Compulsory
work for the capitalist usurped the place, not only of the children’s play,
but also of free labour at home within moderate limits for the support
of the family. [38]

The value of labour-power was determined, not only by the
labour-time necessary to maintain the individual adult labourer, but also
by that necessary to maintain his family. Machinery, by throwing every
member of that family on to the labour-market, spreads the value of the
man’s labour-power over his whole family. It thus depreciates his labour-power.
To purchase the labour-power of a family of four workers may, perhaps,
cost more than it formerly did to purchase the labour-power of the head
of the family, but, in return, four days’ labour takes the place of one,
and their price falls in proportion to the excess of the surplus-labour
of four over the surplus-labour of one. In order that the family may live,
four people must now, not only labour, but expend surplus-labour for the
capitalist. Thus we see, that machinery, while augmenting the human material
that forms the principal object of capital’s exploiting power, [39] at the same time raises the degree of exploitation.

Machinery also revolutionises out and out the contract between
the labourer and the capitalist, which formally fixes their mutual relations.
Taking the exchange of commodities as our basis, our first assumption was
that capitalist and labourer met as free persons, as independent owners
of commodities; the one possessing money and means of production, the other
labour-power. But now the capitalist buys children and young persons under
age. Previously, the workman sold his own labour-power, which he disposed
of nominally as a free agent. Now he sells wife and child. He has become
a slave-dealer. [40] The demand for children’s labour often resembles in form the inquiries for negro slaves, such as were formerly to be read among the advertisements in American journals.

“My attention,” says an English factory inspector, “was drawn to an advertisement
in the local paper of one of the most important manufacturing towns of
my district, of which the following is a copy: Wanted, 12 to 20 young persons,
not younger than what can pass for 13 years. Wages, 4 shillings a week.
Apply &c.” [41]

The phrase “what can pass for 13 years,” has reference to the fact, that by the Factory Act, children under
13 years may work only 6 hours. A surgeon officially appointed must certify
their age. The manufacturer, therefore, asks for children who look as if
they were already 13 years old. The decrease, often by leaps and bounds
in the number of children under 13 years employed in factories, a decrease
that is shown in an astonishing manner by the English statistics of the
last 20 years, was for the most part, according to the evidence of the
factory inspectors themselves, the work of the certifying surgeons, who
overstated the age of the children, agreeably to the capitalist’s greed
for exploitation, and the sordid trafficking needs of the parents. In the
notorious district of Bethnal Green, a public market is held every Monday
and Tuesday morning, where children of both sexes from 9 years of age upwards,
hire themselves out to the silk manufacturers. "The usual terms are 1s. 8d. a week (this belongs to the parents) and ‘2d. for myself and tea.’ The contract is binding only for the week. The scene and language while
this market is going on are quite disgraceful.” [42]
It has also occurred in England, that women have taken “children from the
workhouse and let any one have them out for 2s. 6d. a week.” [43] In spite of legislation, the number of boys sold in Great Britain by their parents to act as live chimney-sweeping machines (although there exist
plenty of machines to replace them) exceeds 2,000. [44] The revolution effected by machinery in the juridical relations between the buyer and the seller of labour-power, causing the transaction as a
whole to lose the appearance of a contract between free persons,
afforded the English Parliament an excuse, founded on juridical principles,
for the interference of the state with factories. Whenever the law limits
the labour of children to 6 hours in industries not before interfered with,
the complaints of the manufacturers are always renewed. They allege that
numbers of the parents withdraw their children from the industry brought
under the Act, in order to sell them where “freedom of labour” still rules,
i.e., where children under 13 years are compelled to work like grown-up
people, and therefore can be got rid of at a higher price. But since capital
is by nature a leveller, since it exacts in every sphere of production
equality in the conditions of the exploitation of labour, the limitation
by law of children’s labour, in one branch of industry, becomes the cause
of its limitation in others.

We have already alluded to the physical deterioration as well
of the children and young-persons as of the women, whom machinery, first
directly in the factories that shoot up on its basis, and then indirectly
in all the remaining branches of industry, subjects to the exploitation
of capital. In this place, therefore, we dwell only on one point, the enormous
mortality, during the first few years of their life, of the children of
the operatives. In sixteen of the registration districts into which England
is divided, there are, for every 100,000 children alive under the age of
one year, only 9,000 deaths in a year on an average (in one district only
7,047); in 24 districts the deaths are over 10,000, but under 11,000; in
39 districts, over 11,000, but under 12,000; in 48 districts over 12,000,
but under 13,000; in 22 districts over 20,000; in 25 districts over 21,000;
in 17 over 22,000; in 11 over 23,000; in Hoo, Wolverhampton, Ashton-under-Lyne,
and Preston, over 24,000; in Nottingham, Stockport, and Bradford, over
25,000; in Wisbeach, 16,000; and in Manchester, 26,125. [45] As was shown by an official medical inquiry in the year 1861, the high death-rates are, apart from local causes, principally due to the employment
of the mothers away from their homes, and to the neglect and maltreatment, consequent on her absence, such as, amongst others, insufficient nourishment,
unsuitable food, and dosing with opiates; besides this, there arises an
unnatural estrangement between mother and child, and as a consequence intentional
starving and poisoning of the children. [46] In those agricultural districts, “where a minimum in the employment of women exists,
the death-rate is on the other hand very low.” [47] The Inquiry Commission of 1861 led, however, to the unexpected result, that in some purely agricultural districts bordering on the North Sea,
the death-rate of children under one year old almost equalled that of the
worst factory districts. Dr. Julian Hunter was therefore commissioned to
investigate this phenomenon on the spot. His report is incorporated with
the “Sixth Report on Public Health.” [48] Up to that
time it was supposed, that the children were decimated by malaria, and
other diseases peculiar to low-lying and marshy districts. But the inquiry
showed the very opposite, namely, that the same cause which drove away
malaria, the conversion of the land, from a morass in winter and a scanty
pasture in summer, into fruitful corn land, created the exceptional death-rate
of the infants. [49] The 70 medical men, whom Dr. Hunter examined in that district, were “wonderfully in accord” on this point.
In fact, the revolution in the mode of cultivation had led to the introduction
of the industrial system.

Married women, who work in gangs along with boys
and girls, are, for a stipulated sum of money, placed at the disposal of
the farmer, by a man called the “undertaker,” who contracts for the whole
gang. “These gangs will sometimes travel many miles from their own village;
they are to be met morning and evening on the roads, dressed in short petticoats, with suitable coats and boots, and sometimes trousers, looking wonderfully
strong and healthy, but tainted with a customary immorality and heedless
of the fatal results which their love of this busy and independent life
is bringing on their unfortunate offspring who are pining at home.” [50]

Every phenomenon of the factory districts is here reproduced, including,
but to a greater extent, ill-disguised infanticide, and dosing children
with opiates. [51]

“My knowledge of such evils,” says Dr. Simon, the medical officer of the Privy Council and editor in chief
of the Reports on Public Health, “may excuse the profound misgiving with
which I regard any large industrial employment of adult women.” [52]

“Happy indeed,” exclaims Mr. Baker, the factory inspector, in his official report, “happy indeed will it be for the manufacturing districts of England,
when every married woman having a family is prohibited from
working in any textile works at all.” [53]

The moral degradation caused by the capitalistic exploitation
of women and children has been so exhaustively depicted by F. Engels in
his “Lage der Arbeitenden Klasse Englands,” and other writers, that I need
only mention the subject in this place. But the intellectual desolation
artificially produced by converting immature human beings into mere machines
for the fabrication of surplus-value, a state of mind clearly distinguishable
from that natural ignorance which keeps the mind fallow without destroying
its capacity for development, its natural fertility, this desolation finally
compelled even the English Parliament to make elementary education a compulsory
condition to the “productive” employment of children under 14 years, in
every industry subject to the Factory Acts. The spirit of capitalist production
stands out clearly in the ludicrous wording of the so-called education
clauses in the Factory Acts, in the absence of an administrative machinery,
an absence that again makes the compulsion illusory, in the opposition
of the manufacturers themselves to these education clauses, and in the
tricks and dodges they put in practice for evading them.

“For this the legislature is alone to blame, by having passed a delusive law, which,
while it would seem to provide that the children employed in factories
shall be educated, contains no enactment by which that professed
end can be secured. It provides nothing more than that the children shall
on certain days of the week, and for a certain number of hours (three)
in each day, be inclosed within the four walls of a place called a school,
and that the employer of the child shall receive weekly a certificate to
that effect signed by a person designated by the subscriber as a schoolmaster
or schoolmistress.” [54]

Previous to the passing of the amended Factory Act, 1844, it happened, not unfrequently, that the
certificates of attendance at school were signed by the schoolmaster or
schoolmistress with a cross, as they themselves were unable to write.

“On one occasion, on visiting a place called a school, from which certificates
of school attendance, had issued, I was so struck with the ignorance of
the master, that I said to him: ‘Pray, sir, can you read?’ His reply was:
‘Aye, summat!’ and as a justification of his right to grant certificates,
he added: ‘At any rate, I am before my scholars.’”

The inspectors, when the Bill of 1844 was in preparation, did not fail to represent the disgraceful
state of the places called schools, certificates from which they were obliged
to admit as a compliance with the laws, but they were successful only in
obtaining thus much, that since the passing of the Act of 1845,

the figures in the school certificate must be filled up in the handwriting
of the schoolmaster, who must also sign his Christian and surname in full.” [55]

Sir John Kincaid, factory inspector for Scotland, relates experiences of the same kind.

“The first school we visited was
kept by a Mrs. Ann Killin. Upon asking her to spell her name, she straightway
made a mistake, by beginning with the letter C, but correcting herself
immediately, she said her name began with a K. On looking at her signature,
however, in the school certificate books, I noticed that she spelt it in
various ways, while her handwriting left no doubt as to her unfitness to
teach. She herself also acknowledged that she could not keep the register
... In a second school I found the schoolroom 15 feet long, and 10 feet
wide, and counted in this space 75 children, who were gabbling something
unintelligible” [56] But it is not only in the miserable places above referred to that the children obtain certificates of school
attendance without having received instruction of any value, for in many
schools where there is a competent teacher, his efforts are of little avail
from the distracting crowd of children of all ages, from infants of 3 years
old and upwards; his livelihood, miserable at the best, depending on the
pence received from the greatest number of children whom it is possible
to cram into the space. To this is to be added scanty school furniture, deficiency of books, and other materials for teaching, and the depressing
effect upon the poor children themselves of a close, noisome atmosphere.
I have been in many such schools, where I have seen rows of children doing
absolutely nothing; and this is certified as school attendance, and, in
statistical returns, such children are set down as being educated.” [57]

In Scotland the manufacturers try all they can to do without the children that are obliged to attend school.

“It requires no further argument to
prove that the educational clauses of the Factory Act, being held in such
disfavour among mill-owners, tend in a great measure to exclude that class
of children alike from the employment and the benefit of education contemplated
by this Act.” [58]

Horribly grotesque does this appear in print works, which are regulated by a special Act. By that Act,

“every child, before being employed in a print work must have attended school
for at least 30 days, and not less than 150 hours, during the six months
immediately preceding such first day of employment, and during the continuance
of its employment in the print works, it must attend for a like period
of 30 days, and 150 hours during every successive period of six months....
The attendance at school must be between 8 a.m. and 6 p.m. No
attendance of less than 2½ hours, nor more than 5 hours on any one day,
shall be reckoned as part of the 150 hours. Under ordinary circumstances
the children attend school morning and afternoon for 30 days, for at least
5 hours each day, and upon the expiration of the 30 days, the statutory
total of 150 hours having been attained, having, in their language, made
up their book, they return to the print work, where they continue until
the six months have expired, when another instalment of school attendance
becomes due, and they again seek the school until the book is again made
up.... Many boys having attended school for the required number of hours,
when they return to school after the expiration of their six months’ work
in the print work, are in the same condition as when they first attended
school as print-work boys, that they have lost all they gained by their
previous school attendance.... In other print works the children’s attendance
at school is made to depend altogether upon the exigencies of the work
in the establishment. The requisite number of hours is made up each six
months, by instalments consisting of from 3 to 5 hours at a time, spreading
over, perhaps, the whole six months.... For instance, the attendance on
one day might be from 8 to 11 a.m., on another day from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m.,
and the child might not appear at school again for several days, when it
would attend from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m.; then it might attend for 3 or 4 days
consecutively, or for a week, then it would not appear in school for 3
weeks or a month, after that upon some odd days at some odd hours when
the operative who employed it chose to spare it; and thus the child was,
as it were, buffeted from school to work, from work to school, until the
tale of 150 hours was told.” [59]

By the excessive addition of women and children to the ranks of
the workers, machinery at last breaks down the resistance which the male
operatives in the manufacturing period continued to oppose to the despotism
of capital. [60]

### B. Prolongation of the Working-Day

If machinery be the most powerful means for increasing the productiveness
of labour — i.e., for shortening the working-time required in the production
of a commodity, it becomes in the hands of capital the most powerful means,
in those industries first invaded by it, for lengthening the working-day
beyond all bounds set by human nature. It creates, on the one hand, new
conditions by which capital is enabled to give free scope to this its constant
tendency, and on the other hand, new motives with which to whet capital’s
appetite for the labour of others.

In the first place, in the form of machinery, the implements of
labour become automatic, things moving and working independent of the workman.
They are thenceforth an industrial perpetuum mobile, that would
go on producing forever, did it not meet with certain natural obstructions
in the weak bodies and the strong wills of its human attendants. The automaton,
as capital, and because it is capital, is endowed, in the person of the
capitalist, with intelligence and will; it is therefore animated by the
longing to reduce to a minimum the resistance offered by that repellent
yet elastic natural barrier, man. [61] This resistance is moreover lessened by the apparent lightness of machine work, and by
the more pliant and docile character of the women and children employed
on it. [62]

The productiveness of machinery is, as we saw, inversely proportional
to the value transferred by it to the product. The longer the life of the
machine, the greater is the mass of the products over which the value transmitted
by the machine is spread, and the less is the portion of that value added
to each single commodity. The active lifetime of a machine is, however,
clearly dependent on the length of the working-day, or on the duration
of the daily labour-process multiplied by the number of days for which
the process is carried on.

The wear and tear of a machine is not exactly proportional to
its working-time. And even if it were so, a machine working 16 hours daily
for 7½ years, covers as long a working period as, and transmits to the
total product no more value than, the same machine would if it worked only
8 hours daily for 15 years. But in the first case the value of the machine
would be reproduced twice as quickly as in the latter, and the capitalist
would, by this use of the machine, absorb in 7½ years as much surplus-value
as in the second case he would in 15.

The material wear and tear of a machine is of two kinds. The one
arises from use, as coins wear away by circulating, the other from non-use,
as a sword rusts when left in its scabbard. The latter kind is due to the
elements. The former is more or less directly proportional, the latter
to a certain extent inversely proportional, to the use of the machine.

But in addition to the material wear and tear, a machine also
undergoes, what we may call a moral depreciation. It loses exchange-value,
either by machines of the same sort being produced cheaper than it, or
by better machines entering into competition with it. [64] In both cases, be the machine ever so young and full of life, its value is no longer determined by the labour actually materialised in it, but
by the labour-time requisite to reproduce either it or the better machine.
It has, therefore, lost value more or less. The shorter the period taken
to reproduce its total value, the less is the danger of moral depreciation;
and the longer the working-day, the shorter is that period. When machinery
is first introduced into an industry, new methods of reproducing it more
cheaply follow blow upon blow, [65] and so do improvements, that not only affect individual parts and details of the machine,
but its entire build. It is, therefore, in the early days of the life of
machinery that this special incentive to the prolongation of the working-day
makes itself felt most acutely. [66]

Given the length of the working-day, all other circumstances remaining
the same, the exploitation of double the number of workmen demands, not
only a doubling of that part of constant capital which is invested in machinery
and buildings, but also of that part which is laid out in raw material
and auxiliary substances. The lengthening of the working-day, on the other
hand, allows of production on an extended scale without any alteration
in the amount of capital laid out on machinery and buildings. [67] Not only is there, therefore, an increase of surplus-value, but the outlay necessary to obtain it diminishes. It is true that this takes place, more or less, with every lengthening of the working-day; but in the case under
consideration, the change is more marked, because the capital converted
into the instruments of labour preponderates to a greater degree. [68] The development of the factory system fixes a constantly increasing portion of the capital in a form, in which, on the one hand, its value is capable
of continual self-expansion, and in which, on the other hand, it loses
both use-value and exchange-value whenever it loses contact with living
labour. “When a labourer,” said Mr. Ashworth, a cotton magnate, to Professor
Nassau W. Senior, “lays down his spade, he renders useless, for that period,
a capital worth eighteen-pence. When one of our people leaves the mill,
he renders useless a capital that has cost £100,000.” [69] Only fancy! making “useless” for a single moment, a capital that has cost £100,000! It is, in truth, monstrous, that a single one of our people
should ever leave the factory! The increased use of machinery, as Senior
after the instruction he received from Ashworth clearly perceives,
makes a constantly increasing lengthening of the working-day “desirable.”

Machinery produces relative surplus-value; not only by directly
depreciating the value of labour-power, and by indirectly cheapening the
same through cheapening the commodities that enter into its reproduction,
but also, when it is first introduced sporadically into an industry, by
converting the labour employed by the owner of that machinery, into labour
of a higher degree and greater efficacy, by raising the social value of
the article produced above its individual value, and thus enabling the
capitalist to replace the value of a day’s labour-power by a smaller portion
of the value of a day’s product. During this transition period, when the
use of machinery is a sort of monopoly, the profits are therefore exceptional,
and the capitalist endeavours to exploit thoroughly “the sunny time of
this his first love,” by prolonging the working-day as much as possible.
The magnitude of the profit whets his appetite for more profit.

As the use of machinery becomes more general in a particular industry,
the social value of the product sinks down to its individual value, and
the law that surplus-value does not arise from the labour-power that has
been replaced by the machinery, but from the labour-power actually employed
in working with the machinery, asserts itself. Surplus-value arises from
variable capital alone, and we saw that the amount of surplus-value depends
on two factors, viz., the rate of surplus-value and the number of the workmen
simultaneously employed. Given the length of the working-day, the rate
of surplus-value is determined by the relative duration of the necessary
labour and of the surplus-labour in a day. The number of the labourers
simultaneously employed depends, on its side, on the ratio of the variable
to the constant capital. Now, however much the use of machinery may increase
the surplus-labour at the expense of the necessary labour by heightening
the productiveness of labour, it is clear that it attains this result,
only by diminishing the number of workmen employed by a given amount of
capital. It converts what was formerly variable capital, invested in labour-power,
into machinery which, being constant capital, does not produce surplus-value.
It is impossible, for instance, to squeeze as much surplus-value out of
2 as out of 24 labourers. If each of these 24 men gives only one hour of
surplus-labour in 12, the 24 men give together 24 hours of surplus-labour,
while 24 hours is the total labour of the two men. Hence, the application
of machinery to the production of surplus-value implies a contradiction
which is immanent in it, since of the two factors of the surplus-value
created by a given amount of capital, one, the rate of surplus-value, cannot
be increased, except by diminishing the other, the number of workmen. This
contradiction comes to light, as soon as by the general employment of machinery
in a given industry, the value of the machine-produced commodity regulates
the value of all commodities of the same sort; and it is this contradiction,
that in its turn, drives the capitalist, without his being conscious of
the fact, [71] to excessive lengthening of the working-day, in order that he may compensate the decrease in the relative number of
labourers exploited, by an increase not only of the relative, but of the
absolute surplus-labour.

If, then, the capitalistic employment of machinery, on the one
hand, supplies new and powerful motives to an excessive lengthening of
the working-day, and radically changes, as well the methods of labour,
as also the character of the social working organism, in such a manner
as to break down all opposition to this tendency, on the other hand it
produces, partly by opening out to the capitalist new strata of the working-class,
previously inaccessible to him, partly by setting free the labourers it
supplants, a surplus working population, [72] which
is compelled to submit to the dictation of capital. Hence that remarkable
phenomenon in the history of modern industry, that machinery sweeps away
every moral and natural restriction on the length of the working-day. Hence,
too, the economic paradox, that the most powerful instrument for shortening
labour-time, becomes the most unfailing means for placing every moment
of the labourer’s time and that of his family, at the disposal of the capitalist for the purpose of expanding the value of his capital. “If,” dreamed Aristotle,
the greatest thinker of antiquity, “if every tool, when summoned, or even
of its own accord, could do the work that befits it, just as the creations
of Daedalus moved of themselves, or the tripods of Hephaestos went of their
own accord to their sacred work, if the weavers’ shuttles were to weave
of themselves, then there would be no need either of apprentices for the
master workers, or of slaves for the lords.” [73] And Antipatros, a Greek poet of the time of Cicero, hailed the invention of the water-wheel for grinding corn, an invention that is the elementary
form of all machinery, as the giver of freedom to female slaves, and the
bringer back of the golden age. [74] Oh! those heathens! They understood, as the learned Bastiat, and before him the still wiser
MacCulloch have discovered, nothing of Political Economy and Christianity.
They did not, for example, comprehend that machinery is the surest means
of lengthening the working-day. They perhaps excused the slavery of one
on the ground that it was a means to the full development of another. But
to preach slavery of the masses, in order that a few crude and half-educated
parvenus, might become “eminent spinners,” “extensive sausage-makers,”
and “influential shoe-black dealers,” to do this, they lacked the bump
of Christianity.

### C. Intensification of Labour

The immoderate lengthening of the working-day, produced by machinery
in the hands of capital, leads to a reaction on the part of society, the
very sources of whose life are menaced; and, thence, to a normal working-day
whose length is fixed by law. Thenceforth a phenomenon that we have already
met with, namely, the intensification of labour, develops into great importance.
Our analysis of absolute surplus-value had reference primarily to the extension
or duration of the labour, its intensity being assumed as given. We now
proceed to consider the substitution of a more intensified labour for labour
of more extensive duration, and the degree of the former.

It is self-evident, that in proportion as the use of machinery
spreads, and the experience of a special class of workmen habituated to
machinery accumulates, the rapidity and intensity of labour increase as
a natural consequence. Thus in England, during half a century, lengthening
of the working-day went hand in hand with increasing intensity of factory
labour. Nevertheless the reader will clearly see, that where we have labour,
not carried on by fits and starts, but repeated day after day with unvarying
uniformity, a point must inevitably be reached, where extension of the
working-day and intensity of the labour mutually exclude one another, in
such a way that lengthening of the working-day becomes compatible only
with a lower degree of intensity, and a higher degree of intensity, only
with a shortening of the working-day. So soon as the gradually surging
revolt of the working-class compelled Parliament to shorten compulsorily
the hours of labour, and to begin by imposing a normal working-day on factories
proper, so soon consequently as an increased production of surplus-value
by the prolongation of the working-day was once for all put a stop to,
from that moment capital threw itself with all its might into the production
of relative surplus-value, by hastening on the further improvement of machinery.
At the same time a change took place in the nature of relative surplus-value.
Generally speaking, the mode of producing relative surplus-value consists
in raising the productive power of the workman, so as to enable him to
produce more in a given time with the same expenditure of labour. Labour-time
continues to transmit as before the same value to the total product, but
this unchanged amount of exchange-value is spread over more use-value;
hence the value of each single commodity sinks. Otherwise, however, so
soon as the compulsory shortening of the hours of labour takes place. The
immense impetus it gives the development of productive power, and to economy
in the means of production, imposes on the workman increased expenditure
of labour in a given time, heightened tension of labour-power, and closer
filling up of the pores of the working-day, or condensation of labour to
a degree that is attainable only within the limits of the shortened working-day.
This condensation of a greater mass of labour into a given period thenceforward
counts for what it really is, a greater quantity of labour. In addition
to a measure of its extension, i.e., duration, labour now acquires a measure
of its intensity or of the degree of its condensation or density. [75] The denser hour of the ten hours’ working-day contains more labour, i.e., expended labour-power than the more porous hour of the twelve hours’ working-day. The product therefore of one of the former hours has as much or more value
than has the product of 1 1/5 of the latter hours. Apart from the increased
yield of relative surplus-value through the heightened productiveness of
labour, the same mass of value is now produced for the capitalist say by
3 1/3 hours of surplus-labour, and 6 2/3 hours of necessary labour, as
was previously produced by four hours of surplus-labour and eight hours
of necessary labour.

We now come to the question: How is the labour intensified?

The first effect of shortening the working-day results from the
self-evident law, that the efficiency of labour-power is in an inverse
ratio to the duration of its expenditure. Hence, within certain limits
what is lost by shortening the duration is gained by the increasing tension
of labour-power. That the workman moreover really does expend more labour-power,
is ensured by the mode in which the capitalist pays him. [76] In those industries, such as potteries, where machinery plays little or no part, the introduction of the Factory Acts has strikingly shown that
the mere shortening of the working-day increases to a wonderful degree
the regularity, uniformity, order, continuity, and energy of the labour.
[77] It seemed, however, doubtful whether this effect was produced in the factory proper, where the dependence of the workman
on the continuous and uniform motion of the machinery had already created
the strictest discipline. Hence, when in 1844 the reduction of the working-day
to less than twelve hours was being debated, the masters almost unanimously
declared

“that their overlookers in the different rooms took good care
that the hands lost no time,” that “the extent of vigilance and attention
on the part of the workmen was hardly capable of being increased,” and,
therefore, that the speed of the machinery and other conditions remaining
unaltered, “to expect in a well-managed factory any important result from
increased attention of the workmen was an absurdity.” [78]

This assertion was contradicted by experiments.
Mr. Robert Gardner reduced the hours of labour in his two large factories at Preston, on and after
the 20th April, 1844, from twelve to eleven hours a day. The result of
about a year’s working was that “the same amount of product for the same
cost was received, and the workpeople as a whole earned in eleven
hours as much wages as they did before in twelve.” [79] I pass over the experiments made in the spinning and carding rooms, because they were accompanied by an increase of 2% in the speed of the machines.
But in the weaving department, where, moreover, many sorts of figured fancy
articles were woven, there was not the slightest alteration in the conditions
of the work. The result was: “From 6th January to 20th April, 1844, with
a twelve hours’ day, average weekly wages of each hand 10s. 1½d., from
20th April to 29th June, 1844, with day of eleven hours, average weekly
wages 10s. 3½d.” [80] Here we have more produced
in eleven hours than previously in twelve, and entirely in consequence
of more steady application and economy of time by the workpeople. While
they got the same wages and gained one hour of spare time, the capitalist
got the same amount produced and saved the cost of coal, gas, and other
such items, for one hour. Similar experiments, and with the like success,
were carried out in the mills of Messrs. Horrocks and Jacson. [81]

The shortening of the hours of labour creates, to begin with,
the subjective conditions for the condensation of labour, by enabling the
workman to exert more strength in a given time. So soon as that shortening
becomes compulsory, machinery becomes in the hands of capital the objective
means, systematically employed for squeezing out more labour in a given
time. This is effected in two ways: by increasing the speed of the machinery,
and by giving the workman more machinery to tent. Improved construction
of the machinery is necessary, partly because without it greater pressure
cannot be put on the workman, and partly because the shortened hours of
labour force the capitalist to exercise the strictest watch over the cost
of production. The improvements in the steam-engine have increased the
piston speed, and at the same time have made it possible, by means of a
greater economy of power, to drive with the same or even a smaller consumption
of coal more machinery with the same engine. The improvements in the transmitting
mechanism have lessened friction, and, what so strikingly distinguishes
modern from the older machinery, have reduced the diameter and weight of
the shafting to a constantly decreasing minimum. Finally, the
improvements in the operative machines have, while reducing their size,
increased their speed and efficiency, as in the modern power-loom; or,
while increasing the size of their framework, have also increased the extent
and number of their working parts, as in spinning-mules, or have added
to the speed of these working parts by imperceptible alterations of detail,
such as those which ten years ago increased the speed of the spindles in
self-acting mules by one-fifth.

The reduction of the working-day to 12 hours dates in England
from 1832. In 1836 a manufacturer stated:

“The labour now undergone in
the factories is much greater than it used to be ... compared with thirty
or forty years ago ... owing to the greater attention and activity required
by the greatly increased speed which is given to the machinery.” [82]

In the year 1844, Lord Ashley, now Lord Shaftesbury, made in the House of Commons the following statements, supported by documentary evidence:

“The labour performed by those engaged in the processes of manufacture,
is three times as great as in the beginning of such operations. Machinery
has executed, no doubt, the work that would demand the sinews of millions
of men; but it has also prodigiously multiplied the labour of those who
are governed by its fearful movements.... In 1815, the labour of following
a pair of mules spinning cotton of No. 40 — reckoning 12 hours to the
working-day — involved a necessity of walking 8 miles. In 1832, the distance
travelled in following a pair of mules, spinning cotton yarn of the same
number, was 20 miles, and frequently more. In 1835” (query — 1815 or 1825?)
“the spinner put up daily, on each of these mules, 820 stretches, making
a total of 1,640 stretches in the course of the day. In 1832, the spinner
put up on each mule 2,200 stretches, making a total of 4,400. In 1844,
2,400 stretches, making a total of 4,800; and in some cases the amount
of labour required is even still greater.... I have another document sent
to me in 1842, stating that the labour is progressively increasing – increasing
not only because the distance to be travelled is greater, but because the
quantity of goods produced is multiplied, while the hands are fewer in
proportion than before; and, moreover, because an inferior species of cotton
is now often spun, which it is more difficult to work.... In the carding-room
there has also been a great increase of labour. One person there does the
work formerly divided between two. In the weaving-room, where a vast number
of persons are employed, and principally females ... the labour has increased
within the last few years fully 10 per cent., owing to the increased speed
of the machinery in spinning. In 1838, the number of hanks spun per week
was 18,000, in 1843 it amounted to 21,000. In 1819, the number
of picks in power-loom-weaving per minute was 60 — in 1842 it was 140,
showing a vast increase of labour.” [83]

In the face of this remarkable intensity of labour which had already
been reached in 1844 under the Twelve Hours’ Act, there appeared to be
a justification for the assertion made at that time by the English manufacturers,
that any further progress in that direction was impossible, and therefore
that every further reduction of the hours of labour meant a lessened production.
The apparent correctness of their reasons will be best shown by the following
contemporary statement by Leonard Horner, the factory inspector, their
ever watchful censor.

“Now, as the quantity produced must, in the main, be regulated
by the speed of the machinery, it must be the interest of the mill-owner
to drive it at the utmost rate of speed consistent with these following
conditions, viz., the preservation of the machinery from too rapid deterioration;
the preservation of the quality of the article manufactured; and the capability
of the workman to follow the motion without a greater exertion than he
can sustain for a constancy. One of the most important problems, therefore,
which the owner of a factory has to solve is to find out the maximum speed
at which he can run, with a due regard to the above conditions. It frequently
happens that he finds he has gone too fast, that breakages and bad work
more than counterbalance the increased speed, and that he is obliged to slacken his pace. I therefore concluded, that as an active and intelligent
mill-owner would find out the safe maximum, it would not be possible to
produce as much in eleven hours as in twelve. I further assumed that the
operative paid by piecework, would exert himself to the utmost consistent
with the power of continuing at the same rate.” [84]

Horner, therefore, came to the conclusion that a reduction of the working hours below twelve would necessarily diminish production. [85] He himself, ten years later, cites his opinion of 1845 in proof of how much he under-estimated in that year the elasticity of machinery, and of
man’s labour-power, both of which are simultaneously stretched to an extreme
by the compulsory shortening of the working-day.

We now come to the period that follows the introduction of the
Ten Hours’ Act in 1847 into the English cotton, woollen, silk, and flax
mills.

“The speed of the spindles has increased upon throstles 500, and
upon mules 1,000 revolutions a minute, i.e., the speed of the throstle
spindle, which in 1839 was 4,500 times a minute, is now (1862) 5,000; and
of the mule spindle, that was 5,000, is now 6,000 times a minute, amounting
in the former case to one-tenth, and in the second case to one-fifth additional
increase.” [86]

James Nasmyth, the eminent civil engineer of Patricroft, near Manchester, explained in a letter to Leonard Horner,
written in 1852, the nature of the improvements in the steam-engine that
had been made between the years 1848 and 1852. After remarking that the
horse-power of steam-engines, being always estimated in the official returns
according to the power of similar engines in 1828, [87] is only nominal, and can serve only as an index of their real power, he goes on to say:

“I am confident that from the same weight of steam-engine
machinery, we are now obtaining at least 50 per cent. more duty or work
performed on the average, and that in many cases the identical steam-engines
which in the days of the restricted speed of 220 feet per minute, yielded
50 horsepower, are now yielding upwards of 100...” "The modern steam-engine of 100 horse-power is capable of being driven at a much greater force than
formerly, arising from improvements in its construction, the capacity and
construction of the boilers, &c....” “Although the same number of hands
are employed in proportion to the horse-power as at former periods, there
are fewer hands employed in proportion to the machinery.” [88] “In the year 1850, the factories of the United Kingdom employed 134,217 nominal horse-power to give motion to 25,638,716 spindles and 301,445 looms.
The number of spindles and looms in 1856 was respectively 33,503,580 of
the former, and 369,205 of the latter, which, reckoning the force of the
nominal horse-power required to be the same as in 1850, would require a
force equal to 175,000 horses, but the actual power given in the return
for 1856 is 161,435, less by above 10,000 horses than, calculating upon
the basis of the return of 1850, the factories ought to have required in
1856.” [89] “The facts thus brought out by the Return (of 1856) appear to be that the factory system is increasing rapidly; that
although the same number of hands are employed in proportion to the horse-power
as at former periods, there are fewer hands employed in proportion to the
machinery; that the steam-engine is enabled to drive an increased weight
of machinery by economy of force and other methods, and that an increased
quantity of work can be turned off by improvements in machinery,
and in methods of manufacture, by increase of speed of the machinery, and
by a variety of other causes.” [90]

“The great improvements made in machines of every kind have raised their
productive power very much. Without any doubt, the shortening of the hours
of labour... gave the impulse to these improvements. The latter, combined
with the more intense strain on the workman, have had the effect, that
at least as much is produced in the shortened (by two hours or one-sixth)
working-day as was previously produced during the longer one.” [91]

One fact is sufficient to show how greatly the wealth of the manufacturers
increased along with the more intense exploitation of labour-power. From
1838 to 1850, the average proportional increase in English cotton and other
factories was 32%, while from 1850 to 1856 it amounted to 86%.

But however great the progress of English industry had been during
the 8 years from 1848 to 1856 under the influence of a working-day of 10
hours, it way far surpassed during the next period of 6 years from 1856
to 1862. In silk factories, for instance, there were in 1856, spindles
1,093,799; in 1862, 1,388,544; in 1856, looms 9,260; in 1862, 10,709. But
the number of operatives was, in 1856, 56,131; in 1862, 52,429. The increase
in the spindles was therefore 26.9% and in the looms 15.6%, while the number
of the operatives decreased 7%. In the year 1850 there were employed in
worsted mills 875,830 spindles; in 1856, 1,324,549 (increase 51.2%), and
in 1862, 1,289,172 (decrease 2.7%). But if we deduct the doubling spindles
that figure in the numbers for 1856, but not in those for 1862, it will
be found that after 1856 the number of spindles remained nearly stationary.
On the other hand, after 1850, the speed of the spindles and looms was
in many cases doubled. The number of power-looms in worsted mills was,
in 1850, 32,617; in 1856, 38,956; in 1862, 43,048. The number of the operatives
was, in 1850, 79,737; in 1856, 87,794; in 1862, 86,063; included in these,
however, the children under 14 years of age were, in 1850, 9,956; in 1856,
11,228; in 1862, 13,178. In spite, therefore, of the greatly increased
number of looms in 1862, compared with 1856, the total number of the workpeople
employed decreased, and that of the children exploited increased. [92]

On the 27th April, 1863, Mr. Ferrand said in the House of Commons:

“I have been informed by delegates from 16 districts of Lancashire and
Cheshire, in whose behalf I speak, that the work in the factories is, in consequence
of the improvements in machinery, constantly on the increase. Instead of
as formerly one person with two helps tenting two looms, one person now
tents three looms without helps, and it is no uncommon thing for one person
to tent four. Twelve hours’ work, as is evident from the facts adduced,
is now compressed into less than 10 hours. It is therefore self-evident,
to what an enormous extent the toil of the factory operative has increased
during the last 10 years.” [93]

Although, therefore, the Factory Inspectors unceasingly and with
justice, commend the results of the Acts of 1844 and 1850, yet they admit
that the shortening of the hours of labour has already called forth such
an intensification of the labour as is injurious to the health of the workman
and to his capacity for work.

“In most of the cotton, worsted, and silk
mills, an exhausting state of excitement necessary to enable the workers
satisfactorily to mind the machinery, the motion of which has been greatly
accelerated within the last few years, seems to me not unlikely to be one
of the causes of that excess of mortality from lung disease, which Dr.
Greenhow has pointed out in his recent report on this subject.” [94]

There cannot be the slightest doubt that the tendency that urges capital, so soon as a prolongation of the hours of labour is once for all forbidden,
to compensate itself, by a systematic heightening of the intensity of labour,
and to convert every improvement in machinery into a more perfect means
of exhausting the workman, must soon lead to a state of things in which
a reduction of the hours of labour will again be inevitable. [95] On the other hand, the rapid advance of English industry between 1848 and the present time, under the influence of a day of 10 hours, surpasses the
advance made between 1833 and 1847, when the day was 12 hours long, by
far more than the latter surpasses the advance made during the half century
after the first introduction of the factory system, when the working-day
was without limits. [96]

## SECTION 4. THE FACTORY

At the commencement of this chapter we considered
that which we may call the body of the factory, i.e., machinery organised
into a system. We there saw how machinery, by annexing the labour of women
and children, augments the number of human beings who form the material
for capitalistic exploitation, how it confiscates the whole of the workman’s
disposable time, by immoderate extension of the hours of labour, and how
finally its progress, which allows of enormous increase of production in
shorter and shorter periods, serves as a means of systematically getting
more work done in a shorter time, or of exploiting labour-power more intensely.
We now turn to the factory as a whole, and that in its most perfect form.

Dr. Ure, the Pindar of the automatic factory, describes it, on
the one hand, as

“Combined co-operation of many orders of workpeople, adult
and young, in tending with assiduous skill, a system of productive machines,
continuously impelled by a central power” (the prime mover); on the other
hand, as “a vast automaton, composed of various mechanical and intellectual
organs, acting in uninterrupted concert for the production of a common
object, all of them being subordinate to a self-regulated moving force.”

These two descriptions are far from being identical. In one, the collective
labourer, or social body of labour, appears as the dominant
subject, and the mechanical automaton as the object; in the other, the automaton itself
is the subject, and the workmen are merely conscious organs, co-ordinate
with the unconscious organs of the automaton, and together with them, subordinated
to the central moving-power. The first description is applicable
to every possible employment of machinery on a large scale, the second
is characteristic of its use by capital, and therefore of the modern factory
system. Ure prefers therefore, to describe the central machine, from which
the motion comes, not only as an automaton, but as an autocrat. “In these
spacious halls the benignant power of steam summons around him his myriads
of willing menials.” [97]

Along with the tool, the skill of the workman in handling it passes
over to the machine. The capabilities of the tool are emancipated from
the restraints that are inseparable from human labour-power. Thereby the
technical foundation on which is based the division of labour in Manufacture,
is swept away. Hence, in the place of the hierarchy of specialised workmen
that characterises manufacture, there steps, in the automatic factory,
a tendency to equalise and reduce to one and the same level every kind
of work that has to be done by the minders of the machines; [98] in the place of the artificially produced differentiations of the detail workmen, step the natural differences of age and sex.

So far as division of labour re-appears in the factory, it is
primarily a distribution of the workmen among the specialised machines;
and of masses of workmen, not however organised into groups, among the
various departments of the factory, in each of which they work at a number
of similar machines placed together; their co-operation, therefore, is
only simple. The organised group, peculiar to manufacture, is replaced
by the connexion between the head workman and his few assistants. The essential
division is, into workmen who are actually employed on the machines (among
whom are included a few who look after the engine), and into mere attendants
(almost exclusively children) of these workmen. Among the attendants are
reckoned more or less all “Feeders” who supply the machines with the material
to be worked. In addition to these two principal classes, there is a numerically
unimportant class of persons, whose occupation it is to look after the
whole of the machinery and repair it from time to time; such as engineers,
mechanics, joiners, &c. This is a superior class of workmen, some of
them scientifically educated, others brought up to a trade; it is distinct
from the factory operative class, and merely aggregated to it. [99] This division of labour is purely technical.

To work at a machine, the workman should be taught from
childhood, in order that he may learn to adapt his own movements to the
uniform and unceasing motion of an automaton. When the machinery, as a
whole, forms a system of manifold machines, working simultaneously and
in concert, the co-operation based upon it, requires the distribution of
various groups of workmen among the different kinds of machines. But the
employment of machinery does away with the necessity of crystallising this
distribution after the manner of Manufacture, by the constant annexation
of a particular man to a particular function. [100]
Since the motion of the whole system does not proceed from the workman,
but from the machinery, a change of persons can take place at any time
without an interruption of the work. The most striking proof of this is
afforded by the relays system, put into operation by the manufacturers
during their revolt from 1848-1850. Lastly, the quickness with which machine
work is learnt by young people, does away with the necessity of bringing
up for exclusive employment by machinery, a special class of operatives.
[101] With regard to the work of the mere attendants, it can, to some extent, be replaced in the mill by machines, [102] and owing to its extreme simplicity, it allows of a rapid and constant change of the individuals burdened with this drudgery.

Although then, technically speaking, the old system of division
of labour is thrown overboard by machinery, it hangs on in the factory,
as a traditional habit handed down from Manufacture, and is afterwards
systematically re-moulded and established in a more hideous form by capital,
as a means of exploiting labour-power. The life-long speciality of handling
one and the same tool, now becomes the life-long speciality of serving
one and the same machine. Machinery is put to a wrong use, with the object
of transforming the workman, from his very childhood, into a part of a
detail-machine. [103] In this way, not only are the
expenses of his reproduction considerably lessened, but at the same time
his helpless dependence upon the factory as a whole, and therefore upon
the capitalist, is rendered complete. Here as everywhere else, we must
distinguish between the increased productiveness due to the development
of the social process of production, and that due to the capitalist exploitation
of that process. In handicrafts and manufacture, the workman makes use
of a tool, in the factory, the machine makes use of him. There the movements
of the instrument of labour proceed from him, here it is the movements
of the machine that he must follow. In manufacture the workmen are parts
of a living mechanism. In the factory we have a lifeless mechanism independent
of the workman, who becomes its mere living appendage.

“The miserable routine
of endless drudgery and toil in which the same mechanical process is gone
through over and over again, is like the labour of Sisyphus. The burden
of labour, like the rock, keeps ever falling back on the worn-out labourer.”

At the same time that factory work exhausts the nervous system to the uttermost, it does away with the many-sided play
of the muscles, and confiscates every atom of freedom, both in bodily and
intellectual activity. [105] The lightening of the
labour, even, becomes a sort of torture, since the machine does not free
the labourer from work, but deprives the work of all interest. Every kind
of capitalist production, in so far as it is not only a labour-process,
but also a process of creating surplus-value, has this in common, that
it is not the workman that employs the instruments of labour, but the
instruments of labour that employ the workman. But it is only in the factory
system that this inversion for the first time acquires technical and palpable
reality. By means of its conversion into an automaton, the instrument of
labour confronts the labourer, during the labour-process, in the shape
of capital, of dead labour, that dominates, and pumps dry, living labour-power.
The separation of the intellectual powers of production from the manual
labour, and the conversion of those powers into the might of capital over
labour, is, as we have already shown, finally completed by modern industry
erected on the foundation of machinery. The special skill of each individual
insignificant factory operative vanishes as an infinitesimal quantity before
the science, the gigantic physical forces, and the mass of labour that
are embodied in the factory mechanism and, together with that mechanism,
constitute the power of the “master.” This “master,” therefore, in whose
brain the machinery and his monopoly of it are inseparably united, whenever
he falls out with his “hands,” contemptuously tells them:

“The factory operatives should keep in wholesome remembrance the fact that theirs is
really a low species of skilled labour; and that there is none which is
more easily acquired, or of its quality more amply remunerated, or which
by a short training of the least expert can be more quickly, as well as
abundantly, acquired.... The master’s machinery really plays a far more
important part in the business of production than the labour and the skill
of the operative, which six months’ education can teach, and a common labourer
can learn.” [106]

The technical subordination of the workman to the uniform motion of the instruments of labour, and the peculiar
composition of the body of workpeople, consisting as it does of individuals
of both sexes and of all ages, give rise to a barrack discipline, which
is elaborated into a complete system in the factory, and which fully develops
the before mentioned labour of overlooking, thereby dividing the workpeople
into operatives and overlookers, into private soldiers and sergeants of
an industrial army. “The main difficulty [in the automatic factory] ...
lay ... above all in training human beings to renounce their desultory
habits of work, and to identify themselves with the unvarying regularity
of the complex automaton. To devise and administer a successful code of
factory discipline, suited to the necessities of factory diligence, was
the Herculean enterprise, the noble achievement of Arkwright! Even at the
present day, when the system is perfectly organised and its labour lightened
to the utmost, it is found nearly impossible to convert persons past the
age of puberty, into useful factory hands.” [107] The factory code in which capital formulates, like a private legislator, and at his own good will, his autocracy over his workpeople, unaccompanied
by that division of responsibility, in other matters so much approved of
by the bourgeoisie, and unaccompanied by the still more approved representative
system, this code is but the capitalistic caricature of that social regulation
of the labour-process which becomes requisite in co-operation on a great
scale, and in the employment in common, of instruments of labour and especially
of machinery. The place of the slave-driver’s lash is taken by the overlooker’s
book of penalties. All punishments naturally resolve themselves into fines and deductions from wages, and the law-giving talent of the factory Lycurgus so arranges matters, that a violation of his laws is, if possible, more profitable to him than the keeping of them. [108] We shall here merely allude to the material conditions under which factory labour is carried on. Every organ of sense is injured in an equal degree
by artificial elevation of the temperature, by the dust-laden atmosphere,
by the deafening noise, not to mention danger to life and limb among the
thickly crowded machinery, which, with the regularity of the seasons, issues
its list of the killed and wounded in the industrial battle. [109] Economy of the social means of production, matured and forced as in a hothouse by the factory system, is turned, in the hands of capital,
into systematic robbery of what is necessary for the life of the workman
while he is at work, robbery of space, light, air, and of protection to
his person against the dangerous and unwholesome accompaniments of the
productive process, not to mention the robbery of appliances for the comfort
of the workman. [110] Is Fourier wrong when he calls factories “tempered bagnos"? [111]

## SECTION 5. THE STRIFE BETWEEN WORKMAN AND MACHINE

The contest between the capitalist and the wage-labourer
dates back to the very origin of capital. It raged on throughout the whole
manufacturing period. [112] But only since the introduction of machinery has the workman fought against the instrument
of labour itself, the material embodiment of capital. He revolts against
this particular form of the means of production, as being the material
basis of the capitalist mode of production.

In the 17th century nearly all Europe experienced revolts of the
workpeople against the ribbon-loom, a machine for weaving ribbons and trimmings,
called in Germany Bandmühle, Schnurmühle, and Mühlenstuhl.
These machines were invented in Germany. Abbé Lancellotti, in a
work that appeared in Venice in 1636, but which was written in 1579, says
as follows:

“Anthony Müller of Danzig saw about 50 years ago in that
town, a very ingenious machine, which weaves 4 to 6 pieces at once. But
the Mayor being apprehensive that this invention might throw a large number
of workmen on the streets, caused the inventor to be secretly strangled
or drowned.”

In Leyden, this machine was not used till 1629; there the
riots of the ribbon-weavers at length compelled the Town Council to prohibit
it.

“In hac urbe,” says Boxhorn (Inst. Pol., 1663), referring to the introduction
of this machine into Leyden, “ante hos viginti circiter annos instrumentum
quidam invenerunt textorium, quo solus plus panni et facilius conficere
poterat, quan plures aequali tempore. Hinc turbae ortae et querulae textorum,
tandemque usus hujus instrumenti a magistratu prohibitus est.”

[In this town, about twenty years ago certain people invented an instrument for weaving, with which a single person could weave more cloth, and more easily, than many others in the same length of time. As a result there arose disturbances and complaints from the weavers, until the Town Council finally prohibited the use of this instrument.]

After making various decrees more or less prohibitive against this loom in 1632, 1639,
&c., the States General of Holland at length permitted it to be used,
under certain conditions, by the decree of the 15th December, 1661. It
was also prohibited in Cologne in 1676, at the same time that its introduction
into England was causing disturbances among the workpeople. By an imperial
Edict of 19th Feb., 1685, its use was forbidden throughout all Germany.
In Hamburg it was burnt in public by order of the Senate. The Emperor Charles
VI., on 9th Feb., 1719, renewed the edict of 1685, and not till 1765 was
its use openly allowed in the Electorate of Saxony. This machine, which
shook Europe to its foundations, was in fact the precursor of the mule
and the power-loom, and of the industrial revolution of the 18th century.
It enabled a totally inexperienced boy, to set the whole loom with all
its shuttles in motion, by simply moving a rod backwards and
forwards, and in its improved form produced from 40 to 50 pieces at once.

About 1630, a wind-sawmill, erected near London by a Dutchman,
succumbed to the excesses of the populace. Even as late as the beginning
of the 18th century, sawmills driven by water overcame the opposition of
the people, supported as it was by Parliament, only with great difficulty.
No sooner had Everet in 1758 erected the first wool-shearing machine that
was driven by water-power, than it was set on fire by 100,000 people who
had been thrown out of work. Fifty thousand workpeople, who had previously
lived by carding wool, petitioned Parliament against Arkwright’s scribbling
mills and carding engines. The enormous destruction of machinery that occurred
in the English manufacturing districts during the first 15 years of this
century, chiefly caused by the employment of the power-loom, and known
as the Luddite movement, gave the anti-Jacobin governments of a Sidmouth,
a Castlereagh, and the like, a pretext for the most reactionary and forcible
measures. It took both time and experience before the workpeople learnt
to distinguish between machinery and its employment by capital, and to
direct their attacks, not against the material instruments of production,
but against the mode in which they are used. [113]

The contests about wages in Manufacture, pre-suppose manufacture,
and are in no sense directed against its existence. The opposition against
the establishment of new manufactures, proceeds from the guilds and privileged
towns, not from the workpeople. Hence the writers of the manufacturing
period treat the division of labour chiefly as a means of virtually supplying
a deficiency of labourers, and not as a means of actually displacing those
in work. This distinction is self-evident. If it be said that 100 millions
of people would be required in England to spin with the old spinning-wheel
the cotton that is now spun with mules by 500,000 people, this does not
mean that the mules took the place of those millions who never existed.
It means only this, that many millions of workpeople would be required
to replace the spinning machinery. If, on the other hand, we say, that
in England the power-loom threw 800,000 weavers on the streets, we do not
refer to existing machinery, that would have to be replaced by a definite
number of workpeople, but to a number of weavers in existence who were
actually replaced or displaced by the looms. During the manufacturing period,
handicraft labour, altered though it was by division of labour, was yet
the basis. The demands of the new colonial markets could not be satisfied
owing to the relatively small number of town operatives handed
down from the middle ages, and the manufactures proper opened out new fields
of production to the rural population, driven from the land by the dissolution
of the feudal system. At that time, therefore, division of labour and co-operation
in the workshops, were viewed more from the positive aspect, that they
made the workpeople more productive. [114] Long before the period of modern industry, co-operation and the concentration of the
instruments of labour in the hands of a few, gave rise, in numerous countries
where these methods were applied in agriculture, to great, sudden and forcible
revolutions in the modes of production, and consequentially, in the conditions
of existence, and the means of employment of the rural populations. But
this contest at first takes place more between the large and the small
landed proprietors, than between capital and wage labour; on the other
hand, when the labourers are displaced by the instruments of labour, by
sheep, horses, &c., in this case force is directly resorted to in the
first instance as the prelude to the industrial revolution. The labourers
are first driven from the land, and then come the sheep. Land grabbing
on a great scale, such as was perpetrated in England, is the first step
in creating a field for the establishment of agriculture on a great scale.
[115] Hence this subversion of agriculture puts on,
at first, more the appearance of a political revolution.

The instrument of labour, when it takes the form of a machine,
immediately becomes a competitor of the workman himself. [116] The self-expansion of capital by means of machinery is thenceforward directly proportional to the number of the workpeople, whose means of livelihood
have been destroyed by that machinery. The whole system of capitalist production
is based on the fact that the workman sells his labour-power
as a commodity. Division of labour specialises this labour-power, by reducing
it to skill in handling a particular tool. So soon as the handling of this
tool becomes the work of a machine, then, with the use-value, the exchange-value
too, of the workman’s labour-power vanishes; the workman becomes unsaleable,
like paper money thrown out of currency by legal enactment. That portion
of the working-class, thus by machinery rendered superfluous, i.e., no
longer immediately necessary for the self-expansion of capital, either
goes to the wall in the unequal contest of the old handicrafts and manufactures
with machinery, or else floods all the more easily accessible branches
of industry, swamps the labour-market, and sinks the price of labour-power
below its value. It is impressed upon the workpeople, as a great consolation,
first, that their sufferings are only temporary (“a temporary inconvenience"),
secondly, that machinery acquires the mastery over the whole of a given
field of production, only by degrees, so that the extent and intensity
of its destructive effect is diminished. The first consolation neutralises the second. When machinery seizes on an industry by degrees, it produces
chronic misery among the operatives who compete with it. Where the transition
is rapid, the effect is acute and felt by great masses. History discloses
no tragedy more horrible than the gradual extinction of the English hand-loom
weavers, an extinction that was spread over several decades, and finally
sealed in 1838. Many of them died of starvation, many with families vegetated
for a long time on 2½ d. a day. [117]
On the other hand, the English cotton machinery produced an acute effect in India. The Governor General reported 1834-35:

“The misery hardly finds a parallel
in the history of commerce. The bones of the cotton-weavers are bleaching
the plains of India.”

No doubt, in turning them out of this
“temporal” world, the machinery caused them no more than “a temporary inconvenience.”
For the rest, since machinery is continually seizing upon new fields of
production, its temporary effect is really permanent. Hence, the character
of independence and estrangement which the capitalist mode of production
as a whole gives to the instruments of labour and to the product, as against
the workman, is developed by means of machinery into a thorough antagonism.
[118] Therefore, it is with the advent of machinery, that the workman for the first time brutally revolts against the instruments
of labour.

The instrument of labour strikes down the labourer. This direct
antagonism between the two comes out most strongly, whenever newly introduced
machinery competes with handicrafts or manufactures, handed down from former
times. But even in modern industry the continual improvement of machinery,
and the development of the automatic system, has an analogous effect.

“The object of improved machinery is to diminish manual labour, to provide for
the performance of a process or the completion of a link in a manufacture
by the aid of an iron instead of the human apparatus.” [119] “The adaptation of power to machinery heretofore moved by hand, is almost of daily occurrence ... the minor improvements in machinery having for
their object economy of power, the production of better work, the turning
off more work in the same time, or in supplying the place of a child, a
female, or a man, are constant, and although sometimes apparently of no
great moment, have somewhat important results.” [120] “Whenever a process requires peculiar dexterity and steadiness of hand, it is withdrawn, as soon as possible, from the cunning workman, who is prone to irregularities of many kinds, and it is placed in charge of a peculiar mechanism, so self-regulating that a child can superintend it.”
[121] “On the automatic plan skilled labour gets progressively superseded.” [122] “The effect of improvements in machinery, not merely in superseding the necessity for
the employment of the same quantity of adult labour as before, in order
to produce a given result, but in substituting one description of human
labour for another, the less skilled for the more skilled, juvenile for
adult, female for male, causes a fresh disturbance in the rate of wages.”
[123] “The effect of substituting the self-acting mule for the common mule, is to discharge the greater part of the men spinners,
and to retain adolescents and children.” [124]

The extraordinary power of expansion of the factory system owing to accumulated
practical experience, to the mechanical means at hand, and to constant
technical progress, was proved to us by the giant strides of that system
under the pressure of a shortened working-day. But who, in 1860, the Zenith
year of the English cotton industry, would have dreamt of the galloping
improvements in machinery, and the corresponding displacement of working
people, called into being during the following 3 years, under the stimulus
of the American Civil War? A couple of examples from the Reports of the
Inspectors of Factories will suffice on this point. A Manchester manufacturer states:

“We formerly had 75 carding engines, now we have 12, doing the
same quantity of work.... We are doing with fewer hands by 14, at a saving
in wages of £10 a-week. Our estimated saving in waste is about 10%
in the quantity of cotton consumed.” “In another fine-spinning mill in
Manchester, I was informed that through increased speed and the adoption
of some self-acting processes, a reduction had been made, in number, of
a fourth in one department, and of above half in another, and that the
introduction of the combing machine in place of the second carding, had
considerably reduced, the number of hands formerly employed in the carding-room.”

Another spinning-mill is estimated to effect a saving of labour of 10%.
The Messrs. Gilmour, spinners at Manchester, state: “In our blowing-room
department we consider our expense with new machinery is fully one-third
less in wages and hands ... in the jack-frame and drawing-frame room, about
one-third less in expense, and likewise one-third less in hands; in the
spinning room about one-third less in expenses. But this is not all; when our yarn goes to the manufacturers, it is so much better by the application
of our new machinery, that they will produce a greater quantity of cloth, and
cheaper than from the yarn produced by old machinery.” [125] Mr. Redgrave further remarks in the same Report:

“The reduction of hands against increased production is, in fact, constantly taking place, in woollen
mills the reduction commenced some time since, and is continuing; a few
days since, the master of a school in the neighbourhood of Rochdale said
to me, that the great falling off in the girls’ school is not only caused
by the distress, but by the changes of machinery in the woollen mills,
in consequence of which a reduction of 70 short-timers had taken place.”

The following table shows the total result of the mechanical improvements
in the English cotton industry due to the American Civil War.

Number of Factories
1857
1861
1868

England and Wales
2,046
2,715
2,405

Scotland
152
163
131

Ireland
12
9
13

United Kingdom
2,210
2,887
2,549

Number of Power Looms
1857
1861
1868

England and Wales
275,590
368,125
344,719

Scotland
21,624
30,110
31,864

Ireland
1,633
1,757
2,746

United Kingdom
298,847
399,992
379,329

Number of Spindles
1857
1861
1868

England and Wales
25,818,576
28,352,125
30,478,228

Scotland
2,041,129
1,915,398
1,397,546

Ireland
150,512
119,944
124,240

United Kingdom
28,010,217
30,387,467
32,000,014

Number of Persons Employed
1857
1861
1868

England and Wales
341,170
407,598
357,052

Scotland
34,698
41,237
39,809

Ireland
3,345
2,734
4,203

United Kingdom
379,213
451,569
401,064

Hence, between 1861 and 1868, 338 cotton factories disappeared, in other
words more productive machinery on a larger scale was concentrated in the
hands of a smaller number of capitalists. The number of power-looms decreased
by 20,663; but since their product increased in the same period, an improved
loom must have yielded more than an old one. Lastly the number of spindles
increased by 1,612,541, while the number of operatives decreased by 50,505.
The “temporary” misery inflicted on the workpeople by the cotton-crisis,
was heightened, and from being temporary made permanent, by the rapid and
persistent progress of machinery.

But machinery not only acts as a competitor who gets the better
of the workman, and is constantly on the point of making him superfluous.
It is also a power inimical to him, and as such capital proclaims it from
the roof tops and as such makes use of it. It is the most powerful weapon
for repressing strikes, those periodical revolts of the working-class against
the autocracy of capital.[127] According to Gaskell, the steam-engine was from the very first an antagonist of human power,
an antagonist that enabled the capitalist to tread under foot the growing
claims of the workmen, who threatened the newly born factory
system with a crisis.[128] It would be possible to
write quite a history of the inventions, made since 1830, for the sole
purpose of supplying capital with weapons against the revolts of the working-class.
At the head of these in importance, stands the self-acting mule, because
it opened up a new epoch in the automatic system.[129]

Nasmyth, the inventor of the steam-hammer, gives the following
evidence before the Trades’ Union Commission, with regard to the improvements
made by him in machinery and introduced in consequence of the wide-spread
and long strikes of the engineers in 1851.

“The characteristic feature
of our modern mechanical improvements, is the introduction of self-acting
tool machinery. What every mechanical workman has now to do, and what every
boy can do, is not to work himself but to superintend the beautiful labour
of the machine. The whole class of workmen that depend exclusively on their
skill, is now done away with. Formerly, I employed four boys to every mechanic.
Thanks to these new mechanical combinations, I have reduced the number
of grown-up men from 1,500 to 750. The result was a considerable increase
in my profits.”

Ure says of a machine used in calico printing:

“At length capitalists
sought deliverance from this intolerable bondage” [namely the, in their
eyes, burdensome terms of their contracts with the workmen] “in the resources
of science, and were speedily re-instated in their legitimate rule, that
of the head over the inferior members.”

Speaking of an invention for dressing warps:

“Then the combined malcontents, who fancied themselves impregnably
entrenched behind the old lines of division of labour, found their flanks
turned and their defences rendered useless by the new mechanical tactics,
and were obliged to surrender at discretion.”

With regard to the invention of the self-acting mule, he says:

“A creation destined to restore order
among the industrious classes.... This invention confirms the great doctrine
already propounded, that when capital enlists science into her service,
the refractory hand of labour will always be taught docility.”[130]

Although Ure’s work appeared 30 years ago, at a time when the factory system was comparatively but little developed, it still perfectly expresses the spirit of the factory, not only by its undisguised cynicism, but also by
the naïveté with which it blurts out the stupid contradictions of
the capitalist brain. For instance, after propounding the “doctrine” stated
above, that capital, with the aid of science taken into its pay, always
reduces the refractory hand of labour to docility, he grows
indignant because

“it (physico-mechanical science) has been accused of
lending itself to the rich capitalist as an instrument for harassing the
poor.”

After preaching a long sermon to show how advantageous the rapid
development of machinery is to the working-classes, he warns them, that
by their obstinacy and their strikes they hasten that development.

“Violent revulsions of this nature,” he says, “display short-sighted man in the
contemptible character of a self-tormentor.”

A few pages before he states the contrary.

“Had it not been for the violent collisions and interruptions
resulting from erroneous views among the factory operatives, the factory
system would have been developed still more rapidly and beneficially for
all concerned.” Then he exclaims again: “Fortunately for the state of society
in the cotton districts of Great Britain, the improvements in machinery
are gradual.” “It” (improvement in machinery) “is said to lower the rate
of earnings of adults by displacing a portion of them, and thus rendering
their number superabundant as compared with the demand for their labour.
It certainly augments the demand for the labour of children and increases
the rate of their wages.”

On the other hand, this same dispenser
of consolation defends the lowness of the children’s wages on the ground
that it prevents parents from sending their children at too early an age
into the factory. The whole of his book is a vindication of a working-day
of unrestricted length; that Parliament should forbid children of 13 years
to be exhausted by working 12 hours a day, reminds his liberal soul of
the darkest days of the Middle Ages. This does not prevent him from calling
upon the factory operatives to thank Providence, who by means of machinery
has given them the leisure to think of their “immortal interests.” [131]

## SECTION 6. THE THEORY OF COMPENSATION AS REGARDS THE WORKPEOPLE DISPLACED BY MACHINERY

James Mill, MacCulloch, Torrens, Senior, John Stuart
Mill, and a whole series besides, of bourgeois political economists, insist
that all machinery that displaces workmen, simultaneously and necessarily
sets free an amount of capital adequate to employ the same identical workmen.

Suppose a capitalist to employ 100 workmen, at £30 a year
each, in a carpet factory. The variable capital annually laid out amounts, therefore,
to £3,000. Suppose, also, that he discharges 50 of his workmen, and
employs the remaining 50 with machinery that costs him £1,500. To
simplify matters, we take no account of buildings, coal, &c. Further
suppose that the raw material annually consumed costs £3,000, both
before and after the change. [133] Is any capital set free by this metamorphosis? Before the change, the total sum of £6,000
consisted half of constant, and half of variable capital. After the change
it consists of £4,500 constant ( £3,000 raw material and £1,500
machinery), and £1,500 variable capital. The variable capital, instead
of being one half, is only one quarter, of the total capital. Instead of
being set free, a part of the capital is here locked up in such a way as
to cease to be exchanged against labour-power: variable has been changed
into constant capital. Other things remaining unchanged, the capital of
£6,000, can, in future, employ no more than 50 men. With each improvement
in the machinery, it will employ fewer. If the newly introduced machinery
had cost less than did the labour-power and implements displaced by it,
if, for instance, instead of costing £1,500, it had cost only £1,000,
a variable capital of £1,000 would have been converted into constant
capital, and locked up; and a capital of £500 would have been set
free. The latter sum, supposing wages unchanged, would form a fund sufficient
to employ about 16 out of the 50 men discharged; nay, less than 16, for,
in order to be employed as capital, a part of this £500 must now
become constant capital, thus leaving only the remainder to be laid out
in labour-power.

But, suppose, besides, that the making of the new machinery affords
employment to a greater number of mechanics, can that be called compensation
to the carpet-makers, thrown on the streets? At the best, its construction
employs fewer men than its employment displaces. The sum of £1,500
that formerly represented the wages of the discharged carpet-makers, now
represents in the shape of machinery: (1) the value of the means of production
used in the construction of that machinery, (2) the wages of the mechanics
employed in its construction, and (3) the surplus-value falling to the
share of their “master.” Further, the machinery need not be renewed till
it is worn out. Hence, in order to keep the increased number of mechanics
in constant employment, one carpet manufacturer after another must displace
workmen by machines.

As a matter of fact the apologists do not mean this sort of setting
free.

They have in their minds the means of subsistence of the liberated
work-people. It cannot be denied, in the above instance, that the machinery
not only liberates 50 men, thus placing them at others’ disposal, but, at
the same time, it withdraws from their consumption, and sets free, means
of subsistence to the value of £1,500. The simple fact, by no means
a new one, that machinery cuts off the workmen from their means of subsistence
is, therefore, in economic parlance tantamount to this, that machinery
liberates means of subsistence for the workman, or converts those means
into capital for his employment. The mode of expression, you see, is everything.
Nominibus mollire licet mala.

This theory implies that the £1,500 worth of means of subsistence
was capital that was being expanded by the labour of the 50 men discharged.
That, consequently, this capital falls out of employment so soon as they
commence their forced holidays, and never rests till it has found a fresh
investment, where it can again be productively consumed by these same 50
men. That sooner or later, therefore, the capital and the workmen must
come together again, and that, then, the compensation is complete. That
the sufferings of the workmen displaced by machinery are therefore as transient
as are the riches of this world.

In relation to the discharged workmen, the £1,500 worth
of means of subsistence never was capital. What really confronted them
as capital, was the sum of £1,500, afterwards laid out in machinery.
On looking closer it will be seen that this sum represented part of the
carpets produced in a year by the 50 discharged men, which part they received
as wages from their employer in money instead of in kind. With the carpets
in the form of money, they bought means of subsistence to the value of
£1,500. These means, therefore, were to them, not capital, but commodities,
and they, as regards these commodities, were not wage-labourers, but buyers.
The circumstance that they were “freed” by the machinery, from the means
of purchase, changed them from buyers into non-buyers. Hence a lessened
demand for those commodities — voilà tout. If this diminution be
not compensated by an increase from some other quarter, the market price
of the commodities falls. If this state of things lasts for some time,
and extends, there follows a discharge of workmen employed in the production
of these commodities. Some of the capital that was previously devoted to
production of necessary means of subsistence, has to become reproduced
in another form. While prices fall, and capital is being displaced, the
labourers employed in the production of necessary means of subsistence
are in their turn “freed” from a part of their wages. Instead, therefore,
of proving that, when machinery frees the workman from his means of subsistence,
it simultaneously converts those means into capital for his further employment,
our apologists, with their cut-and-dried law of supply and demand, prove,
on the contrary, that machinery throws workmen on the streets, not
only in that branch of production in which it is introduced, but also in
those branches in which it is not introduced.

The real facts, which are travestied by the optimism of economists,
are as follows: The labourers, when driven out of the workshop by the machinery,
are thrown upon the labour market, and there add to the number of workmen
at the disposal of the capitalists. In Part VII of this book it will be
seen that this effect of machinery, which, as we have seen, is represented
to be a compensation to the working class, is on the contrary a most frightful
scourge. For the present I will only say this: The labourers that are thrown
out of work in any branch of industry, can no doubt seek for employment
in some other branch. If they find it, and thus renew the bond between
them and the means of subsistence, this takes place only by the intermediary
of a new and additional capital that is seeking investment; not at all
by the intermediary of the capital that formerly employed them and was
afterwards converted into machinery. And even should they find employment,
what a poor look-out is theirs! Crippled as they are by division of labour,
these poor devils are worth so little outside their old trade, that they
cannot find admission into any industries, except a few of inferior kind,
that are over-supplied with underpaid workmen. [134] Further, every branch of industry attracts each year a new stream of men, who furnish a contingent from which to fill up vacancies, and to draw a
supply for expansion. So soon as machinery sets free a part of the workmen
employed in a given branch of industry, the reserve men are also diverted
into new channels of employment, and become absorbed in other branches;
meanwhile the original victims, during the period of transition, for the
most part starve and perish.

It is an undoubted fact that machinery, as such, is not responsible
for “setting free” the workman from the means of subsistence. It cheapens
and increases production in that branch which it seizes on, and at first
makes no change in the mass of the means of subsistence produced in other
branches. Hence, after its introduction, the society possesses as much,
if not more, of the necessaries of life than before, for the labourers
thrown out of work; and that quite apart from the enormous share of the
annual produce wasted by the non-workers. And this is the point relied
on by our apologists! The contradictions and antagonisms inseparable from
the capitalist employment of machinery, do not exist, they say, since they
do not arise out of machinery, as such, but out of its capitalist employment!
Since therefore machinery, considered alone, shortens the hours of labour,
but, when in the service of capital, lengthens them; since in itself it
lightens labour, but when employed by capital, heightens the intensity
of labour; since in itself it is a victory of man over the forces of Nature,
but in the hands of capital, makes man the slave of those forces; since
in itself it increases the wealth of the producers, but in the hands of
capital, makes them paupers – for all these reasons and others besides, says
the bourgeois economist without more ado, it is clear as noon-day that
all these contradictions are a mere semblance of the reality, and that,
as a matter of fact, they have neither an actual nor a theoretical existence.
Thus he saves himself from all further puzzling of the brain, and what
is more, implicitly declares his opponent to be stupid enough to contend
against, not the capitalistic employment of machinery, but machinery itself.

No doubt he is far from denying that temporary inconvenience may
result from the capitalist use of machinery. But where is the medal without
its reverse! Any employment of machinery, except by capital, is to him
an impossibility. Exploitation of the workman by the machine is therefore,
with him, identical with exploitation of the machine by the workman. Whoever,
therefore, exposes the real state of things in the capitalistic employment
of machinery, is against its employment in any way, and is an enemy of
social progress! [135] Exactly the reasoning of the
celebrated Bill Sykes. “Gentlemen of the jury, no doubt the throat of this
commercial traveller has been cut. But that is not my fault, it is the
fault of the knife. Must we, for such a temporary inconvenience, abolish
the use of the knife? Only consider! where would agriculture and trade
be without the knife? Is it not as salutary in surgery, as it is knowing
in anatomy? And in addition a willing help at the festive board? If you
abolish the knife — you hurl us back into the depths of barbarism.” [136]

Although machinery necessarily throws men out of work in
those industries into which it is introduced, yet it may, notwithstanding
this, bring about an increase of employment in other industries. This effect,
however, has nothing in common with the so-called theory of compensation.
Since every article produced by a machine is cheaper than a similar article
produced by hand, we deduce the following infallible law: If the total
quantity of the article produced by machinery, be equal to the total quantity
of the article previously produced by a handicraft or by manufacture, and
now made by machinery, then the total labour expended is diminished. The
new labour spent on the instruments of labour, on the machinery, on the
coal, and so on, must necessarily be less than the labour displaced by
the use of the machinery; otherwise the product of the machine would be
as dear, or dearer, than the product of the manual labour. But, as a matter
of fact, the total quantity of the article produced by machinery with a
diminished number of workmen, instead of remaining equal to, by far exceeds
the total quantity of the hand-made article that has been displaced. Suppose
that 400,000 yards of cloth have been produced on power-looms by fewer
weavers than could weave 100,000 yards by hand. In the quadrupled product
there lies four times as much raw material. Hence the production of raw
material must be quadrupled. But as regards the instruments of labour,
such as buildings, coal, machinery, and so on, it is different; the limit
up to which the additional labour required for their production can increase,
varies with the difference between the quantity of the machine-made article,
and the quantity of the same article that the same number of workmen could
make by hand.

Hence, as the use of machinery extends in a given industry, the
immediate effect is to increase production in the other industries that
furnish the first with means of production. How far employment is thereby found for an increased number of men, depends, given the length of the working-day and the intensity of labour, on the composition of the capital employed, i.e., on the ratio of its constant to its variable component.
This ratio, in its turn, varies considerably with the extent to which machinery
has already seized on, or is then seizing on, those trades. The number
of the men condemned to work in coal and metal mines increased enormously
owing to the progress of the English factory system; but during the last
few decades this increase of number has been less rapid, owing to the use
of new machinery in mining. [137] A new type of workman springs into life along with the machine, namely, its maker.
We have already learnt that machinery has possessed itself even of this
branch of production on a scale that grows greater every day. [138] As to raw material, [139] there is not the least doubt that the rapid strides of cotton spinning, not only pushed on with tropical luxuriance the growth of cotton in the United States, and with it the African slave trade, but also made the breeding of slaves the chief business of
the border slave-states. When, in 1790, the first census of slaves was
taken in the United States, their number was 697,000; in 1861 it had nearly
reached four millions. On the other hand, it is no less certain that the
rise of the English woollen factories, together with the gradual conversion
of arable land into sheep pasture, brought, about the superfluity of agricultural
labourers that led to their being driven in masses into the towns. Ireland,
having during the last twenty years reduced its population by nearly one
half, is at this moment undergoing the process of still further reducing
the number of its inhabitants, so as exactly to suit the requirements of
its landlords and of the English woollen manufacturers.

When machinery is applied to any of the preliminary or intermediate
stages through which the subject of labour has to pass on its way to completion,
there is an increased yield of material in those stages, and simultaneously
an increased demand for labour in the handicrafts or manufactures supplied
by the produce of the machines. Spinning by machinery, for example, supplied
yarn so cheaply and so abundantly that the hand-loom weavers were, at first,
able to work full time without increased outlay. Their earnings accordingly
rose. [140] Hence a flow of people into the cotton-weaving trade, till at length the 800,000 weavers, called into existence by the
Jenny, the throstle and the mule, were overwhelmed by the power-loom. So
also, owing to the abundance of clothing materials produced by machinery,
the number of tailors, seamstresses and needlewomen, went on increasing
until the appearance of the sewing-machine.

In proportion as machinery, with the aid of a relatively
small number of workpeople, increases the mass of raw materials, intermediate
products, instruments of labour, &c., the working-up of these raw materials
and intermediate products becomes split up into numberless branches; social
production increases in diversity. The factory system carries the social
division of labour immeasurably further than does manufacture, for it increases
the productiveness of the industries it seizes upon, in a far higher degree.

The immediate result of machinery is to augment surplus-value
and the mass of products in which surplus-value is embodied. And, as the
substances consumed by the capitalists and their dependents become more
plentiful, so too do these orders of society. Their growing wealth, and
the relatively diminished number of workmen required to produce the necessaries
of life beget, simultaneously with the rise of new and luxurious wants,
the means of satisfying those wants. A larger portion of the produce of
society is changed into surplus-produce, and a larger part of the surplus-produce
is supplied for consumption in a multiplicity of refined shapes. In other
words, the production of luxuries increases. [141]
The refined and varied forms of the products are also due to new relations
with the markets of the world, relations that are created by modern industry.
Not only are greater quantities of foreign articles of luxury exchanged
for home products, but a greater mass of foreign raw materials, ingredients,
and intermediate products, are used as means of production in the home
industries. Owing to these relations with the markets of the world, the
demand for labour increases in the carrying trades, which split up into
numerous varieties. [142]

The increase of the means of production and subsistence, accompanied
by a relative diminution in the number of labourers, causes an increased
demand for labour in making canals, docks, tunnels, bridges, and so on,
works that can only bear fruit in the far future. Entirely new branches
of production, creating new fields of labour, are also formed, as the direct
result either of machinery or of the general industrial changes brought
about by it. But the place occupied by these branches in the general production
is, even in the most developed countries, far from important. The number
of labourers that find employment in them is directly proportional to the
demand, created by those industries, for the crudest form of manual labour.
The chief industries of this kind are, at present, gas-works, telegraphs,
photography, steam navigation, and railways. According to the census of
1861 for England and Wales, we find in the gas industry (gas-works,
production of mechanical apparatus, servants of the gas companies, &c),
15,211 persons; in telegraphy, 2,399; in photography, 2,366; steam navigation,
3,570; and in railways, 70,599, of whom the unskilled “navvies,” more or
less permanently employed, and the whole administrative and commercial
staff, make up about 28,000. The total number of persons, therefore, employed
in these five new industries amounts to 94,145.

Lastly, the extraordinary productiveness of modern industry, accompanied
as it is by both a more extensive and a more intense exploitation of labour-power
in all other spheres of production, allows of the unproductive employment
of a larger and larger part of the working-class, and the consequent reproduction,
on a constantly extending scale, of the ancient domestic slaves under the
name of a servant class, including men-servants, women-servants, lackeys,
&c. According to the census of 1861, the population of England and
Wales was 20,066,244; of these, 9,776,259 males, and 10,289,965 females.
If we deduct from this population all who are too old or too young for
work, all unproductive women, young persons and children, the “ideological”
classes, such as government officials, priests, lawyers, soldiers, &c.;
further, all who have no occupation but to consume the labour of others
in the form of rent, interest, &c.; and, lastly, paupers, vagabonds,
and criminals, there remain in round numbers eight millions of the two
sexes of every age, including in that number every capitalist who is in
any way engaged in industry, commerce, or finance. Among these 8 millions
are:

PERSONS

Agricultural labourers (including shepherds,
farm servants, and maidservants living in the
houses of farmers)1,098,261

All who are employed in cotton, woollen, worsted, flax, hemp, silk, and jute factories, in stocking making and lace making by machinery 642,607[143]

All who are employed in coal mines and metal mines565,835

All who are employed in metal works (blastfurnaces, rolling mills, &c.), and metal manufactures of every kind 396,998[144]

The servant class 1,208,648[145]

All the persons employed in textile factories and in mines, taken
together, number 1,208,442; those employed in textile factories and metal
industries, taken together, number 1,039,605; in both cases less than the
number of modern domestic slaves. What a splendid result of the capitalist
exploitation of machinery!

## SECTION 7. REPULSION AND ATTRACTION OF WORKPEOPLE BY THE FACTORY SYSTEM. CRISES IN THE COTTON TRADE

All political economists of any standing admit that
the introduction of new machinery has a baneful effect on the workmen in
the old handicrafts and manufactures with which this machinery at first
competes. Almost all of them bemoan the slavery of the factory operative.
And what is the great trump-card that they play? That machinery, after
the horrors of the period of introduction and development have subsided,
instead of diminishing, in the long run increases the number of the slaves
of labour! Yes, Political Economy revels in the hideous theory, hideous
to every “philanthropist” who believes in the eternal Nature-ordained necessity
for capitalist production, that after a period of growth and transition,
even its crowning success, the factory system based on machinery, grinds
down more workpeople than on its first introduction it throws on the streets.

It is true that in some cases, as we saw from instances of English
worsted and silk factories, an extraordinary extension of the factory system
may, at a certain stage of its development, be accompanied not only
by a relative, but by an absolute decrease in the number of operatives
employed. In the year 1860, when a special census of all the factories
in the United Kingdom was taken by order of Parliament, the factories in
those parts of Lancashire, Cheshire, and Yorkshire, included in the district
of Mr. Baker, the factory inspector, numbered 652; 570 of these contained
85,622 power-looms, 6,819,146 spindles (exclusive of doubling spindles),
employed 27,439 horse-power (steam), and 1,390 (water), and 94,119 persons. In the year 1865, the same factories contained, looms 95,163, spindles
7,025,031, had a steam-power of 28,925 horses, and a water-power of 1,445
horses, and employed 88,913 persons. Between 1860 and 1865, therefore,
the increase in looms was 11%, in spindles 3%, and in engine-power 3%,
while the number of persons employed decreased 5½%. [147] Between 1852 and 1862, considerable extension of the English woollen manufacture took place, while the number of hands employed in it remained almost stationary,

“showing how greatly the introduction of new machines had superseded the labour of preceding periods.” [148]

In certain cases, the increase in the number of hands employed is only apparent; that is,
it is not due to the extension of the factories already established, but
to the gradual annexation of connected trades; for instance, the increase
in power-looms, and in the hands employed by them between 1838 and 1856,
was, in the cotton trade, simply owing to the extension of this branch
of industry; but in the other trades to the application of steam-power
to the carpet-loom, to the ribbon-loom, and to the linen-loom, which previously
had been worked by the power of men. [149] Hence the increase of the hands in these latter trades was merely a symptom of a
diminution in the total number employed. Finally, we have considered this
question entirely apart from the fact, that everywhere, except in the metal
industries, young persons (under 18), and women and children form the preponderating
element in the class of factory hands.

Nevertheless, in spite of the mass of hands actually displaced
and virtually replaced by machinery, we can understand how the
factory operatives, through the building of more mills and the extension
of old ones in a given industry, may become more numerous than the manufacturing
workmen and handicraftsman that have been displaced. Suppose, for example,
that in the old mode of production, a capital of £500 is employed
weekly, two-fifths being constant and three-fifths variable capital, i.e.,
£200 being laid out in means of production, and £300, say £1
per man, in labour-power. On the introduction of machinery the composition
of this capital becomes altered. We will suppose it to consist of four-fifths
constant and one-fifth variable, which means that only £100 is now
laid out in labour-power. Consequently, two-thirds of the workmen are discharged.
If now the business extends, and the total capital employed grows to £1,500
under unchanged conditions, the number of operatives employed will increase
to 300, just as many as before the introduction of the machinery. If the
capital further grows to £2,000, 400 men will be employed, or one-third
more than under the old system. Their numbers have, in point of fact, increased
by 100, but relatively, i.e., in proportion to the total capital advanced,
they have diminished by 800, for the £2,000 capital would, in the
old state of things, have employed 1,200 instead of 400 men. Hence, a relative
decrease in the number of hands is consistent with an actual increase.
We assumed above that while the total capital increases, its composition
remains the same, because the conditions of production remain constant.
But we have already seen that, with every advance in the use of machinery,
the constant component of capital, that part which consists of machinery,
raw material, &c., increases, while the variable component, the part
laid out in labour-power, decreases. We also know that in no other system
of production is improvement so continuous, and the composition of the
capital employed so constantly changing as in the factory system. These
changes are, however, continually interrupted by periods of rest, during
which there is a mere quantitative extension of the factories on the existing
technical basis. During such periods the operatives increase in number.
Thus, in 1835, the total number of operatives in the cotton, woollen, worsted,
flax, and silk factories of the United Kingdom was only 354,684; while
in 1861 the number of the power-loom weavers alone (of both sexes and of
all ages, from eight years upwards), amounted to 230,654. Certainly, this
growth appears less important when we consider that in 1838 the hand-loom
weavers with their families still numbered 800,000, [150] not to mention those thrown out of work in Asia, and on the Continent of Europe.

In the few remarks I have still to make on this point, I shall
refer to some actually existing relations, the existence of which our theoretical
investigation has not yet disclosed.

So long as, in a given branch of industry, the factory system
extends itself at the expense of the old handicrafts or of manufacture,
the result is as sure as is the result of an encounter between an army
furnished with breach-loaders, and one armed with bows and arrows. This
first period, during which machinery conquers its field of action, is of
decisive importance owing to the extraordinary profits that it helps to
produce. These profits not only form a source of accelerated accumulation,
but also attract into the favoured sphere of production a large part of
the additional social capital that is being constantly created, and is
ever on the look-out for new investments. The special advantages of this
first period of fast and furious activity are felt in every branch of production
that machinery invades. So soon, however, as the factory system has gained
a certain breadth of footing and a definite degree of maturity, and, especially,
so soon as its technical basis, machinery, is itself produced by machinery;
so soon as coal mining and iron mining, the metal industries, and the means
of transport have been revolutionised; so soon, in short, as the general
conditions requisite for production by the modern industrial system have
been established, this mode of production acquires an elasticity,
a capacity for sudden extension by leaps and bounds that finds no hindrance except in the supply of raw material and in the disposal of the produce. On the
one hand, the immediate effect of machinery is to increase the supply of
raw material in the same way, for example, as the cotton gin augmented
the production of cotton. [151] On the other hand,
the cheapness of the articles produced by machinery, and the improved means
of transport and communication furnish the weapons for conquering foreign
markets. By ruining handicraft production in other countries, machinery
forcibly converts them into fields for the supply of its raw material.
In this way East India was compelled to produce cotton, wool, hemp, jute,
and indigo for Great Britain. [152] By constantly
making a part of the hands “supernumerary,” modern industry, in all countries where it has taken root, gives a spur to emigration and to the colonisation of foreign lands, which are thereby converted into settlements for growing the raw material of the mother country; just as Australia,
for example, was converted into a colony for growing wool. [153] A new and international division of labour, a division suited to the requirements of the chief centres of modern industry springs up, and converts one part of the globe into a chiefly agricultural field of production, for supplying
the other part which remains a chiefly industrial field. This revolution
hangs together with radical changes in agriculture which we need not here
further inquire into. [154]

On the motion of Mr. Gladstone, the House of Commons ordered,
on the 17th February, 1867, a return of the total quantities of grain,
corn, and flour, of all sorts, imported into, and exported from, the United
Kingdom, between the years 1831 and 1866. I give below a summary of the
result. The flour is given in quarters of corn. (See the Table on p. 426.)

QUINQUENNIAL PERIODS AND THE YEAR 1866

ANNUAL AVERAGE

1831-1835

1836-1840

1841-1845

1846-1850

1851-1855

1856-1860

1861-1865

1866

Import

1,096,373

2,389,729

2,843,865

8,776,552

8,345,237

10,913,612

15,009,871

16,457,340

Export

225,263

251,770

139,056

155,461

307,491

341,150

302,754

216,218

Excess of import

over export

871,110

2,137,959

2,704,809

8,621,091

8,037,746

10,572,462

14,707,117

16,241,122

POPULATION

Yearly average

in each period

24,621,107

25,929,507

27,262,569

27,797,598

27,572,923

28,391,544

29,381,460

29,935,404

Average quantity of

corn etc,. in qrs.,

consumed annually

per head over and

above the home

produce consumed

0.036

0.082

0.099

0.310

0.291

0.372

0.501

0.543

The enormous power, inherent in the factory system, of expanding by jumps,
and the dependence of that system on the markets of the world, necessarily
beget feverish production, followed by over-filling of the markets, whereupon
contraction of the markets brings on crippling of production. The
life of modern industry becomes a series of periods of moderate activity,
prosperity, over-production, crisis and stagnation. The uncertainty and
instability to which machinery subjects the employment, and consequently
the conditions of existence, of the operatives become normal, owing to
these periodic changes of the industrial cycle. Except in the periods of
prosperity, there rages between the capitalists the most furious combat
for the share of each in the markets. This share is directly proportional
to the cheapness of the product. Besides the rivalry that this struggle
begets in the application of improved machinery for replacing labour-power,
and of new methods of production, there also comes a time in every industrial
cycle, when a forcible reduction of wages beneath the value of labour-power,
is attempted for the purpose of cheapening commodities. [156]

A necessary condition, therefore, to the growth of the number
of factory hands, is a proportionally much more rapid growth of the amount
of capital invested in mills. This growth, however, is conditioned by the
ebb and flow of the industrial cycle. It is, besides, constantly interrupted
by the technical progress that at one time virtually supplies the place
of new workmen, at another, actually displaces old ones. This qualitative
change in mechanical industry continually discharges hands from the factory,
or shuts its doors against the fresh stream of recruits, while the purely
quantitative extension of the factories absorbs not only the men thrown
out of work, but also fresh contingents. The workpeople are thus continually
both repelled and attracted, hustled from pillar to post, while, at the
same time, constant changes take place in the sex, age, and skill of the
levies.

The lot of the factory operatives will be best depicted by taking
a rapid survey of the course of the English cotton industry.

From 1770 to 1815 this trade was depressed or stagnant for 5 years
only. During this period of 45 years the English manufacturers had a monopoly
of machinery and of the markets of the world. From 1815 to 1821 depression;
1822 and 1823 prosperity; 1824 abolition of the laws against Trades’ Unions,
great extension of factories everywhere; 1825 crisis; 1826 great misery
and riots among the factory operatives; 1827 slight improvement; 1828 great
increase in power-looms, and in exports; 1829 exports, especially to India,
surpass all former years; 1830 glutted markets, great distress; 1831 to
1833 continued depression, the monopoly of the trade with India and China
withdrawn from the East India Company; 1834 great increase of factories
and machinery, shortness of hands. The new poor law furthers the migration
of agricultural labourers into the factory districts. The country districts
swept of children. White slave trade; 1835 great prosperity, contemporaneous
starvation of the hand-loom weavers; 1836 great prosperity; 1837 and 1838
depression and crisis; 1839 revival; 1840 great depression, riots, calling
out of the military; 1841 and 1842 frightful suffering among the factory
operatives; 1842 the manufacturers lock the hands out of the factories
in order to enforce the repeal of the Corn Laws. The operatives stream
in thousands into the towns of Lancashire and Yorkshire, are driven back
by the military, and their leaders brought to trial at Lancaster; 1843
great misery; 1844 revival; 1845 great prosperity; 1846 continued improvement
at first, then reaction. Repeal of the Corn Laws; 1847 crisis, general
reduction of wages by 10 and more per cent. in honour of the “big loaf";
1848 continued depression; Manchester under military protection; 1849
revival; 1850 prosperity; 1851 falling prices, low wages, frequent strikes;
1852 improvement begins, strikes continue, the manufacturers threaten to
import foreign hands; 1853 increasing exports. Strike for 8 months, and
great misery at Preston; 1854 prosperity, glutted markets; 1855 news of
failures stream in from the United States, Canada, and the Eastern markets;
1856 great prosperity; 1857 crisis; 1858 improvement; 1859 great prosperity,
increase in factories; 1860 Zenith of the English cotton trade, the Indian,
Australian, and other markets so glutted with goods that even in 1863 they
had not absorbed the whole lot; the French Treaty of Commerce, enormous
growth of factories and machinery; 1861 prosperity continues for a time,
reaction, the American Civil War, cotton famine: 1862 to 1863 complete
collapse.

The history of the cotton famine is too characteristic to
dispense with dwelling upon it for a moment. From the indications as to
the condition of the markets of the world in 1860 and 1861, we see that
the cotton famine came in the nick of time for the manufacturers, and was
to some extent advantageous to them, a fact that was acknowledged in the
reports of the Manchester Chamber of Commerce, proclaimed in Parliament
by Palmerston and Derby, and confirmed by events. [157] No doubt, among the 2,887 cotton mills in the United Kingdom in 1861, there were many of small size. According to the report of Mr. A. Redgrave, out
of the 2,109 mills included in his district, 392, or 19% employed less
than ten horse-power each; 345, or 16% employed 10 H. P., and less than
20 H. P.; while 1,372 employed upwards of 20 H. P. [158] The majority of the small mills were weaving sheds, built during the period of prosperity after 1858, for the most part by speculators, of whom one
supplied the yarn, another the machinery, a third the buildings, and were
worked by men who had been overlookers, or by other persons of small means.
These small manufacturers mostly went to the wall. The same fate would
have overtaken them in the commercial crisis that was staved off only by
the cotton famine. Although they formed one-third of the total number of
manufacturers, yet their mills absorbed a much smaller part of the capital
invested in the cotton trade. As to the extent of the stoppage, it appears
from authentic estimates, that in October 1862, 60.3% of the spindles,
and 58% of the looms were standing. This refers to the cotton trade as
a whole, and, of course, requires considerable modification for individual
districts. Only very few mills worked full time (60 hours a week), the
remainder worked at intervals. Even in those few cases where full time
was worked, and at the customary rate of piece-wage, the weekly wages of
the operatives necessarily shrank, owing to good cotton being replaced
by bad, Sea Island by Egyptian (in fine spinning mills), American and Egyptian
by Surat, and pure cotton by mixings of waste and Surat. The shorter fibre
of the Surat cotton and its dirty condition, the greater fragility of the
thread, the substitution of all sorts of heavy ingredients for flour in
sizing the warps, all these lessened the speed of the machinery, or the
number of the looms that could be superintended by one weaver, increased
the labour caused by defects in the machinery, and reduced the piece-wage
by reducing the mass of the product turned off. Where Surat cotton was
used, the loss to the operatives when on full time, amounted to 20, 30,
and more per cent. But besides this, the majority of the manufacturers
reduced the rate of piece-wage by 5, 7½, and 10 per cent.
We can therefore conceive the situation of those hands who were employed
for only 3, 3½ or 4 days a week, or for only 6 hours a day. Even in
1863, after a comparative improvement had set in, the weekly wages of spinners
and of weavers were 3s. 4d., 3s. 10d., 4s. 6d. and 5s. 1d. [159] Even in this miserable state of things, however, the inventive spirit of the master never stood still, but was exercised in making deductions from
wages. These were to some extent inflicted as a penalty for defects in
the finished article that were really due to his bad cotton and to his
unsuitable machinery. Moreover, where the manufacturer owned the cottages
of the workpeople, he paid himself his rents by deducting the amount from these miserable wages. Mr. Redgrave tells us of self-acting minders (operatives
who manage a pair of self-acting mules)

“earning at the end of a fortnight’s
full work 8s. 11d., and that from this sum was deducted the rent of the
house, the manufacturer, however, returning half the rent as a gift. The
minders took away the sum of 6s. 11d. In many places the self-acting minders
ranged from 5s. to 9s. per week, and the weavers from 2s. to 6s. per week,
during the latter part of 1862.” [160]

Even when working short time the rent was frequently deducted from the wages of the operatives.
[161] No wonder that in some parts of Lancashire a
kind of famine fever broke out. But more characteristic than all this,
was, the revolution that took place in the process of production at the
expense of the workpeople. Experimenta in corpore vili, like those of anatomists
on frogs, were formally made.

“Although,” says Mr. Redgrave, “I have given
the actual earnings of the operatives in the several mills, it does not
follow that they earn the same amount week by week. The operatives are
subject to great fluctuation from the constant experimentalising of the
manufacturers ... the earnings of the operatives rise and fall with the
quality of the cotton mixings; sometimes they have been within 15 per cent.
of former earnings, and then, in a week or two, they have fallen off from
50 to 60 per cent.” [162]

These experiments were not made solely at the expense of the workman’s means of subsistence. His five
senses also had to pay the penalty.

“The people who are employed in making
up Surat cotton complain very much. They inform me, on opening the bales
of cotton there is an intolerable smell, which causes sickness.... In the
mixing, scribbling and carding rooms, the dust and dirt which are disengaged,
irritate the air passages, and give rise to cough and difficulty of breathing.
A disease of the skin, no doubt from the irritation of the dirt contained in
the Surat cotton, also prevails.... The fibre being so short, a great amount
of size, both animal and vegetable, is used.... Bronchitis is more prevalent
owing to the dust. Inflammatory sore throat is common, from the same cause.
Sickness and dyspepsia are produced by the frequent breaking of the weft,
when the weaver sucks the weft through the eye of the shuttle.” On the other hand, the substitutes for flour were a Fortunatus’ purse to the manufacturers, by increasing the weight of the yarn. They caused “15 lbs. of raw material
to weigh 26 lbs. after it was woven.” [163]

In the Report of Inspectors of Factories for 30th April, 1864, we read as follows:

“The trade is availing itself of this resource at present to an extent
which is even discreditable. I have heard on good authority of a cloth
weighing 8 lbs. which was made of 5 1/4 lbs. cotton and 2 3/4 lbs. size;
and of another cloth weighing 5 1/4 lbs., of which 2 lbs. was size. These
were ordinary export shirtings. In cloths of other descriptions, as much
as 50 per cent. size is sometimes added; so that a manufacturer may, and
does truly boast, that he is getting rich by selling cloth for less money
per pound than he paid for the mere yarn of which they are composed.” [164]

But the workpeople had to suffer, not only from the experiments of the manufacturers inside the mills, and of the municipalities outside, not
only from reduced wages and absence of work, from want and from charity,
and from the eulogistic speeches of lords and commons.

“Unfortunate females
who, in consequence of the cotton famine, were at its commencement thrown
out of employment, and have thereby become outcasts of society; and now,
though trade has revived, and work is plentiful, continue members of that
unfortunate class, and are likely to continue so. There are also in the
borough more youthful prostitutes than I have known for the last 25 years.”

We find then, in the first 45 years of the English cotton trade,
from 1770 to 1815, only 5 years of crisis and stagnation; but this was
the period of monopoly. The second period from 1815 to 1863 counts, during
its 48 years, only 20 years of revival and prosperity against 28 of depression
and stagnation. Between 1815 and 1830 the competition with the continent
of Europe and with the United States sets in. After 1833, the extension
of the Asiatic markets is enforced by “destruction of the human race” (the
wholesale extinction of Indian hand-loom weavers). After the repeal of
the Corn Laws, from 1846 to 1863, there are 8 years of moderate activity
and prosperity against 9 years of depression and stagnation. The
condition of the adult male operatives, even during the years of prosperity,
may be judged from the note subjoined. [166]

## SECTION 8. REVOLUTION EFFECTED IN MANUFACTURE, HANDICRAFTS, AND DOMESTIC INDUSTRY BY MODERN INDUSTRY

### A. Overthrow of Co-operation Based on Handicraft, and on the Division of Labour

We have seen how machinery does away with co-operation
based on handicrafts, and with manufacture based on the division of handicraft
labour. An example of the first sort is the mowing-machine; it replaces
co-operation between mowers. A striking example of the second kind, is
the needle-making machine. According to Adam Smith, 10 men, in his day,
made in co-operation, over 48,000 needles a-day. On the other hand, a single
needle-machine makes 145,000 in a working-day of 11 hours. One woman or
one girl superintends four such machines, and so produces near upon 600,000
needles in a day, and upwards of 3,000,000 in a week. [167] A single machine, when it takes the place of co-operation or of manufacture, may itself serve as the basis of an industry of a handicraft character. Still, such a return to handicrafts is but a transition to the factory
system, which, as a rule, makes its appearance so soon as the human muscles
are replaced, for the purpose of driving the machines, by a mechanical
motive power, such as steam or water. Here and there, but in any case only
for a time, an industry may be carried on, on a small scale, by means of
mechanical power. This is effected by hiring steam-power, as is done in
some of the Birmingham trades, or by the use of small caloric-engines,
as in some branches of weaving. [168] In the Coventry silk weaving industry the experiment of “cottage factories” was tried. In the centre of a square surrounded by rows of cottages, an engine-house
was built and the engine connected by shafts with the looms in the cottages.
In all cases the power was hired at so much per loom. The rent was payable
weekly, whether the looms worked or not. Each cottage held from 2 to 6
looms; some belonged to the weaver, some were bought on credit, some were
hired. The struggle between these cottage factories and the factory proper,
lasted over 12 years. It ended with the complete ruin of the 300 cottage
factories. [169] Wherever the nature of the process
did not involve production on a large scale, the new industries that have
sprung up in the last few decades, such as envelope making, steel-pen making,
&c., have, as a general rule, first passed through the handicraft stage,
and then the manufacturing stage, as short phases of transition to the
factory stage. The transition is very difficult in those cases where the
production of the article by manufacture consists, not of a series of graduated
processes, but of a great number of disconnected ones. This circumstance
formed a great hindrance to the establishment of steel-pen factories. Nevertheless,
about 15 years ago, a machine was invented that automatically performed
6 separate operations at once. The first steel-pens were supplied by the
handicraft system, in the year 1820, at £7 4s. the gross; in 1830
they-were supplied by manufacture at 8s., and today the factory system
supplies them to the trade at from 2 to 6d. the gross. [170]

### B. Reaction of the Factory System on Manufacture and Domestic Industries

Along with the development of the factory system and of the revolution
in agriculture that accompanies it, production in all the other branches
of industry not only extends, but alters its character. The principle,
carried out in the factory system, of analysing the process of production
into its constituent phases, and of solving the problems thus proposed
by the application of mechanics, of chemistry, and of the whole range of
the natural sciences, becomes the determining principle everywhere. Hence,
machinery squeezes itself into the manufacturing industries first for one
detail process, then for another. Thus the solid crystal of their organisation,
based on the old division of labour, becomes dissolved, and makes way for
constant changes. Independently of this, a radical change takes place in
the composition of the collective labourer, a change of the persons working
in combination. In contrast with the manufacturing period, the division
of labour is thenceforth based, wherever possible, on the employment of
women, of children of all ages, and of unskilled labourers, in one word,
on cheap labour, as it is characteristically called in England. This is
the case not only with all production on a large scale, whether employing
machinery or not, but also with the so-called domestic industry, whether
carried on in the houses of the workpeople or in small workshops. This
modern so-called domestic industry has nothing, except the name, in common
with the old-fashioned domestic industry, the existence of which pre-supposes
independent urban handicrafts, independent peasant farming, and above all,
a dwelling-house for the labourer and his family. That old-fashioned industry
has now been converted into an outside department of the factory, the manufactory,
or the warehouse. Besides the factory operatives, the manufacturing workmen
and the handicraftsman, whom it concentrates in large masses at one spot,
and directly commands, capital also sets in motion, by means, of invisible
threads, another army; that of the workers in the domestic industries,
who dwell in the large towns and are also scattered over the face of the
country. An example: The shirt factory of Messrs. Tillie at Londonderry,
which employs 1,000 operatives in the factory itself, and 9,000 people
spread up and down the country and working in their own houses. [171]

The exploitation of cheap and immature labour-power is carried
out in a more shameless manner in modern Manufacture than in the factory
proper. This is because the technical foundation of the factory system,
namely, the substitution of machines for muscular power, and the light character
of the labour, is almost entirely absent in Manufacture, and at the same
time women and over-young children are subjected, in a most unconscionable
way, to the influence of poisonous or injurious substances. This exploitation
is more shameless in the so-called domestic industry than in manufactures,
and that because the power of resistance in the labourers decreases with
their dissemination; because a whole series of plundering parasites insinuate
themselves between the employer and the workman; because a domestic industry
has always to compete either with the factory system, or with manufacturing
in the same branch of production; because poverty robs the workman of the
conditions most essential to his labour, of space, light and ventilation;
because employment becomes more and more irregular; and, finally, because
in these the last resorts of the masses made “redundant” by modern industry
and Agriculture, competition for work attains its maximum. Economy in the
means of production, first systematically carried out in the factory system,
and there, from the very beginning, coincident with the most reckless squandering
of labour-power, and robbery of the conditions normally requisite for labour
— this economy now shows its antagonistic and murderous side more and
more in a given branch of industry, the less the social productive power
of labour and the technical basis for a combination of processes are developed
in that branch.

### C. Modern Manufacture

I now proceed, by a few examples, to illustrate the principles laid
down above. As a matter of fact, the reader is already familiar with numerous
instances given in the chapter on the working-day. In the hardware manufactures
of Birmingham and the neighbourhood, there are employed, mostly in very
heavy work, 30,000 children and young persons, besides 10,000 women. There
they are to be seen in the unwholesome brass-foundries, button factories,
enamelling, galvanising, and lackering works. [172]
Owing to the excessive labour of their workpeople, both adult and non-adult,
certain London houses where newspapers and books are printed, have got
the ill-omened name of “slaughterhouses.” [173] Similar excesses are practised in book-binding, where the victims are chiefly women,
girls, and children; young persons have to do heavy work in rope-walks
and night-work in salt mines, candle manufactories, and chemical works;
young people are worked to death at turning the looms in silk weaving,
when it is not carried on by machinery. [174] One of the most shameful, the most dirty, and the worst paid kinds of labour, and one on which women and young girls are by preference employed, is the
sorting of rags. It is well known that Great Britain, apart from its own
immense store of rags, is the emporium for the rag trade of the whole world.
They flow in from Japan, from the most remote States of South America,
and from the Canary Islands. But the chief sources of their supply are
Germany, France, Russia, Italy, Egypt, Turkey, Belgium, and Holland. They
are used for manure, for making bedflocks, for shoddy, and they serve as
the raw material of paper. The rag-sorters are the medium for the spread
of small-pox and other infectious diseases, and they themselves are the
first victims. [175] A classical example of over-work, of hard and inappropriate labour, and of its brutalising effects on the
workman from his childhood upwards, is afforded not only by coal-mining
and miners generally, but also by tile and brick making, in which industry
the recently invented machinery is, in England, used only here and there.
Between May and September the work lasts from 5 in the morning till 8 in
the evening, and where the drying is done in the open air, it often lasts
from 4 in the morning till 9 in the evening. Work from 5 in the morning
till 7 in the evening is considered “reduced” and “moderate.” Both boys
and girls of 6 and even of 4 years of age are employed. They work for the
same number of hours, often longer, than the adults. The work is hard and
the summer heat increases the exhaustion. In a certain tile-field at Mosley,
e.g., a young woman, 24 years of age, was in the habit of making 2,000
tiles a day, with the assistance of 2 little girls, who carried the clay
for her, and stacked the tiles. These girls carried daily 10 tons up the
slippery sides of the clay pits, from a depth of 30 feet, and then for
a distance of 210 feet.

“It is impossible for a child to pass through the
purgatory of a tile-field without great moral degradation... the low language,
which they are accustomed to hear from their tenderest years, the filthy,
indecent, and shameless habits, amidst which, unknowing, and half wild,
they grow up, make them in after-life lawless, abandoned, dissolute....
A frightful source of demoralisation is the mode of living. Each moulder,
who is always a skilled labourer, and the chief of a group, supplies his
7 subordinates with board and lodging in his cottage. Whether members of
his family or not, the men, boys, and girls all sleep in the cottage, which
contains generally two, exceptionally 3 rooms, all on the ground floor,
and badly ventilated. These people are so exhausted after the day’s hard
work, that neither the rules of health, of cleanliness, nor of decency
are in the least observed. Many of these cottages are models
of untidiness, dirt, and dust.... The greatest evil of the system that
employs young girls on this sort of work, consists in this, that, as a
rule, it chains them fast from childhood for the whole of their after-life
to the most abandoned rabble. They become rough, foul-mouthed boys, before
Nature has taught them that they are women. Clothed in a few dirty rags,
the legs naked far above the knees, hair and face besmeared with dirt,
they learn to treat all feelings of decency and of shame with contempt.
During meal-times they lie at full length in the fields, or watch the boys
bathing in a neighbouring canal. Their heavy day’s work at length completed,
they put on better clothes, and accompany the men to the public houses.”

That excessive insobriety is prevalent from childhood upwards among the
whole of this class, is only natural.

“The worst is that the brickmakers
despair of themselves. You might as well, said one of the better kind to
a chaplain of Southallfield, try to raise and improve the devil as a brickie,
sir!” [176]

As to the manner, in which capital effects an economy in the requisites
of labour, in modern Manufacture (in which I include all workshops of larger
size, except factories proper), official and most ample material bearing
on it is to be found in the Public Health Reports IV. (1863) and VI. (1864).
The description of the workshops, more especially those of the London printers
and tailors, surpasses the most loathsome phantasies of our romance writers.
The effect on the health of the workpeople is self-evident. Dr. Simon,
the chief medical officer of the Privy Council and the official editor
of the “Public Health Reports,” says:

“In my fourth Report (1863) I showed,
how it is practically impossible for the workpeople to insist upon that
which is their first sanitary right, viz., the right that, no matter what the work for which their employer brings them together, the labour, so
far as it depends upon him, should be freed from all avoidably unwholesome
conditions. I pointed out, that while the workpeople are practically incapable
of doing themselves this sanitary justice, they are unable to obtain any
effective support from the paid administrations of the sanitary police....
The life of myriads of workmen and workwomen is now uselessly tortured
and shortened by the never-ending physical suffering that their mere occupation
begets.” [177]

In illustration of the way in which
the workrooms influence the state of health Dr. Simon gives the following
table of mortality. [178]

Number of persons of

all ages employed

in the respective

industries.

Industries compared

as regards health.

Death-rate per 100,000 men

in the respective industries

between the stated ages

Age 25-35.

Age 35-45.

Age 45-55.

958,265

Agriculture in

England & Wales

743

805

1,145

22,301 men

12,379 women

London tailors

958

1,262

2,093

13,803

London printers

894

1,747

2,367

### D. Modern Domestic Industry

I now come to the so-called domestic industry. In order to get an idea
of the horrors of this sphere, in which capital conducts its exploitation
in the background of modern mechanical industry, one must go to the apparently
quite idyllic trade of nail-making, [179] carried on in a few remote villages of England. In this place, however, it will be
enough to give a few examples from those branches of the lace-making and
straw-plaiting industries that are not yet carried on by the aid of machinery,
and that as yet do not compete with branches carried on in factories or
in manufactories.

Of the 150,000 persons employed in England in the production of
lace, about 10,000 fall under the authority of the Factory Act, 1861. Almost
the whole of the remaining 140,000 are women, young persons, and children
of both sexes, the male sex, however, being weakly represented. The state
of health of this cheap material for exploitation will be seen from the
following table, computed by Dr. Trueman, physician to the Nottingham General
Dispensary. Out of 686 female patients who were lace-makers, most of them
between the ages of 17 and 24, the number of consumptive ones were:

1852. — 1 in 45.1857. — 1 in 13.

1853. — 1 in 28.1858. — 1 in 15.

1854. — 1 in 17.1859. — 1 in 9.

1856. — 1 in 15.1861. — 1 in 8. [180]

This progress in the rate of consumption ought to suffice for the most
optimist of progressists, and for the biggest hawker of lies among the
Free-trade bagmen of Germany.

The Factory Act of 1861 regulates the actual making of the lace,
so far as it is done by machinery, and this is the rule in England. The
branches that we are now about to examine, solely with regard to those
of the workpeople who work at home, and not those who work in manufactories
or warehouses, fall into two divisions, viz. (1), finishing; (2), mending.
The former gives the finishing touches to the machine-made lace, and includes
numerous sub-divisions.

The lace finishing is done either in what are called “mistresses’
houses,” or by women in their own houses, with or without the help of their
children. The women who keep the “mistresses’ houses” are themselves poor.
The workroom is in a private house. The mistresses take orders from manufacturers,
or from warehousemen, and employ as many women, girls, and young children
as the size of their rooms and the fluctuating demand of the business will
allow. The number of the workwomen employed in these workrooms varies from
20 to 40 in some, and from 10 to 20 in others. The average age at which
the children commence work is six years, but in many cases it is below
five. The usual working-hours are from 8 in the morning till eight in the
evening, with 1½ hours for meals, which are taken at irregular intervals,
and often in the foul workrooms. When business is brisk, the labour frequently
lasts from 8 or even 6 o’clock in the morning till 10, 11, or 12 o’clock
at night. In English barracks the regulation space allotted to each soldier
is 500-600 cubic feet, and in the military hospitals 1,200 cubic feet.
But in those finishing sties there are but 67 to 100 cubic feet to each
person. At the same time the oxygen of the air is consumed by gas-lights.
In order to keep the lace clean, and although the floor is tiled or gagged,
the children are often compelled, even in winter, to pull off their shoes.

“It is not at all uncommon in Nottingham to find 14 to 20 children huddled
together in a small room, of, perhaps, not more than 12 feet square, and
employed for 15 hours out of the 24, at work that of itself is exhausting,
from its weariness and monotony, and is besides carried on under every
possible unwholesome condition.... Even the very youngest children work
with a strained attention and a rapidity that is astonishing, hardly ever
giving their fingers rest or glowering their motion. If a question
be asked them, they never raise their eyes from their work from fear of
losing a single moment.”

The “long stick” is used by the mistresses as
a stimulant more and more as the working hours are prolonged.

“The children gradually tire and become as restless as birds towards the end of their long detention at an occupation that is monotonous, eye-straining, and
exhausting from the uniformity in the posture of the body. Their work is
like slavery.” [181]

When women and their children
work at home, which now-a-days means in a hired room, often in a garret,
the state of things is, if possible, still worse. This sort of work is
given out within a circle of 80 miles radius from Nottingham. On leaving
the warehouses at 9 or 10 o’clock at night, the children are often given
a bundle of lace to take home with them and finish. The Pharisee of a capitalist
represented by one of his servants, accompanies this action, of course,
with the unctuous phrase: “That’s for mother,” yet he knows well enough
that the poor children must sit up and help. [182]

Pillow lace-making is chiefly carried on in England in two agricultural
districts; one, the Honiton lace district, extending from 20 to 30 miles
along the south coast of Devonshire, and including a few places in North
Devon; the other comprising a great part of the counties of Buckingham,
Bedford, and Northampton, and also the adjoining portions of Oxfordshire
and Huntingdonshire. The cottages of the agricultural labourers are the
places where the work is usually carried on. Many manufacturers employ
upwards of 3,000 of these lace-makers, who are chiefly children and young
persons of the female sex exclusively. The state of things described as
incidental to lace finishing is here repeated, save that instead of the
“mistresses’ houses,” we find what are called “lace-schools,” kept by poor
women in their cottages. From their fifth year and often earlier, until
their twelfth or fifteenth year, the children work in these schools; during
the first year the very young ones work from four to eight hours, and later
on, from six in the morning till eight and ten o’clock at night.

“The rooms are generally the ordinary living rooms of small cottages, the chimney
stopped up to keep out draughts, the inmates kept warm by their own animal
heat alone, and this frequently in winter. In other cases, these so-called
school-rooms are like small store-rooms without fire-places.... The over-crowding
in these dens and the consequent vitiation of the air are often extreme.
Added to this is the injurious effect of drains, privies, decomposing substances,
and other filth usual in the purlieus of the smaller cottages.” With regard
to space: “In one lace-school 18 girls and a mistress, 35 cubic
feet to each person; in another, where the smell was unbearable, 18 persons
and 24½ cubic feet per head. In this industry are to be found employed
children of 2 and 2½ years.” [183]

Where lace-making ends in the counties of Buckingham and Bedford,
straw-plaiting begins, and extends over a large part of Hertfordshire and
the westerly and northerly parts of Essex. In 1861, there were 40,043 persons
employed in straw-plaiting and straw-hat making; of these 3,815 were males
of all ages, the rest females, of whom 14,913, including about 7,000 children,
were under 20 years of age. In the place of the lace-schools we find here
the “straw-plait schools.” The children commence their instruction in straw-plaiting
generally in their 4th, often between their 3rd and 4th year. Education,
of course, they get none. The children themselves call the elementary schools,
“natural schools,” to distinguish them from these blood-sucking institutions,
in which they are kept at work simply to get through the task, generally
30 yards daily, prescribed by their half-starved mothers. These same mothers
often make them work at home, after school is over, till 10, 11, and 12
o’clock at night. The straw cuts their mouths, with which they constantly
moisten it, and their fingers. Dr. Ballard gives it as the general opinion
of the whole body of medical officers in London, that 300 cubic feet is
the minimum space proper for each person in a bedroom or workroom. But
in the straw-plait schools space is more sparingly allotted than in the
lace-schools, “12 2/3, 17, 18½ and below 22 cubic feet for each person.”

“The smaller of these numbers, says one of the commissioners, Mr. White,
represents less space than the half of what a child would occupy if packed
in a box measuring 3 feet in each direction.”

Thus do the children enjoy
life till the age of 12 or 14. The wretched half-starved parents think
of nothing but getting as much as possible out of their children. The latter,
as soon as they are grown up, do not care a farthing, and naturally so,
for their parents, and leave them.

“It is no wonder that ignorance and
vice abound in a population so brought up.... Their morality is at the
lowest ebb,... a great number of the women have illegitimate children,
and that at such an immature age that even those most conversant with criminal
statistics are astounded.” [184]

And the native land of these model families is the pattern Christian country for Europe; so
says at least Count Montalembert, certainly a competent authority on Christianity!

Wages in the above industries, miserable as they are (the maximum wages
of a child in the straw-plait schools rising in rare cases to 3 shillings),
are reduced far below their nominal amount by the prevalence of the truck
system everywhere, but especially in the lace districts. [185]

### E. Passage of Modern Manufacture, and Domestic Industry into Modern Mechanical Industry. The Hastening of This Revolution by the Application of the Factory Acts to those Industries

The cheapening of labour-power, by sheer abuse of the labour of women
and children, by sheer robbery of every normal condition requisite for
working and living, and by the sheer brutality of overwork and night-work,
meets at last with natural obstacles that cannot be overstepped. So also,
when based on these methods, do the cheapening of commodities and capitalist
exploitation in general. So soon as this point is at last reached — and
it takes many years — the hour has struck for the introduction of machinery,
and for the thenceforth rapid conversion of the scattered domestic industries
and also of manufactures into factory industries.

An example, on the most colossal scale, of this movement is afforded
by the production of wearing apparel. This industry, according to the classification
of the
Children’s Employment Commission, comprises straw-hat makers, ladies’-hat
makers, cap-makers, tailors, milliners and dressmakers, shirt-makers, corset-makers,
glove-makers, shoemakers, besides many minor branches, such as the making
of neck-ties, collars, &c. In 1861, the number of females employed
in these industries, in England and Wales, amounted to 586,299, of these
115,242 at the least were under 20, and 16,650. under 15 years of age.
The number of these workwomen in the United Kingdom in 1861, was 750,334.
The number of males employed in England and Wales, in hat-making, shoemaking,
glove-making and tailoring was 437,969; of these 14,964 under 15 years,
89,285 between 15 and 20, and 333,117 over 20 years. Many of the smaller
branches are not included in these figures. But take the figures as they
stand; we then have for England and Wales alone, according to the census
of 1861, a total of 1,024,277 persons, about as many as are absorbed by
agriculture and cattle breeding. We begin to understand what becomes of
the immense quantities of goods conjured up by the magic of machinery,
and of the enormous masses of workpeople, which that machinery sets free.

The production of wearing apparel is carried on partly in manufactories
in whose workrooms there is but a reproduction of that division of
labour, the membra disjecta of which were found ready to hand; partly by
small master-handicraftsmen; these, however, do not, as formerly, work
for individual consumers, but for manufactories and warehouses, and to
such an extent that often whole towns and stretches of country carry on
certain branches, such as shoemaking, as a speciality; finally, on a very
great scale by the so-called domestic workers, who form an external department
of the manufactories, warehouses, and even of the workshops of the smaller
masters. [186]

The raw material, &c., is supplied by mechanical industry,
the mass of cheap human material (taillable à merci et miséricorde)
is composed of the individuals “liberated” by mechanical industry and improved
agriculture. The manufactures of this class owed their origin chiefly to
the capitalist’s need of having at hand an army ready equipped to meet
any increase of demand. [187] These manufactures, nevertheless, allowed the scattered handicrafts and domestic industries to continue to
exist as a broad foundation. The great production of surplus-value in these
branches of labour, and the progressive cheapening of their articles, were
and are chiefly due to the minimum wages paid, no more than requisite for
a miserable vegetation, and to the extension of working-time up to the
maximum endurable by the human organism. It was in fact by the cheapness
of the human sweat and the human blood, which were converted into commodities,
that the markets were constantly being extended, and continue daily to
be extended; more especially was this the case with England’s colonial
markets, where, besides, English tastes and habits prevail. At last the
critical point was reached. The basis of the old method, sheer brutality
in the exploitation of the workpeople, accompanied more or less by a systematic
division of labour, no longer sufficed for the extending markets and for
the still more rapidly extending competition of the capitalists. The hour
struck for the advent of machinery. The decisively revolutionary machine,
the machine which attacks in an equal degree the whole of the numberless
branches of this sphere of production, dressmaking, tailoring, shoemaking,
sewing, hat-making, and many others, is the sewing-machine.

Its immediate effect on the workpeople is like that of all machinery,
which, since the rise of modern industry, has seized upon new branches
of trade. Children of too tender an age are sent adrift. The wage of the
machine hands rises compared with that of the house-workers, many of
whom belong to the poorest of the poor. That of the better situated handicraftsman,
with whom the machine competes, sinks. The new machine hands are exclusively
girls and young women. With the help of mechanical force, they destroy
the monopoly that male labour had of the heavier work, and they drive off
from the lighter work numbers of old women and very young children. The
overpowering competition crushes the weakest of the manual labourers. The
fearful increase in death from starvation during the last 10 years in London
runs parallel with the extension of machine sewing. [188] The new workwomen turn the machines by hand and foot, or by hand alone, sometimes sitting, sometimes standing, according to the weight, size, and
special make of the machine, and expend a great deal of labour-power. Their
occupation is unwholesome, owing to the long hours, although in most cases
they are not so long as under the old system. Wherever the sewing-machine
locates itself in narrow and already over-crowded workrooms, it adds to
the unwholesome influences.

“The effect,” says Mr. Lord, “on entering low-ceiled
workrooms in which 30 to 40 machine hands are working is unbearable....
The heat, partly due to the gas stoves used for warming the irons, is horrible....
Even when moderate hours of work, i.e., from 8 in the morning till 6 in
the evening, prevail in such places, yet 3 or 4 persons fall into a swoon
regularly every day.” [189]

The revolution in the industrial methods which is the necessary
result of the revolution in the instruments of production, is effected
by a medley of transition forms. These forms vary according to the extent
to which the sewing-machine has become prevalent in one branch, of industry
or the other, to the time during which it has been in operation, to the
previous condition of the workpeople, to the preponderance of manufacture,
of handicrafts or of domestic industry, to the rent of the workrooms, [190] &c. In dressmaking, for instance, where the labour for the most part was already organised, chiefly by simple co-operation, the sewing-machine
at first formed merely a new factor in that manufacturing industry. In
tailoring, shirtmaking, shoemaking, &c., all the forms are intermingled.
Here the factory system proper. There middlemen receive the raw material
from the capitalist en chef, and group around their sewing-machines,
in “chambers” and “garrets,” from 10 to 50 or more workwomen. Finally, as is always the case with machinery when not organised into a system,
and when it can also be used in dwarfish proportions, handicraftsman and
domestic workers, along with their families, or with a little extra labour
from without, make use of their own sewing-machines. [191] The system actually prevalent in England is, that the capitalist concentrates a large number of machines on his premises, and then distributes the produce
of those machines for further manipulation amongst the domestic workers.
[192] The variety of the transition forms, however,
does not conceal the tendency to conversion into the factory system proper.
This tendency is nurtured by the very nature of the sewing-machine, the
manifold uses of which push on the concentration, under one roof, and one
management, of previously separated branches of a trade. It is also favoured
by the circumstance that preparatory needlework, and certain other operations, are most conveniently done on the premises where the machine is at work; as well as by the inevitable expropriation of the hand sewers, and of the
domestic workers who work with their own machines. This fate has already
in part overtaken them. The constantly increasing amount of capital invested
in sewing-machines, [193] gives the spur to the production of, and gluts the markets with, machine-made articles, thereby giving the
signal to the domestic workers for the sale of their machines. The overproduction
of sewing-machines themselves, causes their producers, in bad want of a
sale, to let them out for so much a week, thus crushing by their deadly
competition the small owners of machines. [194] Constant changes in the construction of the machines, and their ever-increasing
cheapness, depreciate day by day the older makes, and allow of their being
sold in great numbers, at absurd prices, to large capitalists, who alone
can thus employ them at a profit. Finally, the substitution of the steam-engine
for man gives in this, as in all similar revolutions, the finishing blow.
At first, the use of steam power meets with mere technical difficulties,
such as unsteadiness in the machines, difficulty in controlling their speed, rapid wear and tear of the lighter machines, &c., all of which are
soon overcome by experience. [195] If, on the one hand, the concentration of many machines in large manufactories leads to the
use of steam power, on the other hand, the competition of steam
with human muscles hastens on the concentration of workpeople and machines
in large factories. Thus England is at present experiencing, not only in
the colossal industry of making wearing apparel, but in most of the other
trades mentioned above, the conversion of manufacture, of handicrafts,
and of domestic work into the factory system, after each of those forms
of production, totally changed and disorganised under the influence of
modern industry, has long ago reproduced, and even overdone, all the horrors
of the factory system, without participating in any of the elements of
social progress it contains. [196]

This industrial revolution which takes place spontaneously, is
artificially helped on by the extension of the Factory Acts to all industries
in which women, young persons and children are employed. The compulsory
regulation of the working-day as regards its length, pauses, beginning
and end, the system of relays of children, the exclusion of all children
under a certain age, &c., necessitate on the one hand more machinery
[197] and the substitution of steam as a motive power in the place of muscles. [198] On the other hand, in order to make up for the loss of time, an expansion occurs of the means
of production used in common, of the furnaces, buildings, &c., in one
word, greater concentration of the means of production and a correspondingly
greater concourse of workpeople. The chief objection, repeatedly and passionately
urged on behalf of each manufacture threatened with the Factory Act, is
in fact this, that in order to continue the business on the old scale a
greater outlay of capital will be necessary. But as regards labour in the
so-called domestic industries and the intermediate forms between them and
Manufacture, so soon as limits are put to the working-day and to the employment
of children, those industries go to the wall. Unlimited exploitation
of cheap labour-power is the sole foundation of their power to compete.

One of the essential conditions for the existence of the factory
system, especially when the length of the working-day is fixed, is certainty
in the result, i.e., the production in a given time of a given quantity
of commodities, or of a given useful effect. The statutory pauses in the
working-day, moreover, imply the assumption that periodical and sudden
cessation of the work does no harm to the article undergoing the process
of production. This certainty in the result, and this possibility of interrupting
the work are, of course, easier to be attained in the purely mechanical
industries than in those in which chemical and physical processes play
a part; as, for instance, in the earthenware trade, in bleaching, dyeing,
baking, and in most of the metal industries. Wherever there is a workingday
without restriction as to length, wherever there is night-work and unrestricted
waste of human life, there the slightest obstacle presented by the nature
of the work to a change for the better is soon looked upon as an everlasting
barrier erected by Nature. No poison kills vermin with more certainty than
the Factory Act removes such everlasting barriers. No one made a greater
outcry over “impossibilities” than our friends the earthenware manufacturers.
In 1864, however, they were brought under the Act, and within sixteen months
every “impossibility” had vanished.

“The improved method,” called forth
by the Act, “of making slip by pressure instead of by evaporation, the
newly-constructed stoves for drying the ware in its green state, &c.,
are each events of great importance in the pottery art, and mark an advance
which the preceding century could not rival.... It has even considerably reduced the temperature of the stoves themselves with a considerable saving
of fuel, and with a readier effect on the ware.” [199]

In spite of every prophecy, the cost-price of earthenware did not rise, but the quantity produced did, and to such an extent that the export for
the twelve months, ending December, 1865, exceeded in value by £138,628
the average of the preceding three years. In the manufacture of matches
it was thought to be an indispensable requirement, that boys, even while
bolting their dinner, should go on dipping the matches in melted phosphorus,
the poisonous vapour from which rose into their faces. The Factory Act
(1864) made the saving of time a necessity, and so forced into existence
a dipping machine, the vapour from which could not come in contact with
the workers. [200] So, at the present time, in those branches of the lace manufacture not yet subject to the Factory
Act, it is maintained that the meal-times cannot be regular owing to the
different periods required by the various kinds of lace for drying, which
periods vary from three minutes up to an hour and more. To this the Children’s
Employment Commissioners answer:

“The circumstances of this case are precisely
analogous to that of the paper-stainers, dealt with in our first report.
Some of the principal manufacturers in the trade urged that in consequence
of the nature of the materials used, and their various processes, they
would be unable, without serious loss, to stop for meal-times at any given
moment. But it was seen from the evidence that, by due care and previous
arrangement, the apprehended difficulty would be got over; and accordingly,
by clause 6 of section 6 of the Factory Acts Extension Act, passed during this Session of Parliament, an interval of eighteen months is given to
them from the passing of the Act before they are required to conform to
the meal hours, specified by the Factory Acts.” [201]

Hardly had the Act been passed when our friends the manufacturers found out:

“The inconveniences we expected to arise from the introduction of
the Factory Acts into our branch of manufacture, I am happy to say, have
not arisen. We do not find the production at all interfered with; in short,
we produce more in the same time.” [202]

It is evident that the English legislature, which certainly no one will venture to reproach
with being overdosed with genius, has been led by experience to the conclusion
that a simple compulsory law is sufficient to enact away all the so-called
impediments, opposed by the nature of the process, to the restriction and
regulation of the working-day. Hence, on the introduction of the Factory
Act into a given industry, a period varying from six to eighteen months
is fixed within which it is incumbent on the manufacturers to remove all
technical impediments to the working of the Act. Mirabeau’s “Impossible!
ne me dites jamais ce bête de mot!” is particularly applicable to
modern technology. But though the Factory Acts thus artificially ripen
the material elements necessary for the conversion of the manufacturing
system into the factory system, yet at the same time, owing to the necessity
they impose for greater outlay of capital, they hasten on the decline of
the small masters, and the concentration of capital. [203]

Besides the purely technical impediments that are removable
by technical means, the irregular habits of the workpeople themselves obstruct
the regulation of the hours of labour. This is especially the case where
piece-wage predominates, and where loss of time in one part of the day
or week can be made good by subsequent over-time, or by night-work, a process
which brutalises the adult workman, and ruins his wife and children. [204] Although this absence of regularity in the expenditure of labour-power is a natural and rude reaction against the tedium of monotonous drudgery,
it originates, also, to a much greater degree from anarchy in production,
anarchy that in its turn pre-supposes unbridled exploitation of labour-power
by the capitalist. Besides the general periodic changes of the industrial
cycle, and the special fluctuations in the markets to which each industry
is subject, we may also reckon what is called “the season,” dependent either
on the periodicity of favourable seasons of the year for navigation; or
on fashion, and the sudden placing of large orders that have to be executed
in the shortest possible time. The habit of giving such orders becomes
more frequent with the extension of railways and telegraphs.

“The extension of the railway system throughout the country
has tended very much to encourage
giving short notice. Purchasers now come up from Glasgow, Manchester, and
Edinburgh once every fortnight or so to the wholesale city warehouses which
we supply, and give small orders requiring immediate execution, instead
of buying from stock as they used to do. Years ago we were always able
to work in the slack times, so as to meet demand of the next season, but
now no one can say beforehand what will be the demand then.” [205]

In those factories and manufactories that are not yet subject
to the Factory Acts, the most fearful over-work prevails periodically during
what is called the season, in consequence of sudden orders. In the outside
department of the factory, of the manufactory, and of the warehouse,
the so-called domestic workers, whose employment is at the best irregular,
are entirely dependent for their raw material and their orders on the caprice
of the capitalist, who, in this industry, is not hampered by any regard
for depreciation of his buildings and machinery, and risks nothing by a
stoppage of work, but the skin of the worker himself. Here then he sets
himself systematically to work to form an industrial reserve force that
shall be ready at a moment’s notice; during one part of the year he decimates
this force by the most inhuman toil, during the other part, he lets it
starve for want of work.

“The employers avail themselves of the habitual irregularity
in the homework, when any extra work is wanted at a push,
so that the work goes on till 11, and 12 p.m. or 2 a.m., or as the usual
phrase is, “all hours,” and that in localities where “the stench is enough
to knock you down, you go to the door, perhaps, and open it, but shudder
to go further.” [206] “They are curious men,” said
one of the witnesses, a shoemaker, speaking of the masters, “they think
it does a boy no harm to work too hard for half the year, if he is nearly
idle for the other half.” [207]

In the same way as technical impediments, so, too, those “usages
which have grown with the growth of trade” were and still are proclaimed
by interested capitalists as obstacles due to the nature of the work. This
was a favourite cry of the cotton lords at the time they were first threatened
with the Factory Acts. Although their industry more than any other depends
on navigation, yet experience has given them the lie. Since then, every
pretended obstruction to business has been treated by the Factory inspectors
as a mere sham. [208] The thoroughly conscientious
investigations of the Children’s Employment Commission prove that the effect
of the regulation of the hours of work, in some industries, was to spread
the mass of labour previously employed more evenly over the whole year
[208a] that this regulation was the first rational
bridle on the murderous, meaningless caprices of fashion, [208b] caprices that consort so badly with the system of modern industry; that the development of ocean navigation and of the means of communication
generally, has swept away the technical basis on which season-work was really supported, [209] and that all other so-called unconquerable difficulties vanish before larger buildings, additional machinery, increase in the number of workpeople employed, [210] and the alterations caused by all these in the mode of conducting the wholesale trade. [211] But for all that, capital never becomes reconciled to such changes — and this is admitted over and over again by its own representatives — except “under the pressure of a General Act
of Parliament” [212] for the compulsory regulation
of the hours of labour.

## SECTION 9. THE FACTORY ACTS. SANITARY AND EDUCATIONAL CLAUSES OF THE SAME. THEIR GENERAL EXTENSION IN ENGLAND

Factory legislation, that first conscious and methodical
reaction of society against the spontaneously developed form of the process
of production, is, as we have seen, just as much the necessary product
of modern industry as cotton yarn, self-actors, and the electric telegraph.
Before passing to the consideration of the extension of that legislation
in England, we shall shortly notice certain clauses contained in the Factory
Acts, and not relating to the hours of work.

Apart from their wording, which makes it easy for the capitalist
to evade them, the sanitary clauses are extremely meagre, and, in fact, limited
to provisions for whitewashing the walls, for insuring cleanliness in some
other matters, for ventilation, and for protection against dangerous machinery.
In the third book we shall return again to the fanatical opposition of
the masters to those clauses which imposed upon them a slight expenditure
on appliances for protecting the limbs of their workpeople, an opposition
that throws a fresh and glaring light on the Free-trade dogma, according
to which, in a society with conflicting interests, each individual necessarily
furthers the common weal by seeking nothing but his own personal advantage!
One example is enough. The reader knows that during the last 20 years,
the flax industry has very much extended, and that, with that extension,
the number of scutching mills in Ireland has increased. In 1864 there were
in that country 1,800 of these mills. Regularly in autumn and winter women
and “young persons,” the wives, sons, and daughters of the neighbouring
small farmers, a class of people totally unaccustomed to machinery, are
taken from field labour to feed the rollers of the scutching mills with
flax. The accidents, both as regards number and kind, are wholly unexampled
in the history of machinery. In one scutching mill, at Kildinan, near Cork,
there occurred between 1852 and 1856, six fatal accidents and sixty mutilations;
every one of which might have been prevented by the simplest appliances,
at the cost of a few shillings. Dr. W. White, the certifying surgeon for
factories at Downpatrick, states in his official report, dated the 15th
December, 1865:

“The serious accidents at the scutching mills are of the
most fearful nature. In many cases a quarter of the body is torn from the
trunk, and either involves death, or a future of wretched incapacity and
suffering. The increase of mills in the country will, of course, extend
these dreadful results, and it will be a great boon if they are brought
under the legislature. I am convinced that by proper supervision of scutching
mills a vast sacrifice of life and limb would be averted.” [213]

What could possibly show better the character of the capitalist
mode of production, than the necessity that exists for forcing upon it,
by Acts of Parliament, the simplest appliances for maintaining cleanliness
and health? In the potteries the Factory Act of 1864 “has whitewashed and
cleansed upwards of 200 workshops, after a period of abstinence from any
such cleaning, in many cases of 20 years, and in some, entirely,” (this
is the “abstinence” of the capitalist!) “in which were employed 27,800
artisans, hitherto breathing through protracted days and often nights of
labour, a mephitic atmosphere, and which rendered an otherwise comparatively
innocuous occupation, pregnant with disease and death. The Act
has improved the ventilation very much.” [214]

At the same time, this portion of the Act strikingly shows that the capitalist
mode of production, owing to its very nature, excludes all rational improvement
beyond a certain point. It has been stated over and over again that the
English doctors are unanimous in declaring that where the work is continuous,
500 cubic feet is the very least space that should be allowed for each
person. Now, if the Factory Acts, owing to their compulsory provisions,
indirectly hasten on the conversion of small workshops into factories,
thus indirectly attacking the proprietary rights of the smaller capitalists,
and assuring a monopoly to the great ones, so, if it were made obligatory
to provide the proper space for each workman in every workshop, thousands
of small employers would, at one full swoop, be expropriated directly!
The very root of the capitalist mode of production, i.e., the self-expansion
of all capital, large or small, by means of the “free” purchase and consumption
of labour-power, would be attacked. Factory legislation is therefore brought
to a deadlock before these 500 cubic feet of breathing space. The sanitary
officers, the industrial inquiry commissioners, the factory inspectors,
all harp, over and over again, upon the necessity for those 500 cubic feet,
and upon the impossibility of wringing them out of capital. They thus,
in fact, declare that consumption and other lung diseases among the workpeople
are necessary conditions to the existence of capital. [215]

Paltry as the education clauses of the Act appear on the whole,
yet they proclaim elementary education to be an indispensable condition
to the employment of children. [216] The success of
those clauses proved for the first time the possibility of combining education
and gymnastics [217] with manual labour,
and, consequently, of combining manual labour with education and gymnastics.
The factory inspectors soon found out by questioning the schoolmasters,
that the factory children, although receiving only one half the education
of the regular day scholars, yet learnt quite as much and often more.

“This can be accounted for by the simple fact that, with only being at school
for one half of the day, they are always fresh, and nearly always ready
and willing to receive instruction. The system on which they work, half
manual labour, and half school, renders each employment a rest and a relief
to the other; consequently, both are far more congenial to the child, than
would be the case were he kept constantly at one. It is quite clear that
a boy who has been at school all the morning, cannot (in hot weather particularly)
cope with one who comes fresh and bright from his work.” [218]

Further information on this point will be found in Senior’s speech at the Social Science
Congress at Edinburgh in 1863. He there shows, amongst other
things, how the monotonous and uselessly long school hours of the children
of the upper and middle classes, uselessly add to the labour of the teacher,
“while he not only fruitlessly but absolutely injuriously, wastes the time,
health, and energy of the children.” [219] From the
Factory system budded, as Robert Owen has shown us in detail, the germ
of the education of the future, an education that will, in the case of
every child over a given age, combine productive labour with instruction
and gymnastics, not only as one of the methods of adding to the efficiency
of production, but as the only method of producing fully developed human
beings.

Modern industry, as we have seen, sweeps away by technical means
the manufacturing division of labour, under which each man is bound hand
and foot for life to a single detail-operation. At the same time, the capitalistic
form of that industry reproduces this same division of labour in a still
more monstrous shape; in the factory proper, by converting the workman
into a living appendage of the machine; and everywhere outside the Factory,
partly by the sporadic use of machinery and machine workers, [220] partly by re-establishing the division of labour on a fresh basis by the general introduction of the labour of women and children, and of cheap unskilled labour.

The antagonism between the manufacturing division of labour and
the methods of modern industry makes itself forcibly felt. It manifests
itself, amongst other ways, in the frightful fact that a great part of
the children employed in modern factories and manufactures, are from their
earliest years riveted to the most simple manipulations, and exploited
for years, without being taught a single sort of work that would afterwards
make them of use, even in the same manufactory or factory. In the English
letter-press printing trade, for example, there existed formerly a system,
corresponding to that in the old manufactures and handicrafts, of advancing
the apprentices from easy to more and more difficult work. They went through
a course of teaching till they were finished printers. To be able to read
and write was for every one of them a requirement of their trade. All this
was changed by the printing machine. It employs two sorts of labourers,
one grown up, renters, the other, boys mostly from 11 to 17 years of age
whose sole business is either to spread the sheets of paper under the machine,
or to take from it the printed sheets. They perform this weary task, in London especially, for 14, 15, and 16 hours at a stretch, during several
days in the week, and frequently for 36 hours, with only 2 hours’ rest
for meals and sleep. [221] A great part of them cannot read, and they are, as a rule, utter savages and very extraordinary creatures.

“To qualify them for the work which they have to do, they require no intellectual
training; there is little room in it for skill, and less for judgment;
their wages, though rather high for boys, do not increase proportionately
as they grow up, and the majority of them cannot look for advancement to
the better paid and more responsible post of machine minder,
because while each machine has but one minder, it has at least two, and
often four boys attached to it.” [222]

As soon as they get too old for such child’s work, that is about 17 at the latest, they
are discharged from the printing establishments. They become recruits of
crime. Several attempts to procure them employment elsewhere, were rendered
of no avail by their ignorance and brutality, and by their mental and bodily
degradation.

As with the division of labour in the interior of the manufacturing
workshops, so it is with the division of labour in the interior of society.
So long as handicraft and manufacture form the general groundwork of social
production, the subjection of the producer to one branch exclusively, the
breaking up of the multifariousness of his employment, [223] is a necessary step in the development. On that groundwork each separate branch of production acquires empirically the form that is technically
suited to it, slowly perfects it, and, so soon as a given degree of maturity
has been reached, rapidly crystallises that form. The only thing, that
here and there causes a change, besides new raw material supplied by commerce,
is the gradual alteration of the instruments of labour. But their form,
too, once definitely settled by experience, petrifies, as is proved by
their being in many cases handed down in the same form by one generation
to another during thousands of years. A characteristic feature is, that,
even down into the eighteenth century, the different trades were called
“mysteries” (mystères); [224] into their secrets none but those duly initiated could penetrate. modern industry rent the
veil that concealed from men their own social process of production, and
that turned the various, spontaneously divided branches of production into
so many riddles, not only to outsiders, but even to the initiated. The
principle which it pursued, of resolving each process into its constituent
movements, without any regard to their possible execution by the hand of
man, created the new modern science of technology. The varied, apparently
unconnected, and petrified forms of the industrial processes now
resolved themselves into so many conscious and systematic applications
of natural science to the attainment of given useful effects. Technology
also discovered the few main fundamental forms of motion, which, despite
the diversity of the instruments used, are necessarily taken by every productive
action of the human body; just as the science of mechanics sees in the
most complicated machinery nothing but the continual repetition of the
simple mechanical powers.

Modern industry never looks upon and treats the existing form
of a process as final. The technical basis of that industry is therefore
revolutionary, while all earlier modes of production were essentially conservative.
[225] By means of machinery, chemical processes and
other methods, it is continually causing changes not only in the technical
basis of production, but also in the functions of the labourer, and in
the social combinations of the labour-process. At the same time, it thereby
also revolutionises the division of labour within the society, and incessantly
launches masses of capital and of workpeople from one branch of production
to another. But if modern industry, by its very nature, therefore necessitates
variation of labour, fluency of function, universal mobility of the labourer,
on the other hand, in its capitalistic form, it reproduces the old division
of labour with its ossified particularisations. We have seen how this absolute
contradiction between the technical necessities of modern industry, and
the social character inherent in its capitalistic form, dispels all fixity
and security in the situation of the labourer; how it constantly threatens,
by taking away the instruments of labour, to snatch from his hands his
means of subsistence, [226] and, by suppressing his
detail-function, to make him superfluous, we have seen, too, how this antagonism
vents its rage in the creation of that monstrosity, an industrial reserve
army, kept in misery in order to be always at the disposal of capital;
in the incessant human sacrifices from among the working-class, in the
most reckless squandering of labour-power and in the devastation caused
by a social anarchy which turns every economic progress into
a social calamity. This is the negative side. But if, on the one hand,
variation of work at present imposes itself after the manner of an overpowering
natural law, and with the blindly destructive action of a natural law that
meets with resistance [227] at all points, modern industry, on the other hand, through its catastrophes imposes the necessity of recognising,
as a fundamental law of production, variation of work, consequently fitness
of the labourer for varied work, consequently the greatest possible development
of his varied aptitudes. It becomes a question of life and death for society
to adapt the mode of production to the normal functioning of this law.
Modern Industry, indeed, compels society, under penalty of death, to replace
the detail-worker of to-day, grappled by life-long repetition of one and
the same trivial operation, and thus reduced to the mere fragment of a
man, by the fully developed individual, fit for a variety of labours, ready
to face any change of production, and to whom the different social functions
he performs, are but so many modes of giving free scope to his own natural
and acquired powers.

One step already spontaneously taken towards effecting this revolution
is the establishment of technical and agricultural schools, and of “écoles
d’enseignement professionnel,” in which the children of the working-men
receive some little instruction in technology and in the practical handling
of the various implements of labour. Though the Factory Act, that first
and meagre concession wrung from capital, is limited to combining elementary
education with work in the factory, there can be no doubt that when the
working-class comes into power, as inevitably it must, technical instruction,
both theoretical and practical, will take its proper place in the working-class
schools. There is also no doubt that such revolutionary ferments, the final
result of which is the abolition of the old division of labour, are diametrically
opposed to the capitalistic form of production, and to the economic status
of the labourer corresponding to that form. But the historical development
of the antagonisms, immanent in a given form of production, is the only
way in which that form of production can be dissolved and a new form established.
“Ne sutor ultra crepidam” — this nec plus ultra of handicraft wisdom became
sheer nonsense, from the moment the watchmaker Watt invented the steam-engine,
the barber Arkwright, the throstle, and the working-jeweller, Fulton, the
steamship. [228]

So long as Factory legislation is confined to regulating the labour
in factories, manufactories, &c., it is regarded as a mere interference
with the exploiting rights of capital. But when it comes to regulating
the so-called “home-labour,” [229] it is immediately viewed as a direct attack on the patria potestas, on parental authority.
The tender-hearted English Parliament long affected to shrink from taking
this step. The force of facts, however, compelled it at last to acknowledge
that modern industry, in overturning the economic foundation on which was
based the traditional family, and the family labour corresponding to it,
had also unloosened all traditional family ties. The rights of the children
had to be proclaimed. The final report of the Ch. Empl. Comm. of 1866,
states:

“It is unhappily, to a painful degree, apparent throughout the
whole of the evidence, that against no persons do the children of both
sexes so much require protection as against their parents.” The system
of unlimited exploitation of children’s labour in general and the so-called
home-labour in particular is "maintained only because the parents are able,
without check or control, to exercise this arbitrary and mischievous power
over their young and tender offspring.... Parents must not possess the
absolute power of making their children mere ‘machines to earn so much
weekly wage....’ The children and young persons, therefore, in all such
cases may justifiably claim from the legislature, as a natural right, that
an exemption should be secured to them, from what destroys prematurely
their physical strength, and lowers them in the scale of intellectual and
moral beings.” [230]

It was not, however, the misuse of parental authority that created the capitalistic exploitation, whether
direct or indirect, of children’s labour; but, on the contrary, it was
the capitalistic mode of exploitation which, by sweeping away the
economic basis of parental authority, made its exercise degenerate into
a mischievous misuse of power. However terrible and disgusting the dissolution,
under the capitalist system, of the old family ties may appear, nevertheless,
modern industry, by assigning as it does an important part in the process
of production, outside the domestic sphere, to women, to young persons,
and to children of both sexes, creates a new economic foundation for a
higher form of the family and of the relations between the sexes. It is,
of course, just as absurd to hold the Teutonic-Christian form of the family
to be absolute and final as it would be to apply that character to the
ancient Roman, the ancient Greek, or the Eastern forms which, moreover,
taken together form a series in historical development. Moreover, it is
obvious that the fact of the collective working group being composed of
individuals of both sexes and all ages, must necessarily, under suitable
conditions, become a source of humane development; although in its spontaneously
developed, brutal, capitalistic form, where the labourer exists for the
process of production, and not the process of production for the labourer,
that fact is a pestiferous source of corruption and slavery. [231]

The necessity for a generalisation of the Factory Acts, for transforming
them from an exceptional law relating to mechanical spinning and weaving
— those first creations of machinery — into a law affecting social production
as a whole, arose, as we have seen, from the mode in which modern industry
was historically developed. In the rear of that industry, the traditional
form of manufacture, of handicraft, and of domestic industry, is entirely
revolutionised; manufactures are constantly passing into the factory system,
and handicrafts into manufactures; and lastly, the spheres of handicraft and of the domestic industries become, in a, comparatively speaking, wonderfully
short time, dens of misery in which capitalistic exploitation obtains free
play for the wildest excesses. There are two circumstances that finally
turn the scale: first, the constantly recurring experience that capital,
so soon as it finds itself subject to legal control at one point, compensates
itself all the more recklessly at other points; [232] secondly, the cry of the capitalists for equality in the conditions of competition, i.e., for equal restrain on all exploitation of labour. [233] On this point let us listen to two heart-broken cries. Messrs. Cooksley of Bristol, nail and chain, &c., manufacturers, spontaneously introduced the regulations of the Factory Act into their business.

“As the old irregular system prevails in neighbouring works, the Messrs. Cooksley are subject
to the disadvantage of having their boys enticed to continue their labour
elsewhere after 6 p.m. ‘This,’ they naturally say, ‘is an unjustice and
loss to us, as it exhausts a portion of the boy’s strength, of which we
ought to have the full benefit’.” [234]

Mr. J. Simpson (paper box and bagmaker, London) states before the commissioners of the
Ch. Empl. Comm.:

“He would sign any petition for it” (legislative interference)... “As it was, he always felt restless at night, when he had closed his place,
lest others should be working later than him and getting away his orders.”

Summarising, the Ch. Empl. Comm. says:

“It would be unjust to the larger employers that their factories should be placed
under regulation, while the hours of labour in the smaller places in their
own branch of business were under no legislative restriction. And to the
injustice arising from the unfair conditions of competition, in regard
to hours, that would be created if the smaller places of work were exempt,
would be added the disadvantage to the larger manufacturers, of finding
their supply of juvenile and female labour drawn off to the places of work
exempt from legislation. Further, a stimulus would be given to the multiplication
of the smaller places of work, which are almost invariably the least favourable
to the health, comfort, education, and general improvement of the people.”

In its final report the Commission proposes to subject to the
Factory Act more than 1,400,000 children, young persons, and women, of
which number about one half are exploited in small industries and by the
so-called home-work. [237] It says,

“But if it should seem fit to Parliament to place the whole of that large number of children,
young persons and females under the protective legislation above adverted
to ... it cannot be doubted that such legislation would have a most beneficent
effect, not only upon the young and the feeble, who are its more immediate
objects, but upon the still larger body of adult workers, who would in
all these employments, both directly and indirectly, come immediately under
its influence. It would enforce upon them regular and moderate hours; it
would lead to their places of work being kept in a healthy and cleanly
state; it would therefore husband and improve that store of physical strength
on which their own well-being and that of the country so much depends;
it would save the rising generation from that overexertion at an early
age which undermines their constitutions and leads to premature decay;
finally, it would ensure them — at least up to the age of 13 — the opportunity
of receiving the elements of education, and would put an end to that utter
ignorance ... so faithfully exhibited in the Reports of our Assistant Commissioners,
and which cannot be regarded without the deepest pain, and a profound sense
of national degradation.” [238]

The Tory Cabinet [239] announced in the Speech
from the Throne, on February 5, 1867, that it had framed the proposals
of the Industrial Commission of Inquiry [240] into
Bills. To get that far, another twenty years of experimentum in corpore
vili had been required. Already in 1840 a Parliamentary Commission
of Inquiry on the labour of children had been appointed. Its Report, in
1842, unfolded, in the words of Nassau W. Senior,

“the most frightful picture
of avarice, selfishness and cruelty on the part of masters and of parents,
and of juvenile and infantile misery, degradation and destruction ever
presented.... It may be supposed that it describes the horrors of a past
age. But there is unhappily evidence that those horrors continue as intense
as they were. A pamphlet published by Hardwicke about 2 years ago states
that the abuses complained of in 1842, are in full bloom at the present
day. It is a strange proof of the general neglect of the morals and health
of the children of the working-class, that this report lay unnoticed for
20 years, during which the children, ‘bred up without the remotest sign
of comprehension as to what is meant by the term morals, who had neither
knowledge, nor religion, nor natural affection,’ were allowed to become
the parents of the present generation.” [241]

The social conditions having undergone a change, Parliament could
not venture to shelve the demands of the Commission of 1862, as it had
done those of the Commission of 1840. Hence in 1864, when the Commission
had not yet published more than a part of its reports, the earthenware
industries (including the potteries), makers of paperhangings, matches,
cartridges, and caps, and fustian cutters were made subject to the Acts
in force in the textile industries. In the Speech from the Throne, on 5th
February, 1867, the Tory Cabinet of the day announced the introduction
of Bills, founded on the final recommendations of the Commission, which
had completed its labours in 1866.

On the 15th August, 1867, the Factory Acts Extension Act, and
on the 21st August, the Workshops’ Regulation Act received the Royal Assent;
the former Act having reference to large industries, the latter to small.

The former applies to blast-furnaces, iron’ and copper mills,
foundries, machine shops, metal manufactories, gutta-percha works, paper
mills, glass-works, tobacco manufactories, letter-press printing (including
newspapers), book-binding, in short to all industrial establishments of
the above kind, in which 50 individuals or more are occupied simultaneously,
and for not less than 100 days during the year.

To give an idea of the extent of the sphere embraced by the Workshops’
Regulation Act in its application, we cite from its interpretation clause,
the following passages:

“Handicraft shall mean any manual labour exercised by way
of trade, or for purposes of gain in, or incidental to, the making any
article or part of an article, or in, or incidental to, the altering, repairing,
ornamenting, finishing, or otherwise adapting for sale any article.”

“Workshop shall mean any room or place whatever in the
open air or undercover, in which any handicraft is carried on by any child,
young person, or woman, and to which and over which the person by whom
such child, young person, or woman is employed, has the right of access
and control.”

“Employed shall mean occupied in any handicraft, whether
for wages or not, under a master or under a parent as herein defined.”

“Parent shall mean parent, guardian, or person, having
the custody of, or control over, any... child or young person.”

Clause 7, which imposes a penalty for employment of children,
young persons, and women, contrary to the provisions of the Act, subjects
to fines, not only the occupier of the workshop, whether parent or not,
but even

“the parent of, or the person deriving any direct benefit from
the labour of, or having the control over, the child, young person or woman.”

The Factory Acts Extension Act, which affects the large establishments,
derogates from the Factory Act by a crowd of vicious exceptions and cowardly
compromises with the masters.

The Workshops’ Regulation Act, wretched in all its details,
remained a dead letter in the hands of the municipal and local authorities
who were charged with its execution. When, in 1871, Parliament withdrew
from them this power, in order to confer it on the Factory Inspectors,
to whose province it thus added by a single stroke more than one hundred
thousand workshops, and three hundred brickworks, care was taken at the
same time not to add more than eight assistants to their already undermanned
staff. [242]

What strikes us, then, in the English legislation of 1867, is,
on the one hand, the necessity imposed on the parliament of the ruling
classes, of adopting in principle measures so extraordinary, and on so
great a scale, against the excesses of capitalistic exploitation; and on
the other hand, the hesitation, the repugnance, and the bad faith, with
which it lent itself to the task of carrying those measures into practice.

The Inquiry Commission of 1862 also proposed a new regulation
of the mining industry, an industry distinguished from others by the exceptional
characteristic that the interests of landlord and capitalist there join
hands. The antagonism of these two interests had been favourable to Factory
legislation, while on the other hand the absence of that antagonism is
sufficient to explain the delays and chicanery of the legislation on mines.

The Inquiry Commission of 1840 had made revelations so terrible,
so shocking, and creating such a scandal all over Europe, that to salve
its conscience Parliament passed the Mining Act of 1842, in which it limited
itself to forbidding the employment underground in mines of children under
10 years of age and females.

Then another Act, The Mines’ Inspecting Act of 1860, provides
that mines shall be inspected by public officers nominated specially for
that purpose, and that boys between the ages of 10 and 12 years shall not
be employed, unless they have a school certificate, or go to school for
a certain number of hours. This Act was a complete dead letter owing to
the ridiculously small number of inspectors, the meagreness of their powers,
and other causes that will become apparent as we proceed.

One of the most recent Blue books on mines is the “Report from
the Select Committee on Mines, together with &c. Evidence, 23rd July,
1866.” This Report is the work of a Parliamentary Committee selected from
members of the House of Commons, and authorised to summon and examine witnesses.
It is a thick folio volume in which the Report itself occupies
only five lines to this effect; that the committee has nothing to say,
and that more witnesses must be examined!

The mode of examining the witnesses reminds one of the cross-examination
of witnesses in English courts of justice, where the advocate tries, by
means of impudent, unexpected, equivocal and involved questions, put without
connexion, to intimidate, surprise, and confound the witness, and to give
a forced meaning to the answers extorted from him. In this inquiry the
members of the committee themselves are the cross-examiners, and among
them are to be found both mine-owners and mine exploiters; the witnesses
are mostly working coal miners. The whole farce is too characteristic of
the spirit of capital, not to call for a few extracts from this Report.
For the sake of conciseness I have classified them. I may also add that
every question and its answer are numbered in the English Blue books.

1. Employment in mines of boys of 10 years and upwards.
— In the mines the work, inclusive of going and returning, usually lasts
14 or 15 hours, sometimes even from 3, 4 and 5 o’clock a.m., till 5 and
6 o’clock p.m. (n. 6, 452, 83). The adults work in two shifts, of eight
hours each; but there is no alternation with the boys, on account of the
expense (n. 80, 203, 204). The younger boys are chiefly employed in opening
and shutting the ventilating doors in the various parts of the mine; the
older ones are employed on heavier work, in carrying coal, &c. (n.
122, 739, 1747). They work these long hours underground until their 18th
or 22nd year, when they are put to miner’s work proper (n. 161). Children
and young persons are at present worse treated, and harder worked than
at any previous period (n. 1663-1667). The miners demand almost unanimously
an act of Parliament prohibiting the employment in mines of children under
14. And now Hussey Vivian (himself an exploiter of mines) asks:

“Would not the opinion of the workman depend upon the poverty of the workman’s
family?” Mr. Bruce: “Do you not think it would be a very hard case, where
a parent had been injured, or where he was sickly, or where a father was
dead, and there was only a mother, to prevent a child between 12 and 14
earning 1s. 7d. a day for the good of the family? ... You must lay down
a general rule? ... Are you prepared to recommend legislation which would
prevent the employment of children under 12 and 14, whatever the state
of their parents might be?” “Yes.” (ns. 107-110). Vivian: “Supposing that
an enactment were passed preventing the employment of children under the
age of 14, would it not be probable that ... the parents of children would
seek employment for their children in other directions, for instance, in
manufacture?” “Not generally I think” (n. 174). Kinnaird: “Some of the
boys are keepers of doors?” “Yes.” “Is there not generally a very great
draught every time you open a door or close it?” “Yes, generally
there is.” “It sounds a very easy thing, but it is in fact rather a painful
one?” “He is imprisoned there just the same as if he was in a cell of a
gaol.” Bourgeois Vivian: “Whenever a boy is furnished with a lamp cannot
he read?” “Yes, he can read, if he finds himself in candles.... I suppose
he would be found fault with if he were discovered reading; he is there
to mind his business, he has a duty to perform, and he has to attend to
it in the first place, and I do not think it would be allowed down the
pit.” (ns. 139, 141, 143, 158, 160).

II. Education. — The working miners want a law for the
compulsory education of their children, as in factories. They declare the
clauses of the Act of 1860, which require a school certificate to be obtained
before employing boys of 10 and 12 years of age, to be quite illusory.
The examination of the witnesses on this subject is truly droll.

“Is it (the Act) required more against the masters or against the parents?” “It
is required against both I think.” “You cannot say whether it is required
against one more than against the other?” “No; I can hardly answer that
question.” (ns. 115, 116). “Does there appear to be any desire on the part
of the employers that the boys should have such hours as to enable them
to go to school?” “No; the hours are never shortened for that purpose.”
(n. 137) Mr. Kinnaird: “Should you say that the colliers generally improve
their education; have you any instances of men who have, since they began
to work, greatly improved their education, or do they not rather go back,
and lose any advantage that they may have gained?” “They generally become
worse: they do not improve; they acquire bad habits; they get on to drinking
and gambling and such like, and they go completely to wreck.” (n. 211.)
“Do they make any attempt of the kind (for providing instruction) by having
schools at night?” “There are few collieries where night schools are held,
and perhaps at those collieries a few boys do go to those schools; but
they are so physically exhausted that it is to no purpose that they go
there.” (n. 454.) “You are then,” concludes the bourgeois, “against education?”
“Most certainly not; but,” &c. (n. 443.) “But are they (the employers)
not compelled to demand them (school certificates)?” “By law they are;
but I am not aware that they are demanded by the employers.” “Then it is
your opinion, that this provision of the Act as to requiring certificates,
is not generally carried out in the collieries?” “It is not carried out.”
(ns. 443, 444.) “Do the men take a great interest in this question (of
education)?” “The majority of them do.” (n. 717.) “Are they very anxious
to see the law enforced?” “The majority are.” (n. 718.) “Do you think that
in this country any law that you pass ... can really be effectual unless
the population themselves assist in putting it into operation?” “Many a
man might wish to object to employing a boy, but he would perhaps become
marked by it.” (n. 720.) “Marked by whom?” “By his employers.”
(n. 721.) “Do you think that the employers would find any fault with a
man who obeyed the law... ?” “I believe they would.” (n. 722.) “Have
you ever heard of any workman objecting to employ a boy between 10 and
12, who could not write or read?” “It is not left to men’s option.” (n.
123.) “Would you call for the interference of Parliament?” “I think that
if anything effectual is to be done in the education of the colliers’ children,
it will have to be made compulsory by Act of Parliament.” (n. 1634.) “Would
you lay that obligation upon the colliers only, or all the workpeople of
Great Britain?” “I came to speak for the colliers.” (n. 1636.) “Why should
you distinguish them (colliery boys) from other boys?” “Because I think
they are an exception to the rule.” (n. 1638.) “In what respect?” “In a
physical respect.” (n. 1639.) “Why should education be more valuable to
them than to other classes of lads?” “I do not know that it is more valuable;
but through the over-exertion in mines there is less chance for the boys
that are employed there to get education, either at Sunday schools, or
at day schools.” (n. 1640.) “It is impossible to look at a question of
this sort absolutely by itself?” (n. 1644.) “Is there a sufficiency of
schools?” — “No"... (n. 1646). “If the State were to require that every
child should be sent to school, would there be schools for the children
to go to?” “No; but I think if the circumstances were to spring up, the
schools would be forthcoming.” (n. 1647.) “Some of them (the boys) cannot
read and write at all, I suppose?” “The majority cannot... The majority
of the men themselves cannot.” (ns. 705, 725.)

III. Employment of women. — Since 1842 women are no more
employed underground, but are occupied on the surface in loading the coal,
&c., in drawing the tubs to the canals and railway waggons, in sorting,
&c. Their numbers have considerably increased during the last three
or four years. (n. 1727.) They are mostly the wives, daughters, and widows
of the working miners, and their ages range from 12 to 50 or 60 years.
(ns. 645, 1779.)

“What is the feeling among the working miners as to the
employment of women?” “I think they generally condemn it.” (n. 648.) “What
objection do you see to it?” “I think it is degrading to the sex.” (n.
649.) “There is a peculiarity of dress?” “Yes ... it is rather a man’s
dress, and I believe in some cases, it drowns all sense of decency.” “Do
the women smoke?” “Some do.” “And I suppose it is very dirty work?” “Very
dirty.” “They get black and grimy?” “As black as those who are down the
mines ... I believe that a woman having children (and there are plenty
on the banks that have) cannot do her duty to her children.” (ns. 650-654,
701.) “Do you think that those widows could get employment anywhere else,
which would bring them in as much wages as that (from 8s. to 10s. a week)?”
“I cannot speak to that.” (n. 709.) “You would still be prepared, would you,”
(flint-hearted fellow!) “to prevent their obtaining a livelihood by these
means?” “I would.” (n. 710.) “What is the general feeling in the district
... as to the employment of women?” “The feeling is that it is degrading;
and we wish as miners to have more respect to the fair sex than to see
them placed on the pit bank... Some part of the work is very hard; some
of these girls have raised as much as 10 tons of stuff a day.” (ns. 1715,1717.)
“Do you think that the women employed about the collieries are less moral
than the women employed in the factories?” “. ..the percentage of bad ones
may be a little more ... than with the girls in the factories.” (n. 1237.)
“But you are not quite satisfied with the state of morality in the factories?”
“No.” (n. 1733.) “Would you prohibit the employment of women in factories
also?” “No, I would not.” (n. 1734.) “Why not?” “I think it a more honourable
occupation for them in the mills.” (n. 1735.) “Still it is injurious to
their morality, you think?” “Not so much as working on the pit bank; but
it is more on the social position I take it; I do not take it on its moral
ground alone. The degradation, in its social bearing on the girls, is deplorable
in the extreme. When these 400 or 500 girls become colliers’ wives, the
men suffer greatly from this degradation, and it causes them to leave their
homes and drink.” (n. 1736.) “You would be obliged to stop the employment
of women in the ironworks as well, would you not, if you stopped it in
the collieries?” “I cannot speak for any other trade.” (n. 1737.) “Can
you see any difference in the circumstances of women employed in ironworks,
and the circumstances of women employed above ground in collieries?” “I
have not ascertained anything as to that.” (n. 1740.) “Can you see anything
that makes a distinction between one class and the other?” “I have not
ascertained that, but I know from house to house visitation, that it is
a deplorable state of things in our district....” (n. 1741.) “Would you
interfere in every case with the employment of women where that employment
was degrading?” “It would become injurious, I think, in this way: the best
feelings of Englishmen have been gained from the instruction of a mother.
...” (n. 1750.) “That equally applies to agricultural employments, does
it not?” “Yes, but that is only for two seasons, and we have work all the
four seasons.” (n. 1751.) “They often work day and night, wet through to
the skin, their constitution undermined and their health ruined.” “You
have not inquired into that subject perhaps?” “I have certainly taken note
of it as I have gone along, and certainly I have seen nothing parallel
to the effects of the employment of women on the pit bank.... It is the
work of a man... a strong man.” (ns. 1753, 1793, 1794.) “Your feeling upon
the whole subject is that the better class of colliers who desire to raise
themselves and humanise themselves, instead of deriving help from the women,
are pulled down by them?” “Yes.” (n. 1808.) After some further
crooked questions from these bourgeois, the secret of their “sympathy”
for widows, poor families, &c., comes out at last. “The coal proprietor
appoints certain gentlemen to take the oversight of the workings, and it
is their policy, in order to receive approbation, to place things on the
most economical basis they can, and these girls are employed at from 1s.
up to 1s. 6d. a day, where a man at the rate of 2s. 6d. a day would have
to be employed.” (n. 1816.)

IV. Coroner’s inquests. —

“With regard to coroner’s inquests
in your district, have the workmen confidence in the proceedings at those
inquests when accidents occur?” “No; they have not.” (n. 360.) “Why not?”
“Chiefly because the men who are generally chosen, are men who know nothing
about mines and such like.” “Are not workmen summoned at all upon the juries?”
“Never but as witnesses to my knowledge.” “Who are the people who are generally
summoned upon these juries?” “Generally tradesmen in the neighbourhood
... from their circumstances they are sometimes liable to be influenced
by their employers ... the owners of the works. They are generally men
who have no knowledge, and can scarcely understand the witnesses who are
called before them, and the terms which are used and such like.” “Would
you have the jury composed of persons who had been employed in mining?”
“Yes, partly... they (the workmen) think that the verdict is not in accordance
with the evidence given generally.” (ns. 361, 364, 366, 368, 371, 375.)
“One great object in summoning a jury is to have an impartial one, is it
not?” “Yes, I should think so.” “Do you think that the juries would be
impartial if they were composed to a considerable extent of workmen?” “I
cannot see any motive which the workmen would have to act partially ...
they necessarily have a better knowledge of the operations in connexion
with the mine.” “You do not think there would be a tendency on the part
of the workmen to return unfairly severe verdicts?” “No, I think not.”
(ns. 378, 379, 380.)

V. False weights and measures. — The workmen demand to
be paid weekly instead of fortnightly, and by weight instead of by cubical
contents of the tubs; they also demand protection against the use of false
weights, &c. (n. 1071.)

“If the tubs were fraudulently increased, a
man could discontinue working by giving 14 days’ notice?” “But if he goes
to another place, there is the same thing going on there.” (n. 1071.) “But
he can leave that place where the wrong has been committed?” “It is general;
wherever he goes, he has to submit to it.” (n. 1072.) “Could a man leave
by giving 14 days’ notice?” “Yes.” (n. 1073.) And yet they are not satisfied!

VI. Inspection of mines. — Casualties from explosions
are not the only things the workmen suffer from. (n. 234, sqq.)

“Our men complained very much of the bad ventilation of the collieries ... the ventilation
is so bad in general that the men can scarcely breathe; they
are quite unfit for employment of any kind after they have been for a length
of time in connexion with their work; indeed, just at the part of the mine
where I am working, men have been obliged to leave their employment and
come home in consequence of that ... some of them have been out of work
for weeks just in consequence of the bad state of the ventilation where
there is not explosive gas ... there is plenty of air generally in the
main courses, yet pains are not taken to get air into the workings where
men are working.” “Why do you not apply to the inspector?” “To tell the
truth there are many men who are timid on that point; there have been cases
of men being sacrificed and losing their employment in consequence of applying
to the inspector.” “Why is he a marked man for having complained?” “Yes......
And he finds it difficult to get employment in another mine?” “Yes.” “Do
you think the mines in your neighbourhood are sufficiently inspected to
insure a compliance with the provisions of the Act?” “No; they are not
inspected at all ... the inspector has been down just once in the pit,
and it has been going seven years.... In the district to which I belong
there are not a sufficient number of inspectors. We have one old man more
than 70 years of age to inspect more than 130 collieries.” “You wish to
have a class of sub-inspectors?” “Yes.” (ns. 234, 241, 251, 254, 274, 275,
554, 276, 293.) “But do you think it would be possible for Government to
maintain such an army of inspectors as would be necessary to do all that
you want them to do, without information from the men?” “No, I should think
it would be next to impossible....” “It would be desirable the inspectors
should come oftener?” “Yes, and without being sent for.” (n. 280, 277.)
“Do you not think that the effect of having these inspectors examining
the collieries so frequently would be to shift the responsibility (!) of
supplying proper ventilation from the owners of the collieries to the Government
officials?” “No, I do not think that, I think that they should make it
their business to enforce the Acts which are already in existence.” (n.
285.) “When you speak of sub-inspectors, do you mean men at a less salary,
and of an inferior stamp to the present inspectors?” “I would not have
them inferior, if you could get them otherwise.” (n. 294.) “Do you merely
want more inspectors, or do you want a lower class of men as an inspector?”
“A man who would knock about, and see that things are kept right; a man
who would not be afraid of himself.” (n. 295.) “If you obtained your wish
in getting an inferior class of inspectors appointed, do you think that
there would be no danger from want of skill, &c?” “I think not, I think
that the Government would see after that, and have proper men in that position.”
(n. 297.)

This kind of examination becomes at last too much even for the
chairman of the committee, and he interrupts with the observation:

“You want a class of men who would look into all the details of the mine,
and would go into all the holes and corners, and go into the real facts
... they would report to the chief inspector, who would then bring his
scientific knowledge to bear on the facts they have stated?” (ns. 298,
299.) “Would it not entail very great expense if all these old workings
were kept ventilated?” “Yes, expense might be incurred, but life would
be at the same time protected.” (n. 531.)

A working miner objects to the
17th section of the Act of 1860; he says,

“At the present time, if the
inspector of mines finds a part of the mine unfit to work in, he has to
report it to the mine-owner and the Home Secretary. After doing that, there
is given to the owner 20 days to look over the matter; at the end of 20
days he has the power to refuse making any alteration in the mine; but,
when he refuses, the mine-owner writes to the Home Secretary, at the same
time nominating five engineers, and from those five engineers named by
the mine-owner himself, the Home Secretary appoints one, I think, as arbitrator,
or appoints arbitrators from them; now we think in that case the mine-owner
virtually appoints his own arbitrator.” (n. 581.)

Bourgeois examiner, himself a mine-owner:

“But ... is this a merely speculative objection?” (n. 586.)
“Then you have a very poor opinion of the integrity of mining engineers?”
“It is most certainly unjust and inequitable.” (n. 588.) “Do not mining
engineers possess a sort of public character, and do not you think that
they are above making such a partial decision as you apprehend?” “I do
not wish to answer such a question as that with respect to the personal
character of those men. I believe that in many cases they would act very
partially indeed, and that it ought not to be in their hands to do so,
where men’s lives are at stake.” (n. 589.)

This same bourgeois is not ashamed
to put this question: “Do you not think that the mine-owner also suffers
loss from an explosion?” Finally, “Are not you workmen in Lancashire able
to take care of your own interests without calling in the Government to
help you?” “No.” (n. 1042.)

In the year 1865 there were 3,217 coal mines in Great Britain,
and 12 inspectors. A Yorkshire mine-owner himself calculates (Times,
26th January, 1867), that putting on one side their office work, which
absorbs all their time, each mine can be visited but once in ten years
by an inspector. No wonder that explosions have increased progressively,
both in number and extent (sometimes with a loss of 200-300 men), during
the last ten years. These are the beauties of “free” capitalist production!
[This sentence has been added to the English text in conformity with
the 4th German edition. — Ed.]

The very defective Act, passed in 1872, is the first that
regulates the hours of labour of the children employed in mines, and makes
exploiters and owners, to a certain extent, responsible for so-called accidents.

The Royal Commission appointed in 1867 to inquire into the employment
in agriculture of children, young persons, and women, has published some
very important reports. Several attempts to apply the principles of the
Factory Acts, but in a modified form, to agriculture have been made, but
have so far resulted in complete failure. All that I wish to draw attention
to here is the existence of an irresistible tendency towards the general
application of those principles.

If the general extension of factory legislation to all trades
for the purpose of protecting the working-class both in mind and body has
become inevitable, on the other hand, as we have already pointed out, that
extension hastens on the general conversion of numerous isolated small
industries into a few combined industries carried on upon a large scale;
it therefore accelerates the concentration of capital and the exclusive
predominance of the factory system. It destroys both the ancient and the
transitional forms, behind which the dominion of capital is still in part
concealed, and replaces them by the direct and open sway of capital; but
thereby it also generalises the direct opposition to this sway. While in
each individual workshop it enforces uniformity, regularity, order, and
economy, it increases by the immense spur which the limitation and regulation
of the working-day give to technical improvement, the anarchy and the catastrophes
of capitalist production as a whole, the intensity of labour, and the competition
of machinery with the labourer. By the destruction of petty and domestic
industries it destroys the last resort of the “redundant population,” and
with it the sole remaining safety-valve of the whole social mechanism.
By maturing the material conditions, and the combination on a social scale
of the processes of production, it matures the contradictions and antagonisms
of the capitalist form of production, and thereby provides, along with
the elements for the formation of a new society, the forces for exploding
the old one. [243]

## SECTION 10. MODERN INDUSTRY AND AGRICULTURE

The revolution called forth by modern industry in
agriculture, and in the social relations of agricultural producers, will
be investigated later on. In this place, we shall merely indicate a few
results by way of anticipation. If the use of machinery in agriculture
is for the most part free from the injurious physical effect it has on
the factory operative, its action in superseding the labourers is more
intense, and finds less resistance, as we shall see later in detail. In
the counties of Cambridge and Suffolk, for example, the area of cultivated
land has extended very much within the last 20 years (up to 1868), while
in the same period the rural population has diminished, not only relatively,
but absolutely. In the United States it is as yet only virtually that agricultural
machines replace labourers; in other words, they allow of the cultivation
by the farmer of a larger surface, but do not actually expel the labourers
employed. In 1861 the number of persons occupied in England and Wales in
the manufacture of agricultural machines was 1,034, whilst the number of
agricultural labourers employed in the use of agricultural machines and
steam-engines did not exceed 1,205.

In the sphere of agriculture, modern industry has a more
revolutionary effect than elsewhere, for this reason, that it annihilates
the peasant, that bulwark of the old society, and replaces him by the wage-labourer.
Thus the desire for social changes, and the class antagonisms are brought
to the same level in the country as in the towns. The irrational, old-fashioned
methods of agriculture are replaced by scientific ones. Capitalist production
completely tears asunder the old bond of union which held together agriculture
and manufacture in their infancy. But at the same time it creates the material
conditions for a higher synthesis in the future, viz., the union of agriculture
and industry on the basis of the more perfected forms they have each acquired
during their temporary separation. Capitalist production, by collecting
the population in great centres, and causing an ever-increasing preponderance
of town population, on the one hand concentrates the historical motive
power of society; on the other hand, it disturbs the circulation of matter
between man and the soil, i.e., prevents the return to the soil of its
elements consumed by man in the form of food and clothing; it therefore
violates the conditions necessary to lasting fertility of the soil. By
this action it destroys at the same time the health of the town labourer
and the intellectual life of the rural labourer. [244]
But while upsetting the naturally grown conditions for the maintenance
of that circulation of matter, it imperiously calls for its restoration
as a system, as a regulating law of social production, and under a form
appropriate to the full development of the human race. In agriculture as
in manufacture, the transformation of production under the sway of capital,
means, at the same time, the martyrdom of the producer; the instrument
of labour becomes the means of enslaving, exploiting, and impoverishing
the labourer; the social combination and organisation of labour-processes
is turned into an organised mode of crushing out the workman’s individual
vitality, freedom, and independence. The dispersion of the rural labourers
over larger areas breaks their power of resistance while concentration
increases that of the town operatives. In modern agriculture, as in the
urban industries, the increased productiveness and quantity of the labour
set in motion are bought at the cost of laying waste and consuming by disease
labour-power itself. Moreover, all progress in capitalistic agriculture
is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the labourer,
but of robbing the soil; all progress in increasing the fertility of the
soil for a given time, is a progress towards ruining the lasting sources
of that fertility. The more a country starts its development on the foundation
of modern industry, like the United States, for example, the more rapid
is this process of destruction. [245] Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology, and the combining together of various processes
into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth — the
soil and the labourer.

Footnotes

1. Mill should have said, “of any human being not fed by other people’s labour,” for, without doubt, machinery has greatly increased the number of well-to-do idlers.

2. See, for instance, Hutton: “Course of Mathematics.”

3. “From this point of view we may draw a sharp line of distinction between a tool and a machine: spades, hammers, chisels, &c., combinations of levers and of screws, in all of which, no matter how complicated they may be in other respects, man is the motive power, ... all this falls under the idea of a tool; but the plough, which is drawn by animal power, and wind-mills, &c., must be classed among machines.” (Wilhelm Schulz: “Die Bewegung der Produktion.” Zürich, 1843, p. 38.) In many respects a book to be recommended.

4. Before his time, spinning machines, although very imperfect ones, had already been used, and Italy was probably the country of their first appearance. A critical history of technology would show how little any of the inventions of the 18th century are the work of a single individual. Hitherto there is no such book. Darwin has interested us in the history of Nature’s Technology, i.e., in the formation of the organs of plants and animals, which organs serve as instruments of production for sustaining life. Does not the history of the productive organs of man, of organs that are the material basis of all social organisation, deserve equal attention? And would not such a history be easier to compile, since, as Vico says, human history differs from natural history in this, that we have made the former, but not the latter? Technology discloses man’s mode of dealing with Nature, the process of production by which he sustains his life, and thereby also lays bare the mode of formation of his social relations, and of the mental conceptions that flow from them. Every history of religion, even, that fails to take account of this material basis, is uncritical. It is, in reality, much easier to discover by analysis the earthly core of the misty creations of religion, than, conversely, it is, to develop from the actual relations of life the corresponding celestialised forms of those relations. The latter method is the only materialistic, and therefore the only scientific one. The weak points in the abstract materialism of natural science, a materialism that excludes history and its process, are at once evident from the abstract and ideological conceptions of its spokesmen, whenever they venture beyond the bounds of their own speciality.

5. Especially in the original form of the power-loom, we recognise, at the first glance, the ancient loom. In its modern form, the power-loom has undergone essential alterations.

6. It is only during the last 15 years (i.e., since about 1850), that a constantly increasing portion of these machine tools have been made in England by machinery, and that not by the same manufacturers who make the machines. Instances of machines for the fabrication of these mechanical tools are, the automatic bobbin-making engine, the cardsetting engine, shuttle-making machines, and machines for forging mule and throstle spindles.

7. Moses says: “Thou shalt not muzzle the ox that treads the corn.” The Christian philanthropists of Germany, on the contrary, fastened a wooden board round the necks of the serfs, whom they used as a motive power for grinding, in order to prevent them from putting flour into their mouths with their hands.

8. It was partly the want of streams with a good fall on them, and partly their battles with superabundance of water in other respects, that compelled the Dutch to resort to wind as a motive power. The wind-mill itself they got from Germany, where its invention was the origin of a pretty squabble between the nobles, the priests, and the emperor, as to which of those three the wind “belonged.” The air makes bondage, was the cry in Germany, at the same time that the wind was making Holland free. What it reduced to bondage in this case, was not the Dutchman, but the land for the Dutchman. In 1836, 12,000 windmills of 6,000 horse-power were still employed in Holland, to prevent two-thirds of the land from being reconverted into morasses.

9. It was, indeed, very much improved by Watt’s first so-called single acting engine; but, in this form, it continued to be a mere machine for raising water, and the liquor from salt mines.

10. “The union of all these simple instruments, set in motion by a single motor, constitutes a machine.” (Babbage, l.c.)

11. In January, 1861, John C. Morton read before the Society of Arts a paper on “The forces employed in agriculture.” He there states: “Every improvement that furthers the uniformity of the land makes the steam-engine more and more applicable to the production of pure mechanical force.... Horse-power is requisite wherever crooked fences and other obstructions prevent uniform action. These obstructions are vanishing day by day. For operations that demand more exercise of will than actual force, the only power applicable is that controlled every instant by the human mind-in other words, man-power.” Mr. Morton then reduces steam-power, horse-power, and man-power, to the unit in general use for steam-engines, namely, the force required to raise 33,000 lbs. one foot in one minute, and reckons the cost of one horse-power from a steam-engine to be 3d., and from a horse to be 5½d. per hour. Further, if a horse must fully maintain its health, it can work no more than 8 hours a day. Three at the least out of every seven horses used on tillage land during the year can be dispensed with by using steam-power, at an expense not greater than that which, the horses dispensed with, would cost during the 3 or 4 months in which alone they can be used effectively. Lastly, steam-power, in those agricultural operations in which it can be employed, improves, in comparison with horse-power, the quality of the work. To do the work of a steam-engine would require 66 men, at a total cost of 15s. an hour, and to do the work of a horse, 32 men, at a total cost of 8s. an hour.

12. Faulhaber, 1625; De Caus, 1688.

13. The modern turbine frees the industrial exploitation of water-power from many of its former fetters.

14. “In the early days of textile manufactures, the locality of the factory depended upon the existence of a stream having a sufficient fall to turn a water-wheel; and, although the establishment of the water-mills was the commencement of the breaking up of the domestic system of manufacture, yet the mills necessarily situated upon streams, and frequently at considerable distances the one from the other, formed part of a rural, rather than an urban system; and it was not until the introduction of the steam-power as a substitute for the stream that factories were congregated in towns, and localities where the coal and water required for the production of steam were found in sufficient quantities. The steam-engine is the parent of manufacturing towns.” (A. Redgrave in “Reports of the Insp. of Fact., 30th April, 1860,” p. 36.)

15. From the standpoint of division of labour in Manufacture, weaving was not simple, but, on the contrary, complicated manual labour; and consequently the power-loom is a machine that does very complicated work. It is altogether erroneous to suppose that modern machinery originally appropriated those operations alone, which division of labour had simplified. Spinning and weaving were, during the manufacturing period, split up into new species, and the implements were modified and improved; but the labour itself was in no way divided, and it retained its handicraft character. It is not the labour, but the instrument of labour, that serves as the starting-point of the machine.

16. Before the epoch of Mechanical Industry, the wool manufacture was the predominating manufacture in England. Hence it was in this industry that, in the first half of the 18th century, the most experiments were made. Cotton, which required less careful preparation for its treatment by machinery, derived the benefit of the experience gained on wool, just as afterwards the manipulation of wool by machinery was developed on the lines of cotton-spinning and weaving by machinery. It was only during the 10 years immediately preceding 1866, that isolated details of the wool manufacture, such as woolcombing, were incorporated in the factory system. “The application of power to the process of combing wool ... extensively in operation since the introduction of the combingmachine, especially Lister’s ... undoubtedly had the effect of throwing a very large number of men out of work. Wool was formerly combed by hand, most frequently in the cottage of the comber. It is now very generally combed in the factory, and hand-labour is superseded, except in some particular kinds of work, in which hand-combed wool is still preferred. Many of the hand-combers found employment in the factories, but the produce of the hand-combers bears so small a proportion to that of the machine, that the employment of a very large number of combers has passed away.” (“Rep. of lnsp. of Fact. for 31st Oct., 1856,” p. 16.)

17. “The principle of the factory system, then, is to substitute ... the partition of a process into its essential constituents, for the division or graduation of labour among artisans.” (Andrew Ure: “The Philosophy of Manufactures,” Lond., 1835, p. 20.)

18. The power-loom was at first made chiefly of wood; in its improved modern form it is made of iron. To what an extent the old forms of the instruments of production influenced their new forms at first starting, is shown by, amongst other things, the most superficial comparison of the present power-loom with the old one, of the modern blowing apparatus of a blast-furnace with the first inefficient mechanical reproduction of the ordinary bellows, and perhaps more strikingly than in any other way, by the attempts before the invention of the present locomotive, to construct a locomotive that actually had two feet, which after the fashion of a horse, it raised alternately from the ground. It is only after considerable development of the science of mechanics, and accumulated practical experience, that the form of a machine becomes settled entirely in accordance with mechanical principles, and emancipated from the traditional form of the tool that gave rise to it.

19. Eli Whitney’s cotton gin had until very recent times undergone less essential changes than any other machine of the 18th century. It is only during the last decade (i.e., since 1856) that another American, Mr. Emery, of Albany, New York, has rendered Whitney’s gin antiquated by an improvement as simple as it is effective.

20. “The Industry of Nations,” Lond., 1855, Part II., p. 239. This work also remarks: ‘Simple and outwardly unimportant as this appendage to lathes may appear, it is not, we believe, averring too much to state, that its influence in improving and extending the use of machinery has been as great as that produced by Watt’s improvements of the steam-engine itself. Its introduction went at once to perfect all machinery, to cheapen it, and to stimulate invention and improvement.”

21. One of these machines, used for forging paddle-wheel shafts in London, is called “Thor.” It forges a shaft of 16½ tons with as much ease as a blacksmith forges a horseshoe.

22. Wood-working machines that are also capable of being employed on a small scale are mostly American inventions.

23. Science, generally speaking, costs the capitalist nothing, a fact that by no means hinders him from exploiting it. The science of others is as much annexed by capital as the labour of others. Capitalistic appropriation and personal appropriation, whether of science or of material wealth, are, however, totally different things. Dr. Ure himself deplores the gross ignorance of mechanical science existing among his dear machinery-exploiting manufacturers, and Liebig can a tale unfold about the astounding ignorance of chemistry displayed by English chemical manufacturers.

24. Ricardo lays such stress on this effect of machinery (of which, in other connexions, he takes no more notice than he does of the general distinction between the labour process and the process of creating surplus-value), that he occasionally loses sight of the value given up by machines to the product, and puts machines on the same footing as natural forces. Thus “Adam Smith nowhere undervalues the services which the natural agents and machinery perform for us, but he very justly distinguishes the nature of the value which they add to commodities... as they perform their work gratuitously, the assistance which they afford us, adds nothing to value in exchange.” (Ric., l.c., pp. 336, 337.) This observation of Ricardo is of course correct in so far as it is directed against J. B. Say, who imagines that machines render the “service” of creating value which forms a part of “profits.”

25. A horse-power is equal to a force of 33,000 foot-pounds per minute, i.e., to a force that raises 33,000 pounds one foot in a minute, or one pound 33,000 feet. This is the horse power meant in the text. In ordinary language, and also here and there in quotations in this work, a distinction is drawn between the “nominal” and the “commercial” or “indicated” horse-power of the same engine. The old or nominal horse-power is calculated exclusively from the length of piston-stroke, and the diameter of the cylinder, and leaves pressure of steam and piston speed out of consideration. It expresses practically this: This engine would be one of 50 horse-power, if it were driven with the same low pressure of steam, and the same slow piston speed, as in the days of Boulton and Watt. But the two latter factors have increased enormously since those days. In order to measure the mechanical force exerted today by an engine, an indicator has been invented which shows the pressure of the steam in the cylinder. The piston speed is easily ascertained. Thus the “indicated” or “commercial” horse-power of an engine is expressed by a mathematical formula, involving diameter of cylinder, length of stroke, piston speed, and steam pressure, simultaneously, and showing what multiple of 33,000 pounds is really raised by the engine in a minute. Hence, one “nominal” horse-power may exert three, four, or even five “indicated” or “real” horse-powers. This observation is made for the purpose of explaining various citations in the subsequent pages. — F. E.

26. The reader who is imbued with capitalist notions will naturally miss here the “interest” that the machine, in proportion to its capital value, adds to the product. It is, however, easily seen that since a machine no more creates new value than any other part of constant capital, it cannot add any value under the name of “interest.” It is also evident that here, where we are treating of the production of surplus-value, we cannot assume a priori the existence of any part of that value under the name of interest. The capitalist mode of calculating, which appears, primâ facie, absurd, and repugnant to the laws of the creation of value, will be explained in the third book of this work.

27. This portion of value which is added by the machinery, decreases both absolutely and relatively, when the machinery does away with horses and other animals that are employed as mere moving forces, and not as machines for changing the form of matter. It may here be incidentally observed, that Descartes, in defining animals as mere machines, saw with eyes of the manufacturing period, while to eyes of the middle ages, animals were assistants to man, as they were later to Von Haller in his “Restauration der Staatswissenschaften.” That Descartes, like Bacon, anticipated an alteration in the form of production, and the practical subjugation of Nature by Man, as a result of the altered methods of thought, is plain from his “Discours de la Méthode.” He there says: “Il est possible (by the methods he introduced in philosophy) de parvenir à des connaissances fort utiles à la vie, et qu’au lieu de cette philosophie spéculative qu’on enseigne dans les écoles, on en peut trouver une pratique, par laquelle, connaissant la force et les actions du feu, de l’eau, de l’air, des astres, et de tous les autres corps qui nous environnent, aussi distinctement que nous connaissons les divers métiers de nos artisans, nous les pourrions employer en même façon à tous les usages auxquels ils sont propres, et ainsi nous rendre comme maîtres et possesseurs de la nature” and thus “contribuer au perfectionnement de la vie humaine.” [It is possible to attain knowledge very useful in life and, in place of the speculative philosophy taught in the schools, one can find a practical philosophy by which, given that we know the powers and the effectiveness of fire, water, air, the stars, and all the other bodies that surround us, as well and as accurately as we know the various trades of our craftsmen, we shall be able to employ them in the same manner as the latter to all uses to which they are adapted, and thus as it were make ourselves the masters and possessors of nature, and thus contributing to the perfection of human life.] In the preface to Sir Dudley North’s “Discourses upon Trade” (1691) it is stated, that Descartes’ method had begun to free Political Economy from the old fables and superstitious notions of gold, trade, &c. On the whole, however, the early English economists sided with Bacon and Hobbes as their philosophers; while, at a later period, the philosopher kat' exochín [dominant] of Political Economy in England, France, and Italy, was Locke.

28. According to the annual report (1863) of the Essen chamber of commerce, there was produced in 1862, at the cast-steel works of Krupp, with its 161 furnaces, thirty-two steam-engines (in the year 1800 this was about the number of all the steam-engines working in Manchester), and fourteen steam-hammers (representing in all 1,236 horse-power) forty-nine forges, 203 tool-machines, and about 2,400 workmen – thirteen million pounds of cast steel. Here there are not two workmen to each horse-power.

29. Babbage estimates that in Java the spinning labour alone adds 117% to the value of the cotton. At the same period (1832) the total value added to the cotton by machinery and labour in the fine-spinning industry, amounted to about 33% of the value of the cotton. (“On the Economy of Machinery,” pp. 165, 166.)

30. Machine printing also economises colour.

31. See Paper read by Dr. Watson, Reporter on Products to the Government of India, before the Society of Arts, 17th April, 1860.

32. “These mute agents (machines) are always the produce of much less labour than that which they displace, even when they are of the same money-value.” (Ricardo, l.c., p. 40.)

33. Hence in a communistic society there would be a very different scope for the employment of machinery than there can be in a bourgeois society.

34. “Employers of labour would not unnecessarily retain two sets of children under thirteen.... In fact one class of manufacturers, the spinners of woollen yarn, now rarely employ children under thirteen years of age, i.e., half-timers. They have introduced improved and new machinery of various kinds, which altogether supersedes the employment of children (i.e., under 13 years); f. i., I will mention one process as an illustration of this diminution in the number of children, wherein by the addition of an apparatus, called a piecing machine, to existing machines, the work of six or four half-timers, according to the peculiarity of each machine, can be performed by one young person (over 13 years)... the half-time system ‘stimulated’ the invention of the piecing machine.” (Reports of Insp. of Fact. for 31st Oct., 1858.)

35. “Wretch” is the recognised term in English Political Economy for the agricultural labourer.

36. “Machinery ... can frequently not be employed until labour (he means wages) rises.” (Ricardo, l.c., p. 479.)

37. See “Report of the Social Science Congress, at Edinburgh.” Oct., 1863.

38. Dr. Edward Smith, during the cotton crisis caused by the American Civil War, was sent by the English Government to Lancashire, Cheshire, and other places, to report on the sanitary condition of the cotton operatives. He reported, that from a hygienic point of view, and apart from the banishment of the operatives from the factory atmosphere, the crisis had several advantages. The women now had sufficient leisure to give their infants the breast, instead of poisoning them with “Godfrey’s cordial.” They had time to learn to cook. Unfortunately the acquisition of this art occurred at a time when they had nothing to cook. But from this we see how capital, for the purposes of its self-expansion, has usurped the labour necessary in the home of the family. This crisis was also utilised to teach sewing to the daughters of the workmen in sewing schools. An American revolution and a universal crisis, in order that the working girls, who spin for the whole world, might learn to sew!

39. “The numerical increase of labourers has been great, through the growing substitution of female for male, and above all, of childish for adult labour. Three girls of 13, at wages of from 6 shillings to 8 shillings a week, have replaced the one man of mature age, of wages varying from 18 shillings to 45 shillings.” (Th. de Quincey: “The Logic of Political Econ.,” London, 1844. Note to p. 147.) Since certain family functions, such as nursing and suckling children, cannot be entirely suppressed, the mothers confiscated by capital, must try substitutes of some sort. Domestic work, such as sewing and mending, must be replaced by the purchase of ready-made articles. Hence, the diminished expenditure of labour in the house is accompanied by an increased expenditure of money. The cost of keeping the family increases, and balances the greater income. In addition to this, economy and judgment in the consumption and preparation of the means of subsistence becomes impossible. Abundant material relating to these facts, which are concealed by official Political Economy, is to be found in the Reports of the Inspectors of Factories, of the Children’s Employment Commission, and more especially in the Reports on Public Health.

40. In striking contrast with the great fact, that the shortening of the hours of labour of women and children in English factories was exacted from capital by the male operatives, we find in the latest reports of the Children’s Employment Commission traits of the operative parents in relation to the traffic in children, that are truly revolting and thoroughly like slave-dealing. But the Pharisee of a capitalist, as may be seen from the same reports, denounces this brutality which he himself creates, perpetuates, and exploits, and which he moreover baptises “freedom of labour.” “Infant labour has been called into aid ... even to work for their own daily bread. Without strength to endure such disproportionate toil, without instruction to guide their future life, they have been thrown into a situation physically and morally polluted. The Jewish historian has remarked upon the overthrow of Jerusalem by Titus that it was no wonder it should have been destroyed, with such a signal destruction, when an inhuman mother sacrificed her own offspring to satisfy the cravings of absolute hunger.” (“Public Economy Concentrated.” Carlisle, 1833, p. 66.)

41. A. Redgrave in “Reports of lnsp. of Fact. for 31st October, 1858,” pp. 40, 41.

42. “Children’s Employment Commission, Fifth Report,” London, 1866, p. 81, n. 31. [Added in the 4th German edition. — The Bethnal Green silk industry is now almost destroyed. — F. E.]

43. “Children’s Employment Commission, Third Report,” London, 1864, p. 53, n. 15.

44. l.c., Fifth Report, p. 22, n. 137.

45. “Sixth Report on Public Health,” Lond., 1864, p. 34.

46. “It (the inquiry of 1861)... showed, moreover, that while, with the described circumstances, infants perish under the neglect and mismanagement which their mothers’ occupations imply, the mothers become to a grievous extent denaturalised towards their offspring – commonly not troubling themselves much at the death, and even sometimes... taking direct measures to insure it.” (l.c.)

47. l.c., p. 454.

48. l.c., pp. 454-463. “Report by Dr. Henry Julian Hunter on the excessive mortality of infants in some rural districts of England.”

49. l.c., p. 35 and pp. 455, 456.

50. l.c., p. 456.

51. In the agricultural as well as in the factory districts the consumption of opium among the grown-up labourers, both male and female, is extending daily. “To push the sale of opiate... is the great aim of some enterprising wholesale merchants. By druggists it is considered the leading article.” (l.c., p. 459.) Infants that take opiates “shrank up into little old men,” or “wizened like little monkeys.” (l.c., p. 460.) We here see how India and China avenged themselves on England.

52. l.c., p. 37.

53. “Rep. of Insp. of Fact. for 31st Oct., 1862,” p. 59. Mr. Baker was formerly a doctor.

54. L. Horner in “Reports of Insp. of Fact. for 30th June, 1857,” p. 17.

55. L. Horner in “Rep. of lnsp. of Fact. for 31st Oct., 1855,” pp. 18, 19.

56. Sir John Kincaid in “Rep. of Insp. of Fact. for 31st Oct., 1858,” pp. 31, 32.

57. L. Horner in “Reports, &c., for 31st Oct., 1857,” pp. 17, 18.

58. Sir J. Kincaid in “Reports, &c., 31st Oct., 1856,” p. 66.

59. A. Redgrave in “Rep. of Insp. of Fact., 31st. Oct., 1857,” pp. 41-42. In those industries where the Factory Act proper (not the Print Works Act referred to in the text) has been in force for some time, the obstacles in the way of the education clauses have, in recent years, been overcome. In industries not under the Act, the views of Mr. J. Geddes, a glass manufacturer, still extensively prevail. He informed Mr. White, one of the Inquiry Commissioners: “As far as I can see, the greater amount of education which a part of the working-class has enjoyed for some years past is an evil. It is dangerous, because it makes them independent.” (“Children’s Empl. Comm., Fourth Report,” Lond., 1865, p. 253.)

60. “Mr. E., a manufacturer ... informed me that he employed females exclusively at his power-looms ... gives a decided preference to married females, especially those who have families at home dependent on them for support; they are attentive, docile, more so than unmarried females, and are compelled to use their utmost exertions to procure the necessaries of life. Thus are the virtues, the peculiar virtues of the female character to be perverted to her injury – thus all that is most dutiful and tender in her nature is made a means of her bondage and suffering.” (Ten Hours’ Factory Bill. The Speech of Lord Ashley, March 15th, Lond., 1844, p. 20.)

61. “Since the general introduction of machinery, human nature has been forced far beyond its average strength.” (Rob. Owen: “Observations on the Effects of the Manufacturing System,” 2nd Ed., London, 1817.)

62. The English, who have a tendency to look upon the earliest form of appearance of a thing as the cause of its existence, are in the habit of attributing the long hours of work in factories to the extensive kidnapping of children, practised by capitalists in the infancy of the factory system, on workhouses and orphanages, by means of which robbery, unresisting material for exploitation was procured. Thus, for instance, Fielden, himself a manufacturer, says: “It is evident that the long hours of work were brought about by the circumstance of so great a number of destitute children being supplied from different parts of the country, that the masters were independent of the hands, and that having once established the custom by means of the miserable materials they had procured in this way, they could impose it on their neighbours with the greater facility.” (J. Fielden: “The Curse of the Factory System,” Lond., 1836, p. 11.) With reference to the labour of women, Saunders, the factory inspector, says in his report of 1844: “Amongst the female operatives there are some women who, for many weeks in succession, except for a few days, are employed from 6 a.m. till midnight, with less than 2 hours for meals, so that on 5 days of the week they have only 6 hours left out of the 24, for going to and from their homes and resting in bed.”

63. “Occasion... injury to the delicate moving parts of metallic mechanism by inaction.” (Ure, l.c., p. 281.)

64. The Manchester Spinner (Times, 26th Nov., 1862) before referred to says in relation to this subject: “It (namely, the “allowance for deterioration of machinery") is also intended to cover the loss which is constantly arising from the superseding of machines before they are worn out, by others of a new and better construction.”

65. “It has been estimated, roughly, that the first individual of a newly-invented machine will cost about five times as much as the construction of the second.” Babbage, l.c., p. 349.

66. “The improvements which took place not long ago in frames for making patent net were so great that a machine in good repair which had cost £1,200, sold a few years after for £60 ... improvements succeeded each other so rapidly, that machines which had never been finished were abandoned in the hands of their makers, because new improvements had superseded their utility.” (Babbage, l.c., p. 233.) In these stormy, go-ahead times, therefore, the tulle manufacturers soon extended the working-day, by means of double sets of hands, from the original 8 hours to 24.

67. “It is self-evident, that, amid the ebbings and flowings of the markets and the alternate expansions and contractions of demand, occasions will constantly recur, in which the manufacturer may employ additional floating capital without employing additional fixed capital... if additional quantities of raw material can be worked up without incurring an additional expense for buildings and machinery.” (R. Torrens: “On Wages and Combination.” London, 1834, p. 64.)

68. This circumstance is mentioned only for the sake of completeness, for I shall not consider the rate of profit, i.e., the ratio of the surplus-value to the total capital advanced, until I come to the third book.

69. Senior, “Letters on the Factory Act.” London, 1837, pp. 13, 14.

70. “The great proportion of fixed to circulating capital ... makes long hours of work desirable.” With the increased use of machinery, &c., “the motives to long hours of work will become greater, as the only means by which a large proportion of fixed capital can be made profitable.” (l.c., pp. 11-13.) “There are certain expenses upon a mill which go on in the same proportion whether the mill be running short or full time, as, for instance, rent rates, and taxes, insurance against fire, wages of several permanent servants, deterioration of machinery, with various other charges upon a manufacturing establishment, the proportion of which to profits increases as the production decreases.” (“Rep. of Insp. of Fact. for 31st Oct., 1862,” p. 19.)

71. Why it is, that the capitalist, and also the political economists who are imbued with his views, are unconscious of this immanent contradiction, will appear from the first part of the third book.

72. It is one of the greatest merits of Ricardo to have seen in machinery not only the means of producing commodities, but of creating a “redundant population.”

73. F. Biese. “Die Philosophie des Aristoteles,” Vol. 2. Berlin, 1842, p. 408.

74. I give below the translation of this poem by Stolberg, because it brings into relief, quite in the spirit of former quotations referring to division of labour, the antithesis between the views of the ancients and the moderns. “Spare the hand that grinds the corn, Oh, miller girls, and softly sleep. Let Chanticleer announce the morn in vain! Deo has commanded the work of the girls to be done by the Nymphs, and now they skip lightly over the wheels, so that the shaken axles revolve with their spokes and pull round the load of the revolving stones. Let us live the life of our fathers, and let us rest from work and enjoy the gifts that the Goddess sends us.”

“Schonet der mahlenden Hand, o Müllerinnen, und schlafet

Sanft! es verkünde der Hahn euch den Morgen umsonst!

Däo hat die Arbeit der Mädchen den Nymphen befohlen,

Und itzt hüpfen sie leicht über die Räder dahin,

Daß die erschütterten Achsen mit ihren Speichen sich wälzen,

Und im Kreise die Last drehen des wälzenden Steins.

Laßt uns leben das Leben der Väter, und laßt uns der Gaben

Arbeitslos uns freun, welche die Göttin uns schenkt.”

(Gedichte aus dem Griechischen übersetzt von Christian Graf zu Stolberg, Hamburg, 1782.)

75. There are, of course, always differences, in the intensities of the labour in various industries. But these differences are, as Adam Smith has shown, compensated to a partial extent by minor circumstances, peculiar to each sort of labour. Labour-time, as a measure of value, is not, however, affected in this case, except in so far as the duration of labour, and the degree of its intensity, are two antithetical and mutually exclusive expressions for one and the same quantity of labour.

76. Especially by piece-work, a form we shall investigate in Part VI. of this book.

77. See “Rep. of lnsp. of Fact. for 31st October, 1865.”

78. Rep. of Insp. of Fact. for 1844 and the quarter ending 30th April, 1845, pp. 20-21.

79. l.c., p. 19. Since the wages for piece-work were unaltered, the weekly wages depended on the quantity produced.

80. l.c., p. 20.

81. The moral element played an important part in the above experiments. The workpeople told the factory inspector: “We work with more spirit, we have the reward ever before us of getting away sooner at night, and one active and cheerful spirit pervades the whole mill, from the youngest piecer to the oldest hand, and we can greatly help each other.” (l.c., p. 21.)

82. John Fielden, l.c., p. 32.

83. Lord Ashley, l.c., pp. 6-9, passim.

84. Rep. of Insp. of Fact. for Quarter ending 30th September, 1844, and from 1st October, 1844, to 30th April, 1845, p. 20.

85. l.c., p. 22.

86. “Rep. of lnsp. of Fact. for 31st October, 1862,” p. 62.

87. This was altered in the “Parliamentary Return” of 1862. In it the actual horse-power of the modern steam engines and water wheels appears in place of the nominal. The doubling spindles, too, are no longer included in the spinning spindles (as was the case in the “Returns” of 1839, 1850, and 1856); further, in the case of woollen mills, the number of “gigs” is added, a distinction made between jute and hemp mills on the one hand and flax mills on the other, and finally stocking-weaving is for the first time inserted in the report.

88. “Rep. of Insp. of Fact. for 31st October, 1856,” pp. 13-14, 20 and 1852, p. 23.

89. l.c., pp. 14-15.

90. l.c., P. 20.

91. “Reports, &c., for 31st October, 1858,” pp. 9-10. Compare “Reports, &c., for 30th April, 1860,” p. 30, sqq.

92. “Reports of lnsp. of Fact. for 31st Oct., 1862,” pp. 100 and 130.

93. On 2 modern power-looms a weaver now makes in a week of 60 hours 26 pieces of certain quality, length, and breadth; while on the old power-looms he could make no more than 4 such pieces. The cost of weaving a piece of such cloth had already soon after 1850 fallen from 2s. 9d. to 5 1/8d.

“Thirty years ago (1841) one spinner with three placers was not required to attend to more than one pair of mules with 300-324 spindles. At the present time (1871) he has to mind with the help of 5 piecers 2,200 spindles, and produces not less than seven times as much yarn as in 1841.” (Alex. Redgrave, Factory Inspector – in the Journal of Arts, 5th January, 1872.)

94. “Rep. of Insp. of Fact. for 31st Oct., 1861,” pp. 25, 26.

95. The agitation for a working-day of 8 hours has now (1867) begun in Lancashire among the factory operatives.

96. The following few figures indicate the increase in the “factories” of the United Kingdom since 1848:

Quantity

Exported.

1848.Quantity

Exported.

1851.Quantity

Exported.

1860.Quantity

Exported.

1865.

COTTON

Cotton yarnlbs.

135,831,162lbs.

143,966,106lbs.

197,343,655lbs.

103,751,455

Sewing thread—lbs.

4,392,176lbs.

6,297,554lbs.

4,648,611

Cotton clothyds.

1,091,373,930yds.

1,543,161,789yds.

2,776,218,427yds.

2,015,237,851

FLAX & HEMP

Yarnlbs.

11,722,182lbs.

18,841,326lbs.

31,210,612lbs.

36,777,334

Clothyds.

88,901,519yds.

129,106,753yds.

143,996,773yds.

247,012.529

SILK

Yarnlbs.

466,825lbs.

462,513lbs.

897,402lbs.

812,589

Cloth—yds.

1,181,455yds.

1,307,293yds.

2,869,837

WOOL

Woollen and

Worsted yarns—lbs.

14,670,880lbs.

27,533,968lbs.

31,669,267

Cloth—yds.

151,231,153yds.

190,371,507yds.

278,837,418

Value

Exported.

1848.

£Value

Exported.

1851.

£Value

Exported.

1860.

£Value

Exported.

1865.

£

COTTON

Yarn5,927,8316,634,0269,870,87510,351,049

Cloth16,753,36923,454,81042,141,50546,903,796

FLAX & HEMP

Yarn493,449951,4261,801,2722,505,497

Cloth2,802,7894,107,3964,804,8039,155,358

SILK

Yarn77,789196,380826,107768,064

Cloth—1,130,3981,587,3031,409,221

WOOL

Yarn776,9751,484,5443,843,4505,424,047

Cloth5,733,8288,377,18312,156,99820,102,259

See the Blue books “Statistical Abstract of the United Kingdom,” Nos. 8 and 13. Lond., 1861 and 1866. In Lancashire the number of mills increased only 4 per cent. between 1839 and 1850; 19 per cent. between 1850 and 1856; and 33 per cent. between 1856 and 1862; while the persons employed in them during each of the above periods of It years increased absolutely, but diminished relatively. (See “Rep. of Insp. of Fact., for 31st Oct., 1862,” p. 63.) The cotton trade preponderates in Lancashire. We may form an idea of the stupendous nature of the cotton trade in that district when we consider that, of the gross number of textile factories in the United Kingdom, it absorbs 45.2 per cent., of the spindles 83.3 per cent., of the power-looms 81.4 per cent., of the mechanical horse-power 72.6 per cent., and of the total number of persons employed 58.2 per cent. (l.c., pp. 62-63.)

97. Ure, l.c., p. 18.

98. Ure, l.c., P. 3 1. See Karl Marx, l.c., pp. 140-141.

99. It looks very like intentional misleading by statistics (which misleading it would be possible to prove in detail in other cases too), when the English factory legislation excludes from its operation the class of labourers last mentioned in the text, while the parliamentary returns expressly include in the category of factory operatives, not only engineers, mechanics, &c., but also managers, salesmen, messengers, warehousemen, packers, &c., in short everybody, except the owner of the factory himself.

100. Ure grants this. He says, “in case of need,” the workmen can be moved at the will of the manager from one machine to another, and he triumphantly exclaims: “Such a change is in flat contradiction with the old routine, that divides the labour, and to one workman assigns the task of fashioning the head of a needle, to another the sharpening of the point.” He had much better have asked himself, why this “old routine” is departed from in the automatic factory, only “in case of need. “

101. When distress is very great, as, for instance, during the American Civil War, the factory operative is now and then set by the Bourgeois to do the roughest of work, such as road-making, &c.. The English “ateliers nationaux” [national workshops] of 1862 and the following years, established for the benefit of the destitute cotton operatives, differ from the French of 1848 in this, that in the latter the workmen had to do unproductive work at the expense of the state, in the former they had to do productive municipal work to the advantage of the bourgeois, and that, too, cheaper than the regular workmen, with whom they were thus thrown into competition. “The physical appearance of the cotton operatives is unquestionably improved. This I attribute ... as to the men, to outdoor labour on public works.” (“Rep. of Insp. of Fact., 31st Oct., 1863,” p. 59.) The writer here alludes to the Preston factory operatives, who were employed on Preston Moor.

102. An example: The various mechanical apparatus introduced since the Act of 1844 into woollen mills, for replacing the labour of children. So soon as it shall happen that the children of the manufacturers themselves have to go through a course of schooling as helpers in the mill, this almost unexplored territory of mechanics will soon make remarkable progress. “Of machinery, perhaps self-acting mules are as dangerous as any other kind. Most of the accidents from them happen to little children, from their creeping under the mules to sweep the floor whilst the mules are in motion. Several ‘minders’ have been fined for this offence, but without much general benefit. If machine makers would only invent a self-sweeper, by whose use the necessity for these little children to creep under the machinery might be prevented, it would be a happy addition to our protective measures.” (“Reports of Insp. of Fact. for 31st. Oct., 1866,” p. 63.)

103. So much then for Proudhon’s wonderful idea: he “construes” machinery not as a synthesis of instruments of labour, but as a synthesis of detail operations for the benefit of the labourer himself.

104. F. Engels, l.c., p. 217. Even an ordinary and optimist Free-trader, like Mr. Molinari, goes so far as to say, “Un homme s’use plus vite en surveillant, quinze heures par jour, l’évolution uniforme d’un mécanisme, qu’en exercant, dans le même espace de temps, sa force physique. Ce travail de surveillance qui servirait peut-être d’utile gymnastique à l’intelligence, s’il n’était pas trop prolongé, détruit à la longue, par son excès, et l’intelligence, et le corps même.” [A man becomes exhausted more quickly when he watches over the uniform motion of mechanism for fifteen hours a day, than when he applies his physical strength over the same period of time. This labour of surveillance, which might perhaps serve as a useful exercise for the mind, if it did not go on too long, destroys both the mind and the body in the long run, through excessive application] (G. de Molinari: “Études Économiques.” Paris, 1846.)

105. F. Engels, l.c., p. 216.

106. “The Master Spinners’ and Manufacturers’ Defence Fund. Report of the Committee.” Manchester, 1854, p. 17. We shall see hereafter, that the “master” can sing quite another song, when he is threatened with the loss of his “living” automaton.

107. Ure, l.c., p. 15. Whoever knows the life history of Arkwright, will never dub this barber-genius “noble.” Of all the great inventors of the 18th century, he was incontestably the greatest thiever of other people’s inventions and the meanest fellow.

108. “The slavery in which the bourgeoisie has bound the proletariat, comes nowhere more plainly
into daylight than in the factory system. In it all freedom comes to an end both at law and in fact.
The workman must be in the factory at half past five. If he come a few minutes late, he is punished;
if he come 10 minutes late, he is not allowed to enter until after breakfast, and thus loses a
quarter of a day’s wage. He must eat, drink and sleep at word of command.... The despotic bell calls
him from his bed, calls him from breakfast and dinner. And how does he fare in the mill? There the
master is the absolute law-giver. He makes what regulations he pleases; he alters and makes
additions to his code at pleasure; and if he insert the veriest nonsense, the courts say to the
workman: Since you have entered into this contract voluntarily, you must now carry it out .... These
workmen are condemned to live, from their ninth year till their death, under this mental and bodily
torture.” (F. Engels, l.c., p. 217, sq.) What, “the courts say,” I will illustrate by two examples.
One occurs at Sheffield at the end of 1866. In that town a workman had engaged himself for 2 years
in a steelworks. In consequence of a quarrel with his employer he left the works, and declared that
under no circumstances would he work for that master any more. He was prosecuted for breach of
contract, and condemned to two months’ imprisonment. (If the master break the contract, he can be
proceeded against only in a civil action, and risks nothing but money damages.) After the workman
has served his two months, the master invites him to return to the works, pursuant to the contract.
Workman says: No, he has already been punished for the breach. The master prosecutes again, the
court condemns again, although one of the judges, Mr. Shee, publicly denounces this as a legal
monstrosity, by which a man can periodically, as long as he lives, be punished over and over again
for the same offence or crime. This judgment was given not by the “Great Unpaid,” the provincial
Dogberries, but by one of the highest courts of justice in London. — [Added in the 4th German
edition. — This has now been done away with. With few exceptions, e.g., when public gas-works are
involved, the worker in England is now put on an equal footing with the employer in case of breach
of contract and can be sued only civilly. — F. E.] The second case occurs in Wiltshire at the end of
November 1863. About 30 power-loom weavers, in the employment of one Harrup, a cloth manufacturer at
Leower’s Mill, Westbury Leigh, struck work because master Harrup indulged in the agreeable habit of
making deductions from their wages for being late in the morning; 6d. for 2 minutes; 1s. for 3
minutes, and 1s. 6d. for ten minutes. This is at the rate of 9s. per hour, and £4 10s. 0d. per diem;
while the wages of the weavers on the average of a year, never exceeded 10s. to 12s. weekly. Harrup
also appointed a boy to announce the starting time by a whistle, which he often did before six
o’clock in the morning: and if the hands were not all there at the moment the whistle ceased, the
doors were closed, and those hands who were outside were fined: and as there was no clock on the
premises, the unfortunate hands were at the mercy of the young Harrup-inspired time-keeper. The
hands on strike, mothers of families as well as girls, offered to resume work if the timekeeper were
replaced by a clock, and a more reasonable scale of fines were introduced. Harrup summoned I9 women
and girls before the magistrates for breach of contract. To the utter indignation of all present,
they were each mulcted in a fine of 6d. and 2s. 6d. for costs. Harrup was followed from the court by
a crowd of people who hissed him. A favourite operation with manufacturers is to punish the
workpeople by deductions made from their wages on account of faults in the material worked on. This
method gave rise in 1866 to a general strike in the English pottery districts. The reports of the
Ch. Empl. Com. (1863-1866), give cases where the worker not only receives no wages, but becomes, by
means of his labour, and of the penal regulations, the debtor to boot, of his worthy master. The
late cotton crisis also furnished edifying examples of the sagacity shown by the factory autocrats
in making deductions from wages. Mr. R. Baker, the Inspector of Factories, says, “I have myself had
lately to direct prosecutions against one cotton mill occupier for having in these pinching and
painful times deducted 10d. a piece from some of the young workers employed by him, for the
surgeon’s certificate (for which he himself had only paid 6d.), when only allowed by the law to
deduct 3d., and by custom nothing at all .... And I have been informed of another, who, in order to
keep without the law, but to attain the same object, charges the poor children who work for him a
shilling each, as a fee for learning them the art and mystery of cotton spinning, so soon as they
are declared by the surgeon fit and proper persons for that occupation. There may therefore be
undercurrent causes for such extraordinary exhibitions as strikes, not only wherever they arise, but
particularly at such times as the present, which without explanation, render them inexplicable to
the public understanding.” He alludes here to a strike of power-loom weavers at Darwen, June, 1863.
(“Reports of Insp. of Fact. for 30 April, 1863,” pp. 50-51.) The reports always go beyond their
official dates.

109. The protection afforded by the Factory Acts against dangerous machinery has had a beneficial effect. “But ... there are other sources of accident which did not exist twenty years since; one especially, viz., the increased speed of the machinery. Wheels, rollers, spindles and shuttles are now propelled at increased and increasing rates; fingers must be quicker and defter in their movements to take up the broken thread, for, if placed with hesitation or carelessness, they are sacrificed.... A large number of accidents are caused by the eagerness of the workpeople to get through their work expeditiously. It must be remembered that it is of the highest importance to manufacturers that their machinery should be in motion, i.e., producing yarns and goods. Every minute’s stoppage is not only a loss of power, but of production, and the workpeople are urged by the overlookers, who are interested in the quantity of work turned off, to keep the machinery in motion, and it is no less important to those of the operatives who are paid by the weight or piece, that the machines should be kept in motion. Consequently, although it is strictly forbidden in many, nay in most factories, that machinery should be cleaned while in motion, it is nevertheless the constant practice in most, if not in all, that the workpeople do, unreproved, pick out waste, wipe rollers and wheels, &c., while their frames are in motion. Thus from this cause only, 906 accidents have occurred during the six months.... Although a great deal of cleaning is constantly going on day by day, yet Saturday is generally the day set apart for the thorough cleaning of the machinery, and a great deal of this is done while the machinery is in motion.” Since cleaning is not paid for, the workpeople seek to get done with it as speedily as possible. Hence “the number of accidents which occur on Fridays, and especially on Saturdays, is much larger than on any other day. On the former day the excess is nearly 12 per cent. over the average number of the four first days of the week, and on the latter day the excess is 25 per cent. over the average of the preceding five days; or, if the number of working-hours on Saturday being taken into account — 7½ hours on Saturday as compared with 10½ on other days — there is an excess of 65 per cent. on Saturdays over the average of the other five days.” (“Rep. of Insp. of Fact., 31st Oct., 1866,” pp. 9, 15, 16, 17.)

110. In Part I. of Book III. I shall give an account of a recent campaign by the English manufacturers against the Clauses in the Factory Acts that protect the “hands” against dangerous machinery. For the present, let this one quotation from the official report of Leonard Horner suffice: “I have heard some mill-owners speak with inexcusable levity of some of the accidents; such, for instance, as the loss of a finger being a trifling matter. A working-man’s living and prospects depend so much upon his fingers, that any loss of them is a very serious matter to him. When I have heard such inconsiderate remarks made, I have usually put this question: Suppose you were in want of an additional workman, and two were to apply, both equally well qualified in other respects, but one had lost a thumb or a forefinger, which would you engage? There never was a hesitation as to the answer....” The manufacturers have “mistaken prejudices against what they have heard represented as a pseudo-philanthropic legislation.” (“Rep. of Insp. of Fact., 31st Oct., 1855.") These manufacturers are clever folk, and not without reason were they enthusiastic for the slave-holders’ rebellion.

111. In those factories that have been longest subject to the Factory Acts, with their compulsory limitation of the hours of labour, and other regulations, many of the older abuses have vanished. The very improvement of the machinery demands to a certain extent “improved construction of the buildings,” and this is an advantage to the workpeople. (See “Rep. of Insp. of Fact. for 31st Oct., 1863,” p. 109.)

112. See amongst others, John Houghton: “Husbandry and Trade Improved.” London, 1727. “The Advantages of the East India Trade, 1720.” John Bellers, l.c. “The masters and their workmen are, unhappily, in a perpetual war with each other. The invariable object of the former is to get their work done as cheaply as possible; and they do not fail to employ every artifice to this purpose, whilst the latter are equally attentive to every occasion of distressing their masters into a compliance with higher demands.” (“An Enquiry into the Causes of the Present High Price of Provisions,” pp. 61-62. Author, the Rev. Nathaniel Forster, quite on the side of the workmen.)

113. In old-fashioned manufactures the revolts of the workpeople against machinery, even to this day, occasionally assume a savage character, as in the case of the Sheffield file cutters in 1865.

114. Sir James Steuart also understands machinery quite in this sense. “Je considère donc les machines comme des moyens d’augmenter (virtuellement) le nombre des gens industrieux qu’on n’est pas obligé de nourrir.... En quoi l’effet d’une machine diffère-t-il de celui de nouveaux habitants?” (French trans. t. I., l. I., ch. XIX.) [I thus consider machines to be a means to (virtually) increase the number of industrious individuals we are not forced to feed. In what way does the effect of a machine differ from that of new inhabitants?] More naïve is Petty, who says, it replaces “Polygamy.” The above point of view is, at the most, admissible only for some parts of the United States. On the other hand, “machinery can seldom be used with success to abridge the labour of an individual; more time would be lost in its construction than could be saved by its application. It is only really useful when it acts on great masses, when a single machine can assist the work of thousands. It is accordingly in the most populous countries, where there are most idle men, that it is most abundant.... It is not called into use by a scarcity of men, but by the facility with which they can be brought to work in masses.” (Piercy Ravenstone: “Thoughts on the Funding System and its Effects.” London, 1824, p. 45.)

115. [Note in the 4th German edition. — This applies to Germany too. Where in our country agriculture on a large scale exists, hence particularly in the East, it has become possible only in consequence of the clearing of the estates (“Bauernlegen"), a practice which became widerspread in the 16th century and was particularly so since 1648. — F. E.]

116. “Machinery and labour are in constant competition.” Ricardo, l.c., p. 479.

117. The competition between hand-weaving and power-weaving in England, before the passing of the Poor Law of 1833, was prolonged by supplementing the wages, which had fallen considerably below the minimum, with parish relief. “The Rev. Mr. Turner was, in 1827, rector of Wilmslow in Cheshire, a manufacturing district. The questions of the Committee of Emigration, and Mr. Turner’s answers, show how the competition of human labour is maintained against machinery. ‘Question: Has not the use of the power-loom superseded the use of the hand-loom? Answer: Undoubtedly; it would have superseded them much more than it has done, if the hand-loom weavers were not enabled to submit to a reduction of wages.’ ‘Question: But in submitting he has accepted wages which are insufficient to support him, and looks to parochial contribution as the remainder of his support? Answer: Yes, and in fact the competition between the hand-loom and the power-loom is maintained out of the poor-rates.’ Thus degrading pauperism or expatriation, is the benefit which the industrious receive from the introduction of machinery, to be reduced from the respectable and in some degree independent mechanic, to the cringing wretch who lives on the debasing bread of charity. This they call a temporary inconvenience.” (“A Prize Essay on the Comparative Merits of Competition and Co-operation.” Lond., 1834, p. 29.)

118. “The same cause which may increase the revenue of the country” (i.e., as Ricardo explains in the same passage, the revenues of landlords and capitalists, whose wealth, from the economic point of view, forms the Wealth of the Nation), “may at the same time render the population redundant and deteriorate the condition of the labourer.” (Ricardo, l.c., p. 469.) “The constant aim and the tendency of every improvement in machinery is, in fact, to do away entirely with the labour of man, or to lessen its price by substituting the labour of women and children for that of grown-up men, or of unskilled for that of skilled workmen.” (Ure, l.c., t. I., p. 35.)

119. “Rep. Insp. Fact. for 31st October, 1858,” p. 43.

120. “Rep. lnsp. Fact. for 31st October, 1856,” p. 15.

121. Ure, l.c., p. 19. “The great advantage of the machinery employed in brick-making consists in this, that the employer is made entirely independent of skilled labourers.” (“Ch. Empl. Comm. V. Report,” Lond., 1866, p. 130, n. 46.) Mr. A. Sturrock, superintendent of the machine department of the Great Northern Railway, says, with regard to the building of locomotives, &c.: “Expensive English workmen are being less used every day. The production of the workshops of England is being increased by the use of improved tools and these tools are again served by a low class of labour.... Formerly their skilled labour necessarily produced all the parts of engines. Now the parts of engines are produced by labour with less skill, but with good tools. By tools, I mean engineer’s machinery, lathes, planing machines, drills, and so on.” (“Royal Com. on Railways,” Lond., 1867, Minutes of Evidence, n. 17, 862 and 17, 863.)

122. Ure, l.c., p. 20.

123. Ure, l.c., p. 321.

124. Ure, l.c., p. 23.

125. “Rep. Insp. Fact., 31st Oct., 1863,” pp. 108,109.

126. l.c., p. 109. The rapid improvement of machinery, during the crisis, allowed the English manufacturers, immediately after the termination of the American Civil War, and almost in no time, to glut the markets of the world again. Cloth, during the last six months of 1866, was almost unsaleable. Thereupon began the consignment of goods to India and China, thus naturally making the glut more intense. At the beginning of 1867 the manufacturers resorted to their usual way out of the difficulty, viz., reducing wages 5 per cent. The workpeople resisted, and said that the only remedy was to work short time, 4 days a-week; and their theory was the correct one. After holding out for some time, the self-elected captains of industry had to make up their minds to short time, with reduced wages in some places, and in others without.

127. “The relation of master and man in the blown-flint bottle trades amounts to a chronic strike.” Hence the impetus given to the manufacture of pressed glass, in which the chief operations are done by machinery. One firm in Newcastle, who formerly produced 350,000 lbs. of blown-flint glass, now produces in its place 3,000,500 lbs. of pressed glass. (“Ch. Empl. Comm., Fourth Rep.,” 1865, pp. 262-263.)

128. Gaskell. “The Manufacturing Population of England,” London, 1833, pp. 3, 4.

129. W. Fairbairn discovered several very important applications of machinery to the construction of machines, in consequence of strikes in his own workshops.

130. Ure, l.c., pp. 368-370

131. Ure, l.c., pp. 368, 7, 370, 280, 281, 321, 370, 475.

132. Ricardo originally was also of this opinion, but afterwards expressly disclaimed it with the scientific impartiality and love of truth characteristic of him. See l.c., ch. xxxi. “On Machinery.”

133. Nota bene. My illustration is entirely on the lines of those given by the above named economists.

134. A disciple of Ricardo, in answer to the insipidities of J. B. Say, remarks on this point: “Where division of labour is well developed, the skill of the labourer is available only in that particular branch in which it has been acquired; he himself is a sort of machine. It does not therefore help matters one jot, to repeat in parrot fashion, that things have a tendency to find their level. On looking around us we cannot but see, that they are unable to find their level for a long time; and that when they do find it, the level is always lower than at the commencement of the process.” (“An Inquiry into those Principles Respecting the Nature of Demand,” &c., Lond. 1821, p. 72.)

135. MacCulloch, amongst others, is a past master in this pretentious cretinism. “If,” he says, with the affected naïveté of a child of 8 years, “if it be advantageous, to develop the skill of the workman more and more, so that he is capable of producing, with the same or with a less quantity of labour, a constantly increasing quantity of commodities, it must also be advantageous, that he should avail himself of the help of such machinery as will assist him most effectively in the attainment of this result.” (MacCulloch: “Princ. of Pol. Econ.,” Lond. 1830, p. 166.)

136. “The inventor of the spinning machine has ruined India, a fact, however, that touches us but little.” A. Thiers: De la propriété. — M. Thiers here confounds the spinning machine with the power-loom, “a fact, however, that touches us but little.”

137. According to the census of 1861 (Vol. II., Lond., 1863), the number of people employed in coal mines in England and Wales, amounted to 246,613 of which 73,545 were under, and 173,067 were over 20 years. Of those under 20, 835 were between 5 and 10 years, 30,701 between 10 and 15 years, 42,010 between 15 and 19 years. The number employed in iron, copper, lead, tin, and other mines of every description, was 319, 222.

138. In England and Wales, in 1861, there were employed in making machinery, 60,807 persons, including the masters and their clerks, &c., also all agents and business people connected with this industry, but excluding the makers of small machines, such as sewing-machines, &c., as also the makers of the operative parts of machines, such as spindles. The total number of civil engineers amounted to 3,329.

139. Since iron is one of the most important raw materials; let me here state that, in 1861, there were in England and Wales 125,771 operative iron founders, of whom 123,430 were males, 2,341 females. Of the former 30,810 were under, and 92,620 over 20 years.

140. “A family of four grown-up persons, with two children as winders, earned at the end of the last, and the beginning of the present century, by ten hours’ daily labour, £4 a week. If the work was very pressing, they could earn more.... Before that, they had always suffered from a deficient supply of yarn.” (Gaskell, l.c., pp. 25-27.)

141. F. Engels, in “Lage, &c.,” points out the miserable condition of a large number of those who work on these very articles of luxury. See also numerous instances in the “Reports of the Children’s Employment Commission.”

142. In 1861, in England and Wales, there were 94,665 sailors in the merchant service.

143. Of these only 177,596 are males above 13 years of age.

144. Of these, 30,501 are females.

145. Of these, 137,447 males. None are included in the 1,208,648 who do not serve in private houses. Between 1861 and 1870 the number of male servants nearly doubled itself. It increased to 267,671. In the year 1847 there were 2,694 gamekeepers (for the landlords’ preserves), in 1869 there were 4,921. The young servant girls in the houses of the London lower middle class are in common parlance called “slaveys.”

146. Ganilh, on the contrary, considers the final result of the factory system to be an absolutely less number of operatives, at whose expense an increased number of “gens honnêtes” live and develop their well-known “perfectibilité perfectible.” Little as he understands the movement of production, at least he feels, that machinery must needs be a very fatal institution, if its introduction converts busy workmen into paupers, and its development calls more slaves of labour into existence than it has suppressed. It is not possible to bring out the cretinism of his standpoint, except by his own words: “Les classes condamnées à produire et à consommer diminuent, et les classes qui dirigent le travail, qui soulagent, consolent, et éclairent toute la population, se multiplient ... et s’approprient tous les bienfaits qui résultent de la diminution des frais du travail, de l’abondance des productions, et du bon marché des consommations. Dans cette direction, l’espéce humaine s’élève aux plus hautes conceptions du génie, pénètre dans les profoundeurs mystérieuses de la religion, établit les principes salutaires de la morale (which consists in ‘s’approprier tous les beinfaits,’ &c.), les lois tutélaires de la liberté (liberty of ‘les classes condamnées à produire?’) et du pouvoir, de l’obéissance et de la justice, du devoir et de la l’humanité.” [The classes condemned to produce and to consume diminish, and the classes which direct labour, which relieve, console and enlighten the whole population, multiply ... and appropriate all the benefits which result from the diminution of the costs of labour, from the abundance of products and the cheapness of consumer goods. In this way, the human species rises to the highest creations of genius, penetrates the mysterious depths of religion, and establishes the salutory principles of morality, the laws for the protection of liberty, and power, of obedience and justice, of obligation and humanity] For this twaddle, see “Des Systèmes d’Economie Politique, &c., Par M. Ch. Ganilh,” 2ème ed., Paris, 1821, t. I, p. 224, and see p. 212.

147. “Reports of Insp. of Fact., 31 Oct., 1865,” p. 58, sq. At the same time, however, means of employment for an increased number of hands was ready in 110 new mills with 11,625 looms, 628,576 spindles and 2,695 total horse-power of steam and water (l.c.).

148. “Reports, &c., for 31 Oct., 1862,” p. 79. At the end of 1871, Mr. A. Redgrave, the factory inspector, in a lecture given at Bradford, in the New Mechanics’ Institution, said: “What has struck me for some time past is the altered appearance of the woollen factories. Formerly they were filled with women and children, now machinery seems to do all the work. At my asking for an explanation of this from a manufacturer, he gave me the following: ‘Under the old system I employed 63 persons; after the introduction of improved machinery I reduced my hands to 33, and lately, in consequence of new and extensive alterations, I have been in a position to reduce those 33 to 13’.”

149. See “Reports, &c., 31 Oct., 1856,” p. 16.

150. “The sufferings of the hand-loom weavers were the subject of an inquiry by a Royal Commission, but although their distress was acknowledged and lamented, the amelioration of their condition was left, and probably necessarily so, to the chances and changes of time, which it may now be hoped” [20 years later!] “have nearly obliterated those miseries, and not improbably by the present great extention of the power-loom.” (“Rep. Insp. of Fact., 31 Oct., 1856,” p. 15.)

151. Other ways in which machinery affects the production of raw material will be mentioned in the third book.

152.

EXPORT OF COTTON FROM INDIA TO GREAT BRITAIN.

1846. —34,540,143 lbs.

1860. — 204,141,168 lbs.

1865. — 445,947,600 lbs.

EXPORT OF WOOL FROM INDIA TO GREAT BRITAIN.

1846. — 4,570,581 lbs.

1860. — 20,214,173 lbs.

1865. — 20,679,111 lbs.

153.

EXPORT OF WOOL FROM THE CAPE TO GREAT BRITAIN.

1846. — 2,958,457 lbs.

1860. — 16,574,345 lbs.

1865. — 29,920,623 lbs.

EXPORT OF WOOL FROM AUSTRALIA TO GREAT BRITAIN.

1846. — 21,789,346 lbs.

1860. — 59,166,616 lbs.

1865. — 109,734,261 lbs.

154. The economic development of the United States is itself a product of European, more especially of English modern industry. In their present form (1866) the States must still be considered a European colony. [Added in the 4th German edition. — “Since then they have developed into country whose industry holds second place in the world, without on that account entirely losing their colonial character.” — F. E.]

EXPORT OF COTTON FROM THE UNITED STATES TO GREAT BRITAIN

1846401,949,393 lbs.

1852765,630,543 lbs.

1859961,707,264 lbs.

18601,115,890,608 lbs.

EXPORT OF CORN, &c., FROM THE UNITED STATES TO GREAT BRITAIN

18501862

Wheat, cwts16,202,31241,033,503

Barley, cwts3,669,6536,624,800

Oats, cwts3,174,8014,496,994

Rye, cwts388,7497,108

Flour, cwts3,819,4407,207,113

Buckwheat, cwts1,05419,571

Maize, cwts5,473,16111,694,818

Bere or Bigg (a sort of Barley), cwts2,0397,675

Peas, cwts811,6201,024,722

Beans, cwts1,822,9722,037,137

Total exports — 74,083,441

156. In an appeal made in July, 1866, to the Trade Societies of England, by the shoemakers of Leicester, who had been thrown on the streets by a lock-out, it is stated: “Twenty years ago the Leicester shoe trade was revolutionised by the introduction of riveting in the place of stitching. At that time good wages could be earned. Great competition was shown between the different firms as to which could turn out the neatest article. Shortly afterwards, however a worse kind of competition sprang up, namely, that of underselling one another in the market. The injurious consequences soon manifested themselves in reductions of wages, and so sweepingly quick was the fall in the price of labour, that many firms now pay only one half of the original wages. And yet, though wages sink lower and lower, profits appear, with each alteration in the scale of wages, to increase.” Even bad times are utilised by the manufacturers, for making exceptional profits by excessive lowering of wages, i.e., by a direct robbery of the labourer’s means of subsistence. One example (it has reference to the crisis in the Coventry silk weaving): “From information I have received from manufacturers as well as workmen, there seems to be no doubt that wages have been reduced to a greater extent than either the competition of the foreign producers, or other circumstances have rendered necessary ... the majority of weavers are working at a reduction of 30 to 40 per cent. in their wages. A piece of ribbon for making which the weaver got 6s. or 7s. five years back, now only brings them 3s. 3d. or 3s. 6d.; other work is now priced at 2s. and 2s. 3d. which was formerly priced at 4s. and 4s. 3d. The reduction in wage seems to have been carried to a greater extent than is necessary for increasing demand. Indeed, the reduction in the cost of weaving, in the case of many descriptions of ribbons, has not been accompanied by any corresponding reduction in the selling price of the manufactured article.” (Mr. F. D. Longe’s Report. “Ch. Emp. Com., V. Rep., 1866,” p. 114, 1.)

157. Conf “Reports of Insp. of Fact., 31st October, 1862,” p. 30.

158. l.c., p. 19.

159. “Rep. Insp. of Fact., 31st October, 1863,” pp. 41-45.

160. l.c., pp. 41-42

161. l.c., p. 57.

162. l.c., pp. 50-51.

163. l.c., pp. 62-63.

164. “Rep. &c., 30th April, 1864,” p. 27.

165. From a letter of Mr. Harris, Chief Constable of Bolton, in “Rep. of Insp. of Fact., 31st October, 1865,” pp. 61-62.

166. In an appeal, dated 1863, of the factory operatives of Lancashire, &c., for the purpose of forming a society for organised emigration, we find the following: “That a large emigration of factory workers is now absolutely essential to raise them from their present prostrate condition, few will deny; but to show that a continuous stream of emigration is at all times demanded, and, without which it is impossible for than to maintain their position in ordinary times, we beg to call attention to the subjoined facts: — In 1814 the official value of cotton goods exported was £17,665,378, whilst the real marketable value was £20,070,824. In 1858 the official value of cotton goods exported, was £182,221,681; but the real or marketable value was only £43,001,322, being a ten-fold quantity sold for little more than double the former price. To produce results so disadvantageous to the country generally, and to the factory workers in particular, several causes have cooperated, which, had circumstances permitted, we should have brought more prominently under your notice; suffice it for the present to say that the most obvious one is the constant redundancy of labour, without which a trade so ruinous in its effects never could have been carried on, and which requires a constantly extending market to save it from annihilation. Our cotton mills may be brought to a stand by the periodical stagnations of trade, which, under present arrangements, are as inevitable as death itself; but the human mind is constantly at work, and although we believe we are under the mark in stating that six millions of persons have left these shores during the last 25 years, yet, from the natural increase of population, and the displacement of labour to cheapen production, a large percentage of the male adults in the most prosperous times find it impossible to obtain work in factories on any conditions whatever.” (“Reports of Insp. of Fact., 30th April 1863,” pp. 51-52.) We shall, in a later chapter, see how our friends, the manufacturers, endeavoured, during the catastrophe in the cotton trade, to prevent by every means, including State interference, the emigration of the operatives.

167. “Ch. Empt. Comm. III. Report, 1864,” p. 108, n. 447.

168. In the United States the restoration, in this way, of handicrafts based on machinery is frequent; and therefore, when the inevitable transition to the factory system shall take place, the ensuing concentration will, compared with Europe and even with England, stride on in seven-league boots.

169. See “Rep. of Insp. of Fact., 31st Oct., 1865,” p. 64.

170. Mr. Gillott erected in Birmingham the first steel-pen factory on a large scale. It produced, so early as 1851, over 180,000,000 of pens yearly, and consumed 120 tons of steel. Birmingham has the monopoly of this industry in the United Kingdom, and at present produces thousands of millions of steel-pens. According to the Census of 1861, the number of persons employed was 1,428, of whom 1,268 females from 5 years of age upwards.

171. “Ch. Empl. Comm. II. Rep. 1864,” p. LXVIII., n. 415.

172. And now forsooth children are employed at file-cutting in Sheffield.

173. “Ch. Empl. Comm., V. Rep. 1866,” p. 3, n. 24; p. 6, n. 55, 56; p. 7, n. 59, 60.

174. l.c., pp. 114, 115, n. 6, 7. The commissioner justly remarks that though as a rule machines take the place of men, here literally young persons replace machines.

175. See the Report on the rag trade, and numerous details in “Public Health, VIII. Rep.” Lond. 1866, app., pp. 196, 208.

176. “Ch. Empl. Comm. V. Rep., 1866,” pp. xvi-xviii, n. 86-97, and pp. 130-133, n. 39-71. See also III. Rep., 1864, pp. 48, 56.

177. “Public Health. Sixth Rep.,” Lond. 1864, pp. 29, 31.

178. l.c., p. 30. Dr. Simon remarks that the mortality among the London tailors and printers between the ages of 25 and 35 is in fact much greater, because the employers in London obtain from the country a great number of young people up to 30 years of age, as “apprentices” and “improvers,” who come for the purpose of being perfected in their trade. These figure in the census as Londoners, they swell out the number of heads on which the London death-rate is calculated, without adding proportionally to the number of deaths in that place. The greater part of them in fact return to the country, and especially in cases of severe illness. (l.c.)

179. I allude here to hammered nails, as distinguished from nails cut out and made by machinery. See “Child. Empl. Comm., Third Rep.,” pp. xi., xix., n. 125-130, p. 52, n. 11, p. 114, n. 487, p. 137, n. 674.

180. “Ch. Empl. Comm., II. Rep.,” p. xxii, n. 166.

181. “Ch. Empl. Comm., II. Rep., 1864,” pp. xix., xx., xxi.

182. l.c., pp. xxi.. xxii.

183. l.c., pp. xxix., xxx.

184. l.c., pp. xi., xii.

185. “Child. Empl. Comm., I. Rep. 1863,” p. 185.

186. In England millinery and dressmaking are for the most part carried on, on the premises of the employer, partly by workwomen who live there, partly by women who live off the premises.

187. Mr. White, a commissioner, visited a military clothing manufactory that employed 1,000 to 1,200 persons, almost all females, and a shoe manufactory with 1,300 persons; of these nearly one half were children and young persons.

188. An instance. The weekly report of deaths by the Registrar-General dated 26th Feb., 1864, contains 5 cases of death from starvation. On the same day The Times reports another case. Six victims of starvation in one week!

189. “Child. Empl. Comm., Second Rep., 1864,” p. lxvii., n. 406-9, p. 84, n. 124, p. lxxiii, n. 441, p. 68, n. 6, p. 84, n. 126, p. 78, n. 85, p. 76, n. 69, p. lxxii, n. 483.

190. “The rental of premises required for workrooms seems the element which ultimately determines the point; and consequently it is in the metropolis, that the old system of giving work out to small employers and families has been longest retained, and earliest returned to.” (l.c., p. 83, n. 123.) The concluding statement in this quotation refers exclusively to shoemaking.

191. In glove-making and other industries where the condition of the work-people is hardly distinguishable from that of paupers, this does not occur.

192. l.c., p. 83, n. 122.

193. In the wholesale boot and shoe trade of Leicester alone, there were in 1864, 800 sewing-machines already in use.

194. l.c., p. 84, n. 124.

195. Instances: The Army Clothing Depot at Pimlico, London, the Shirt factory of Tillie and Henderson at Londonderry, and the clothes factory of Messrs. Tait at Limerick which employs about 1,200 hands.

196. “Tendency to Factory System” (l.c., p. lxvii). “The whole employment is at this time in a state of transition, and is undergoing the same Change as that effected in the lace trade, weaving, &c.” (l.c., n. 405.) “A complete revolution” (l.c., p. xlvi., n. 318). At the date of the Child. Empl. Comm. of 1840 stocking making was still done by manual labour. Since 1846 various sorts of machines have been introduced, which are now driven by steam. The total number of persons of both sexes and of all ages from 3 years upwards, employed in stocking making in England, was in 1862 about 129,000. Of these only 4,063 were, according to the Parliamentary Return of the 11th February, 1862, working under the Factory Acts.

197. Thus, e.g., in the earthenware trade, Messrs. Cochrane, of the Britain Pottery, Glasgow, report: “To keep up our quantity we have gone extensively into machines wrought by unskilled labour, and every day convinces us that we can produce a greater quantity than by the old method.” (“Rep. of Insp. of Fact., 31st Oct., 1865,” p. 13.) “The effect of the Fact. Acts is to force on the further introduction of machinery” (l.c., pp. 13-14).

198. Thus, after the extension of the Factory Act to the potteries, great increase of powerjiggers in place of hand-moved jiggers.

199. “Report of lnsp. of Fact., 31st Oct., 1865,” pp. 96 and 127.

200. The introduction of this and other machinery into match-making caused in one department alone 230 young persons to be replaced by 32 boys and girls of 14 to 17 years of age. This saving in labour was carried still further in 1865, by the employment of steam power.

201. “Ch. Empl. Comm., 11. Rep., 1864,” p. ix., n. 50.

202. “Rep. of Insp. of Fact., 31st Oct., 1865,” p..22.

203. “But it must be borne in mind that those improvements, though carried out fully in some establishments, are by no means general, and are not capable of being brought into use in many of the old manufactories without an expenditure of capital beyond the means of many of the present occupiers.” “I cannot but rejoice,” writes Sub-Insp. May, “that notwithstanding the temporary disorganisation which inevitably follows the introduction of such a measure (as the Factory Act Extension Act), and is, indeed, directly indicative of the evils which it was intended to remedy, &c.” (Rep. of Insp. of Fact., 31st Oct., 1865.)

204. With blast furnaces, for instance, “work towards the end of the week being generally much increased in duration in consequence of the habit of the men of idling on Monday and occasionally during a part or the whole of Tuesday also.” (“Child. Empl. Comm., III. Rep.,” p. vi.) “The little masters generally have very irregular hours. They lose two or three days, and then work all night to make it up.... They always employ their own children, if they have any.” (l.c., p. vii.) “The want of regularity in coming to work, encouraged by the possibility and practice of making up for this by working longer hours.” (l.c., p. xviii.) “In Birmingham ... an enormous amount of time is lost ... idling part of the time, slaving the rest.” (l.c., p. xi.)

205. “Child. Empl. Comm., IV., Rep.,” p. xxxii., “The extension of the railway system is said to have contributed greatly to this custom of giving sudden orders, and the consequent hurry, neglect of meal-times, and late hours of the workpeople.” (l.c., p. xxxi.)

206. “Ch. Empl. Comm, IV. Rep.,” pp. xxxv., n. 235, 237.

207. “Ch. Empl. Comm. IV. Rep.,” p. 127, n. 56.

208. “With respect to the loss of trade by non-completion of shipping orders in time, I remember that this was the pet argument of the factory masters in 1832 and 1833. Nothing that can be advanced now on this subject, could have the force that it had then, before steam had halved all distances and established new regulations for transit. It quite failed at that time of proof when put to the test, and again it will certainly fail should it have to be tried.” (“Reports of Insp. of Fact., 31 Oct., 1862,” pp. 54, 55.)

208a. “Ch. Empl. Comm. IV. Rep.,” p. xviii, n. 118.

208b. John Bellers remarked as far back as 1699: “The uncertainty of fashions does increase necessitous poor. It has two great mischiefs in it. 1st, The journeymen are miserable in winter for want of work, the mercers and master-weavers not daring to lay out their stocks to keep the journeymen employed before the spring comes, and they know what the fashion will then be; 2ndly, In the spring the journeymen are not sufficient, but the master-weavers must draw in many prentices, that they may supply the trade of the kingdom in a quarter or half a year, which robs the plough of hands, drains the country of labourers, and in a great part stocks the city with beggars, and starves some in winter that are ashamed to beg.” (“Essays about the Poor, Manufactures, &c.,” p. 9.)

209. “Ch. Empl. Comm. V. Rep.,” p. 171, n. 34.

210. The evidence of some Bradford export-houses is as follows: “Under these circumstances, it seems clear that no boys need be worked longer than from 8 a.m. to 7 or 7.30 p.m., in making up. It is merely a question of extra hands and extra outlay. If some masters were not so greedy, the boys would not work late; an extra machine costs only £16 or £18; much of such over-time as does occur is to be referred to an insufficiency of appliances, and a want of space.” “Ch. Empl, Comm. V. Rep.,” p. 171, n. 35, 36, 38.

211. l.c. A London manufacturer, who in other respects looks upon the compulsory regulation of the hours of labour as a protection for the workpeople against the manufacturers, and for the manufacturers themselves against the wholesale trade, states: “The pressure in our business is caused by the shippers, who want, e.g., to send the goods by sailing vessel so as to reach their destination at a given season, and at the same time want to pocket the difference in freight between a sailing vessel and a steamship, or who select the earlier of two steamships in order to be in the foreign market before their competitors.”

212. “This could be obviated,” says a manufacturer, “at the expense of an enlargement of the works under the pressure of a General Act of Parliament.” l.c., p. x., n. 38.

213. l.c., p. xv., n. 72. sqq.

214. “Rep. Insp. Fact., 31st October, 1865,” p. 127.

215. It has been found out by experiment, that with each respiration of average intensity made by a healthy average individual, about 25 cubic inches of air are consumed, and that about 20 respirations are made in each minute. Hence the air inhaled in 24 hours by each individual is about 720,000 cubic inches, or 416 cubic feet. It is clear, however, that air which has been once breathed, can no longer serve for the same process until it has been purified in the great workshop of Nature. According to the experiments of Valentin and Brunner, it appears that a healthy man gives off about 1,300 cubic inches of carbonic acid per hour; this would give about 8 ounces of solid carbon thrown off from the lungs in 24 hours. “Every man should have at least 800 cubic feet.” (Huxley.)

216. According to the English Factory Act, parents cannot send their children under 14 years of age into Factories under the control of the Act, unless at the same time they allow them to receive elementary education. The manufacturer is responsible for compliance with the Act. “Factory education is compulsory, and it is a condition of labour.” (“Rep. Insp. Fact., 31st Oct., 1865,” p. 111.)

217. On the very advantageous results of combining gymnastics (and drilling in the case of boys) with compulsory education for factory children and pauper scholars, see the speech of N. W. Senior at the seventh annual congress of “The National Association for the Promotion of Social Science,” in “Report of Proceedings, &c.,” Lond. 1863, pp. 63, 64, also the “Rep. Insp. Fact., 31st Oct., 1865,” pp. 118, 119, 120, 126, sqq.

218. “Rep. Insp. Fact., 31st Oct., 1865,” p. 118. A silk manufacturer naively states to the Children’s Employment Commissioners: “I am quite sure that the true secret of producing efficient workpeople is to be found in uniting education and labour from a period of childhood. Of course the occupation must not be too severe, nor irksome, or unhealthy. But of the advantage of the union I have no doubt. I wish my own children could have some work as well as play to give variety to their schooling.” (“Ch. Empl. Comm. V. Rep.,” p. 82, n. 36.)

219. Senior, l.c., p. 66. How modern industry, when it has attained to a certain pitch, is capable, by the revolution it effects in the mode of production and in the social conditions of production, of also revolutionising people’s minds, is strikingly shown by a comparison of Senior’s speech in 1863, with his philippic against the Factory Act of 1833; or by a comparison, of the views of the congress above referred to, with the fact that in certain country districts of England poor parents are forbidden, on pain of death by starvation, to educate their children. Thus, e.g., Mr. Snell reports it to be a common occurrence in Somersetshire that, when a poor person claims parish relief, he is compelled to take his children from school. Mr. Wollarton, the clergyman at Feltham, also tells of cases where all relief was denied to certain families “because they were sending their children to school!”

220. Wherever handicraft-machines, driven by men, compete directly or indirectly with more developed machines driven by mechanical power, a great change takes place with regard to the labourer who drives the machine. At first the steam-engine replaces this labourer, afterwards he must replace the steam-engine. Consequently the tension and the amount of labour-power expended become monstrous, and especially so in the case of the children who are condemned to this torture. Thus Mr. Longe; one of the commissioners, found in Coventry and the neighbourhood boys of from 10 to 15 years employed in driving the ribbon-looms, not to mention younger children who had to drive smaller machines. “It is extraordinarily fatiguing work. The boy is a mere substitute for steam power.” (“Ch. Empl. Comm. V, Rep. 1866;” p. 114, n. 6.) As to the fatal consequences of “this system of slavery,” as the official report styles it, see l.c., p. 114 sqq.

221. l.c., p. 3, n. 24.

222. l.c., P. 7, n. 60.

223. “In some parts of the Highlands of Scotland, not many years ago, every peasant, according to the Statistical Account, made his own shoes of leather tanned by himself. Many a shepherd and cottar too, with his wife and children, appeared at Church in clothes which had been touched by no hands but their own, since they were shorn from the sheep and sown in the flaxfield. In the preparation of these. it is added, scarcely a single article had been purchased, except the awl, needle, thimble, and a very few parts of the iron-work employed in the weaving. The dyes, toci, were chiefly extracted by the women from trees, shrubs and herbs.” (Dugald Stewart’s “Works,” Hamilton’s Ed., Vol. viii., pp. 327-328.)

224. In the celebrated “Livre des métiers” of Etienne Boileau, we find it prescribed that a journeyman on being admitted among the masters had to swear “to love his brethren with brotherly love, to support them in their respective trades, not wilfully to betray the secrets of the trade, and besides, in the interests of all, not to recommend his own wares by calling the attention of the buyer to defects in the articles made by others.”

225. “The bourgeoisie cannot exist without continually revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production and all the social relations. Conservation, in an unaltered form, of the old modes of production was on the contrary the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolution in production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation, distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.” (F. Engels und Karl Marx: “Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei.” Lond. 1848, p. 5.)

226.

“You take my life

When you do take the means whereby I live.”

Shakespeare.

227. A French workman, on his return from San-Francisco, writes as follows: “I never could have believed, that I was capable of working at the various occupations I was employed on in California. I was firmly convinced that I was fit for nothing but letter-press printing.... Once in the midst of this world of adventurers, who change their occupation as often as they do their shirt, egad, I did as the others. As mining did not turn out remunerative enough, I left it for the town, where in succession I became typographer, slater, plumber, &c. In consequence of thus finding out that I am fit to any sort of work, I feel less of a mollusk and more of a man.” (A. Corbon, “De l’enseignement professionnel,” 2ème ed., p. 50.)

228. John Bellers, a very phenomenon in the history of Political Economy, saw most clearly at the end of the 17th century, the necessity for abolishing the present system of education and division of labour, which beget hypertrophy and atrophy at the two opposite extremities of society. Amongst other things he says this: “An idle learning being little better than the learning of idleness.... Bodily labour, it’s a primitive institution of God.... Labour being as proper for the bodies’ health as eating is for its living; for what pains a man saves by ease, he will find in disease.... Labour adds oil to the lamp of life, when thinking inflames it.... A childish silly employ” (a warning this, by presentiment, against the Basedows and their modern imitators) “leaves the children’s minds silly,” (“Proposals for Raising a Colledge of Industry of all Useful Trades and Husbandry.” Lond., 1696, pp. 12, 14, 18.)

229. This sort of labour goes on mostly in small workshops, as we have seen in the lacemaking and straw-plaiting trades, and as could be shown more in detail from the metal trades of Sheffield, Birmingham, &c.

230. “Ch. Empl. Comm., V. Rep.,” p. xxv., n. 162, and II. Rep., p. xxxviii., n, 285, 289, p. xxv., xxvi., n. 191.

231. “Factory labour may be as pure and as excellent as domestic labour, and perhaps more so.” (“Rep. Insp. of Fact., 31st October, 1865,” p. 129.)

232. “Rep. Insp. of Fact., 31st October, 1865,” pp. 27-32.

233. Numerous instances will be found in “Rep. of Insp. of Fact.”

234. “Ch. Empl. Comm., V. Rep.,” p. x., n. 35.

235. “Ch. Empl. Comm., V. Rep.,” p. ix., n. 28.

236. l.c., p. xxv., n. 165-167. As to the advantages of large scale, compared with small scale, industries, see “Ch. Empl. Comm., III. Rep.,” p. 13, n. 144, p. 25, n. 121, p. 26, n. 125, p. 27, n. 140, &c.

237. The trades proposed to be brought under the Act were the following: Lace-making, stocking-weaving, straw-plaiting, the manufacture of wearing apparel with its numerous sub-divisions, artificial flower-making, shoemaking, hat-making, glove-making, tailoring, all metal works, from blast furnaces down to needleworks, &c., paper-mills, glassworks, tobacco factories, India-rubber works, braid-making (for weaving), hand-carpetmaking, umbrella and parasol making, the manufacture of spindles and spools, letterpress printing, book-binding, manufacture of stationery (including paper bags, cards, coloured paper, &c.), rope-making, manufacture of jet ornaments, brick-making, silk manufacture by hand, Coventry weaving, salt works, tallow chandlers, cement works, sugar refineries, biscuit-making, various industries connected with timber, and other mixed trades.

238. l.c., p. xxv., n. 169.

239. Here (from “The Tory Cabinet...... to “Nassau W. Senior") the English text has been altered in conformity with the 4th German edition. — Ed.

240. The Factory Acts Extension Act was passed on August 12, 1867. It regulates all foundries, smithies, and metal manufactories, including machine shops; furthermore glass-works, paper mills, gutta-percha and India-rubber works, tobacco manufactories, letter-press printing and book-binding works, and, lastly, all workshops in which more than 50 persons are employed. The Hours of Labour Regulation Act, passed on August 17, 1867, regulates the smaller workshops and the so-called domestic industries.

I shall revert to these Acts and to the new Mining Act of 1872 in Volume II.

241. Senior, “Social Science Congress,” pp. 55-58.

242. The “personnel” of this staff consisted of 2 inspectors, 2 assistant inspectors and 41 sub-inspectors. Eight additional sub-inspectors were appointed in 1871. The total cost of administering the Acts in England, Scotland, and Ireland amounted for the year 1871-72 to no more than £25,347, inclusive of the law expenses incurred by prosecutions of offending masters.

243. Robert Owen, the father of Co-operative Factories and Stores, but who, as before remarked, in no way shared the illusions of his followers with regard to the bearing of these isolated elements of transformation, not only practically made the factory system the sole foundation of his experiments, but also declared that system to be theoretically the starting-point of the social revolution. Herr Vissering, Professor of Political Economy in the University of Leyden, appears to have a suspicion of this when, in his “Handboek van Practische Staatshuishoudkunde, 1860-62,” which reproduces all the platitudes of vulgar economy, he strongly supports handicrafts against the factory system.

[Added in the 4th German edition — The “hopelessly bewildering tangle of contradictory enactments” (S. 314) (present volume, p. 284) which English legislation called into life by means of the mutually conflicting Factory Acts, the Factory Acts Extension Act and the Workshops’ Act, finally became intolerable, and thus all legislative enactments on this subject were codified in the Factory and Workshop Act of 1878. Of course no detailed critique of this English industrial code now in effect can be presented here. The following remarks will have to suffice. The Act comprises:

1) Textile Mills. Here everything remains about as it was: children more than 10 years of age may work 5½ hours a day; or 6 hours and Saturday off; young persons and women, 10 hours on 5 days, and at most 6½ on Saturday.

2) Non-Textile Factories. Here the regulations are brought closer than before to those of No. 1, but there are still several exceptions which favour the capitalists and which in certain cases may be expanded by special permission of the Home Secretary.

3) Workshops, defined approximately as in the former Act; as for the children, young workers and women employed there, the workshops are about on a par with the non-textile factories, but again conditions are easier in details.

4) Workshops in which no children or young workers are employed, but only persons of both sexes above the age of 18; this category enjoy still easier conditions.

5) Domestic Workshops, where only members of the family are employed, in the family dwelling: still more elastic regulations and simultaneously the restriction that the inspector may, without special permission of the ministry or a court, enter only rooms not used also for dwelling purposes; and lastly unrestricted freedom for straw-plaiting and lace and glove-making by members of the family. With all its defects this Act, together with the Swiss Federal Factory Law of March 23, 1877, is still by far the best piece of legislation in this field. A comparison of it with the said Swiss federal law is of particular interest because it clearly demonstrates the merits and demerits of the two legislative methods — the English, “historical” method, which intervenes when occasion requires, and the continental method, which is built up on the traditions of the French Revolution and generalises more. Unfortunately, due to insufficient inspection personnel, the English code is still largely a dead letter with regard to its application to workshops. — F. E.]

244. “You divide the people into two hostile camps of clownish boors and emasculated dwarfs. Good heavens! a nation divided into agricultural and commercial interests, calling itself sane; nay, styling itself enlightened and civilised, not only in spite of, but in consequence of this monstrous and unnatural division.” (David Urquhart, l.c., p. 119.) This passage shows, at one and the same time, the strength and the weakness of that kind of criticism which knows how to judge and condemn the present, but not how to comprehend it.

245. See Liebig: “Die Chemie in ihrer Anwendung auf Agricultur und Physiologie,” 7. Auflage, 1862, and especially the “Einleitung in die Naturgesetze des Feldbaus,” in the 1st Volume. To have developed from the point of view of natural science, the negative, i.e., destructive side of modern agriculture, is one of Liebig’s immortal merits. His summary, too, of the history of agriculture, although not free from gross errors, contains flashes of light. It is, however, to be regretted that he ventures on such haphazard assertions as the following: “By greater pulverising and more frequent ploughing, the circulation of air in the interior of porous soil is aided, and the surface exposed to the action of the atmosphere is increased and renewed; but it is easily seen that the increased yield of the land cannot be proportional to the labour spent on that land, but increases in a much smaller proportion. This law,” adds Liebig, “was first enunciated by John Stuart Mill in his ‘Principles of Pol. Econ.,’ Vol. 1, p. 17, as follows: ‘That the produce of land increases, caeteris paribus, in a diminishing ratio to the increase of the labourers employed’ (Mill here introduces in an erroneous form the law enunciated by Ricardo’s school, for since the ‘decrease of the labourers employed,’ kept even pace in England with the advance of agriculture, the law discovered in, and applied to, England, could have no application to that country, at all events), ‘is the universal law of agricultural industry.’ This is very remarkable, since Mill was ignorant of the reason for this law.” (Liebig, l.c., Bd. I., p. 143 and Note.) Apart from Liebig’s wrong interpretation of the word “labour,” by which word he understands something quite different from what Political Economy does, it is, in any case, “very remarkable” that he should make Mr. John Stuart Mill the first propounder of a theory which was first published by James Anderson in A. Smith’s days, and was repeated in various works down to the beginning of the 19th century; a theory which Malthus, that master in plagiarism (the whole of his population theory is a shameless plagiarism), appropriated to himself in 1815; which West developed at the same time as, and independently of, Anderson; which in the year 1817 was connected by Ricardo with the general theory of value, then made the round of the world as Ricardo’s theory, and in 1820 was vulgarised by James Mill, the father of John Stuart Mill; and which, finally, was reproduced by John Stuart Mill and others, as a dogma already quite commonplace, and known to every schoolboy. It cannot be denied that John Stuart Mill owes his, at all events, “remarkable” authority almost entirely to such quid-pro-quos.

## Part V: The Production of Absolute and of Relative Surplus-Value

## Chapter Sixteen: Absolute and Relative Surplus-Value

In considering the labour-process, we began (see Chapter
VII.) by treating it in the abstract, apart from its historical forms,
as a process between man and Nature. We there stated, “If we examine the
whole labour-process, from the point of view of its result, it is plain
that both the instruments and the subject of labour are means of production,
and that the labour itself is productive labour.” And in Note 2, same page,
we further added: “This method of determining, from the standpoint of the
labour-process alone, what is productive labour, is by no means directly
applicable to the case of the capitalist process of production.” We now
proceed to the further development of this subject.

So far as the labour-process is purely individual, one and the
same labourer unites in himself all the functions, that later on become
separated. When an individual appropriates natural objects for his livelihood,
no one controls him but himself. Afterwards he is controlled by others.
A single man cannot operate upon Nature without calling his own muscles
into play under the control of his own brain. As in the natural body head
and hand wait upon each other, so the labour-process unites the labour
of the hand with that of the head. Later on they part company and even
become deadly foes. The product ceases to be the direct product of the
individual, and becomes a social product, produced in common by a collective
labourer, i.e., by a combination of workmen, each of whom takes
only a part, greater or less, in the manipulation of the subject of their
labour. As the co-operative character of the labour-process becomes more
and more marked, so, as a necessary consequence, does our notion of productive
labour, and of its agent the productive labourer, become extended. In order
to labour productively, it is no longer necessary for you to do manual
work yourself; enough, if you are an organ of the collective labourer,
and perform one of its subordinate functions. The first definition given
above of productive labour, a definition deduced from the very nature of
the production of material objects, still remains correct for the collective
labourer, considered as a whole. But it no longer holds good for each member
taken individually.

On the other hand, however, our notion of productive labour becomes
narrowed. Capitalist production is not merely the production of commodities,
it is essentially the production of surplus-value. The labourer produces,
not for himself, but for capital. It no longer suffices, therefore, that
he should simply produce. He must produce surplus-value. That labourer
alone is productive, who produces surplus-value for the capitalist, and
thus works for the self-expansion of capital. If we may take an example
from outside the sphere of production of material objects, a schoolmaster
is a productive labourer when, in addition to belabouring the heads of
his scholars, he works like a horse to enrich the school proprietor. That
the latter has laid out his capital in a teaching factory, instead of in
a sausage factory, does not alter the relation. Hence the notion of a productive
labourer implies not merely a relation between work and useful effect,
between labourer and product of labour, but also a specific, social relation
of production, a relation that has sprung up historically and stamps the
labourer as the direct means of creating surplus-value. To be a productive
labourer is, therefore, not a piece of luck, but a misfortune. In Book
IV, which treats of the history of the theory, it will be more clearly
seen, that the production of surplus-value has at all times been made,
by classical political economists, the distinguishing characteristic of
the productive labourer. Hence their definition of a productive labourer
changes with their comprehension of the nature of surplus-value. Thus the
Physiocrats insist that only agricultural labour is productive, since that
alone, they say, yields a surplus-value. And they say so because, with
them, surplus-value has no existence except in the form of rent.

The prolongation of the working-day beyond the point at which
the labourer would have produced just an equivalent for the value of his
labour-power, and the appropriation of that surplus-labour by capital,
this is production of absolute surplus-value. It forms the general groundwork
of the capitalist system, and the starting-point for the production of
relative surplus-value. The latter presupposes that the working-day is
already divided into two parts, necessary labour, and surplus-labour. In
order to prolong the surplus-labour, the necessary labour is shortened
by methods whereby the equivalent for the wages is produced in less time.
The production of absolute surplus-value turns exclusively upon the length
of the working-day; the production of relative surplus-value, revolutionises
out and out the technical processes of labour, and the composition of society.
It therefore presupposes a specific mode, the capitalist mode of production,
a mode which, along with its methods, means, and conditions, arises and
develops itself spontaneously on the foundation afforded by the formal
subjection of labour to capital. In the course of this development, the
formal subjection is replaced by the real subjection of labour to capital.

It will suffice merely to refer to certain intermediate forms,
in which surplus-labour is not extorted by direct compulsion from the producer,
nor the producer himself yet formally subjected to capital. In such forms
capital has not yet acquired the direct control of the labour-process.
By the side of independent producers who carry on their handicrafts and
agriculture in the traditional old-fashioned way, there stands the usurer
or the merchant, with his usurer’s capital or merchant’s capital, feeding
on them like a parasite. The predominance, in a society, of this form of
exploitation excludes the capitalist mode of production; to which mode,
however, this form may serve as a transition, as it did towards the close
of the Middle Ages. Finally, as is shown by modern “domestic industry,”
some intermediate forms are here and there reproduced in the background
of Modern Industry, though their physiognomy is totally changed.

If, on the one hand, the mere formal subjection of labour to capital
suffices for the production of absolute surplus-value, if, e.g.,
it is sufficient that handicraftsmen who previously worked on their own
account, or as apprentices of a master, should become wage labourers under
the direct control of a capitalist; so, on the other hand, we have seen,
how the methods of producing relative surplus-value, are, at the same time,
methods of producing absolute surplus-value. Nay, more, the excessive prolongation
of the working-day turned out to be the peculiar product of Modern Industry.
Generally speaking, the specifically capitalist mode of production ceases
to be a mere means of producing relative surplus-value, so soon as that
mode has conquered an entire branch of production; and still more so, so
soon as it has conquered all the important branches. It then becomes the
general, socially predominant form of production. As a special method of
producing relative surplus-value, it remains effective only, first, in
so far as it seizes upon industries that previously were only formally
subject to capital, that is, so far as it is propagandist; secondly, in
so far as the industries that have been taken over by it, continue to be
revolutionised by changes in the methods of production.

From one standpoint, any distinction between absolute and relative
surplus-value appears illusory. Relative surplus-value is absolute, since
it compels the absolute prolongation of the working-day beyond the labour-time
necessary to the existence of the labourer himself. Absolute surplus-value
is relative, since it makes necessary such a development of the productiveness
of labour, as will allow of the necessary labour-time being confined to
a portion of the working-day. But if we keep in mind the behaviour of surplus-value,
this appearance of identity vanishes. Once the capitalist mode of production
is established and become general, the difference between absolute and
relative surplus-value makes itself felt, whenever there is a question
of raising the rate of surplus-value. Assuming that labour-power is paid
for at its value, we are confronted by this alternative: given the productiveness
of labour and its normal intensity, the rate of surplus-value can be raised
only by the actual prolongation of the working-day; on the other hand,
given the length of the working-day, that rise can be effected only by
a change in the relative magnitudes of the components of the working-day,
viz., necessary labour and surplus-labour; a change which, if the wages
are not to fall below the value of labour-power, presupposes a change either
in the productiveness or in the intensity of the labour.

If the labourer wants all his time to produce the necessary means
of subsistence for himself and his race, he has no time left in which to
work gratis for others. Without a certain degree of productiveness in his
labour, he has no such superfluous time at his disposal; without such superfluous
time, no surplus-labour, and therefore no capitalists, no slave-owners,
no feudal lords, in one word, no class of large proprietors. [1]

Thus we may say that surplus-value rests on a natural basis; but
this is permissible only in the very general sense, that there is no natural
obstacle absolutely preventing one man from disburdening himself of the
labour requisite for his own existence, and burdening another with it,
any more, for instance, than unconquerable natural obstacle prevent one
man from eating the flesh of another. [2] No mystical
ideas must in any way be connected, as sometimes happens, with this historically
developed productiveness of labour. It is only after men have raised themselves
above the rank of animals, when therefore their labour has been to some
extent socialised, that a state of things arises in which the surplus-labour
of the one becomes a condition of existence for the other. At the dawn
of civilisation the productiveness acquired by labour is small, but so
too are the wants which develop with and by the means of satisfying them.
Further, at that early period, the portion of society that lives on the
labour of others is infinitely small compared with the mass of direct producers.
Along with the progress in the productiveness of labour, that small portion
of society increases both absolutely and relatively. [3] Besides, capital with its accompanying relations springs up from an economic soil that is the product of a long process of development. The productiveness
of labour that serves as its foundation and starting-point, is a gift,
not of nature, but of a history embracing thousands of centuries.

Apart from the degree of development, greater or less, in the
form of social production, the productiveness of labour is fettered by
physical conditions. These are all referable to the constitution of man
himself (race, &c.), and to surrounding nature. The external physical
conditions fall into two great economic classes, (1) Natural wealth in
means of subsistence, i.e., a fruitful soil, waters teeming with
fish, &c., and (2), natural wealth in the instruments of labour, such
as waterfalls, navigable rivers, wood, metal, coal, &c. At the dawn
of civilisation, it is the first class that turns the scale; at a higher
stage of development, it is the second. Compare, for example, England with
India, or in ancient times, Athens and Corinth with the shores of the Black
Sea.

The fewer the number of natural wants imperatively calling for
satisfaction, and the greater the natural fertility of the soil and the
favourableness of the climate, so much less is the labour-time necessary
for the maintenance and reproduction of the producer. So much greater therefore
can be the excess of his labours for others over his labour for himself.
Diodorus long ago remarked this in relation to the ancient Egyptians.

“It is altogether incredible how little trouble and expense the bringing up
of their children causes them. They cook for them the first simple food
at hand; they also give them the lower part of the papyrus stem to eat,
so far as it can be roasted in the fire, and the roots and stalks of marsh
plants, some raw, some boiled and roasted. Most of the children go without
shoes and unclothed, for the air is so mild. Hence a child, until he is
grown up, costs his parents not more, on the whole, than twenty drachmas.
It is this, chiefly, which explains why the population of Egypt is so numerous,
and, therefore, why so many great works can be undertaken.” [4]

Nevertheless the grand structures of ancient Egypt are less due to the
extent of its population than to the large proportion of it that was freely
disposable. Just as the individual labourer can do more surplus-labour
in proportion as his necessary labour-time is less, so with regard to the
working population. The smaller the part of it which is required for the
production of the necessary means of subsistence, so much the greater is
the part that can be set to do other work.

Capitalist production once assumed, then, all other circumstances
remaining the same, and given the length of the working day, the quantity
of surplus-labour will vary with the physical conditions of labour, especially
with the fertility of the soil. But it by no means follows from this that
the most fruitful soil is the most fitted for the growth of the capitalist
mode of production. This mode is based on the dominion of man over nature.
Where nature is too lavish, she “keeps him in hand, like a child in leading-strings.”
She does not impose upon him any necessity to develop himself. [5] It is not the tropics with their luxuriant vegetation, but the temperate zone, that is the mother-country of capital. It is not the mere fertility of the soil, but the differentiation of the soil, the variety of its natural products, the changes of the seasons, which form the physical basis for
the social division of labour, and which, by changes in the natural surroundings,
spur man on to the multiplication of his wants, his capabilities, his means
and modes of labour. It is the necessity of bringing a natural force under
the control of society, of economising, of appropriating or subduing it
on a large scale by the work of man’s hand, that first plays the decisive
part in the history of industry. Examples are, the irrigation works in
Egypt, [6] Lombardy, Holland, or in India and Persia
where irrigation by means of artificial canals, not only supplies the soil
with the water indispensable to it, but also carries down to it, in the
shape of sediment from the hills, mineral fertilisers. The secret of the
flourishing state of industry in Spain and Sicily under the dominion of
the Arabs lay in their irrigation works. [7]

Favourable natural conditions alone, give us only the possibility,
never the reality, of surplus-labour, nor, consequently, of surplus-value
and a surplus-product. The result of difference in the natural conditions
of labour is this, that the same quantity of labour satisfies, in different
countries, a different mass of requirements, [8] consequently, that under circumstances in other respects analogous, the necessary labour-time
is different. These conditions affect surplus-labour only as natural limits,
i.e., by fixing the points at which labour for others can begin.
In proportion as industry advances, these natural limits recede. In the
midst of our West European society, where the labourer purchases the right
to work for his own livelihood only by paying for it in surplus-labour,
the idea easily takes root that it is an inherent quality of human labour
to furnish a surplus-product. [9] But consider, for example, an inhabitant of the eastern islands of the Asiatic Archipelago, where sago grows wild in the forests.

“When the inhabitants have convinced themselves,
by boring a hole in the tree, that the pith is ripe, the trunk is cut down
and divided into several pieces, the pith is extracted, mixed with water
and filtered: it is then quite fit for use as sago. One tree commonly yields
300 lbs., and occasionally 500 to 600 lbs. There, then, people go into
the forests, and cut bread for themselves, just as with us they cut fire-wood.”

Suppose now such an eastern bread-cutter requires 12 working hours a week for the satisfaction of all his wants. Nature’s direct gift to him is plenty of leisure time. Before he can apply this
leisure time productively for himself, a whole series of historical events
is required; before he spends it in surplus-labour for strangers, compulsion
is necessary. If capitalist production were introduced, the honest fellow
would perhaps have to work six days a week, in order to appropriate to
himself the product of one working day. The bounty of Nature does not explain
why he would then have to work 6 days a week, or why he must furnish 5
days of surplus-labour. It explains only why his necessary labour-time
would be limited to one day a week. But in no case would his surplus-product
arise from some occult quality inherent in human labour.

Thus, not only does the historically developed social productiveness
of labour, but also its natural productiveness, appear to be productiveness
of the capital with which that labour is incorporated.

Ricardo never concerns himself about the origin of surplus-value.
He treats it as a thing inherent in the capitalist mode of production,
which mode, in his eyes, is the natural form of social production. Whenever
he discusses the productiveness of labour, he seeks in it, not the cause
of surplus-value, but the cause that determines the magnitude of that value.
On the other hand, his school has openly proclaimed the productiveness
of labour to be the originating cause of profit (read: Surplus-value).
This at all events is a progress as against the mercantilists who, on their
side, derived the excess of the price over the cost of production of the
product, from the act of exchange, from the product being sold above its
value. Nevertheless, Ricardo’s school simply shirked the problem, they
did not solve it. In fact these bourgeois economists instinctively saw,
and rightly so, that it is very dangerous to stir too deeply the burning
question of the origin of surplus-value. But what are we to think of John
Stuart Mill, who, half a century after Ricardo, solemnly claims superiority
over the mercantilists, by clumsily repeating the wretched evasions of
Ricardo’s earliest vulgarisers?

Mill says:

“The cause of profit is that labour produces more than
is required for its support.”

So far, nothing but the old story; but Mill
wishing to add something of his own, proceeds:

“To vary the form of the
theorem; the reason why capital yields a profit, is because food, clothing,
materials and tools, last longer than the time which was required to produce
them.”

He here confounds the duration of labour-time with the duration
of its products. According to this view, a baker whose product lasts only
a day, could never extract from his workpeople the same profit, as a machine
maker whose products endure for 20 years and more. Of course it is very
true, that if a bird’s nest did not last longer than the time it takes
in building, birds would have to do without nests.

This fundamental truth once established, Mill establishes his
own superiority over the mercantilists.

“We thus see,” he proceeds, “that
profit arises, not from the incident of exchange, but from the productive
power of labour; and the general profit of the country is always what the
productive power of labour makes it, whether any exchange takes place or
not. If there were no division of employments, there would be no buying
or selling, but there would still be profit.”

For Mill then, exchange,
buying and selling, those general conditions of capitalist production,
are but an incident, and there would always be profits even without the
purchase and sale of labour-power!

“If,” he continues, “the labourers of the country collectively
produce twenty per cent more than their wages, profits will be twenty per
cent, whatever prices may or may not be.” This is, on the one hand, a rare
bit of tautology; for if labourers produce a surplus-value of 20% for the
capitalist, his profit will be to the total wages of the labourers as 20:100.
On the other hand, it is absolutely false to say that “profits will be
20%.” They will always be less, because they are calculated upon the sum
total of the capital advanced. If, for example, the capitalist have
advanced £500, of which £400 is laid out in means of production
and £100 in wages, and if the rate of surplus-value be 20%, the rate
of profit will be 20:500, i.e., 4% and not 20%.

Then follows a splendid example of Mill’s method of handling the
different historical forms of social production.

“I assume, throughout,
the state of things which, where the labourers and capitalists are separate
classes, prevails, with few exceptions, universally; namely, that the capitalist
advances the whole expenses, including the entire remuneration of the labourer.”

Strange optical illusion to see everywhere a state of things which as yet
exists only exceptionally on our earth. [11] But let
us finish — Mill is willing to concede,

“that he should do so is not a
matter of inherent necessity.” On the contrary: “the labourer might wait,
until the production is complete, for all that part of his wages which
exceeds mere necessaries: and even for the whole, if he has funds in hand
sufficient for his temporary support. But in the latter case, the labourer
is to that extent really a capitalist in the concern, by supplying a portion
of the funds necessary for carrying it on.”

Mill might have gone further
and have added, that the labourer who advances to himself not only the
necessaries of life but also the means of production, is in reality nothing
but his own wage-labourer. He might also have said that the American peasant
proprietor is but a serf who does enforced labour for himself instead of
for his lord.

After thus proving clearly, that even if capitalist production
had no existence, still it would always exist, Mill is consistent enough
to show, on the contrary, that it has no existence, even when it does exist.

“And even in the former case” (when the workman is a wage labourer to whom
the capitalist advances all the necessaries of life, he the labourer), “may be looked upon in the same light,”
(i.e., as a capitalist), “since, contributing his labour at less than the market-price, (!) he may be regarded
as lending the difference (?) to his employer and receiving it back with
interest, &c.” [12]

In reality, the labourer advances his labour gratuitously to the capitalist during, say one week, in order
to receive the market price at the end of the week, &c., and it is
this which, according to Mill, transforms him into a capitalist. On the
level plain, simple mounds look like hills; and the imbecile flatness of
the present bourgeoisie is to be measured by the altitude of its great
intellects.

Footnotes

1. “The very existence of the master-capitalists,
as a distinct class, is dependent on the productiveness of industry.” (Ramsay,
l.c., p. 206.) “If each man’s labour were but enough to produce his own
food, there could be no property.” (Ravenstone, l.c. p. 14, 15.)

2. According to a recent calculation,
there are yet at least 4,000,000 cannibals in those parts of the earth
which have already been explored.

3. “Among the wild Indians in America,
almost everything is the labourer’s, 99 parts of a hundred are to be put
upon the account of labour. In England, perhaps, the labourer has not 2/3.”
(The Advantages of the East India Trade, &c., p. 73.)

4. Diodorus, l.c., l. I., c. 80.

5. “The first (natural wealth) as it is most noble and advantageous, so doth it make the people careless, proud,
and given to all excesses; whereas the second enforceth vigilancy, literature,
arts and policy.” (England’s Treasure by Foreign Trade. Or the Balance
of our Foreign Trade is the Rule of our Treasure. Written by Thomas Mun
of London, merchant, and now published for the common good by his son John
Mun. London, 1669, p. 181, 182.) “Nor can I conceive a greater curse upon
a body of people, than to be thrown upon a spot of land, where the productions
for subsistence and food were, in great measure, spontaneous, and the climate
required or admitted little care for raiment and covering... there may
be an extreme on the other side. A soil incapable of produce by labour
is quite as bad as a soil that produces plentifully without any labour.”
(An Inquiry into the Present High Price of Provisions. Lond. 1767, p. 10.)

6. The necessity for predicting the rise and fall of the Nile created Egyptian astronomy, and with it the dominion
of the priests, as directors of agriculture. “Le solstice est le moment
de l’année ou commence la crue du Nil, et celui que les Egyptiens
ont du observer avec le plus d’attention.... C’était cette année
tropique qu’il leur importait de marquer pour se diriger dans leurs opérations
agricoles. Ils durent donc chercher dans le ciel un signe apparent de son
retour.” [The solstice is the moment of the year when the Nile begins to rise, and it is the moment the Egyptians have had to watch for with the greatest attention ... It was the evolution of the tropical year which they had to establish firmly so as to conduct their agricultural operations in accordance with it. They therefore had to search the heavens for a visible sign of the solstice’s return.] (Cuvier: Discours sur les révolutions du globe, ed. Hoefer,
Paris, 1863, p. 141.)

7. One of the material bases of the power of the state over the small disconnected producing organisms in India,
was the regulation of the water supply. The Mahometan rulers of India understood
this better than their English successors. It is enough to recall to mind
the famine of 1866, which cost the lives of more than a million Hindus
in the district of Orissa, in the Bengal presidency.

8. “There are no two countries which furnish an equal number of the necessaries of life in equal plenty, and
with the same quantity of labour. Men’s wants increase or diminish with
the severity or temperateness of the climate they live in; consequently,
the proportion of trade which the inhabitants of different countries are
obliged to carry on through necessity cannot be the same, nor is it practicable
to ascertain the degree of variation farther than by the degrees of Heat
and Cold; from whence one may make this general conclusion, that the quantity
of labour required for a certain number of people is greatest in cold climates,
and least in hot ones; for in the former men not only want more clothes,
but the earth more cultivating than in the latter.” (An Essay on the Governing
Causes of the Natural Rate of Interest. Lond. 1750. p. 60.) The author
of this epoch-making anonymous work is J. Massy. Hume took his theory of
interest from it.

9. “Chaque travail doit (this appears also to be part of the droits et devoirs du citoyen [rights and duties of the citizen]) laisser un excédent.” [All labour must leave a surplus] Proudhon.

10. F. Schouw: “Die Erde, die Pflanze und der Mensch,” 2. Ed. Leipz. 1854, p. 148.

11. In earlier editions of Capital the quotation from John Stuart Mill, “I assume throughout...of the labourer,”
had been given incorrectly, the words “where the labourers and capitalists
are separate classes” having been left out. Marx, in a letter dated November
28, 1878, pointed this out to Danielson, the Russian translator of Capital, adding:

“The next two sentences, viz. ‘Strange optical illusion to see everywhere
a state of things which as yet exists only exceptionally on our earth.
But let us finish’ - should be deleted and the following sentence substituted:

“Mr. Mill is good enough to believe that this state of things
is not an absolute necessity, even in that economic system in which ‘labourers
and capitalists are separate classes.’”

The substance of this note has been taken from the Volksausgabe.
The quotation from Mill is from his Principles of Political Economy, Book
II, Chap XV, 5.

12. J. St. Mill. Principles of Pol. Econ. Lond. 1868, p. 252-53 passim.

## Chapter Seventeen: Changes of Magnitude in the Price of Labour-Power and in Surplus-Value

Contents

Section 1 - Length of the Working-Day and Intensity of Labour Constant. Productiveness of Labour Variable

Section 2 - Working-Day Constant. Productiveness of Labour
Constant. Intensity of Labour Variable

Section 3 - Productiveness and Intensity of Labour Constant.
Length of the Working-Day Variable

Section 4 - Simultaneous Variations in the Duration, Productiveness,
and Intensity of Labour

A. Diminishing Productiveness of Labour with
a Simultaneous Lengthening of the Working-Day

B. Increasing Intensity and Productiveness
of Labour with Simultaneous Shortening of the Working-Day

The value of labour-power is determined by the value
of the necessaries of life habitually required by the average labourer.
The quantity of these necessaries is known at any given epoch of a given
society, and can therefore be treated as a constant magnitude. What changes,
is the value of this quantity. There are, besides, two other factors that
enter into the determination of the value of labour-power. One, the expenses
of developing that power, which expenses vary with the mode of production;
the other, its natural diversity, the difference between the labour-power
of men and women, of children and adults. The employment of these different
sorts of labour-power, an employment which is, in its turn, made necessary
by the mode of production, makes a great difference in the cost of maintaining
the family of the labourer, and in the value of the labour-power of the
adult male. Both these factors, however, are excluded in the following
investigation. [1]

I assume (1) that commodities are sold at their value; (2) that
the price of labour-power rises occasionally above its value, but never
sinks below it.

On this assumption we have seen that the relative magnitudes of
surplus-value and of price of labour-power are determined by three circumstances;
(1) the length of the working-day, or the extensive magnitude of labour;
(2) the normal intensity of labour, its intensive magnitude, whereby a
given quantity of labour is expended in a given time; (3) the productiveness
of labour, whereby the same quantum of labour yields, in a given time, a
greater or less quantum of product, dependent on the degree of development
in the conditions of production. Very different combinations are clearly
possible, according as one of the three factors is constant and two variable,
or two constant and one variable, or lastly, all three simultaneously variable.
And the number of these combinations is augmented by the fact that, when
these factors simultaneously vary, the amount and direction of their respective
variations may differ. In what follows the chief combinations alone are
considered.

### SECTION 1. LENGTH OF THE WORKING-DAY AND INTENSITY OF LABOUR CONSTANT. PRODUCTIVENESS OF LABOUR VARIABLE.

On these assumptions the value of labour-power, and
the magnitude of surplus-value, are determined by three laws.

(1.) A working day of given length always creates the same
amount of value, no matter how the productiveness of labour, and, with
it, the mass of the product, and the price of each single commodity produced,
may vary.

If the value created by a working-day of 12 hours be, say, six
shillings, then, although the mass of the articles produced varies with
the productiveness of labour, the only result is that the value represented
by six shillings is spread over a greater or less number of articles.

(2.) Surplus-value and the value of labour-power vary in
opposite directions. A variation in the productiveness of labour, its increase
or diminution, causes a variation in the opposite direction in the value
of labour-power, and in the same direction in surplus-value.

The value created by a working day of 12 hours is a constant quantity,
say, six shillings. This constant quantity is the sum of the surplus-value
plus the value of the labour-power, which latter value the labourer replaces
by an equivalent. It is self-evident, that if a constant quantity consists
of two parts, neither of them can increase without the other diminishing.
Let the two parts at starting be equal; 3 shillings value of labour-power,
3 shillings surplus-value. Then the value of the labour-power cannot rise
from three shillings to four, without the surplus-value falling from three
shillings to two; and the surplus-value cannot rise from three shillings
to four, without the value of labour-power falling from three shillings
to two. Under these circumstances, therefore, no change can take place
in the absolute magnitude, either of the surplus-value, or of the value
of labour-power, without a simultaneous change in their relative magnitudes,
i.e., relatively to each other. It is impossible for them to rise
or fall simultaneously.

Further, the value of labour-power cannot fall, and consequently
surplus-value cannot rise, without a rise in the productiveness of labour.
For instance, in the above case, the value of the labour-power cannot sink
from three shillings to two, unless an increase in the productiveness of
labour makes it possible to produce in 4 hours the same quantity of necessaries
as previously required 6 hours to produce. On the other hand, the value
of the labour-power cannot rise from three shillings to four, without a
decrease in the productiveness of labour, whereby eight hours become requisite
to produce the same quantity of necessaries, for the production of which
six hours previously sufficed. It follows from this, that an increase in
the productiveness of labour causes a fall in the value of labour-power
and a consequent rise in surplus-value, while, on the other hand, a decrease
in such productiveness causes a rise in the value of labour-power, and
a fall in surplus-value.

In formulating this law, Ricardo overlooked one circumstance;
although a change in the magnitude of the surplus-value or surplus-labour
causes a change in the opposite direction in the magnitude of the value
of labour-power, or in the quantity of necessary labour, it by no means
follows that they vary in the same proportion. They do increase or diminish
by the same quantity. But their proportional increase or diminution depends
on their original magnitudes before the change in the productiveness of
labour took place. If the value of the labour-power be 4 shillings, or
the necessary labour time 8 hours, and the surplus-value be 2 shillings,
or the surplus-labour 4 hours, and if, in consequence of an increase in
the productiveness of labour, the value of the labour-power fall to 3 shillings,
or the necessary labour to 6 hours, the surplus-value will rise to 3 shillings,
or the surplus-labour to 6 hours. The same quantity, 1 shilling or 2 hours,
is added in one case and subtracted in the other. But the proportional
change of magnitude is different in each case. While the value of the labour-power
falls from 4 shillings to 3, i.e., by 1/4 or 25%, the surplus-value
rises from 2 shillings to 3, i.e., by 1/2 or 50%. It therefore follows
that the proportional increase or diminution in surplus-value, consequent
on a given change in the productiveness of labour, depends on the original
magnitude of that portion of the working day which embodies itself in surplus-value;
the smaller that portion, the greater is the proportional change; the greater
that portion, the less is the proportional change.

(3.) Increase or diminution in surplus-value is always
consequent on, and never the cause of, the corresponding diminution or
increase in the value of labour-power. [2]

Since the working-day is constant in magnitude, and is represented
by a value of constant magnitude, since, to every variation in the magnitude
of surplus-value, there corresponds an inverse variation in the value of
labour-power, and since the value of labour-power cannot change, except
in consequence of a change in the productiveness of labour, it clearly
follows, under these conditions, that every change of magnitude in surplus-value
arises from an inverse change of magnitude in the value of labour-power.
If, then, as we have already seen, there can be no change of absolute magnitude
in the value of labour-power, and in surplus-value, unaccompanied by a
change in their relative magnitudes, so now it follows that no change in
their relative magnitudes is possible, without a previous change in the
absolute magnitude of the value of labour-power.

According to the third law, a change in the magnitude of surplus-value,
presupposes a movement in the value of labour-power, which movement is
brought about by a variation in the productiveness of labour. The limit
of this change is given by the altered value of labour-power. Nevertheless,
even when circumstances allow the law to operate, subsidiary movements
may occur. For example: if in consequence of the increased productiveness
of labour, the value of labour-power falls from 4 shillings to 3, or the
necessary labour time from 8 hours to 6, the price of labour-power may
possibly not fall below 3s. 8d., 3s. 6d., or 3s. 2d., and the surplus-value
consequently not rise above 3s. 4d., 3s. 6d., or 3s. 10d. The amount of
this fall, the lowest limit of which is 3 shillings (the new value of labour-power),
depends on the relative weight, which the pressure of capital on the one
side, and the resistance of the labourer on the other, throws into the
scale.

The value of labour-power is determined by the value of a given
quantity of necessaries. It is the value and not the mass of these necessaries
that varies with the productiveness of labour. It is, however, possible
that, owing to an increase of productiveness, both the labourer and the
capitalist may simultaneously be able to appropriate a greater quantity
of these necessaries, without any change in the price of labour-power or
in surplus-value. If the value of labour-power be 3 shillings, and the
necessary labour time amount to 6 hours, if the surplus-value likewise
be 3 shillings, and the surplus-labour 6 hours, then if the productiveness
of labour were doubled without altering the ratio of necessary labour to
surplus-labour, there would be no change of magnitude in surplus-value
and price of labour-power. The only result would be that each of them would
represent twice as many use-values as before; these use-values being twice
as cheap as before. Although labour-power would be unchanged in price,
it would be above its value. If, however, the price of labour-power had
fallen, not to 1s. 6d., the lowest possible point consistent with its new
value, but to 2s. 10d. or 2s. 6d., still this lower price would represent
an increased mass of necessaries. In this way it is possible with an increasing
productiveness of labour, for the price of labour-power to keep on falling,
and yet this fall to be accompanied by a constant growth in the mass of
the labourer's means of subsistence. But even in such case, the fall in
the value of labour-power would cause a corresponding rise of surplus-value,
and thus the abyss between the labourer's position and that of the capitalist
would keep widening. [3]

Ricardo was the first who accurately formulated the three laws
we have above stated. But he falls into the following errors: (1) he looks
upon the special conditions under which these laws hold good as the general
and sole conditions of capitalist production. He knows no change, either
in the length of the working-day, or in the intensity of labour; consequently
with him there can be only one variable factor, viz., the productiveness
of labour; (2), and this error vitiates his analysis much more than (1),
he has not, any more than have the other economists, investigated surplus-value
as such, i.e., independently of its particular forms, such as profit,
rent, &c. He therefore confounds together the laws of the rate of surplus-value
and the laws of the rate of profit. The rate of profit is, as we have already
said, the ratio of the surplus-value to the total capital advanced; the
rate of surplus-value is the ratio of the surplus-value to the variable
part of that capital. Assume that a capital C of £500 is made up
of raw material, instruments of labour, &c. (c) to the amount of £400;
and of wages (v) to the amount of £100; and further, that the surplus-value
(s) = £100. Then we have rate of surplus-value s/v = £100/£100
= 100%. But the rate of profit s/c = £100/£500 = 20%. It is,
besides, obvious that the rate of profit may depend on circumstances that
in no way affect the rate of surplus-value. I shall show in Book III. that,
with a given rate of surplus-value, we may have any number of rates of
profit, and that various rates of surplus-value may, under given conditions,
express themselves in a single rate of profit.

### SECTION 2. WORKING-DAY CONSTANT. PRODUCTIVENESS OF LABOUR CONSTANT. INTENSITY OF LABOUR VARIABLE

Increased intensity of labour means increased expenditure
of labour in a given time. Hence a working-day of more intense labour is
embodied in more products than is one of less intense labour, the length
of each day being the same. Increased productiveness of labour also, it
is true, will supply more products in a given working-day. But in this
latter case, the value of each single product falls, for it costs less
labour than before; in the former case, that value remains unchanged, for
each article costs the same labour as before. Here we have an increase
in the number of products, unaccompanied by a fall in their individual
prices: as their number increases, so does the sum of their prices. But
in the case of increased productiveness, a given value is spread over a
greater mass of products. Hence the length of the working-day being constant,
a day's labour of increased intensity will be incorporated in an increased
value, and, the value of money remaining unchanged, in more money. The
value created varies with the extent to which the intensity of labour deviates
from its normal intensity in the society. A given working-day, therefore,
no longer creates a constant, but a variable value; in a day of 12 hours
of ordinary intensity, the value created is, say 6 shillings, but with
increased intensity, the value created may be 7, 8, or more shillings.
It is clear that, if the value created by a day's labour increases from,
say, 6 to 8 shillings then the two parts into which this value is divided,
viz., price of labour-power and surplus-value, may both of them increase
simultaneously, and either equally or unequally. They may both simultaneously
increase from 3 shillings to 4. Here, the rise in the price of labour-power
does not necessarily imply that the price has risen above the value of
labour-power. On the contrary, the rise in price may be accompanied by
a fall in value. This occurs whenever the rise in the price of labour-power
does not compensate for its increased wear and tear.

We know that, with transitory exceptions, a change in the productiveness
of labour does not cause any change in the value of labour-power, nor consequently
in the magnitude of surplus-value, unless the products of the industries
affected are articles habitually consumed by the labourers. In the present
case this condition no longer applies. For when the variation is either
in the duration or in the intensity of labour, there is always a corresponding
change in the magnitude of the value created, independently of the nature
of the article in which that value is embodied.

If the intensity of labour were to increase simultaneously and
equally in every branch of industry, then the new and higher degree of
intensity would become the normal degree for the society, and would therefore
cease to be taken account of. But still, even then, the intensity of labour
would be different in different countries, and would modify the international
application of the law of value. The more intense working-day of one nation
would be represented by a greater sum of money than would the less intense
day of another nation. [4]

### SECTION 3. PRODUCTIVENESS AND INTENSITY OF LABOUR CONSTANT. LENGTH OF THE WORKING-DAY VARIABLE

The working-day may vary in two ways. It may be made
either longer or shorter. From our present data, and within the limits
of the assumptions made on p. 487 [v. 35 MECW p. 520] we obtain the following laws:

(1.) The working-day creates a greater or less amount of
value in proportion to its length — thus, a variable and not a constant
quantity of value.

(2.) Every change in the relation between the magnitudes
of surplus-value and of the value of labour-power arises from a change
in the absolute magnitude of the surplus-labour, and consequently of the
surplus-value.

(3.) The absolute value of labour-power can change only
in consequence of the reaction exercised by the prolongation of surplus-labour
upon the wear and tear of labour-power. Every change in this absolute value
is therefore the effect, but never the cause, of a change in the magnitude
of surplus-value.

We begin with the case in which the working-day is shortened.

(1.) A shortening of the working-day under the conditions
given above, leaves the value of labour-power, and with it, the necessary
labour time, unaltered. It reduces the surplus-labour and surplus-value.
Along with the absolute magnitude of the latter, its relative magnitude
also falls, i.e., its magnitude relatively to the value of labour-power
whose magnitude remains unaltered. Only by lowering the price of labour-power
below its value could the capitalist save himself harmless.

All the usual arguments against the shortening of the working-day,
assume that it takes place under the conditions we have here supposed to
exist; but in reality the very contrary is the case: a change in the productiveness
and intensity of labour either precedes, or immediately follows, a shortening
of the working-day. [5]

(2.) Lengthening of the working-day. Let the necessary
labour time be 6 hours, or the value of labour-power 3 shillings; also
let the surplus-labour be 6 hours or the surplus-value 3 shillings. The
whole working-day then amounts to 12 hours and is embodied in a value of
6 shillings. If, now, the working-day be lengthened by 2 hours and the
price of labour-power remain unaltered, the surplus-value increases both
absolutely and relatively. Although there is no absolute change in the
value of labour-power, it suffers a relative fall. Under the conditions
assumed in 1. there could not be a change of relative magnitude in the
value of labour-power without a change in its absolute magnitude. Here,
on the contrary, the change of relative magnitude in the value of labour-power
is the result of the change of absolute magnitude in surplus-value.

Since the value in which a day's labour is embodied, increases
with the length of that day, it is evident that the surplus-value and the
price of labour-power may simultaneously increase, either by equal or unequal
quantities. This simultaneous increase is therefore possible in two cases,
one, the actual lengthening of the working-day, the other, an increase
in the intensity of labour unaccompanied by such lengthening.

When the working-day is prolonged, the price of labour-power may
fall below its value, although that price be nominally unchanged or even
rise. The value of a day's labour-power is, as will be remembered, estimated
from its normal average duration, or from the normal duration of life among
the labourers, and from corresponding normal transformations of organised
bodily matter into motion, [6] in conformity with the
nature of man. Up to a certain point, the increased wear and tear of labour-power,
inseparable from a lengthened working-day, may be compensated by higher
wages. But beyond this point the wear and tear increases in geometrical
progression, and every condition suitable for the normal reproduction and
functioning of labour-power is suppressed. The price of labour-power and
the degree of its exploitation cease to be commensurable quantities.

### SECTION 4. SIMULTANEOUS VARIATIONS IN THE DURATION, PRODUCTIVENESS, AND INTENSITY OF LABOUR

It is obvious that a large number of combinations
are here possible. Any two of the factors may vary and the third remain
constant, or all three may vary at once. They may vary either in the same
or in different degrees, in the same or in opposite directions, with the
result that the variations counteract one another, either wholly or in
part. Nevertheless the analysis of every possible case is easy in view
of the results given in I., II., and III. The effect of every possible
combination may be found by treating each factor in turn as variable, and
the other two constant for the time being. We shall, therefore, notice,
and that briefly, but two important cases.

### A. Diminishing productiveness of labour with a simultaneous lengthening of the working-day.

In speaking of diminishing productiveness of labour, we here refer to diminution
in those industries whose products determine the value of labour-power;
such a diminution, for example, as results from decreasing fertility of
the soil, and from the corresponding dearness of its products. Take the
working-day at 12 hours and the value created by it at 6 shillings, of
which one half replaces the value of the labour-power, the other forms
the surplus-value. Suppose, in consequence of the increased dearness of
the products of the soil, that the value of labour-power rises from 3 shillings
to 4, and therefore the necessary labour time from 6 hours to 8. If there
be no change in the length of the working-day, the surplus-labour would
fall from 6 hours to 4, the surplus-value from 3 shillings to 2. If the
day be lengthened by 2 hours, i.e., from 12 hours to 14, the surplus-labour
remains at 6 hours, the surplus-value at 3 shillings [note], but the surplus-value
decreases compared with the value of labour-power, as measured by the necessary
labour time. If the day be lengthened by 4 hours, viz., from 12 hours to
16, the proportional magnitudes of surplus-value and value of labour-power,
of surplus-labour and necessary labour, continue unchanged, but the absolute
magnitude of surplus-value rises from 3 shillings to 4, that of the surplus-labour
from 6 hours to 8, an increment of 33 1/3%. Therefore, with diminishing
productiveness of labour and a simultaneous lengthening of the working-day,
the absolute magnitude of surplus-value may continue unaltered, at the
same time that its relative magnitude diminishes; its relative magnitude
may continue unchanged, at the same time that its absolute magnitude increases;
and, provided the lengthening of the day be sufficient, both may increase.

In the period between 1799 and 1815 the increasing price of provisions
led in England to a nominal rise in wages, although the real wages, expressed
in the necessaries of life, fell. From this fact West and Ricardo drew
the conclusion, that the diminution in the productiveness of agricultural
labour had brought about a fall in the rate of surplus-value, and they
made this assumption of a fact that existed only in their imaginations,
the starting-point of important investigations into the relative magnitudes
of wages, profits, and rent. But, as a matter of fact, surplus-value had
at that time, thanks to the increased intensity of labour, and to the prolongation
of the working-day, increased both in absolute and relative magnitude.
This was the period in which the right to prolong the hours of labour to
an outrageous extent was established; [7] the period
that was especially characterised by an accelerated accumulation of capital
here, by pauperism there. [8]

### B. Increasing intensity and productiveness of labour with simultaneous shortening of the working-day.

Increased productiveness and greater intensity of labour, both have a like
effect. They both augment the mass of articles produced in a given time.
Both, therefore, shorten that portion of the working-day which the labourer
needs to produce his means of subsistence or their equivalent. The minimum
length of the working-day is fixed by this necessary but contractile portion
of it. If the whole working-day were to shrink to the length of this portion,
surplus-labour would vanish, a consummation utterly impossible under the
régime of capital. Only by suppressing the capitalist form of production
could the length of the working-day be reduced to the necessary labour time.
But, even in that case, the latter would extend its limits. On the one
hand, because the notion of “means of subsistence” would considerably expand,
and the labourer would lay claim to an altogether different standard of
life. On the other hand, because a part of what is now surplus-labour,
would then count as necessary labour; I mean the labour of forming a fund
for reserve and accumulation.

The more the productiveness of labour increases, the more can
the working-day be shortened; and the more the working-day is shortened,
the more can the intensity of labour increase. From a social point of view,
the productiveness increases in the same ratio as the economy of labour,
which, in its turn, includes not only economy of the means of production,
but also the avoidance of all useless labour. The capitalist mode of production,
while on the one hand, enforcing economy in each individual business, on
the other hand, begets, by its anarchical system of competition, the most
outrageous squandering of labour-power and of the social means of production,
not to mention the creation of a vast number of employments, at present
indispensable, but in themselves superfluous.

The intensity and productiveness of labour being given, the time
which society is bound to devote to material production is shorter, and
as a consequence, the time at its disposal for the free development, intellectual
and social, of the individual is greater, in proportion as the work is
more and more evenly divided among all the able-bodied members of society,
and as a particular class is more and more deprived of the power to shift
the natural burden of labour from its own shoulders to those of another
layer of society. In this direction, the shortening of the working-day
finds at last a limit in the generalisation of labour. In capitalist society
spare time is acquired for one class by converting the whole life-time
of the masses into labour time.

Footnotes

1. Note in the 3rd German edition. — The case considered at pages 321-324 is here of course omitted. — F. E.

2. To this third law MacCulloch has made, amongst others, this absurd addition, that a rise in surplus-value, unaccompanied by a fall in the value of labour-power, can occur through the abolition
of taxes payable by the capitalist. The abolition of such taxes makes no
change whatever in the quantity of surplus-value that the capitalist extorts
at first-hand from the labourer. It alters only the proportion in which
that surplus-value is divided between himself and third persons. It consequently
makes no alteration whatever in the relation between surplus-value and
value of labour-power. MacCulloch's exception therefore proves only his
misapprehension of the rule, a misfortune that as often happens to him
in the vulgarisation of Ricardo, as it does to J. B. Say in the vulgarisation
of Adam Smith.

3. “When an alteration takes place in the productiveness of industry, and that either more or less is produced
by a given quantity of labour and capital, the proportion of wages may
obviously vary, whilst the quantity, which that proportion represents,
remains the same, or the quantity may vary, whilst the proportion remains
the same.” (“Outlines of Political Economy, &c.,” p. 67.)

4. “All things being equal, the English manufacturer can turn out a considerably larger amount of work in a given
time than a foreign manufacturer, so much as to counterbalance the difference
of the working-days, between 60 hours a week here, and 72 or 80 elsewhere.”
(Rep. of Insp. of Fact. for 31st Oct., 1855, p. 65.) The most infallible
means for reducing this qualitative difference between the English and
Continental working hour would be a law shortening quantitatively the length
of the working-day in Continental factories.

5. “There are compensating circumstances ... which the working of the Ten Hours' Act has brought to light.” (“Rep. of Insp. of Fact. for 31st Oct. 1848,” p. 7.)

6. “The amount of labour which a man had undergone in the course of 24 hours might be approximately arrived
at by an examination of the chemical changes which had taken place in his
body, changed forms in matter indicating the anterior exercise of dynamic
force.” (Grove: “On the Correlation of Physical Forces.”)

7. “Corn and labour rarely march quite abreast; but there is an obvious limit, beyond which they cannot be separated.
With regard to the unusual exertions made by the labouring classes in periods
of dearness, which produce the fall of wages noticed in the evidence” (namely,
before the Parliamentary Committee of Inquiry, 1814-15), “they are most
meritorious in the individuals, and certainly favour the growth of capital.
But no man of humanity could wish to see them constant and unremitted.
They are most admirable as a temporary relief; but if they were constantly
in action, effects of a similar kind would result from them, as from the
population of a country being pushed to the very extreme limits of its
food.” (Malthus: “Inquiry into the Nature and Progress of Rent,” Lond.,
1815, p. 48, note.) All honour to Malthus that he lays stress on the lengthening
of the hours of labour, a fact to which he elsewhere in his pamphlet draws
attention, while Ricardo and others, in face of the most notorious facts,
make invariability in the length of the working-day the groundwork of all
their investigations. But the conservative interests, which Malthus served,
prevented him from seeing that an unlimited prolongation of the working-day,
combined with an extraordinary development of machinery, and the exploitation
of women and children, must inevitably have made a great portion of the
working-class “supernumerary,” particularly whenever the war should have
ceased, and the monopoly of England in the markets of the world should
have come to an end. It was, of course, far more convenient, and much more
in conformity with the interests of the ruling classes, whom Malthus adored
like a true priest, to explain this “over-population” by the eternal laws
of Nature, rather than by the historical laws of capitalist production.

8. “A principal cause of the increase of capital, during the war, proceeded from the greater exertions, and perhaps
the greater privations of the labouring classes, the most numerous in every
society. More women and children were compelled by necessitous circumstances,
to enter upon laborious occupations, and former workmen were, from the
same cause, obliged to devote a greater portion of their time to increase
production.” (Essays on Pol. Econ., in which are illustrated the principal
causes of the present national distress. Lond., 1830, p. 248.)

Note

Earlier English translations have “6 sh.” instead of 3 shillings. This error was pointed out to us by a reader, we have investigated and checked with the 1872 German Edition and duly corrected an obvious error. See “A three shilling mystery”.

Andy Blunden (2002)

## Chapter Eighteen: Various Formula for the Rate of Surplus-Value

We have seen that the rate of surplus-value is represented
by the following formulae:

I.Surplus-value(s)=Surplus-value=Surplus-labour

Variable CapitalvValue of labour-powerNecessary labour

The two first of these formulae represent, as a ratio of values, that which,
in the third, is represented as a ratio of the times during which those
values are produced. These formulae, supplementary the one to the other,
are rigorously definite and correct. We therefore find them substantially,
but not consciously, worked out in classical Political Economy. There we
meet with the following derivative formulae.

II.Surplus-labour =Surplus-value=Surplus-product

Working-day Value of the ProductTotal Product

One and the same ratio is here expressed as a ratio of labour-times, of
the values in which those labour-times are embodied, and of the products
in which those values exist. It is of course understood that, by “Value
of the Product,” is meant only the value newly created in a working-day,
the constant part of the value of the product being excluded.

In all of these formulae (II.), the actual degree of exploitation of
labour, or the rate of surplus-value, is falsely expressed. Let the working-day
be 12 hours. Then, making the same assumptions as in former instances,
the real degree of exploitation of labour will be represented in the following
proportions.

6 hours surplus-labour=Surplus-value of 3 sh.= 100%

6 hours necessary labourVariable Capital of 3 sh.

From formulae II. we get very differently,

6 hours surplus-labour=Surplus-value of 3 sh.= 50%

Working-day of 12 hoursValue created of 6 sh.

These derivative formulae express, in reality, only the proportion in which
the working-day, or the value produced by it, is divided between capitalist
and labourer. If they are to be treated as direct expressions of the degree
of self-expansion of capital, the following erroneous law would hold good:
Surplus-labour or surplus-value can never reach 100%. [1] Since the surplus-labour is only an aliquot part of the working-day, or
since surplus-value is only an aliquot part of the value created, the surplus-labour
must necessarily be always less than the working-day, or the surplus-value
always less than the total value created. In order, however, to attain
the ratio of 100:100 they must be equal. In order that the surplus-labour
may absorb the whole day (i.e., an average day of any week or year), the
necessary labour must sink to zero. But if the necessary labour vanish, so
too does the surplus-labour, since it is only a function of the former.
The ratio

Surplus-labourorSurplus-value

Working-dayValue created

can therefore never reach the limit 100/100, still less rise to 100 + x/100.
But not so the rate of surplus-value, the real degree of exploitation of
labour. Take, e.g., the estimate of L. de Lavergne, according to which the
English agricultural labourer gets only 1/4, the capitalist (farmer) on
the other hand 3/4 of the product [2] or its value, apart from the question of how the booty is subsequently divided between the
capitalist, the landlord, and others. According to this, this surplus-labour
of the English agricultural labourer is to his necessary labour as 3:1, which
gives a rate of exploitation of 300%.

The favorite method of treating the working-day as constant in magnitude
became, through the use of formulae II., a fixed usage, because in them
surplus-labour is always compared with a working-day of given length. The
same holds good when the repartition of the value produced is exclusively
kept in sight. The working-day that has already been realized in given value,
must necessarily be a day of given length.

The habit of representing surplus-value and value of labour-power as
fractions of the value created — a habit that originates in the capitalist
mode of production itself, and whose import will hereafter be disclosed
— conceals the very transaction that characterizes capital, namely the
exchange of variable capital for living labour-power, and the consequent
exclusion of the labourer from the product. Instead of the real fact, we
have false semblance of an association, in which labourer and capitalist
divide the product in proportion to the different elements which they respectively
contribute towards its formation. [3]

Moreover, the formulae II. can at any time be reconverted into
formulae I. If, for instance, we have

Surplus-labour of 6 hours

Working-day of 12 hours

then the necessary labour-time being 12 hours less the surplus-labour of
6 hours, we get the following result,

Surplus-labour of 6 hours=100

Necessary labour of 6 hours100

There is a third formula which I have occasionally already anticipated;
it is

III.Surplus-value=Surplus-labour=Unpaid labour

Value of labour-powerNecessary labourPaid labour

After the investigations we have given above, it is no longer possible
to be misled, by the formula

Unpaid labour,

Paid labour

into concluding, that the capitalist pays for labour and not for labour-power.
This formula is only a popular expression for

Surplus-labour,

Necessary labour

The capitalist pays the value, so far as price coincides with value, of
the labour-power, and receives in exchange the disposal of the living labour-power
itself. His usufruct is spread over two periods. During one the labourer
produces a value that is only equal to the value of his labour-power; he
produces its equivalent. Thus the capitalist receives in return for his
advance of the price of the labour-power, a product ready made in the market.
During the other period, the period of surplus-labour, the usufruct of the
labour-power creates a value for the capitalist, that costs him no equivalent.
[4] This expenditure of labour-power comes to him gratis. In this sense it is that surplus-labour can be called unpaid labour.

Capital, therefore, is not only, as Adam Smith says, the command over
labour. It is essentially the command over unpaid labour. All surplus-value,
whatever particular form (profit, interest, or rent), it may subsequently
crystallize into, is in substance the materialization of unpaid labour.
The secret of the self-expansion of capital resolves itself into having
the disposal of a definite quantity of other people’s unpaid labour.

Footnotes

1. Thus, e.g., in “Dritter Brief an v. Kirchmann von Rodbertus. Widerlegung der Ricardo’schen Lehre von der Grundrente und
Begrundung einer neuen Rententheorie". Berlin, 1851. I shall return to
this letter later on; in spite of its erroneous theory of rent, it sees
through the nature of capitalist production.

NOTE ADDED IN THE 3RD GERMAN EDITION: It may be seen from this how favorably
Marx judged his predecessors, whenever he found in them real progress,
or new and sound ideas. The subsequent publications of Robertus’ letters
to Rud. Meyer has shown that the above acknowledgement by Marx wants restricting
to some extent. In those letters this passage occurs:

“Capital must be rescued not only from labour, but from itself, and
that will be best effected, by treating the acts of the industrial capitalist
as economic and political functions, that have been delegated to him with
his capital, and by treating his profit as a form of salary, because we
still know no other social organization. But salaries may be regulated,
and may also be reduced if they take too much from wages. The irruption
of Marx into Society, as I may call his book, must be warded off.... Altogether,
Marx’s book is not so much an investigation into capital, as a polemic
against the present form of capital, a form which he confounds with the
concept itself of capital.”

("Briefe, &c., von Dr. Robertus-Jagetzow, herausgg. von Dr. Rud. Meyer,”
Berlin, 1881, I, Bd. P.111, 46. Brief von Rodbertus.) To such ideological
commonplaces did the bold attack by Robertus in his “social letters” finally
dwindle down. — F.E.

2. That part of the product which merely replaces the constant capital advanced is of course left out in this calculation.
Mr. L. de Lavergne, a blind admirer of England, is inclined to estimate
the share of the capitalist too low, rather than too high.

3. All well-developed forms of capitalist production being forms of cooperation, nothing is, of course, easier, than to make
abstraction from their antagonistic character, and to transform them by
a word into some form of free association, as is done by A. de labourde
in “De l’Esprit d’Association dans tous les intérêts de la communauté".
Paris 1818. H. Carey, the Yankee, occasionally performs this conjuring
trick with like success, even with the relations resulting from slavery.

4. Although the Physiocrats could not penetrate the mystery of surplus-value, yet this much was clear to them, viz., that
it is “une richesse indépendante et disponible qu’il (the possessor) n’a
point achetée et qu’il vend.” [a wealth which is independent and disposable, which he ... has not bought and which he sells] (Turgot: “Réflexions sur la Formation et la Distribution des Richesses,” p.11.)

## Part VI: Wages

## Chapter Nineteen: The Transformation of the Value (and Respective Price) of Labour-Power into Wages

On the surface of bourgeois society the wage of the
labourer appears as the price of labour, a certain quantity of money that
is paid for a certain quantity of labour. Thus people speak of the value
of labour and call its expression in money its necessary or natural price.
On the other hand they speak of the market-prices of labour, i.e., prices
oscillating above or below its natural price.

But what is the value of a commodity? The objective form of the
social labour expended in its production. And how do we measure the quantity
of this value? By the quantity of the labour contained in it. How then
is the value, e.g., of a 12 hour working-day to be determined? By the
12 working-hours contained in a working-day of 12 hours, which is an absurd
tautology. [1]

In order to be sold as a commodity in the market, labour must
at all events exist before it is sold. But, could the labourer give it
an independent objective existence, he would sell a commodity and not labour.

Apart from these contradictions, a direct exchange of money, i.e.,
of realized labour, with living labour would either do away with the law
of value which only begins to develop itself freely on the basis of capitalist
production, or do away with capitalist production itself, which rests directly
on wage-labour. The working-day of 12 hours embodies itself, e.g., in a
money-value of 6s. Either equivalents are exchanged, and then the labourer
receives 6s, for 12 hours’ labour; the price of his labour would be equal
to the price of his product. In this case he produces no surplus-value
for the buyer of his labour, the 6s. are not transformed into capital,
the basis of capitalist production vanishes. But it is on this very basis
that he sells his labour and that his labour is wage-labour. Or else he
receives for 12 hours’ labour less than 6s., i.e., less than 12 hours’
labour. Twelve hours’ labour are exchanged against 10, 6, &c., hours’
labour. This equalization of unequal quantities not merely does away with
the determination of value. Such a self-destructive contradiction cannot
be in any way even enunciated or formulated as a law. [3]

It is of no avail to deduce the exchange of more labour against
less, from their difference of form, the one being realized, the other
living. [4] This is the more absurd as the value of a
commodity is determined not by the quantity of labour actually realized
in it, but by the quantity of living labour necessary for its production.
A commodity represents, say, 6 working-hours. If an invention is made by
which it can be produced in 3 hours, the value, even of the commodity already
produced, falls by half. It represents now 3 hours of social labour instead
of the 6 formerly necessary. It is the quantity of labour required for
its production, not the realized form of that labour, by which the amount
of the value of a commodity is determined.

That which comes directly face to face with the possessor of money
on the market, is in fact not labour, but the labourer. What the latter
sells is his labour-power. As soon as his labour actually begins, it has
already ceased to belong to him; it can therefore no longer be sold by
him. Labour is the substance, and the immanent measure of value, but has
itself no value. [5]

In the expression “value of labour,” the idea of value is not
only completely obliterated, but actually reversed. It is an expression
as imaginary as the value of the earth. These imaginary expressions, arise,
however, from the relations of production themselves. They are categories
for the phenomenal forms of essential relations. That in their appearance
things often represent themselves in inverted form is pretty well known
in every science except Political Economy. [6]

Classical Political Economy borrowed from every-day life the category
“price of labour” without further criticism, and then simply asked the
question, how is this price determined? It soon recognized that the change
in the relations of demand and supply explained in regard to the price
of labour, as of all other commodities, nothing except its changes i.e.,
the oscillations of the market-price above or below a certain mean. If
demand and supply balance, the oscillation of prices ceases, all other
conditions remaining the same. But then demand and supply also cease to
explain anything. The price of labour, at the moment when demand and supply
are in equilibrium, is its natural price, determined independently of the
relation of demand and supply. And how this price is determined is just
the question. Or a larger period of oscillations in the market-price is
taken, e.g., a year, and they are found to cancel one the other, leaving
a mean average quantity, a relatively constant magnitude. This had naturally
to be determined otherwise than by its own compensating variations. This
price which always finally predominates over the accidental market-prices
of labour and regulates them, this “necessary price” (Physiocrats) or “natural
price” of labour (Adam Smith) can, as with all other commodities, be nothing
else than its value expressed in money. In this way Political Economy expected
to penetrate athwart the accidental prices of labour, to the value of labour.
As with other commodities, this value was determined by the cost of production.
But what is the cost of production – of the labourer, i.e., the cost of producing
or reproducing the labourer himself? This question unconsciously substituted
itself in Political Economy for the original one; for the search after
the cost of production of labour as such turned in a circle and never left
the spot. What economists therefore call value of labour, is in fact the
value of labour-power, as it exists in the personality of the labourer,
which is as different from its function, labour, as a machine is from the
work it performs. Occupied with the difference between the market-price
of labour and its so-called value, with the relation of this value to the
rate of profit, and to the values of the commodities produced by means
of labour, &c., they never discovered that the course of the analysis
had led not only from the market-prices of labour to its presumed value,
but had led to the resolution of this value of labour itself into the value
of labour-power. Classical economy never arrived at a consciousness of
the results of its own analysis; it accepted uncritically the categories
“value of labour,” “natural price of labour,” &c., as final and as
adequate expressions for the value-relation under consideration, and was
thus led, as will be seen later, into inextricable confusion and contradiction,
while it offered to the vulgar economists a secure basis of operations
for their shallowness, which on principle worships appearances only.

Let us next see how value (and price) of labour-power, present
themselves in this transformed condition as wages.

We know that the daily value of labour-power is calculated upon
a certain length of the labourer’s life, to which, again, corresponds a
certain length of working-day. Assume the habitual working-day as 12 hours,
the daily value of labour-power as 3s., the expression in money of a value
that embodies 6 hours of labour. If the labourer receives 3s., then he
receives the value of his labour-power functioning through 12 hours. If,
now, this value of a day’s labour-power is expressed as the value of a
day’s labour itself, we have the formula: Twelve hours’ labour has a value
of 3s. The value of labour-power thus determines the value of labour, or,
expressed in money, its necessary price. If, on the other hand, the price
of labour-power differs from its value, in like manner the price of labour
differs from its so-called value.

As the value of labour is only an irrational expression for the
value of labour-power, it follows, of course, that the value of labour
must always be less than the value it produces, for the capitalist always
makes labour-power work longer than is necessary for the reproduction of
its own value. In the above example, the value of the labour-power that
functions through 12 hours is 3s., a value for the reproduction of which
6 hours are required. The value which the labour-power produces is, on
the other hand, 6s., because it, in fact, functions during 12 hours, and
the value it produces depends, not on its own value, but on the length
of time it is in action. Thus, we have a result absurd at first sight that
labour which creates a value of 6s. possesses a value of 3s. [7]

We see, further: The value of 3s. by which a part only of the
working-day – i.e., 6 hours’ labour-is paid for, appears as the value or
price of the whole working-day of 12 hours, which thus includes 6 hours
unpaid for. The wage form thus extinguishes every trace of the division
of the working-day into necessary labour and surplus-labour, into paid
and unpaid labour. All labour appears as paid labour. In the corvée,
the labour of the worker for himself, and his compulsory labour for his
lord, differ in space and time in the clearest possible way. In slave labour,
even that part of the working-day in which the slave is only replacing
the value of his own means of existence, in which, therefore, in fact,
he works for himself alone, appears as labour for his master. All the slave’s
labour appears as unpaid labour. [8] In wage labour,
on the contrary, even surplus-labour, or unpaid labour, appears as paid.
There the property-relation conceals the labour of the slave for himself;
here the money-relation conceals the unrequited labour of the wage labourer.

Hence, we may understand the decisive importance of the transformation
of value and price of labour-power into the form of wages, or into the
value and price of labour itself. This phenomenal form, which makes the
actual relation invisible, and, indeed, shows the direct opposite of that
relation, forms the basis of all the juridical notions of both labourer
and capitalist, of all the mystifications of the capitalistic mode of production,
of all its illusions as to liberty, of all the apologetic shifts of the
vulgar economists.

If history took a long time to get at the bottom of the mystery
of wages, nothing, on the other hand, is more easy to understand than the
necessity, the raison d’etre, of this phenomenon.

The exchange between capital and labour at first presents itself
to the mind in the same guise as the buying and selling of all other commodities.
The buyer gives a certain sum of money, the seller an article of a nature
different from money. The jurist’s consciousness recognizes in this, at
most, a material difference, expressed in the juridically equivalent formula:
“Do ut des, do ut facias, facio ut des, facio ut facias.” [9]

Furthermore, exchange-value and use-value, being intrinsically
incommensurable magnitudes, the expressions “value of labour,” “price of
labour,” do not seem more irrational than the expressions “value of cotton,”
“price of cotton.” Moreover, the labourer is paid after he has given his
labour. In its function of means of payment, money realizes subsequently
the value or price of the article supplied – i.e., in this particular case,
the value or price of the labour supplied. Finally, the use-value supplied
by the labourer to the capitalist is not, in fact, his labour-power, but
its function, some definite useful labour, the work of tailoring, shoemaking,
spinning, &c. That this same labour is, on the other hand, the universal
value-creating element, and thus possesses a property by which it differs
from all other commodities, is beyond the cognizance of the ordinary mind.

Let us put ourselves in the place of the labourer who receives
for 12 hours’ labour, say the value produced by 6 hours’ labour, say 3s.
For him, in fact, his 12 hours’ labour is the means of buying the 3s. The
value of his labour-power may vary, with the value of his usual means of
subsistence, from 3 to 4 shillings, or from 3 to 2 shillings; or, if the
value of his labour-power remains constant, its price may, in consequence
of changing relations of demand and supply, rise to 4s. or fall to 2s.
He always gives 12 hours of labour. Every change in the amount of the equivalent
that he receives appears to him, therefore, necessarily as a change in
the value or price of his 12 hours’ work. This circumstance misled Adam
Smith, who treated the working-day as a constant quantity, [10] to the assertion that the value of labour is constant, although the value of the means of subsistence may vary, and the same working-day, therefore,
may represent itself in more or less money for the labourer.

Let us consider, on the other hand, the capitalist. He wishes
to receive as much labour as possible for as little money as possible.
Practically, therefore, the only thing that interests him is the difference
between the price of labour-power and the value which its function creates.
But, then, he tries to buy all commodities as cheaply as possible, and
always accounts for his profit by simple cheating, by buying under, and
selling over the value. Hence, he never comes to see that, if such a thing
as the value of labour really existed, and he really paid this value, no
capital would exist, his money would not be turned into capital.

Moreover, the actual movement of wages presents phenomena which
seem to prove that not the value of labour-power is paid, but the value
of its function, of labour itself. We may reduce these phenomena to two
great classes: 1.) Change of wages with the changing length of the working-day.
One might as well conclude that not the value of a machine is paid, but
that of its working, because it costs more to hire a machine for a week
than for a day. 2.) The individual difference in the wages of different
labourers who do the same kind of work. We find this individual difference,
but are not deceived by it, in the system of slavery, where, frankly and
openly, without any circumlocution, labour-power itself is sold. Only,
in the slave system, the advantage of a labour-power above the average,
and the disadvantage of a labour-power below the average, affects the slave-owner;
in the wage-labour system, it affects the labourer himself, because his
labour-power is, in the one case, sold by himself, in the other, by a third
person.

For the rest, in respect to the phenomenal form, “value and price
of labour,” or “wages,” as contrasted with the essential relation manifested
therein, viz., the value and price of labour-power, the same difference
holds that holds in respect to all phenomena and their hidden substratum.
The former appear directly and spontaneously as current modes of thought;
the latter must first be discovered by science. Classical Political Economy
nearly touches the true relation of things, without, however, consciously
formulating it. This it cannot, so long as it sticks in its bourgeois skin.

Footnotes

1. “Mr.Ricardo ingeniously enough avoids a difficulty which, on a first view, threatens to encumber his doctrine —
that value depends on the quantity of labour employed in production. If
this principle is rigidly adhered to, it follows that the value of labour
depends on the quantity of labour employed in producing it — which is
evidently absurd. By a dexterous turn, therefore, Mr. Ricardo makes the
value of labour depend on the quantity of labour required to produce wages;
or, to give him the benefit of his own language, he maintains, that the
value of labour is to be estimated by the quantity of labour required to
produce wages; by which he means the quantity of labour required to produce
the money or commodities given to the labourer. This is similar to saying,
that the value of cloth is estimated, not by the quantity of labour bestowed
on its production, but by the quantity of labour bestowed on the production
of the silver, for which the cloth is exchanged.” — “A Critical Dissertation
on the Nature, &c., of Value,” pp. 50, 51.

2. “If you call labour a commodity, it is not like a commodity which is first produced in order to exchange, and
then brought to market where it must exchange with other commodities according
to the respective quantities of each which there may be in the market at
the time; labour is created the moment it is brought to market; nay, it
is brought to market before it is created.” — “Observations on Certain
Verbal Disputes,” &c., pp. 75, 76.

3. “Treating labour as a commodity, and capital, the produce of labour, as another, then, if the values of these
two commodities were regulated by equal quantities of labour, a given amount
of labour would ... exchange for that quantity of capital which had been
produced by the same amount of labour; antecedent labour would ... exchange
for the same amount as present labour. But the value of labour in relation
to other commodities ... is determined not by equal quantities of labour.”
— E. G. Wakefield in his edition of Adam Smith’s “Wealth of Nations,”
Vol. I., London, 1836, p. 231, note.

4. “There has to be a new agreement” (a new edition of the social contract!) “that whenever there is an exchange
of work done for work to be done, the latter” (the capitalist) “is to receive
a higher value than the former” (the worker). — Simonde (de Sismondi),
“De la Richesse Commerciale,” Geneva, 1803, Vol I, p. 37.

5. “Labour the exclusive standard of value ... the creator of all wealth, no commodity.” Thomas Hodgskin, “Popul. Polit. Econ.,” p. 186.

6. On the other hand, the attempt to explain such expressions as merely poetic license only shows the impotence
of the analysis. Hence, in answer to Proudhon’s phrase; “Labour is called
value, not as being a commodity itself, but in view of the values supposed
to be potentially embodied in it. The value of labour is a figurative expression,”
&c. I have remarked: “In labour, commodity, which is a frightful reality,
he (Proudhon) sees nothing but a grammatical ellipsis. The whole of existing
society, then, based upon labour commodity, is henceforth based upon a
poetic license, on a figurative expression. Does society desire to eliminate
all the inconveniences which trouble it, it has only to eliminate all the
ill-sounding terms. Let it change the language, and for that it has only
to address itself to the Academy and ask it for a new edition of its dictionary.”
(Karl Marx, “Misère de la Philosophie,” pp. 34, 35.) It is naturally still
more convenient to understand by value nothing at all. Then one can without
difficulty subsume everything under this category. Thus, e.g., J. B. Say:
“What is value?” Answer: “That which a thing is worth"; and what is “price"?
Answer: “The value of a thing expressed in money.” And why has agriculture
a value? Answer: “Because one sets a price on it.” Therefore value is what
a thing is worth, and the land has its “value,” because its value is “expressed
in money.” This is, anyhow, a very simple way of explaining the why and
the wherefore of things.

7. Cf. “Zur Kritik &c.,” p. 40, where I state that, in the portion of that work that deals with Capital,
this problem will be solved: “How does production, on the basis of exchange-value
determined simply by labour-time, lead to the result that the exchange-value
of labour is less than the exchange-value of its product?”

8. The “Morning Star,” a London Free-trade organ, naif to silliness, protested again and again during the American
Civil War, with all the moral indignation of which man is capable, that
the Negro in the “Confederate States” worked absolutely for nothing. It
should have compared the daily cost of such a Negro with that of the free
workman in the East-end of London.

9. I give in order that you may give; I give in order that you may produce; I produce so that you may give; I produce so that you may produce.

10. Adam Smith only accidentally alludes to the variation of the working-day when he is referring to piece-wages.

## Chapter Twenty: Time-Wages

Wages themselves again take many forms, a fact not
recognizable in the ordinary economic treatises which, exclusively interested
in the material side of the question, neglect every difference of form.
An exposition of all these forms however, belongs to the special study
of wage labour, not therefore to this work. Still the two fundamental forms
must be briefly worked out here.

The sale of labour-power, as will be remembered, takes place for
a definite period of time. The converted form under which the daily, weekly,
&c., value of labour-power presents itself, is hence that of time-wages, therefore day-wages, &c.

Next it is to be noted that the laws set forth, in the 17th chapter,
on the changes in the relative magnitudes of price of labour-power and
surplus-value, pass by a simple transformation of form, into laws of wages.
Similarly the distinction between the exchange-value of labour power, and
the sum of the necessaries of life into which this value is converted,
now reappears as the distinction between nominal and real wages. It would
be useless to repeat here, with regard to the phenomenal form, what has
been already worked out in the substantial form. We limit ourselves therefore
to a few points characteristic of time-wages.

The sum of money [1] which the labourer receives
for his daily or weekly labour, forms the amount of his nominal wages,
or of his wages estimated in value. But it is clear that according to the
length of the working-day, that is, according to the amount of actual labour
daily supplied, the same daily or weekly wage may represent very different
prices of labour, i.e., very different sums of money for the same quantity
of labour. [2] We must, therefore, in considering time-wages, again distinguish between the sum-total of the daily or weekly wages, &c.,
and the price of labour. How then, to find this price, i.e., the money-value
of a given quantity of labour? The average price of labour is found, when
the average daily value of the labour-power is divided by the average number
of hours in the working-day. If, e.g., the daily value of labour-power
is 3 shillings, the value of the product of 6 working-hours, and if the
working-day is 12 hours, the price of 1 working hour is 3/12 shillings
= 3d. The price of the working-hour thus found serves as the unit measure
for the price of labour.

It follows therefore that the daily and weekly wages, &c.,
may remain the same, although the price of labour falls constantly. If,
e.g., the habitual working-day is 10 hours and the daily value of the labour-power
3s., the price of the working-hour is 3 3/5d. It falls to 3d. as soon as
the working-day rises to 12 hours, to 2 2/5d as soon as it rises to 15
hours. Daily or weekly wages remain, despite all this, unchanged. On the
contrary, the daily or weekly wages may rise, although the price of labour
remains constant or even falls. If, e.g., the working-day is 10 hours,
and the daily value of labour-power 3 shillings, the price of one working-hour
is 3 3/5d. If the labourer, in consequence of increase of trade, works
12 hours, the price of labour remaining the same, his daily wage now rises
to 3 shillings 7 1/5 d. without any variation in the price of labour. The
same result might follow if, instead of the extensive amount of labour,
its intensive amount increased. [3]
The rise of the nominal daily or weekly wages may therefore be accompanied by a price of labour
that remains stationary or falls. The same holds as to the income of the
labourer’s family, as soon as the quantity of labour expended by the head
of the family is increased by the labour of the members of his family.
There are, therefore, methods of lowering the price of labour independent
of the reduction of the nominal daily or weekly wages. [4]

As a general law it follows that, given the amount of daily or
weekly labour, &c., the daily or weekly wages depend on the price
of labour which itself varies either with the value of labour-power, or
with the difference between its price and its value. Given, on the other
hand, the price of labour, the daily or weekly wages depend on the quantity
of the daily or weekly labour.

The unit-measure for time-wages, the price of the working-hour,
is the quotient of the value of a day’s labour-power, divided by the number
of hours of the average working-day. Let the latter be 12 hours, and the
daily value of labour-power 3 shillings, the value of the product of 6
hours of labour. Under these circumstances the price of a working hour
is 3d.; the value produced in it is 6d. If the labourer is now employed
less than 12 hours (or less than 6 days in the week), e.g., only 6 or 8
hours, he receives, with this price of labour, only 2s. or 1s. 6d. a day.
[5] As on our hypothesis he must work on the average
6 hours daily, in order to produce a day’s wage corresponding merely to
the value of his labour power, as according to the same hypothesis he works
only half of every hour for himself, and half for the capitalist, it is
clear that he cannot obtain for himself the value of the product of 6 hours
if he is employed less than 12 hours. In previous chapters we saw the destructive
consequences of over-work; here we find the sources of the sufferings that
result to the labourer from his insufficient employment.

If the hour’s wage is fixed so that the capitalist does not bind
himself to pay a day’s or a week’s wage, but only to pay wages for the
hours during which he chooses to employ the labourer, he can employ him
for a shorter time than that which is originally the basis of the calculation
of the hour-wage, or the unit-measure of the price of labour. Since this
unit is determined by the ratio

daily value of labour-power

working-day of a given number of hours’

it, of course, loses all meaning as soon as the working-day ceases to contain
a definite number of hours. The connection between the paid and the unpaid
labour is destroyed. The capitalist can now wring from the labourer a certain
quantity of surplus-labour without allowing him the labour-time necessary
for his own subsistence. He can annihilate all regularity of employment,
and according to his own convenience, caprice, and the interest of the
moment, make the most enormous overwork alternate with relative or absolute
cessation of work. He can, under the pretense of paying “the normal price
of labour,” abnormally lengthen the working-day without any corresponding
compensation to the labourer. Hence the perfectly rational revolt in 1860
of the London labourers, employed in the building trades, against the attempt
of the capitalists to impose on them this sort of wage by the hour. The
legal limitation of the working-day puts an end to such mischief, although
not, of course, to the diminution of employment caused by the competition
of machinery, by changes in the quality of the labourers employed, and
by crises partial or general.

With an increasing daily or weekly wage the price of labour may
remain nominally constant, and yet may fall below its normal level. This
occurs every time that, the price of labour (reckoned per working-hour)
remaining constant, the working-day is prolonged beyond its customary length.
If in the fraction:

daily value of labour power

working-day

the denominator increases, the numerator increases yet more rapidly. The
value of labour-power, as dependent on its wear and tear, increases with
the duration of its functioning, and in more rapid proportion than the
increase of that duration. In many branches of industry where time-wage
is the general rule without legal limits to the working-time, the habit
has, therefore, spontaneously grown up of regarding the working day as
normal only up to a certain point, e.g., up to the expiration of the tenth
hour (“normal working-day,” “the day’s work,” “the regular hours of work”).
Beyond this limit the working-time is over-time, and is, taking the hour
as unit-measure, paid better (“extra pay”), although often in a proportion
ridiculously small. [6] The normal working-day exists
here as a fraction of the actual working-day, and the latter, often during
the whole year, lasts longer than the former. [7] The
increase in the price of labour with the extension of the working-day beyond
a certain normal limit, takes such a shape in various British industries
that the low price of labour during the so-called normal time compels the
labourer to work during the better paid over-time, if he wishes to obtain
a sufficient wage at all. [8] Legal limitation of the
working-day puts an end to these amenities. [9]

It is a fact generally known that, the longer the working-days,
in any branch of industry, the lower are the wages. [10] A. Redgrave, factory inspector, illustrates this by a comparative review of the 20 years from 1839-1859, according to which wages rose in the factories
under the 10 Hours Law, whilst they fell in the factories in which the
work lasted 14 to 15 hours daily. [11]

From the law, “the price of labour being given, the daily or weekly
wage depends on the quantity of labour expended,” it follows, first of
all, that the lower the price of labour, the greater must be the quantity
of labour, or the longer must be the working-day for the labourer to secure
even a miserable average wage. The lowness of the price of labour acts
here as a stimulus to the extension of the labour-time. [12]

On the other hand, the extension of the working-time produces,
in its turn, a fall in the price of labour, and with this a fall in the
day’s or week’s wages.

The determination of the price of labour by:

daily value of labour power

working day of a given number of hours

shows that a mere prolongation of the working-day lowers the price of labour,
if no compensation steps in. But the same circumstances which allow the
capitalist in the long run to prolong the working-day, also allow him first,
and compel him finally, to nominally lower the price of labour until the
total price of the increased number of hours is lowered, and, therefore,
the daily or weekly wage. Reference to two circumstances is sufficient
here. If one man does the work of 1½ or 2 men, the supply of labour
increases, although the supply of labour-power on the market remains constant.
The competition thus created between the labourers allows the capitalist
to beat down the price of labour, whilst the falling price of labour allows
him, on the other hand, to screw up still further the working-time. [13] Soon, however, this command over abnormal quantities of unpaid labour, i.e., quantities in excess of the average social amount, becomes a source
of competition amongst the capitalists themselves. A part of the price
of the commodity consists of the price of labour. The unpaid part of the
labour-price need not be reckoned in the price of the commodity. It may
be presented to the buyer. This is the first step to which competition
leads. The second step to which it drives is to exclude also from the selling
price of the commodity at least a part of the abnormal surplus-value created
by the extension of the working-day. In this way, an abnormally low selling
price of the commodity arises, at first sporadically, and becomes fixed
by degrees; a lower selling price which henceforward becomes the constant
basis of a miserable wage for an excessive working-time, as originally
it was the product of these very circumstances. This movement is simply
indicated here, as the analysis of competition does not belong to this
part of our subject. Nevertheless, the capitalist may, for a moment, speak
for himself. “In Birmingham there is so much competition of masters one against another that many are obliged to do things as employers that they
would otherwise be ashamed of; and yet no more money is made, but only
the public gets the benefit.” [14] The reader will remember the two sorts of London bakers, of whom one sold the bread at its full
price (the “full-priced” bakers), the other below its normal price (“the
under-priced,” “the undersellers”). The “full-priced” denounced their rivals
before the Parliamentary Committee of Inquiry: “They only exist now by
first defrauding the public, and next getting 18 hours’ work out of their
men for 12 hours’ wages.... The unpaid labour of the men was made ... the
source whereby the competition was carried on, and continues so to this
day.... The competition among the master bakers is the cause of the difficulty
in getting rid of night-work. An underseller, who sells his bread below
the cost-price according to the price of flour, must make it up by getting
more out of the labour of the men.... If I got only 12 hours’ work out
of my men, and my neighbor got 18 or 20, he must beat me in the selling
price. If the men could insist on payment for over-work, this would be
set right.... A large number of those employed by the undersellers are
foreigners and youths, who are obliged to accept almost any wages they
can obtain.” [15]

This jeremiad is also interesting because it shows how the appearance
only of the relations of production mirrors itself in the brain of the
capitalist. The capitalist does not know that the normal price of labour
also includes a definite quantity of unpaid labour, and that this very
unpaid labour is the normal source of his gain. The category of surplus
labour-time does not exist at all for him, since it is included in the
normal working-day, which he thinks he has paid for in the day’s wages.
But over-time does exist for him, the prolongation of the working-day beyond
the limits corresponding with the usual price of labour. Face to face with
his underselling competitor, he even insists upon extra pay for this over-time.
He again does not know that this extra pay includes unpaid labour, just
as well as does the price of the customary hour of labour. For example,
the price of one hour of the 12 hours’ working-day is 3d., say the value-product
of half a working-hour, whilst the price of the over-time working-hour
is 4d., or the value-product of 2/3 of a working hour. In the first case
the capitalist appropriates to himself one-half, in the second, one-third
of the working-hour without paying for it.

Footnotes

1. The value of money itself is here always supposed constant.

2. “The price of labour is the sum paid for a given quantity of labour.” (Sir Edward West, “Price of Corn and Wages
of Labour,” London, 1826, p. 67.) West is the author of the anonymous “Essay
on the Application of Capital to Land. By a Fellow of the University College
of Oxford,” London, 1815. An epoch-making work in the history of Political Economy.

3. “The wages of labour depend upon the price of labour and the quantity of labour performed.... An increase in
the wages of labour does not necessarily imply an enhancement of the price
of labour. From fuller employment, and greater exertions, the wages of
labour may be considerably increased, while the price of labour may continue
the same.” (West, op. cit., pp. 67, 68, 112.) The main question: “How is
the price of labour determined?” West, however, dismisses with mere banalities.

4. This is perceived by the fanatical representative of the industrial bourgeoisie of the 18th century, the author
of the “Essay on Trade and Commerce” often quoted by us, although he puts
the matter in a confused way: “It is the quantity of labour and not the
price of it” (he means by this the nominal daily or weekly wages) “that
is determined by the price of provisions and other necessaries: reduce
the price of necessaries very low, and of course you reduce the quantity
of labour in proportion. Master manufacturers know that there are various
ways of raising and felling the price of labour, besides that of altering
its nominal amount.” (op. cit., pp. 48, 61.) In his “Three Lectures on
the Rate of Wages,” London, 1830, in which N. W. Senior uses West’s work
without mentioning it, he says: “The labourer is principally interested
in the amount of wages” (p. 14), that is to say, the labourer is principally
interested in what he receives, the nominal sum of his wages, not in that
which he gives, the amount of labour!

5. The effect of such an abnormal lessening of employment is quite different from that of a general reduction of the
working-day, enforced by law. The former has nothing to do with the absolute
length of the working-day, and may occur just as well in a working-day
of 15, as of 6 hours. The normal price of labour is in the first case calculated
on the labourer working 15 hours, in the second case on his working 6 hours
a day on the average. The result is therefore the same, if he in the one
case is employed only for 7½, in the other only for 3 hours.

6. “The rate of payment for overtime (in lace-making) is so small, from ½ d. and ¾ d. to 2d. per hour, that
it stands in painful contrast to the amount of injury produced to the health
and stamina of the workpeople.... The small amount thus earned is also
often obliged to be spent in extra nourishment.” (“Child.Empl.Com., II.
Rep.,” p. xvi., n. 117.)

7. E.g., in paper-staining before the recent introduction into this trade of the Factory Act. “We work on with
no stoppage for meals, so that the day’s work of 10½ hours is finished
by 4:30 p.m., and all after that is over-time, and we seldom leave off
working before 6 p.m., so that we are really working over-time the whole
year round.” (Mr. Smith’s “Evidence in Child. Empl. Com., 1. Rep.,” p.
125.)

8. E.g., in the Scotch bleaching-works. “In some parts of Scotland this trade” (before the introduction of the
Factory Act in 1862) “was carried on by a system of over-time, i.e., ten
hours a day were the regular hours of work, for which a nominal wage of
1s. 2d. per day was paid to a man, there being every day over-time for
three or four hours, paid at the rate of 3d. per hour. The effect of this
system ... a man could not earn more than 8s. per week when working the
ordinary hours ... without over-time they could not earn a fair day’s wages.”
(“Rept. of Insp. of Factories,” April 30th, 1863, p. 10.) “The higher wages,
for getting adult males to work longer hours, are a temptation too strong
to be resisted.” (“Rept. of Insp. of Fact.,” April 30th, 1848, p. 5.) The
book-binding trade in the city of London employs very many young girls
from 14 to 15 years old, and that under indentures which prescribe certain
definite hours of labour. Nevertheless, they work in the last week of each
month until 10, 11, 12, or 1 o’clock at night, along with the older labourers,
in a very mixed company. “The masters tempt them by extra pay and supper,”
which they eat in neighboring public houses. The great debauchery thus
produced among these “young immortals” (“Children’s Employment Comm., V.
Rept.,” p. 44, n. 191) is compensated by the fact that among the rest many
Bibles and religious books are bound by them.

9. See “Reports of Insp. of Fact.,” 30th April, 1863, p. 10. With very accurate appreciation of the state of things,
the London labourers employed in the building trades declared, during the
great strike and lock-out of 1860, that they would only accept wages by
the hour under two conditions: (1), that, with the price of the working-hour,
a normal working day of 9 and 10 hours respectively should be fixed, and
that the price of the hour for the 10 hours’ working-day should be higher
than that for the hour of the 9 hours working-day; (2), that every hour
beyond the normal working-day should be reckoned as over-time and proportionally
more highly paid.

10. “It is a very notable thing, too, that where long hours are the rule, small wages are also so.” (“Report
of Insp. of Fact.,” 31st. Oct., 1863, p. 9.) “The work which obtains the
scanty pittance of food, is, for the most part, excessively prolonged.”
(“Public Health, Sixth Report,” 1864, p. 15.)

11. “Report of Inspectors of Fact.,” 30th April, 1860, pp. 31, 32.

12. The hand nail-makers in England, e.g., have, on account of the low price of labour, to work 15 hours a day
in order to hammer out their miserable weekly wage. “It’s a great many
hours in a day (6 a.m. to 8 p.m.), and he has to work hard all the time
to get 11 d. or 1s., and there is the wear of the tools, the cost of firing,
and something for waste iron to go out of this, which takes off altogether
2½d. or 3d.” (“Children’s Employment Com., III. Report,” p. 136, n.
671.) The women earn by the same working-time a week’s wage of only 5 shillings.
(l.c., p. 137, n. 674.)

13. If a factory-hand, e.g., refused to work the customary long hours, “he would very shortly be replaced by
somebody who would work any length of time, and thus be thrown out of employment.”
(“Reports of Inspectors of Factories,” 30th April, 1848. Evidence, p. 39,
n. 58.) “If one man performs the work of two... the rate of profits will
generally be raised ... in consequence of the additional supply of labour
having diminished its price.” (Senior, l.c., p. 15.)

14. “Children’s Employment Com., III Rep.,” Evidence, p. 66, n. 22.

15. “Report, &c., Relative to the Grievances Complained of by the Journeymen Bakers.” London, 1862, p. 411,
and ib. Evidence, notes 479, 359, 27. Anyhow the full-priced bakers, as
was mentioned above, and as their spokesman, Bennett, himself admits, make
their men “generally begin work at 11 p.m. ... up to 8 o’clock the next
morning.... They are then engaged all day long ... as late as 7 o’clock
in the evening.” (l.c., p. 22.)

## Chapter Twenty-One: Piece-Wages

Wages by the piece are nothing else than a converted
form of wages by time, just as wages by time are a converted form of the
value or price of labour-power.

In piece wages it seems at first sight as if the use-value bought
from the labourer was, not the function of his labour-power, living labour,
but labour already realized in the product, and as if the price of this
labour was determined, not as with time-wages, by the fraction

daily value of labour-power

the working day of a given number of hours

but by the capacity for work of the producer. [1]

The confidence that trusts in this appearance ought to receive
a first severe shock from the fact that both forms of wages exist side
by side, simultaneously, in the same branches of industry; e.g.,

“the compositors of London, as a general rule, work by the piece, time-work being the exception,
while those in the country work by the day, the exception being work by
the piece. The shipwrights of the port of London work by the job or piece,
while those of all other parts work by the day.” [2]

In the same saddlery shops of London, often for the same work,
piece wages are paid to the French, time-wages to the English. In the regular
factories in which throughout piece wages predominate, particular kinds
of work are unsuitable to this form of wage, and are therefore paid by
time. [3] But it is, moreover, self-evident that the
difference of form in the payment of wages alters in no way their essential
nature, although the one form may be more favorable to the development
of capitalist production than the other.

Let the ordinary working-day contain 12 hours of which 6 are paid,
6 unpaid. Let its value-product be 6 shillings, that of one hour’s labour
therefore 6d. Let us suppose that, as the result of experience, a labourer
who works with the average amount of intensity and skill, who, therefore,
gives in fact only the time socially necessary to the production of an
article, supplies in 12 hours 24 pieces, either distinct products or measurable
parts of a continuous whole. Then the value of these 24 pieces, after.
subtraction of the portion of constant capital contained in them, is 6
shillings, and the value of a single piece 3d. The labourer receives 1
½d. per piece, and thus earns in 12 hours 3 shillings. Just as, with
time-wages, it does not matter whether we assume that the labourer works
6 hours for himself and 6 hours for the capitalist, or half of every hour
for himself, and the other half for the capitalist, so here it does not
matter whether we say that each individual piece is half paid, and half
unpaid for, or that the price of 12 pieces is the equivalent only of the
value of the labour-power, whilst in the other 12 pieces surplus-value
is incorporated.

The form of piece wages is just as irrational as that of time-wages.
Whilst in our example two pieces of a commodity, after subtraction of the
value of the means of production consumed in them, are worth 6d. as being
the product of one hour, the labourer receives for them a price of 3d.
Piece wages do not, in fact, distinctly express any relation of value.
It is not, therefore, a question of measuring the value of the piece by
the working-time incorporated in it, but on the contrary, of measuring
the working-time the labourer has expended by the number of pieces he has
produced. In time-wages, the labour is measured by its immediate duration;
in piece wages, by the quantity of products in which the labour has embodied
itself during a given time. [4] The price of labour time itself is finally determined by the equation: value of a day’s labour = daily value of labour-power. Piece-wage is, therefore, only a modified
form of time-wage.

Let us now consider a little more closely the characteristic peculiarities
of piece wages.

The quality of the labour is here controlled by the work itself,
which must be of average perfection if the piece-price is to be paid in
full. Piece wages become, from this point of view, the most fruitful source
of reductions of wages and capitalistic cheating.

They furnish to the capitalist an exact measure for the intensity
of labour. Only the working-time which is embodied in a quantum of commodities
determined beforehand, and experimentally fixed, counts as socially necessary
working-time, and is paid as such. In the larger workshops of the London
tailors, therefore, a certain piece of work, a waistcoat, e.g., is called
an hour, or half an hour, the hour at 6d. By practice it is known how much
is the average product of one hour. With new fashions, repairs, &c.,
a contest arises between master and labourer as to whether a particular
piece of work is one hour, and so on, until here also experience decides.
Similarly in the London furniture workshops, &c. If the labourer does
not possess the average capacity, if he cannot in consequence supply a
certain minimum of work per day, he is dismissed. [5]

Since the quality and intensity of the work are here controlled
by the form of wage itself, superintendence of labour becomes in great
part superfluous. Piece wages therefore lay the foundation of the modern
“domestic labour,” described above, as well as of a hierarchically organized
system of exploitation and oppression. The latter has two fundamental forms.
On the one hand, piece wages facilitate the interposition of parasites
between the capitalist and the wage-labourer, the “sub-letting of labour.”
The gain of these middlemen comes entirely from the difference between
the labour-price which the capitalist pays, and the part of that price
which they actually allow to reach the labourer. [6]
In England this system is characteristically called the “sweating system.”
On the other hand, piece-wage allows the capitalist to make a contract
for so much per piece with the head labourer — in manufactures with the chief
of some group, in mines with the extractor of the coal, in the factory
with the actual machine-worker — at a price for which the head labourer
himself undertakes the enlisting and payment of his assistant work people.
The exploitation of the labourer by capital is here effected through the
exploitation of the labourer by the labourer. [7]

Given piece-wage, it is naturally the personal interest of the
labourer to strain his labour-power as intensely as possible; this enables
the capitalist to raise more easily the normal degree of intensity of labour.
[8] It is moreover now the personal interest of the labourer to lengthen the working-day, since with it his daily or weekly wages rise.
[9] This gradually brings on a reaction like that already described in time-wages, without reckoning that the prolongation of the
working-day, even if the piece wage remains constant, includes of necessity
a fall in the price of the labour.

In time-wages, with few exceptions, the same wage holds for the
same kind of work, whilst in piece wages, though the price of the working
time is measured by a certain quantity of product, the day’s or week’s
wage will vary with the individual differences of the labourers, of whom
one supplies in a given time the minimum of product only, another the average,
a third more than the average. With regard to actual receipts there is,
therefore, great variety according to the different skill, strength, energy,
staying-power, &c., of the individual labourers. [10] Of course this does not alter the general relations between capital and wage-labour. First, the individual differences balance one another in the
workshop as a whole, which thus supplies in a given working-time the average
product, and the total wages paid will be the average wages of that particular
branch of industry. Second, the proportion between wages and surplus-value
remains unaltered, since the mass of surplus labour supplied by each particular
labourer corresponds with the wage received by him. But the wider scope
that piece-wage gives to individuality tends to develop on the one hand
that individuality, and with it the sense of liberty, independence, and
self-control of the labourers, and on the other, their competition one
with another. Piece-work has, therefore, a tendency, while raising individual wages above the average, to lower this average itself. But where a particular
rate of piece-wage has for a long time been fixed by tradition, and its
lowering, therefore, presented especial difficulties, the masters, in such
exceptional cases, sometimes had recourse to its compulsory transformation
into time-wages. Hence, e.g., in 1860 a great strike among the ribbon-weavers
of Coventry. [11] Piece-wage is finally one of the chief supports of the hour-system described in the preceding chapter. [12]

From what has been shown so far, it follows that piece-wage is
the form of wages most in harmony with the capitalist mode of production.
Although by no means new — it figures side by side with time-wages officially
in the French and English labour statutes of the 14th century — it only
conquers a larger field for action during the period of manufacture, properly
so-called. In the stormy youth of modern industry, especially from 1797
to 1815, it served as a lever for the lengthening of the working-day, and
the lowering of wages. Very important materials for the fluctuation of
wages during that period are to be found in the Blue books: “Report and
Evidence from the Select Committee on Petitions respecting the Corn Laws”
(Parliamentary Session of 1813-14), and “Report from the Lords’ Committee,
on the State of the Growth, Commerce, and Consumption of Grain, and all
Laws relating thereto” (Session of 1814-15). Here we find documentary evidence
of the constant lowering of the price of labour from the beginning of the
anti-Jacobin War. In the weaving industry, e.g., piece wages had fallen
so low that, in spite of the very great lengthening of the working-day,
the daily wages were then lower than before.

“The real earnings of the
cotton weaver are now far less than they were; his superiority over the
common labourer, which at first was very great, has now almost entirely
ceased. Indeed... the difference in the wages of skillful and common labour
is far less now than at any former period.” [13]

How little the increased intensity and extension of labour through piece wages
benefited the agricultural proletariat, the following passage borrowed
from a work on the side of the landlords and farmers shows:

“By far the
greater part of agricultural operations is done by people who are hired
for the day or on piece-work. Their weekly wages are about 12s., and although it may be assumed that a man earns on piece-work under the greater stimulus
to labour, 1s. or perhaps 2s. more than on weekly wages, yet it is found,
on calculating his total income, that his loss of employment, during the
year, outweighs this gain...Further, it will generally be found that the
wages of these men bear a certain proportion to the price of the necessary
means of subsistence, so that a man with two children is able to bring
up his family without recourse to parish relief.” [14]

Malthus at that time remarked with reference to the facts published by Parliament:

“I confess that I see, with misgiving, the great extension
of the practice of piece-wage. Really hard work during 12 or 14 hours of
the day, or for any longer time, is too much for any human being.” [15]

In the workshops under the Factory Acts, piece wages become the
general rule, because capital can there only increase the efficacy of the
working-day by intensifying labour. [16]

With the changing productiveness of labour the same quantum of
product represents a varying working-time. Therefore, piece-wage also varies,
for it is the money expression of a determined working-time. In our example
above, 24 pieces were produced in 12 hours, whilst the value of the product
of the 12 hours was 6s., the daily value of the labour-power 3s., the price
of the labour-hour 3d., and the wage for one piece ½d. In one piece half-an-hour’s
labour was absorbed. If the same working-day now supplies, in consequence
of the doubled productiveness of labour, 48 pieces instead of 24, and all
other circumstances remain unchanged, then the piece-wage falls from 1
½d. to 3/4d., as every piece now only represents 1/4, instead of ½
of a working-hour. 24 by 1½d. = 3s., and in like manner 48 by 3/4d.
= 3s. In other words, piece-wage is lowered in the same proportion as the
number of the pieces produced in the same time rises, [17] and, therefore, as the working time spent on the same piece falls. This change in piece-wage, so far purely nominal, leads to constant battles
between capitalist and labour. Either because the capitalist uses it as
a pretext for actually lowering the price of labour, or because increased
productive power of labour is accompanied by an increased intensity of
the same. Or because the labourer takes seriously the appearance of piece wages
(viz., that his product is paid for, and not his labour-power) and therefore
revolts against a lowering of wages, unaccompanied by a lowering in the
selling price of the commodity.

“The operatives...carefully watch the price
of the raw material and the price of manufactured goods, and are thus enabled
to form an accurate estimate of their master’s profits.” [18]

The capitalist rightly knocks on the head such pretensions as
gross errors as to the nature of wage-labour. [19] He cries out against this usurping attempt to lay taxes on the advance of
industry, and declares roundly that the productiveness of labour does not
concern the labourer at all. [20]

Footnotes

1. “The system of piece-work illustrates an epoch in the history of the working-man; it is halfway between the position
of the mere day-labourer depending upon the will of the capitalist and
the co-operative artisan, who in the not distant future promises to combine
the artisan and the capitalist in his own person. Piece-workers are in
fact their own masters, even whilst working upon the capital of the employer.”
(John Watts: “Trade Societies and Strikes, Machinery and Co-operative Societies.”
Manchester, 1865, pp. 52, 53.) I quote this little work because it is a
very sink of all long-ago-rotten, apologetic commonplaces. This same Mr.
Watts earlier traded in Owenism and published in 1842 another pamphlet:
“Facts and Fictions of Political Economists,” in which among other things
he declares that “property is robbery.” That was long ago.

2. T. J. Dunning: “Trades’ Unions and Strikes,” Lond., 1860, p. 22.

3. How the existence, side by side and simultaneously, of these two forms of wage favors the masters’ cheating:
“A factory employs 400 people, the half of which work by the piece, and
have a direct interest in working longer hours. The other 200 are paid
by the day, work equally long with the others, and get no more money for
their over-time.... The work of these 200 people for half an hour a day
is equal to one person’s work for 50 hours, or 5/6’s of one person’s labour
in a week, and is a positive gain to the employer.” (“Reports of Insp.
of Fact., 31st Oct., 1860,” p. 9.) “Over-working to a very considerable
extent still prevails; and, in most instances, with that security against
detection and punishment which the law itself affords. I have in many former
reports shown ... the injury to workpeople who are not employed on piece-work,
but receive weekly wages.” (Leonard Horner in “Reports of Insp. of Fact.,”
30th April, 1859, pp. 8, 9.)

4. “Wages can be measured in two ways: either by the duration of the labour, or by its product.” (“Abrégé é1émentaire
des principes de l’économie politique.” Paris, 1796, p. 32.) The author
of this anonymous work: G. Garnier.

5. “So much weight of cotton is delivered to him” (the spinner), “and he has to return by a certain time, in lieu
of it, a given weight of twist or yarn, of a certain degree of fineness,
and he is paid so much per pound for all that he so returns. If his work
is defective in quality, the penalty falls on him, if less in quantity
than the minimum fixed for a given time, he is dismissed and an abler operative
procured.” (Ure, l.c., p. 317.)

6. “It is when work passes through several hands, each of which is to take its share of profits, while only the last
does the work, that the pay which reaches the workwoman is miserably disproportioned.”
(“Child. Emp. Comm. II Report,” p. 1xx., n. 424.)

7. Even Watts, the apologetic, remarks: “It would be a great improvement to the system of piece-work, if all the
men employed on a job were partners in the contract, each according to
his abilities, instead of one man being interested in over-working his
fellows for his own benefit.” (l.c., p. 53.) On the vileness of this system,
cf. “Child. Emp. Comm., Rep. III.,” p. 66, n. 22, p. 11, n. 124, p. xi,
n. 13, 53, 59, &c.

8. This spontaneous result is often artificially helped along, e.g., in the Engineering Trade of London, a customary trick
is “the selecting of a man who possesses superior physical strength and
quickness, as the principal of several workmen, and paying him an additional
rate, by the quarter or otherwise, with the understanding that he is to
exert himself to the utmost to induce the others, who are only paid the
ordinary wages, to keep up to him ... without any comment this will go
far to explain many of the complaints of stinting the action, superior
skill, and working-power, made by the employers against the men” (in Trades-Unions.
Dunning, l.c., pp. 22, 23). As the author is himself a labourer and secretary
of a Trades’ Union, this might be taken for exaggeration. But the reader
may compare the “highly respectable” “Cyclopedia of Agriculture” of J.
C. Morton, Art., the article “Labourer,” where this method is recommended
to the farmers as an approved one.

9. “All those who are paid by piece-work ... profit by the transgression of the legal limits of work. This observation
as to the willingness to work over-time is especially applicable to the
women employed as weavers and reelers.” (“Rept. of Insp. of Fact., 30th
April, 1858,” p. 9.) “This system” (piece-work), “so advantageous to the
employer ... tends directly to encourage the young potter greatly to over-work
himself during the four or five years during which he is employed in the
piece-work system, but at low wages.... This is ... another great cause
to which the bad constitutions of the potters are to be attributed.” (“Child.
Empl. Comm. 1. Rept.,” p. xiii.)

10. “Where the work in any trade is paid for by the piece at so much per job ... wages may very materially
differ in amount.... But in work by the day there is generally an uniform
rate ... recognized by both employer and employed as the standard of wages
for the general run of workmen in the trade.” (Dunning, l.c., p. 17.)

11. “The work of the journeyman-artisans
will be ruled by the day or by the piece. These master-artisans know about
how much work a journeyman-artisan can do per day in each craft, and often
pay them in proportion to the work which they do; the journey men, therefore,
work as much as they can, in their own interest, without any further inspection.”
(Cantillon, “Essai sur la Nature du Commerce en général,” Amst. Ed., 1756,
pp. 185 and 202. The first edition appeared in 1755.) Cantillon, from whom
Quesnay, Sir James Steuart & A. Smith have largely drawn, already here
represents piece-wage as simply a modified form of time-wage. The French
edition of Cantillon professes in its title to be a translation from the
English, but the English edition: “The Analysis of Trade, Commerce, &c.,”
by Philip Cantillon, late of the city of London, Merchant, is not only
of later date (1759), but proves by its contents that it is a later and
revised edition: e.g., in the French edition, Hume is not yet mentioned,
whilst in the English, on the other hand, Petty hardly figures any longer.
The English edition is theoretically less important, but it contains numerous
details referring specifically to English commerce, bullion trade, &c.,
that are wanting in the French text. The words on the title-page of the
English edition, according to which the work is “taken chiefly from the
manuscript of a very ingenious gentleman, deceased, and adapted, &c.,”
seem, therefore, a pure fiction, very customary at that time.

12. “How often have we seen, in some workshops, many more workers recruited than the work actually called for?
On many occasions, workers are recruited in anticipation of future work,
which may never materialize. Because they are paid by piece wages, it is
said that no risk is incurred, since any loss of time will be charged against
the unemployed.” (H. Gregoir: “Les Typographes devant le Tribunal correctionnel
de Bruxelles,” Brusseles, 1865, p. 9.)

13. “Remarks on the Commercial Policy of Great Britain,” London, 1815.

14. “A Defense of the Landowners and Farmers of Great Britain,” 1814, pp. 4, 5.

15. Malthus, “Inquiry into the Nature and Progress of Rent,” Lond., 1815.

16. “Those who are paid by piece-work ... constitute probably four-fifths of the workers in the factories.” “Report
of Insp. of Fact.,” 30th April, 1858.

17. “The productive power of his spinning-machine is accurately measured, and the rate of pay for work done with it decreases with, though not as, the increase of its productive power.” (Ure, l.c., p. 317.) This last apologetic phrase Ure himself again cancels. The lengthening
of the mule causes some increase of labour, he admits. The labour does
therefore not diminish in the same ratio as its productivity increases.
Further: “By this increase the productive power of the machine will be
augmented one-fifth. When this event happens the spinner will not be paid
at the same rate for work done as he was before, but as that rate will
not be diminished in the ratio of one-fifth, the improvement will augment
his money earnings for any given number of hours’ work,” but “the foregoing
statement requires a certain modification.... The spinner has to pay something
additional for juvenile aid out of his additional sixpence, accompanied
by displacing a portion of adults” (l.c., p. 321), which has in no way
a tendency to raise wages.

18. H. Fawcett: “The Economic Position of the British labourer.” Cambridge and London, 1865, p. 178.

19. In the “London Standard” of October 26, 1861, there is a report of proceedings of the firm of John Bright &
Co., before the Rochdale magistrates “to prosecute for intimidation the
agents of the Carpet Weavers Trades’ Union. Bright’s partners had introduced
new machinery which would turn out 240 yards of carpet in the time and
with the labour (!) previously required to produce 160 yards. The workmen
had no claim whatever to share in the profits made by the investment of
their employer’s capital in mechanical improvements. Accordingly, Messrs.
Bright proposed to lower the rate of pay from 1½d. per yard to 1d.,
leaving the earnings of the men exactly the same as before for the same
labour. But there was a nominal reduction, of which the operatives, it
is asserted, had not fair warning beforehand.”

20. “Trades’ Unions, in their desire to maintain wages, endeavor to share in the benefits of improved machinery.”
(Quelle horreur!) “... the demanding higher wages, because labour is abbreviated,
is in other words the endeavor to establish a duty on mechanical improvements.”
(“On Combination of Trades,” new ed., London, 1834, p. 42.)

## Chapter Twenty-Two: National Differences of Wages

In the 17th chapter we were occupied with the manifold
combinations which may bring about a change in magnitude of the value of
labour-power — this magnitude being considered either absolutely or relatively,
i.e., as compared with surplus-value; whilst on the other hand, the quantum
of the means of subsistence in which the price of labour is realized might
again undergo fluctuations independent of, or different from, the changes
of this price. [1] As has been already said, the simple translation of the value, or respectively of the price, of labour-power
into the exoteric form of wages transforms all these laws into laws of
the fluctuations of wages. That which appears in these fluctuations of
wages within a single country as a series of varying combinations, may
appear in different countries as contemporaneous difference of national
wages. In the comparison of the wages in different nations, we must therefore
take into account all the factors that determine changes in the amount
of the value of labour-power; the price and the extent of the prime necessaries
of life as naturally and historically developed, the cost of training the
labourers, the part played by the labour of women and children, the productiveness
of labour, its extensive and intensive magnitude. Even the most superficial
comparison requires the reduction first of the average day-wage for the
same trades, in different countries, to a uniform working-day. After this
reduction to the same terms of the day-wages, time-wage must again be translated
into piece-wage, as the latter only can be a measure both of the productivity
and the intensity of labour.

In every country there is a certain average intensity of labour
below which the labour for the production of a commodity requires more
than the socially necessary time, and therefore does not reckon as labour
of normal quality. Only a degree of intensity above the national average
affects, in a given country, the measure of value by the mere duration
of the working-time. This is not the case on the universal market, whose
integral parts are the individual countries. The average intensity of labour
changes from country to country; here it is greater, there less. These
national averages form a scale, whose unit of measure is the average unit
of universal labour. The more intense national labour, therefore, as compared
with the less intense, produces in the same time more value, which expresses
itself in more money.

But the law of value in its international application is yet more
modified by the fact that on the world-market the more productive national
labour reckons also as the more intense, so long as the more productive
nation is not compelled by competition to lower the selling price of its
commodities to the level of their value.

In proportion as capitalist production is developed in a country,
in the same proportion do the national intensity and productivity of labour
there rise above the international level. [2] The different quantities of commodities of the same kind, produced in different countries
in the same working-time, have, therefore, unequal international values,
which are expressed in different prices, i.e., in sums of money varying
according to international values. The relative value of money will, therefore,
be less in the nation with more developed capitalist mode of production
than in the nation with less developed. It follows, then, that the nominal
wages, the equivalent of labour-power expressed in money, will also be
higher in the first nation than in the second; which does not at all prove
that this holds also for the real wages, i.e., for the means of subsistence
placed at the disposal of the labourer.

But even apart from these relative differences of the value of
money in different countries, it will be found, frequently, that the daily
or weekly, etc., wage in the first nation is higher than in the second,
whilst the relative price of labour, i.e., the price of labour as compared
both with surplus-value and with the value of the product, stands higher
in the second than in the first. [3]

J. W. Cowell, member of the Factory Commission of 1833, after
careful investigation of the spinning trade, came to the conclusion that

“in England wages are virtually lower to the capitalist, though higher
to the operative than on the Continent of Europe.” [4]

The English Factory Inspector, Alexander Redgrave, in his report of Oct. 31st, 1866,
proves by comparative statistics with continental states, that
in spite of lower wages and much longer working-time, continental labour
is, in proportion to the product, dearer than English. An English manager
of a cotton factory in Oldenburg declares that the working time there lasted
from 5:30 a.m. to 8 p.m., Saturdays included, and that the workpeople there,
when under English overlookers, did not supply during this time quite so
much product as the English in 10 hours, but under German overlookers much
less. Wages are much lower than in England, in many cases 50%, but the
number of hands in proportion to the machinery was much greater, in certain
departments in the proportion of 5:3.

Mr. Redgrave gives very full details as to the Russian cotton
factories. The data were given him by an English manager until recently
employed there. On this Russian soil, so fruitful of all infamies, the
old horrors of the early days of English factories are in full swing. The
managers are, of course, English, as the native Russian capitalist is of
no use in factory business. Despite all over-work, continued day and night,
despite the most shameful under-payment of the workpeople, Russian manufacture
manages to vegetate only by prohibition of foreign competition.

I give, in conclusion, a comparative table of Mr. Redgrave’s,
on the average number of spindles per factory and per spinner in the different
countries of Europe. He himself remarks that he had collected these figures
a few years ago, and that since that time the size of the factories and
the number of spindles per labourer in England has increased. He supposes,
however, an approximately equal progress in the continental countries mentioned,
so that the numbers given would still have their value for purposes of
comparison.

AVERAGE NUMBER OF SPINDLES PER FACTORY

England, average of spindles per factory

12,600

France, average of spindles per factory

1,500

Prussia, average of spindles per factory

1,500

Belgium, average of spindles per factory

4,000

Saxony, average of spindles per factory

4,500

Austria, average of spindles per factory

7,000

Switzerland, average of spindles per factory

8,000

AVERAGE NUMBER OF PERSONS EMPLOYED TO SPINDLES

France

one person to 14 spindles

Russia

one person to 28 spindles

Prussia

one person to 37 spindles

Bavaria

one person to 46 spindles

Austria

one person to 49 spindles

Belgium

one person to 50 spindles

Saxony

one person to 50 spindles

Switzerland

one person to 55 spindles

Smaller States of Germany

one person to 55 spindles

Great Britain

one person to 74 spindles

“This comparison,” says Mr. Redgrave, “is yet more unfavorable to Great
Britain, inasmuch as there is so large a number of factories in which weaving
by power is carried on in conjunction with spinning” (whilst in the table
the weavers are not deducted), “and the factories abroad are chiefly spinning
factories; if it were possible to compare like with like, strictly, I could
find many cotton spinning factories in my district in which mules containing
2,200 spindles are minded by one man (the minder) and two assistants only,
turning off daily 220 lbs. of yarn, measuring 400 miles in length.” [5]

It is well known that in Eastern Europe, as well as in Asia, English
companies have undertaken the construction of railways, and have, in making
them, employed side by side with the native labourers, a certain number
of English working-men. Compelled by practical necessity, they thus have
had to take into account the national difference in the intensity of labour,
but this has brought them no loss. Their experience shows that even if
the height of wages corresponds more or less with the average intensity
of labour, the relative price of labour varies generally in the inverse
direction.

In an “Essay on the Rate of Wages,” [6] one
of his first economic writings, H. Carey tries to prove that the wages
of the different nations are directly proportional to the degree of productiveness
of the national working-days, in order to draw from this international
relation the conclusion that wages everywhere rise and fall in proportion
to the productiveness of labour. The whole of our analysis of the production
of surplus-value shows the absurdity of this conclusion, even if Carey
himself had proved his premises instead of, after his usual uncritical
and superficial fashion, shuffling to and fro a confused mass of statistical
materials. The best of it is that he does not assert that things actually
are as they ought to be according to his theory. For State intervention
has falsified the natural economic relations. The different national wages
must be reckoned, therefore, as if that part of each that goes to the State
in the form of taxes, came to the labourer himself. Ought not Mr. Carey
to consider further whether those “State expenses” are not the “natural”
fruits of capitalistic development? The reasoning is quite worthy of the
man who first declared the relations of capitalist production to be eternal
laws of nature and reason, whose free, harmonious working is only disturbed
by the intervention of the State, in order afterwards to discover that
the diabolical influence of England on the world market (an influence which,
it appears, does not spring from the natural laws of capitalist production)
necessitates State intervention, i.e., the protection of those laws of
nature and reason by the State, alias the System of Protection. He discovered
further that the theorems of Ricardo and others, in which existing social
antagonisms and contradictions are formulated, are not the ideal product
of the real economic movement, but on the contrary, that the real antagonisms
of capitalist production in England and elsewhere are the result of the
theories of Ricardo and others! Finally he discovered that it is, in the
last resort, commerce that destroys the inborn beauties and harmonies of
the capitalist mode of production. A step further and he will, perhaps,
discover that the one evil in capitalist production is capital itself.
Only a man with such atrocious want of the critical faculty and such spurious
erudition deserved, in spite of his Protectionist heresy, to become the
secret source of the harmonious wisdom of a Bastiat, and of all the other
Free-trade optimists of today.

Footnotes

1. “It is not accurate to say that wages” (he deals here with their money expression) “are increased, because they purchase
more of a cheaper article.” (David Buchanan in his edition of Adam Smith’s
“Wealth of Nations,” 1814, Vol. 1, p. 417, note.)

2. We shall inquire, in another place, what circumstances in relation to productivity may modify this law for
individual branches of industry.

3. James Anderson remarks in his polemic against Adam Smith: “It deserves, likewise, to be remarked, that although
the apparent price of Labour is usually lower in poor countries, where
the produce of the soil, and grain in general, is cheap; yet it is in fact
for the most part really higher than in other countries. For it is not
the wages that is given to the labourer per day that constitutes the real
price of labour, although it is its apparent price. The real price is that
which a certain quantity of work performed actually costs the employer;
and considered in this light, labour is in almost all cases cheaper in
rich countries than in those that are poorer, although the price of grain
and other provisions is usually much lower in the last than in the first....
Labour estimated by the day is much lower in Scotland than in England....
Labour by the piece is generally cheaper in England.” (James Anderson,
“Observations on the Means of Exciting a Spirit of National Industry,”
&tc., Edin. 1777, pp. 350, 351.) On the contrary, lowness of wages
produces, in its turn, dearness of labour. “Labour being dearer in Ireland
than it is in England ... because the wages are so much lower.” (N. 2079
in “Royal Commission on Railways, Minutes,” 1867.)

4. (Ure, op. cit., p. 314.)

5. (“Reports of Insp. of Fact.,” 31st Oct., 1866, pp. 31-37, passim.)

6. “Essay on the Rate of Wages, with an Examination of the Causes of the Differences in the Condition of the
Labouring Population throughout the World,” Philadelphia, 1835.

## Part VII: The Accumulation of Capital

The conversion of a sum of money into means of production
and labour-power, is the first step taken by the quantum of value that
is going to function as capital. This conversion takes place in the market,
within the sphere of circulation. The second step, the process of production,
is complete so soon as the means of production have been converted into
commodities whose value exceeds that of their component parts, and, therefore,
contains the capital originally advanced, plus a surplus-value. These commodities
must then be thrown into circulation. They must be sold, their value realised
in money, this money afresh converted into capital, and so over and over
again. This circular movement, in which the same phases are continually
gone through in succession, forms the circulation of capital.

The first condition of accumulation is that the capitalist must
have contrived to sell his commodities, and to reconvert into capital the
greater part of the money so received. In the following pages we shall
assume that capital circulates in its normal way. The detailed analysis
of the process will be found in Book II.

The capitalist who produces surplus-value — i.e., who
extracts unpaid labour directly from the labourers, and fixes it in commodities,
is, indeed, the first appropriator, but by no means the ultimate owner,
of this surplus-value. He has to share it with capitalists, with landowners,
&c., who fulfil other functions in the complex of social production.
Surplus-value, therefore, splits up into various parts. Its fragments fall
to various categories of persons, and take various forms, independent the
one of the other, such as profit, interest, merchants’ profit, rent, &c.
It is only in Book III. that we can take in hand these modified forms of
surplus-value.

On the one hand, then, we assume that the capitalist sells at
their value the commodities he has produced, without concerning ourselves
either about the new forms that capital assumes while in the sphere of
circulation, or about the concrete conditions of reproduction hidden under
these forms. On the other hand, we treat the capitalist producer as owner
of the entire surplus-value, or, better perhaps, as the representative
of all the sharers with him in the booty. We, therefore, first of all consider
accumulation from an abstract point of view — i.e., as a mere phase
in the actual process of production.

So far as accumulation takes place, the capitalist must have succeeded
in selling his commodities, and in reconverting the sale-money into capital.
Moreover, the breaking-up of surplus-value into fragments neither alters
its nature nor the conditions under which it becomes an element of accumulation.
Whatever be the proportion of surplus-value which the industrial capitalist
retains for himself, or yields up to others, he is the one who, in the
first instance, appropriates it. We, therefore, assume no more than what
actually takes place. On the other hand, the simple fundamental form of
the process of accumulation is obscured by the incident of the circulation
which brings it about, and by the splitting up of surplus-value. An exact
analysis of the process, therefore, demands that we should, for a time,
disregard all phenomena that hide the play of its inner mechanism.

## Chapter Twenty-Three: Simple Reproduction

Whatever the form of the process of production
in a society, it must be a continuous process, must continue to go periodically
through the same phases. A society can no more cease to produce than it
can cease to consume. When viewed, therefore, as a connected whole, and
as flowing on with incessant renewal, every social process of production
is, at the same time, a process of reproduction.

The conditions of production are also those of reproduction. No
society can go on producing, in other words, no society can reproduce,
unless it constantly reconverts a part of its products into means of production,
or elements of fresh products. All other circumstances remaining the same,
the only mode by which it can reproduce its wealth, and maintain it at
one level, is by replacing the means of production — i.e., the
instruments of labour, the raw material, and the auxiliary substances consumed
in the course of the year — by an equal quantity of the same kind of articles;
these must be separated from the mass of the yearly products, and thrown
afresh into the process of production. Hence, a definite portion of each
year’s product belongs to the domain of production. Destined for productive
consumption from the very first, this portion exists, for the most part,
in the shape of articles totally unfitted for individual consumption.

If production be capitalistic in form, so, too, will be reproduction.
Just as in the former the labour process figures but as a means towards
the self-expansion of capital, so in the latter it figures but as a means
of reproducing as capital — i.e., as self-expanding value — the
value advanced. It is only because his money constantly functions as capital
that the economic guise of a capitalist attaches to a man. If, for instance,
a sum of £100 has this year been converted into capital, and produced
a surplus-value of £20, it must continue during next year, and subsequent
years, to repeat the same operation. As a periodic increment of the capital
advanced, or periodic fruit of capital in process, surplus-value acquires
the form of a revenue flowing out of capital. [1]

If this revenue serve the capitalist only as a fund to provide
for his consumption, and be spent as periodically as it is gained, then,
caeteris paribus, simple reproduction will take place. And although
this reproduction is a mere repetition of the process of production on
the old scale, yet this mere repetition, or continuity, gives a new character
to the process, or, rather, causes the disappearance of some apparent characteristics
which it possessed as an isolated discontinuous process.

The purchase of labour-power for a fixed period is the prelude
to the process of production; and this prelude is constantly repeated when
the stipulated term comes to an end, when a definite period of production,
such as a week or a month, has elapsed. But the labourer is not paid until
after he has expended his labour-power, and realised in commodities not
only its value, but surplus-value. He has, therefore, produced not only
surplus-value, which we for the present regard as a fund to meet the private
consumption of the capitalist, but he has also produced, before it flows
back to him in the shape of wages, the fund out of which he himself is
paid, the variable capital; and his employment lasts only so long as he
continues to reproduce this fund. Hence, that formula of the economists,
referred to in Chapter XVIII, which represents wages as a share in the
product itself. [2] What flows back to the labourer in the shape of wages is a portion of the product that is continuously reproduced
by him. The capitalist, it is true, pays him in money, but this money is
merely the transmuted form of the product of his labour. While he is converting
a portion of the means of production into products, a portion of his former
product is being turned into money. It is his labour of last week, or of
last year, that pays for his labour-power this week or this year. The illusion
begotten by the intervention of money vanishes immediately,
if, instead of taking a single capitalist and a single labourer, we take
the class of capitalists and the class of labourers as a whole. The capitalist
class is constantly giving to the labouring class order-notes, in the form
of money, on a portion of the commodities produced by the latter and appropriated
by the former. The labourers give these order-notes back just as constantly
to the capitalist class, and in this way get their share of their own product.
The transaction is veiled by the commodity form of the product and the
money form of the commodity.

Variable capital is therefore only a particular historical form
of appearance of the fund for providing the necessaries of life, or the
labour-fund which the labourer requires for the maintenance of himself
and family, and which, whatever be the system of social production, he
must himself produce and reproduce. If the labour-fund constantly flows
to him in the form of money that pays for his labour, it is because the
product he has created moves constantly away from him in the form of capital.
But all this does not alter the fact, that it is the labourer’s own labour,
realised in a product, which is advanced to him by the capitalist. [3] Let us take a peasant liable to do compulsory service for his lord. He
works on his own land, with his own means of production, for, say, 3 days
a week. The 3 other days he does forced work on the lord’s domain. He constantly
reproduces his own labour-fund, which never, in his case, takes the form
of a money payment for his labour, advanced by another person. But in return,
his unpaid forced labour for the lord, on its side, never acquires the
character of voluntary paid labour. If one fine morning the lord appropriates
to himself the land, the cattle, the seed, in a word, the, means of production
of this peasant, the latter will thenceforth be obliged to sell his labour-power
to the lord. He will, ceteris paribus, labour 6 days a week as before,
3 for himself, 3 for his lord, who thenceforth becomes a wages-paying capitalist.
As before, he will use up the means of production as means of production,
and transfer their value to the product. As before, a definite portion
of the product will be devoted to reproduction. But from the moment that
the forced labour is changed into wage labour, from that moment the labour-fund,
which the peasant himself continues as before to produce and reproduce,
takes the form of a capital advanced in the form of wages by the lord.
The bourgeois economist whose narrow mind is unable to separate the form
of appearance from the thing that appears, shuts his eyes to the fact,
that it is but here and there on the face of the earth, that
even nowadays the labour fund crops up in the form of capital. [4]

Variable capital, it is true, only then loses its character of
a value advanced out of the capitalist’s funds, [5] when we view the process of capitalist production in the flow of its constant
renewal. But that process must have had a beginning of some kind. From
our present standpoint it therefore seems likely that the capitalist, once
upon a time, became possessed of money, by some accumulation that took
place independently of the unpaid labour of others, and that this was,
therefore, how he was enabled to frequent the market as a buyer of labour-power.
However this may be, the mere continuity of the process, the simple reproduction,
brings about some other wonderful changes, which affect not only the variable,
but the total capital.

If a capital of £1,000 beget yearly a surplus-value of £200,
and if this surplus-value be consumed every year, it is clear that at the
end of 5 years the surplus-value consumed will amount to 5 × £200
or the £1,000 originally advanced. If only a part, say one half,
were consumed, the same result would follow at the end of 10 years, since
10 × £100= £1,000. General Rule: The value of the capital advanced
divided by the surplus-value annually consumed, gives the number of years,
or reproduction periods, at the expiration of which the capital originally
advanced has been consumed by the capitalist and has disappeared. The capitalist
thinks, that he is consuming the produce of the unpaid labour of others,
i.e., the surplus-value, and is keeping intact his original capital;
but what he thinks cannot alter facts. After the lapse of a certain number
of years, the capital value he then possesses is equal to the sum total
of the surplus-value appropriated by him during those years, and the total
value he has consumed is equal to that of his original capital. It is true,
he has in hand a capital whose amount has not changed, and of which a part,
viz., the buildings, machinery, &c., were already there when the work
of his business began. But what we have to do with here, is not the material
elements, but the value, of that capital. When a person gets through all
his property, by taking upon himself debts equal to the value of that property,
it is clear that his property represents nothing but the sum total of his
debts. And so it is with the capitalist; when he has consumed the equivalent
of his original capital, the value of his present capital represents
nothing but the total amount of the surplus-value appropriated by him without
payment. Not a single atom of the value of his old capital continues to
exist.

Apart then from all accumulation, the mere continuity of the process
of production, in other words simple reproduction, sooner or later, and
of necessity, converts every capital into accumulated capital, or capitalised
surplus-value. Even if that capital was originally acquired by the personal
labour of its employer, it sooner or later becomes value appropriated without
an equivalent, the unpaid labour of others materialised either in money
or in some other object. We saw in Chapt. IV.-VI. that in order to convert
money into capital something more is required than the production and circulation
of commodities. We saw that on the one side the possessor of value or money,
on the other, the possessor of the value-creating substance; on the one
side, the possessor of the means of production and subsistence, on the
other, the possessor of nothing but labour-power, must confront one another
as buyer and seller. The separation of labour from its product, of subjective
labour-power from the objective conditions of labour, was therefore the
real foundation in fact, and the starting-point of capitalist production.

But that which at first was but a starting-point, becomes, by
the mere continuity of the process, by simple reproduction, the peculiar
result, constantly renewed and perpetuated, of capitalist production. On
the one hand, the process of production incessantly converts material wealth
into capital, into means of creating more wealth and means of enjoyment
for the capitalist. On the other hand, the labourer, on quitting the process,
is what he was on entering it, a source of wealth, but devoid of all means
of making that wealth his own. Since, before entering on the process, his
own labour has already been alienated from himself by the sale of his labour-power,
has been appropriated by the capitalist and incorporated with capital,
it must, during the process, be realised in a product that does not belong
to him. Since the process of production is also the process by which the
capitalist consumes labour-power, the product of the labourer is incessantly
converted, not only into commodities, but into capital, into value that
sucks up the value-creating power, into means of subsistence that buy the
person of the labourer, into means of production that command the producers.
[6] The labourer therefore constantly produces material,
objective wealth, but in the form of capital, of an alien power that dominates
and exploits him; and the capitalist as constantly produces
labour-power, but in the form of a subjective source of wealth, separated
from the objects in and by which it can alone be realised; in short he
produces the labourer, but as a wage labourer. [7] This incessant reproduction, this perpetuation of the labourer, is the sine
quâ non of capitalist production.

The labourer consumes in a two-fold way. While producing he consumes
by his labour the means of production, and converts them into products
with a higher value than that of the capital advanced. This is his productive
consumption. It is at the same time consumption of his labour-power by
the capitalist who bought it. On the other hand, the labourer turns the
money paid to him for his labour-power, into means of subsistence: this
is his individual consumption. The labourer’s productive consumption, and
his individual consumption, are therefore totally distinct. In the former,
he acts as the motive power of capital, and belongs to the capitalist.
In the latter, he belongs to himself, and performs his necessary vital
functions outside the process of production. The result of the one is,
that the capitalist lives; of the other, that the labourer lives.

When treating of the working day, we saw that the labourer is
often compelled to make his individual consumption a mere incident of production.
In such a case, he supplies himself with necessaries in order to maintain
his labour-power, just as coal and water are supplied to the steam-engine
and oil to the wheel. His means of consumption, in that case, are the mere
means of consumption required by a means of production; his individual
consumption is directly productive consumption. This, however, appears
to be an abuse not essentially appertaining to capitalist production. [8]

The matter takes quite another aspect, when we contemplate, not
the single capitalist, and the single labourer, but the capitalist class
and the labouring class, not an isolated process of production, but capitalist
production in full swing, and on its actual social scale. By converting
part of his capital into labour-power, the capitalist augments the value
of his entire capital. He kills two birds with one stone. He profits, not
only by what he receives from, but by what he gives to, the labourer. The
capital given in exchange for labour-power is converted into necessaries,
by the consumption of which the muscles, nerves, bones, and brains of existing
labourers are reproduced, and new labourers are begotten. Within the limits
of what is strictly necessary, the individual consumption of the working class
is, therefore, the reconversion of the means of subsistence given by capital
in exchange for labour-power, into fresh labour-power at the disposal of
capital for exploitation. It is the production and reproduction of that
means of production so indispensable to the capitalist: the labourer himself.
The individual consumption of the labourer, whether it proceed within the
workshop or outside it, whether it be part of the process of production
or not, forms therefore a factor of the production and reproduction of
capital; just as cleaning machinery does, whether it be done while the
machinery is working or while it is standing. The fact that the labourer
consumes his means of subsistence for his own purposes, and not to please
the capitalist, has no bearing on the matter. The consumption of food by
a beast of burden is none the less a necessary factor in the process of
production, because the beast enjoys what it eats. The maintenance and
reproduction of the working class is, and must ever be, a necessary condition
to the reproduction of capital. But the capitalist may safely leave its
fulfilment to the labourer’s instincts of self-preservation and of propagation.
All the capitalist cares for, is to reduce the labourer’s individual consumption
as far as possible to what is strictly necessary, and he is far away from
imitating those brutal South Americans, who force their labourers to take
the more substantial, rather than the less substantial, kind of food. [9]

Hence both the capitalist and his ideological representative,
the political economist, consider that part alone of the labourer’s individual
consumption to be productive, which is requisite for the perpetuation of
the class, and which therefore must take place in order that the capitalist
may have labour-power to consume; what the labourer consumes for his own
pleasure beyond that part, is unproductive consumption. [10] If the accumulation of capital were to cause a rise of wages and an increase in the labourer’s consumption, unaccompanied by increase in the consumption
of labour-power by capital, the additional capital would be
consumed unproductively. [11] In reality, the individual consumption of the labourer is unproductive as regards himself, for it
reproduces nothing but the needy individual; it is productive to the capitalist
and to the State, since it is the production of the power that creates
their wealth. [12]

From a social point of view, therefore, the working class, even
when not directly engaged in the labour process, is just as much an appendage
of capital as the ordinary instruments of labour. Even its individual consumption
is, within certain limits, a mere factor in the process of production.
That process, however, takes good care to prevent these self-conscious
instruments from leaving it in the lurch, for it removes their product,
as fast as it is made, from their pole to the opposite pole of capital.
Individual consumption provides, on the one hand, the means for their maintenance
and reproduction: on the other hand, it secures by the annihilation of
the necessaries of life, the continued re-appearance of the workman in
the labour-market. The Roman slave was held by fetters: the wage labourer
is bound to his owner by invisible threads. The appearance of independence
is kept up by means of a constant change of employers, and by the fictio
juris of a contract.

In former times, capital resorted to legislation, whenever necessary,
to enforce its proprietary rights over the free labourer. For instance,
down to 1815, the emigration of mechanics employed in machine making was,
in England, forbidden, under grievous pains and penalties.

The reproduction of the working class carries with it the accumulation
of skill, that is handed down from one generation to another. [13] To what extent the capitalist reckons the existence of such a skilled class among the factors of production that belong to him by right, and to what
extent he actually regards it as the reality of his variable capital, is
seen so soon as a crisis threatens him with its loss. In consequence of
the civil war in the United States and of the accompanying cotton famine,
the majority of the cotton operatives in Lancashire were, as is well known,
thrown out of work. Both from the working class itself, and from other
ranks of society, there arose a cry for State aid, or for voluntary
national subscriptions, in order to enable the “superfluous” hands to emigrate
to the colonies or to the United States. Thereupon, The Times published
on the 24th March, 1863, a letter from Edmund Potter, a former president
of the Manchester Chamber of Commerce. This letter was rightly called in
the House of Commons, the manufacturers’ manifesto. [14] We cull here a few characteristic passages, in which the proprietary rights of capital over labour-power are unblushingly asserted.

“He” (the man out of work) “may be told the supply of cotton-workers
is too large ... and ... must ... in fact be reduced by a third, perhaps,
and that then there will be a healthy demand for the remaining two-thirds....
Public opinion... urges emigration.... The master cannot willingly see
his labour supply being removed; he may think, and perhaps justly, that
it is both wrong and unsound.... But if the public funds are to be devoted
to assist emigration, he has a right to be heard, and perhaps to protest.”

Mr. Potter then shows how useful the cotton trade is, how the “trade has
undoubtedly drawn the surplus-population from Ireland and from the agricultural
districts,” how immense is its extent, how in the year 1860 it yielded
5/13 ths of the total English exports, how, after a few years, it will
again expand by the extension of the market, particularly of the Indian
market, and by calling forth a plentiful supply of cotton at 6d. per lb.
He then continues:

“Some time ...,one, two, or three years, it may be,
will produce the quantity.... The question I would put then is this —
Is the trade worth retaining? Is it worth while to keep the machinery (he
means the living labour machines) in order, and is it not the greatest
folly to think of parting with that? I think it is. I allow that the workers
are not a property, not the property of Lancashire and the masters; but
they are the strength of both; they are the mental and trained power which
cannot be. replaced for a generation; the mere machinery which they work
might much of it be beneficially replaced, nay improved, in a twelvemonth
[15] Encourage or allow (!) the working-power
to emigrate, and what of the capitalist?... Take away the cream of the
workers, and fixed capital will depreciate in a great degree, and the floating
will not subject itself to a struggle with the short supply of inferior
labour.... We are told the workers wish it” (emigration). “Very natural
it is that they should do so.... Reduce, compress the cotton trade by taking
away its working power and reducing their wages expenditure, say one-fifth,
or five millions, and what then would happen to the class above, the small
shopkeepers; and what of the rents, the cottage rents.... Trace out the
effects upwards to the small farmer, the better householder, and ... the
landowner, and say if there could be any suggestion more suicidal to all
classes of the country than by enfeebling a nation by exporting the best
of its manufacturing population, and destroying the value of some of its
most productive capital and enrichment .... I advise a loan (of five or
six millions sterling), ... extending it may be over two or three years,
administered by special commissioners added to the Boards of Guardians
in the cotton districts, under special legislative regulations, enforcing
some occupation or labour, as a means of keeping up at least the moral
standard of the recipients of the loan... can anything be worse for landowners
or masters than parting with the best of the workers, and demoralising
and disappointing the rest by an extended depletive emigration, a depletion
of capital and value in an entire province?”

Potter, the chosen mouthpiece of the manufacturers, distinguishes
two sorts of “machinery,” each of which belongs to the capitalist, and
of which one stands in his factory, the other at night-time and on Sundays
is housed outside the factory, in cottages. The one is inanimate, the other
living. The inanimate machinery not only wears out and depreciates from
day to day, but a great part of it becomes so quickly superannuated, by
constant technical progress, that it can be replaced with advantage by
new machinery after a few months. The living machinery, on the contrary
gets better the longer it lasts, and in proportion as the skill, handed
from one generation to another, accumulates. The Times answered
the cotton lord as follows:

“Mr. Edmund Potter is so impressed with the exceptional and supreme
importance of the cotton masters that, in order to preserve this class
and perpetuate their profession, he would keep half a million of the labouring
class confined in a great moral workhouse against their will. ‘Is the
trade worth retaining?’ asks Mr. Potter. ‘Certainly by all honest means
it is,’ we answer. ‘Is it worth while keeping the machinery in order?’
again asks Mr. Potter. Here we hesitate. By the ‘machinery’ Mr. Potter
means the human machinery, for he goes on to protest that he does not mean
to use them as an absolute property. We must confess that we do not think
it ‘worth while,’ or even possible, to keep the human machinery
in order-that is to shut it up and keep it oiled till it is wanted. Human
machinery will rust under inaction, oil and rub it as you may. Moreover,
the human machinery will, as we have just seen, get the steam up of its
own accord, and burst or run amuck in our great towns. It might, as Mr.
Potter says, require some time to reproduce the workers, but, having machinists
and capitalists at hand, we could always find thrifty, hard, industrious
men wherewith to improvise more master manufacturers than we can ever want.
Mr. Potter talks of the trade reviving ‘in one, two, or three years,’ and
he asks us not ‘to encourage or allow (!) the working power to emigrate.’
[16] He says that it is very natural the workers should wish to emigrate; but he thinks that in spite of their desire, the nation
ought to keep this half million of workers with their 700,000 dependents,
shut up in the cotton districts; and as a necessary consequence, he must
of course think that the nation ought to keep down their discontent by
force, and sustain them by alms — and upon the chance that the cotton
masters may some day want them.... The time is come when the great public
opinion of these islands must operate to save this ‘working power’ from
those who would deal with it as they would deal with iron, and coal, and
cotton.”

The Times’ article was only a jeu d’esprit. The “great
public opinion” was, in fact, of Mr. Potter’s opinion, that the factory
operatives are part of the movable fittings of a factory. Their emigration
was prevented. They were locked up in that “moral workhouse,” the cotton
districts, and they form, as before, “the strength” of the cotton manufacturers
of Lancashire.

Capitalist production, therefore, of itself reproduces the separation
between labour-power and the means of labour. It thereby reproduces and
perpetuates the condition for exploiting the labourer. It incessantly forces
him to sell his labour-power in order to live, and enables the capitalist
to purchase labour-power in order that he may enrich himself. [17] It is no longer a mere accident, that capitalist and labourer confront each other in the market as buyer and seller. It is the process itself
that incessantly hurls back the labourer on to the market as a vendor of
his labour-power, and that incessantly converts his own product
into a means by which another man can purchase him. In reality, the labourer
belongs to capital before he has sold himself to capital. His economic
bondage [18] is both brought about and concealed by
the periodic sale of himself, by his change of masters, and by the oscillations
in the market-price of labour-power. [19]

Capitalist production, therefore, under its aspect of a continuous
connected process, of a process of reproduction, produces not only commodities,
not only surplus-value, but it also produces and reproduces the capitalist
relation; on the one side the capitalist, on the other the wage labourer.

Footnotes

1. “Mais ces riches, qui consomment les produits du travail des autres, ne peuvent les obtenir que par des échanges
[purchases of commodities]. S’ils donnent cependant leur richesse acquise
et accumulée en retour contre ces produits nouveaux qui sont l’objet
de leur fantaisie, ils semblent exposés à épuiser
bientôt leur fonds de réserve; ils ne travaillent point,
avons-nous dit, et ils ne peuvent même travailler; on croirait donc que
chaque jour doit voir diminuer leurs vieilles richesses, et que lorsqu’il
ne leur en restera plus, rien ne sera offert en échange aux ouvriers
qui travaillent exclusivement pour eux.... Mais dans l’ordre social, la
richesse a acquis la propriété de se reproduire par le travail
d’autrui, et sans que son propriétaire y concoure. La richesse, comme le
travail, et par le travail, donne un fruit annuel qui peut être détruit
chaque année sans que le riche en devienne plus pauvre. Ce fruit
est le revenu qui naît du capital.” [The rich, who consume the labour of others, can only obtain them by making exchanges ... By giving away their acquired and accumulated wealth in exchange for the new products which are the object of their capricious wishes, they seem to be exposed to an early exhaustion of their reserve fund; we have already said that they do not work and are unable to work; therefore it could be assumed with full justification that their former wealth would be diminishing with every day and that, finally, a day would come when they would have nothing, and they would have nothing to offer to the workers, who work exclusively for them. ... But, in the social order, wealth has acquired the power of reproducing itself through the labour of others, without the help of its owners. Wealth, like labour, and by means of labour, bears fruit every year, but this fruit can be destroyed every year without making the rich man any poorer thereby. This fruit is the revenue which arises out of capital.] (Sismondi: “Nouv. Princ.
d’Econ. Pol.” Paris, 1819, t. I, pp. 81-82.)

2. “Wages as well as profits are to be considered, each of them, as really a portion of the finished product.”
(Ramsay, l. c., p. 142.) “The share of the product which comes to the labourer
in the form of wages.” (J. Mill, “Eléments, &c.” Translated
by Parissot. Paris, 1823, p. 34.)

3. “When capital is employed in advancing to the workman his wages, it adds nothing to the funds for the maintenance
of labour.” (Cazenove in note to his edition of Malthus’ “Definitions in
Pol. Econ.” London, 1853, p. 22.)

4. “The wages of labour are advanced by capitalists in the case of less than one fourth of the labourers of
the earth.” (Rich. Jones: “Textbook of Lectures on the Pol. Econ. of Nations.”
Hertford, 1852, p. 36.)

5. “Though the manufacturer” (i.e., the labourer) “has his wages advanced to him by his master, he in reality costs him no expense, the value of these wages being generally reserved, together with a profit, in the improved value of the subject upon which his labour is bestowed.” (A. Smith, l. c., Book II. ch. III, p. 311.)

6. “This is a remarkably peculiar property of productive labour. Whatever is productively consumed is capital and
it becomes capital by consumption.” (James Mill, l. c., p. 242.) James
Mill, however, never got on the track of this “remarkably peculiar property.”

7. “It is true indeed, that the first introducing a manufacture employs many poor, but they cease not to be so,
and the continuance of it makes many.” (“Reasons for a Limited Exportation
of Wool.” London, 1677, p. 19.) “The farmer now absurdly asserts, that
he keeps the poor. They are indeed kept in misery.” (“Reasons for the Late
Increase of the Poor Rates: or a Comparative View of the Prices of Labour
and Provisions.” London, 1777, p. 31.)

8. Rossi would not declaim so emphatically against this, had he really penetrated the secret of “productive consumption.”

9. “The labourers in the mines of S. America, whose daily task (the heaviest perhaps in the world) consists
in bringing to the surface on their shoulders a load of metal weighing
from 180 to 200 pounds, from a depth of 450 feet, live on bread and beans
only; they themselves would prefer the bread alone for food, but their
masters, who have found out that the men cannot work so hard on bread,
treat them like horses, and compel them to eat beans; beans, however, are
relatively much richer in bone-earth (phosphate of lime) than is bread.”
(Liebig, l. c., vol. 1., p. 194, note.)

10. James Mill, l. c., p. 238.

11. “If the price of labour should rise so high that, notwithstanding the increase of capital, no more could be
employed, I should say that such increase of capital would be still unproductively
consumed.” (Ricardo, l. c., p. 163.)

12. “The only productive consumption, properly so called, is the consumption or destruction of wealth” (he alludes to the means of production) “by capitalists with a view to reproduction.... The workman ... is a productive consumer to the person who employs him, and to the State, but not, strictly speaking, to himself.” (Malthus’ “Definitions, &c.,” p. 30.)

13. “The only thing, of which one can say, that it is stored up and prepared beforehand, is the skill of the
labourer.... The accumulation and storage of skilled labour, that most
important operation, is, as regards the great mass of labourers, accomplished
without any capital whatever.” (Th. Hodgskin: “Labour Defended, &c.,”
p. 13.)

14. “That letter might be looked upon as the manifesto of the manufacturers.” (Ferrand: “Motion on the Cotton
Famine.” H.o.C., 27th April, 1863.)

15. It will not be forgotten that this same capital sings quite another song, under ordinary circumstances, when
there is a question of reducing wages. Then the masters exclaim with one
voice: “The factory operatives should keep in wholesome remembrance the
fact that theirs is really a low species of skilled labour, and that there
is none which is more easily acquired, or of its quality more amply remunerated,
or which, by a short training of the least expert, can be more quickly,
as well as abundantly, acquired ... The master’s machinery” (which we now
learn can be replaced with advantage in 12 months,) “really plays a far
more important part in the business of production than the labour and skill
of the operative” (who cannot now be replaced under 30 years), “which six
months’ education can reach, and a common labourer can learn.” (See ante,
p. 423.)

16. Parliament did not vote a single farthing in aid of emigration, but simply passed some Acts empowering the
municipal corporations to keep the operatives in a half-starved state,
i.e., to exploit them at less than the normal wages. On the other
hand, when 3 years later, the cattle disease broke out, Parliament broke
wildly through its usages and voted, straight off, millions for indemnifying
the millionaire landlords, whose farmers in any event came off without
loss, owing to the rise in the price of meat. The bull-like bellow of the
landed proprietors at the opening of Parliament, in 1866, showed that a
man can worship the cow Sabala without being a Hindu, and can change himself
into an ox without being a Jupiter.

17. “L’ouvrier demandait de la subsistence pour vivre, le chef demandait du travail pour gagner.” [The worker required the means of subsistence to live, the boss required labour to make a profit] (Sismondi, l. c.,
p. 91.)

18. A boorishly clumsy form of this bondage exists in the county of Durham. This is one of the few counties,
in which circumstances do not secure to the farmer undisputed proprietary
rights over the agricultural labourer. The mining industry allows the latter
some choice. In this county, the farmer, contrary to the custom elsewhere,
rents only such farms as have on them labourers’ cottages. The rent of
the cottage is a part of the wages. These cottages are known as “hinds’
houses.” They are let to the labourers in consideration of certain feudal
services, under a contract called “bondage,” which, amongst other things,
binds the labourer, during the time he is employed elsewhere, to leave
some one, say his daughter, &c., to supply his place. The labourer
himself is called a “bondsman.” The relationship here set up also shows
how individual consumption by the labourer becomes consumption on behalf
of capital – or productive consumption – from quite a new point of view: “It
is curious to observe that the very dung of the hind and bondsman is the
perquisite of the calculating lord ... and the lord will allow no privy
but his own to exist in the neighbourhood, and will rather give a bit of
manure here and there for a garden than bate any part of his seigneurial
right.” (“Public Health, Report VII., 1864,” p. 188.)

19. It will not be forgotten, that, with respect to the labour of children, &c., even the formality of a voluntary sale disappears.

20. “Capital pre-supposes wage labour, and wage labour pre-supposes capital. One is a necessary condition to the
existence of the other; they mutually call each other into existence. Does
an operative in a cotton-factory produce nothing but cotton goods? No,
he produces capital. He produces values that give fresh command over his
labour, and that, by means of such command, create fresh values.” (Karl
Marx: “Lohnarbeit und Kapital,” in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung:
No. 266, 7th April, 1849.) The articles published under the above title
in the N. Rh. Z. are parts of some lectures given by me on that
subject, in 1847, in the German “Arbeiter-Verein” at Brussels, the publication
of which was interrupted by the revolution of February.

## Chapter Twenty-Four: Conversion of Surplus-Value into Capital

Contents

Section 1 - Capitalist Production on a Progressively Increasing Scale. Transition of the Laws of Property that Characterise Production of Commodities into Laws of Capitalist Appropriation

Section 2 - Erroneous Conception, by Political Economy, of Reproduction on a Progressively Increasing Scale

Section 3 - Separation of Surplus-Value into Capital and Revenue. The Abstinence Theory

Section 4 - Circumstances that, Independently of the Proportional Division of Surplus-Value into Capital and Revenue, Determine the Amount of Accumulation. Degree of Exploitation of Labour-Power. Productivity of Labour. Growing Difference in Amount Between Capital Employed and Capital Consumed. Magnitude of Capital Advanced

Section 5 - The So-Called labour fund

### SECTION 1. CAPITALIST PRODUCTION ON A PROGRESSIVELY INCREASING SCALE. TRANSITION OF THE LAWS OF PROPERTY THAT CHARACTERISE PRODUCTION OF COMMODITIES INTO LAWS OF CAPITALIST APPROPRIATION

Hitherto we have investigated how surplus-value emanates
from capital; we have now to see how capital arises from surplus-value.
Employing surplus-value as capital, reconverting it into capital, is called
accumulation of capital. [1]

First let us consider this transaction from the standpoint of
the individual capitalist. Suppose a spinner to have advanced a capital
of £10,000, of which four-fifths (£8,000) are laid out in cotton,
machinery, &c., and one-fifth (£2,000) in wages. Let him produce
240,000 lbs. of yarn annually, having a value of £12,000. The rate
of surplus-value being 100%, the surplus-value lies in the surplus or net
product of 40,000 lbs. of yarn, one-sixth of the gross product, with a
value of £2,000 which will be realised by a sale. £2,000 is
£2,000. We can neither see nor smell in this sum of money a trace
of surplus-value. When we know that a given value is surplus-value, we
know how its owner came by it; but that does not alter the nature either
of value or of money.

In order to convert this additional sum of £2,000 into capital,
the master-spinner will, all circumstances remaining as before, advance
four-fifths of it (£1,600) in the purchase of cotton, &c., and
one-fifth (£400) in the purchase of additional spinners, who will
find in the market the necessaries of life whose value the master has advanced
to them.

Then the new capital of £2,000 functions in the spinning mill,
and brings in, in its turn, a surplus-value of £400.

The capital value was originally advanced in the money form. The
surplus-value on the contrary is, originally, the value of a definite portion
of the gross product. If this gross product be sold, converted into money,
the capital value regains its original form. From this moment the capital value
and the surplus-value are both of them sums of money, and their reconversion
into capital takes place in precisely the same way. The one, as well as
the other, is laid out by the capitalist in the purchase of commodities
that place him in a position to begin afresh the fabrication of his goods,
and this time, on an extended scale. But in order to be able to buy those
commodities, he must find them ready in the market.

His own yarns circulate, only because he brings his annual product
to market, as all other capitalists likewise do with their commodities.
But these commodities, before coming to market, were part of the general
annual product, part of the total mass of objects of every kind, into which
the sum of the individual capitals, i.e., the total capital of society,
had been converted in the course of the year, and of which each capitalist
had in hand only an aliquot part. The transactions in the market effectuate
only the interchange of the individual components of this annual product,
transfer them from one hand to another, but can neither augment the total
annual production, nor alter the nature of the objects produced. Hence
the use that can be made of the total annual product, depends entirely
upon its own composition, but in no way upon circulation.

The annual production must in the first place furnish all those
objects (use values) from which the material components of capital, used
up in the course of the year, have to be replaced. Deducting these there
remains the net or surplus-product, in which the surplus-value lies. And
of what does this surplus-product consist? Only of things destined to satisfy
the wants and desires of the capitalist class, things which, consequently,
enter into the consumption fund of the capitalists? Were that the case,
the cup of surplus-value would be drained to the very dregs, and nothing
but simple reproduction would ever take place.

To accumulate it is necessary to convert a portion of the surplus-product
into capital. But we cannot, except by a miracle, convert into capital
anything but such articles as can be employed in the labour process (i.e.,
means of production), and such further articles as are suitable for the
sustenance of the labourer (i.e., means of subsistence). Consequently,
a part of the annual surplus-labour must have been applied to the production
of additional means of production and subsistence, over and above the quantity
of these things required to replace the capital advanced. In one word,
surplus-value is convertible into capital solely because the
surplus-product, whose value it is, already comprises the material elements
of new capital. [2]

Now in order to allow of these elements actually functioning as
capital, the capitalist class requires additional labour. If the exploitation
of the labourers already employed do not increase, either extensively or
intensively, then additional labour-power must be found. For this the mechanism
of capitalist production provides beforehand, by converting the working class
into a class dependent on wages, a class whose ordinary wages suffice,
not only for its maintenance, but for its increase. It is only necessary
for capital to incorporate this additional labour-power, annually supplied
by the working class in the shape of labourers of all ages, with the surplus
means of production comprised in the annual produce, and the conversion
of surplus-value into capital is complete. From a concrete point of view,
accumulation resolves itself into the reproduction of capital on a progressively
increasing scale. The circle in which simple reproduction moves, alters
its form, and, to use Sismondi’s expression, changes into a spiral. [3]

Let us now return to our illustration. It is the old story: Abraham
begat Isaac, Isaac begat Jacob, and so on. The original capital of £10,000
brings in a surplus-value of £2,000, which is capitalised. The new
capital of £2,000 brings in a surplus-value of £400, and this,
too, is capitalised, converted into a second additional capital, which,
in its turn, produces a further surplus-value of £80. And so the
ball rolls on.

We here leave out of consideration the portion of the surplus-value
consumed by the capitalist. Just as little does it concern us, for the
moment, whether the additional capital is joined on to the original capital,
or is separated from it to function independently; whether the same capitalist,
who accumulated it, employs it, or whether he hands it over to another.
This only we must not forget, that by the side of the newly-formed capital,
the original capital continues to reproduce itself, and to produce surplus-value,
and that this is also true of all accumulated capital, and the additional
capital engendered by it.

The original capital was formed by the advance of £10,000.
How did the owner become possessed of it? “By his own labour and that of
his forefathers,” answer unanimously the spokesmen of Political
Economy. [4] And, in fact, their supposition appears
the only one consonant with the laws of the production of commodities.

But it is quite otherwise with regard to the additional capital
of £2,000. How that originated we know perfectly well. There is not
one single atom of its value that does not owe its existence to unpaid
labour. The means of production, with which the additional labour-power
is incorporated, as well as the necessaries with which the labourers are
sustained, are nothing but component parts of the surplus-product, of the
tribute annually exacted from the working class by the capitalist class.
Though the latter with a portion of that tribute purchases the additional
labour-power even at its full price, so that equivalent is exchanged for
equivalent, yet the transaction is for all that only the old dodge of every
conqueror who buys commodities from the conquered with the money he has
robbed them of.

If the additional capital employs the person who produced it,
this producer must not only continue to augment the value of the original
capital, but must buy back the fruits of his previous labour with more
labour than they cost. When viewed as a transaction between the capitalist
class and the working class, it makes no difference that additional labourers
are employed by means of the unpaid labour of the previously employed labourers.
The capitalist may even convert the additional capital into a machine that
throws the producers of that capital out of work, and that replaces them
by a few children. In every case the working class creates by the surplus-labour
of one year the capital destined to employ additional labour in the following
year. [5] And this is what is called: creating capital out of capital.

The accumulation of the first additional capital of £2,000
presupposes a value of £10,000 belonging to the capitalist by virtue
of his “primitive labour,” and advanced by him. The second additional capital
of £400 presupposes, on the contrary, only the previous accumulation
of the £2,000, of which the £400 is the surplus-value capitalised.
The ownership of past unpaid labour is thenceforth the sole condition for
the appropriation of living unpaid labour on a constantly increasing scale.
The more the capitalist has accumulated, the more is he able to accumulate.

In so far as the surplus-value, of which the additional capital,
No. 1, consists, is the result of the purchase of labour-power with part
of the original capital, a purchase that conformed to the laws
of the exchange of commodities, and that, from a legal standpoint, presupposes
nothing beyond the free disposal, on the part of the labourer, of his own
capacities, and on the part of the owner of money or commodities, of the
values that belong to him; in so far as the additional capital, No. 2,
&c., is the mere result of No. 1, and, therefore, a consequence of
the above conditions; in so far as each single transaction invariably conforms
to the laws of the exchange of commodities, the capitalist buying labour-power,
the labourer selling it, and we will assume at its real value; in so far
as all this is true, it is evident that the laws of appropriation or of
private property, laws that are based on the production and circulation
of commodities, become by their own inner and inexorable dialectic changed
into their very opposite. The exchange of equivalents, the original operation
with which we started, has now become turned round in such a way that there
is only an apparent exchange. This is owing to the fact, first, that the
capital which is exchanged for labour-power is itself but a portion of
the product of others’ labour appropriated without an equivalent; and,
secondly, that this capital must not only be replaced by its producer,
but replaced together with an added surplus. The relation of exchange subsisting
between capitalist and labourer becomes a mere semblance appertaining to
the process of circulation, a mere form, foreign to the real nature of
the transaction, and only mystifying it. The ever repeated purchase and
sale of labour-power is now the mere form; what really takes place is this
— the capitalist again and again appropriates, without equivalent, a portion
of the previously materialised labour of others, and exchanges it for a
greater quantity of living labour. At first the rights of property seemed
to us to be based on a man’s own labour. At least, some such assumption
was necessary since only commodity-owners with equal rights confronted
each other, and the sole means by which a man could become possessed of
the commodities of others, was by alienating his own commodities; and these
could be replaced by labour alone. Now, however, property turns out to
be the right, on the part of the capitalist, to appropriate the unpaid
labour of others or its product, and to be the impossibility, on the part
of the labourer, of appropriating his own product. The separation of property
from labour has become the necessary consequence of a law that apparently
originated in their identity. [6]

Therefore, [7] however much the capitalist
mode of appropriation may seem to fly in the face of the original laws
of commodity production, it nevertheless arises, not from a violation,
but, on the contrary, from the application of these laws. Let us make this
clear once more by briefly reviewing the consecutive phases of motion whose
culminating point is capitalist accumulation.

We saw, in the first place, that the original conversion of a
sum of values into capital was achieved in complete accordance with the
laws of exchange. One party to the contract sells his labour-power, the
other buys it. The former receives the value of his commodity, whose use value
— labour — is thereby alienated to the buyer. Means of production which
already belong to the latter are then transformed by him, with the aid
of labour equally belonging to him, into a new product which is likewise
lawfully his.

The value of this product includes: first, the value of the used-up
means of production. Useful labour cannot consume these means of production
without transferring their value to the new product, but, to be saleable,
labour-power must be capable of supplying useful labour in the branch of
industry in which it is to be employed.

The value of the new product further includes: the equivalent
of the value of the labour-power together with a surplus-value. This is
so because the value of the labour-power — sold for a definite length
of time, say a day, a week, etc. — is less than the value created by its
use during that time. But the worker has received payment for the exchange-value
of his labour-power and by so doing has alienated its use value — this
being the case in every sale and purchase.

The fact that this particular commodity, labour-power, possesses
the peculiar use value of supplying labour, and therefore of creating value,
cannot affect the general law of commodity production. If, therefore, the
magnitude of value advanced in wages is not merely found again in the product,
but is found there augmented by a surplus-value, this is not because the
seller has been defrauded, for he has really received the value of his
commodity; it is due solely to the fact that this commodity has been used
up by the buyer.

The law of exchange requires equality only between the exchange-values
of the commodities given in exchange for one another. From the very outset
it presupposes even a difference between their use values and it has nothing
whatever to do with their consumption, which only begins after the deal
is closed and executed.

Thus the original conversion of money into capital is achieved
in the most exact accordance with the economic laws of commodity production
and with the right of property derived from them. Nevertheless, its result
is:

(1) that the product belongs to the capitalist and not to the worker;

(2) that the value of this product includes, besides the value
of the capital advanced, a surplus-value which costs the worker labour
but the capitalist nothing, and which none the less becomes the legitimate
property of the capitalist;

(3) that the worker has retained his labour-power and can sell
it anew if he can find a buyer.

Simple reproduction is only the periodical repetition of this first operation;
each time money is converted afresh into capital. Thus the law is not broken;
on the contrary, it is merely enabled to operate continuously. “Several
successive acts of exchange have only made the last represent the first”
(Sismondi, “Nouveaux Principes, etc.,” p. 70).

And yet we have seen that simple reproduction suffices to stamp
this first operation, in so far as it is conceived as an isolated process,
with a totally changed character. “Of those who share the national income
among themselves, the one side (the workers) acquire every year a fresh
right to their share by fresh work; the others (the capitalists) have already
acquired, by work done originally, a permanent right to their share” (Sismondi,
l. c., pp. 110, 111). It is indeed notorious that the sphere of labour
is not the only one in which primogeniture works miracles.

Nor does it matter if simple reproduction is replaced by reproduction
on an extended scale, by accumulation. In the former case the capitalist
squanders the whole surplus-value in dissipation, in the latter he demonstrates
his bourgeois virtue by consuming only a portion of it and converting the
rest into money.

The surplus-value is his property; it has never belonged to anyone
else. If he advances it for the purposes of production, the advances made
come from his own funds, exactly as on the day when he first entered the
market. The fact that on this occasion the funds are derived from the unpaid
labour of his workers makes absolutely no difference. If worker B is paid
out of the surplus-value which worker A produced, then, in the first place,
A furnished that surplus-value without having the just price of his commodity
cut by a half-penny, and, in the second place, the transaction is no concern
of B’s whatever. What B claims, and has a right to claim, is that the capitalist
should pay him the value of his labour-power. “Both were still gainers:
the worker because he was advanced the fruits of his labour” (should read:
of the unpaid labour of other workers) “before the work was
done” (should read: before his own labour had borne fruit); “the employer
(le maître), because the labour of this worker was worth more
than his wages” (should read: produced more value than the value of his
wages). (Sismondi, l. c., p. 135.)

To be sure, the matter looks quite different if we consider capitalist
production in the uninterrupted flow of its renewal, and if, in place of
the individual capitalist and the individual worker, we view in their totality,
the capitalist class and the working class confronting each other. But
in so doing we should be applying standards entirely foreign to commodity
production.

Only buyer and seller, mutually independent, face each other in
commodity production. The relations between them cease on the day when
the term stipulated in the contract they concluded expires. If the transaction
is repeated, it is repeated as the result of a new agreement which has
nothing to do with the previous one and which only by chance brings the
same seller together again with the same buyer.

If, therefore, commodity production, or one of its associated
processes, is to be judged according to its own economic laws, we must
consider each act of exchange by itself, apart from any connexion with
the act of exchange preceding it and that following it. And since sales
and purchases are negotiated solely between particular individuals, it
is not admissible to seek here for relations between whole social classes.

However long a series of periodical reproductions and preceding
accumulations the capital functioning today may have passed through, it
always preserves its original virginity. So long as the laws of exchange
are observed in every single act of exchange the mode of appropriation
can be completely revolutionised without in any way affecting the property
rights which correspond to commodity production. These same rights remain
in force both at the outset, when the product belongs to its producer,
who, exchanging equivalent for equivalent, can enrich himself only by his
own labour, and also in the period of capitalism, when social wealth becomes
to an ever-increasing degree the property of those who are in a position
to appropriate continually and ever afresh the unpaid labour of others.

This result becomes inevitable from the moment there is a free
sale, by the labourer himself, of labour-power as a commodity. But it is
also only from then onwards that commodity production is generalised and
becomes the typical form of production; it is only from then onwards that,
from the first, every product is produced for sale and all wealth produced
goes through the sphere of circulation. Only when and where wage labour
is its basis does commodity production impose itself upon society
as a whole; but only then and there also does it unfold all its hidden
potentialities. To say that the supervention of wage labour adulterates
commodity production is to say that commodity production must not develop
if it is to remain unadulterated. To the extent that commodity production,
in accordance with its own inherent laws, develops further, into capitalist
production, the property laws of commodity production change into the laws
of capitalist appropriation. [8]

We have seen that even in the case of simple reproduction, all capital,
whatever its original source, becomes converted into accumulated capital,
capitalised surplus-value. But in the flood of production all the capital
originally advanced becomes a vanishing quantity (magnitudo evanescens,
in the mathematical sense), compared with the directly accumulated capital,
i.e., with the surplus-value or surplus-product that is reconverted
into capital, whether it functions in the hands of its accumulator, or
in those of others. Hence, Political Economy describes capital in general
as “accumulated wealth” (converted surplus-value or revenue), “that is
employed over again in the production of surplus-value,” [9] and the capitalist as “the owner of surplus-value.” [10] It is merely another way of expressing the same thing to say that all existing capital is accumulated or capitalised interest, for interest is a mere
fragment of surplus-value. [11]

### SECTION 2. ERRONEOUS CONCEPTION, BY POLITICAL ECONOMY, OF REPRODUCTION ON A PROGRESSIVELY INCREASING SCALE

Before we further investigate accumulation or the
reconversion of surplus-value into capital, we must brush on one side an
ambiguity introduced by the classical economists.

Just as little as the commodities that the capitalist buys with
a part of the surplus-value for his own consumption, serve the purpose
of production and of creation of value, so little is the labour that he
buys for the satisfaction of his natural and social requirements, productive labour.
Instead of converting surplus-value into capital, he, on the contrary,
by the purchase of those commodities and that labour, consumes or expends
it as revenue. In the face of the habitual mode of life of the old feudal
nobility, which, as Hegel rightly says, “consists in consuming what is
in hand,” and more especially displays itself in the luxury of personal
retainers, it was extremely important for bourgeois economy to promulgate the doctrine that accumulation of capital is the first duty of every citizen, and to preach without ceasing, that a man cannot accumulate, if he eats up all his revenue, instead of spending a good part of it in the acquisition
of additional productive labourers, who bring in more than they cost. On
the other hand the economists had to contend against the popular prejudice,
that confuses capitalist production with hoarding, [12]and fancies that accumulated wealth is either wealth that is rescued
from being destroyed in its existing form, i.e., from being consumed,
or wealth that is withdrawn from circulation. Exclusion of money from circulation
would also exclude absolutely its self-expansion as capital, while accumulation
of a hoard in the shape of commodities would be sheer tomfoolery. [13] The accumulation of commodities in great masses is the result either
of over-production or of a stoppage of circulation. [14]It is true that the popular mind is impressed by the sight, on the
one hand, of the mass of goods that are stored up for gradual consumption
by the rich, [15] and on the other hand, by the formation of reserve stocks; the latter, a phenomenon that is common to all modes
of production, and on which we shall dwell for a moment, when we come to
analyse circulation. Classical economy is therefore quite right, when it
maintains that the consumption of surplus-products by productive, instead
of by unproductive labourers, is a characteristic feature of the process
of accumulation. But at this point the mistakes also begin. Adam Smith
has made it the fashion, to represent accumulation as nothing more than
consumption of surplus products by productive labourers, which amounts
to saying, that the capitalising of surplus-value consists in merely turning
surplus-value into labour-power.

Let us see what Ricardo, e.g., says:

“It must be understood that all the productions of a country are
consumed; but it makes the greatest difference imaginable whether they
are consumed by those who reproduce, or by those who do not reproduce another
value. When we say that revenue is saved, and added to capital, what we
mean is, that the portion of revenue, so said to be added to capital, is
consumed by productive instead of unproductive labourers. There can be no greater error than in supposing that capital is increased by non-consumption.” [16]

There can be no greater error than that which Ricardo and all subsequent economists repeat after A. Smith, viz., that

“the part of revenue, of which it is said, it has been added to capital, is consumed
by productive labourers.”

According to this, all surplus-value that is
changed into capital becomes variable capital. So far from this being the
case, the surplus-value, like the original capital, divides itself into
constant capital and variable capital, into means of production and labour-power.
Labour-power is the form under which variable capital exists during the
process of production. In this process the labour-power is itself consumed
by the capitalist while the means of production are consumed by the labour-power
in the exercise of its function, labour. At the same time, the money paid
for the purchase of the labour-power, is converted into necessaries, that
are consumed, not by “productive labour,” but by the “productive labourer.”
Adam Smith, by a fundamentally perverted analysis, arrives at the absurd
conclusion, that even though each individual capital is divided into a
constant and a variable part, the capital of society resolves itself only
into variable capital, i.e., is laid out exclusively in payment of
wages. For instance, suppose a cloth manufacturer converts £2,000
into capital. One portion he lays out in buying weavers, the other in woollen
yarn, machinery, &c. But the people, from whom he buys the yarn and
the machinery, pay for labour with a part of the purchase money, and so
on until the whole £2,000 are spent in the payment of wages, i.e.,
until the entire product represented by the £2,000 has been consumed
by productive labourers. It is evident that the whole gist of this argument
lies in the words “and so on,” which send us from pillar to post. In truth,
Adam Smith breaks his investigation off, just where its difficulties begin.

The annual process of reproduction is easily understood,
so long as we keep in view merely the sum total of the year’s production.
But every single component of this product must be brought into the market
as a commodity, and there the difficulty begins. The movements of the individual
capitals, and of the personal revenues, cross and intermingle and are lost
in the general change of places, in the circulation of the wealth of society;
this dazes the sight, and propounds very complicated problems for solution.
In the third part of Book II. I shall give the analysis of the real bearings
of the facts. It is one of the great merits of the Physiocrats, that in
their Tableau économique they were the first to attempt to
depict the annual production in the shape in which it is presented to us
after passing through the process of circulation. [18]

For the rest, it is a matter of course, that Political Economy,
acting in the interests of the capitalist class, has not failed to exploit
the doctrine of Adam Smith, viz., that the whole of that part of the surplus-product
which is converted into capital, is consumed by the working class.

### SECTION 3. SEPARATION OF SURPLUS-VALUE INTO CAPITAL AND REVENUE. THE ABSTINENCE THEORY

In the last preceding chapter, we treated surplus-value
(or the surplus-product) solely as a fund for supplying the individual
consumption of the capitalist. In this chapter we have, so far, treated
it solely as a fund for accumulation. It is, however, neither the one nor
the other, but is both together. One portion is consumed by the capitalist
as revenue, [19] the other is employed as capital, is accumulated.

Given the mass of surplus-value, then, the larger the one
of these parts, the smaller is the other. Caeteris paribus, the
ratio of these parts determines the magnitude of the accumulation. But
it is by the owner of the surplus-value, by the capitalist alone, that
the division is made. It is his deliberate act. That part of the tribute
exacted by him which he accumulates, is said to be saved by him, because
he does not eat it, i.e., because he performs the function of a capitalist,
and enriches himself.

Except as personified capital, the capitalist has no historical
value, and no right to that historical existence, which, to use an expression
of the witty Lichnowsky, “hasn’t got no date.” And so far only is the necessity
for his own transitory existence implied in the transitory necessity for
the capitalist mode of production. But, so far as he is personified capital,
it is not values in use and the enjoyment of them, but exchange-value and
its augmentation, that spur him into action. Fanatically bent on making
value expand itself, he ruthlessly forces the human race to produce for
production’s sake; he thus forces the development of the productive powers
of society, and creates those material conditions, which alone can form
the real basis of a higher form of society, a society in which the full
and free development of every individual forms the ruling principle. Only
as personified capital is the capitalist respectable. As such, he shares
with the miser the passion for wealth as wealth. But that which in the
miser is a mere idiosyncrasy, is, in the capitalist, the effect of the
social mechanism, of which he is but one of the wheels. Moreover, the development
of capitalist production makes it constantly necessary to keep increasing
the amount of the capital laid out in a given industrial undertaking, and
competition makes the immanent laws of capitalist production to be felt
by each individual capitalist, as external coercive laws. It compels him
to keep constantly extending his capital, in order to preserve it, but
extend it he cannot, except by means of progressive accumulation.

So far, therefore, as his actions are a mere function of capital
— endowed as capital is, in his person, with consciousness and a will
— his own private consumption is a robbery perpetrated on accumulation,
just as in book-keeping by double entry, the private expenditure of the
capitalist is placed on the debtor side of his account against his capital.
To accumulate, is to conquer the world of social wealth, to increase the
mass of human beings exploited by him, and thus to extend both the direct
and the indirect sway of the capitalist. [20]

But original sin is at work everywhere. As capitalist production,
accumulation, and wealth, become developed, the capitalist ceases to be
the mere incarnation of capital. He has a fellow-feeling for his own Adam,
and his education gradually enables him to smile at the rage for asceticism,
as a mere prejudice of the old-fashioned miser. While the capitalist of
the classical type brands individual consumption as a sin against his function,
and as “abstinence” from accumulating, the modernised capitalist is capable
of looking upon accumulation as “abstinence” from pleasure.

“Two souls, alas, do dwell with in his breast;

The one is ever parting from the other.” [21]

At the historical dawn of capitalist production, — and every capitalist
upstart has personally to go through this historical stage — avarice,
and desire to get rich, are the ruling passions. But the progress of capitalist
production not only creates a world of delights; it lays open, in speculation
and the credit system, a thousand sources of sudden enrichment. When
a certain stage of development has been reached, a conventional degree
of prodigality, which is also an exhibition of wealth, and consequently
a source of credit, becomes a business necessity to the “unfortunate” capitalist.
Luxury enters into capital’s expenses of representation. Moreover, the
capitalist gets rich, not like the miser, in proportion to his personal
labour and restricted consumption, but at the same rate as he squeezes
out the labour-power of others, and enforces on the labourer abstinence
from all life’s enjoyments. Although, therefore, the prodigality of the
capitalist never possesses the bona fide character of the open-handed
feudal lord’s prodigality, but, on the contrary, has always lurking behind
it the most sordid avarice and the most anxious calculation, yet his expenditure
grows with his accumulation, without the one necessarily restricting the
other. But along with this growth, there is at the same time developed
in his breast, a Faustian conflict between the passion for accumulation,
and the desire for enjoyment.

Dr. Aikin says in a work published in 1795:

“The trade of Manchester may be divided into four periods. First, when manufacturers were obliged
to work hard for their livelihood.”

They enriched themselves chiefly by
robbing the parents, whose children were bound as apprentices to them;
the parents paid a high premium, while the apprentices were starved. On
the other hand, the average profits were low, and to accumulate, extreme
parsimony was requisite. They lived like misers and were far from consuming
even the interest on their capital.

“The second period, when they had begun
to acquire little fortunes, but worked as hard as before,” — for direct
exploitation of labour costs labour, as every slave-driver knows — “and
lived in as plain a manner as before.... The third, when luxury began,
and the trade was pushed by sending out riders for orders into every market
town in the Kingdom.... It is probable that few or no capitals of £3,000
to £4,000 acquired by trade existed here before 1690. However, about
that time, or a little later, the traders had got money beforehand, and
began to build modern brick houses, instead of those of wood and plaster.”

Even in the early part of the 18th century, a Manchester manufacturer,
who placed a pint of foreign wine before his guests, exposed himself to
the remarks and headshakings of all his neighbours. Before the rise of
machinery, a manufacturer’s evening expenditure at the public house where
they all met, never exceeded sixpence for a glass of punch, and a penny
for a screw of tobacco. It was not till 1758, and this marks an epoch,
that a person actually engaged in business was seen with an equipage of
his own.

“The fourth period,” the last 30 years of the 18th century, “is
that in which expense and luxury have made great progress, and was supported
by a trade extended by means of riders and factors through every part
of Europe.” [22]

What would the good Dr. Aikin say if he could rise from his grave and see the Manchester of today?

Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets! “Industry
furnishes the material which saving accumulates.” [23]
Therefore, save, save, i.e., reconvert the greatest possible portion of surplus-value, or surplus-product into capital! Accumulation for accumulation’s sake, production for production’s sake: by this formula classical economy
expressed the historical mission of the bourgeoisie, and did not for a
single instant deceive itself over the birth-throes of wealth. [24] But what avails lamentation in the face of historical necessity? If to classical economy, the proletarian is but a machine for the production
of surplus-value; on the other hand, the capitalist is in its eyes only
a machine for the conversion of this surplus-value into additional capital.
Political Economy takes the historical function of the capitalist in bitter
earnest. In order to charm out of his bosom the awful conflict between
the desire for enjoyment and the chase after riches, Malthus, about the
year 1820, advocated a division of labour, which assigns to the capitalist actually engaged in production, the business of accumulating, and to the
other sharers in surplus-value, to the landlords, the place-men, the beneficed
clergy, &c., the business of spending. It is of the highest importance,
he says,

“to keep separate the passion for expenditure and the passion
for accumulation.” [25]

The capitalists having long
been good livers and men of the world, uttered loud cries. What, exclaimed
one of their spokesmen, a disciple of Ricardo, Mr. Malthus preaches high
rents, heavy taxes, &c., so that the pressure of the spur may constantly
be kept on the industrious by unproductive consumers! By all means, production,
production on a constantly increasing scale, runs the shibboleth; but

“production will, by such a process, be far more curbed in than spurred on. Nor is
it quite fair thus to maintain in idleness a number of persons, only to
pinch others, who are likely, from their characters, if you can force them
to work, to work with success.” [26]

Unfair as he finds it to spur on the industrial capitalist, by depriving his bread of its
butter, yet he thinks it necessary to reduce the labourer’s wages to a
minimum "to keep him industrious.” Nor does he for a moment conceal the
fact, that the appropriation of unpaid labour is the secret of surplus-value.

“Increased demand on the part of the labourers means nothing more than their willingness to take less of their own product for themselves, and leave a greater part
of it to their employers; and if it be said, that this begets glut, by
lessening consumption” (on the part of the labourers), “I can only reply
that glut is synonymous with large profits.” [27]

The learned disputation, how the booty pumped out of the labourer
may be divided, with most advantage to accumulation, between the industrial
capitalist and the rich idler, was hushed in face of the revolution of
July. Shortly afterwards, the town proletariat at Lyons sounded the tocsin
of revolution, and the country proletariat in England began to set fire
to farm-yards and corn-stacks. On this side of the Channel Owenism began
to spread; on the other side, St. Simonism and Fourierism. The hour of
vulgar economy had struck. Exactly a year before Nassau W. Senior discovered
at Manchester, that the profit (including interest) of capital is the product
of the last hour of the twelve, he had announced to the world another discovery.

“I substitute,” he proudly says, “for the word capital, considered as an
instrument of production, the word abstinence.”

An unparalleled sample this, of the discoveries of vulgar economy! It substitutes for an economic category, a sycophantic phrase — voilà tout. [that’s all]

“When the savage,” says Senior, “makes bows, he exercises an industry, but he does not practise abstinence.” [28]

This explains how and why, in the earlier states of society, the implements of labour were fabricated without
abstinence on the part of the capitalist.

“The more society progresses,
the more abstinence is demanded,” [29]

Namely, from
those who ply the industry of appropriating the fruits of others’ industry.
All the conditions for carrying on the labour process are suddenly converted
into so many acts of abstinence on the part of the capitalist. If the corn is not all eaten, but part of it also sown — abstinence of the capitalist. If the wine gets time to mature — abstinence of the capitalist.
[30] The capitalist robs his own self, whenever he “lends (!) the instruments of production to the labourer,” that is, whenever by
incorporating labour-power with them, he uses them to extract surplus-value
out of that labour-power, instead of eating them up, steam-engines, cotton,
railways, manure, horses, and all; or as the vulgar economist childishly
puts it, instead of dissipating “their value” in luxuries and other articles
of consumption. [31] How the capitalists as a class
are to perform that feat, is a secret that vulgar economy has hitherto
obstinately refused to divulge. Enough, that the world still jogs on, solely
through the self-chastisement of this modern penitent of Vishnu, the capitalist.
Not only accumulation, but the simple “conservation of a capital requires
a constant effort to resist the temptation of consuming it.” [32] The simple dictates of humanity therefore plainly enjoin the release of the capitalist from this martyrdom and temptation, in the same way that
the Georgian slave-owner was lately delivered, by the abolition of slavery,
from the painful dilemma, whether to squander the surplus-product, lashed
out of his niggers, entirely in champagne, or whether to reconvert a part
of it into more niggers and more land.

In economic forms of society of the most different kinds, there
occurs, not only simple reproduction, but, in varying degrees, reproduction
on a progressively increasing scale. By degrees more is produced and more
consumed, and consequently more products have to be converted into means
of production. This process, however, does not present itself as accumulation
of capital, nor as the function of a capitalist, so long as the labourer’s
means of production, and with them, his product and means of subsistence,
do not confront him in the shape of capital. [33] Richard Jones, who died a few years ago, and was the successor of Malthus in the chair of Political Economy at Haileybury College, discusses this point well in the light of two important facts. Since the great mass of the Hindu
population are peasants cultivating their land themselves, their products,
their instruments of labour and means of subsistence never take “the shape
of a fund saved from revenue, which fund has, therefore, gone through a
previous process of accumulation.” [34] On the other
hand, the non-agricultural labourers in those provinces where the English
rule has least disturbed the old system, are directly employed by the magnates,
to whom a portion of the agricultural surplus-product is rendered in the
shape of tribute or rent. One portion of this product is consumed by the
magnates in kind, another is converted, for their use, by the labourers,
into articles of luxury and such like things, while the rest forms the
wages of the labourers, who own their implements of labour. Here, production
and reproduction on a progressively increasing scale, go on their way without
any intervention from that queer saint, that knight of the woeful countenance,
the capitalist “abstainer.”

### SECTION 4. CIRCUMSTANCES THAT, INDEPENDENTLY OF THE PROPORTIONAL DIVISION OF SURPLUS-VALUE INTO CAPITAL AND REVENUE, DETERMINE THE AMOUNT OF ACCUMULATION. DEGREE OF EXPLOITATION OF LABOUR-POWER. PRODUCTIVITY OF LABOUR. GROWING DIFFERENCE IN AMOUNT BETWEEN CAPITAL EMPLOYED AND CAPITAL CONSUMED. MAGNITUDE OF CAPITAL ADVANCED

The proportion in which surplus-value breaks up into
capital and revenue being given, the magnitude of the capital accumulated
clearly depends on the absolute magnitude of the surplus-value. Suppose
that 80 per cent. were capitalised and 20 per cent. eaten up, the accumulated
capital will be £2,400 or £1,200, according as the total surplus-value
has amounted to £3,000 or £1,500. Hence all the circumstances
that determine the mass of surplus-value operate to determine the magnitude
of the accumulation. We sum them up once again, but only in so far as they
afford new points of view in regard to accumulation.

It will be remembered that the rate of surplus-value depends,
in the first place, on the degree of exploitation of labour-power. Political
Economy values this fact so highly, that it occasionally identifies the
acceleration of accumulation due to increased productiveness of labour, with
its acceleration due to increased exploitation of the labourer. [35] In the chapters on the production of surplus-value it was constantly presupposed that wages are at least equal to the value of labour-power. Forcible reduction
of wages below this value plays, however, in practice too important a part,
for us not to pause upon it for a moment. It, in fact, transforms, within
certain limits, the labourer’s necessary consumption fund into a fund for
the accumulation of capital.

“Wages,” says John Stuart Mill, “have no productive power; they
are the price of a productive power. Wages do not contribute, along with
labour, to the production of commodities, no more than the price of tools
contributes along with the tools themselves. If labour could be had without
purchase, wages might be dispensed with.” [36]

But if the labourers could live on air they could not be bought at any price.
The zero of their cost is therefore a limit in a mathematical sense, always
beyond reach, although we can always approximate more and more nearly to
it. The constant tendency of capital is to force the cost of labour back
towards this zero. A writer of the 18th century, often quoted already,
the author of the “Essay on Trade and Commerce,” only betrays the innermost
secret soul of English capitalism, when he declares the historic mission of England to be the forcing down of English wages to the level of the
French and the Dutch. [37] With other things he says
naively:

“But if our poor” (technical term for labourers) “will live luxuriously
... then labour must, of course, be dear ... When it is considered what
luxuries the manufacturing populace consume, such as brandy, gin, tea,
sugar, foreign fruit, strong beer, printed linens, snuff, tobacco, &C.”

He quotes the work of a Northamptonshire manufacturer, who, with eyes squinting heavenward moans:

“Labour is one-third
cheaper in France than in England; for their poor work hard, and fare hard,
as to their food and clothing. Their chief diet is bread, fruit, herbs,
roots, and dried fish; for they very seldom eat flesh; and when wheat is
dear, they eat very little bread.” [39] “To which may be added,” our essayist goes on, “that their drink is either water or other small liquors, so that they spend very little money.... These things are very difficult to be brought about; but they are not impracticable, since
they have been effected both in France and in Holland.” [40]

Twenty years later, an American humbug, the baronised Yankee, Benjamin Thompson (alias Count Rumford) followed the same line of philanthropy
to the great satisfaction of God and man. His “Essays” are a cookery book
with receipts of all kinds for replacing by some succedaneum the ordinary
dear food of the labourer. The following is a particularly successful receipt
of this wonderful philosopher:

“5 lbs. of barleymeal, 7½d.; 5 lbs.
of Indian corn, 6¼d.; 3d. worth of red herring, 1d. salt, 1d. vinegar,
2d. pepper and sweet herbs, in all 20¾.; make a soup for 64 men, and
at the medium price of barley and of Indian corn ... this soup may be provided
at ¼d., the portion of 20 ounces. [41]

With the advance of capitalistic production, the adulteration of food rendered Thompson’s
ideal superfluous. [42] At the end of the 18th and during the first ten years of the 19th century, the English farmers
and landlords enforced the absolute minimum of wage, by paying the agricultural
labourers less than the minimum in the form of wages, and the remainder
in the shape of parochial relief. An example of the waggish way in which
the English Dogberries acted in their “legal” fixing of a wages tariff:

“The squires of Norfolk had dined, says Mr. Burke, when they fixed the
rate of wages; the squires of Berks evidently thought the labourers ought
not to do so, when they fixed the rate of wages at Speenhamland, 1795....
There they decide that ‘income (weekly) should be 3s. for a man,’ when
the gallon or half-peck loaf of 8 lbs. 11 oz. is at 1s., and increase regularly
till bread is 1s. 5d.; when it is above that sum decrease regularly till
it be at 2s., and then his food should be 1/5 th less.” [43]

Before the Committee of Inquiry of the House of Lords, 1814, a certain A. Bennett, a large farmer, magistrate, poor-law guardian, and wage-regulator,
was asked:

“Has any proportion of the value of daily labour been made up
to the labourers out of the poors’ rate?” Answer: “Yes, it has; the weekly
income of every family is made up to the gallon loaf (8 lbs. 11 oz.), and
3d. per head!... The gallon loaf per week is what we suppose sufficient for the maintenance of every person in the family for the week; and the
3d. is for clothes, and if the parish think proper to find clothes; the
3d. is deducted. This practice goes through all the western part of Wiltshire,
and, I believe, throughout the country.” [44] “For years,” exclaims a bourgeois author of that time, “they (the farmers) have degraded
a respectable class of their countrymen, by forcing them to have recourse
to the workhouse ... the farmer, while increasing his own gains, has prevented
any accumulation on the part of his labouring dependents.” [45]

The part played in our days by the direct robbery from the labourer’s necessary consumption fund in the formation of surplus-value, and, therefore, of
the accumulation fund of capital, the so-called domestic industry has served
to show. (Ch. xv., sect. 8, c.) Further facts on this subject will be given later.

Although in all branches of industry that part of the constant
capital consisting of instruments of labour must be sufficient
for a certain number of labourers (determined by the magnitude of the undertaking),
it by no means always necessarily increases in the same proportion as the
quantity of labour employed. In a factory, suppose that 100 labourers working
8 hours a day yield 800 working-hours. If the capitalist wishes to raise
this sum by one half, he can employ 50 more workers; but then he must also
advance more capital, not merely for wages, but for instruments of labour.
But he might also let the 100 labourers work 12 hours instead of 8, and
then the instruments of labour already to hand would be enough. These would
then simply be more rapidly consumed. Thus additional labour, begotten
of the greater tension of labour-power, can augment surplus-product and
surplus-value (i.e., the subject-matter of accumulation), without corresponding
augmentation in the constant part of capital.

In the extractive industries, mines, &c., the raw materials
form no part of the capital advanced. The subject of labour is in this
case not a product of previous labour, but is furnished by Nature gratis,
as in the case of metals, minerals, coal, stone, &c. In these cases
the constant capital consists almost exclusively of instruments of labour,
which can very well absorb an increased quantity of labour (day and night
shifts of labourers, e.g.). All other things being equal, the mass
and value of the product will rise in direct proportion to the labour expended.
As on the first day of production, the original produce-formers, now turned
into the creators of the material elements of capital — man and Nature
— still work together. Thanks to the elasticity of labour-power, the domain
of accumulation has extended without any previous enlargement of constant
capital.

In agriculture the land under cultivation cannot be increased
without the advance of more seed and manure. But this advance once made,
the purely mechanical working of the soil itself produces a marvellous
effect on the amount of the product. A greater quantity of labour, done
by the same number of labourers as before, thus increases the fertility,
without requiring any new advance in the instruments of labour. It is once
again the direct action of man on Nature which becomes an immediate source
of greater accumulation, without the intervention of any new capital.

Finally, in what is called manufacturing industry, every additional
expenditure of labour presupposes a corresponding additional expenditure
of raw materials, but not necessarily of instruments of labour. And as
extractive industry and agriculture supply manufacturing industry with
its raw materials and those of its instruments of labour, the additional
product the former have created without additional advance of capital,
tells also in favour of the latter.

General result: by incorporating with itself the two primary
creators of wealth, labour-power and the land, capital acquires a power
of expansion that permits it to augment the elements of its accumulation
beyond the limits apparently fixed by its own magnitude, or by the value
and the mass of the means of production, already produced, in which it
has its being.

Another important factor in the accumulation of capital is the
degree of productivity of social labour.

With the productive power of labour increases the mass of the
products, in which a certain value, and, therefore, a surplus-value of
a given magnitude, is embodied. The rate of surplus-value remaining the
same or even falling, so long as it only falls more slowly, than the productive
power of labour rises, the mass of the surplus-product increases. The division
of this product into revenue and additional capital remaining the same,
the consumption of the capitalist may, therefore, increase without any
decrease in the fund of accumulation. The relative magnitude of the accumulation fund
may even increase at the expense of the consumption fund, whilst the cheapening
of commodities places at the disposal of the capitalist as many means of
enjoyment as formerly, or even more than formerly. But hand-in-hand with
the increasing productivity of labour, goes, as we have seen, the cheapening
of the labourer, therefore a higher rate of surplus-value, even when the
real wages are rising. The latter never rise proportionally to the productive
power of labour. The same value in variable capital therefore sets in movement
more labour-power, and, therefore, more labour. The same value in constant
capital is embodied in more means of production, i.e., in more instruments
of labour, materials of labour and auxiliary materials; it therefore also
supplies more elements for the production both of use value and of value,
and with these more absorbers of labour. The value of the additional capital,
therefore, remaining the same or even diminishing, accelerated accumulation
still takes place. Not only does the scale of reproduction materially extend,
but the production of surplus-value increases more rapidly than the value
of the additional capital.

The development of the productive power of labour reacts also
on the original capital already engaged in the process of production. A
part of the functioning constant capital consists of instruments of labour,
such as machinery, &c., which are not consumed, and therefore not reproduced,
or replaced by new ones of the same kind, until after long periods of time.
But every year a part of these instruments of labour perishes or reaches
the limit of its productive function. It reaches, therefore, in that
year, the time for its periodical reproduction, for its replacement by
new ones of the same kind. If the productiveness of labour has,
during the using up of these instruments of labour, increased (and it develops
continually with the uninterrupted advance of science and technology),
more efficient and (considering their increased efficiency), cheaper machines,
tools, apparatus, &c., replace the old. The old capital is reproduced
in a more productive form, apart from the constant detail improvements
in the instruments of labour already in use. The other part of the constant
capital, raw material and auxiliary substances, is constantly reproduced
in less than a year; those produced by agriculture, for the most part annually.
Every introduction of improved methods, therefore, works almost simultaneously
on the new capital and on that already in action. Every advance in Chemistry
not only multiplies the number of useful materials and the useful applications
of those already known, thus extending with the growth of capital its sphere
of investment. It teaches at the same time how to throw the excrements
of the processes of production and consumption back again into the circle
of the process of reproduction, and thus, without any previous outlay of
capital, creates new matter for capital. Like the increased exploitation
of natural wealth by the mere increase in the tension of labour-power,
science and technology give capital a power of expansion independent of
the given magnitude of the capital actually functioning. They react at
the same time on that part of the original capital which has entered upon
its stage of renewal. This, in passing into its new shape, incorporates
gratis the social advance made while its old shape was being used up. Of
course, this development of productive power is accompanied by a partial
depreciation of functioning capital. So far as this depreciation makes
itself acutely felt in competition, the burden falls on the labourer, in
the increased exploitation of whom the capitalist looks for his indemnification.

Labour transmits to its product the value of the means of production
consumed by it. On the other hand, the value and mass of the means of production
set in motion by a given quantity of labour increase as the labour becomes
more productive. Though the same quantity of labour adds always to its
products only the same sum of new value, still the old capital value, transmitted
by the labour to the products, increases with the growing productivity
of labour.

An English and a Chinese spinner, e.g., may work the same number
of hours with the same intensity; then they will both in a week create
equal values. But in spite of this equality, an immense difference will
obtain between the value of the week’s product of the Englishman, who works
with a mighty automaton, and that of the Chinaman, who has but a spinning-wheel.
In the same time as the Chinaman spins one pound of cotton, the Englishman
spins several hundreds of pounds. A sum, many hundred times as great, of
old values swells the value of his product, in which those re-appear
in a new, useful form, and can thus function anew as capital.

“In 1782,” as Frederick Engels teaches us, “all the wool crop in England of the three
preceding years, lay untouched for want of labourers, and so it must have
lain, if newly invented machinery had not come to its aid and spun it.”

Labour embodied in the form of machinery of course did not directly force into life a single man, but it made it possible
for a smaller number of labourers, with the addition of relatively less
living labour, not only to consume the wool productively, and put into
it new value, but to preserve in the form of yarn, &c., its old value.
At the same time, it caused and stimulated increased reproduction of wool.
It is the natural property of living labour, to transmit old value, whilst
it creates new. Hence, with the increase in efficacy, extent and value
of its means of production, consequently with the accumulation that accompanies
the development of its productive power, labour keeps up and eternises
an always increasing capital value in a form ever new.” [47] This natural power of labour takes the appearance of an intrinsic property of capital, in which it is incorporated, just as the productive
forces of social labour take the appearance of inherent properties of capital,
and as the constant appropriation of surplus-labour by the capitalists,
takes that of a constant self-expansion of capital.

With the increase of capital, the difference between the capital
employed and the capital consumed increases. In other words, there is increase
in the value and the material mass of the instruments of labour, such as
buildings, machinery, drain-pipes, working-cattle, apparatus of every kind
that function for a longer or shorter time in processes of production constantly
repeated, or that serve for the attainment of particular useful effects,
whilst they themselves only gradually wear out, therefore only lose their
value piecemeal, therefore transfer that value to the product only bit
by bit. In the same proportion as these instruments of labour serve as
product-formers without adding value to the product, i.e., in the
same proportion as they are wholly employed but only partly consumed, they
perform, as we saw earlier, the same gratuitous service as the natural
forces, water, steam, air, electricity, etc. This gratuitous service of
past labour, when seized and filled with a soul by living labour, increases
with the advancing stages of accumulation.

Since past labour always disguises itself as capital, i.e.,
since the passive of the labour of A, B, C, etc., takes the form of the
active of the non-labourer X, bourgeois and political economists are full
of praises of the services of dead and gone labour, which, according to
the Scotch genius MacCulloch, ought to receive a special remuneration in
the shape of interest, profit, etc. [48] The powerful and ever-increasing assistance given by past labour to the living
labour process under the form of means of production is, therefore, attributed
to that form of past labour in which it is alienated, as unpaid labour,
from the worker himself, i.e., to its capitalistic form. The practical
agents of capitalistic production and their pettifogging ideologists are
as unable to think of the means of production as separate from the antagonistic
social mask they wear today, as a slave-owner to think of the worker himself
as distinct from his character as a slave.

With a given degree of exploitation of labour-power, the mass
of the surplus-value produced is determined by the number of workers simultaneously
exploited; and this corresponds, although in varying proportions, with
the magnitude of the capital. The more, therefore, capital increases by
means of successive accumulations, the more does the sum of the value increase
that is divided into consumption fund and accumulation fund. The capitalist
can, therefore, live a more jolly life, and at the same time show more
“abstinence.” And, finally, all the springs of production act with greater
elasticity, the more its scale extends with the mass of the capital advanced.

### SECTION 5. THE SO-CALLED LABOUR FUND

It has been shown in the course of this inquiry that
capital is not a fixed magnitude, but is a part of social wealth, elastic
and constantly fluctuating with the division of fresh surplus-value into
revenue and additional capital. It has been seen further that, even with
a given magnitude of functioning capital, the labour-power, the science,
and the land (by which are to be understood, economically, all conditions
of labour furnished by Nature independently of man), embodied in it, form
elastic powers of capital, allowing it, within certain limits, a field
of action independent of its own magnitude. In this inquiry we have neglected
all effects of the process of circulation, effects which may produce very
different degrees of efficiency in the same mass of capital. And as we
presupposed the limits set by capitalist production, that is to say, presupposed
the process of social production in a form developed by purely spontaneous
growth, we neglected any more rational combination, directly and systematically
practicable with the means of production, and the mass of labour-power
at present disposable.
Classical economy always loved to conceive social capital as a fixed magnitude of a fixed degree of efficiency. But this prejudice was first established as a dogma by the arch-Philistine, Jeremy
Bentham, that insipid, pedantic, leather-tongued oracle of the ordinary
bourgeois intelligence of the 19th century. [49]
Bentham is among philosophers what Martin Tupper is among poets. Both could only have been manufactured in England. [50] In the light of his dogma the commonest phenomena of the process of production,
as, e.g., its sudden expansions and contractions, nay, even accumulation
itself, become perfectly inconceivable. [51]
The dogma was used by Bentham himself, as well as by Malthus, James Mill, MacCulloch,
etc., for an apologetic purpose, and especially in order to represent one
part of capital, namely, variable capital, or that part convertible into
labour-power, as a fixed magnitude. The material of variable capital, i.e.,
the mass of the means of subsistence it represents for the labourer, or
the so-called labour fund, was fabled as a separate part of social wealth,
fixed by natural laws and unchangeable. To set in motion the part of social
wealth which is to function as constant capital, or, to express it in a
material form, as means of production, a definite mass of living labour
is required. This mass is given technologically. But neither is the number
of labourers required to render fluid this mass of labour-power given (it
changes with the degree of exploitation of the individual labour-power),
nor is the price of this labour-power given, but only its minimum limit,
which is moreover very variable. The facts that lie at the bottom of this
dogma are these: on the one hand, the labourer has no right to interfere
in the division of social wealth into means of enjoyment for the non-labourer
and means of production. [52]
On the other hand, only in favourable and exceptional cases, has he the power to enlarge the so-called
labour fund at the expense of the “revenue” of the wealthy.

What silly tautology results from the attempt to represent the
capitalistic limits of the labour fund as its natural and social limits
may be seen, e.g., in Professor Fawcett. [53]

“The circulating capital of a country,” he says, “is its wage-fund. Hence, if we desire
to calculate the average money wages received by each labourer, we have
simply to divide the amount of this capital by the number of the labouring
population.” [54]

That is to say, we first add together the individual wages actually paid, and then we affirm that the sum thus
obtained, forms the total value of the “labour fund” determined and vouchsafed
to us by God and Nature. Lastly, we divide the sum thus obtained by the
number of labourers to find out again how much may come to each on the
average. An uncommonly knowing dodge this. It did not prevent Mr. Fawcett
saying in the same breath:

“The aggregate wealth which is annually saved
in England, is divided into two portions; one portion is employed as capital
to maintain our industry, and the other portion is exported to foreign
countries... Only a portion, and perhaps, not a large portion of the wealth
which is annually saved in this country, is invested in our own industry.
55]

The greater part of the yearly accruing surplus-product,
embezzled, because abstracted without return of an equivalent, from the
English labourer, is thus used as capital, not in England, but in foreign
countries. But with the additional capital thus exported, a part of the
“labour fund” invented by God and Bentham is also exported. [56]

Footnotes

1. “Accumulation
of capital; the employment of a portion of revenue as capital.” (Malthus: “Definitions, &c.,”
ed. Cazenove, p. 11.) “Conversion of revenue into capital,” (Malthus: “Princ.
of Pol. Econ “ 2nd Ed., Lond.. 1836, p. 320.)

2. We here
take no account of export trade, by means of which a nation can change articles of luxury either
into means of production or means of subsistence, and vice versà.
In order to examine the object of our investigation in its integrity,
free from all disturbing subsidiary circumstances, we must treat the whole
world as one nation, and assume that capitalist production is everywhere
established and has possessed itself of every branch of industry.

3. Sismondi’s
analysis of accumulation suffers from the great defect, that he contents himself, to too great an
extent, with the phrase “conversion of revenue into capital,” without fathoming
the material conditions of this operation.

4. “Le
travail primitif auquel son capital a dû sa naissance.” [the original labour, to which his capital owed its origin] Sismondi, l. c., ed. Paris, t. I., p. 109.

5. “Labour
creates capital before capital employs labour.” E. G. Wakefield, “England and America,” Lond., 1833, Vol. II, p. 110.

6. The property
of the capitalist in the product of the labour of others “is a strict consequence of the law
of appropriation, the fundamental principle of which was, on the contrary,
the exclusive title of every labourer to the product of his own labour.”
(Cherbuliez, “Richesse ou Pauvreté,” Paris, 1841, p. 58, where, however,
the dialectical reversal is not properly developed.)

7. The following
passage (to p. 551 “laws of capitalist appropriation.”) has been added to the English text in conformity with the 4th German edition.

8. We may well,
therefore, feel astonished at the cleverness of Proudhon, who would abolish capitalistic property
by enforcing the eternal laws of property that are based on commodity production!

9. “Capital,
viz., accumulated wealth employed with a view to profit.” (Malthus, l. c.) “Capital ... consists
of wealth saved from revenue, and used with a view to profit.” (R. Jones:
“An Introductory Lecture on Polit. Econ.,” Lond., 1833, p. 16.)

10. “The possessors of surplus-produce or capital.” (“The Source and Remedy of the National Difficulties. A Letter
to Lord John Russell.” Lond., 1821.)

11. “Capital, with compound interest on every portion of capital saved, is so all engrossing that all the wealth
in the world from which income is derived, has long ago become the interest
on capital.” (London, Economist, 19th July, 1851.)

12. “No political economist of the present day can by saving mean mere hoarding: and beyond this contracted and insufficient proceeding, no use of the term in reference to the national wealth can
well be imagined, but that which must arise from a different application
of what is saved, founded upon a real distinction between the different
kinds of labour maintained by it.” (Malthus, l. c., pp. 38, 39.)

13. Thus for instance, Balzac, who so thoroughly studied every shade of avarice, represents the old usurer Gobseck
as in his second childhood when he begins to heap up a hoard of commodities.

14. “Accumulation of stocks ... non-exchange ... over-production.” (Th. Corbet. l. c., p. 104.)

15. In this sense Necker speaks of the “objets de faste et de somptuosité,” [things of pomp and luxury] of which “le temps a grossi l’accummulation,” [accumulation has grown with time] and which “les lois de propriété ont rassemblés dans une seule classe de la société.” [the laws of property have brought into the hands of one class of society alone] (Oeuvres de M. Necker, Paris and Lausanne, 1789, t. ii., p. 291.)

16. Ricardo, l.c., p. 163, note.

17. In spite of his “Logic,” John St. Mill never detects even such faulty analysis as this when made by his predecessors, an analysis which, even from the bourgeois standpoint of the science, cries out for rectification. In every case he registers with the dogmatism of
a disciple, the confusion of his master’s thoughts. So here: “The capital
itself in the long run becomes entirely wages, and when replaced by the
sale of produce becomes wages again.”

18. In his description of the process of reproduction, and of accumulation, Adam Smith, in many ways, not only
made no advance, but even lost considerable ground, compared with his predecessors,
especially by the Physiocrats. Connected with the illusion mentioned in
the text, is the really wonderful dogma, left by him as an inheritance
to Political Economy, the dogma, that the price of commodities is made
up of wages, profit (interest) and rent, i.e., of wages and surplus-value.
Starting from this basis, Storch naively confesses, “Il est impossible
de résoudre le prix nécessaire dans ses éléments les plus simples.”
[... it is impossible to resolve the necessary price into its simplest elements] (Storch, l. c., Petersb. Edit., 1815, t. ii., p. 141, note.)
A fine science of economy this, which declares it impossible to resolve
the price of a commodity into its simplest elements! This point will be
further investigated in the seventh part of Book iii.

19. The reader will notice, that the word revenue is used in a double sense: first, to designate surplus-value
so far as it is the fruit periodically yielded by capital; secondly, to
designate the part of that fruit which is periodically consumed by the
capitalist, or added to the fund that supplies his private consumption.
I have retained this double meaning because it harmonises with the language
of the English and French economists.

20. Taking the usurer, that old-fashioned but ever renewed specimen of the capitalist for his text, Luther shows
very aptly that the love of power is an element in the desire to get rich.
“The heathen were able, by the light of reason, to conclude that a usurer
is a double-dyed thief and murderer. We Christians, however, hold them
in such honour, that we fairly worship them for the sake of their money....
Whoever eats up, robs, and steals the nourishment of another, that man
commits as great a murder (so far as in him lies) as he who starves a man
or utterly undoes him. Such does a usurer, and sits the while safe on his
stool, when he ought rather to be hanging on the gallows, and be eaten
by as many ravens as he has stolen guilders, if only there were so much
flesh on him, that so many ravens could stick their beaks in and share
it. Meanwhile, we hang the small thieves.... Little thieves are put in
the stocks, great thieves go flaunting in gold and silk.... Therefore is
there, on this earth, no greater enemy of man (after the devil) than a
gripe-money, and usurer, for he wants to be God over all men. Turks, soldiers,
and tyrants are also bad men, yet must they let the people live, and Confess
that they are bad, and enemies, and do, nay, must, now and then show pity
to some. But a usurer and money-glutton, such a one would have the whole
world perish of hunger and thirst, misery and want, so far as in him lies,
so that he may have all to himself, and every one may receive from him
as from a God, and be his serf for ever. To wear fine cloaks, golden chains,
rings, to wipe his mouth, to be deemed and taken for a worthy, pious man
.... Usury is a great huge monster, like a werewolf, who lays waste all,
more than any Cacus, Gerion or Antus. And yet decks himself out, and would
be thought pious, so that people may not see where the oxen have gone,
that he drags backwards into his den. But Hercules shall hear the cry of
the oxen and of his prisoners, and shall seek Cacus even in cliffs and
among rocks, and shall set the oxen loose again from the villain. For Cacus
means the villain that is a pious usurer, and steals, robs, eats everything.
And will not own that he has done it, and thinks no one will find him out,
because the oxen, drawn backwards into his den, make it seem, from their
foot-prints, that they have been let out. So the usurer would deceive the
world, as though he were of use and gave the world oxen, which he, however,
rends, and eats all alone... And since we break on the wheel, and behead
highwaymen, murderers and housebreakers, how much more ought we to break
on the wheel and kill.... hunt down, curse and behead all usurers.” (Martin
Luther, l. c.)

21. See Goethe’s “Faust.”

22. Dr. Aikin: “Description of the Country from 30 to 40 miles round Manchester.” Lond., 1795, p. 182, sq.

23. A. Smith, l. c., bk. iii., ch. iii.

24. Even J. B. Say says: “Les épargnes des riches se font aux dépens des pauvres.” [the savings of the rich are made at the expense of the poor] “The Roman proletarian lived almost entirely at the expense of society.... It can almost be said that modern society lives at the expense of the proletarians, on what it keeps out of the remuneration of labour.” (Sismondi: “études, &c.,” t. i., p. 24.)

25. Malthus, l. c., pp. 319, 320.

26. “An Inquiry into those Principles Respecting the Nature of Demand, &c.,” p. 67.

27. l. c., p. 59.

28. (Senior, “Principes fondamentaux del’Écon. Pol.” trad. Arrivabene. Paris, 1836, p. 308.) This was
rather too much for the adherents of the old classical school. “Mr. Senior
has substituted for it” (the expression, labour and profit) “the expression
labour and Abstinence. He who converts his revenue abstains from the enjoyment
which its expenditure would afford him. It is not the capital, but the
use of the capital productively, which is the cause of profits.” (John
Cazenove, l. c., p. 130, Note.) John St. Mill, on the contrary, accepts
on the one hand Ricardo’s theory of profit, and annexes on the other hand
Senior’s “remuneration of abstinence.” He is as much at home in absurd
contradictions, as he feels at sea in the Hegelian contradiction, the source
of all dialectic. It has never occurred to the vulgar economist to make
the simple reflexion, that every human action may be viewed, as “abstinence”
from its opposite. Eating is abstinence from fasting, walking, abstinence
from standing still, working, abstinence from idling, idling, abstinence
from working, &c. These gentlemen would do well, to ponder, once in
a while, over Spinoza’s: “Determinatio est Negatio.”

29. Senior, l. c., p. 342.

30. “No one ... will sow his wheat, for instance, and allow it to remain a twelvemonth in the ground, or leave
his wine in a cellar for years, instead of consuming these things or their
equivalent at once ... unless he expects to acquire additional value, &c.”
(Scrope, “Polit. Econ.,” edit. by A. Potter, New York, 1841, pp. 133-134.)

31. “La privation que s’impose le capitalisté, en prêtant [The deprivation the capitalist imposes on himself by lending ...] (this euphemism used, for the purpose of identifying, according to the approved method of vulgar economy, the labourer who is exploited, with the industrial capitalist who exploits, and to whom other capitalists lend money) ses instruments de production au travailleur, au lieu d’en consacrer la valeur à son propre usage, en la transforment en objets d’utilité
ou d’agrément.” [his instruments of production to the worker, instead of devoting their value to his own consumption, by transforming them into objects of utility or pleasure] (G. de Molinari, l. c., p. 36.)

32. “La conservation d’un capital exige ... un effort constant pour résister a la tentation de le consommer.” (Courcelle-Seneuil, l. c., p. 57.)

33. “The particular classes of income which yield the most abundantly to the progress of national capital, change
at different stages of their progress, and are, therefore, entirely different
in nations occupying different positions in that progress.... Profits ...
unimportant source of accumulation, compared with wages and rents, in the
earlier stages of society.... When a considerable advance in the powers
of national industry has actually taken place, profits rise into comparative
importance as a source of accumulation.” (Richard Jones, “Textbook, &c.,”
pp. 16, 21.)

34. l. c., p. 36, sq.

35. “Ricardo says: ‘In different stages of society the accumulation of capital or of the means of employing’ (i.e.,
exploiting) ‘labour is more or less rapid, and must in all cases depend
on the productive powers of labour. The productive powers of labour are
generally greatest where there is an abundance of fertile land.’ If, in
the first sentence, the productive powers of labour mean the smallness
of that aliquot part of any produce that goes to those whose manual labour
produced it, the sentence is nearly identical, because the remaining aliquot
part is the fund whence capital can, if the owner pleases, be accumulated.
But then this does not generally happen, where there is most fertile land.”
(“Observations on Certain Verbal Disputes, &c.” pp. 74, 75.)

36. J. Stuart Mill: “Essays on Some Unsettled Questions of Political Economy,” Lond., 1844, p. 90.

37. “An Essay on Trade and Commerce,” Lond., 1770, P. 44. The Times of December, 1866, and January, 1867,
in like manner published certain outpourings of the heart of the English
mine-owner, in which the happy lot of the Belgian miners was pictured,
who asked and received no more than was strictly necessary for them to
live for their “masters.” The Belgian labourers have to suffer much, but
to figure in The Times as model labourers! In the beginning of February,
1867, came the answer: strike of the Belgian miners at Marchienne, put
down by powder and lead.

38. l. c., pp. 44, 46.

39. The Northamptonshire manufacturer commits a pious fraud, pardonable in one whose heart is so full. He nominally compares the life of the English and French manufacturing labourer, but in the words just quoted he is painting, as he himself confesses in his confused way,
the French agricultural labourers.

40. l. c., pp. 70, 71. Note in the 3rd German edition: today, thanks to the competition on the world-market,
established since then, we have advanced much further. “If China,” says
Mr. Stapleton, M.P., to his constituents, “should become a great manufacturing
country, I do not see how the manufacturing population of Europe could
sustain the contest without descending to the level of their competitors.”
(Times, Sept. 3, 1873, p. 8.) The wished-for goal of English capital
is no longer Continental wages but Chinese.

41. Benjamin Thompson: “Essays, Political, Economical, and Philosophical, &c.,” 3 vols., Lond, 1796-1802, vol.
i., p. 294. In his “The State of the Poor, or an History of the Labouring
Classes in England, &c.,” Sir F. M. Eden strongly recommends the Rumfordian
beggar-soup to workhouse overseers, and reproachfully warns the English
labourers that “many poor people, particularly in Scotland, live, and that
very comfortably, for months together, upon oat-meal and barley-meal, mixed
with only water and salt.” (l. c., vol. i, book i., ch. 2, p. 503.) The
same sort of hints in the 19th century. “The most wholesome mixtures of
flour having been refused (by the English agricultural labourer)... in
Scotland, where education is better, this prejudice is, probably, unknown.”
(Charles H. Parry, M. D., “The Question of the Necessity of the Existing
Corn Laws Considered.” London, 1816, p. 69.) This same Parry, however,
complains that the English labourer is now (1815) in a much worse condition
than in Eden’s time (1797.)

42. From the reports of the last Parliamentary Commission on adulteration of means of subsistence, it will be seen that
the adulteration even of medicines is the rule, not the exception in England.
E.g., the examination of 34 specimens of opium, purchased of as many different
chemists in London, showed that 31 were adulterated with poppy heads, wheat-flour,
gum, clay, sand, &c. Several did not contain an atom of morphia.

43. G. B. Newnham (barrister-at-law): “A Review of the Evidence before the Committee of the two Houses of Parliament on the Corn Laws.” Lond., 1815, p. 20, note.

44. l. c., pp. 19, 20.

45. C. H. Parry, l. c., pp. 77, 69. The landlords, on their side, not only “indemnified” themselves for the Anti-Jacobin War, which they waged in the name of England, but enriched themselves enormously. Their rents doubled, trebled, quadrupled, “and in one instance, increased sixfold in eighteen years.” (I. c., pp. 100, 101.)

46. Friedrich Engels, “Lage der arbeitenden Klasse in England,” p. 20.

47. Classic economy has, on account of a deficient analysis of the labour process, and of the process of creating
value, never properly grasped this weighty element of reproduction, as
may be seen in Ricardo; he says, e.g., whatever the change in productive
power, “a million men always produce in manufactures the same value.” This
is accurate, if the extension and degree of intensity of their labour are
given. But it does not prevent (this Ricardo overlooks in certain conclusions
he draws) a million men with different powers of productivity in their
labour, turning into products very different masses of the means of production,
and therefore preserving in their products very different masses of value;
in consequence of which the values of the products yielded may vary considerably.
Ricardo has, it may be noted in passing, tried in vain to make clear to
J. B. Say, by that very example, the difference between use value (which
he here calls wealth or material riches) and exchange-value. Say answers:
“Quant à la difficulté qu’élève Mr. Ricardo
en disant que, par des procédés mieux entendus un million
de personnes peuvent produire deux fois, trois fois autant de richesses,
sans produire plus de valeurs, cette difficulté n’est pas une lorsque
l’on considére, ainsi qu’on le doit, la production comme un échange
dans lequel on donne les services productifs de son travail, de sa terre,
et de ses capitaux, pour obtenir des produits. C’est par le moyen de ces
services productifs, que nous acquérons tous les produits qui sont
au monde. Or... nous sommes d’autant plus riches, nos services productifs
ont d’autant plus de valeur qu’ils obtiennent dans l’échange appelé
production une plus grande quantité de choses utiles.” [As for the difficulty raised by Ricardo when he says that, by using better methods of production, a million people can produce two or three times as much wealth, without producing any more value, this difficulty disappears when one bears in mind, as one should, that production is like an exchange in which a man contributes the productive services of his labour, his land, and his capital, in order to obtain products. It is by means of these productive services that we acquire all the products existing in the world. Therefore ... we are richer, our productive services have the more value, the greater the quantity of useful things they bring in through the exchange which is called production] (J. B. Say, “Lettres à M. Malthus,” Paris, 1820, pp. 168, 169.) The “difficulté”
— it exists for him, not for Ricardo — that Say means to clear up is
this: Why does not the exchange-value of the use values increase, when
their quantity increases in consequence of increased productive power of
labour? Answer: the difficulty is met by calling use value, exchange-value,
if you please. Exchange-value is a thing that is connected one way or another
with exchange. If therefore production is called an exchange of labour
and means of production against the product, it is clear as day that you
obtain more exchange-value in proportion as the production yields more
use value. In other words, the more use values, e.g., stockings, a working-day
yields to the stocking-manufacturer, the richer is he in stockings. Suddenly,
however, Say recollects that “with a greater quantity” of stockings their
“price” (which of course has nothing to do with their exchange-value!)
falls “parce que la concurrence les (les producteurs) oblige à donner les
produits pour ce qu’ils leur coûtent... [because competition obliges them (the producers) to sell their products for what they cost to make] But whence does the profit come,
if the capitalist sells the commodities at cost-price? Never mind! Say
declares that, in consequence of increased productivity, every one now
receives in return for a given equivalent two pairs of stockings instead
of one as before. The result he arrives at, is precisely that proposition
of Ricardo that he aimed at disproving. After this mighty effort of thought,
he triumphantly apostrophises Malthus in the words: “Telle est, monsieur,
la doctrine bien liée, sans laquelle il est impossible, je le déclare,
d’expliquer les plus grandes difficultés de l’économie politique,
et notamment, comment il se peut qu’une nation soit plus riche lorsque
ses produits diminuent de valeur, quoique la richesse soit de la valeur.”
[This, Sir, is the well-founded doctrine without which it is impossible, I say, to explain the greatest difficulties in political economy, and, in particular, to explain why it is that a nation can be richer when its products fall in value, even though wealth is value]
(l. c., p. 170.) An English economist remarks upon the conjuring tricks
of the same nature that appear in Say’s “Lettres”: “Those affected ways
of talking make up in general that which M. Say is pleased to call his
doctrine and which he earnestly urges Malthus to teach at Hertford, as
it is already taught ‘dans plusieurs parties de l’Europe.’ He says, ‘Si
vous trouvez une physionomie de paradoxe à toutes ces propositions,
voyez les choses qu’elles expriment, et j’ose croire qu’elles vous paraîtront
fort simples et fort raisonnables.’ [in numerous parts of Europe ... If all those propositions appear paradoxical to you, look at the things they express, and I venture to believe that they will then appear very simple and very rational] Doubtless, and in consequence of the
same process, they will appear everything else, except original.” (“An
Inquiry into those Principles Respecting the Nature of Demand, &c.,”
pp. 116, 110.)

48. MacCulloch took out a patent for “wages of past labour,” long before Senior did for “wages of abstinence.”

49. Compare among others, Jeremy Bentham: “Théorie des Peines et des Récompenses,” traduct. d’Et. Dumont,
3ème édit. Paris, 1826, t. II, L. IV., ch. II.

50. Bentham is a purely English phenomenon. Not even excepting our philosopher, Christian Wolff, in no time and in
no country has the most homespun commonplace ever strutted about in so
self-satisfied a way. The principle of utility was no discovery of Bentham.
He simply reproduced in his dull way what Helvétius and other Frenchmen
had said with esprit in the 18th century. To know what is useful for a
dog, one must study dog-nature. This nature itself is not to be deduced
from the principle of utility. Applying this to man, he that would criticise
all human acts, movements, relations, etc., by the principle of utility,
must first deal with human nature in general, and then with human nature
as modified in each historical epoch. Bentham makes short work of it. With
the driest naiveté he takes the modern shopkeeper, especially the
English shopkeeper, as the normal man. Whatever is useful to this queer
normal man, and to his world, is absolutely useful. This yard-measure,
then, he applies to past, present, and future. The Christian religion,
e.g., is “useful,” “because it forbids in the name of religion the same
faults that the penal code condemns in the name of the law.” Artistic criticism
is “harmful,” because it disturbs worthy people in their enjoyment of Martin
Tupper, etc. With such rubbish has the brave fellow, with his motto, “nulla
dies sine linea!,” piled up mountains of books. Had I the courage of my
friend, Heinrich Heine, I should call Mr. Jeremy a genius in the way of
bourgeois stupidity.

51. “Political economists are too apt to consider a certain quantity of capital and a certain number of labourers
as productive instruments of uniform power, or operating with a certain
uniform intensity.... Those... who maintain ... that commodities are the
sole agents of production ... prove that production could never be enlarged,
for it requires as an indispensable condition to such an enlargement that
food, raw materials, and tools should be previously augmented; which is
in fact maintaining that no increase of production can take place without
a previous increase, or, in other words, that an increase is impossible.”
(S. Bailey: “Money and its Vicissitudes,” pp. 58 and 70.) Bailey criticises
the dogma mainly from the point of view of the process of circulation.

52. John Stuart Mill, in his “Principles of Political Economy,” says: “The really exhausting and the really repulsive
labours instead of being better paid than others, are almost invariably
paid the worst of all.... The more revolting the occupation, the more certain
it is to receive the minimum of remuneration.... The hardships and the
earnings, instead of being directly proportional, as in any just arrangements
of society they would be, are generally in an inverse ratio to one another.”
To avoid misunderstanding, let me say that although men like John Stuart
Mill are to blame for the contradiction between their traditional economic
dogmas and their modern tendencies, it would be very wrong to class them
with the herd of vulgar economic apologists.

53. H. Fawcett, Professor of Political Economy at Cambridge. “The Economic position of the British labourer.” London, 1865, p. 120.

54. I must here remind the reader that the categories, “variable and constant capital,” were first used by me.
Political Economy since the time of Adam Smith has confusedly mixed up
the essential distinctions involved in these categories, with the mere
formal differences, arising out of the process of circulation, of fixed
and circulating capital. For further details on this point, see Book II.,
Part II.

55. Fawcett, l. c., pp. 122, 123.

56. It might be said that not only capital, but also labourers, in the shape of emigrants, are annually exported from
England. In the text, however, there is no question of the peculium of
the emigrants, who are in great part not labourers. The sons of farmers
make up a great part of them. The additional capital annually transported
abroad to be put out at interest is in much greater proportion to the annual
accumulation than the yearly emigration is to the yearly increase of population.

## Chapter Twenty-Five: The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation

Contents

Section 1 - The Increased Demand for labour
power that Accompanies Accumulation, the Composition of Capital Remaining the
same

Section 2 - Relative Diminution of the Variable Part of Capital
Simultaneously with the Progress of Accumulation and of the Concentration that
Accompanies it

Section 3 - Progressive Production of a Relative surplus
population or Industrial Reserve Army

Section 4 - Different Forms of the Relative surplus population.
The General Law of Capitalistic Accumulation

Section 5 - Illustrations of the General Law of Capitalist
Accumulation

A. England from 1846-1866

B. The Badly Paid Strata of the British Industrial Class

C. The Nomad Population

D. Effect of Crises on the Best Paid Part of the working
class

E. The British Agricultural Proletariat

F. Ireland

### Section 1. The Increased Demand for labour power that Accompanies Accumulation, the Composition of Capital Remaining the Same

In this chapter we consider the influence of the growth of capital on the
lot of the labouring class. The most important factor in this inquiry is the
composition of capital and the changes it undergoes in the course of the
process of accumulation.

The composition of capital is to be understood in a two-fold sense. On the
side of value, it is determined by the proportion in which it is divided into
constant capital or value of the means of production, and variable capital or
value of labour power, the sum total of wages. On the side of material, as it
functions in the process of production, all capital is divided into means of
production and living labour power. This latter composition is determined by
the relation between the mass of the means of production employed, on the one
hand, and the mass of labour necessary for their employment on the other. I
call the former the value-composition, the latter the technical
composition of capital.

Between the two there is a strict correlation. To express this, I call the
value composition of capital, in so far as it is determined by its technical
composition and mirrors the changes of the latter, the organic
composition of capital. Wherever I refer to the composition of capital,
without further qualification, its organic composition is always understood.

The many individual capitals invested in a particular branch of production
have, one with another, more or less different compositions. The average of
their individual compositions gives us the composition of the total
capital in this branch of production. Lastly, the average of these averages, in
all branches of production, gives us the composition of the total social
capital of a country, and with this alone are we, in the last resort, concerned
in the following investigation.

Growth of capital involves growth of its variable constituent or of the part
invested in labour power. A part of the surplus-value turned into additional
capital must always be re-transformed into variable capital, or additional
labour fund. If we suppose that, all other circumstances remaining the same,
the composition of capital also remains constant (i.e., that a
definite mass of means of production constantly needs the same mass of labour
power to set it in motion), then the demand for labour and the subsistence-fund
of the labourers clearly increase in the same proportion as the capital, and
the more rapidly, the more rapidly the capital increases. Since the capital
produces yearly a surplus-value, of which one part is yearly added to the
original capital; since this increment itself grows yearly along with the
augmentation of the capital already functioning; since lastly, under special
stimulus to enrichment, such as the opening of new markets, or of new spheres
for the outlay of capital in consequence of newly developed social wants,
&c., the scale of accumulation may be suddenly extended, merely by a change
in the division of the surplus-value or surplus-product into capital and
revenue, the requirements of accumulating capital may exceed the increase of
labour power or of the number of labourers; the demand for labourers may exceed
the supply, and, therefore, wages may rise. This must, indeed, ultimately be
the case if the conditions supposed above continue. For since in each year more
labourers are employed than in its predecessor, sooner or later a point must be
reached, at which the requirements of accumulation begin to surpass the
customary supply of labour, and, therefore, a rise of wages takes place. A
lamentation on this score was heard in England during the whole of the
fifteenth, and the first half of the eighteenth centuries. The more or less
favourable circumstances in which the wage working class supports and
multiplies itself, in no way alter the fundamental character of capitalist
production. As simple reproduction constantly reproduces the
capital relation itself, i.e., the relation of capitalists on the one
hand, and wage workers on the other, so reproduction on a progressive scale,
i.e., accumulation, reproduces the capital relation on a progressive
scale, more capitalists or larger capitalists at this pole, more wage workers
at that. The reproduction of a mass of labour power, which must incessantly
re-incorporate itself with capital for that capital’s self-expansion;
which cannot get free from capital, and whose enslavement to capital is only
concealed by the variety of individual capitalists to whom it sells itself,
this reproduction of labour power forms, in fact, an essential of the
reproduction of capital itself. Accumulation of capital is, therefore, increase
of the proletariat. [1]

Classical economy grasped this fact so thoroughly that Adam Smith, Ricardo,
&c., as mentioned earlier, inaccurately identified accumulation with the
consumption, by the productive labourers, of all the capitalised part of the
surplus-product, or with its transformation into additional wage labourers. As
early as 1696 John Bellers says:

“For if one had a hundred thousand acres of land and as
many pounds in money, and as many cattle, without a labourer, what would the
rich man be, but a labourer? And as the labourers make men rich, so the more
labourers there will be, the more rich men ... the labour of the poor being the
mines of the rich.” [2]

So also Bernard de Mandeville at the beginning of the eighteenth century:

“It would be easier, where property is well secured, to
live without money than without poor; for who would do the work? ... As they
[the poor] ought to be kept from starving, so they should receive nothing worth
saving. If here and there one of the lowest class by uncommon industry, and
pinching his belly, lifts himself above the condition he was brought up in,
nobody ought to hinder him; nay, it is undeniably the wisest course for every
person in the society, and for every private family to be frugal; but it is the
interest of all rich nations, that the greatest part of the poor should almost
never be idle, and yet continually spend what they get.... Those that get their
living by their daily labour ... have nothing to stir them up to be serviceable
but their wants which it is prudence to relieve, but folly to cure. The only
thing then that can render the labouring man industrious, is a moderate
quantity of money, for as too little will, according as his temper is, either
dispirit or make him desperate, so too much will make him insolent and lazy....
From what has been said, it is manifest, that, in a free nation, where slaves
are not allowed of, the surest wealth consists in a multitude of laborious
poor; for besides, that they are the never-failing nursery of fleets and
armies, without them there could be no enjoyment,
and no product of any country could be valuable. “To make the
society” [which of course consists of non-workers] “happy and
people easier under the meanest circumstances, it is requisite that great
numbers of them should be ignorant as well as poor; knowledge both enlarges and
multiplies our desires, and the fewer things a man wishes for, the more easily
his necessities may be supplied.” [3]

What Mandeville, an honest, clear-headed man, had not yet seen, is that the
mechanism of the process of accumulation itself increases, along with the
capital, the mass of “labouring poor,” i.e., the wage
labourers, who turn their labour power into an increasing power of
self-expansion of the growing capital, and even by doing so must eternise their
dependent relation on their own product, as personified in the capitalists. In
reference to this relation of dependence, Sir F. M. Eden in his “The
State of the Poor, an History of the Labouring Classes in England,” says,

“the natural produce of our soil is certainly not fully
adequate to our subsistence; we can neither be clothed, lodged nor fed but in
consequence of some previous labour. A portion at least of the
society must be indefatigably employed .... There are others who, though they
‘neither toil nor spin,’ can yet command the produce of industry,
but who owe their exemption from labour solely to civilisation and order ....
They are peculiarly the creatures of civil institutions, [4] which have recognised that individuals may acquire property by various other means
besides the exertion of labour.... Persons of independent fortune ... owe their
superior advantages by no means to any superior abilities of their own, but
almost entirely ... to the industry of others. It is not the possession of
land, or of money, but the command of labour which distinguishes the opulent
from the labouring part of the community .... This [scheme approved by Eden]
would give the people of property sufficient (but by no means too much)
influence and authority over those who ... work for them; and it would place
such labourers, not in an abject or servile condition, but in such a state of
easy and liberal dependence as all who know human nature, and its history, will
allow to be necessary for their own comfort.” [5]

Sir F. M. Eden, it may be remarked in passing, is the only disciple of Adam
Smith during the eighteenth century that produced any work of importance. [6]

Under the conditions of accumulation supposed thus far, which
conditions are those most favourable to the labourers, their relation of
dependence upon capital takes on a form endurable or, as Eden says: “easy
and liberal.” Instead of becoming more intensive with the growth of
capital, this relation of dependence only becomes more extensive,
i.e., the sphere of capital’s exploitation and rule merely
extends with its own dimensions and the number of its subjects. A larger part
of their own surplus-product, always increasing and continually transformed
into additional capital, comes back to them in the shape of means of payment,
so that they can extend the circle of their enjoyments; can make some additions
to their consumption-fund of clothes, furniture, &c., and can lay by small
reserve funds of money. But just as little as better clothing, food, and
treatment, and a larger peculium, do away with the exploitation of the slave,
so little do they set aside that of the wage worker. A rise in the price of
labour, as a consequence of accumulation of capital, only means, in fact, that
the length and weight of the golden chain the wage worker has already forged
for himself, allow of a relaxation of the tension of it. In the
controversies on this subject the chief fact has generally been overlooked,
viz., the differentia specifica
{defining characteristic} of capitalistic production. Labour power
is sold today, not with a view of satisfying, by its service or by its product,
the personal needs of the buyer. His aim is augmentation of
his capital, production of commodities containing more labour than he pays for,
containing therefore a portion of value that costs him nothing, and that is
nevertheless realised when the commodities are sold. Production of
surplus-value is the absolute law of this mode of production. Labour power is
only saleable so far as it preserves the means of production in their capacity
of capital, reproduces its own value as capital, and yields in unpaid labour a
source of additional capital. [7]
The conditions of its sale, whether more or less favourable to the labourer,
include therefore the necessity of its constant re-selling, and the constantly
extended reproduction of all wealth in the shape of capital. Wages, as we have
seen, by their very nature, always imply the performance of a certain quantity
of unpaid labour on the part of the labourer. Altogether, irrespective of the
case of a rise of wages with a falling price of labour, &c., such an
increase only means at best a quantitative diminution of the unpaid labour that
the worker has to supply. This diminution can never reach the point at which it
would threaten the system itself. Apart from violent conflicts as to the rate
of wages (and Adam Smith has already shown that in such a conflict, taken on
the whole, the master is always master), a rise in the price of labour
resulting from accumulation of capital implies the following alternative:

Either the price of labour keeps on rising, because its rise does not
interfere with the progress of accumulation. In this there is nothing
wonderful, for, says Adam Smith, “after these (profits) are diminished,
stock may not only continue to increase, but to increase much faster than
before.... A great stock, though with small profits, generally increases faster
than a small stock with great profits.” (l. c., ii, p. 189.) In this case
it is evident that a diminution in the unpaid labour in no way interferes with
the extension of the domain of capital. — Or, on the other hand,
accumulation slackens in consequence of the rise in the price of labour,
because the stimulus of gain is blunted. The rate of accumulation lessens; but
with its lessening, the primary cause of that lessening vanishes,
i.e., the disproportion between capital and exploitable labour power.
The mechanism of the process of capitalist production removes the
very obstacles that it temporarily creates. The price of labour falls again to
a level corresponding with the needs of the self-expansion of capital, whether
the level be below, the same as, or above the one which was normal before the
rise of wages took place. We see thus: In the first case, it is not the
diminished rate either of the absolute, or of the proportional, increase in
labour power, or labouring population, which causes capital to be in excess,
but conversely the excess of capital that makes exploitable labour power
insufficient. In the second case, it is not the increased rate either of the
absolute, or of the proportional, increase in labour power, or labouring
population, that makes capital insufficient; but, conversely, the relative
diminution of capital that causes the exploitable labour power, or rather its
price, to be in excess. It is these absolute movements of the accumulation of
capital which are reflected as relative movements of the mass of exploitable
labour power, and therefore seem produced by the latter’s own independent
movement. To put it mathematically: the rate
of accumulation is the independent, not the dependent, variable; the rate of
wages, the dependent, not the independent, variable. Thus, when the industrial
cycle is in the phase of crisis, a general fall in the price of commodities is
expressed as a rise in the value of money, and, in the phase of prosperity, a
general rise in the price of commodities, as a fall in the value of money. The
so-called currency school concludes from this that with high prices too much,
with low prices too little [8] money
is in circulation. Their ignorance and complete misunderstanding of facts [9] are worthily paralleled by the
economists, who interpret the above phenomena of accumulation by saying that
there are now too few, now too many wage labourers.

The law of capitalist production, that is at the bottom of the pretended
“natural law of population,” reduces itself simply to this: The
correlation between accumulation of capital and rate of wages is nothing else
than the correlation between the unpaid labour transformed into capital, and
the additional paid labour necessary for the setting in motion of this
additional capital. It is therefore in no way a relation between two
magnitudes, independent one of the other: on the one hand, the magnitude of the
capital; on the other, the number of the labouring population; it is rather, at
bottom, only the relation between the unpaid and the paid labour of the same
labouring population. If the quantity of unpaid labour supplied by the working
class, and accumulated by the capitalist class, increases so rapidly that its
conversion into capital requires an extraordinary addition of paid labour, then
wages rise, and, all other circumstances remaining equal, the unpaid
labour diminishes in proportion. But as soon as this diminution touches the
point at which the surplus labour that nourishes capital is no longer supplied
in normal quantity, a reaction sets in: a smaller part of revenue is
capitalised, accumulation lags, and the movement of rise in wages receives a
check. The rise of wages therefore is confined within limits that not only
leave intact the foundations of the capitalistic system, but also secure its
reproduction on a progressive scale. The law of capitalistic accumulation,
metamorphosed by economists into pretended law of Nature, in
reality merely states that the very nature of accumulation excludes every
diminution in the degree of exploitation of labour, and every rise in the price
of labour, which could seriously imperil the continual reproduction, on an
ever-enlarging scale, of the capitalistic relation. It cannot be otherwise in a
mode of production in which the labourer exists to satisfy the needs of
self-expansion of existing values, instead of, on the contrary, material wealth
existing to satisfy the needs of development on the part of the labourer. As,
in religion, man is governed by the products of his own brain, so in
capitalistic production, he is governed by the products of his own hand. [10]

### Section 2. Relative Diminution of the Variable Part of Capital Simultaneously with the Progress of Accumulation and of the Concentration that Accompanies it

According to the economists themselves, it is neither the actual extent of
social wealth, nor the magnitude of the capital already functioning, that lead
to a rise of wages, but only the constant growth of accumulation and the degree
of rapidity of that growth. (Adam Smith, Book I., chapter 8.) So far, we have
only considered one special phase of this process, that in which the increase
of capital occurs along with a constant technical composition of capital. But
the process goes beyond this phase.

Once given the general basis of the capitalistic system, then, in the course
of accumulation, a point is reached at which the development of the
productivity of social labour becomes the most powerful lever of
accumulation.

“The same cause,” says Adam Smith, “which
raises the wages of labour, the increase of stock, tends to increase its
productive powers, and to make a smaller quantity of labour produce a greater
quantity of work.” [11]

Apart from natural conditions, such as fertility of the soil, &c., and
from the skill of independent and isolated producers (shown rather
qualitatively in the goodness than quantitatively in the mass of their
products), the degree of productivity of labour, in a given society, is
expressed in the relative extent of the means of production that one labourer,
during a given time, with the same tension of labour power, turns into
products. The mass of the means of production which he thus transforms,
increases with the productiveness of his labour. But those means of production
play a double part. The increase of some is a consequence, that of the others a
condition of the increasing productivity of labour. E.g., with the
division of labour in manufacture, and with the use of machinery, more raw
material is worked up in the same time, and, therefore, a greater mass of raw
material and auxiliary substances enter into the labour process. That is the
consequence of the increasing productivity of labour. On the other hand, the
mass of machinery, beasts of burden, mineral manures, drain-pipes, &c., is
a condition of the increasing productivity of labour. So also is it with the
means of production concentrated in buildings, furnaces, means of transport,
&c. But whether condition or consequence, the growing extent of the means
of production, as compared with the labour power incorporated with them, is an
expression of the growing productiveness of labour. The increase of the latter
appears, therefore, in the diminution of the mass of labour in proportion to
the mass of means of production moved by it, or in the diminution of the
subjective factor of the labour process as compared with the objective factor.

This change in the technical composition of capital, this growth in the mass
of means of production, as compared with the mass of the labour power that
vivifies them, is reflected again in its value composition, by the increase of
the constant constituent of capital at the expense of its variable constituent.
There may be, e.g., originally 50 per cent. of a capital laid out in
means of production, and 50 per cent. in labour power; later on, with the
development of the productivity of labour, 80 per cent. in means of production,
20 per cent. in labour power, and so on. This law of the progressive increase
in constant capital, in proportion to the variable, is confirmed at every step
(as already shown) by the comparative analysis of the prices of commodities,
whether we compare different economic epochs or different nations in the same
epoch. The relative magnitude of the element of price, which represents the
value of the means of production only, or the constant part of capital
consumed, is in direct, the relative magnitude of the other element of price
that pays labour (the variable part of capital) is in inverse proportion to the
advance of accumulation.

This diminution in the variable part of capital as compared with the
constant, or the altered value-composition of the capital, however, only shows
approximately the change in the composition of its material constituents. If,
e.g., the capital-value employed today in spinning is 7/8 constant and
1/8 variable, whilst at the beginning of the 18th century it was ½ constant and
½ variable, on the other hand, the mass of raw material, instruments of labour,
&c., that a certain quantity of spinning labour consumes productively
today, is many hundred times greater than at the beginning of the 18th century.
The reason is simply that, with the increasing productivity of labour, not only
does the mass of the means of production consumed by it increase, but their
value compared with their mass diminishes. Their value therefore rises
absolutely, but not in proportion to their mass. The increase of the difference
between constant and variable capital, is, therefore, much less than that of
the difference between the mass of the means of production into which the
constant, and the mass of the labour power into which the variable, capital is
converted. The former difference increases with the latter, but in a smaller
degree.

But, if the progress of accumulation lessens the relative magnitude of the
variable part of capital, it by no means, in doing this, excludes the
possibility of a rise in its absolute magnitude. Suppose that a capital-value
at first is divided into 50 per cent. of constant and 50 per cent. of variable
capital; later into 80 per cent. of constant and 20 per cent. of variable. If
in the meantime the original capital, say £6,000, has increased to £18,000, its
variable constituent has also increased. It was £3,000, it is now £3,600. But
where as formerly an increase of capital by 20 per cent. would have sufficed to
raise the demand for labour 20 per cent., now this latter rise requires a
tripling of the original capital.

In Part IV, it was shown, how the development of the productiveness of
social labour presupposes co-operation on a large scale; how it is only upon
this supposition that division and combination of labour can be organised, and
the means of production economised by concentration on a vast scale; how
instruments of labour which, from their very nature, are only fit for use in
common, such as a system of machinery, can be called into being; how huge
natural forces can be pressed into the service of production; and how the
transformation can be effected of the process of production into a
technological application of science. On the basis of the production of
commodities, where the means of production are the property of private persons,
and where the artisan therefore either produces commodities, isolated from and
independent of others, or sells his labour power as a commodity, because he
lacks the means for independent industry, co-operation on a large scale can
realise itself only in the increase of individual capitals, only in proportion
as the means of social production and the means of subsistence are transformed
into the private property of capitalists. The basis of the production of
commodities can admit of production on a large scale in the capitalistic form
alone. A certain accumulation of capital, in the hands of individual producers
of commodities, forms therefore the necessary preliminary of the specifically
capitalistic mode of production. We had, therefore, to assume that this occurs
during the transition from handicraft to capitalistic industry. It may be
called primitive accumulation, because it is the historic basis, instead of the
historic result of specifically capitalist production. How it itself
originates, we need not here inquire as yet. It is enough that it forms the
starting point. But all methods for raising the social productive power of
labour that are developed on this basis, are at the same time methods for the
increased production of surplus-value or surplus-product, which in its turn is
the formative element of accumulation. They are, therefore, at the same time
methods of the production of capital by capital, or methods of its accelerated
accumulation. The continual re-transformation of surplus-value into capital now
appears in the shape of the increasing magnitude of the capital that enters
into the process of production. This in turn is the basis of an extended scale
of production, of the methods for raising the productive power of labour that
accompany it, and of accelerated production of surplus-value. If, therefore, a
certain degree of accumulation of capital appears as a condition of the
specifically capitalist mode of production, the latter causes conversely an
accelerated accumulation of capital. With the accumulation of capital,
therefore, the specifically capitalistic mode of production develops, and with
the capitalist mode of production the accumulation of capital. Both these
economic factors bring about, in the compound ratio of the impulses they
reciprocally give one another, that change in the technical composition of
capital by which the variable constituent becomes always smaller and smaller as
compared with the constant.

Every individual capital is a larger or smaller concentration of means of
production, with a corresponding command over a larger or smaller labour-army.
Every accumulation becomes the means of new accumulation. With the increasing
mass of wealth which functions as capital, accumulation increases the
concentration of that wealth in the hands of individual capitalists, and
thereby widens the basis of production on a large scale and of the specific
methods of capitalist production. The growth of social capital is
effected by the growth of many individual capitals. All other circumstances
remaining the same, individual capitals, and with them the concentration of the
means of production, increase in such proportion as they form aliquot parts of
the total social capital. At the same time portions of the original capitals
disengage themselves and function as new independent capitals. Besides other
causes, the division of property, within capitalist families, plays a great
part in this. With the accumulation of capital, therefore, the number of
capitalists grows to a greater or less extent. Two points characterise this
kind of concentration which grows directly out of, or rather is identical with,
accumulation. First: The increasing concentration of the social means of
production in the hands of individual capitalists is, other things remaining
equal, limited by the degree of increase of social wealth. Second: The part of
social capital domiciled in each particular sphere of production is divided
among many capitalists who face one another as independent commodity-producers
competing with each other. Accumulation and the concentration accompanying it
are, therefore, not only scattered over many points, but the increase of each
functioning capital is thwarted by the formation of new and the sub-division of
old capitals. Accumulation, therefore, presents itself on the one hand as
increasing concentration of the means of production, and of the command over
labour; on the other, as repulsion of many individual capitals one from
another.

This splitting-up of the total social capital into many individual capitals
or the repulsion of its fractions one from another, is counteracted by their
attraction. This last does not mean that simple concentration of the means of
production and of the command over labour, which is identical with
accumulation. It is concentration of capitals already formed, destruction of
their individual independence, expropriation of capitalist by capitalist,
transformation of many small into few large capitals. This process differs from
the former in this, that it only presupposes a change in the distribution of
capital already to hand, and functioning; its field of action is therefore not
limited by the absolute growth of social wealth, by the absolute limits of
accumulation. Capital grows in one place to a huge mass in a single hand,
because it has in another place been lost by many. This is centralisation
proper, as distinct from accumulation and concentration.

The laws of this centralisation of capitals, or of the attraction of capital
by capital, cannot be developed here. A brief hint at a few facts must suffice.
The battle of competition is fought by cheapening of commodities. The cheapness
of commodities demands, caeteris paribus, on the productiveness of
labour, and this again on the scale of production. Therefore, the larger
capitals beat the smaller. It will further be remembered that, with
the development of the capitalist mode of production, there is an increase in
the minimum amount of individual capital necessary to carry on a business under
its normal conditions. The smaller capitals, therefore, crowd
into spheres of production which Modern Industry has only sporadically or
incompletely got hold of. Here competition rages in direct proportion to the
number, and in inverse proportion to the magnitudes, of the antagonistic
capitals. It always ends in the ruin of many small capitalists, whose capitals
partly pass into the hands of their conquerors, partly vanish. Apart from this,
with capitalist production an altogether new force comes into play — the
credit system, which in its first stages furtively creeps in as the humble
assistant of accumulation, drawing into the hands of individual or associated
capitalists, by invisible threads, the money resources which lie scattered,
over the surface of society, in larger or smaller amounts; but it soon becomes
a new and terrible weapon in the battle of competition and is finally
transformed into an enormous social mechanism for the centralisation of
capitals.

Commensurately with the development of capitalist production and
accumulation there develop the two most powerful levers of centralisation
— competition and credit. At the same time the progress of accumulation
increases the material amenable to centralisation, i.e., the
individual capitals, whilst the expansion of capitalist production creates, on
the one hand, the social want, and, on the other, the technical means necessary
for those immense industrial undertakings which require a previous
centralisation of capital for their accomplishment. Today, therefore, the force
of attraction, drawing together individual capitals, and the tendency to
centralisation are stronger than ever before. But if the relative extension and
energy of the movement towards centralisation is determined, in a certain
degree, by the magnitude of capitalist wealth and superiority of economic
mechanism already attained, progress in centralisation does not in any way
depend upon a positive growth in the magnitude of social capital. And this is the specific difference between centralisation and
concentration, the latter being only another name for reproduction on an
extended scale. Centralisation may result from a mere change in the
distribution of capitals already existing, from a simple alteration in the
quantitative grouping of the component parts of social capital. Here capital
can grow into powerful masses in a single hand because there it has been
withdrawn from many individual hands. In any given branch of industry
centralisation would reach its extreme limit if all the individual capitals
invested in it were fused into a single capital. [12] In a given society the limit would
be reached only when the entire social capital was united in the hands of
either a single capitalist or a single capitalist company.

Centralisation completes the work of accumulation by enabling industrial
capitalists to extend the scale of their operations. Whether this latter result
is the consequence of accumulation or centralisation, whether centralisation is
accomplished by the violent method of annexation — when certain capitals
become such preponderant centres of attraction for others that they shatter the
individual cohesion of the latter and then draw the separate fragments to
themselves — or whether the fusion of a number of capitals already formed
or in process of formation takes place by the smoother process of organising
joint-stock companies — the economic effect remains the same. Everywhere
the increased scale of industrial establishments is the starting point for a
more comprehensive organisation of the collective work of many, for a wider
development of their material motive forces — in other words, for the
progressive transformation of isolated processes of production, carried on by
customary methods, into processes of production socially combined and
scientifically arranged.

But accumulation, the gradual increase of capital by reproduction as it
passes from the circular to the spiral form, is clearly a very slow procedure
compared with centralisation, which has only to change the quantitative
groupings of the constituent parts of social capital. The world would still be
without railways if it had had to wait until accumulation had got a few
individual capitals far enough to be adequate for the construction of a
railway. Centralisation, on the contrary, accomplished this in the twinkling of
an eye, by means of joint-stock companies. And whilst centralisation thus
intensifies and accelerates the effects of accumulation, it simultaneously
extends and speeds those revolutions in the technical composition of capital
which raise its constant portion at the expense of its variable portion, thus
diminishing the relative demand for labour.

The masses of capital fused together overnight by centralisation reproduce
and multiply as the others do, only more rapidly, thereby becoming new and
powerful levers in social accumulation. Therefore, when we speak of the
progress of social accumulation we tacitly include — today — the
effects of centralisation.

The additional capitals formed in the normal course of accumulation (see
Chapter XXIV, Section 1) serve particularly as vehicles for
the exploitation of new inventions and discoveries, and industrial
improvements in general. But in time the old capital also reaches the moment of
renewal from top to toe, when it sheds its skin and is reborn like the others
in a perfected technical form, in which a smaller quantity of labour will
suffice to set in motion a larger quantity of machinery and raw materials. The
absolute reduction in the demand for labour which necessarily follows from this
is obviously so much the greater the higher the degree in which the capitals
undergoing this process of renewal are already massed together by virtue of the
centralisation movement.

On the one hand, therefore, the additional capital formed in the course of
accumulation attracts fewer and fewer labourers in proportion to its magnitude.
On the other hand, the old capital periodically reproduced with change of
composition, repels more and more of the labourers formerly employed by it.

### Section 3. Progressive Production of a Relative surplus population or Industrial Reserve Army

The accumulation of capital, though originally appearing as its quantitative
extension only, is effected, as we have seen, under a progressive qualitative
change in its composition, under a constant increase of its constant, at the
expense of its variable constituent. [13]

The specifically capitalist mode of production, the development of the
productive power of labour corresponding to it, and the change thence resulting
in the organic composition of capital, do not merely keep pace with the advance
of accumulation, or with the growth of social wealth. They develop at a much
quicker rate, because mere accumulation, the absolute increase of the total
social capital, is accompanied by the centralisation of the individual capitals
of which that total is made up; and because the change in the technological
composition of the additional capital goes hand in hand with a similar change
in the technological composition of the original capital. With the advance of
accumulation, therefore, the proportion of constant to variable capital
changes. If it was originally say 1:1, it now becomes successively 2:1, 3:1,
4:1, 5:1, 7:1, &c., so that, as the capital increases, instead of ½ of its
total value, only 1/3, 1/4, 1/5, 1/6, 1/8, &c., is transformed into
labour-power, and, on the other hand, 2/3, 3/4, 4/5, 5/6, 7/8 into
means of production. Since the demand for labour is determined not by the
amount of capital as a whole, but by its variable constituent alone, that
demand falls progressively with the increase of the total capital, instead of,
as previously assumed, rising in proportion to it. It falls relatively to the
magnitude of the total capital, and at an accelerated rate, as this magnitude
increases. With the growth of the total capital, its variable constituent or
the labour incorporated in it, also does increase, but in a constantly
diminishing proportion. The intermediate pauses are shortened, in which
accumulation works as simple extension of production, on a given technical
basis. It is not merely that an accelerated accumulation of total capital,
accelerated in a constantly growing progression, is needed to absorb an
additional number of labourers, or even, on account of the constant
metamorphosis of old capital, to keep employed those already functioning. In
its turn, this increasing accumulation and centralisation becomes a source of
new changes in the composition of capital, of a more accelerated diminution of
its variable, as compared with its constant constituent. This accelerated
relative diminution of the variable constituent, that goes along with the
accelerated increase of the total capital, and moves more rapidly than this
increase, takes the inverse form, at the other pole, of an apparently absolute
increase of the labouring population, an increase always moving more rapidly
than that of the variable capital or the means of employment. But in fact, it
is capitalistic accumulation itself that constantly produces, and produces in
the direct ratio of its own energy and extent, a relatively redundant
population of labourers, i.e., a population of greater extent than
suffices for the average needs of the self-expansion of capital, and therefore
a surplus population.

Considering the social capital in its totality, the movement of its
accumulation now causes periodical changes, affecting it more or less as a
whole, now distributes its various phases simultaneously over the different
spheres of production. In some spheres a change in the composition of capital
occurs without increase of its absolute magnitude, as a consequence of simple
centralisation; in others the absolute growth of capital is connected with
absolute diminution of its variable constituent, or of the labour power
absorbed by it; in others again, capital continues growing for a time on its
given technical basis, and attracts additional labour power
in proportion to its increase, while at other times it undergoes organic
change, and lessens its variable constituent; in all spheres, the increase of
the variable part of capital, and therefore of the number of labourers employed
by it, is always connected with violent fluctuations and transitory production
of surplus population, whether this takes the more striking form of
the repulsion of labourers already employed, or the less evident but not less
real form of the more difficult absorption of the additional labouring
population through the usual channels. [14] With the magnitude of social capital already
functioning, and the degree of its increase, with the extension of the scale of
production, and the mass of the labourers set in motion, with the development
of the productiveness of their labour, with the greater breadth and fulness of
all sources of wealth, there is also an extension of the scale on which greater
attraction of labourers by capital is accompanied by their greater repulsion;
the rapidity of the change in the organic composition of capital, and in its technical form increases, and an increasing number of
spheres of production becomes involved in this change, now simultaneously, now
alternately. The labouring population therefore produces, along with the
accumulation of capital produced by it, the means by which it itself is made
relatively superfluous, is turned into a relative surplus population; and it
does this to an always increasing extent. [15] This is a law of population peculiar to the
capitalist mode of production; and in fact every special historic
mode of production has its own special laws of population, historically valid
within its limits and only in so far as man has not interfered with them.

But if a surplus labouring population is a necessary product of accumulation
or of the development of wealth on a capitalist basis, this surplus population
becomes, conversely, the lever of capitalistic accumulation, nay, a condition
of existence of the capitalist mode of production. It forms a disposable
industrial reserve army, that belongs to capital quite as absolutely as if the
latter had bred it at its own cost. Independently of the limits of the actual
increase of population, it creates, for the changing needs of the
self-expansion of capital, a mass of human material always ready for
exploitation. With accumulation, and the development of the productiveness of
labour that accompanies it, the power of sudden expansion of capital grows
also; it grows, not merely because the elasticity of the capital already
functioning increases, not merely because the absolute wealth of society
expands, of which capital only forms an elastic part, not merely because
credit, under every special stimulus, at once places an unusual part of this
wealth at the disposal of production in the form of additional capital; it
grows, also, because the technical conditions of the process of production
themselves — machinery, means of transport, &c. — now admit of
the rapidest transformation of masses of surplus-product into additional means
of production. The mass of social wealth, overflowing with the advance of
accumulation, and transformable into additional capital, thrusts itself
frantically into old branches of production, whose market suddenly expands, or
into newly formed branches, such as railways, &c., the need for which grows
out of the development of the old ones. In all such cases, there must be the
possibility of throwing great masses of men suddenly on the decisive points
without injury to the scale of production in other spheres. Overpopulation
supplies these masses. The course characteristic of modern industry,
viz., a decennial cycle (interrupted by smaller oscillations), of
periods of average activity, production at high pressure, crisis and
stagnation, depends on the constant formation, the greater or less absorption,
and the re-formation of the industrial reserve army or surplus population. In
their turn, the varying phases of the industrial cycle recruit the surplus
population, and become one of the most energetic agents of its reproduction.
This peculiar course of modern industry, which occurs in no earlier period of
human history, was also impossible in the childhood of capitalist production.
The composition of capital changed but very slowly. With its accumulation,
therefore, there kept pace, on the whole, a corresponding growth in the demand
for labour. Slow as was the advance of accumulation compared with that of more
modern times, it found a check in the natural limits of the exploitable
labouring population, limits which could only be got rid of by forcible means
to be mentioned later. The expansion by fits and starts of the scale of
production is the preliminary to its equally sudden contraction; the latter
again evokes the former, but the former is impossible without disposable human
material, without an increase, in the number of labourers independently of the
absolute growth of the population. This increase is effected by the simple
process that constantly “sets free” a part of the labourers; by
methods which lessen the number of labourers employed in proportion to the
increased production. The whole form of the movement of modern industry
depends, therefore, upon the constant transformation of a part of the labouring
population into unemployed or half-employed hands. The superficiality of
Political Economy shows itself in the fact that it looks upon the expansion and
contraction of credit, which is a mere symptom of the periodic changes of the
industrial cycle, as their cause. As the heavenly bodies, once thrown into a
certain definite motion, always repeat this, so is it with social production as
soon as it is once thrown into this movement of alternate expansion and
contraction. Effects, in their turn, become causes, and the varying accidents
of the whole process, which always reproduces its own conditions, take on the
form of periodicity. When this periodicity is once consolidated, even Political
Economy then sees that the production of a relative surplus population —
i.e., surplus with regard to the average needs of the self-expansion
of capital — is a necessary condition of modern industry.

“Suppose,” says H. Merivale, formerly Professor
of Political Economy at Oxford, subsequently employed in the English Colonial
Office, “suppose that, on the occasion of some of these crises, the
nation were to rouse itself to the effort of getting rid by emigration of some
hundreds of thousands of superfluous arms, what would be the consequence? That,
at the first returning demand for labour, there would be a
deficiency. However rapid reproduction may be, it takes, at all
events, the space of a generation to replace the loss of adult labour. Now, the
profits of our manufacturers depend mainly on the power of making use of the
prosperous moment when demand is brisk, and thus compensating themselves for
the interval during which it is slack. This power is secured
to them only by the command of machinery and of manual labour. They must have
hands ready by them, they must be able to increase the activity of their
operations when required, and to slacken it again, according to the state of
the market, or they cannot possibly maintain that pre-eminence in the race of
competition on which the wealth of the country is founded.” [16]

Even Malthus recognises overpopulation as a necessity of modern industry,
though, after his narrow fashion, he explains it by the absolute over-growth of
the labouring population, not by their becoming relatively supernumerary. He
says:

“Prudential habits with regard to marriage, carried to
a considerable extent among the labouring class of a country mainly depending
upon manufactures and commerce, might injure it.... From the nature of a population, an increase of labourers cannot
be brought into market in consequence of a particular demand till after the
lapse of 16 or 18 years, and the conversion of revenue into capital, by saving,
may take place much more rapidly: a country is always liable to an increase in
the quantity of the funds for the maintenance of labour faster than the
increase of population.” [17]

After Political Economy has thus demonstrated the constant production of a
relative surplus population of labourers to be a necessity of capitalistic
accumulation, she very aptly, in the guise of an old maid, puts in the mouth of
her “beau ideal” of a capitalist the following words addressed to
those supernumeraries thrown on the streets by their own creation of additional
capital: —

“We manufacturers do what we can for you, whilst we are
increasing that capital on which you must subsist, and you must do the rest by
accommodating your numbers to the means of subsistence.” [18]

Capitalist production can by no means content itself with the quantity of
disposable labour power which the natural increase of population yields. It
requires for its free play an industrial reserve army independent of these
natural limits.

Up to this point it has been assumed that the increase or
diminution of the variable capital corresponds rigidly with the
increase or diminution of the number of labourers employed.

The number of labourers commanded by capital may remain the same, or even
fall, while the variable capital increases. This is the case if the individual
labourer yields more labour, and therefore his wages increase, and this
although the price of labour remains the same or even falls, only more slowly
than the mass of labour rises. Increase of variable capital, in this case,
becomes an index of more labour, but not of more labourers employed. It is the
absolute interest of every capitalist to press a given quantity of labour out
of a smaller, rather than a greater number of labourers, if the cost is about
the same. In the latter case, the outlay of constant capital increases in
proportion to the mass of labour set in action; in the former that increase is
much smaller. The more extended the scale of production, the stronger this
motive. Its force increases with the accumulation of capital.

We have seen that the development of the capitalist mode of production and
of the productive power of labour — at once the cause and effect of
accumulation — enables the capitalist, with the same outlay of variable
capital, to set in action more labour by greater exploitation (extensive or
intensive) of each individual labour power. We have further seen that the
capitalist buys with the same capital a greater mass of labour power, as he
progressively replaces skilled labourers by less skilled, mature labour power
by immature, male by female, that of adults by that of young persons or
children.

On the one hand, therefore, with the progress of accumulation, a larger
variable capital sets more labour in action without enlisting more labourers;
on the other, a variable capital of the same magnitude sets in action more
labour with the same mass of labour power; and, finally, a greater number of
inferior labour powers by displacement of higher.

The production of a relative surplus population, or the setting free of
labourers, goes on therefore yet more rapidly than the technical revolution of
the process of production that accompanies, and is accelerated by, the advance
of accumulation; and more rapidly than the corresponding diminution of the
variable part of capital as compared with the constant. If the means of
production, as they increase in extent and effective power, become to a less
extent means of employment of labourers, this state of things is again modified
by the fact that in proportion as the productiveness of labour increases,
capital increases its supply of labour more quickly than its demand for
labourers. The overwork of the employed part of the working class swells the
ranks of the reserve, whilst conversely the greater pressure that the latter by
its competition exerts on the former, forces these to submit to overwork and to
subjugation under the dictates of capital. The condemnation of one
part of the working class to enforced idleness by the overwork of the other
part, and the converse, becomes a means of enriching the individual
capitalists, [19] and accelerates
at the same time the production of the industrial reserve army on a scale
corresponding with the advance of social accumulation. How important is this
element in the formation of the relative surplus population, is shown by the
example of England. Her technical means for saving labour are colossal.
Nevertheless, if to-morrow morning labour generally were reduced to a rational
amount, and proportioned to the different sections of the working class
according to age and sex, the working population to hand would be absolutely
insufficient for the carrying on of national production on its present scale.
The great majority of the labourers now “unproductive” would have
to be turned into “productive” ones.

Taking them as a whole, the general movements of wages are exclusively
regulated by the expansion and contraction of the industrial reserve army, and
these again correspond to the periodic changes of the industrial cycle. They
are, therefore, not determined by the variations of the absolute number of the
working population, but by the varying proportions in which the working class
is divided into active and reserve army, by the increase or diminution in the
relative amount of the surplus population, by the extent to which it is now
absorbed, now set free. For Modern Industry with its decennial cycles and
periodic phases, which, moreover, as accumulation advances, are complicated by
irregular oscillations following each other more and more quickly,
that would indeed be a beautiful law, which pretends to make the
action of capital dependent on the absolute variation of the population,
instead of regulating the demand and supply of labour by the alternate
expansion and contraction of capital, the labour-market now appearing
relatively under-full, because capital is expanding, now again over-full,
because it is contracting. Yet this is the dogma of the economists. According
to them, wages rise in consequence of accumulation of capital. The higher wages
stimulate the working population to more rapid multiplication, and this goes on
until the labour-market becomes too full, and therefore capital, relatively to
the supply of labour, becomes insufficient. Wages fall, and now we have the
reverse of the medal. The working population is little by little decimated as
the result of the fall in wages, so that capital is again in excess relatively
to them, or, as others explain it, falling wages and the corresponding increase
in the exploitation of the labourer again accelerates accumulation, whilst, at
the same time, the lower wages hold the increase of the working class in check.
Then comes again the time, when the supply of labour is less than the demand,
wages rise, and so on. A beautiful mode of motion this for developed capitalist
production! Before, in consequence of the rise of wages, any positive increase
of the population really fit for work could occur, the time would have been
passed again and again, during which the industrial campaign must have been
carried through, the battle fought and won.

Between 1849 and 1859, a rise of wages practically insignificant, though
accompanied by falling prices of corn, took place in the English agricultural
districts. In Wiltshire, e.g., the weekly wages rose from 7s. to 8s.;
in Dorsetshire from 7s. or 8s., to 9s., &c. This was the result of an
unusual exodus of the agricultural surplus population caused by the demands of
war, the vast extension of railroads, factories, mines, &c. The lower the
wages, the higher is the proportion in which ever so insignificant a rise of
them expresses itself. If the weekly wage, e.g., is 20s. and it rises
to 22s., that is a rise of 10 per cent.; but if it is only 7s. and it rises to
9s., that is a rise of 28 4/7 per cent., which sounds very fine. Everywhere the
farmers were howling, and the London Economist, with reference to
these starvation-wages, prattled quite seriously of “a general and
substantial advance.” [20]
What did the farmers do now? Did they wait until, in consequence of this
brilliant remuneration, the agricultural labourers had so increased and
multiplied that their wages must fall again, as prescribed by the dogmatic
economic brain? They introduced more machinery, and in a moment the labourers
were redundant again in a proportion satisfactory even to the
farmers. There was now “more capital” laid out in agriculture than
before, and in a more productive form. With this the demand for labour fell,
not only relatively, but absolutely.

The above economic fiction confuses the laws that regulate the general
movement of wages, or the ratio between the working class —
i.e., the total labour power — and the total social capital,
with the laws that distribute the working population over the different spheres
of production. If, e.g., in consequence of favourable circumstances,
accumulation in a particular sphere of production becomes especially active,
and profits in it, being greater than the average profits, attract additional
capital, of course the demand for labour rises and wages also rise. The higher
wages draw a larger part of the working population into the more favoured
sphere, until it is glutted with labour power, and wages at length fall again
to their average level or below it, if the pressure is too great. Then, not
only does the immigration of labourers into the branch of industry in question
cease; it gives place to their emigration. Here the political economist thinks
he sees the why and wherefore of an absolute increase of workers accompanying
an increase of wages, and of a diminution of wages accompanying an absolute
increase of labourers. But he sees really only the local oscillation of the
labour-market in a particular sphere of production — he sees only the
phenomena accompanying the distribution of the working population into the
different spheres of outlay of capital, according to its varying needs.

The industrial reserve army, during the periods of stagnation and average
prosperity, weighs down the active labour-army; during the periods of
over-production and paroxysm, it holds its pretensions in check. Relative
surplus population is therefore the pivot upon which the law of demand and
supply of labour works. It confines the field of action of this law within the
limits absolutely convenient to the activity of exploitation and to the
domination of capital.

This is the place to return to one of the grand exploits of economic
apologetics. It will be remembered that if through the introduction of new, or
the extension of old, machinery, a portion of variable capital is transformed
into constant, the economic apologist interprets this operation which
“fixes” capital and by that very act sets labourers
“free,” in exactly the opposite way, pretending that it sets free
capital for the labourers. Only now can one fully understand the effrontery of
these apologists. What are set free are not only the labourers immediately
turned out by the machines, but also their future substitutes in the rising
generation, and the additional contingent, that with the usual extension of
trade on the old basis would be regularly absorbed. They are now all “set
free,” and every new bit of capital looking out for employment
can dispose of them. Whether it attracts them or others, the effect on the
general labour demand will be nil, if this capital is just sufficient to take
out of the market as many labourers as the machines threw upon it. If it
employs a smaller number, that of the supernumeraries increases; if it employs
a greater, the general demand for labour only increases to the extent of the
excess of the employed over those “set free.” The impulse that
additional capital, seeking an outlet, would otherwise have given to the
general demand for labour, is therefore in every case neutralised to the extent
of the labourers thrown out of employment by the machine. That is to say, the
mechanism of capitalistic production so manages matters that the absolute
increase of capital is accompanied by no corresponding rise in the general
demand for labour. And this the apologist calls a compensation for the misery,
the sufferings, the possible death of the displaced labourers during the
transition period that banishes them into the industrial reserve army! The
demand for labour is not identical with increase of capital, nor supply of
labour with increase of the working class. It is not a case of two independent
forces working on one another. Les dés sont pipés.

Capital works on both sides at the same time. If its accumulation, on the
one hand, increases the demand for labour, it increases on the other the supply
of labourers by the “setting free” of them, whilst at the same time
the pressure of the unemployed compels those that are employed to furnish more
labour, and therefore makes the supply of labour, to a certain extent,
independent of the supply of labourers. The action of the law of supply and
demand of labour on this basis completes the despotism of capital. As soon,
therefore, as the labourers learn the secret, how it comes to pass that in the
same measure as they work more, as they produce more wealth for others, and as
the productive power of their labour increases, so in the same measure even
their function as a means of the self-expansion of capital becomes more and
more precarious for them; as soon as they discover that the degree of intensity
of the competition among themselves depends wholly on the pressure of the
relative surplus population; as soon as, by Trades’ Unions, &c., they
try to organise a regular co-operation between employed and unemployed in order
to destroy or to weaken the ruinous effects of this natural law of capitalistic
production on their class, so soon capital and its sycophant, Political
Economy, cry out at the infringement of the “eternal” and so to say
“sacred” law of supply and demand. Every combination of employed
and unemployed disturbs the “harmonious” action of this law. But,
on the other hand, as soon as (in the colonies, e.g.) adverse
circumstances prevent the creation of an industrial reserve army and, with it,
the absolute dependence of the working class upon the capitalist class,
capital, along with its commonplace Sancho Panza, rebels against the
“sacred” law of supply and demand, and tries to check its
inconvenient action by forcible means and State interference.

### Section 4. Different Forms of the Relative surplus population. The General Law of Capitalistic Accumulation

The relative surplus population exists in every possible form. Every
labourer belongs to it during the time when he is only partially employed or
wholly unemployed. Not taking into account the great periodically recurring
forms that the changing phases of the industrial cycle impress on it, now an
acute form during the crisis, then again a chronic form during dull times
— it has always three forms, the floating, the latent, the stagnant.

In the centres of modern industry — factories, manufactures,
ironworks, mines, &c. — the labourers are sometimes repelled,
sometimes attracted again in greater masses, the number of those employed
increasing on the whole, although in a constantly decreasing proportion to the
scale of production. Here the surplus population exists in the floating form.

In the automatic factories, as in all the great workshops, where machinery
enters as a factor, or where only the modern division of labour is carried out,
large numbers of boys are employed up to the age of maturity. When this term is
once reached, only a very small number continue to find employment in the same
branches of industry, whilst the majority are regularly discharged. This
majority forms an element of the floating surplus population, growing with the
extension of those branches of industry. Part of them emigrates, following in
fact capital that has emigrated. One consequence is that the female population
grows more rapidly than the male, teste England. That the natural
increase of the number of labourers does not satisfy the requirements of the
accumulation of capital, and yet all the time is in excess of them, is a
contradiction inherent to the movement of capital itself. It wants larger
numbers of youthful labourers, a smaller number of adults. The contradiction is
not more glaring than that other one that there is a complaint of the want of
hands, while at the same time many thousands are out of work, because the
division of labour chains them to a particular branch of industry. [21]

The consumption of labour power by capital is, besides, so rapid
that the labourer, half-way through his life, has already more or less
completely lived himself out. He falls into the ranks of the supernumeraries,
or is thrust down from a higher to a lower step in the scale. It is precisely
among the work-people of modern industry that we meet with the shortest
duration of life. Dr. Lee, Medical Officer of Health for Manchester, stated

“that the average age at death of the Manchester ...
upper middle class was 38 years, while the average age at death of the
labouring class was 17; while at Liverpool those figures were represented as 35
against 15. It thus appeared that the well-to-do classes had a lease of life
which was more than double the value of that which fell to the lot of the less
favoured citizens.” [22]

In order to conform to these circumstances, the absolute increase of this
section of the proletariat must take place under conditions that shall swell
their numbers, although the individual elements are used up rapidly. Hence,
rapid renewal of the generations of labourers (this law does not hold for the
other classes of the population). This social need is met by early marriages, a
necessary consequence of the conditions in which the labourers of modern
industry live, and by the premium that the exploitation of children sets on
their production.

As soon as capitalist production takes possession of agriculture, and in
proportion to the extent to which it does so, the demand for an agricultural
labouring population falls absolutely, while the accumulation of the capital
employed in agriculture advances, without this repulsion being, as in
non-agricultural industries, compensated by a greater attraction. Part of the
agricultural population is therefore constantly on the point of passing over
into an urban or manufacturing proletariat, and on the look-out for
circumstances favourable to this transformation. (Manufacture is used here in
the sense of all non-agricultural industries.) [23] This source of relative surplus population is thus
constantly flowing. But the constant flow towards the towns
pre-supposes, in the country itself, a constant latent surplus
population, the extent of which becomes evident only when its channels of
outlet open to exceptional width. The agricultural labourer is therefore
reduced to the minimum of wages, and always stands with one foot already in the
swamp of pauperism.

The third category of the relative surplus population, the stagnant, forms a
part of the active labour army, but with extremely irregular employment. Hence
it furnishes to capital an inexhaustible reservoir of disposable labour power.
Its conditions of life sink below the average normal level of the working
class; this makes it at once the broad basis of special branches of capitalist
exploitation. It is characterised by maximum of working-time, and minimum of
wages. We have learnt to know its chief form under the rubric of
“domestic industry.” It recruits itself
constantly from the supernumerary forces of modern industry and agriculture,
and specially from those decaying branches of industry where handicraft is
yielding to manufacture, manufacture to machinery. Its extent grows, as with
the extent and energy of accumulation, the creation of a surplus population
advances. But it forms at the same time a self-reproducing and
self-perpetuating element of the working class, taking a proportionally greater
part in the general increase of that class than the other elements. In fact,
not only the number of births and deaths, but the absolute size of the families
stand in inverse proportion to the height of wages, and therefore to the amount
of means of subsistence of which the different categories of labourers dispose.
This law of capitalistic society would sound absurd to savages, or even
civilised colonists. It calls to mind the boundless reproduction of animals
individually weak and constantly hunted down. [24]

The lowest sediment of the relative surplus population finally dwells in the
sphere of pauperism. Exclusive of vagabonds, criminals, prostitutes, in a word,
the “dangerous” classes, this layer of society consists of three
categories. First, those able to work. One need only glance superficially at
the statistics of English pauperism to find that the quantity of paupers
increases with every crisis, and diminishes with every revival of trade.
Second, orphans and pauper children. These are candidates for the industrial
reserve army, and are, in times of great prosperity, as 1860, e.g.,
speedily and in large numbers enrolled in the active army of
labourers. Third, the demoralised and ragged, and those unable to work, chiefly
people who succumb to their incapacity for adaptation, due to the division of
labour; people who have passed the normal age of the labourer; the victims of
industry, whose number increases with the increase of dangerous machinery, of
mines, chemical works, &c., the mutilated, the sickly, the widows, &c.
Pauperism is the hospital of the active labour-army and the dead weight of the
industrial reserve army. Its production is included in that of the relative
surplus population, its necessity in theirs; along with the surplus population,
pauperism forms a condition of capitalist production, and of the capitalist
development of wealth. It enters into the faux frais of capitalist
production; but capital knows how to throw these, for the most part, from its
own shoulders on to those of the working class and the lower middle class.

The greater the social wealth, the functioning capital, the extent and
energy of its growth, and, therefore, also the absolute mass of the proletariat
and the productiveness of its labour, the greater is the industrial reserve
army. The same causes which develop the expansive power of capital, develop
also the labour power at its disposal. The relative mass of the industrial
reserve army increases therefore with the potential energy of wealth. But the
greater this reserve army in proportion to the active labour army, the greater
is the mass of a consolidated surplus population, whose misery is in inverse
ratio to its torment of labour. The more extensive, finally, the lazarus layers
of the working class, and the industrial reserve army, the greater is official
pauperism. This is the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation.
Like all other laws it is modified in its working by many circumstances,
the analysis of which does not concern us here.

The folly is now patent of the economic wisdom that preaches to the
labourers the accommodation of their number to the requirements of capital. The
mechanism of capitalist production and accumulation constantly effects this
adjustment. The first word of this adaptation is the creation of a relative
surplus population, or industrial reserve army. Its last word is the misery of
constantly extending strata of the active army of labour, and the dead weight
of pauperism.

The law by which a constantly increasing quantity of means of production,
thanks to the advance in the productiveness of social labour, may be set in
movement by a progressively diminishing expenditure of human power, this law,
in a capitalist society — where the labourer does not employ the means of
production, but the means of production employ the labourer — undergoes a
complete inversion and is expressed thus: the higher the productiveness of
labour, the greater is the pressure of the labourers on the means of
employment, the more precarious, therefore, becomes their condition of
existence, viz., the sale of their own labour power for the increasing
of another’s wealth, or for the self-expansion of capital. The fact that
the means of production, and the productiveness of labour, increase more
rapidly than the productive population, expresses itself, therefore,
capitalistically in the inverse form that the labouring population always
increases more rapidly than the conditions under which capital can employ this
increase for its own self-expansion.

We saw in Part IV., when analysing the production of relative surplus-value:
within the capitalist system all methods for raising the social productiveness
of labour are brought about at the cost of the individual labourer; all means
for the development of production transform themselves into means of domination
over, and exploitation of, the producers; they mutilate the labourer into a
fragment of a man, degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine,
destroy every remnant of charm in his work and turn it into a hated toil; they
estrange from him the intellectual potentialities of the labour process in the
same proportion as science is incorporated in it as an independent power; they
distort the conditions under which he works, subject him during the labour
process to a despotism the more hateful for its meanness; they transform his
life-time into working-time, and drag his wife and child beneath the wheels of
the Juggernaut of capital. But all methods for the production of surplus-value
are at the same time methods of accumulation; and every extension of
accumulation becomes again a means for the development of those methods. It
follows therefore that in proportion as capital accumulates, the lot of the
labourer, be his payment high or low, must grow worse. The
law, finally, that always equilibrates the relative surplus population, or
industrial reserve army, to the extent and energy of accumulation, this law
rivets the labourer to capital more firmly than the wedges of Vulcan did
Prometheus to the rock. It establishes an accumulation of misery, corresponding
with accumulation of capital. Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore,
at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil slavery, ignorance,
brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole, i.e., on the side
of the class that produces its own product in the form of capital. [25] This antagonistic character of
capitalistic accumulation is enunciated in various forms by political
economists, although by them it is confounded with phenomena, certainly to some
extent analogous, but nevertheless essentially distinct, and belonging to
pre-capitalistic modes of production.

The Venetian monk Ortes, one of the great economic writers of the 18th
century, regards the antagonism of capitalist production as a general natural
law of social wealth.

“In the economy of a nation, advantages and evils
always balance one another (il bene ed il male economico in una nazione sempre
all, istessa misura): the abundance of wealth with some people, is always equal
to the want of it with others (la copia dei beni in alcuni sempre eguale
alia mancanza di essi in altri): the great riches of a small number are
always accompanied by the absolute privation of the first necessaries of life
for many others. The wealth of a nation corresponds with its population, and
its misery corresponds with its wealth. Diligence in some compels idleness in
others. The poor and idle are a necessary consequence of the rich and
active,” &c. [26]

In a thoroughly brutal way about 10 years after Ortes, the Church of England
parson, Townsend, glorified misery as a necessary condition of wealth.

“Legal constraint (to labour) is attended with too much
trouble, violence, and noise, whereas hunger is not only a peaceable, silent,
unremitted pressure, but as the most natural motive to industry and labour, it
calls forth the most powerful exertions.”

Everything therefore depends upon making hunger permanent among the working
class, and for this, according to Townsend, the principle of population,
especially active among the poor, provides.

“It seems to be a law of Nature that the poor should be
to a certain degree improvident” [i.e., so improvident as to be
born without a silver spoon in the mouth], “that there may
always be some to fulfil the most servile, the most sordid,
and the most ignoble offices in the community. The stock of human happiness is
thereby much increased, whilst the more delicate are not only relieved from
drudgery ... but are left at liberty without interruption to pursue those
callings which are suited to their various dispositions ... it” [the Poor
Law] “tends to destroy the harmony and beauty, the symmetry and order of
that system which God and Nature have established in the world.” [27] If the Venetian monk
found in the fatal destiny that makes misery eternal, the raison
d’être of Christian charity, celibacy, monasteries and holy houses,
the Protestant prebendary finds in it a pretext for condemning the laws in
virtue of which the poor possessed a right to a miserable public relief.

“The progress of social wealth,” says Storch,
“begets this useful class of society ... which performs the most
wearisome, the vilest, the most disgusting functions, which takes, in a word,
on its shoulders all that is disagreeable and servile in life, and procures
thus for other classes leisure, serenity of mind and conventional”
[c’est bon!] “dignity of character.” [28]

Storch asks himself in what then really consists the progress of this
capitalistic civilisation with its misery and its degradation of the masses, as
compared with barbarism. He finds but one answer: security!

“Thanks to the advance of industry and science,”
says Sismondi, “every labourer can produce every day much more than his
consumption requires. But at the same time, whilst his labour produces wealth,
that wealth would, were he called on to consume it himself, make him less fit
for labour.” According to him, “men” [i.e.,
non-workers] “would probably prefer to do without all artistic
perfection, and all the enjoyments that manufacturers procure for us, if it
were necessary that all should buy them by constant toil like that of the
labourer.... Exertion today is separated from its recompense; it is not the
same man that first works, and then reposes; but it is because the one works
that the other rests.... The indefinite multiplication of the productive powers
of labour can then only have for result the increase of luxury and enjoyment of
the idle rich.” [29]

Finally Destutt de Tracy, the fish-blooded bourgeois doctrinaire, blurts out
brutally:

“In poor nations the people are comfortable, in rich
nations they are generally poor.” [30]

### Section 5. Illustrations of the General Law of Capitalist Accumulation

### A. England from 1846-1866

No period of modern society is so favourable for the study of capitalist
accumulation as the period of the last 20 years. It is as if this period had
found Fortunatus’ purse. But of all countries England again furnishes the
classical example, because it holds the foremost place in the world-market,
because capitalist production is here alone completely developed, and lastly,
because the introduction of the Free-trade millennium since 1846 has cut off
the last retreat of vulgar economy. The titanic advance of production —
the latter half of the 20 years’ period again far surpassing the former
— has been already pointed out sufficiently in Part IV.

Although the absolute increase of the English population in the last half
century was very great, the relative increase or rate of growth fell
constantly, as the following table borrowed from the census shows.

Annual increase per cent. of the population of England and Wales in decimal
numbers:

1811-1821
1.533 per cent.

1821-1831
1.446 per cent.

1831-1841
1.326 per cent.

1841-1851
1.216 per cent.

1851-1861
1.141 per cent.

Let us now, on the other hand, consider the increase of wealth. Here the
movement of profit, rent of land, &c., that come under the income tax,
furnishes the surest basis. The increase of profits liable to income tax
(farmers and some other categories not included) in Great Britain from 1853 to
1864 amounted to 50.47% or 4.58% as the annual average, [31] that of the population during the same period to
about 12%. The augmentation of the rent of land subject to taxation (including
houses, railways, mines, fisheries, &c.), amounted for 1853 to 1864 to 38%
or 3 5/12% annually. Under this head the following categories show the greatest
increase:

Excess of annual income

of 1864 over that of 1853
Increase

per year

Houses
38.60%
3.50%

Quarries
84.76%
7.70%

Mines
68.85%
6.26%

Ironworks
39.92%
3.63%

Fisheries
57.37%
5.21%

Gasworks
126.02%
11.45%

Railways
83.29%
7.57%

If we compare the years from 1853 to 1864 in three sets of four consecutive
years each, the rate of augmentation of the income increases constantly. [32] It is, e.g., for that
arising from profits between 1853 to 1857, 1.73% yearly; 1857-1861, 2.74%, and
for 1861-64, 9.30% yearly. The sum of the incomes of the United Kingdom that
come under the income tax was in 1856, £307,068,898; in 1859, £328,127,416; in
1862, £351,745,241; in 1863, £359,142,897; in 1864, £362,462,279; in 1865,
£385,530,020. [33]

The accumulation of capital was attended at the same time by its
concentration and centralisation. Although no official statistics of
agriculture existed for England (they did for Ireland), they were voluntarily
given in 10 counties. These statistics gave the result that from 1851 to 1861
the number of farms of less than 100 acres had fallen from 31,583 to 26,597, so
that 5,016 had been thrown together into larger farms. [34] From 1815 to 1825 no personal estate of more than
£1,000,000 came under the succession duty; from 1825 to 1855, however, 8 did;
and 4 from 1856 to June, 1859, i.e., in 4½ years. [35] The centralisation will, however,
be best seen from a short analysis of the Income Tax Schedule D (profits,
exclusive of farms, &c.), in the years 1864 and 1865. I note beforehand
that incomes from this source pay income tax on everything over £60. These
incomes liable to taxation in England, Wales and Scotland, amounted in 1864 to
£95,844,222, in 1865 to £105,435,579. [36] The number of persons taxed were in 1864, 308,416,
out of a population of 23,891,009; in 1865, 332,431 out of a population of
24,127,003. The following table shows the distribution of these incomes in the
two years:

Year ending

April 5th, 1864.
Year ending

April 5th, 1865.

Income from

Profits
Income from

People
Income from

Profits
Income from

People

Total Income
£95,844,222
308,416
105,435,738
332,431

of these
57,028,289
23,334
64,554,297
24,265

of these
36,415,225
3,619
42,535,576
4,021

of these
22,809,781
832
27,555,313
973

of these
8,744,762
91
11,077,238
107

In 1855 there were produced in the United Kingdom 61,453,079 tons of coal,
of value £16,113,167; in 1864, 92,787,873 tons, of value £23,197,968; in 1855,
3,218,154 tons of pig-iron, of value £8,045,385; 1864, 4,767,951 tons, of value
£11,919,877. In 1854 the length of the railroads worked in the United Kingdom
was 8,054 miles, with a paid-up capital of £286,068,794; in 1864 the length was
12,789 miles, with capital paid up of £425,719,613. In 1854 the total sum of
the exports and imports of the United Kingdom was £268,210,145; in 1865,
£489,923,285. The following table shows the movement of the exports:

1846
£58,842,377

1849
63,596,052

1856
115,826,948

1860
135,842,817

1865
165,862,402

1866[37]
188,917,563

After these few examples one understands the cry of triumph of the
Registrar-General of the British people:

“Rapidly as the population has increased, it has not
kept pace with the progress of industry and wealth.” [38]

Let us turn now to the direct agents of this industry, or the producers of
this wealth, to the working class.

“It is one of the most melancholy features in the
social state of this country,” says Gladstone, “that while there
was a decrease in the consuming powers of the people, and while there was an
increase in the privations and distress of the labouring class and operatives,
there was at the same time a constant accumulation of wealth in the upper
classes, and a constant increase of capital.” [39]

Thus spake this unctuous minister in the House of Commons of February 13th,
1843. On April 16th, 1863, 20 years later, in the speech in which he introduced
his Budget:

“From 1842 to 1852 the taxable income of the country
increased by 6 per cent.... In the 8 years from 1853 to 1861 it had increased
from the basis taken in 1853 by 20 per cent.! The fact is so astonishing as to
be almost incredible ... this intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power ...
entirely confined to classes of property ... must be of indirect benefit to the
labouring population, because it cheapens the commodities of general consumption.
While the rich have been growing richer, the poor have been growing less poor.
At any rate, whether the extremes of poverty are less, I do not presume to
say.” [40]

How lame an anti-climax! If the working class has remained
“poor,” only “less poor” in proportion as it produces
for the wealthy class “an intoxicating augmentation of wealth and
power,” then it has remained relatively just as poor. If the extremes of
poverty have not lessened, they have increased, because the extremes of wealth
have. As to the cheapening of the means of subsistence, the official
statistics, e.g., the accounts of the London Orphan Asylum, show an
increase in price of 20% for the average of the three years 1860-1862, compared
with 1851-1853. In the following three years, 1863-1865, there was a
progressive rise in the price of meat, butter, milk, sugar, salt, coals, and a
number of other necessary means of subsistence. [41] Gladstone’s next Budget speech of
April 7th, 1864, is a Pindaric dithyrambus on the advance of
surplus-value-making and the happiness of the people “tempered by
poverty.” He speaks of masses “on the border” of pauperism,
of branches of trade in which “wages have not increased,” and
finally sums up the happiness of the working class in the words:

“human life is but, in nine cases out of ten, a
struggle for existence.” [42]

Professor Fawcett, not bound like Gladstone by official
considerations, declares roundly:

“I do not, of course, deny that money wages have been
augmented by this increase of capital (in the last ten years), but this
apparent advantage is to a great extent lost, because many of the necessaries
of life are becoming dearer” (he believes because of the fall in value of
the precious metals)..."the rich grow rapidly richer, whilst there is no
perceptible advance in the comfort enjoyed by the industrial classes.... They
(the labourers) become almost the slaves of the tradesman, to whom they owe
money.” [43]

In the chapters on the “working-day” and
“machinery,” the reader has seen under what circumstances the
British working class created an “intoxicating augmentation of wealth and
power” for the propertied classes. There we were chiefly concerned with
the social functioning of the labourer. But for a full elucidation of the law
of accumulation, his condition outside the workshop must also be looked at, his
condition as to food and dwelling. The limits of this book compel us to concern
ourselves chiefly with the worst paid part of the industrial proletariat, and
with the agricultural labourers, who together form the majority of the working
class.

But first, one word on official pauperism, or on that part of the working
class which has forfeited its condition of existence (the sale of labour
power), and vegetates upon public alms. The official list of
paupers numbered in England [44] 851,369 persons; in 1856, 877,767; in 1865, 971,433.
In consequence of the cotton famine, it grew in the years 1863 and 1864 to
1,079,382 and 1,014,978. The crisis of 1866, which fell most heavily on London,
created in this centre of the world market, more populous than the kingdom of
Scotland, an increase of pauperism for the year 1866 of 19.5% compared with
1865, and of 24.4% compared with 1864, and a still greater increase for the
first months of 1867 as compared with 1866. From the analysis of the statistics
of pauperism, two points are to be taken. On the one hand, the fluctuation up
and down of the number of paupers, reflects the periodic changes of the industrial cycle. On the other, the official statistics
become more and more misleading as to the actual extent of pauperism in
proportion as, with the accumulation of capital, the class-struggle, and,
therefore, the class consciousness of the working men, develop. E.g.,
the barbarity in the treatment of the paupers, at which the English Press
(The Times, Pall Mall Gazette, etc.) have cried out so loudly during
the last two years, is of ancient date. F. Engels showed in 1844 exactly the
same horrors, exactly the same transient canting outcries of “sensational
literature.” But frightful increase of “deaths by starvation”
in London during the last ten years proves beyond doubt the growing horror in
which the working-people hold the slavery of the workhouse, that place of
punishment for misery. [45]

### B. The Badly Paid Strata of the British Industrial Class

During the cotton famine of 1862, Dr. Smith was charged by the Privy Council
with an inquiry into the conditions of nourishment of the distressed operatives
in Lancashire and Cheshire. His observations during many preceding years had
led him to the conclusion that “to avert starvation diseases,” the
daily food of an average woman ought to contain at least 3,900 grains of carbon
with 180 grains of nitrogen; the daily food of an average man, at least 4,300
grains of carbon with 200 grains of nitrogen; for women, about the same
quantity of nutritive elements as are contained in 2 lbs. of good wheaten
bread, for men 1/9 more; for the weekly average of adult men and women, at
least 28,600 grains of carbon and 1,330 grains of nitrogen. His
calculation was practically confirmed in a surprising manner by its
agreement with the miserable quantity of nourishment to which want had forced
down the consumption of the cotton operatives. This was, in December, 1862,
29,211 grains of carbon, and 1,295 grains of nitrogen weekly.

In the year 1863, the Privy Council ordered an inquiry into the state of
distress of the worst-nourished part of the English working class. Dr. Simon,
medical officer to the Privy Council, chose for this work the above-mentioned
Dr. Smith. His inquiry ranges on the one hand over the agricultural labourers,
on the other, over silk-weavers, needlewomen, kid-glovers, stocking-weavers,
glove-weavers, and shoemakers. The latter categories are, with the exception of
the stocking-weavers, exclusively town-dwellers. It was made a rule in the
inquiry to select in each category the most healthy families, and those
comparatively in the best circumstances.

As a general result it was found that

“in only one of the examined classes of in-door
operatives did the average nitrogen supply just exceed, while in another it
nearly reached, the estimated standard of bare sufficiency [i.e.,
sufficient to avert starvation diseases], and that in two classes there was
defect — in one, a very large defect — of both nitrogen and carbon.
Moreover, as regards the examined families of the agricultural population, it
appeared that more than a fifth were with less than the estimated sufficiency
of carbonaceous food, that more than one-third were with less than the
estimated sufficiency of nitrogenous food, and that in three counties
(Berkshire, Oxfordshire, and Somersetshire), insufficiency of nitrogenous food
was the average local diet.” [46]

Among the agricultural labourers, those of England, the wealthiest part of
the United Kingdom, were the worst fed. [47] The insufficiency of food among the agricultural
labourers, fell, as a rule, chiefly on the women and children, for “the
man must eat to do his work.” Still greater penury ravaged the
town-workers examined.

“They are so ill fed that assuredly among them there
must be many cases of severe and injurious privation.” [48]

(“Privation” of the capitalist all this! i.e.,
“abstinence” from paying for the means of subsistence absolutely
necessary for the mere vegetation of his “hands.”) [49]

The following table shows the conditions of nourishment of the above-named
categories of purely town-dwelling work-people, as compared with the minimum
assumed by Dr. Smith, and with the food-allowance of the cotton operatives
during the time of their greatest distress:

Both Sexes
Average weekly

carbon
Average weekly

nitrogen

Five in-door

occupations
28,876 grains
1,192 grains

Unemployed Lancashire

Operatives
28,211 grains
1,295 grains

Minimum quantity to be

allowed to the Lancashire

Operatives, equal number

of males and females
28,600 grains
1,330 grains

One half, or 60/125, of the industrial labour categories investigated, had
absolutely no beer, 28% no milk. The weekly average of the liquid means of
nourishment in the families varied from seven ounces in the needle-women to 24¾
ounces in the stocking-makers. The majority of those who did not obtain milk
were needle-women in London. The quantity of bread-stuffs consumed weekly
varied from 7¾ lbs. for the needle-women to 11½ lbs. for the
shoemakers, and gave a total average of 9.9 lbs. per adult weekly. Sugar
(treacle, etc.) varied from 4 ounces weekly for the kid-glovers to 11 ounces
for the stocking-makers; and the total average per week for all categories was
8 ounces per adult weekly. Total weekly average of butter (fat, etc.) 5 ounces
per adult. The weekly average of meat (bacon, etc.) varied from 7¼ ounces for
the silk-weavers, to 18¼ ounces for the kid-glovers; total average for the
different categories 13.6 ounces. The weekly cost of food per adult, gave the
following average figures; silk-weavers 2s. 2½d., needle-women 2s. 7d.,
kid-glovers 2s. 9½d., shoemakers 2s 7¾d., stocking-weavers 2s. 6¼d. For the
silk-weavers of Macclesfield the average was only 1s. 8½d. The worst categories
were the needle-women, silk-weavers and kid-glovers. [50] Of these facts, Dr. Simon in his General Health
Report says:

“That cases are innumerable in which defective diet is
the cause or the aggravator of disease, can be affirmed by any one who is
conversant with poor law medical practice, or with the wards and out-patient
rooms of hospitals.... Yet in this point of view, there is, in my opinion, a
very important sanitary context to be added. It must be remembered that
privation of food is very reluctantly borne, and that as a rule great poorness
of diet will only come when other privations have preceded it. Long before
insufficiency of diet is a matter of hygienic concern, long before the
physiologist would think of counting the grains of nitrogen and carbon which
intervene between life and starvation, the household will have been utterly
destitute of material comfort; clothing and fuel will have been even scantier
than food — against inclemencies of weather there will have been no
adequate protection — dwelling space will have been stinted to the degree
in which overcrowding produces or increases disease; of household utensils and
furniture there will have been scarcely any — even cleanliness will have been
found costly or difficult, and if there still be self-respectful endeavours to
maintain it, every such endeavour will represent additional pangs of hunger.
The home, too, will be where shelter can be cheapest bought; in quarters where
commonly there is least fruit of sanitary supervision, least drainage, least
scavenging, least suppression of public nuisances, least or worst water supply,
and, if in town, least light and air. Such are the sanitary
dangers to which poverty is almost certainly exposed, when it is poverty enough
to imply scantiness of food. And while the sum of them is of terrible magnitude
against life, the mere scantiness of food is in itself of very serious
moment.... These are painful reflections, especially when it is remembered that
the poverty to which they advert is not the deserved poverty of idleness. In
all cases it is the poverty of working populations. Indeed, as regards the
in-door operatives, the work which obtains the scanty pittance of food, is for
the most part excessively prolonged. Yet evidently it is only in a qualified
sense that the work can be deemed self-supporting.... And on a very large scale
the nominal self-support can be only a circuit, longer or shorter, to
pauperism.” [51]

The intimate connexion between the pangs of hunger of the most industrious
layers of the working class, and the extravagant consumption, coarse or
refined, of the rich, for which capitalist accumulation is the basis, reveals
itself only when the economic laws are known. It is otherwise with the
“housing of the poor.” Every unprejudiced observer sees that the
greater the centralisation of the means of production, the greater is the
corresponding heaping together of the labourers, within a given space; that
therefore the swifter capitalistic accumulation, the more miserable are the
dwellings of the working-people. “Improvements” of towns,
accompanying the increase of wealth, by the
demolition of badly built quarters, the erection of palaces for banks,
warehouses, &c., the widening of streets for business traffic, for the
carriages of luxury, and for the introduction of tramways, &c., drive away
the poor into even worse and more crowded hiding places. On the other hand,
every one knows that the dearness of dwellings is in inverse ratio to their
excellence, and that the mines of misery are exploited by house speculators
with more profit or less cost than ever were the mines of Potosi. The
antagonistic character of capitalist accumulation, and therefore of the
capitalistic relations of property generally, [52] is here so evident, that even the official English
reports on this subject teem with heterodox onslaughts on “property and
its rights.” With the development of industry, with the accumulation of
capital, with the growth and “improvement” of towns, the evil makes
such progress that the mere fear of contagious diseases which do not spare even
“respectability,” brought into existence from 1847 to 1864 no less
than 10 Acts of Parliament on sanitation, and that the frightened bourgeois in
some towns, as Liverpool, Glasgow, &c., took strenuous measures through
their municipalities. Nevertheless Dr. Simon, in his report of 1865, says:

“Speaking generally, it may be said that the evils are
uncontrolled in England.”

By order of the Privy Council, in 1864, an inquiry was made into the
conditions of the housing of the agricultural labourers, in 1865 of the poorer
classes in the towns. The results of the admirable work of Dr. Julian Hunter
are to be found in the seventh (1865) and eighth (1866) reports on
“Public Health.” To the agricultural labourers, I shall come later.
On the condition of town dwellings, I quote, as preliminary, a general remark
of Dr. Simon.

“Although my official point of view,” he says,
“is one exclusively physical, common humanity requires that the other
aspect of this evil should not be ignored .... In its higher
degrees it [i.e., over-crowding] almost necessarily involves such
negation of all delicacy, such unclean confusion of bodies and bodily
functions, such exposure of animal and sexual nakedness, as is rather bestial
than human. To be subject to these influences is a degradation which must
become deeper and deeper for those on whom it continues to work. To children
who are born under its curse, it must often be a very baptism into infamy. And
beyond all measure hopeless is the wish that persons thus circumstanced should
ever in other respects aspire to that atmosphere of civilisation which has its
essence in physical and moral cleanliness.” [53]

London takes the first place in over-crowded habitations,
absolutely unfit for human beings.

“He feels clear,” says Dr. Hunter, “on two
points; first, that there are about 20 large colonies in London, of about
10,000 persons each, whose miserable condition exceeds almost anything he has
seen elsewhere in England, and is almost entirely the result of their bad house
accommodation; and second, that the crowded and dilapidated condition of the
houses of these colonies is much worse than was the case 20 years ago.”
[54] “It is not too much to
say that life in parts of London and Newcastle is infernal.” [55]

Further, the better-off part of the working class, together with the small
shopkeepers and other elements of the lower middle class, falls in London more
and more under the curse of these vile conditions of dwelling, in proportion as
“improvements,” and with them the demolition of old streets and
houses, advance, as factories and the afflux of human beings grow in the
metropolis, and finally as house rents rise with the ground-rents.

“Rents have become so heavy that few labouring men can
afford more than one room.” [56]

There is almost no house-property in London that is not overburdened with a
number of middlemen. For the price of land in London is always very high in
comparison with its yearly revenue, and therefore every buyer speculates on
getting rid of it again at a jury price (the expropriation valuation fixed by
jurymen), or on pocketing an extraordinary increase of value arising from the
neighbourhood of some large establishment. As a consequence of this there is a
regular trade in the purchase of “fag-ends of leases.”

“Gentlemen in this business may be fairly expected to
do as they do — get all they can from the tenants while they have them,
and leave as little as they can for their successors.” [57]

The rents are weekly, and these gentlemen run no risk. In consequence of the
making of railroads in the City,

“the spectacle has lately been seen in the East of
London of a number of families wandering about some Saturday night with their
scanty worldly goods on their backs, without any resting place but the
workhouse.” [58]

The workhouses are already over-crowded, and the “improvements”
already sanctioned by Parliament are only just begun. If labourers
are driven away by the demolition of their old houses, they do not leave their
old parish, or at most they settle down on its borders, as near as they can get
to it.

“They try, of course, to remain as near as possible to
their workshops. The inhabitants do not go beyond the same or the next parish,
parting their two-room tenements into single rooms, and crowding even those....
Even at an advanced rent, the people who are displaced will hardly be able to
get an accommodation so good as the meagre one they have left.... Half the
workmen ... of the Strand ... walked two miles to their work.” [59]

This same Strand, a main thoroughfare which gives strangers an imposing idea
of the wealth of London, may serve as an example of the packing together of
human beings in that town. In one of its parishes, the Officer of Health
reckoned 581 persons per acre, although half the width of the
Thames was reckoned in. It will be self-understood that every sanitary measure,
which, as has been the case hitherto in London, hunts the labourers from one
quarter, by demolishing uninhabitable houses, serves only to crowd them
together yet more closely in another.

“Either,” says Dr. Hunter, “the whole
proceeding will of necessity stop as an absurdity, or the public compassion (!)
be effectually aroused to the obligation which may now be without exaggeration
called national, of supplying cover to those who by reason of their having no
capital, cannot provide it for themselves, though they can by periodical
payments reward those who will provide it for them.” [60]

Admire this capitalistic justice! The owner of land, of houses, the
businessman, when expropriated by “improvements” such as railroads,
the building of new streets, &c., not only receives full indemnity. He
must, according to law, human and divine, be comforted for his enforced
“abstinence” over and above this by a thumping profit. The
labourer, with his wife and child and chattels, is thrown out into the street,
and — if he crowds in too large numbers towards quarters of the town
where the vestries insist on decency, he is prosecuted in the name of
sanitation!

Except London, there was at the beginning of the 19th century no single town
in England of 100,000 inhabitants. Only five had more than 50,000. Now there
are 28 towns with more than 50,000 inhabitants.

“The result of this change is not only that the class
of town people is enormously increased, but the old close-packed little towns
are now centres, built round on every side, open nowhere to air, and being no
longer agreeable to the rich are abandoned by them for the pleasanter
outskirts. The successors of these rich are occupying the larger
houses at the rate of a family to each room [... and find
accommodation for two or three lodgers ...] and a population, for which the
houses were not intended and quite unfit, has been created, whose surroundings
are truly degrading to the adults and ruinous to the children.” [61]

The more rapidly capital accumulates in an industrial or commercial town,
the more rapidly flows the stream of exploitable human material, the more
miserable are the improvised dwellings of the labourers.

Newcastle-on-Tyne, as the centre of a coal and iron district of growing
productiveness, takes the next place after London in the housing inferno. Not
less than 34,000 persons live there in single rooms. Because of their absolute
danger to the community, houses in great numbers have lately been destroyed by
the authorities in Newcastle and Gateshead. The building of new houses
progresses very slowly, business very quickly. The town was, therefore, in
1865, more full than ever. Scarcely a room was to let. Dr. Embleton, of the
Newcastle Fever Hospital, says:

“There can be little doubt that the great cause of the
continuance and spread of the typhus has been the over-crowding of human
beings, and the uncleanliness of their dwellings. The rooms, in which labourers in many cases live, are situated
in confined and unwholesome yards or courts, and for space, light, air, and
cleanliness, are models of insufficiency and insalubrity, and a disgrace to any
civilised community; in them men, women, and children lie at night huddled
together: and as regards the men, the night-shift succeed the day-shift, and
the day-shift the night-shift in unbroken series for some time together, the
beds having scarcely time to cool; the whole house badly supplied with water
and worse with privies; dirty, unventilated, and pestiferous.” [62]

The price per week of such lodgings ranges from 8d. to 3s.

“The town of Newcastle-on-Tyne,” says Dr. Hunter,
“contains a sample of the finest tribe of our countrymen, often sunk by
external circumstances of house and street into an almost savage
degradation.” [63]

As a result of the ebbing and flowing of capital and labour, the state of
the dwellings of an industrial town may today be bearable, tomorrow hideous. Or
the aedileship of the town may have pulled itself together for the removal of
the most shocking abuses. Tomorrow, like a swarm of locusts, come crowding in
masses of ragged Irishmen or decayed English agricultural labourers. They are stowed away in cellars and lofts, or the
hitherto respectable labourer’s dwelling is transformed into a lodging
house whose personnel changes as quickly as the billets in the 30
years’ war. Example: Bradford (Yorkshire). There the municipal philistine
was just busied with urban improvements. Besides, there were still in Bradford,
in 1861, 1,751 uninhabited houses. But now comes that revival of trade which
the mildly liberal Mr. Forster, the negro’s friend, recently crowed over
with so much grace. With the revival of trade came of course an overflow from
the waves of the ever fluctuating “reserve army” or “relative
surplus population.” The frightful cellar habitations and rooms
registered in the list, [64] which
Dr. Hunter obtained from the agent of an Insurance Company, were for the most
part inhabited by well-paid labourers. They declared that they would willingly
pay for better dwellings if they were to be had. Meanwhile, they become
degraded, they fall ill, one and all, whilst the mildly liberal Forster, M. P.,
sheds tears over the blessings of Free Trade, and the profits of the eminent
men of Bradford who deal in worsted. In the Report of September, 1865, Dr.
Bell, one of the poor law doctors of Bradford, ascribes the frightful mortality
of fever-patients in his district to the nature of their dwellings.

“In one small cellar measuring 1,500 cubic feet ...
there are ten persons .... Vincent Street, Green Aire Place, and the Leys
include 223 houses having 1,450 inhabitants, 435 beds, and 36 privies.... The beds — and in that term I include any roll of dirty old rags,
or an armful of shavings — have an average of 3.3 persons to each, many have 5
and 6 persons to each, and some people, I am told, are absolutely without beds;
they sleep in their ordinary clothes, on the bare boards — young men and
women, married and unmarried, all together. I need scarcely add that many of
these dwellings are dark, damp, dirty, stinking holes, utterly unfit for human
habitations; they are the centres from which disease and death are distributed
amongst those in better circumstances, who have allowed them thus to fester in
our midst.” [65]

Bristol takes the third place after London in the misery of its
dwellings.

“Bristol, where the blankest poverty and domestic
misery abound in the wealthiest town of Europe.” [66]

### C. The Nomad Population

We turn now to a class of people whose origin is agricultural, but whose
occupation is in great part industrial. They are the light infantry of capital,
thrown by it, according to its needs, now to this point, now to that. When they
are not on the march, they “camp.” Nomad labour is used for various
operations of building and draining, brick-making, lime-burning,
railway-making, &c. A flying column of pestilence, it carries into the
places in whose neighbourhood it pitches its camp, small-pox, typhus, cholera,
scarlet fever, &c. [67] In
undertakings that involve much capital outlay, such as railways, &c., the
contractor himself generally provides his army with wooden huts and the like,
thus improvising villages without any sanitary provisions, outside the control
of the local boards, very profitable to the contractor, who exploits the
labourers in two-fold fashion — as soldiers of industry and as tenants.
According as the wooden hut contains 1, 2, or 3 holes, its inhabitant, navvy,
or whatever he may be, has to pay 1, 3, or 4 shillings weekly. [68] One example will suffice. In
September, 1864, Dr. Simon reports that the Chairman of the Nuisances Removal
Committee of the parish of Sevenoaks sent the following denunciation to Sir
George Grey, Home Secretary: —

“Small-pox cases were rarely heard of in this parish
until about twelve months ago. Shortly before that time, the works for a
railway from Lewisham to Tunbridge were commenced here, and, in addition to the
principal works being in the immediate neighbourhood of this town, here was
also established the depôt for the whole of the works, so that a
large number of persons was of necessity employed here. As cottage
accommodation could not be obtained for them all, huts were built in several
places along the line of the works by the contractor, Mr. Jay, for their
especial occupation. These huts possessed no ventilation nor drainage, and,
besides, were necessarily over-crowded, because each occupant had to
accommodate lodgers, whatever the number in his own family might be, although
there were only two rooms to each tenement. The consequences were, according to
the medical report we received, that in the night-time these poor people were
compelled to endure all the horror of suffocation to avoid the pestiferous
smells arising from the filthy, stagnant water, and the privies close under
their windows. Complaints were at length made to the Nuisances Removal
Committee by a medical gentleman who had occasion to visit these huts, and he
spoke of their condition as dwellings in the most severe terms, and he
expressed his fears that some very serious consequences might ensue, unless
some sanitary measures were adopted. About a year ago, Mr. Jay promised to
appropriate a hut, to which persons in his employ, who were suffering from
contagious diseases, might at once be removed. He repeated that promise on the
23rd July last, but although since the date of the last Promise there have been
several cases of small-pox in his huts, and two deaths from the same disease,
yet he has taken no steps whatever to carry out his promise. On the 9th
September instant, Mr. Kelson, surgeon, reported to me further cases of
small-pox in the same huts, and he described their condition as most
disgraceful. I should add, for your (the Home
Secretary’s) information that an isolated house, called the Pest-house,
which is set apart for parishioners who might be suffering from infectious
diseases, has been continually occupied by such patients for many months past,
and is also now occupied; that in one family five children died from small-pox
and fever; that from the 1st April to the 1st September this year, a period of
five months, there have been no fewer than ten deaths from small-pox in the
parish, four of them being in the huts already referred to; that it is
impossible to ascertain the exact number of persons who have suffered from that
disease although they are known to be many, from the fact of the families
keeping it as private as possible.” [69]

The labourers in coal and other mines belong to the best paid
categories of the British proletariat. The price at which they buy their wages
was shown on an earlier page. [70]
Here I merely cast a hurried glance over the conditions of their dwellings. As
a rule, the exploiter of a mine, whether its owner or his tenant, builds a
number of cottages for his hands. They receive cottages and coal for firing
“for nothing” — i.e., these form part of their
wages, paid in kind. Those who are not lodged in this way receive in
compensation £4 per annum. The mining districts attract with rapidity a large
population, made up of the miners themselves, and the artisans, shopkeepers,
&c., that group themselves around them. The ground-rents are high, as they
are generally where population is dense. The master tries, therefore, to run
up, within the smallest space possible at the mouth of the pit, just so many
cottages as are necessary to pack together his hands and their families. If new
mines are opened in the neighbourhood, or old ones are again set working, the
pressure increases. In the construction of the cottages, only
one point of view is of moment, the “abstinence” of the capitalist
from all expenditure that is not absolutely unavoidable.

“The lodging which is obtained by the pitman and other
labourers connected with the collieries of Northumberland and Durham,”
says Dr. Julian Hunter, “is perhaps, on the whole, the worst and the
dearest of which any large specimens can be found in England, the similar
parishes of Monmouthshire excepted.... The extreme badness is in the high
number of men found in one room, in the smallness of the ground-plot on which a
great number of houses are thrust, the want of water, the absence of privies,
and the frequent placing of one house on the top of another, or distribution
into flats, ... the lessee acts as if the whole colony were encamped, not
resident.” [71]

“In pursuance of my instructions,” says Dr.
Stevens, “I visited most of the large colliery villages in the Durham
Union.... With very few exceptions, the general statement that no means are
taken to secure the health of the inhabitants would be true of all of them....
All colliers are bound ['bound,’ an expression which, like bondage, dates
from the age of serfdom] to the colliery lessee or owner for twelve months....
If the colliers express discontent, or in any way annoy the
‘viewer,’ a mark of memorandum is made against their names, and, at
the annual ‘binding,’ such men are turned off... It appears to
me that no part of the ‘truck system’ could be worse than
what obtains in these densely-populated districts. The collier is bound to take
as part of his hiring a house surrounded with pestiferous influences; he cannot
help himself, and it appears doubtful whether anyone else can help him except
his proprietor (he is, to all intents and purposes, a serf), and his proprietor
first consults his balance-sheet, and the result is tolerably certain. The
collier is also often supplied with water by the proprietor, which, whether it
be good or bad, he has to pay for, or rather he suffers a deduction for from
his wages.” [72]

In conflict with “public opinion,” or even with the Officers of
Health, capital makes no difficulty about “justifying” the
conditions partly dangerous, partly degrading, to which it confines the working
and domestic life of the labourer, on the ground that they are necessary for
profit. It is the same thing when capital “abstains” from
protective measures against dangerous machinery in the factory, from appliances
for ventilation and for safety in mines, &c. It is the same here with the
housing of the miners. Dr. Simon, medical officer of the Privy Council, in his
official Report says:

“In apology for the wretched household accommodation
... it is alleged that miners are commonly worked on lease; that the duration
of the lessee’s interest (which in collieries is commonly for 21 years),
is not so long that he should deem it worth his while to create good
accommodation for his labourers, and for the tradespeople and others whom the
work attracts; that even if he were disposed to act liberally in the matter,
this disposition would commonly be defeated by his landlord’s tendency to
fix on him, as ground-rent, an exorbitant additional charge for the privilege
of having on the surface of the ground the decent and comfortable village which
the labourers of the subterranean property ought to inhabit, and that
prohibitory price (if not actual prohibition) equally excludes others who might
desire to build. It would be foreign to the purpose of this report to enter
upon any discussion of the merits of the above apology. Nor here is it even
needful to consider where it would be that, if decent accommodation were
provided, the cost ... would eventually fall — whether on landlord, or
lessee, or labourer, or public. But in presence of such shameful facts as are
vouched for in the annexed reports [those of Dr. Hunter, Dr. Stevens, &c.]
a remedy may well be claimed.... Claims of landlordship are
being so used as to do great public wrong. The landlord in his capacity of
mine-owner invites an industrial colony to labour on his estate, and then in
his capacity of surface-owner makes it impossible that the labourers whom he
collects, should find proper lodging where they must live. The lessee [the
capitalist exploiter] meanwhile has no pecuniary motive for resisting
that division of the bargain; well knowing that if its latter conditions be
exorbitant, the consequences fall, not on him, that his labourers on whom they
fall have not education enough to know the value of their sanitary rights, that
neither obscenest lodging nor foulest drinking water will be appreciable
inducements towards a ‘strike.’” [73]

### D. Effect of Crises on the Best Paid Part of the working class

Before I turn to the regular agricultural labourers, I may be allowed to
show, by one example, how industrial revulsions affect even the best-paid, the
aristocracy, of the working class. It will be remembered that the year 1857
brought one of the great crises with which the industrial cycle periodically
ends. The next termination of the cycle was due in 1866. Already discounted in
the regular factory districts by the cotton famine, which threw much capital
from its wonted sphere into the great centres of the money-market, the crisis
assumed, at this time, an especially financial character. Its outbreak in 1866
was signalised by the failure of a gigantic London Bank, immediately followed
by the collapse of countless swindling companies. One of the great London
branches of industry involved in the catastrophe was iron shipbuilding. The magnates of this trade had not only over-produced beyond all
measure during the overtrading time, but they had, besides, engaged in enormous
contracts on the speculation that credit would be forthcoming to an equivalent
extent. Now, a terrible reaction set in, that even at this hour (the end of
March, 1867) continues in this and other London industries. [74] To show the condition of the
labourers, I quote the following from the circumstantial report of a
correspondent of the Morning Star, who, at the end of 1866, and
beginning of 1867, visited the chief centres of distress:

“In the East End districts of Poplar, Millwall,
Greenwich, Deptford, Limehouse and Canning Town, at least 15,000 workmen
and their families were in a state of utter destitution, and 3,000
skilled mechanics were breaking stones in the workhouse yard (after distress of
over half a year’s duration).... I had great difficulty in reaching the
workhouse door, for a hungry crowd besieged it.... They were waiting for their
tickets, but the time had not yet arrived for the distribution. The yard was a
great square place with an open shed running all round it, and several large
heaps of snow covered the paving-stones in the middle. In the middle, also,
were little wicker-fenced spaces, like sheep pens, where in finer weather the
men worked; but on the day of my visit the pens were so snowed up that nobody
could sit in them. Men were busy, however, in the open shed breaking
paving-stones into macadam. Each man had a big paving-stone for a seat, and he
chipped away at the rime-covered granite with a big hammer until he had broken
up, and think! five bushels of it, and then he had done his day’s work,
and got his day’s pay — threepence and an allowance of food. In
another part of the yard was a rickety little wooden house, and when we opened
the door of it, we found it filled with men who were huddled together shoulder
to shoulder for the warmth of one another’s bodies and breath. They were
picking oakum and disputing the while as to which could work the longest on a
given quantity of food — for endurance was the point of honour. Seven
thousand ... in this one workhouse ... were recipients of relief ... many
hundreds of them ... it appeared, were, six or eight months ago, earning the
highest wages paid to artisans.... Their number would be more than doubled by
the count of those who, having exhausted all their savings, still refuse to
apply to the parish, because they have a little left to pawn. Leaving the
workhouse, I took a walk through the streets, mostly of little one-storey
houses, that abound in the neighbourhood of Poplar. My guide was a member of
the Committee of the Unemployed.... My first call was on an ironworker who had
been seven and twenty weeks out of employment. I found the man with his family
sitting in a little back room. The room was not bare of furniture, and there
was a fire in it. This was necessary to keep the naked feet of the young
children from getting frost bitten, for it was a bitterly cold day. On a tray
in front of the fire lay a quantity of oakum, which the wife and children were
picking in return for their allowance from the parish. The man worked in the
stone yard of the workhouse for a certain ration of food, and threepence per
day. He had now come home to dinner quite hungry, as he told us with a
melancholy smile, and his dinner consisted of a couple of slices of bread and
dripping, and a cup of milkless tea.... The next door at which we knocked was
opened by a middle-aged woman, who, without saying a word, led us into a little
back parlour, in which sat all her family, silent and fixedly staring at a
rapidly dying fire. Such desolation, such hopelessness wasabout these
people and their little room, as I should not care to witness again.
‘Nothing have they done, sir,’ said the woman, pointing to her
boys, ‘for six and twenty weeks; and all our money gone — all the
twenty pounds that me and father saved when times were better, thinking it
would yield a little to keep us when we got past work. Look at it,’ she
said, almost fiercely, bringing out a bank-book with all its well kept entries
of money paid in, and money taken out, so that we could see how the little
fortune had begun with the first five shilling deposit, and had grown by little
and little to be twenty pounds, and how it had melted down again till the sum
in hand got from pounds to shillings, and the last entry made the book as
worthless as a blank sheet. This family received relief from the workhouse, and
it furnished them with just one scanty meal per day.... Our next visit was to
an iron labourer’s wife, whose husband had worked in the yards. We found
her ill from want of food, lying on a mattress in her clothes, and just covered
with a strip of carpet, for all the bedding had been pawned. Two wretched
children were tending her, themselves looking as much in need of nursing as
their mother. Nineteen weeks of enforced idleness had brought them to this
pass, and while the mother told the history of that bitter past, she moaned as
if all her faith in a future that should atone for it were dead.... On getting
outside a young fellow came running after us, and asked us to step inside his
house and see if anything could be done for him. A young wife, two pretty
children, a cluster of pawn-tickets, and a bare room were all he had to
show.”

On the after pains of the crisis of 1866, the following extract from a Tory
newspaper. It must not be forgotten that the East-end of London, which is here
dealt with, is not only the seat of the iron shipbuilding mentioned above, but
also of a so-called “home-industry” always underpaid.

“A frightful spectacle was to be seen yesterday in one
part of the metropolis. Although the unemployed thousands of the East-end did
not parade with their black flags en masse, the human torrent was
imposing enough. Let us remember what these people suffer. They are dying of
hunger. That is the simple and terrible fact. There are 40,000 of them.... In
our presence, in one quarter of this wonderful metropolis, are packed —
next door to the most enormous accumulation of wealth the world ever saw
— cheek by jowl with this are 40,000 helpless, starving people. These
thousands are now breaking in upon the other quarters; always half-starving,
they cry their misery in our ears, they cry to Heaven, they tell us from their
miserable dwellings, that it is impossible for them to find work, and useless
for them to beg. The local ratepayers themselves are driven by the parochial
charges to the verge of pauperism.” — (Standard, 5th
April, 1867.)

As it is the fashion amongst English capitalists to quote Belgium as the
Paradise of the labourer because “freedom of labour,” or what is
the same thing, “freedom of capital,” is there limited neither by
the despotism of Trades’ Unions, nor by Factory Acts, a word or two on
the “happiness” of the Belgian labourer. Assuredly no one was more
thoroughly initiated in the mysteries of this happiness than the late M.
Ducpétiaux, inspector-general of Belgian prisons and charitable institutions,
and member of the central commission of Belgian statistics. Let us take his
work: “Budgets économiques des classes ouvrières de la Belgique,”
Bruxelles, 1855. Here we find among other matters, a normal Belgian
labourer’s family, whose yearly income and expenditure he calculates on
very exact data, and whose conditions of nourishment are then compared with
those of the soldier, sailor, and prisoner. The family “consists of
father, mother, and four children.” Of these 6 persons “four may be
usefully employed the whole year through.” It is assumed that
“there is no sick person nor one incapable of work, among them,”
nor are there “expenses for religious, moral, and intellectual purposes,
except a very small sum for church sittings,” nor “contributions to
savings banks or benefit societies,” nor “expenses due to luxury or
the result of improvidence.” The father and eldest son, however, allow
themselves “the use of tobacco,” and on Sundays “go to the
cabaret,” for which a whole 86 centimes a week are reckoned.

“From a general compilation of wages allowed to the
labourers in different trades, it follows that the highest average of daily
wage is 1 franc 56c., for men, 89 centimes for women, 56 centimes for boys, and
55 centimes for girls. Calculated at this rate, the resources of the family
would amount, at the maximum, to 1,068 francs a-year.... In the family ...
taken as typical we have calculated all possible resources. But in ascribing
wages to the mother of the family we raise the question of the direction of
the household. How will its internal economy be cared for? Who will look
after the young children? Who will get ready the meals, do the washing and
mending? This is the dilemma incessantly presented to the labourers.”

According to this the budget of the family is:

The father
300 working-days at fr. 1.56
fr. 468

mother
300 working-days at fr. 0.89
fr. 267

boy
300 working-days at fr. 0.56
fr. 168

girl
300 working-days at fr. 0.55
fr. 165

Total fr. 1,068

The annual expenditure of the family would cause a deficit upon the
hypothesis that the labourer has the food of:

The man-of-war’s man
fr. 1,828
Deficit fr. 760

The soldier
fr. 1,473
Deficit fr. 405

The prisoner
fr. 1,112
Deficit fr. 44

“We see that few labouring families can reach, we will
not say the average of the sailor or soldier, but even that of the prisoner.
The general average (of the cost of each prisoner in the different
prisons during the period 1847-1849), has been 63 centimes for all prisons.
This figure, compared with that of the daily maintenance of the labourer, shows
a difference of 13 centimes. It must be remarked further, that if in the
prisons it is necessary to set down in the account the expenses of
administration and surveillance, on the other hand, the prisoners have not to
pay for their lodging; that the purchases they make at the canteens are not
included in the expenses of maintenance, and that these expenses are greatly
lowered in consequence of the large number of persons that make up the
establishments, and of contracting for or buying wholesale, the food and other
things that enter into their consumption.... How comes it, however, that a
great number, we might say, a great majority, of labourers, live in a more
economical way? It is ... by adopting expedients, the secret of which only the
labourer knows; by reducing his daily rations; by substituting rye-bread for
wheat; by eating less meat, or even none at all, and the same with butter and
condiments; by contenting themselves with one or two rooms where the family is
crammed together, where boys and girls sleep side by side, often on the same
pallet; by economy of clothing, washing, decency; by giving up the Sunday
diversions; by, in short, resigning themselves to the most painful privations.
Once arrived at this extreme limit, the least rise in the price of food,
stoppage of work, illness, increases the labourer’s distress and
determines his complete ruin; debts accumulate, credit fails, the most
necessary clothes and furniture are pawned, and finally, the family asks to be
enrolled on the list of paupers.” (Ducpétiaux, l. c., pp. 151, 154,
155.)

In fact, in this “Paradise of capitalists” there follows, on the
smallest change in the price of the most essential means of subsistence, a
change in the number of deaths and crimes! (See Manifesto of the Maatschappij:
“De Vlamingen Vooruit!” Brussels, 1860, pp. 15, 16.) In all Belgium
are 930,000 families, of whom, according to the official statistics, 90,000 are
wealthy and on the list of voters = 450,000 persons; 390,000 families of the
lower middle-class in towns and villages, the greater part of them constantly
sinking into the proletariat, = 1,950,000 persons. Finally, 450,000 working
class families = 2,250,000 persons, of whom the model ones enjoy the happiness
depicted by Ducpétiaux. Of the 450,000 working class families, over 200,000 are
on the pauper list.

### E. The British Agricultural Proletariat

Nowhere does the antagonistic character of capitalistic production and
accumulation assert itself more brutally than in the progress of English
agriculture (including cattle-breeding) and the retrogression of the English
agricultural labourer. Before I turn to his present situation, a rapid
retrospect. Modern agriculture dates in England from the middle of the 18th
century, although the revolution in landed property, from which the changed
mode of production starts as a basis, has a much earlier date.

If we take the statements of Arthur Young, a careful observer, though a
superficial thinker, as to the agricultural labourer of 1771, the latter plays
a very pitiable part compared with his predecessor of the end of the 14th
century,

“when the labourer ... could live in plenty, and
accumulate wealth,” [75]

not to speak of the 15th century, “the golden age of the
English labourer in town and country.” We need not, however, go back so
far. In a very instructive work of the year 1777 we read:

“The great farmer is nearly mounted to a level with him
[the gentleman]; while the poor labourer is depressed almost to the earth. His
unfortunate situation will fully appear, by taking a comparative view of it,
only forty years ago, and at present.... Landlord and tenant ... have both gone
hand in hand in keeping the labourer down.” [76]

It is then proved in detail that the real agricultural wages between 1737
and 1777 fell nearly ¼ or 25 per cent.

“Modern policy,” says Dr. Richard Price also,
“is, indeed, more favourable to the higher classes of people; and the
consequences may in time prove that the whole kingdom will consist of only
gentry and beggars, or of grandees and slaves.” [77]

Nevertheless, the position of the English agricultural labourer from 1770 to
1780, with regard to his food and dwelling, as well as to his self-respect,
amusements, &c., is an ideal never attained again since that
time. His average wage expressed in pints of wheat was from 1770 to 1771, 90
pints, in Eden’s time (1797) only 65, in 1808 but 60. [78]

The state of the agricultural labourer at the end of the Anti-Jacobin War,
during which landed proprietors, farmers, manufacturers, merchants, bankers,
stockbrokers, army-contractors, &c., enriched themselves so
extraordinarily, has been already indicated above. The nominal wages rose in
consequence partly of the bank-note depreciation, partly of a rise in the price
of the primary means of subsistence independent of this depreciation. But the
actual wage-variation can be evidenced in a very simple way, without entering
into details that are here unnecessary. The Poor Law and its administration
were in 1795 and 1814 the same. It will be remembered how this law was carried
out in the country districts: in the form of alms the parish made up the
nominal wage to the nominal sum required for the simple vegetation of the
labourer. The ratio between the wages paid by the farmer, and the wage-deficit
made good by the parish, shows us two things. First, the falling of wages below
their minimum; second, the degree in which the agricultural labourer was a
compound of wage labourer and pauper, or the degree in which he had been turned
into a serf of his parish. Let us take one county that represents the average
condition of things in all counties. In Northamptonshire, in 1795, the average
weekly wage was 7s. 6d.; the total yearly
expenditure of a family of 6 persons, £36 12s. 5d.; their total income, £29
18s.; deficit made good by the parish, £6 14s. 5d. In 1814, in the same county,
the weekly wage was 12s. 2d.; the total yearly expenditure of a family of 5
persons, £54 18s. 4d.; their total income, £36, 2s.; deficit made good by the
parish, £18 6s. 4d. [79] In 1795
the deficit was less than 1/4 the wage, in 1814, more than half. It is
self-evident that, under these circumstances, the meagre comforts that Eden
still found in the cottage of the agricultural labourer, had vanished by 1814.
[80] Of all the animals kept by the
farmer, the labourer, the instrumentum vocale, was, thenceforth, the
most oppressed, the worst nourished, the most brutally treated.

The same state of things went on quietly until

“the Swing riots, in 1830, revealed to us
(i.e., the ruling classes) by the light of blazing corn-stacks, that
misery and black mutinous discontent smouldered quite as fiercely under the
surface of agricultural as of manufacturing England.” [81]

At this time, Sadler, in the House of Commons, christened the
agricultural labourers “white slaves,” and a Bishop echoed the
epithet in the Upper House. The most notable political economist of that period
— E. G. Wakefield — says:

“The peasant of the South of England ... is not a
freeman, nor is he a slave; he is a pauper.” [82]

The time just before the repeal of the Corn Laws threw new light on the
condition of the agricultural labourers. On the one hand, it was to the
interest of the middle-class agitators to prove how little the Corn Laws
protected the actual producers of the corn. On the other hand, the industrial
bourgeoisie foamed with sullen rage at the denunciations of the factory system
by the landed aristocracy, at the pretended sympathy with the woes of the
factory operatives, of those utterly corrupt, heartless, and genteel loafers,
and at their “diplomatic zeal” for factory legislation. It is an
old English proverb that “when thieves fall out, honest men come by their
own,” and, in fact, the noisy, passionate quarrel between the two
fractions of the ruling class about the question, which of the two exploited
the labourers the more shamefully, was on each hand the midwife of the truth.
Earl Shaftesbury, then Lord Ashley, was commander-in-chief in the aristocratic,
philanthropic, anti-factory campaign. He was, therefore, in 1845, a favourite
subject in the revelations of the Morning Chronicle on the condition
of the agricultural labourers. This journal, then the most important Liberal
organ, sent special commissioners into the agricultural districts, who did not
content themselves with mere general descriptions and statistics, but published
the names both of the labouring families examined and of their landlords. The
following list gives the wages paid in three villages in the neighbourhood of
Blanford, Wimbourne, and Poole. The villages are the property of Mr. G. Bankes
and of the Earl of Shaftesbury. It will be noted that, just like Bankes, this
“low church pope,” this head of English pietists, pockets a great
part of the miserable wages of the labourers under the pretext of house-rent:
—

FIRST VILLAGE

(a) Children.
2
3
2
2
6
3

(b) Number of Members in Family.
4
5
4
4
8
5

(c) Weekly Wage of the Men.
8s. 0d.
8s. 0d.
8s. 0d.
8s. 0d.
7s. 0d.
7s. 0d.

(d) Weekly Wage of the Children.
—
—
—
—
1/-, 1/6
1/-, 2/-

(e) Weekly Income of the whole Family.
8s. 0d.
8s. 0d.
8s. 0d.
8s. 0d.
10s. 6d.
7s. 0d.

(f) Weekly Rent.
2s. 0d.
1s. 6d.
1s. 0d.
1s. 0d.
2s. 0d.
1s. 4d.

(g) Total Weekly wage after deduction of
Rent.
6s. 0d.
6s. 6d.
7s. 0d.
7s. 0d.
8s. 6d.
5s. 8d.

(h) Weekly income per head.
1s. 6d.
1s. 3½d.
1s. 9d.
1s. 9d.
1s. 0 3/4d.
1s. 1½d.

SECOND VILLAGE

(a) Children.
6
6
8
4
3

(b) Number of Members in Family.
8
8
10
6
5

(c) Weekly Wage of the Men.
7s. 0d.
7s. 0d.
7s. 0d.
7s. 0d.
7s. 0d.

(d) Weekly Wage of the Children.
1/-, 1/6
1/-, 1/6
—
—
—

(e) Weekly Income of the whole Family.
10s. 0d.
7s. 0d.
7s. 0d.
7s. 0d.
7s. 0d.

(f) Weekly Rent.
1s. 6d.
1s. 3½d.
1s. 3½d.
1s. 6½d.
1s. 6½d.

(g) Total Weekly wage after deduction of
Rent.
8s. 6d.
5s. 8½d.
5s. 8½d.
5s. 5½d.
5s. 5½d.

(h) Weekly income per head.
1s. 0 3/4d.
0s. 8½d.
0s. 7d.
0s. 11d.
1s. 1d.

THIRD VILLAGE

(a) Children.
4
3
0

(b) Number of Members in Family.
6
5
2

(c) Weekly Wage of the Men.
7s. 0d.
7s. 0d.
5s. 0d.

(d) Weekly Wage of the Children.
-
1/- 2/-
1/- 2/6

(e) Weekly Income of the whole Family.
7s. 0d.
11s. 6d.
5s. 0d.

(f) Weekly Rent.
1s. 0d.
0s. 10d.
1s. 0d.

(g) Total Weekly wage after deduction of
Rent.
6s. 0d.
10s. 8d.
4s. 0d.

(h) Weekly income per head.[83]
1s. 0d.
2s. 1 3/5d.
2s. 0d.

The repeal of the Corn Laws gave a marvellous impulse to English
agriculture. [84] Drainage on the
most extensive scale, new methods of stall-feeding, and of the artificial
cultivation of green crops, introduction of mechanical manuring apparatus, new
treatment of clay soils, increased use of mineral manures, employment of the
steam-engine, and of all kinds of new machinery, more intensive cultivation
generally, characterised this epoch. Mr. Pusey, Chairman of the Royal
Agricultural Society, declares that the (relative) expenses of
farming have been reduced nearly one half by the introduction of new machinery.
On the other hand, the actual return of the soil rose rapidly. Greater outlay
of capital per acre, and, as a consequence, more rapid concentration of farms,
were essential conditions of the new method. [85] At the same time, the area under cultivation increased, from 1846 to
1856, by 464,119 acres, without reckoning the great area in the Eastern
Counties which was transformed from rabbit warrens and poor pastures into
magnificent corn-fields. It has already been seen that, at the same time, the
total number of persons employed in agriculture fell. As far as the actual
agricultural labourers of both sexes and of all ages are concerned, their
number fell from 1,241,396, in 1851, to 1,163, 217 in 1861. [86] If the English Registrar-General,
therefore, rightly remarks:

“The increase of farmers and farm-labourers, since
1801, bears no kind of proportion ... to the increase of agricultural
produce,” [87]

this disproportion obtains much more for the last period, when a
positive decrease of the agricultural population went hand in hand with
increase of the area under cultivation, with more intensive cultivation,
unheard-of accumulation of the capital incorporated with the soil, and devoted
to its working, an augmentation in the products of the soil without parallel in
the history of English agriculture, plethoric rent-rolls of landlords, and
growing wealth of the capitalist farmers. If we take this, together with the
swift, unbroken extension of the markets, viz., the towns, and the
reign of Free Trade, then the agricultural labourer was at last, post tot
discrimina rerum, placed in circumstances that ought, secundum
artem, to have made him drunk with happiness.

But Professor Rogers comes to the conclusion that the lot of the English
agricultural labourer of today, not to speak of his predecessor in the last
half of the 14th and in the 15th century, but only compared with his
predecessor from 1770 to 1780, has changed for the worse to an extraordinary
extent, that “the peasant has again become a serf,” and a serf
worse fed and worse clothed. [88]
Dr. Julian Hunter, in his epochmaking report on the dwellings of the
agricultural labourers, says:

“The cost of the hind” (a name for the
agricultural labourer, inherited from the time of serfdom) “is fixed at
the lowest possible amount on which he can live ... the supplies of wages and
shelter are not calculated on the profit to be derived from him. He is a zero
in farming calculations ... [89] The means [of subsistence] being always supposed to
be a fixed quantity. [90] As to any
further reduction of his income, he may say, nihil habeo nihil curo.
He has no fears for the future, because he has now only the spare supply
necessary to keep him. He has reached the zero from which are dated the
calculations of the farmer. Come what will, he has no share either in
prosperity or adversity.” [91]

In the year 1863, an official inquiry took place into the conditions of
nourishment and labour of the criminals condemned to transportation and penal
servitude. The results are recorded in two voluminous Blue books. Among other
things it is said:

“From an elaborate comparison between the diet of
convicts in the convict prisons in England, and that of paupers in workhouses
and of free labourers in the same country ... it certainly appears that the
former are much better fed than either of the two other classes,” [92] whilst “the amount of labour
required from an ordinary convict under penal servitude is about one half of
what would be done by an ordinary day-labourer.” [93]

A few characteristic depositions of
witnesses: John Smith, governor of the Edinburgh prison, deposes:

No. 5056. “The diet of the English prisons [is]
superior to that of ordinary labourers in England.” No 50. “It is
the fact ... that the ordinary agricultural labourers in Scotland very seldom
get any meat at all.” Answer No. 3047. “Is there anything that you
are aware of to account for the necessity of feeding them very much better than
ordinary labourers? — Certainly not.” No. 3048. “Do you think
that further experiments ought to be made in order to ascertain whether a
dietary might not be hit upon for prisoners employed on public works nearly
approaching to the dietary of free labourers? ...” [94] “He [the agricultural labourer] might say:
‘I work hard, and have not enough to eat, and when in prison I did not
work harder where I had plenty to eat, and therefore it is better for me to be
in prison again than here.’” [95]

From the tables appended to the first volume of the Report I have compiled
the annexed comparative summary.

WEEKLY AMOUNT OF NUTRIENTS

Quantity Of

Nitrogenous

Ingredients
Quantity Of

Non-Nitro-

genous In-

gredients
Quantity Of

Mineral

Matter
TOTAL

Ounces
Ounces
Ounces
Ounces

Portland (convict)
28.95
150.06
4.68
183.69

Sailor in the Navy
29.63
152.91
4.52
187.06

Soldier
25.55
114.49
3.94
143.98

Working Coachmaker
24.53
162.06
4.23
190.82

Compositor
21.24
100.83
3.12
125.19

Agricultural labourer[96]
17.73
118.06
3.29
139.08

The general result of the inquiry by the medical commission of 1863 on the
food of the lowest fed classes, is already known to the reader. He will
remember that the diet of a great part of the agricultural labourers’
families is below the minimum necessary “to arrest starvation
diseases.” This is especially the case in all the purely rural districts
of Cornwall, Devon, Somerset, Wilts, Stafford, Oxford, Berks, and Herts.

“The nourishment obtained by the labourer
himself,” says Dr. E. Smith, “is larger than the average quantity
indicates, since he eats a larger share ... necessary to enable him to perform
his labour ... of food than the other members of the family, including in the
poorer districts nearly all the meat and bacon.... The quantity of food
obtained by the wife and also by the children at the period of rapid growth, is
in many cases, in almost every county, deficient, and particularly in
nitrogen.” [97]

The male and female servants living with the farmers
themselves are sufficiently nourished. Their number fell from 288,277 in 1851,
to 204,962 in 1861.

“The labour of women in the fields,” says Dr.
Smith, “whatever may be its disadvantages, ... is under present
circumstances of great advantage to the family, since it adds that amount of
income which ... provides shoes and clothing and pays the rent, and thus
enables the family to be better fed.” [98]

One of the most remarkable results of the inquiry was that the agricultural
labourer of England, as compared with other parts of the United Kingdom,
“is considerably the worst fed,” as the appended table shows:

Quantities of Carbon and Nitrogen weekly consumed by an average agricultural
adult:

Carbon,

grains
Nitrogen,

grains

England
46,673
1,594

Wales
48,354
2,031

Scotland
48,980
2,348

Ireland[99]
43,366
2,434

“To the insufficient quantity and miserable quality of
the house accommodation generally had,” says Dr. Simon, in his official
Health Report, “by our agricultural labourers, almost every page of Dr.
Hunter’s report bears testimony. And gradually, for many years past, the
state of the labourer in these respects has been deteriorating, house-room
being now greatly more difficult for him to find, and, when found, greatly less
suitable to his needs than, perhaps, for centuries had been the case.
Especially within the last twenty or thirty years, the evil has been in very
rapid increase, and the household circumstances of the labourer are now in the
highest degree deplorable. Except in so far as they whom his labour enriches,
see fit to treat him with a kind of pitiful indulgence, he is quite peculiarly
helpless in the matter. Whether he shall find house-room on the land which he
contributes to till, whether the house-room which he gets shall be human or
swinish, whether he shall have the little space of garden that so vastly
lessens the pressure of his poverty — all this does not depend on his
willingness and ability to pay reasonable rent for the decent accommodation he
requires, but depends on the use which others may see fit to make of their
‘right to do as they will with their own.’ However large may be a
farm, there is no law that a certain proportion of labourers’ dwellings
(much less of decent dwellings) shall be
upon it; nor does any law reserve for the labourer ever so little right in that
soil to which his industry is as needful as sun and rain.... An extraneous
element weighs the balance heavily against him ... the influence of the Poor
Law in its provisions concerning settlement and chargeability. [100] Under this influence, each parish
has a pecuniary interest in reducing to a minimum the number of its resident
labourers: — for, unhappily, agricultural labour instead of implying a
safe and permanent independence for the hardworking labourer and his family,
implies for the most part only a longer or shorter circuit to eventual
pauperism — a pauperism which, during the whole circuit, is so near, that
any illness or temporary failure of occupation necessitates immediate recourse
to parochial relief — and thus all residence of agricultural population
in a parish is glaringly an addition to its poor-rates .... Large proprietors
[101] ... have but to resolve that
there shall be no labourers’ dwellings on their estates, and their
estates will thenceforth be virtually free from half their responsibility for
the poor. How far it has been intended, in the English
constitution and law, that this kind of unconditional property in
land should be acquirable, and that a landlord ‘doing as he wills with
his own,’ should be able to treat the cultivators of the soil as aliens,
whom he may expel from his territory, is a question which I do not pretend to
discuss.... For that (power) of eviction ... does not exist only in theory. On
a very large scale it prevails in practice — prevails ... as a main
governing condition in the household circumstances of agricultural labour....
As regards the extent of the evil, it may suffice to refer to the evidence
which Dr. Hunter has compiled from the last census, that destruction of houses,
notwithstanding increased local demands for them, had, during the last ten
years, been in progress in 821 separate parishes or townships of England, so
that irrespectively of persons who had been forced to become non-resident (that
is in the parishes in which they work), these parishes and
townships were receiving in 1861, as compared with 1851, a population 5 1/3 per
cent. greater, into houseroom 4½ per cent. less... When the process of
depopulation has completed itself, the result, says Dr. Hunter, is a
show-village where the cottages have been reduced to a few, and where none but
persons who are needed as shepherds, gardeners, or game-keepers, are allowed to
live; regular servants who receive the good treatment usual to their class.
[102] But the land requires
cultivation, and it will be found that the labourers employed upon it are not
the tenants of the owner, but that they come from a neighbouring open village,
perhaps three miles off, where a numerous small proprietary had received them
when their cottages were destroyed in the close villages around. Where things
are tending to the above result, often the cottages which stand, testify, in
their unrepaired and wretched condition, to the extinction to which they are
doomed. They are seen standing in the various stages of natural decay. While
the shelter holds together, the labourer is permitted to rent it, and glad
enough he will often be to do so, even at the price of decent lodging. But no
repair, no improvement shall it receive, except such as its penniless occupants
can supply. And when at last it becomes quite uninhabitable —
uninhabitable even to the humblest standard of serfdom — it will be but
one more destroyed cottage, and future poor-rates will be somewhat lightened.
While great owners are thus escaping from poor-rates through the
depopulation of lands over which they have control, the nearest town or open
village receive the evicted labourers: the nearest, I say, but this
“nearest” may mean three or four miles distant from the farm where
the labourer has his daily toil. To that daily toil there will then have to be
added, as though it were nothing, the daily need of walking six or eight miles
for power of earning his bread. And whatever farmwork is done by his wife and
children, is done at the same disadvantage. Nor is this nearly all the toil
which the distance occasions him. In the open village, cottage-speculators buy
scraps of land, which they throng as
densely as they can with the cheapest of all possible hovels. And into those
wretched habitations (which, even if they adjoin the open country, have some of
the worst features of the worst town residences) crowd the agricultural
labourers of England. [103] ....
Nor on the other hand must it be supposed that even when the labourer is housed
upon the lands which he cultivates, his household circumstances are generally
such as his life of productive industry would seem to deserve. Even on princely
estates ... his cottage ... may be of the meanest description. There are
landlords who deem any stye good enough for their labourer and his family, and
who yet do not disdain to drive with him the hardest possible bargain for rent.
[104] It may be but a ruinous
one-bedroomed hut, having no fire-grate, no privy, no opening window, no water
supply but the ditch, no garden — but the labourer is helpless against
the wrong.... And the Nuisances Removal Acts ... are ... a mere dead letter ...
in great part dependent for their working on such cottage-owners as the one
from whom his (the labourer’s) hovel is rented.... From brighter, but
exceptional scenes, it is requisite in the interests of justice, that attention
should again be drawn to the overwhelming preponderance of facts which are a
reproach to the civilisation of England. Lamentable indeed, must be the case,
when, notwithstanding all that is evident with regard to the quality of the
present accommodation, it is the common conclusion of competent observers that
even the general badness of dwellings is an evil infinitely less urgent than
their mere numerical insufficiency. For years the over-crowding of rural
labourers’ dwellings has been a matter of deep concern, not only to
persons who care for sanitary good, but to persons who care for decent and
moral life. For, again and again in phrases so uniform that they seem
stereotyped, reporters on the spread of epidemic disease in rural districts,
have insisted on the extreme importance of that over-crowding, as an influence
which renders it a quite hopeless task, to attempt the limiting of any
infection which is introduced. And again and again it has been pointed out
that, notwithstanding the many salubrious influences which there are in country
life, the crowding which so favours the extension of contagious disease, also
favours the origination of disease which is not contagious. And those who have
denounced the over-crowded state of our rural population have not been silent
as to a further mischief. Even where their primary concern has been only with
the injury to health, often almost perforce they have referred to other
relations on the subject. In showing how frequently it happens that adult
persons of both sexes, married and unmarried, are huddled together in single
small sleeping rooms, their reports have carried the conviction that, under the circumstances they describe,
decency must always be outraged, and morality almost of necessity must suffer.
[105] Thus, for instance, in the
appendix of my last annual report, Dr. Ord, reporting on an outbreak of fever
at Wing, in Buckinghamshire, mentions how a young man who had come thither from
Wingrave with fever, “in the first days of his illness slept in a room
with nine other persons. Within a fortnight several of these persons were
attacked, and in the course of a few weeks five out of the nine had fever, and
one died...” From Dr. Harvey, of St. George’s Hospital, who, on
private professional business, visited Wing during the time of the epidemic, I
received information exactly in the sense of the above report.... “A
young woman having fever, lay at night in a room occupied by her father and
mother, her bastard child, two young men (her brothers), and her two sisters,
each with a bastard child — 10 persons in all. A few weeks ago 13 persons
slept in it.” [106]

Dr. Hunter investigated 5,375 cottages of agricultural labourers, not only
in the purely agricultural districts, but in all counties of England. Of these,
2,195 had only one bedroom (often at the same time used as living-room), 2,930
only two, and 250, more than two. I will give a few specimens culled from a
dozen counties.

(1.) Bedfordshire

Wrestlingworth. Bedrooms about 12 feet long and 10 broad, although
many are smaller than this. The small, one-storied cots are often divided by
partitions into two bedrooms, one bed frequently in a kitchen, 5 feet 6 inches
in height. Rent, £3 a year. The tenants have to make their own privies, the
landlord only supplies a hole. As soon as one has made a privy, it is made use
of by the whole neighbourhood. One house, belonging to a family called
Richardson, was of quite unapproachable beauty. “Its plaster walls bulged
very like a lady’s dress in a curtsey. One gable end was convex, the
other concave, and on this last, unfortunately, stood the chimney, a curved
tube of clay and wood like an elephant’s trunk. A long stick served as
prop to prevent the chimney from falling. The doorway and window were
rhomboidal.” Of 17 houses visited, only 4 had more than one bedroom, and
those four overcrowded. The cots with one bedroom sheltered 3 adults and 3
children, a married couple with 6 children, &c.

Dunton. High rents, from £4 to £5; weekly wages of the man, 10s.
They hope to pay the rent by the straw-plaiting of the family. The higher the
rent, the greater the number that must work together to pay it. Six adults,
living with 4 children in one sleeping apartment, pay £3 10s. for it. The
cheapest house in Dunton, 15 feet long externally, 10 broad, let for £3. Only
one of the houses investigated had 2 bedrooms. A little outside the village, a
house whose “tenants dunged against the house-side,” the lower 9
inches of the door eaten away through sheer rottenness; the doorway, a single
opening closed at night by a few bricks, ingeniously pushed up after shutting
and covered with some matting. Half a window, with glass and frame, had gone
the way of all flesh. Here, without furniture, huddled together were 3 adults
and 5 children. Dunton is not worse than the rest of Biggleswade Union.

(2.) Berkshire

Beenham. In June, 1864, a man, his wife and 4 children lived in a
cot (one-storied cottage). A daughter came home from service with scarlet
fever. She died. One child sickened and died. The mother and one child were
down with typhus when Dr. Hunter was called in. The father and one child slept
outside, but the difficulty of securing isolation was seen here, for in the
crowded market of the miserable village lay the linen of the fever-stricken
household, waiting for the wash. The rent of H.’s house, 1s. a-week; one
bedroom for man, wife, and 6 children. One house let for 8d. a-week, 14 feet 6
inches long, 7 feet broad, kitchen, 6 feet high; the bedroom without window,
fire-place, door, or opening, except into the lobby; no garden. A man lived
here for a little while, with two grown-up daughters and one grown-up son;
father and son slept on the bed, the girls in the passage. Each of the latter
had a child while the family was living here, but one went to the workhouse for
her confinement and then came home.

(3.) Buckinghamshire

30 cottages — on 1,000 acres of land — contained here about
130-140 persons. The parish of Bradenham comprises 1,000 acres; it
numbered, in 1851, 36 houses and a population of 84 males and 54 females. This
inequality of the sexes was partly remedied in 1861, when they numbered 98
males and 87 females; increase in 10 years of 14 men and 33 women. Meanwhile,
the number of houses was one less.

Winslow. Great part of this newly built in good style; demand for
houses appears very marked, since very miserable cots let at 1s. to 1s. 3d. per
week.

Water Eaton. Here the landlords, in view of the increasing
population, have destroyed about 20 per cent. of the existing houses. A poor
labourer, who had to go about 4 miles to his work, answered the question,
whether he could not find a cot nearer: “No; they know better than to
take a man in with my large family.”

Tinker’s End, near Winslow. A bedroom in which were 4 adults
and 4 children; 11 feet long, 9 feet broad, 6 feet 5 inches high at its highest
part; another 11 feet 3 inches by 9 feet, 5 feet 10 inches high, sheltered 6
persons. Each of these families had less space than is considered necessary for
a convict. No house had more than one bedroom, not one of them a back-door;
water very scarce; weekly rent from 1s. 4d. to 2s. In 16 of the houses visited,
only 1 man that earned 10s. a-week. The quantity of air for each person under
the circumstances just described corresponds to that which he would have if he
were shut up in a box of 4 feet measuring each way, the whole night. But then,
the ancient dens afforded a certain amount of unintentional ventilation.

(4.) Cambridgeshire

Gamblingay belongs to several landlords. It contains the
wretchedest cots to be found anywhere. Much straw-plaiting. “A deadly
lassitude, a hopeless surrendering up to filth,” reigns in Gamblingay.
The neglect in its centre, becomes mortification at its extremities, north and
south, where the houses are rotting to pieces. The absentee landlords bleed
this poor rookery too freely. The rents are very high; 8 or 9 persons packed in
one sleeping apartment, in 2 cases 6 adults, each with 1 or 2 children in one
small bedroom.

(5.) Essex

In this county, diminutions in the number of persons and of cottages go, in
many parishes, hand in hand. In not less than 22 parishes, however, the
destruction of houses has not prevented increase of population, or has not
brought about that expulsion which, under the name “migration to
towns,” generally occurs. In Fingringhoe, a parish of 3,443 acres, were
in 1851, 145 houses; in 1861, only 110. But the people did not wish to go away,
and managed even to increase under these circumstances. In 1851, 252 persons
inhabited 61 houses, but in 1861, 262 persons were squeezed into 49 houses. In
Basilden, in 1851, 157 persons lived on 1,827 acres, in 35 houses; at the end
of ten years, 180 persons in 27 houses. In the parishes of Fingringhoe, South
Fambridge, Widford, Basilden, and Ramsden Crags, in 1851, 1,392 persons were
living on 8,449 acres in 316 houses; in 1861, on the same area, 1,473 persons
in 249 houses.

(6.) Herefordshire

This little county has suffered more from the “eviction-spirit”
than any other in England. At Nadby, overcrowded cottages generally, with only
2 bedrooms, belonging for the most part to the farmers. They easily let them
for £3 or £4 a-year, and paid a weekly wage of 9s.

(7.) Huntingdon

Hartford had, in 1851, 87 houses; shortly after this, 19 cottages
were destroyed in this small parish of 1,720 acres; population in 1831, 452; in
1852, 382; and in 1861, 341. 14 cottages, each with 1 bedroom, were visited. In
one, a married couple, 3 grown-up sons, 1 grown-up daughter, 4 children —
in all 10 in another, 3 adults, 6 children. One of these rooms, in which 8
people slept, was 12 feet 10 inches long, 12 feet 2 inches broad, 6 feet 9
inches high: the average, without making any deduction for projections into the
apartment, gave about 130 cubic feet per head. In the 14 sleeping rooms, 34
adults and 33 children. These cottages are seldom provided with gardens, but
many of the inmates are able to farm small allotments at 10s. or 12s. per rood.
These allotments are at a distance from the houses, which are without privies.
The family “must either go to the allotment to deposit their
ordures,” or, as happens in this place, saving your presence, “use
a closet with a trough set like a drawer in a chest of drawers, and drawn out
weekly and conveyed to the allotment to be emptied where its contents were
wanted.” In Japan, the circle of life-conditions moves more decently than
this.

(8.) Lincolnshire

Langtoft. A man lives here, in Wright’s house, with his wife,
her mother, and 5 children; the house has a front kitchen, scullery, bedroom
over the front kitchen; front kitchen and bedroom, 12 feet 2 inches by 9 feet 5
inches; the whole ground floor, 21 feet 2 inches by 9 feet 5 inches. The
bedroom is a garret: the walls run together into the roof like a sugar-loaf, a
dormer-window opening in front. “Why did he live here? On account of the
garden? No; it is very small. Rent? High, 1s. 3d. per week. Near his work? No;
6 miles away, so that he walks daily, to and fro, 12 miles. He lived there,
because it was a tenantable cot,” and because he wanted to have a cot for
himself alone, anywhere, at any price, and in any conditions. The following are
the statistics of 12 houses in Langtoft, with 12 bedrooms, 38 adults, and 36
children.

TWELVE HOUSES IN LANGTOFT

House
No. 1.
No. 2.
No. 3.
No. 4.
No. 5.
No. 6.
No. 7.
No. 8.
No. 9.
No. 10.
No. 11.
No. 12.

Bedrooms.
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1

Adults.
3
4
4
5
2
5
3
3
2
2
3
2

Children.
5
3
4
4
2
3
3
2
0
3
3
4

Number of Persons.
8
7
8
9
4
8
6
5
2
.5
6
6

(9.) Kent

Kennington, very seriously over-populated in 1859, when diphtheria
appeared, and the parish doctor instituted a medical inquiry into the condition
of the poorer classes. He found that in this locality, where much labour is
employed, various cots had been destroyed and no new ones built. In one
district stood four houses, named birdcages; each had 4 rooms of the following
dimensions in feet and inches:

Kitchen:
9 ft. 5 by 8 ft. 11 by 6 ft. 6

Scullery:
8 ft. 6 by 4 ft. 6 by 6 ft. 6

Bedroom:
8 ft. 5 by 5 ft. 10 by 6 ft. 3

Bedroom:
8 ft. 3 by 8 ft. 4 by 6 ft. 3

(10.) Northamptonshire

Brinworth, Pickford and Floore: in these villages in the winter
20-30 men were lounging about the streets from want of work. The farmers do not
always till sufficiently the corn and turnip lands, and the landlord has found
it best to throw all his farms together into 2 or 3. Hence want of employment.
Whilst on one side of the wall, the land calls for labour, on the other side
the defrauded labourers are casting at it longing glances. Feverishly
overworked in summer, and half-starved in winter, it is no wonder if they say
in their peculiar dialect, “the parson and gentlefolk seem frit to death
at them.”

At Floore, instances, in one bedroom of the smallest size, of couples with
4, 5, 6 children; 3 adults with 5 children; a couple with grandfather and 6
children down with scarlet fever, &c.; in two houses with two bedrooms, two
families of 8 and 9 adults respectively.

(11.) Wiltshire

Stratton. 31 houses visited, 8 with only one bedroom. Pentill, in
the same parish: a cot let at Is. 3d. weekly with 4 adults and 4 children, had
nothing good about it, except the walls, from the floor of rough-hewn pieces of
stones to the roof of worn-out thatch.

(12.) Worcestershire

House-destruction here not quite so excessive; yet from 1851 to 1861, the
number of inhabitants to each house on the average, has risen from 4.2 to 4.6.

Badsey. Many cots and little gardens here. Some of the farmers
declare that the cots are “a great nuisance here, because they bring the
poor.” On the statement of one gentleman:

“The poor are none the better for them; if you build
500 they will let fast enough, in fact, the more you build, the more they
want”

(according to him the houses give birth to the inhabitants, who then by a
law of Nature press on “the means of housing”). Dr. Hunter
remarks:

“Now these poor must come from somewhere, and as there
is no particular attraction, such as doles, at Badsey, it must be repulsion
from some other unfit place, which will send them here. If each could find an
allotment near his work, he would not prefer Badsey, where he pays for his
scrap of ground twice as much as the farmer pays for his.”

The continual emigration to the towns, the continual formation of surplus
population in the country through the concentration of farms, conversion of
arable land into pasture, machinery, &c., and the continual eviction of the
agricultural population by the destruction of their cottages, go hand in hand.
The more empty the district is of men, the greater is its “relative
surplus population,” the greater is their pressure on
the means of employment, the greater is the absolute excess of the agricultural
population over the means for housing it, the greater, therefore, in the
villages is the local surplus population and the most pestilential packing
together of human beings. The packing together of knots of men in scattered
little villages and small country towns corresponds to the forcible draining of
men from the surface of the land. The continuous superseding of the
agricultural labourers, in spite of their diminishing number and the increasing
mass of their products, gives birth to their pauperism. Their pauperism is
ultimately a motive to their eviction and the chief source of their miserable
housing which breaks down their last power of resistance, and makes them more
slaves of the landed proprietors and the farmers. [107] Thus the minimum of wages becomes
a law of Nature to them. On the other hand, the land, in
spite of its constant “relative surplus population,” is at the same
time underpopulated. This is seen, not only locally at the points where the
efflux of men to towns, mines, railroad-making, &c., is most marked. It is
to be seen everywhere, in harvest-time as well as in spring and summer, at
those frequently recurring times when English agriculture, so careful and
intensive, wants extra hands. There are always too many agricultural labourers
for the ordinary, and always too few for the exceptional or temporary needs of
the cultivation of the soil. [108]
Hence we find in the official documents contradictory
complaints from the same places of deficiency and excess of labour
simultaneously. The temporary or local want of labour brings about no rise in
wages, but a forcing of the women and children into the fields, and
exploitation at an age constantly lowered. As soon as the exploitation of the
women and children takes place on a larger scale, it becomes in turn a new
means of making a surplus population of the male agricultural labourer and of
keeping down his wage. In the east of England thrives a beautiful fruit of this
vicious circle — the so-called gang-system, to which I must
briefly return here. [109]

The gang-system obtains almost exclusively in the counties of Lincoln,
Huntingdon, Cambridge, Norfolk, Suffolk, and Nottingham, here and there in the
neighbouring counties of Northampton, Bedford, and Rutland. Lincolnshire will
serve us as an example. A large part of this county is new land, marsh
formerly, or even, as in others of the eastern counties just named, won lately
from the sea. The steam-engine has worked wonders in the way of drainage. What
were once fens and sandbanks, bear now a luxuriant sea of corn and the highest
of rents. The same thing holds of the alluvial lands won by human endeavour, as
in the island of Axholme and other parishes on the banks of the Trent. In
proportion as the new farms arose, not only were no new cottages built: old
ones were demolished, and the supply of labour had to come from open villages,
miles away, by long roads that wound along the sides of the hills. There alone
had the population formerly found shelter from the incessant floods of the
winter-time. The labourers that dwell on the farms of 400-1,000 acres (they are called “confined labourers”) are solely
employed on such kinds of agricultural work as is permanent, difficult, and
carried on by aid of horses. For every 100 acres there is, on an average,
scarcely one cottage. A fen farmer, e.g., gave evidence before the Commission
of Inquiry:

“I farm 320 acres, all arable land. I have not one
cottage on my farm. I have only one labourer on my farm now. I have four
horsemen lodging about. We get light work done by gangs.” [110]

The soil requires much light field labour, such as weeding, hoeing, certain
processes of manuring, removing of stones, &c. This is done by the gangs,
or organised bands that dwell in the open villages.

The gang consists of 10 to 40 or 50 persons, women, young persons of both
sexes (13-18 years of age, although the boys are for the most part eliminated
at the age of 13), and children of both sexes (6-13 years of age). At the head
is the gang-master, always an ordinary agricultural labourer, generally what is
called a bad lot, a scapegrace, unsteady, drunken, but with a dash of
enterprise and savoir-faire. He is the recruiting-sergeant for the
gang, which works under him, not under the farmer. He generally arranges with
the latter for piece-work, and his income, which on the average is not very
much above that of an ordinary agricultural labourer, [111] depends almost entirely upon the
dexterity with which he manages to extract within the shortest time
the greatest possible amount of labour from his gang. The farmers have
discovered that women work steadily only under the direction of men, but that
women and children, once set going, impetuously spend their life-force —
as Fourier knew — while the adult male labourer is shrewd enough to
economise his as much as he can. The gang-master goes from one farm to another,
and thus employs his gang from 6 to 8 months in the year. Employment by him is,
therefore, much more lucrative and more certain for the labouring families,
than employment by the individual farmer, who only employs children
occasionally. This circumstance so completely rivets his influence in the open
villages that children are generally only to be hired through his
instrumentality. The lending out of these individually, independently of the
gang, is his second trade.

The “drawbacks” of the system are the overwork of the children
and young persons, the enormous marches that they make daily to and from the
farms, 5, 6, and sometimes 7 miles distant, finally, the demoralisation of the
gang. Although the gang-master, who, in some districts is called “the
driver,” is armed with a long stick, he uses it but seldom, and
complaints of brutal treatment are exceptional. He is a democratic emperor, or
a kind of Pied Piper of Hamelin. He must therefore be popular with his
subjects, and he binds them to himself by the charms of the gipsy life under
his direction. Coarse freedom, a noisy jollity, and obscenest impudence give
attractions to the gang. Generally the gangmaster pays up in a public house;
then he returns home at the head of the procession reeling drunk, propped up
right and left by a stalwart virago, while children and young persons bring up
the rear, boisterous, and singing chaffing and bawdy songs. On the return
journey what Fourier calls “phanerogamie,” is the order of the day.
The getting with child of girls of 13 and 14 by their male companions of the
same age, is common. The open villages which supply the contingent of the gang,
become Sodoms and Gomorrahs, [112]
and have twice as high a rate of illegitimate births as the rest of the
kingdom. The moral character of girls bred in these schools, when married
women, was shown above. Their children, when opium does not give them the
finishing stroke, are born recruits of the gang.

The gang in its classical form just described, is called the public, common,
or tramping gang. For there are also private gangs. These are made up in the
same way as the common gang, but count fewer members, and work, not under a
gang-master, but under some old farm servant, whom the farmer does
not know how to employ in any better way. The gipsy fun has vanished here, but
according to all witnesses, the payment and treatment of the children is worse.

The gang-system, which during the last years has steadily increased, [113] clearly does not exist for the
sake of the gang-master. It exists for the enrichment of the large farmers,
[114] and indirectly of the
landlords. [115] For the farmer
there is no more ingenious method of keeping his labourers well below the
normal level, and yet of always having an extra hand ready for extra work, of
extracting the greatest possible amount of labour with the least possible
amount of money [116] and of
making adult male labour “redundant.” From the exposition already
made, it will be understood why, on the one hand, a greater or less lack of
employment for the agricultural labourer is admitted, while on the other, the
gang-system is at the same time declared “necessary” on account of
the want of adult male labour and its migration to the towns. [117] The cleanly weeded land, and the
uncleanly human weeds, of Lincolnshire, are pole and counterpole of
capitalistic production. [118]

### F. Ireland

In concluding this section, we must travel for a moment to Ireland. First,
the main facts of the case.

The population of Ireland had, in 1841, reached 8,222,664; in 1851, it had
dwindled to 6,623,985; in 1861, to 5,850,309; in 1866, to 5½ millions, nearly
to its level in 1801. The diminution began with the famine year, 1846, so that
Ireland, in less than twenty years, lost more than 5/16 ths of its people. [119] Its total emigration from May,
1851, to July, 1865, numbered 1,591,487: the emigration during the years
1861-1865 was more than half-a-million. The number of inhabited houses fell,
from 1851-1861, by 52,990. From 1851-1861, the number of holdings of 15 to 30
acres increased 61,000, that of holdings over 30 acres, 109,000, whilst the
total number of all farms fell 120,000, a fall, therefore, solely due to the
suppression of farms under 15 acres — i.e., to their
centralisation.

Table A

LIVE-STOCK

Year
Horses
Cattle
Sheep
Pigs

Total

Number
Decrease
Total

Number
Decrease
Increase
Total

Number
Decrease
Increase
Total

Number
Decrease
Increase

1860
619,811
—
3,606,374
—
—
3,542,080
—
—
1,271,072
—
—

1861
614,232
5,579
3,471,688
134,686
—
3,556,050
—
13,970
1,102,042
169,030
—

1862
602,894
11,338
3,254,890
216,798
—
3,456,132
99,918
—
1,154,324
—
52,282

1863
579,978
22,916
3,144,231
110,659
—
3,308,204
147,982
—
1,067,458
86,866
—

1864
562,158
17,820
3,262,294
—
118,063
3,366,941
—
58,737
1,058,480
8,978
—

1865
547,867
14,291
3,493,414
—
231,120
3,688,742
—
321,801
1,299,893
—
241,413

The decrease of the population was naturally accompanied by a decrease in
the mass of products. For our purpose, it suffices to consider the 5 years from
1861-1865 during which over half-a-million emigrated, and the absolute number
of people sank by more than 1/3 of a million. From the above table it results:
—

Horses
Cattle
Sheep
Pigs

Absolute Decrease
Absolute Decrease
Absolute Increase
Absolute Increase

71,944
112,960
146,662
28,8211[120]

Let us now turn to agriculture, which yields the means of subsistence for
cattle and for men. In the following table is calculated the
decrease or increase for each separate year, as compared with its
immediate predecessor. The Cereal Crops include wheat, oats, barley, rye,
beans, and peas; the Green Crops, potatoes, turnips, marigolds, beet-root,
cabbages, carrots, parsnips, vetches, &c.

Table B

INCREASE OR DECREASE IN THE AREA UNDER
CROPS AND GRASS IN ACREAGE

Year
Cereal

Crops
Green

Crops
Grass and

Clover
Flax
Total

Cultivated

Land

Decrease

(Acres)
Decrease

(Acres)
Increase

(Acres)
Decrease

(Acres)
Increase

(Acres)
Decrease

(Acres)
Increase

(Acres)
Decrease

(Acres)
Increase

(Acres)

1861
15,701
36,974
—
47,969
—
—
19,271
81,373
—

1862
72,734
74,785
—
—
6,623
—
2,055
138,841
—

1863
144,719
19,358
—
—
7,724
—
63,922
92,431
—

1864
122,437
2,317
—
—
47,486
—
87,761
—
10,493

1865
72,450
—
25,241
—
68,970
50,159
—
28,398
—

1861-65
428,041
108,193
—
—
82,834
—
122,8501
330,350
—

In the year 1865, 127,470 additional acres came under the heading
“grass land,” chiefly because the area under the heading of
“bog and waste unoccupied,” decreased by 101,543 acres. If we
compare 1865 with 1864, there is a decrease in cereals of 246,667
qrs., of which 48,999 were wheat, 160,605 oats, 29,892 barley, &c.: the
decrease in potatoes was 446,398 tons, although the area of their cultivation
increased in 1865.

From the movement of population and the agricultural produce of Ireland, we
pass to the movement in the purse of its landlords, larger farmers, and
industrial capitalists. It is reflected in the rise and fall of the Income-tax.
It may be remembered that Schedule D. (profits with the exception of those of
farmers), includes also the so-called, “professional” profits
— i.e., the incomes of lawyers, doctors, &c.; and the
Schedules C. and E., in which no special details are given, include the incomes
of employees, officers, State sinecurists, State fundholders, &c.

Table C [121]

INCREASE OR DECREASE IN THE AREA UNDER
CULTIVATION,

PRODUCT PER ACRE, AND TOTAL PRODUCT OF 1865 COMPARED WITH 1864

Product
Acres of

Cultivated Land
Product

per Acre
Total Product

1864
1865
Increase or

Decrease, 1865
1864
1865
Increase or

Decrease, 1865
1864
1865
Increase or

Decrease, 1865

Wheat
276,483
266,989
—
9,494
cwt., 13.3
13.0
—
0.3
875,782 Qrs.
826,783 Qrs.
—
48,999 Qrs.

Oats
1,814,886
1,745,228
—
69,658
cwt., 12.1
12.3
0.2
—
7,826,332 Qrs.
7,659,727 Qrs.
—
166,605 Qrs.

Barley
172,700
177,102
4,402
—
cwt., 15.9
14.9
—
1.0
761,909 Qrs.
732,017 Qrs.
—
29,892 Qrs.

Bere
8,894
10,091
1,197
—
cwt., 16.4
14.8
—
1.6
15,160 Qrs.
13,989 Qrs.
—
1,171 Qrs.

Rye
cwt., 8.5
10.4
1.9
—
12,680 Qrs.
18,314 Qrs.
5,684 Qrs.
—

Potatoes
1,039,724
1,066,260
26,536
—
tons, 4.1
3.6
—
0.5
4,312,388 ts.
3,865,990 ts.
—
446,398 ts.

Turnips
337,355
334,212
—
3,143
tons, 10.3
9.9
—
0.4
3,467,659 ts.
3,301,683 ts.
—
165,976 ts.

Mangold-

wurzel
14,073
14,389
316
—
tons, 10.5
13.3
2.8
—
147,284 ts.
191,937 ts.
44,653 ts.
—

Cabbages
31,821
33,622
1,801
—
tons, 9.3
10.4
1.1
—
297,375 ts.
350,252 ts.
52,877 ts.
—

Flax
301,693
251,433
—
50,260
st. (14 lb.) 34.2
25.2
—
9.0
64,506 st.
39,561 st.
—
24,945 st.

Hay
1,609,569
1,678,493
68,9241
—
tons, 1.6
1.8
0.2
—
2,607,153 ts.
3,068,707 ts.
461,554 ts.
—

Table D

THE INCOME-TAX ON THE SUBJOINED INCOMES

(Tenth Report of the Commissioners of Inland Revenue, Lond. 1866.)

1860
1861
1862
1863
1864
1865

Schedule A.

Rent of Land
13,893,829
13,003,554
13,398,938
13,494,091
13,470,700
13,801,616

Schedule B.

Farmers’ Profits.
2,765,387
2,773,644
2,937,899
2,938,923
2,930,874
2,946,072

Schedule D.

Industrial,

&c., Profits
4,891,652
4,836,203
4,858,800
4,846,497
4,546,147
4,850,199

Total Schedules

A to E
22,962,885
22,998,394
23,597,574
23,658,631
23,236,298
23,930,340

Under Schedule D., the average annual increase of income from 1853-1864 was
only 0.93; whilst, in the same period, in Great Britain, it was 4.58. The
following table shows the distribution of the profits (with the exception of
those of farmers) for the years 1864 and 1865: —

Table E [122]

SCHEDULE D.

INCOME FROM PROFITS (OVER £6O) IN IRELAND

1864

£
1865

£

Total yearly

income of
4,368,610 divided

among 17,467 persons.
4,669,979 divided

among 18,081 persons.

Yearly income

over £60

and under £100
238,726 divided

among 5,015 persons.
222,575 divided

among 4,703 persons.

Of the yearly

total income
1,979,066 divided

among 11,321 persons.
2,028,571 divided

among 12,184 persons.

Remainder of the

total yearly income
2,150,818 divided

among 1,131 persons.
2,418,833 divided

among 1,194 persons.

Of
these

1,073,906 divided

among 1,010 persons.
1,097,927 divided

among 1,044 persons.

1,076,912 divided

among 121 persons.
1,320,906 divided

among 150 persons.

430,535 divided

among 95 persons.
584,458 divided

among 2 persons.

646,377 divided

among 26
736,448 divided

among 28

262,819 divided

among 3
274,528 divided

among 3

England, a country with fully developed capitalist production, and
pre-eminently industrial, would have bled to death with such a drain of
population as Ireland has suffered. But Ireland is at present only an
agricultural district of England, marked off by a wide channel from the country
to which it yields corn, wool, cattle, industrial and military recruits.

The depopulation of Ireland has thrown much of the land out of cultivation,
has greatly diminished the produce of the soil, [123] and, in spite of the greater area devoted to
cattle breeding, has brought about, in some of its branches, an absolute
diminution, in others, an advance scarcely worthy of mention, and constantly
interrupted by retrogressions. Nevertheless, with the fall in numbers of the
population, rents and farmers’ profits rose, although the latter not as
steadily as the former. The reason of this is easily comprehensible. On the one
hand, with the throwing of small holdings into large ones, and the change of
arable into pasture land, a larger part of the whole produce was transformed
into surplus-produce. The surplus-produce increased, although the total
produce, of which it formed a fraction, decreased. On the other hand, the money
value of this surplus-produce increased yet more rapidly than its mass, in
consequence of the rise in the English market price of meat, wool, &c.,
during the last 20, and especially during the last 10, years.

The scattered means of production that serve the producers themselves as
means of employment and of subsistence, without expanding their own value by
the incorporation of the labour of others, are no more capital than a product
consumed by its own producer is a commodity. If, with the mass of the
population, that of the means of production employed in agriculture also
diminished, the mass of the capital employed in agriculture increased, because
a part of the means of production that were formerly scattered, was
concentrated and turned into capital.

The total capital of Ireland outside agriculture, employed in industry and
trade, accumulated during the last two decades slowly, and with great and
constantly recurring fluctuations; so much the more rapidly did the
concentration of its individual constituents develop. And, however small its
absolute increase, in proportion to the dwindling population it had increased
largely.

Here, then, under our own eyes and on a large scale, a process is revealed,
than which nothing more excellent could be wished for by orthodox economy for
the support of its dogma: that misery springs from absolute surplus population,
and that equilibrium is re-established by depopulation. This is a far more
important experiment than was the plague in the middle of the 14th century so
belauded of Malthusians. Note further: If only the naïveté of the schoolmaster
could apply, to the conditions of production and population of the nineteenth
century, the standard of the 14th, this naïveté, into the bargain, overlooked
the fact that whilst, after the plague and the decimation that accompanied it,
followed on this side of the Channel, in England, enfranchisement and
enrichment of the agricultural population, on that side, in France, followed
greater servitude and more misery. [124]

The Irish famine of 1846 killed more than 1,000,000 people, but it killed
poor devils only. To the wealth of the country it did not the slightest damage.
The exodus of the next 20 years, an exodus still constantly increasing, did
not, as, e.g., the Thirty Years’ War, decimate, along with the
human beings, their means of production. Irish genius discovered an altogether
new way of spiriting a poor people thousands of miles away from the scene of
its misery. The exiles transplanted to the United States, send home sums of
money every year as travelling expenses for those left behind. Every troop that
emigrates one year, draws another after it the next. Thus, instead of costing
Ireland anything, emigration forms one of the most lucrative branches
of its export trade. Finally, it is a systematic process, which does not simply
make a passing gap in the population, but sucks out of it every year more
people than are replaced by the births, so that the absolute level of the
population falls year by year. [125]

What were the consequences for the Irish labourers left behind and freed
from the surplus population? That the relative surplus population is today as
great as before 1846; that wages are just as low, that the oppression of the
labourers has increased, that misery is forcing the country towards a new
crisis. The facts are simple. The revolution in agriculture
has kept pace with emigration. The production of relative surplus population
has more than kept pace with the absolute depopulation. A glance at table C.
shows that the change of arable to pasture land must work yet more acutely in
Ireland than in England. In England the cultivation of green crops increases
with the breeding of cattle; in Ireland, it decreases. Whilst a large number of
acres, that were formerly tilled, lie idle or are turned permanently into
grass-land, a great part of the waste land and peat bogs that were unused
formerly, become of service for the extension of cattle-breeding. The smaller
and medium farmers — I reckon among these all who do not cultivate more
than 100 acres — still make up about 8/10ths of the whole number. [126] They are one after the other, and
with a degree of force unknown before, crushed by the competition of an
agriculture managed by capital, and therefore they continually furnish new
recruits to the class of wage labourers. The one great industry of Ireland,
linen-manufacture, requires relatively few adult men and only employs
altogether, in spite of its expansion since the price of cotton rose in
1861-1866, a comparatively insignificant part of the population. Like all other
great modern industries, it constantly produces, by incessant fluctuations, a
relative surplus population within its own sphere, even with an absolute
increase in the mass of human beings absorbed by it. The misery of the
agricultural population forms the pedestal for gigantic shirt-factories, whose
armies of labourers are, for the most part, scattered over the country. Here,
we encounter again the system described above of domestic industry, which in
underpayment and overwork, possesses its own systematic means for creating
supernumerary labourers. Finally, although the depopulation has not such
destructive consequences as would result in a country with fully developed
capitalistic production, it does not go on without constant reaction
upon the home-market. The gap which emigration causes here, limits not only the
local demand for labour, but also the incomes of small shopkeepers, artisans,
tradespeople generally. Hence the diminution in incomes between £60 and £100 in
Table E.

A clear statement of the condition of the agricultural labourers in Ireland
is to be found in the Reports of the Irish Poor Law Inspectors (1870). [127] Officials of a government which
is maintained only by bayonets and by a state of siege, now open, now
disguised, they have to observe all the precautions of language that their
colleagues in England disdain. In spite of this, however, they do not let their
government cradle itself in illusions. According to them the rate of wages in
the country, still very low, has within the last 20 years risen 50-60 per
cent., and stands now, on the average, at 6s. to 9s. per week. But behind this
apparent rise, is hidden an actual fall in wages, for it does not correspond at
all to the rise in price of the necessary means of subsistence that has taken
place in the meantime. For proof, the following extract from the official
accounts of an Irish workhouse.

AVERAGE WEEKLY COST PER HEAD

Year ended
Provisions and

Necessaries.
Clothing.
TOTAL.

29th Sept., 1849.
1s. 3 1/4d.
3d.
1s. 6 1/4d.

29th Sept., 1869.
2s. 7 1/4d.
6d.
3s. 1 1/4d.

The price of the necessary means of subsistence is therefore fully twice,
and that of clothing exactly twice, as much as they were 20 years before.

Even apart from this disproportion, the mere comparison of the rate of wages
expressed in gold would give a result far from accurate. Before the famine, the
great mass of agricultural wages were paid in kind, only the smallest part in
money; today, payment in money is the rule. From this it follows that, whatever
the amount of the real wage, its money rate must rise.

“Previous to the famine, the labourer enjoyed his cabin
... with a rood, or half-acre or acre of land, and facilities for ... a crop
of potatoes. He was able to rear his pig and keep fowl.... But they now have to
buy bread, and they have no refuse upon which they can feed a pig or fowl, and
they have consequently no benefit from the sale of a pig, fowl, or eggs.”

In fact, formerly, the agricultural labourers were but the smallest of the
small farmers, and formed for the most part a kind of rear-guard of the medium
and large farms on which they found employment. Only since the catastrophe of
1846 have they begun to form a fraction of the class of purely wage labourers,
a special class, connected with its wage-masters only by monetary relations.

We know what were the conditions of their dwellings in 1846. Since then they
have grown yet worse. A part of the agricultural labourers, which, however,
grows less day by day, dwells still on the holdings of the farmers in
over-crowded huts, whose hideousness far surpasses the worst that the English
agricultural labourers offered us in this way. And this holds generally with
the exception of certain tracts of Ulster; in the south, in the counties of
Cork, Limerick, Kilkenny, &c.; in the east, in Wicklow, Wexford, &c.;
in the centre of Ireland, in King’s and Queen’s County, Dublin,
&c.; in the west, in Sligo, Roscommon, Mayo, Galway, &c.

“The agricultural labourers’ huts,” an
inspector cries out, “are a disgrace to the Christianity and to the
civilisation of this country.” [129]

In order to increase the attractions of these holes for the labourers, the
pieces of land belonging thereto from time immemorial, are systematically
confiscated.

“The mere sense that they exist subject to this species
of ban, on the part of the landlords and their agents, has ... given birth in
the minds of the labourers to corresponding sentiments of antagonism and
dissatisfaction towards those by whom they are thus led to regard themselves as
being treated as ... a proscribed race.” [130]

The first act of the agricultural revolution was to sweep away the huts
situated on the field of labour. This was done on the largest scale, and as if
in obedience to a command from on high. Thus many labourers were compelled to
seek shelter in villages and towns. There they were thrown like refuse into
garrets, holes, cellars and corners, in the worst back slums. Thousands of Irish
families, who according to the testimony of the English, eaten up as these are
with national prejudice, are notable for their rare attachment to the domestic
hearth, for their gaiety and the purity of their home-life, found themselves
suddenly transplanted into hotbeds of vice. The men are now obliged to seek
work of the neighbouring farmers and are only hired by the day, and therefore
under the most precarious form of wage. Hence

“they sometimes have long distances to go to
and from work, often get wet, and suffer much hardship, not unfrequently ending
in sickness, disease and want.” [131]

“ The towns have had to receive from year to year what
was deemed to be the surplus-labour of the rural division;” [132] and then people still wonder
“there is still a surplus of labour in the towns and villages, and either
a scarcity or a threatened scarcity in some of the country divisions.”
[133] The truth is that this want
only becomes perceptible “in harvest-time, or during spring, or at such
times as agricultural operations are carried on with activity; at other periods
of the year many hands are idle;” [134] that “from the digging out of the main crop
of potatoes in October until the early spring following ... there is no
employment for them;” [135]
and further, that during the active times they “are subject to broken
days and to all kinds of interruptions.” [136]

These results of the agricultural revolution — i.e., the
change of arable into pasture land, the use of machinery, the most rigorous
economy of labour, &c., are still further aggravated by the model
landlords, who, instead of spending their rents in other countries, condescend
to live in Ireland on their demesnes. In order that the law of supply and
demand may not be broken, these gentlemen draw their

“labour-supply ... chiefly from their small tenants,
who are obliged to attend when required to do the landlord’s work, at
rates of wages, in many instances, considerably under the current rates paid to
ordinary labourers, and without regard to the inconvenience or loss to the
tenant of being obliged to neglect his own business at critical periods of
sowing or reaping.” [137]

The uncertainty and irregularity of employment, the constant return and long
duration of gluts of labour, all these symptoms of a relative surplus
population, figure therefore in the reports of the Poor Law administration, as
so many hardships of the agricultural proletariat. It will be remembered that
we met, in the English agricultural proletariat, with a similar spectacle. But
the difference is that in England, an industrial country, the industrial
reserve recruits itself from the country districts, whilst in Ireland, an
agricultural country, the agricultural reserve recruits itself from the towns,
the cities of refuge of the expelled agricultural labourers. In the former,
the supernumeraries of agriculture are transformed into factory
operatives; in the latter, those forced into the towns, whilst at the same time
they press on the wages in towns, remain agricultural labourers, and are
constantly sent back to the country districts in search of work.

The official inspectors sum up the material condition of the agricultural
labourer as follows:

“Though living with the strictest frugality, his own
wages are barely sufficient to provide food for an ordinary family and pay his
rent” and he depends upon other sources for the means of clothing
himself, his wife, and children.... The atmosphere of these cabins, combined
with the other privations they are subjected to, has made this class
particularly susceptible to low fever and pulmonary consumption.” [138]

After this, it is no wonder that, according to the unanimous testimony of
the inspectors, a sombre discontent runs through the ranks of this class, that
they long for the return of the past, loathe the present, despair of the
future, give themselves up “to the evil influence of agitators,”
and have only one fixed idea, to emigrate to America. This is the land of
Cockaigne, into which the great Malthusian panacea, depopulation, has
transformed green Erin.

What a happy life the Irish factory operative leads one example will
show:

“On my recent visit to the North of Ireland,”
says the English Factory Inspector, Robert Baker, “I met with the
following evidence of effort in an Irish skilled workman to afford education to
his children; and I give his evidence verbatim, as I took it from his mouth.
That he was a skilled factory hand, may be understood when I say that he was
employed on goods for the Manchester market. ‘Johnson. — I am a
beetler and work from 6 in the morning till 11 at night, from Monday to Friday.
Saturday we leave off at 6 p. m., and get three hours of it (for meals and
rest). I have five children in all. For this work I get 10s. 6d. a week; my
wife works here also, and gets 5s. a week. The oldest girl who is 12, minds the
house. She is also cook, and all the servant we have. She gets the young ones
ready for school. A girl going past the house wakes me at half past five in the
morning. My wife gets up and goes along with me. We get nothing (to eat) before
we come to work. The child of 12 takes care of the little children all the day,
and we get nothing till breakfast at eight. At eight we go home. We get tea once a week; at other times we get stirabout,
sometimes of oat-meal, sometimes of Indian meal, as we are able to get it. In
the winter we get a little sugar and water to our Indian meal. In the summer we
get a few potatoes, planting a small patch ourselves; and when they are done
we get back to stirabout. Sometimes we get a little milk as it may be. So we go
on from day to day, Sunday and week day, always the same the year round. I am
always very much tired when I have done at night. We may see a bit of
flesh meat sometimes, but very seldom. Three of our children attend school, for
whom we pay 1d. a week a head. Our rent is 9d. a week. Peat for firing costs
1s. 6d. a fortnight at the very lowest.’” [139]

Such are Irish wages, such is Irish life!

In fact the misery of Ireland is again the topic of the day in England. At
the end of 1866 and the beginning of 1867, one of the Irish land magnates, Lord
Dufferin, set about its solution in The Times. “Wie menschlich
von solch grossem Herrn!”

From Table E. we saw that, during 1864, of £4,368,610 of total profits,
three surplus-value makers pocketed only £262,819; that in 1865, however, out
of £4,669,979 total profits, the same three virtuosi of
“abstinence” pocketed £274,528; in 1864, 26 surplus-value makers
reached to £646,377; in 1865, 28 surplus-value makers reached to £736,448; in
1864, 121 surplus-value makers, £1,076,912; in 1865, 150 surplus-value makers,
£1,320,906; in 1864, 1,131 surplus-value makers £2,150,818, nearly half of the
total annual profit; in 1865, 1,194 surplus-value makers, £2,418,833, more than
half of the total annual profit. But the lion’s share, which an
inconceivably small number of land magnates in England, Scotland and Ireland
swallow up of the yearly national rental, is so monstrous that the wisdom of
the English State does not think fit to afford the same statistical materials
about the distribution of rents as about the distribution of profits. Lord
Dufferin is one of those land magnates. That rent-rolls and profits can ever be
“excessive,” or that their plethora is in any way connected with
plethora of the people’s misery is, of course, an idea as
“disreputable” as “unsound.” He keeps to facts. The
fact is that, as the Irish population diminishes, the Irish rent-rolls swell;
that depopulation benefits the landlords, therefore also benefits the soil,
and, therefore, the people, that mere accessory of the soil. He declares,
therefore, that Ireland is still over-populated, and the stream of emigration
still flows too lazily. To be perfectly happy, Ireland must get rid of at least
one-third of a million of labouring men. Let no man imagine that this lord,
poetic into the bargain, is a physician of the school of Sangrado, who as often
as he did not find his patient better, ordered phlebotomy and again phlebotomy,
until the patient lost his sickness at the same time as his blood. Lord
Dufferin demands a new blood-letting of one-third of a million only, instead of
about two millions; in fact, without the getting rid of these, the millennium
in Erin is not to be. The proof is easily given.

NUMBER AND EXTENT OF FARMS IN IRELAND IN
1864 [140]

No.
Acres

(1) Farms not

over 1 acre.
48,653
25,394

(2) Farms over 1,

not over 5 acres.
82,037
288,916

(3) Farms over 5,

not over 15 acres.
176,368
1,836,310

(4) Farms over 15,

not over 30 acres.
136,578
3,051,343

(5) Farms over 30,

not over 50 acres.
71,961
2,906,274

(6) Farms over 50,

not over 100 acres.
54,247
3,983,880

(7) Farms over

100 acres.
31,927
8,227,807

(8) TOTAL AREA.
—
26,319,924

Centralisation has from 1851 to 1861 destroyed principally farms of the
first three categories, under 1 and not over 15 acres. These above all must
disappear. This gives 307,058 “supernumerary” farmers, and
reckoning the families the low average of 4 persons, 1,228,232 persons. On the
extravagant supposition that, after the agricultural revolution is complete
one-fourth of these are again absorbable, there remain for emigration 921,174
persons. Categories 4, 5, 6, of over 15 and not over 100 acres, are, as was
known long since in England, too small for capitalistic cultivation of corn,
and for sheep-breeding are almost vanishing quantities. On the same supposition
as before, therefore, there are further 788,761 persons to emigrate; total,
1,709,532. And as l’appétit vient en mangeant, Rentroll’s eyes will
soon discover that Ireland, with 3½ millions, is still always miserable, and
miserable because she is overpopulated. Therefore her depopulation must go yet
further, that thus she may fulfil her true destiny, that of an English
sheep-walk and cattle-pasture.” [141]

Like all good things in this bad world, this profitable method has its
drawbacks. With the accumulation of rents in Ireland, the accumulation of the
Irish in America keeps pace. The Irishman, banished by sheep and ox, re-appears
on the other side of the ocean as a Fenian, and face to face with the old queen
of the seas rises, threatening and more threatening, the young giant
Republic:

Acerba fata Romanos agunt

Scelusque fraternae necis.

[A cruel fate torments the Romans,

and the crime of fratricide]

Footnotes

1.
Karl Marx, l. c., “A égalité d’oppression des masses, plus un pays
a de prolétaires et plus il est riche.” (Colins, “L’Economie
Politique. Source des Révolutions et des Utopies, prétendues
Socialistes.” Paris, 1857, t. III., p. 331.) Our
“prolétarian” is economically none other than the wage labourer,
who produces and increases capital, and is thrown out on the streets, as soon
as he is superfluous for the needs of aggrandisement of “Monsieur
capital,” as Pecqueur calls this person. “The sickly proletarian of
the primitive forest,” is a pretty Roscherian fancy. The primitive
forester is owner of the primitive forest, and uses the primitive forest as his
property with the freedom of an orang-outang. He is not, therefore, a
proletarian. This would only be the case, if the primitive forest exploited
him, instead of being exploited by him. As far as his health is concerned, such
a man would well bear comparison, not only with the modern proletarian, but
also with the syphilitic and scrofulous upper classes. But, no doubt, Herr
Wilhelm Roscher, by “primitive forest” means his native heath of
Lüneburg.

2.
John Bellers, l. c., p. 2.

3.
Bernard de Mandeville: “The Fable of the Bees,” 5th edition,
London, 1728. Remarks, pp. 212, 213, 328. “Temperate living and constant
employment is the direct road, for the poor, to rational happiness” [by
which he most probably means long working-days and little means of
subsistence], “and to riches and strength for the state”
(viz., for the landlords, capitalists, and their political dignitaries
and agents). (“An Essay on Trade and Commerce,” London, 1770, p.
54.)

4.
Eden should have asked, whose creatures then are “the civil
institutions"? From his standpoint of juridical illusion, he does not regard
the law as a product of the material relations of production, but conversely
the relations of production as products of the law. Linguet overthrew
Montesquieu’s illusory “Esprit des lois” with one word:
“ L’esprit des lois, c’est la propriété.” [The spirit of laws is property]

5.
Eden, l. c., Vol. 1, book I., chapter 1, pp. 1, 2, and preface, p. xx.

6.
If the reader reminds me of Malthus, whose “Essay on Population”
appeared in 1798, I remind him that this work in its first form is nothing more
than a schoolboyish, superficial plagiary of De Foe, Sir James Steuart,
Townsend, Franklin, Wallace, &c., and does not contain a single sentence
thought out by himself. The great sensation this pamphlet caused, was due
solely to party interest. The French Revolution had found passionate defenders
in the United Kingdom; the “principle of population,” slowly worked
out in the eighteenth century, and then, in the midst of a great social crisis,
proclaimed with drums and trumpets as the infallible antidote to the teachings
of Condorcet, &c., was greeted with jubilance by the English oligarchy as
the great destroyer of all hankerings after human development. Malthus, hugely
astonished at his success, gave himself to stuffing into his book materials
superficially compiled, and adding to it new matter, not discovered but annexed
by him. Note further: Although Malthus was a parson of the English State
Church, he had taken the monastic vow of celibacy — one of the conditions
of holding a Fellowship in Protestant Cambridge University: “Socios
collegiorum maritos esse non permittimus, sed statim postquam quis uxorem
duxerit socius collegii desinat esse.” (“Reports of Cambridge
University Commission,” p. 172.) This circumstance favourably
distinguishes Malthus from the other Protestant parsons, who have shuffled off
the command enjoining celibacy of the priesthood and have taken, “Be
fruitful and multiply,” as their special Biblical mission in such a
degree that they generally contribute to the increase of population to a really
unbecoming extent, whilst they preach at the same time to the labourers the
“principle of population.” It is characteristic that the economic
fall of man, the Adam’s apple, the urgent appetite, “the checks
which tend to blunt the shafts of Cupid,” as Parson Townsend waggishly
puts it, that this delicate question was and is monopolised by the Reverends of
Protestant Theology, or rather of the Protestant Church. With the exception of
the Venetian monk, Ortes, an original and clever writer, most of the population
theory teachers are Protestant parsons. For instance, Bruckner, “Théorie
du Système animal,” Leyde, 1767, in which the whole subject of the modern
population theory is exhausted, and to which the passing quarrel between
Quesnay and his pupil, the elder Mirabeau, furnished ideas on the same topic;
then Parson Wallace, Parson Townsend, Parson Malthus and his pupil, the
arch-Parson Thomas Chalmers, to say nothing of lesser reverend scribblers in
this line. Originally, Political Economy was studied by philosophers like
Hobbes, Locke, Hume; by businessmen and statesmen, like Thomas More, Temple,
Sully, De Witt, North, Law, Vanderlint, Cantillon, Franklin; and especially,
and with the greatest success, by medical men like Petty, Barbon, Mandeville,
Quesnay. Even in the middle of the eighteenth century, the Rev. Mr. Tucker, a
notable economist of his time, excused himself for meddling with the things of
Mammon. Later on, and in truth with this very “Principle of
population,” struck the hour of the Protestant parsons. Petty, who
regarded the population as the basis of wealth, and was, like Adam Smith, an
outspoken foe to parsons, says, as if he had a presentiment of their bungling
interference, “that Religion best flourishes when the Priests are most
mortified, as was before said of the Law, which best flourisheth when lawyers
have least to do.” He advises the Protestant priests, therefore, if they,
once for all, will not follow the Apostle Paul and “mortify”
themselves by celibacy, “not to breed more Churchmen than the Benefices,
as they now stand shared out, will receive, that is to say, if there be places
for about twelve thousand in England and Wales, it will not be safe to breed up
24,000 ministers, for then the twelve thousand which are unprovided for, will
seek ways how to get themselves a livelihood, which they cannot do more easily
than by persuading the people that the twelve thousand incumbents do poison or
starve their souls, and misguide them in their way to Heaven.” (Petty:
“A Treatise of Taxes and Contributions,” London, 1667, p. 57.) Adam
Smith’s position with the Protestant priesthood of his time is shown by
the following. In “A Letter to A. Smith, L.L.D. On the Life, Death, and
Philosophy of his Friend, David Hume. By one of the People called
Christians,” 4th Edition, Oxford, 1784, Dr. Horne, Bishop of Norwich,
reproves Adam Smith, because in a published letter to Mr. Strahan, he
“embalmed his friend David” (sc. Hume); because he told the world
how “Hume amused himself on his deathbed with Lucian and Whist,”
and because he even had the impudence to write of Hume: “I have always
considered him, both in his life-time and since his death, as approaching as
nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man, as, perhaps, the
nature of human frailty will permit.” The bishop cries out, in a passion:
“Is it right in you, Sir, to hold up to our view as ‘perfectly wise
and virtuous,’ the character and conduct of one, who seems to
have been possessed with an incurable antipathy to all that is called
Religion; and who strained every nerve to explode, suppress and
extirpate the spirit of it among men, that its very name, if he could effect
it, might no more be had in remembrance?” (l. c., p. 8.) “But let
not the lovers of truth be discouraged. Atheism cannot be of long
continuance.” (P. 17.) Adam Smith, “had the atrocious wickedness to
propagate atheism through the land (viz., by his “Theory of Moral
Sentiments”). Upon the whole, Doctor, your meaning is good; but I think
you will not succeed this time. You would persuade us, by the example of
David Hume, Esq., that atheism is the only cordial for low spirits,
and the proper antidote against the fear of death.... You may smile over
Babylon in ruins and congratulate the hardened Pharaoh on his
overthrow in the Red Sea.” (l. c., pp. 21, 22.) One orthodox individual,
amongst Adam Smith’s college friends, writes after his death:
“Smith’s well-placed affection for Hume ... hindered him from being
a Christian.... When he met with honest men whom he liked ... he would believe
almost anything they said. Had he been a friend of the worthy ingenious Horrox
he would have believed that the moon some times disappeared in a clear sky
without the interposition of a cloud.... He approached to republicanism in his
political principles.” (“The Bee.” By James Anderson, 18
Vols., Vol. 3, pp. 166, 165, Edinburgh, 1791-93.) Parson Thomas Chalmers has
his suspicions as to Adam Smith having invented the category of
“unproductive labourers,” solely for the Protestant parsons, in
spite of their blessed work in the vineyard of the Lord.

7.
“The limit, however, to the employment of both the operative and the
labourer is the same; namely, the possibility of the employer realising a
profit on the produce of their industry. If the rate of wages is such
as to reduce the master’s gains below the average profit of capital, he
will cease to employ them, or he will only employ them on condition of
submission to a reduction of wages.” (John Wade, l. c., p. 241.)

8.
Note by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism to the Russian edition: The MS in the
first case says “little” and in the second case “much”;
the correction has been introduced according to the authorised French
translation.

9.
Cf. Karl Marx: “Zur Kritik der Politischen Oekonomie,” pp. 166,
seq.

10. “If we now return to our first inquiry,
wherein it was shown that capital itself is only the result of human labour...
it seems quite incomprehensible that man can have fallen under the domination
of capital, his own product; can be subordinated to it; and as in reality this
is beyond dispute the case, involuntarily the question arises: How has the
labourer been able to pass from being master of capital — as its creator
— to being its slave?” (Von Thünen, “Der isolierte
Staat” Part ii., Section ii., Rostock, 1863, pp. 5, 6.) It is
Thünen’s merit to have asked this question. His answer is simply
childish.

11. From Adam Smith, Enquiry into the Nature of
...., Volume I.

12. Note in the 4th German edition. — The
latest English and American “trusts” are already striving to attain
this goal by attempting to unite at least all the large-scale concerns in one
branch of industry into one great joint-stock company with a practical
monopoly. F. E.

13. Note in the 3rd German edition. — In
Marx’s copy there is here the marginal note: “Here note for working
out later; if the extension is only quantitative, then for a greater and a
smaller capital in the same branch of business the profits are as the
magnitudes of the capitals advanced. If the quantitative extension induces
qualitative change, then the rate of profit on the larger capital rises
simultaneously.” F. E.

14. The census of England and Wales shows: all persons
employed in agriculture (landlords, farmers, gardeners, shepherds, &c.,
included): 1851, 2,011,447; 1861, 1,924,110. Fall, 87,337. Worsted manufacture:
1851, 102,714 persons; 1861, 79,242. Silk weaving: 1851, 111,940; 1861,
101,678. Calico-printing: 1851, 12,098; 1861, 12,556. A small rise that, in the
face of the enormous extension of this industry and implying a great fall
proportionally in the number of labourers employed. Hat-making: 1851, 15,957;
1861, 13,814. Straw-hat and bonnet-making: 1851, 20,393; 1861, 18,176. Malting:
1851, 10,566; 1861, 10,677. Chandlery, 1851, 4,949; 1861, 4,686. This fall is
due, besides other causes, to the increase in lighting by gas. Comb-making:
1851, 2,038; 1861, 1,478. Sawyers: 1851, 30,552; 1861, 31,647 — a
small rise in consequence of the increase of sawing-machines. Nail-making:
1851, 26,940; 1861, 26,130 — fall in consequence of the competition of
machinery. Tin and copper-mining: 1851, 31,360; 1861, 32,041. On the other
hand: Cotton-spinning and weaving: 1851, 371,777; 1861, 456,646. Coal-mining:
1851, 183,389, 1861, 246,613, “The increase of labourers is generally
greatest, since 1851, in such branches of industry in which machinery has not
up to the present been employed with success.” (Census of England and
Wales for 1861. Vol. III. London, 1863, p. 36.)

15. Added in the 4th German edition. —
The law of progressive diminution of the relative magnitude of variable capital
and its effect on the condition of the class of wage workers is conjectured
rather than understood by some of the prominent economists of the classical
school. The greatest service was rendered here by John Barton, although he,
like all the rest, lumps together constant and fixed capital, variable and
circulating capital. He says:

“The demand for labour
depends on the increase of circulating, and not of fixed capital. Were it true
that the proportion between these two sorts of capital is the same at all
times, and in all circumstances, then, indeed, it follows that the number of
labourers employed is in proportion to the wealth of the state. But such a
proposition has not the semblance of probability. As arts are cultivated, and
civilisation is extended, fixed capital bears a larger and larger proportion to
circulating capital. The amount of fixed capital employed in the production of
a piece of British muslin is at least a hundred, probably a thousand times
greater than that employed in a similar piece of Indian muslin. And the
proportion of circulating capital is a hundred or thousand times less ... the
whole of the annual savings, added to the fixed capital, would have no effect
in increasing the demand for labour.” (John Barton, “Observations
on the Circumstances which Influence the Condition of the Labouring Classes of
Society.” London, 1817, pp. 16, 17.) “The same cause which may
increase the net revenue of the country may at the same time render the
population redundant, and deteriorate the condition of the labourer.”
(Ricardo, l. c., p. 469.) With increase of capital, “the demand [for
labour] will be in a diminishing ratio.” (Ibid., p. 480, Note.)
“The amount of capital devoted to the maintenance of labour may vary,
independently of any changes in the whole amount of capital.... Great
fluctuations in the amount of employment, and great suffering may become more
frequent as capital itself becomes more plentiful.” (Richard Jones,
“An Introductory Lecture on Pol. Econ.,” Lond. 1833, p. 13)
“Demand [for labour] will rise ... not in proportion to the accumulation
of the general capital. ... Every augmentation, therefore, in the national
stock destined for reproduction, comes, in the progress of society, to have
less and less influence upon the condition of the labourer.” (Ramsay, l.
c., pp. 90, 91.)

16. H. Merivale. “Lectures on Colonisation and
Colonies,” 1841, Vol. I , p. 146.

17. Malthus, “Principles of Political
Economy,” pp. 215, 319, 320. In this work, Malthus finally discovers,
with the help of Sismondi, the beautiful Trinity of capitalistic production:
over-production, over-population, over-consumption — three very delicate
monsters, indeed. Cf. F. Engels, “Umrisse zu einer Kritik der
Nationalökonomie,” l. c., p, 107, et seq.

18. Harriet Martineau, “A Manchester
Strike,” 1832, p. 101.

19. Even in the cotton famine of 1863 we find, in a
pamphlet of the operative cotton-spinners of Blackburn, fierce denunciations of
overwork, which, in consequence of the Factory Acts, of course only affected
adult male labourers. “The adult operatives at this mill have been asked
to work from 12 to 13 hours per day, while there are hundreds who are compelled
to be idle who would willingly work partial time, in order to maintain their
families and save their brethren from a premature grave through being
overworked.... We,” it goes on to say, “would ask if the practice
of working overtime by a number of hands, is likely to create a good feeling
between masters and servants. Those who are worked overtime feel the injustice
equally with those who are condemned to forced idleness. There is in the
district almost sufficient work to give to all partial employment if fairly
distributed. We are only asking what is right in requesting the masters
generally to pursue a system of short hours, particularly until a better state
of things begins to dawn upon us, rather than to work a portion of the hands
overtime, while others, for want of work, are compelled to exist upon
charity.” (“Reports of Insp. of Fact., Oct. 31, 1863,” p. 8.)
The author of the “Essay on Trade and Commerce” grasps the effect
of a relative surplus population on the employed labourers with his usual
unerring bourgeois instinct. “Another cause of idleness in this kingdom
is the want of a sufficient number of labouring hands .... Whenever from an
extraordinary demand for manufactures, labour grows scarce, the labourers feel
their own consequence, and will make their masters feel it likewise — it
is amazing; but so depraved are the dispositions of these people, that in such
cases a set of workmen have combined to distress the employer by idling a whole
day together.” (“Essay, &c.,” pp. 27, 28.) The fellows in
fact were hankering after a rise in wages.

20. Economist, Jan. 21. 1860.

21. Whilst during the last six months of 1866, 80-90,000
working people in London were thrown out of work, the Factory Report for that
same half year says: “It does not appear absolutely true to say that
demand will always produce supply just at the moment when it is needed. It has
not done so with labour, for much machinery has been idle last year for want of
hands.” (“Rep. of Insp. of Fact., 31st Oct., 1866,” p.
81.)

22. Opening address to the Sanitary Conference,
Birmingham, January 15th, 1875, by J. Chamberlain, Mayor of the town, now
(1883) President of the Board of Trade.

23. 781 towns given in the census for 1861 for England
and Wales “contained 10,960,998 inhabitants, while the villages and
country parishes contained 9,105,226. In 1851, 580 towns were distinguished,
and the population in them and in the surrounding country was nearly equal. But
while in the subsequent ten years the population in the villages and the
country increased half a million, the population in the 580 towns increased by
a million and a half (1,554,067). The increase of the population of the country
parishes is 6.5 per cent., and of the towns 17.3 per cent. The difference in
the rates of increase is due to the migration from country to town.
Three-fourths of the total increase of population has taken place in the
towns.” (“Census, &c.,” pp. 11 and 12.)

24. “Poverty seems favourable to
generation.” (A. Smith.) This is even a specially wise arrangement of
God, according to the gallant and witty Abbé Galiani “Iddio af che gli
uomini che esercitano mestieri di prima utilità nascono abbondantemente.”
(Galiani, l. c., p. 78.) [God ordains that men who carry
on trades of primary utility are born in abundance] “Misery up to
the extreme point of famine and pestilence, instead of checking, tends to
increase population.” (S. Laing, “National Distress,” 1844,
p. 69.) After Laing has illustrated this by statistics, he continues: “If
the people were all in easy circumstances, the world would soon be
depopulated.”

25. “De jour en jour il devient donc plus clair
que les rapports de production dans lesquels se meut la bourgeoisie n’ont
pas un caractère un, un caractère simple, mais un caractère de duplicité; que
dans les mêmes rapports dans lesquels se produit la richesse, la misère se
produit aussi; que dans les mêmes rapports dans lesquels il y a développement
des forces productives, il y a une force productive de répression; que ces
rapports ne produisent la richesse bourgeoise, c’est-à-dire la richesse
de la classe bourgeoise, qu’en anéantissant continuellement la richesse
des membres intégrants de cette classe et en produisant un prolétariat toujours
croissant.” [From day to day it thus becomes
clearer that the production relations in which the bourgeoisie moves have not a
simple, uniform character, but a dual character; that in the selfsame relations
in which wealth is produced, poverty is produced also; that in the selfsame
relations in which there is a development of productive forces, there is also a
force producing repression; that there relations produce bourgeois wealth,
i.e., the wealth of the bourgeois class, only by continually annihilating the
wealth of the individual members of this class and by producing an evergrowing
proletariat] (Karl Marx: “Misère de la Philosophie,” p.
116.)

26. G. Ortes: “Delia Economia Nazionale libri sei,
1777,” in Custodi, Parte Moderna, t. xxi, pp. 6, 9, 22, 25, etc. Ortes
says, l. c., p. 32: “In luoco di progettar sistemi inutili per la
felicità de’popoli, mi limiterò a investigare la regione della loro
infelicità.” [Instead of projecting useless systems
for achieving the happiness of people, I shall limit myself to investigating
the reasons for their unhappiness]

27. “A Dissertation on the Poor Laws. By a
Well-wisher of Mankind. (The Rev. J. Townsend) 1786,” republished Lond.
1817, pp. 15, 39, 41. This “delicate” parson, from whose work just
quoted, as well as from his “Journey through Spain,” Malthus often
copies whole pages, himself borrowed the greater part of his doctrine from Sir
James Steuart, whom he however alters in the borrowing. E.g., when
Steuart says: “Here, in slavery, was a forcible method of making mankind
diligent,” [for the non-workers] ... “Men were then forced to
work” [i.e.,to work gratis for others], “because they were
slaves of others; men are now forced to work” [i.e., to work
gratis for non-workers] “because they are the slaves of their
necessities,” he does not thence conclude, like the fat holder of
benefices, that the wage labourer must always go fasting. He wishes, on the
contrary, to increase their wants and to make the increasing number of their
wants a stimulus to their labour for the “more delicate.”

28. Storch, l. c., t. iii, p. 223.

29. Sismondi, l. c., pp. 79, 80, 85.

30. Destutt de Tracy, l. c., p. 231: “Les nations
pauvres, c’est là où le peuple est à son aise; et les nations riches,
c’est là où il est ordinairement pauvre.” [The poor nations are those where the people are comfortably
off; and the rich nations, those where the people are generally poor]

31. “Tenth Report of the Commissioners of H. M.
Inland Revenue.” Lond., 1866. p. 38.

32. lbidem.

33. These figures are sufficient for comparison, but,
taken absolutely, are false, since, perhaps, £100,000,000 of income are
annually not declared. The complaints of the Inland Revenue Commissioners of
systematic fraud, especially on the part of the commercial and industrial
classes, are repeated in each of their reports. So e.g., “A
Joint-stock company returns £6,000 as assessable profits, the surveyor raises
the amount to £88,000, and upon that sum duty is ultimately paid. Another
company which returns £190,000 is finally compelled to admit that the true
return should be £250,000.” (Ibid., p, 42.)

34. “Census, &c.,” l. c., p. 29. John
Bright’s assertion that 150 landlords own half of England, and 12 half
the Scotch soil, has never been refuted.

35. “Fourth Report, &c., of Inland
Revenue.” Lond., 1860, p. 17.

36. These are the net incomes after certain legally
authorised abatements.

37. At this moment, March, 1867, the Indian and Chinese
market is again overstocked by the consignments of the British cotton
manufacturers. In 1866 a reduction in wages of 5 per cent. took place amongst
the cotton operatives. In 1867, as consequence of a similar operation, there
was a strike of 20,000 men at Preston. [Added in the 4th German
edition. — That was the prelude to the crisis which broke out immediately
afterwards. — F. E.]

38. “Census, &C.,” l. c., P. 11.

39. Gladstone in the House of Commons, Feb. 13th, 1843.
Times, Feb. 14th, 1843 — “It is one of the most melancholy
features in the social state of this country that we see, beyond the
possibility of denial, that while there is at this moment a decrease in the
consuming powers of the people, an increase of the pressure of privations and
distress; there is at the same time a constant accumulation of wealth in the
upper classes, an increase of the luxuriousness of their habits, and of their
means of enjoyment.” (Hansard, 13th Feb.)

40. Gladstone in the House of Commons, April 16th, 1863.
Morning Star, April 17th.

41. See the official accounts in the Blue book:
“Miscellaneous Statistics of the United Kingdom,” Part vi., London,
1866, pp. 260-273, passim. Instead of the statistics of orphan asylums,
&c., the declamations of the ministerial journals in recommending dowries
for the Royal children might also serve. The greater dearness of the means of
subsistence is never forgotten there.

42. Gladstone, House of Commons, 7th April, 1864.
— “The Hansard version runs: ‘Again, and yet more at large
— what is human life, but, in the majority of cases, a struggle for
existence.’ The continual crying contradictions in Gladstone’s
Budget speeches of 1863 and 1864 were characterised by an English writer by the
following quotation from Boileau:

“Voilà l’homme en
effet. Il va du blanc au noir,

Il condamne au matin ses sentiments du soir.

Importun à tout autre, à soi-même incommode,

Il change à tout moment d’esprit comme de mode.”

[Such is the man: he goes from black to white. / He
condemns in the morning what he felt in the evening. / A nuisance to everyone
else, and an inconvenience to himself, / he changes his way of thinking as
easily as he changes his way of dressing]

(“The Theory of Exchanges, &c.,” London, 1864, p. 135.)

43. H. Fawcett, l. c., pp. 67-82. As to the increasing
dependence of labourers on the retail shopkeepers, this is the consequence of
the frequent oscillations and interruptions of their employment.

44. Wales here is always included in England.

45. A peculiar light is thrown on the advance made since
the time of Adam Smith, by the fact that by him the word
“workhouse” is still occasionally used as synonymous with
“manufactory”; e.g., the opening of his chapter on the
division of labour; “those employed in every different branch of the work
can often be collected into the same workhouse.”

46. “Public Health. Sixth Report, 1864,” p.
13.

47. l. c., p. 17.

48. l. c., p. 13.

49. l. c., Appendix, p. 232.

50. l. c., pp. 232, 233.

51. l. c., pp. 14, 15.

52. “In no particular have the rights of
persons been so avowedly and shamefully sacrificed to the rights of
property as in regard to the lodging of the labouring class. Every
large town may be looked upon as a place of human sacrifice, a shrine where
thousands pass yearly through the fire as offerings to the moloch of
avarice,” S. Laing, l. c., p. 150.

53. “Public Health, Eighth Report. 1866.” p.
14, note.

54. l. c., p. 89. With reference to the children in
these colonies, Dr. Hunter says: “People are not now alive to tell us how
children were brought up before this age of dense agglomerations of poor began,
and he would be a rash prophet who should tell us what future behaviour is to
be expected from the present growth of children, who, under circumstances
probably never before paralleled in this country, are now completing their
education for future practice, as ’dangerous classes’ by sitting up
half the night with persons of every age, half naked, drunken, obscene, and
quarrelsome.” (l. c., p. 56.)

55. l. c., p. 62.

56. “Report of the Officer of Health of St.
Martins-in-the-Fields, 1865.”

57. “Public Health, Eighth Report, 1866,” p. 91.

58. l. c., p. 88.

59. l. c., p. 88.

60. l. c., p. 89.

61. l. c., p. 55 and 56.

62. l. c., p. 149.

63. l. c., p. 50.

64.

COLLECTING AGENTS LIST
(BRADFORD).

Houses

Vulcan Street, No. 122
1 room
16 persons

Lumiev Street, No. 13
1 room
11 persons

Bower Street, No. 41
1 room
11 persons

Portland Street. No. 112
1 room
10 persons

Hardy Street, No. 17
1 room
10 persons

North Street, No. 18
1 room
16 persons

North Street, No. 17
1 room
13 persons

Wymer Street, No. 19
1 room
8 adults

Jowett Street, No. 56
1 room
12 persons

George Street, No. 150
1 room
3 families

Rifle Court Marygate, No. 11
1 room
11 persons

Marshall Street, No. 28
1 room
10 persons

Marshall Street, No. 49
1 room
3 families

George Street, No. 128
1 room
18 persons

George Street, No. 130
1 room
16 persons

Edward Street, No. 4
1 room
17 persons

George Street, No. 49
1 room
2 families

York Street, No. 34
1 room
2 families

Salt Pie Street (bottom)
2 room
26 persons

Cellars

Regent Square
1 cellar
8 persons

Acre Street
1 cellar
7 persons

33 Roberts Court
1 cellar
7 persons

Back Pratt Street used as a brazier’s shop
1 cellar
7 persons

27 Ebenezer Street
1 cellar
6 persons

l. c.,
p. 111.
(no male above 18).

65. l. c., p. 114.

66. l. c., p. 50.

67. “Public Health. Seventh Report. 1865,”
p. 18.

68. l. c., p. 165.

69. l. c., p. 18, Note. — The Relieving Officer of
the Chapel-en-le-Frith Union reported to the Registar-General as follows:
— “At Doveholes, a number of small excavations have been made into
a large hillock of lime ashes (the refuse of lime-kilns), and which are used as
dwellings, and occupied by labourers and others employed in the construction of
a railway now in course of construction through that neighbourhood. The
excavations are small and damp, and have no drains or privies about them, and
not the slightest means of ventilation except up a hole pulled through the top,
and used for a chimney. In consequence of this defect, small-pox has been
raging for some time, and some deaths [amongst the troglodytes] have been
caused by it.” (l. c., note 2.)

70. The details given at the end of Part IV. refer
especially to the labourers in coal mines. On the still worse condition in
metal mines, see the very conscientious Report of the Royal Commission of
1864.

71. l. c., pp. 180, 182.

72. l. c., pp. 515, 517.

73. l. c., p. 16.

74. “Wholesale starvation of the London Poor....
Within the last few days the walls of London have been placarded with large
posters, bearing the following remarkable announcement: — ‘Fat
oxen! Starving men! The fat oxen from their palace of glass have gone to feed
the rich in their luxurious abode, while the starving men are left to rot and
die in their wretched dens.’ The placards bearing these ominous words are
put up at certain intervals. No sooner has one set been defaced or covered
over, than a fresh set is placarded in the former, or some equally public
place.... This ... reminds one of the secret revolutionary associations which
prepared the French people for the events of 1789.... At this moment, while
English workmen with their wives and children are dying of cold and hunger,
there are millions of English gold — the produce of English labour
— being invested in Russian, Spanish, Italian, and other foreign
enterprises.” —Reynolds’ Newspaper, January 20th,
1867.

75. James E. Thorold Rogers. (Prof. of Polit. Econ. in
the University of Oxford.) “A History of Agriculture and Prices in
England.” Oxford, 1866, v. 1, p. 690. This work, the fruit of patient and
diligent labour, contains in the two volumes that have so far appeared, only
the period from 1259 to 1400. The second volume contains simply statistics. It
is the first authentic “History of Prices” of the time that we
possess.

76. “Reasons for the Late Increase of the
Poor-Rates: or a comparative view of the prices of labour and
provisions.” Lond., 1777, pp. 5, 11.

77. Dr. Richard Price: “Observations on
Reversionary Payments,” 6th Ed. By W. Morgan, Lond., 1803, v. II., pp.
158, 159. Price remarks on p. 159: “The nominal price of day-labour is at
present no more than about four times, or, at most, five times higher than it
was in the year 1514. But the price of corn is seven times, and of flesh-meat
and raiment about fifteen times higher. So far, therefore, has the price of
labour been even from advancing in proportion to the increase in the expenses
of living, that it does not appear that it bears now half the proportion to
those expenses that it did bear.”

78. Barton, l. c., p. 26. For the end of the 18th
century cf. Eden, l. c.

79. Parry, l. c., p. 86.

80. id., p. 213.

81. S. Laing, l. c., p. 62.

82. “England and America.” Lond., 1833, Vol.
1, p. 47.

83. The landed aristocracy advanced themselves to this
end, of course per Parliament, funds from the State Treasury, at a very low
rate of interest, which the farmers have to make good at a much higher rate.

84. London Economist, May 29th, 1845, p.
290.

85. The decrease of the middle-class farmers can be seen
especially in the census category: “Farmer’s son, grandson,
brother, nephew, daughter, granddaughter, sister, niece"; in a word, the
members of his own family, employed by the farmer. This category numbered, in
1851, 216,851 persons; in 1861, only 176,151. From 1851 to 1871, the farms
under 20 acres fell by more than 900 in number; those between 50 and 75 acres
fell from 8,253 to 6,370; the same thing occurred with all other farms under
100 acres. On the other hand, during the same twenty years, the number of large
farms increased; those of 300-500 acres rose from 7,771 to 8,410, those of more
than 500 acres from 2,755 to 3,914, those of more than 1,000 acres from 492 to
582.

86. The number of shepherds increased from 12,517 to
25,559.

87. Census, l. c., p. 36.

88. Rogers, l. c., p. 693, p. 10. Mr. Rogers belongs to
the Liberal School, is a personal friend of Cobden and Bright, and therefore no
laudator temporis acti.

89. “Public Health. Seventh Report,” 1865,
p. 242. It is therefore nothing unusual either for the landlord to raise a
labourer’s rent as soon as he hears that he is earning a little more, or
for the farmer to lower the wage of the labourer, “because his wife has
found a trade,” l. c.

90. l. c., p. 135.

91. l. c., p. 134.

92. “Report of the Commissioners ... relating to
Transportation and Penal Servitude,” Lond., 1863, pp. 42, 50.

93. l. c., p. 77. “Memorandum by the Lord Chief
Justice.”

94. l. c., Vol. II, Minutes of Evidence.

95. l. c., Vol. 1. Appendix, p. 280.

96. l. c., pp. 274, 275.

97. “Public Health, Sixth Report,” 1864, pp.
238, 249, 261, 262.

98. l. c., p. 262.

99. l. c., p. 17. The English agricultural labourer
receives only 1/4 as much milk, and 1/2 as much bread as the Irish. Arthur Young
in his “Tour in Ireland,” at the beginning of this century, already
noticed the better nourishment of the latter. The reason is simply this, that
the poor Irish farmer is incomparably more humane than the rich English. As
regards Wales, that which is said in the text holds only for the southwest. All
the doctors there agree that the increase of the death-rate through
tuberculosis, scrofula, etc., increases in intensity with the deterioration of
the physical condition of the population, and all ascribe this deterioration to
poverty. “His (the farm labourer’s) keep is reckoned at about five
pence a day, but in many districts it was said to be of much less cost to the
farmer” [himself very poor].... “A morsel of the salt meat or
bacon, ... salted and dried to the texture of mahogany, and hardly worth the
difficult process of assimilation ... is used to flavour a large quantity of
broth or gruel, of meal and leeks, and day after day this is the
labourer’s dinner.” The advance of industry resulted for him, in
this harsh and damp climate, in “the abandonment of the solid homespun
clothing in favour of the cheap and so-called cotton goods,” and of
stronger drinks for so-called tea. “The agriculturist, after several
hours’ exposure to wind and rain, pins his cottage to sit by a fire of
peat or of balls of clay and small coal kneaded together, from which volumes of
carbonic and sulphurous acids are poured forth. His walls are of mud and
stones, his floor the bare earth which was there before the hut was built, his
roof a mass of loose and sodden thatch. Every crevice is topped to maintain
warmth, and in an atmosphere of diabolic odour, with a mud floor, with his only
clothes drying on his back, he often sups and sleeps with his wife and
children. Obstetricians who have passed parts of the night in such cabins have
described how they found their feet sinking in the mud of the floor, and they
were forced (easy task) to drill a hole through the wall to effect a little
private respiration. It was attested by numerous witnesses in various grades of
life, that to these insanitary influences, and many more, the underfed peasant
was nightly exposed, and of the result, a debilitated and scrofulous people,
there was no want of evidence.... The statements of the relieving officers of
Carmarthenshire and Cardiganshire show in a striking way the same state of
things. There is besides “a plague more horrible still, the great number
of idiots.” Now a word on the climatic conditions. “A strong
south-west wind blows over the whole country for 8 or 9 months in the year,
bringing with it torrents of rain, which discharge principally upon the western
slopes of the hills. Trees are rare, except in sheltered places, and where not
protected, are blown out of all shape. The cottages generally crouch under some
bank, or often in a ravine or quarry, and none but the smallest sheep and
native cattle can live on the pastures.... The young people migrate to the
eastern mining districts of Glamorgan and Monmouth. Carmarthenshire is the
breeding ground of the mining population and their hospital. The population can
therefore barely maintain its numbers.” Thus in Cardiganshire:

1851
1861

Males
45,155
44,446

Females
52,459
52,955

97,614
97,401

Dr. Hunter’s Report in “Public Health,
Seventh Report. 1865,” pp. 498-502, passim.

100. In 1865 this law was improved to some extent. It
will soon be learnt from experience that tinkering of this sort is of no
use.

101. In order to understand that which follows, we must
remember that “Close Villages” are those whose owners are one or
two large landlords. “Open villages,” those whose soil belongs to
many smaller landlords. It is in the latter that building speculators can build
cottages and lodging-houses.

102. A show-village of this kind looks very nice, but
is as unreal as the villages that Catherine II. saw on her journey to the
Crimea. In recent times the shepherd also has often been banished from these
show-villages; e.g., near Market Harboro is sheep-farm of about 500
acres, which only employs the labour of one man. To reduce the long trudges
over these wide plains, the beautiful pastures of Leicester and Northampton,
the shepherd used to get a cottage on the farm. Now they give him a thirteenth
shilling a week for lodging, that he must find far away in an open village.

103. “The labourers’ houses (in the open
villages, which, of course, are always overcrowded) are usually in rows, built
with their backs against the extreme edge of the plot of land which the builder
could call his, and on this account are not allowed light and air, except from
the front.” (Dr. Hunter’s Report, l. c., p. 135.) Very often the
beerseller or grocer of the village is at the same time the letter of its
houses. In this case the agricultural labourer finds in him a second master,
besides the farmer. He must be his customer as well as his tenant. “The
hind with his 10s. a week, minus a rent of £4 a year ... is obliged to buy at
the seller’s own terms, his modicum of tea, sugar, flour, soap, candles,
and beer.” (l. c., p. 132.) These open villages form, in fact, the
“penal settlements” of the English agricultural proletariat. Many
of the cottages are simply lodging-houses, through which all the rabble of the
neighbourhood passes. The country labourer and his family who had often, in a
way truly wonderful, preserved, under the foulest conditions, a thoroughness
and purity of character, go, in these, utterly to the devil. It is, of course,
the fashion amongst the aristocratic shylocks to shrug their shoulders
pharisaically at the building speculators, the small landlords, and the open
villages. They know well enough that their “close villages” and
“show-villages” are the birth-places of the open villages, and
could not exist without them. “The labourers ... were it not for the
small owners, would, for by far the most part, have to sleep under the trees of
the farms on which they work.” (l. c., p. 135.) The system of
“open” and “closed” villages obtains in all the Midland
counties and throughout the East of England.

104. “The employer ... is ... directly or
indirectly securing to himself the profit on a man employed at 10s. a week, and
receiving from this poor hind £4 or £5 annual rent for houses not worth £20 in
a really free market, but maintained at their artificial value by the power of
the owner to say ‘Use my house, or go seek a hiring elsewhere without a
character from me....’ Does a man wish to better himself, to go as a
plate-layer on the railway, or to begin quarry-work, the same power is ready
with ‘Work for me at this low rate of wages or begone at a week’s
notice; take your pig with you, and get what you can for the potatoes growing
in your garden.’ Should his interest appear to be better served by it, an
enhanced rent is sometimes preferred in these cases by the owner
(i.e., the farmer) as the penalty for leaving his service.” (Dr.
Hunter, l. c., p. 132.)

105. “New married couples are no edifying study
for grown-up brothers and sisters: and though instances must not be recorded,
sufficient data are remembered to warrant the remark, that great depression and
sometimes death are the lot of the female participator in the offence of
incest.” (Dr. Hunter, l. c., p. 137.) A member of the rural police who
had for many years been a detective in the worst quarters of London, says of
the girls of his village: “their boldness and shamelessness I never saw
equalled during some years of police life and detective duty in the worst parts
of London .... They live like pigs, great boys and girls, mothers and fathers,
all sleeping in one room, in many instances.” (“Child. Empl. Com.
Sixth Report, 1867,” p. 77 sq. 155.)

106. “Public Health. Seventh Report, 1865,”
pp. 9, 14 passim.

107. “The heaven-born employment of the hind
gives dignity even to his position. He is not a slave, but a soldier of peace,
and deserves his place in married men’s quarters to be provided by the
landlord, who has claimed a power of enforced labour similar to that the
country demands of the soldier. He no more receives market-price for his work
than does the soldier. Like the soldier he is caught young, ignorant, knowing
only his own trade, and his own locality. Early marriage and the operation of
the various laws of settlement affect the one as enlistment and the Mutiny Act
affect the other.” (Dr. Hunter, l. c., p. 132.) Sometimes an
exceptionally soft-hearted landlord relents as the solitude he has created.
“It is a melancholy thing to stand alone in one’s country,”
said Lord Leicester, when complimented on the completion of Hookham. “I
look around and not a house is to be seen but mine. I am the giant of Giant
Castle, and have eat up all my neighbours.”

108. A similar movement is seen during the last ten
years in France; in proportion as capitalist production there takes possession
of agriculture, it drives the “surplus” agricultural population
into the towns. Here also we find deterioration in the housing and other
conditions at the source of the surplus population. On the special
“prolétariat foncier,” to which this system of parcelling out the
land has given rise, see, among others, the work of Colins, already quoted, and
Karl Marx “Der Achtzehnte Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte.” 2nd
edition. Hamburg, 1869, pp. 56, &c. In 1846, the town population in France
was represented by 24.42, the agricultural by 75.58; in 1861, the town by
28.86, the agricultural by 71.14 per cent. During the last 5 years, the
diminution of the agricultural percentage of the population has been yet more
marked. As early as 1846, Pierre Dupont in his “Ouvriers” sang:

Mal vêtus, logés dans des
trous,

Sous les combles, dans les décombres,

Nous vivons avec les hiboux

Et les larrons, amis des ombres.

[Badly clothed, living in holes, under the eaves, in the
ruins, with the owls and the thieves, companions of the shadows]

109. “Sixth and last Report of the
Children’s Employment Commission,” published at the end of March,
1867. It deals solely with the agricultural gang-system.

110. “Child. Emp. Comm., VI. Report." Evidence
173, p. 37.

111. Some gang-masters, however, have worked themselves
up to the position of farmers of 500 acres, or proprietors of whole rows of
houses.

112. “Half the girls of Ludford have been ruined
by going out” (in gangs). l. c., p. 6, § 32.

113. “They (gangs) have greatly increased of late
years. In some places they are said to have been introduced at comparatively
late dates; in others where gangs ... have been known for many years ... more
and younger children are employed in them.” (l. c., p. 79, § 174).

114. “Small farmers never employ gangs.”
“It is not on poor land, but on land which affords rent of from 40 to 50
shillings, that women and children are employed in the greatest numbers.”
(l. c., pp. 17, 14.)

115. To one of these gentlemen the taste of his rent
was so grateful that he indignantly declared to the Commission of Inquiry that
the whole hubbub was only due to the name of the system. If instead of
“gang” it were called “the Agricultural Juvenile Industrial
Self-supporting Association,” everything would be all right.

116. “Gang work is cheaper than other work; that
is why they are employed,” says a former gang-master (l. c., p. 17, § 14
)."The gang-system is decidedly the cheapest for the farmer, and decidedly the
worst for the children,” says a farmer (l. c., p. 16, § 3.)

117. “Undoubtedly much of the work now done by
children in gangs used to be done by men and women. More men are out of work
now where children and women are employed than formerly.” (l. c., p. 43,
n. 202.) On the other hand, “the labour question in some agricultural
districts, particularly the arable, is becoming so serious in consequence of
emigration, and the facility afforded by railways for getting to large towns
that I (the “I” is the steward of a great lord) think the services
of children are most indispensable,” (l. c., p. 80, n. 180.) For the
“labour question” in English agricultural districts, differently
from the rest of the civilised world, means the landlords’ and
farmers’ question, viz., how is it possible, despite an always
increasing exodus of the agricultural folk, to keep up a sufficient relative
surplus population in the country, and by means of it keep the wages of the
agricultural labourer at a minimum?

118. The “Public Health Report,” where in
dealing with the subject of children’s mortality, the gang-system is
treated in passing, remains unknown to the press, and, therefore, to the
English public. On the other hand, the last report of the “Child. Empl.
Comm.” afforded the press sensational copy always welcome. Whilst the
Liberal press asked how the fine gentlemen and ladies, and the well-paid clergy
of the State Church, with whom Lincolnshire swarms, could allow such a system
to arise on their estates, under their very eyes, they who send out expressly
missions to the Antipodes, “for the improvement of the morals of South
Sea Islanders” — the more refined press confined itself to
reflections on the coarse degradation of the agricultural population who are
capable of selling their children into such slavery! Under the accursed
conditions to which these “delicate” people condemn the
agricultural labourer, it would not be surprising if he ate his own children.
What is really wonderful is the healthy integrity of character, he has, in
great part, retained. The official reports prove that the parents, even in the
gang districts, loathe the gang-system. “There is much in the evidence
that shows that the parents of the children would, in many instances, be glad
to be aided by the requirements of a legal obligation, to resist the pressure
and the temptations to which they are often subject. They are liable to be
urged, at times by the parish officers, at times by employers, under threats of
being themselves discharged, to be taken to work at an age when ... school
attendance ... would be manifestly to their greater advantage.... All that time
and strength wasted; all the suffering from extra and unprofitable fatigue
produced to the labourer and to his children; every instance in which the
parent may have traced the moral ruin of his child to the undermining of
delicacy by the over-crowding of cottages, or to the contaminating influences
of the public gang, must have been so many incentives to feelings in the minds
of the labouring poor which can be well understood, and which it would be
needless to particularise. They must be conscious that much bodily and mental
pain has thus been inflicted upon them from causes for which they were in no
way answerable; to which, had it been in their power, they would have in no way
consented; and against which they were powerless to struggle.” (l. c., p.
xx., § 82, and xxiii., n. 96.)

119. Population of Ireland, 1801, 5,319,867 persons;
1811, 6,084,996; 1821, 6,869,544; 1831, 7,828,347; 1841, 8,222,664.

120. The result would be found yet more unfavourable if
we went further back. Thus: Sheep in 1865, 3,688,742, but in 1856, 3,694,294.
Pigs in 1865, 1,299,893, but in 1858, 1,409,883.

121. The data of the text are put together from the
materials of the “Agricultural Statistics, Ireland, General Abstracts,
Dublin,” for the years 1860, et seq., and “Agricultural
Statistics, Ireland. Tables showing the estimated average produce, &c.,
Dublin, 1866.” These statistics are official, and laid before Parliament
annually.

Note to 2nd edition. The official statistics
for the year 1872 show, as compared with 1871, a decrease in area under
cultivation of 134,915 acres. An increase occurred in the cultivation of green
crops, turnips, mangold-wurzel, and the like; a decrease in the area under
cultivation for wheat of 16,000 acres; oats, 14,000; barley and rye, 4,000;
potatoes, 66,632; flax, 34,667; grass, clover, vetches, rape-seed, 30,000. The
soil under cultivation for wheat shows for the last 5 years the following
stages of decrease: — 1868, 285,000 acres; 1869, 280,000; 1870, 259,000;
1871, 244,000; 1872, 228,000. For 1872 we find, in round numbers, an increase
of 2,600 horses, 80,000 horned cattle, 68,609 sheep, and a decrease of 236,000
pigs.

122. The total yearly income under Schedule D. is
different in this table from that which appears in the preceding ones, because
of certain deductions allowed by law.

123. If the product also diminishes relatively per
acre, it must not be forgotten that for a century and a half England has
indirectly exported the soil of Ireland, without as much as allowing its
cultivators the means for making up the constituents of the soil that had been
exhausted.

124. As Ireland is regarded as the promised land of the
“principle of population,” Th. Sadler, before the publication of
his work on population, issued his famous book, “Ireland, its Evils and
their Remedies.” 2nd edition, London, 1829. Here, by comparison of the
statistics of the individual provinces, and of the individual counties in each
province, he proves that the misery there is not, as Malthus would have it, in
proportion to the number of the population, but in inverse ratio to this.

125. Between 1851 and 1874, the total number of
emigrants amounted to 2,325,922.

126. According to a table in Murphy’s
“Ireland Industrial, Political and Social,” 1870, 94.6 per cent. of
the holdings do not reach 100 acres, 5.4 exceed 100 acres.

127. “Reports from the Poor Law Inspectors on the
Wages of Agricultural Labourers in Dublin,” 1870. See also
“Agricultural labourers (Ireland). Return, etc.” 8 March, 1861,
London, 1862.

128. l. c., pp. 29, 1.

129. l. c., p. 12.

130. l. c., p. 12.

131. l. c., p. 25.

132. l. c., p. 27.

133. l. c., p. 25.

134. l. c., p. 1.

135. l. c., pp. 31, 32.

136. l. c., p. 25.

137. l. c., p. 30.

138. l. c., pp. 21, 13.

139. “Rept. of Insp. of Fact., 31st Oct.,
1866,” p. 96.

140. The total area includes also peat, bogs, and waste
land.

141. How the famine and its consequences have been
deliberately made the most of, both by the individual landlords and by the
English legislature, to forcibly carry out the agricultural revolution and to
thin the population of Ireland down to the proportion satisfactory to the
landlords, I shall show more fully in Vol. III. of this work, in the section on
landed property. There also I return to the condition of the small farmers and
the agricultural labourers. At present, only one quotation. Nassau W. Senior
says, with other things, in his posthumous work, “Journals, Conversations
and Essays relating to Ireland.” 2 vols. London, 1868; Vol. II., p. 282.
“Well,” said Dr. G., “we have got our Poor Law and it is a
great instrument for giving the victory to the landlords. Another, and a still
more powerful instrument is emigration.... No friend to Ireland can wish the
war to be prolonged [between the landlords and the small Celtic farmers]
— still less, that it should end by the victory of the tenants. The
sooner it is over — the sooner Ireland becomes a grazing country, with
the comparatively thin population which a grazing country requires, the better
for all classes.” The English Corn Laws of 1815 secured Ireland the
monopoly of the free importation of corn into Great Britain. They favoured
artificially, therefore, the cultivation of corn. With the abolition of the
Corn Laws in 1846, this monopoly was suddenly removed. Apart from all other
circumstances, this event alone was sufficient to give a great impulse to the
turning of Irish arable into pasture land, to the concentration of farms, and to
the eviction of small cultivators. After the fruitfulness of the Irish soil had
been praised from 1815 to 1846, and proclaimed loudly as by Nature herself
destined for the cultivation of wheat, English agronomists, economists,
politicians, discover suddenly that it is good for nothing but to produce
forage. M. Léonce de Lavergne has hastened to repeat this on the other side of
the Channel. It takes a “serious” man, à la Lavergne, to be caught
by such childishness.

## Part VIII: Primitive Accumulation

## Chapter Twenty-Six: The Secret of Primitive Accumulation

We have seen how money is changed into capital; how
through capital surplus-value is made, and from
surplus-value more capital. But the accumulation of capital
presupposes surplus-value; surplus-value presupposes
capitalistic production; capitalistic production presupposes
the pre-existence of considerable masses of capital and of
labour power in the hands of producers of commodities. The
whole movement, therefore, seems to turn in a vicious
circle, out of which we can only get by supposing a
primitive accumulation (previous accumulation of Adam Smith)
preceding capitalistic accumulation; an accumulation not the
result of the capitalistic mode of production, but its
starting point.

This primitive accumulation plays in Political
Economy about the same part as original sin in theology.
Adam bit the apple, and thereupon sin fell on the human
race. Its origin is supposed to be explained when it is told
as an anecdote of the past. In times long gone by there were
two sorts of people; one, the diligent, intelligent, and,
above all, frugal elite; the other, lazy rascals, spending
their substance, and more, in riotous living. The legend of
theological original sin tells us certainly how man came to
be condemned to eat his bread in the sweat of his brow; but
the history of economic original sin reveals to us that
there are people to whom this is by no means essential.
Never mind! Thus it came to pass that the former sort
accumulated wealth, and the latter sort had at last nothing
to sell except their own skins. And from this original sin
dates the poverty of the great majority that, despite all
its labour, has up to now nothing to sell but itself, and
the wealth of the few that increases constantly although
they have long ceased to work. Such insipid childishness is
every day preached to us in the defence of property.
M. Thiers, e.g., had the assurance to repeat it with
all the solemnity of a statesman to the French people, once
so spirituel. But as soon as the question of
property crops up, it becomes a sacred duty to proclaim the
intellectual food of the infant as the one thing fit for all
ages and for all stages of development. In actual history it
is notorious that conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder,
briefly force, play the great part. In the tender annals of
Political Economy, the idyllic reigns from time immemorial.
Right and “labour” were from all time the sole means of
enrichment, the present year of course always excepted. As a
matter of fact, the methods of primitive accumulation are
anything but idyllic.

In themselves money and commodities are no more
capital than are the means of production and of subsistence.
They want transforming into capital. But this transformation
itself can only take place under certain circumstances that
centre in this, viz., that two very different kinds of
commodity-possessors must come face to face and into
contact; on the one hand, the owners of money, means of
production, means of subsistence, who are eager to increase
the sum of values they possess, by buying other people’s
labour power; on the other hand, free labourers, the sellers
of their own labour power, and therefore the sellers of
labour. Free labourers, in the double sense that neither
they themselves form part and parcel of the means of
production, as in the case of slaves, bondsmen, &c., nor
do the means of production belong to them, as in the case of
peasant-proprietors; they are, therefore, free from,
unencumbered by, any means of production of their own. With
this polarization of the market for commodities, the
fundamental conditions of capitalist production are given.
The capitalist system presupposes the complete separation
of the labourers from all property in the means by which
they can realize their labour. As soon as capitalist
production is once on its own legs, it not only maintains
this separation, but reproduces it on a continually
extending scale. The process, therefore, that clears the way
for the capitalist system, can be none other than the
process which takes away from the labourer the possession of
his means of production; a process that transforms, on the
one hand, the social means of subsistence and of production
into capital, on the other, the immediate producers into
wage labourers. The so-called primitive accumulation,
therefore, is nothing else than the historical process of
divorcing the producer from the means of production. It
appears as primitive, because it forms the prehistoric
stage of capital and of the mode of production corresponding
with it.

The economic structure of capitalist society has
grown out of the economic structure of feudal society. The
dissolution of the latter set free the elements of the
former.

The immediate producer, the labourer, could only
dispose of his own person after he had ceased to be attached
to the soil and ceased to be the slave, serf, or bondsman
of another. To become a free seller of labour power, who
carries his commodity wherever he finds a market, he must
further have escaped from the regime of the guilds, their
rules for apprentices and journeymen, and the impediments of
their labour regulations. Hence, the historical movement
which changes the producers into wage-workers, appears, on
the one hand, as their emancipation from serfdom and from
the fetters of the guilds, and this side alone exists for
our bourgeois historians. But, on the other hand, these new
freedmen became sellers of themselves only after they had
been robbed of all their own means of production, and of all
the guarantees of existence afforded by the old feudal
arrangements. And the history of this, their expropriation,
is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and
fire.

The industrial capitalists, these new potentates,
had on their part not only to displace the guild masters of
handicrafts, but also the feudal lords, the possessors of
the sources of wealth. In this respect, their conquest of
social power appears as the fruit of a victorious struggle
both against feudal lordship and its revolting prerogatives,
and against the guilds and the fetters they laid on the free
development of production and the free exploitation of man
by man. The chevaliers d’industrie, however, only succeeded
in supplanting the chevaliers of the sword by making use of
events of which they themselves were wholly innocent. They
have risen by means as vile as those by which the Roman
freedman once on a time made himself the master of his
patronus.

The starting point of the development that gave
rise to the wage labourer as well as to the capitalist, was
the servitude of the labourer. The advance consisted in a
change of form of this servitude, in the transformation of
feudal exploitation into capitalist exploitation. To
understand its march, we need not go back very far. Although
we come across the first beginnings of capitalist production
as early as the 14th or 15th century, sporadically, in
certain towns of the Mediterranean, the capitalistic era
dates from the 16th century. Wherever it appears, the
abolition of serfdom has been long effected, and the highest
development of the middle ages, the existence of sovereign
towns, has been long on the wane.

In the history of primitive accumulation, all
revolutions are epoch-making that act as levers for the
capital class in course of formation; but, above all, those
moments when great masses of men are suddenly and forcibly
torn from their means of subsistence, and hurled as free and
“unattached” proletarians on the labour-market. The
expropriation of the agricultural producer, of the peasant,
from the soil, is the basis of the whole process. The
history of this expropriation, in different countries,
assumes different aspects, and runs through its various
phases in different orders of succession, and at different
periods. In England alone, which we take as our example, has
it the classic form. [1]

Footnotes

1.
In Italy, where capitalistic production developed earliest,
the dissolution of serfdom also took place earlier than
elsewhere. The serf was emancipated in that country before
he had acquired any prescriptive right to the soil. His
emancipation at once transformed him into a free
proletarian, who, moreover, found his master ready
waiting for him in the towns, for the most part handed down
as legacies from the Roman time. When the revolution of the
world-market, about the end of the 15th century, annihilated
Northern Italy’s commercial supremacy, a movement in the
reverse direction set in. The labourers of the towns were
driven en masse into the country, and gave an
impulse, never before seen, to the petite culture,
carried on in the form of gardening.

## Chapter Twenty-Seven: Expropriation of the Agricultural Population from the Land

In England, serfdom had practically disappeared in the
last part of the 14th century. The immense majority of the
population [1]
consisted then, and to a still larger extent, in the 15th
century, of free peasant proprietors, whatever was the
feudal title under which their right of property was hidden.
In the larger seignorial domains, the old bailiff, himself a
serf, was displaced by the free farmer. The wage labourers
of agriculture consisted partly of peasants, who utilised
their leisure time by working on the large estates, partly
of an independent special class of wage labourers,
relatively and absolutely few in numbers. The latter also
were practically at the same time peasant farmers, since,
besides their wages, they had allotted to them arable land
to the extent of 4 or more acres, together with their
cottages. Besides they, with the rest of the peasants,
enjoyed the usufruct of the common land, which gave pasture
to their cattle, furnished them with timber, fire-wood,
turf, &c. [2] In all countries of Europe, feudal
production is characterised by
division of the soil amongst the greatest possible number of
subfeudatories. The might of the feudal lord, like that of
the sovereign, depended not on the length of his rent roll,
but on the number of his subjects, and the latter depended
on the number of peasant proprietors. [3] Although, therefore, the English
land, after the Norman Conquest, was distributed in gigantic
baronies, one of which often included some 900 of the old
Anglo-Saxon lordships, it was bestrewn with small peasant
properties, only here and there interspersed with great
seignorial domains. Such conditions, together with the
prosperity of the towns so characteristic of the 15th
century, allowed of that wealth of the people which
Chancellor Fortescue so eloquently paints in his “Laudes
legum Angliae;” but it excluded the possibility of
capitalistic wealth.

The prelude of the revolution that laid the foundation of
the capitalist mode of production, was played in the last
third of the 15th, and the first decade of the 16th century.
A mass of free proletarians was hurled on the labour market
by the breaking-up of the bands of feudal retainers, who, as
Sir James Steuart well says, “everywhere uselessly filled
house and castle.” Although the royal power, itself a
product of bourgeois development, in its strife after
absolute sovereignty forcibly hastened on the dissolution of
these bands of retainers, it was by no means the sole cause
of it. In insolent conflict with king and parliament, the
great feudal lords created an incomparably larger
proletariat by the forcible driving of the peasantry from
the land, to which the latter had the same feudal right as
the lord himself, and by the usurpation of the common lands.
The rapid rise of the Flemish wool manufactures, and the
corresponding rise in the price of wool in England, gave the
direct impulse to these evictions. The old nobility had been
devoured by the great feudal wars. The new nobility was the
child of its time, for which money was the power of all
powers. Transformation of arable land into sheep-walks was,
therefore, its cry. Harrison, in his “Description of
England, prefixed to Holinshed’s Chronicles,” describes how
the expropriation of small peasants is ruining the country.
“What care our great encroachers?” The dwellings of the
peasants and the cottages of the labourers were razed to the
ground or doomed to decay. “If,” says Harrison, “the old
records of euerie manour be sought... it will soon appear that
in some manour seventeene, eighteene, or twentie
houses are shrunk... that England
was neuer less furnished with people than at the present...
Of cities and townes either utterly decaied or more than a
quarter or half diminished, though some one be a little
increased here or there; of townes pulled downe for
sheepe-walks, and no more but the lordships now standing in
them... I could saie somewhat.” The complaints of these old
chroniclers are always exaggerated, but they reflect
faithfully the impression made on contemporaries by the
revolution in the conditions of production. A comparison of
the writings of Chancellor Fortescue and Thomas More reveals
the gulf between the 15th and 16th century. As Thornton
rightly has it, the English working class was precipitated
without any transition from its golden into its iron age.

Legislation was terrified at this revolution. It did not
yet stand on that height of civilization where the “wealth
of the nation” (i.e., the formation of capital, and the
reckless exploitation and impoverishing of the mass of the
people) figure as the ultima Thule of all
state-craft. In his history of Henry VII., Bacon says:
“Inclosures at that time (1489) began to be more frequent,
whereby arable land (which could not be manured without
people and families) was turned into pasture, which was
easily rid by a few herdsmen; and tenancies for years,
lives, and at will (whereupon much of the yeomanry lived)
were turned into demesnes. This bred a decay of people, and
(by consequence) a decay of towns, churches, tithes, and the
like... In remedying of this inconvenience the king’s
wisdom was admirable, and the parliament’s at that time...
they took a course to take away depopulating enclosures, and
depopulating pasturage.” An Act of Henry VII., 1489, cap.
19, forbad the destruction of all “houses of husbandry” to
which at least 20 acres of land belonged. By an Act, 25
Henry VIII., the same law was renewed. It recites, among
other things, that many farms and large flocks of cattle,
especially of sheep, are concentrated in the hands of a few
men, whereby the rent of land has much risen and tillage has
fallen off, churches and houses have been pulled down, and
marvellous numbers of people have been deprived of the means
wherewith to maintain themselves and their families.
The Act, therefore, ordains
the rebuilding of the decayed farmsteads, and fixes a
proportion between corn land and pasture land, &c. An
Act of 1533 recites that some owners possess 24,000 sheep,
and limits the number to be owned to 2,000.
[4] The cry of
the people and the legislation directed, for 150 years after
Henry VII., against the expropriation
of the small farmers and peasants,
were alike fruitless. The secret of their inefficiency
Bacon, without knowing it, reveals to us. “The device of
King Henry VII.,” says Bacon, in his “Essays, Civil and
Moral,” Essay 29, “was profound and admirable, in making
farms and houses of husbandry of a standard; that is,
maintained with such a proportion of land unto them as may
breed a subject to live in convenient plenty, and no servile
condition, and to keep the plough in the hands of the owners
and not mere hirelings.” [5] What the capitalist system
demanded was, on the other hand, a degraded and almost
servile condition of the mass of the people, the
transformation of them into mercenaries, and of their means
of labour into capital. During this transformation period,
legislation also strove to retain the 4 acres of land by the
cottage of the agricultural wage labourer, and forbad him to
take lodgers into his cottage. In the reign of James I.,
1627, Roger Crocker of Front Mill, was condemned for having
built a cottage on the manor of Front Mill without 4 acres
of land attached to the same in perpetuity. As late as
Charles I.’s reign, 1638, a royal commission was appointed
to enforce the carrying out of the old laws, especially that
referring to the 4 acres of land. Even in
Cromwell’s time, the building of a house within 4 miles of
London was forbidden unless it was endowed with 4 acres of
land. As late as the first half of the 18th century
complaint is made if the cottage of the agricultural
labourer has not an adjunct of one or two acres of land.
Nowadays he is lucky if it is furnished with a little
garden, or if he may rent, far away from his cottage, a few
roods. “Landlords and farmers,” says Dr. Hunter, “work here
hand in hand. A few acres to the cottage would make the
labourers too independent.” [6]

The process of forcible expropriation
of the people received in the 16th century a new and
frightful impulse from the Reformation, and from the
consequent colossal spoliation of the church property. The
Catholic church was, at the time of the Reformation, feudal
proprietor of a great part of the English land. The
suppression of the monasteries, &c., hurled their
inmates into the proletariat. The estates of the church were
to a large extent given away to rapacious royal favourites,
or sold at a nominal price to speculating farmers and
citizens, who drove out, en masse, the hereditary
sub-tenants and threw their holdings into one. The legally
guaranteed property of the poorer folk in a part of the
church’s tithes was tacitly confiscated. [7] “Pauper ubique
jacet,” cried Queen Elizabeth, after a journey through
England. In the 43rd year of her reign the nation was
obliged to recognise pauperism officially by the
introduction of a poor-rate. “The authors of this law seem
to have been ashamed to state the grounds of it, for
[contrary to traditional usage] it has no preamble
whatever.” [8]
By the 16th of Charles I., ch. 4, it was declared perpetual,
and in fact only in 1834 did it take a new and harsher form.
[9] These
immediate results of the Reformation were
not its most lasting ones. The
property of the church formed the religious bulwark of the
traditional conditions of landed property. With its fall
these were no longer tenable. [10]

Even in the last decade of the 17th century, the
yeomanry, the class of independent peasants, were more
numerous than the class of farmers. They had formed the
backbone of Cromwell’s strength, and, even according to the
confession of Macaulay, stood in favourable contrast to the
drunken squires and to their servants, the country clergy,
who had to marry their masters’ cast-off mistresses. About
1750, the yeomanry had disappeared, [11] and so had, in the last decade
of the 18th century, the last trace of the common land of
the agricultural labourer. We leave on one side here the
purely economic causes of the agricultural revolution. We
deal only with the forcible means employed.

After the restoration of the Stuarts, the landed
proprietors carried, by legal means, an act of usurpation,
effected everywhere on the Continent without any legal
formality. They abolished the feudal tenure of land,
i.e., they got rid of all its obligations to the
State, “indemnified” the State by taxes on the peasantry and
the rest of the mass of the people, vindicated for
themselves the rights of modern private property in estates
to which they had only a feudal title, and, finally, passed
those laws of settlement, which, mutatis mutandis,
had the same effect on the English agricultural
labourer, as the edict of the Tartar Boris Godunof on the
Russian peasantry.

The “glorious Revolution” brought into power, along with
William of Orange, the landlord and
capitalist appropriators of surplus-value.
[12] They inaugurated
the new era by practising on a colossal scale thefts of
state lands, thefts that had been hitherto managed more
modestly. These estates were given away, sold at a
ridiculous figure, or even annexed to private estates by
direct seizure. [13] All this happened without the
slightest observation of legal etiquette. The Crown lands
thus fraudulently appropriated, together with the robbery of
the Church estates, as far as these had not been lost again
during the republican revolution, form the basis of the
today princely domains of the English oligarchy.
[14] The bourgeois
capitalists favoured the operation with the view, among
others, to promoting free trade in land, to extending the
domain of modern agriculture on the large farm-system, and
to increasing their supply of the free agricultural
proletarians ready to hand. Besides, the new landed
aristocracy was the natural ally of the new bankocracy, of
the newly-hatched haute finance, and of the large
manufacturers, then depending on protective duties. The
English bourgeoisie acted for its own interest quite as
wisely as did the Swedish bourgeoisie who, reversing the
process, hand in hand with their economic allies, the
peasantry, helped the kings in the forcible resumption of
the Crown lands from the oligarchy. This happened since
1604 under Charles X. and Charles XI.

Communal property — always distinct from the State
property just dealt with — was an old Teutonic
institution which lived on under cover of feudalism. We have
seen how the forcible usurpation of this, generally
accompanied by the turning of arable into pasture land,
begins at the end of the 15th and extends into the 16th
century. But, at that time, the process was carried on by
means of individual acts of violence against which
legislation, for a hundred and fifty years, fought in vain.
The advance made by the 18th century shows itself in this,
that the law itself becomes now the
instrument of the theft of the people’s land, although the
large farmers make use of their little independent methods
as well. [15]
The parliamentary form of the robbery is that of Acts for
enclosures of Commons, in other words, decrees by which the
landlords grant themselves the people’s land as private
property, decrees of expropriation of the people. Sir F. M.
Eden refutes his own crafty special pleading, in which he
tries to represent communal property as the private property
of the great landlords who have taken the place of the
feudal lords, when he, himself, demands a “general Act of
Parliament for the enclosure of Commons” (admitting thereby
that a parliamentary coup d’état is
necessary for its transformation into private property), and
moreover calls on the legislature for the indemnification
for the expropriated poor.

Whilst the place of the independent yeoman was taken by
tenants at will, small farmers on yearly leases, a servile
rabble dependent on the pleasure of the landlords, the
systematic robbery of the Communal lands helped especially,
next to the theft of the State domains, to swell those large
farms, that were called in the 18th century capital farms
[17] or
merchant farms, [18] and to “set free” the
agricultural population as proletarians for manufacturing
industry.

The 18th century, however, did not yet recognise as fully
as the 19th, the identity between national wealth and the
poverty of the people. Hence the most vigorous polemic, in
the economic literature of that time, on the “enclosure of
commons.” From the mass of materials that lie before me, I
give a few extracts that will throw a strong light on the
circumstances of the time. “In several parishes of
Hertfordshire,” writes one indignant person, “24 farms,
numbering on the average 50-150 acres, have been melted up
into three farms.” [19] “In Northamptonshire and
Leicestershire the enclosure of common lands has taken place
on a very large scale, and most of the new lordships,
resulting from the enclosure, have
been turned into pasturage, in consequence of which many
lordships have not now 50 acres ploughed yearly, in which
1,500 were ploughed formerly. The ruins of former
dwelling-houses, barns, stables, &c.,” are the sole
traces of the former inhabitants. “An hundred houses and
families have in some open-field villages dwindled to eight
or ten.... The landholders in most parishes that have been
enclosed only 15 or 20 years, are very few in comparison of
the numbers who occupied them in their open-field state. It
is no uncommon thing for 4 or 5 wealthy graziers to engross
a large enclosed lordship which was before in the hands of
20 or 30 farmers, and as many smaller tenants and
proprietors. All these
are hereby thrown out of their livings with their families
and many other families who were chiefly employed and
supported by them.” [20] It was not only the land that
lay waste, but often land cultivated either in common or
held under a definite rent paid to the community, that was
annexed by the neighbouring landlords under pretext of
enclosure. “I have here in view enclosures of open fields
and lands already improved. It is acknowledged by even the
writers in defence of enclosures that these diminished
villages increase the monopolies of farms, raise the prices
of provisions, and produce depopulation ... and even the
enclosure of waste lands (as now carried on) bears hard on
the poor, by depriving them of a part of their subsistence,
and only goes towards increasing farms already too large.”
[21] “When,”
says Dr. Price, “this land gets into the hands of a few
great farmers, the consequence must be that the little
farmers” (earlier designated by him “a multitude of little
proprietors and tenants, who maintain themselves and
families by the produce of the ground they occupy by sheep
kept on a common, by poultry, hogs, &c., and who
therefore have little occasion to purchase any of the means
of subsistence”) “will be converted into a body of men who
earn their subsistence by working for others, and who will
be under a necessity of going to market for all they
want.... There will, perhaps, be more labour, because there
will be more compulsion to it.... Towns and manufactures
will increase, because more will be driven to them in quest
of places and employment. This is the way in which the engrossing of
farms naturally operates. And this is the way in which, for
many years, it has been actually operating in this kingdom.”
[22] He sums up
the effect of the enclosures thus: “Upon the whole, the
circumstances of the lower ranks of
men are altered in almost every respect for the worse. From
little occupiers of land, they are reduced to the state of
day-labourers and hirelings; and, at the same time, their
subsistence in that state has become more difficult.” [23] In fact,
usurpation of the common lands and the revolution in
agriculture accompanying this, told so acutely on the
agricultural labourers that, even according to Eden, between
1765 and 1780, their wages began to fall below the minimum,
and to be supplemented by official poor-law relief. Their
wages, he says, “were not more than enough for the absolute
necessaries of life.”

Let us hear for a moment a defender of enclosures and an
opponent of Dr. Price. “Not is it a consequence that there
must be depopulation, because men are not seen wasting their
labour in the open field.... If, by converting the little
farmers into a body of men who must work for others, more
labour is produced, it is an advantage which the nation” (to
which, of course, the “converted” ones do not belong)
“should wish for ... the produce being greater when their
joint labours are employed on one farm, there will be a
surplus for manufactures, and by this means manufactures,
one of the mines of the nation, will increase, in proportion
to the quantity of corn produced.” [24]

The stoical peace of mind with which the political
economist regards the most shameless violation of the
“sacred rights of property” and the grossest acts of
violence to persons, as soon as they are necessary to lay
the foundations of the capitalistic mode of production, is
shown by Sir F. M. Eden, philanthropist and tory to boot.
The whole series of thefts,
outrages, and popular misery, that accompanied the forcible
expropriation of the people, from the last third of the 15th
to the end of the 18th century, lead him merely to the
comfortable conclusion: “The due proportion between arable
land and pasture had to be established. During the whole of
the 14th and the greater part of the 15th century, there was
one acre of pasture to 2, 3, and even 4 of arable land.
About the middle of the 16th century the proportion was
changed of 2 acres of pasture to 2, later on, of 2 acres of
pasture to one of arable, until at last the just proportion
of 3 acres of pasture to one of arable land was attained.”

In the 19th century, the very memory of the connexion
between the agricultural labourer and the communal property
had, of course, vanished. To say nothing of more recent
times, have the agricultural population received a farthing
of compensation for the 3,511,770 acres of common land which
between 1801 and 1831 were stolen from them and by
parliamentary devices presented to the landlords by the
landlords?

The last process of wholesale expropriation of the
agricultural population from the soil is, finally, the
so-called clearing of estates, i.e., the sweeping
men off them. All the English methods hitherto considered
culminated in “clearing.” As we saw in the picture of modern
conditions given in a former chapter, where there are no
more independent peasants to get rid of, the “clearing” of
cottages begins; so that the agricultural labourers do not
find on the soil cultivated by them even the spot necessary
for their own housing. But what “clearing of estates” really
and properly signifies, we learn only in the promised land
of modern romance, the Highlands of Scotland. There the
process is distinguished by its systematic character, by the
magnitude of the scale on which it is carried out at one
blow (in Ireland landlords have gone to the length of
sweeping away several villages at once; in Scotland areas as
large as German principalities are dealt with), finally by
the peculiar form of property, under which the embezzled
lands were held.

The Highland Celts were organised in clans, each of which
was the owner of the land on which it was settled. The
representative of the clan, its chief or “great man,” was
only the titular owner of this property, just as the Queen
of England is the titular owner of all the national soil.
When the English government succeeded in suppressing the
intestine wars of these “great men,” and their constant
incursions into the Lowland plains, the chiefs of the clans
by no means gave up their time-honored trade as robbers;
they only changed its form. On their own authority they
transformed their nominal right into a right of private
property, and as this brought them into collision with their
clansmen, resolved to drive them out by open force. “A king
of England might as well claim to
drive his subjects into the sea,” says Professor Newman.
[25] This
revolution, which began in Scotland after the last rising of
the followers of the Pretender, can be followed through its
first phases in the writings of Sir James Steuart
[26] and James
Anderson. [27]
In the 18th century the hunted-out Gaels were forbidden to
emigrate from the country, with a view to driving them by
force to Glasgow and other manufacturing towns. [28] As an example of
the method [29]
obtaining in the 19th century, the “clearing” made by the
Duchess of Sutherland will suffice here. This person, well
instructed in economy, resolved, on entering upon her
government, to effect a radical cure, and to turn the whole
country, whose population had already been, by earlier
processes of the like kind, reduced to 15,000,
into a sheep-walk. From 1814 to 1820 these
15,000 inhabitants, about 3,000 families, were
systematically hunted and rooted out. All their villages
were destroyed and burnt, all their fields turned into
pasturage. British soldiers enforced this eviction, and came
to blows with the inhabitants. One old woman was burnt to
death in the flames of the hut, which she refused to leave.
Thus this fine lady appropriated 794,000 acres of land that
had from time immemorial belonged
to the clan. She assigned to the expelled inhabitants about
6,000 acres on the sea-shore — 2 acres per family. The
6,000 acres had until this time lain waste, and brought in
no income to their owners. The Duchess, in the nobility of
her heart, actually went so far as to let these at an
average rent of 2s. 6d. per acre to the clansmen, who for
centuries had shed their blood for her family. The whole of
the stolen clanland she divided into 29 great sheep farms,
each inhabited by a single family, for the most part
imported English farm-servants. In the year 1835 the 15,000
Gaels were already replaced by 131,000 sheep. The remnant of
the aborigines flung on the sea-shore tried to live by
catching fish. They became amphibious and lived, as an
English author says, half on land and half on water, and
withal only half on both. [30]

But the brave Gaels must expiate yet more bitterly their
idolatry, romantic and of the mountains, for the “great men”
of the clan. The smell of their fish rose to the noses of
the great men. They scented some profit in it, and let the
sea-shore to the great fishmongers of London. For the second
time the Gaels were hunted out. [31]

But, finally, part of the sheep-walks are turned into
deer preserves. Every one knows that there are no real
forests in England. The deer in the parks of the great are
demurely domestic cattle, fat as London aldermen. Scotland
is therefore the last refuge of the “noble passion.” “In the
Highlands,” says Somers in 1848, “new forests are springing
up like mushrooms. Here, on one side of Gaick, you have the
new forest of Glenfeshie; and there on the other you have
the new forest of Ardverikie. In the same line you have the
Black Mount, an immense waste also recently erected. From
east to west — from the neighbourhood of Aberdeen to
the crags of Oban — you have now a continuous line of forests; while in other parts of the
Highlands there are the new forests of Loch Archaig,
Glengarry, Glenmoriston, &c. Sheep were introduced into
glens which had been the seats of communities of small
farmers; and the latter were driven to seek subsistence on
coarser and more sterile tracks of soil. Now deer are
supplanting sheep; and these are
once more dispossessing the small tenants, who will
necessarily be driven down upon still coarser land and to
more grinding penury. Deer-forests [32] and the people cannot co-exist.
One or other of the two must yield. Let the forests be
increased in number and extent during the next quarter of a
century, as they have been in the last, and the Gaels will
perish from their native soil... This movement among the
Highland proprietors is with some a matter of ambition...
with some love of sport... while others, of a more
practical cast, follow the trade in deer with an eye solely
to profit. For it is a fact, that a mountain range laid out
in forest is, in many cases, more profitable to the
proprietor than when let as a sheep-walk. ...
The huntsman who wants a deer-forest limits
his offers by no other calculation than the extent of his
purse.... Sufferings have been inflicted in the Highlands
scarcely less severe than those occasioned by the policy of
the Norman kings. Deer have received extended ranges, while
men have been hunted within a narrower and still narrower
circle.... One after one the liberties of the people have
been cloven down.... And the oppressions are daily on the
increase.... The clearance and dispersion of the people is
pursued by the proprietors as a settled principle, as an
agricultural necessity, just as trees and brushwood are
cleared from the wastes of America or Australia; and the
operation goes on in a quiet, business-like way, &c.”

The spoliation of the church’s
property, the fraudulent alienation of the State domains,
the robbery of the common lands, the usurpation of feudal
and clan property, and its transformation into modern
private property under circumstances of reckless terrorism,
were just so many idyllic methods of primitive accumulation.
They conquered the field for capitalistic agriculture, made
the soil part and parcel of capital, and created for the
town industries the necessary supply of a “free” and
outlawed proletariat.

Footnotes

1. “The petty proprietors who
cultivated their own fields with their own hands, and
enjoyed a modest competence.... then formed a much more
important part of the nation than at present. If we may
trust the best statistical writers of that age, not less
than 160,000 proprietors who, with their families, must have
made up more than a seventh of the whole population, derived
their subsistence from little freehold estates. The average
income of these small landlords... was estimated at between
£60 and £70 a year. It was computed that the
number of persons who tilled their own land was greater than
the number of those who farmed the land of others.”
Macaulay: “History of England,” 10th ed., 1854, I. pp. 333,
334. Even in the last third of the 17th century, 4/5 of the
English people were agricultural. (l. c., p. 413.) I quote
Macaulay, because as systematic falsifier of history he
minimises as much as possible facts of this kind.

2. We must never forget that even the serf was
not only the owner, if but a tribute-paying owner, of the
piece of land attached to his house, but also a co-possessor
of the common land. “Le paysan (in Silesia, under Frederick
II.) est serf.” Nevertheless, these serfs possess common
lands. “On n’a pas pu encore engager les Silésiens au
partage des communes, tandis que dans la Nouvelle Marche, il
n’y a guère de village où ce partage ne soit
exécuté avec le plus grand succès.” [The peasant ... is a serf. ... It has not yet been possible to persuade the Silesians to partition the common lands, whereas in the Neumark there is scarcely a village where the partition has not been implemented with very great success]
(Mirabeau: “De la Monarchie Prussienne.” Londres, 1788, t.
ii, pp. 125, 126.)

3. Japan, with its purely feudal
organisation of landed property and its developed petite
culture, gives a much truer picture of the European
middle ages than all our history books, dictated as these
are, for the most part, by bourgeois prejudices. It is very
convenient to be “liberal” at the expense of the middle
ages.

4. In his “Utopia,” Thomas More says,
that in England “your shepe that were wont to be so meke and
tame, and so smal eaters, now, as I heare saye, be become so
great devourers and so wylde that they eate up, and swallow
downe, the very men themselfes.” “Utopia,” transl. by
Robinson, ed. Arber, Lond., 1869, p. 41.

5. Bacon shows the
connexion between a free, well-to-do peasantry and good
infantry. “This did wonderfully concern the might and
mannerhood of the kingdom to have farms as it were of a
standard sufficient to maintain an able body out of penury,
and did in effect amortise a great part of the lands of the
kingdom unto the hold and occupation of the yeomanry or
middle people, of a condition between gentlemen, and
cottagers and peasants.... For it hath been held by the
general opinion of men of best judgment in the wars.... that
the principal strength of an army consisteth in the infantry
or foot. And to make good infantry it requireth men bred,
not in a servile or indigent fashion, but in some free and
plentiful manner. Therefore, if a state run most to noblemen
and gentlemen, and that the husbandman and ploughmen be but
as their workfolk and labourers, or else mere cottagers
(which are but hous’d beggars), you may have a good cavalry,
but never good stable bands of foot.... And this is to be
seen in France, and Italy, and some other parts abroad,
where in effect all is noblesse or peasantry.... insomuch
that they are inforced to employ mercenary bands of Switzers
and the like, for their battalions of foot; whereby also it
comes to pass that those nations have much people and few
soldiers.” (“The Reign of Henry VII.” Verbatim reprint from
Kennet’s England. Ed. 1719. Lond., 1870, p. 308.)

6. Dr. Hunter, l. c., p.
134. “The quantity of land assigned (in the old laws) would
now be judged too great for labourers, and rather as likely
to convert them into small farmers.” (George Roberts: “The
Social History of the People of the Southern Counties of
England in Past Centuries.” Lond., 1856, pp. 184-185.)

7. “The right of the
poor to share in the tithe, is established by the tenour of
ancient statutes.” (Tuckett, l. c., Vol. II., pg.
804-805.)

8. William Cobbett: “A
History of the Protestant Reformation,” § 471.

9. The “spirit” of
Protestantism may be seen from the following, among other
things. In the south of England certain landed proprietors
and well-to-do farmers put their heads together and
propounded ten questions as to the right interpretation of
the poor-law of Elizabeth. These they laid before a
celebrated jurist of that time, Sergeant Snigge (later a
judge under James I.) for his opinion. “Question 9 —
Some of the more wealthy farmers in the parish have devised
a skilful mode by which all the trouble of executing this
Act (the 43rd of Elizabeth) might be avoided. They have
proposed that we shall erect a prison in the parish, and
then give notice to the neighbourhood, that if any persons
are disposed to farm the poor of this parish, they do give
in sealed proposals, on a certain day, of the lowest price
at which they will take them off our hands; and that they
will be authorised to refuse to any one unless he be shut up
in the aforesaid prison. The proposers of this plan conceive
that there will be found in the adjoining counties, persons,
who, being unwilling to labour and not possessing substance
or credit to take a farm or ship, so as to live without
labour, may be induced to make a very advantageous offer to
the parish. If any of the poor perish under the contractor’s
care, the sin will lie at his door, as the parish will have
done its duty by them. We are, however, apprehensive that
the present Act (43rd of Elizabeth) will not warrant a
prudential measure of this kind; but you are to learn that
the rest of the freeholders of the county, and of the
adjoining county of B, will very readily join in instructing
their members to propose an Act to enable the parish to
contract with a person to lock up and work the poor; and to
declare that if any person shall refuse to be so locked up
and worked, he shall be entitled to no relief. This, it is
hoped, will prevent persons in distress from wanting relief,
and be the means of keeping down parishes.” (R. Blakey: “The
History of Political Literature from the Earliest Times.”
Lond., 1855, Vol. II., pp. 84-85.) In Scotland, the
abolition of serfdom took place some centuries later than in
England. Even in 1698, Fletcher of Saltoun, declared in the
Scotch parliament, “The number of beggars in Scotland is
reckoned at not less than 200,000. The only remedy that I, a
republican on principle, can suggest, is to restore the old
state of serfdom, to make slaves of all those who are unable
to provide for their own subsistence.” Eden, l. c., Book I.,
ch. 1, pp. 60-61, says, “The decrease of villenage seems
necessarily to have been the era of the origin of the poor.
Manufactures and commerce are the two parents of our
national poor.” Eden, like our Scotch republican on
principle, errs only in this: not the abolition of
villenage, but the abolition of the property of the
agricultural labourer in the soil made him a proletarian,
and eventually a pauper. In France, where the expropriation
was effected in another way, the ordonnance of Moulins,
1571, and the Edict of 1656, correspond to the English
poor-laws.

10. Professor Rogers,
although formerly Professor of Political Economy in the
University of Oxford, the hotbed of Protestant orthodoxy, in
his preface to the “History of Agriculture” lays stress on
the fact of the pauperisation of the mass of the people by
the Reformation.

11. “A Letter to Sir
T. C. Bunbury, Bart., on the High Price of Provisions. By a
Suffolk Gentleman.” Ipswich, 1795, p. 4. Even the fanatical
advocate of the system of large farms, the author of the
“Inquiry into the Connexion between the Present Price of
Provisions,” London, 1773, p. 139, says: “I most lament the
loss of our yeomanry, that set of men who really kept up the
independence of this nation; and sorry I am to see their
lands now in the hands of monopolising lords, tenanted out
to small farmers, who hold their leases on such conditions
as to be little better than vassals ready to attend a
summons on every mischievous occasion.”

12. On the private
moral character of this bourgeois hero, among other things:
“The large grant of lands in Ireland to Lady Orkney, in
1695, is a public instance of the king’s affection, and the
lady’s influence... Lady Orkney’s endearing offices are
supposed to have been — fœda labiorum
ministeria.” (In the Sloane Manuscript Collection, at the
British Museum, No. 4224. The Manuscript is entitled: “The
character and behaviour of King William, Sunderland, etc.,
as represented in Original Letters to the Duke of Shrewsbury
from Somers Halifax, Oxford, Secretary Vernon, etc.” It is
full of curiosa.)

13. “The illegal
alienation of the Crown Estates, partly by sale and partly
by gift, is a scandalous chapter in English history... a
gigantic fraud on the nation.” (F. W. Newman, “Lectures on
Political Economy.” London, 1851, pp. 129, 130.) [For
details as to how the present large landed proprietors of
England came into their possessions see “Our Old Nobility.
By Noblesse Oblige.” London, 1879. — F. E.]

14. Read,
e.g., E. Burke’s Pamphlet on the ducal house of
Bedford, whose offshoot was Lord John Russell, the “tomtit
of Liberalism.”

15. “The farmers
forbid cottagers to keep any living creatures besides
themselves and children, under the pretence that if they
keep any beasts or poultry, they will steal from the
farmers’ barns for their support; they also say, keep the
cottagers poor and you will keep them industrious, &c.,
but the real fact I believe, is that the farmers may have
the whole right of common to themselves.” (“A Political
Inquiry into the Consequences of Enclosing Waste Lands.”
London, 1785, p. 75.)

16. Eden, l. c.,
preface.

17. “Capital Farms.”
Two letters on the Flour Trade and the Dearness of Corn. By
a person in business. London, 1767, pp. 19, 20.

18. “Merchant Farms.”
“An Enquiry into the Causes of the Present High Price of
Provisions.” London, 1767, p. 11. Note.— This excellent
work, that was published anonymously, is by the Rev.
Nathaniel Forster.

19. Thomas Wright: “A
Short Address to the Public on the Monopoly of Large Farms,”
1779, pp. 2, 3.

20. Rev. Addington:
“Inquiry into the Reasons for or against Enclosing Open
Fields,” London, 1772, pp. 37, 43 passim.

21. Dr. R. Price, l.
c., v. ii., p. 155, Forster, Addington, Kent, Price, and
James Anderson, should be read and compared with the
miserable prattle of Sycophant MacCulloch in his catalogue:
“The Literature of Political Economy,” London, 1845.

22. Price, l. c., p.
147.

23. Price, l. c., p.
159. We are reminded of ancient Rome. “The rich had got
possession of the greater part of the undivided land. They
trusted in the conditions of the time, that these
possessions would not be again taken from them, and bought,
therefore, some of the pieces of land lying near theirs, and
belonging to the poor, with the acquiescence of their
owners, and took some by force, so that they now were
cultivating widely extended domains, instead of isolated
fields. Then they employed slaves in agriculture and
cattle-breeding, because freemen would have been taken from
labour for military service. The possession of slaves
brought them great gain, inasmuch as these, on account of
their immunity from military service, could freely multiply
and have a multitude of children. Thus the powerful men drew
all wealth to themselves, and all the land swarmed with
slaves. The Italians, on the other hand, were always
decreasing in number, destroyed as they were by poverty,
taxes, and military service. Even when times of peace came,
they were doomed to complete inactivity, because the rich
were in possession of the soil, and used slaves instead of
freemen in the tilling of it.” (Appian: “Civil Wars,” I.7.)
This passage refers to the time before the Licinian
rogations. Military service, which hastened to so great an
extent the ruin of the Roman plebeians, was also the chief
means by which, as in a forcing-house, Charlemagne brought
about the transformation of free German peasants into serfs
and bondsmen.

24. “An Inquiry into
the Connexion between the Present Price of Provisions,
&c.,” pp. 124, 129. To the like effect, but with an
opposite tendency: “Working-men are driven from their
cottages and forced into the towns to seek for employment;
but then a larger surplus is obtained, and thus capital is
augmented.” (“The Perils of the Nation,” 2nd ed. London.,
1843, p. 14.)

25. l. c., p. 132.

26. Steuart says: “If
you compare the rent of these lands” (he erroneously
includes in this economic category the tribute of the
taskmen to the clanchief) “with the extent, it appears very
small. If you compare it with the numbers fed upon the farm,
you will find that an estate in the Highlands maintains,
perhaps, ten times as many people as another of the same
value in a good and fertile province.” (l. c., vol. i., ch.
xvi., p. 104.)

27. James Anderson:
“Observations on the Means of Exciting a Spirit of National
Industry, &c.,” Edinburgh, 1777.

28. In 1860 the people
expropriated by force were exported to Canada under false
pretences. Some fled to the mountains and neighbouring
islands. They were followed by the police, came to blows
with them and escaped.

29. “In the Highlands
of Scotland,” says Buchanan, the commentator on Adam Smith,
1814, “the ancient state of property is daily subverted....
The landlord, without regard to the hereditary tenant (a
category used in error here), now offers his land to the
highest bidder, who, if he is an improver, instantly adopts
a new system of cultivation. The land, formerly overspread
with small tenants or labourers, was peopled in proportion
to its produce, but under the new system of improved
cultivation and increased rents, the largest possible
produce is obtained at the least possible expense: and the
useless hands being, with this view, removed, the population
is reduced, not to what the land will maintain, but to what
it will employ. “The dispossessed tenants either seek a
subsistence in the neighbouring towns,” &c. (David
Buchanan: “Observations on, &c., A. Smith’s Wealth of
Nations.” Edinburgh, 1814, vol. iv., p. 144.) “The Scotch
grandees dispossessed families as they would grub up
coppice-wood, and they treated villages and their people as
Indians harassed with wild beasts do, in their vengeance, a
jungle with tigers.... Man is bartered for a fleece or a
carcase of mutton, nay, held cheaper.... Why, how much worse
is it than the intention of the Moguls, who, when they had
broken into the northern provinces of China, proposed in
council to exterminate the inhabitants, and convert the land
into pasture. This proposal many Highland proprietors have
effected in their own country against their own countrymen.”
(George Ensor: “An Inquiry Concerning the Population of
Nations.” Lond,. 1818, pp. 215, 216.)

30. When the present
Duchess of Sutherland entertained Mrs. Beecher Stowe,
authoress of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” with great magnificence in
London to show her sympathy for the Negro slaves of the
American republic — a sympathy that she prudently
forgot, with her fellow-aristocrats, during the civil war,
in which every “noble” English heart beat for the
slave-owner — I gave in the New York Tribune
the facts about the Sutherland slaves. (Epitomised in part
by Carey in “The Slave Trade.” Philadelphia, 1853, pp. 203,
204.) My article was reprinted in a Scotch newspaper, and
led to a pretty polemic between the latter and the
sycophants of the Sutherlands.

31. Interesting
details on this fish trade will be found in Mr. David
Urquhart’s Portfolio, new series. — Nassau W. Senior,
in his posthumous work, already quoted, terms “the
proceedings in Sutherlandshire one of the most beneficent
clearings since the memory of man.” (l. c.)

32. The deer-forests
of Scotland contain not a single tree. The sheep are driven
from, and then the deer driven to, the naked hills, and then
it is called a deer-forest. Not even timber-planting and
real forest culture.

33. Robert Somers:
“Letters from the Highlands: or the Famine of 1847.” London,
1848, pp. 12-28 passim. These letters originally appeared in
The Times. The English economists of course
explained the famine of the Gaels in 1847, by their
over-population. At all events, they “were pressing on their
food-supply.” The “clearing of estates,” or as it is called
in Germany, “Bauernlegen,” occurred in Germany especially
after the 30 years’ war, and led to peasant-revolts as late
as 1790 in Kursachsen. It obtained especially in East
Germany. In most of the Prussian provinces, Frederick II.
for the first time secured right of property for the
peasants. After the conquest of Silesia he forced the
landlords to rebuild the huts, barns, etc., and to provide
the peasants with cattle and implements. He wanted soldiers
for his army and tax-payers for his treasury. For the rest,
the pleasant life that the peasant led under Frederick’s
system of finance and hodge-podge rule of despotism,
bureaucracy and feudalism, may be seen from the following
quotation from his admirer, Mirabeau: “Le lin fait donc une
des grandes richesses du cultivateur dans le Nord de
l’Allemagne. Malheureusement pour l’espèce humaine,
ce n’est qu’une ressource contre la misère et non un
moyen de bien-être. Les impôts directs, les
corvées, les servitudes de tout genre,
écrasent le cultivateur allemand, qui paie encore des
impôts indirects dans tout ce qu’il achète....
et pour comble de ruine, il n’ose pas vendre ses productions
où et comme il le veut; il n’ose pas acheter ce dont
il a besoin aux marchands qui pourraient le lui livrer au
meilleur prix. Toutes ces causes le ruinent insensiblement,
et il se trouverait hors d’état de payer les
impôts directs à l’échéance sans
la filerie; elle lui offre une ressource, en occupant
utilement sa femme, ses enfants, ses servants, ses valets,
et lui-même; mais quelle pénible vie,
même aidée de ce secours. En
été, il travaille comme un forçat au
labourage et à la récolte; il se couche
à 9 heures et se lève à deux, pour
suffire aux travaux; en hiver il devrait réparer ses
forces par un plus grand repos; mais il manquera de grains
pour le pain et les semailles, s’il se défait des
denrées qu’il faudrait vendre pour payer les
impôts. Il faut donc filer pour suppléer
à ce vide.... il faut y apporter la plus grande
assiduité. Aussi le paysan se couche-t-il en hiver
à minuit, une heure, et se lève à cinq
ou six; ou bien il se couche à neuf, et se
lève à deux, et cela tous les jours de la vie
si ce n’est le dimanche. Ces excès de veille et de
travail usent la nature humaine, et de là vient
qu’hommes et femmes vieillissent beaucoup plutôt dans
les campagnes que dans les villes.” [Flax represents one of the greatest sources of wealth for the peasant of North Germany. Unfortunately for the human race, this is only a resource against misery and not a means towards well-being. Direct taxes, forced labour service, obligations of all kinds crush the German peasant, especially as he still has to pay indirect taxes on everything he buys, ... and to complete his ruin he dare not sell his produce where and as he wishes; he dare not buy what he needs from the merhcants who could sell it to him at a cheaper price. He is slowly ruined by all those factors, and when the dirct taxes fall due, he would find himself incapable of paying them without his spinning-wheel; it offers him a last resort, while providing useful occupation for his wife, his children, his maids, his farm-hands, and himself; but what a painful life he leads, even with this extra resource! In summer, he works like a convict with the plough and at harvest; he goes to bed at nine o’clock and rises at two to get through all his work; in winter he ought to be recovering his strength by sleeping longer; but he would run short of corn for his bread and next year’s sowing if he got rid of the products that he needs to sell in order to pay the taxes. He therefore has to spin to fill up this gap ... and indeed he must do so most assiduously. Thus the peasant goes to bed at midnight or one o’clock in winter, and gets up at five or six; or he goes to bed at nine and gets up at two, and this he does every day of his life except Sundays. These excessively short hours of sleep and long hours of work consume a person’s strength and hence it happens that men and women age much more in the country than in the towns] (Mirabeau, l. c., t.III.
pp. 212 sqq.)

Note to the second edition. In April 1866, 18
years after the publication of the work of Robert Somers
quoted above, Professor Leone Levi gave a lecture before the
Society of Arts on the transformation of sheep-walks into
deer-forest, in which he depicts the advance in the
devastation of the Scottish Highlands. He says, with other
things: “Depopulation and transformation into sheep-walks
were the most convenient means for getting an income without
expenditure... A deer-forest in place of a sheep-walk was a
common change in the Highlands. The landowners turned out
the sheep as they once turned out the men from their
estates, and welcomed the new tenants — the wild beasts
and the feathered birds.... One can walk from the Earl of
Dalhousie’s estates in Forfarshire to John O’Groats, without
ever leaving forest land.... In many of these woods the fox,
the wild cat, the marten, the polecat, the weasel and the
Alpine hare are common; whilst the rabbit, the squirrel and
the rat have lately made their way into the country. Immense
tracts of land, much of which is described in the
statistical account of Scotland as having a pasturage in
richness and extent of very superior description, are thus
shut out from all cultivation and improvement, and are
solely devoted to the sport of a few persons for a very
brief period of the year.” The London Economist of
June 2, 1866, says, “Amongst the items of news in a Scotch
paper of last week, we read... ’One of the finest sheep
farms in Sutherlandshire, for which a rent of £1,200 a
year was recently offered, on the expiry of the existing
lease this year, is to be converted into a deer-forest.’
Here we see the modern instincts of feudalism ... operating
pretty much as they did when the Norman Conqueror...
destroyed 36 villages to create the New Forest.... Two
millions of acres... totally laid waste, embracing within
their area some of the most fertile lands of Scotland. The
natural grass of Glen Tilt was among the most nutritive in
the county of Perth. The deer-forest of Ben Aulder was by
far the best grazing ground in the wide district of
Badenoch; a part of the Black Mount forest was the best
pasture for black-faced sheep in Scotland. Some idea of the
ground laid waste for purely sporting purposes in Scotland
may be formed from the fact that it embraced an area larger
than the whole county of Perth. The resources of the forest
of Ben Aulder might give some idea of the loss sustained
from the forced desolations. The ground would pasture
15,000 sheep, and as it was not more than one-thirtieth part
of the old forest ground in Scotland ... it might, &c.,
... All that forest land is as totally unproductive.... It
might thus as well have been submerged under the waters of
the German Ocean.... Such extemporised wildernesses or
deserts ought to be put down by the decided interference of
the Legislature.”

## Chapter Twenty-Eight: Bloody Legislation Against the Expropriated, from the End of the 15th Century. Forcing Down of Wages by Acts of Parliament

The proletariat created by the breaking up of the bands
of feudal retainers and by the forcible expropriation of the
people from the soil, this “free” proletariat could not
possibly be absorbed by the nascent manufactures as fast as
it was thrown upon the world. On the other hand, these men,
suddenly dragged from their wonted mode of life, could not
as suddenly adapt themselves to the discipline of their new
condition. They were turned en masse into beggars,
robbers, vagabonds, partly from inclination, in most cases
from stress of circumstances. Hence at the end of the 15th
and during the whole of the 16th century, throughout Western
Europe a bloody legislation against vagabondage. The fathers
of the present working class were chastised for their
enforced transformation into vagabonds and paupers.
Legislation treated them as “voluntary” criminals, and
assumed that it depended on their own good will to go on
working under the old conditions that no longer existed.

In England this legislation began under Henry VII.

Henry VIII. 1530: Beggars old and unable to work
receive a beggar’s licence. On the other hand, whipping and
imprisonment for sturdy vagabonds. They are to be tied to
the cart-tail and whipped until the blood streams from their
bodies, then to swear an oath to go back to their birthplace
or to where they have lived the last three years and to “put
themselves to labour.” What grim irony! In 27 Henry VIII.
the former statute is repeated, but strengthened with new
clauses. For the second arrest for vagabondage the whipping
is to be repeated and half the ear sliced off; but for the
third relapse the offender is to be executed as a hardened
criminal and enemy of the common weal.

Edward VI.: A statute of the first year of his
reign, 1547, ordains that if anyone refuses to work, he
shall be condemned as a slave to the
person who has denounced him as an
idler. The master shall feed his slave on bread and water,
weak broth and such refuse meat as he thinks fit. He has the
right to force him to do any work, no matter how disgusting,
with whip and chains. If the slave is absent a fortnight, he
is condemned to slavery for life and is to be branded on
forehead or back with the letter S; if he runs away thrice,
he is to be executed as a felon. The master can sell him,
bequeath him, let him out on hire as a slave, just as any
other personal chattel or cattle. If the slaves attempt
anything against the masters, they are also to be executed.
Justices of the peace, on information, are to hunt the
rascals down. If it happens that a vagabond has been idling
about for three days, he is to be taken to his birthplace,
branded with a red-hot iron with the letter V on the breast
and be set to work, in chains, in the
streets or at some other labour. If the vagabond gives a
false birthplace, he is then to become the slave for life of
this place, of its inhabitants, or its corporation, and to
be branded with an S. All persons have the right to take
away the children of the vagabonds and to keep them as
apprentices, the young men until the 24th year, the girls
until the 20th. If they run away, they are to become up to
this age the slaves of their masters, who can put them in
irons, whip them, &c., if they like. Every master may
put an iron ring round the neck, arms or legs of his slave,
by which to know him more easily and to be more certain of
him. [1] The
last part of this statute provides, that certain poor people
may be employed by a place or by persons, who are willing to
give them food and drink and to find them work. This kind of
parish slaves was kept up in England until far into the 19th
century under the name of “roundsmen.”

Elizabeth, 1572: Unlicensed beggars above 14 years
of age are to be severely flogged and branded on the left
ear unless some one will take them into service for two
years; in case of a repetition of the offence, if they are
over 18, they are to be executed, unless some one will take
them into service for two years; but for the third offence
they are to be executed without mercy as felons. Similar
statutes: 18 Elizabeth, c. 13, and another of 1597.

James 1: Any one wandering
about and begging is declared a rogue and a vagabond.
Justices of the peace in petty sessions are authorised to
have them publicly whipped and for the first offence to
imprison them for 6 months, for the second for 2 years.
Whilst in prison they are to be whipped as much and as often
as the justices of the peace think fit... Incorrigible and
dangerous rogues are to be branded with an R on the left
shoulder and set to hard labour, and if they are caught
begging again, to be executed without mercy. These statutes,
legally binding until the beginning of the 18th century,
were only repealed by 12 Anne, c. 23.

Similar laws in France, where by the middle of the 17th
century a kingdom of vagabonds (truands) was established in
Paris. Even at the beginning of Louis XVI.’s reign
(Ordinance of July 13th, 1777) every man in good health from
16 to 60 years of age, if without means of subsistence and
not practising a trade, is to be sent to the galleys. Of the
same nature are the statute of Charles V. for the
Netherlands (October, 1537), the first edict of the States
and Towns of Holland (March 10, 1614), the “Plakaat” of the
United Provinces (June 26, 1649), &c.

Thus were the agricultural people, first forcibly
expropriated from the soil, driven from their homes, turned
into vagabonds, and then whipped, branded, tortured by laws
grotesquely terrible, into the discipline necessary for the
wage system.

It is not enough that the conditions of labour are
concentrated in a mass, in the shape of capital, at the one
pole of society, while at the
other are grouped masses of men,
who have nothing to sell but their labour-power. Neither is
it enough that they are compelled to sell it voluntarily.
The advance of capitalist production develops a
working class, which by education, tradition, habit, looks
upon the conditions of that mode of production as
self-evident laws of Nature. The organisation of the
capitalist process of production, once fully developed,
breaks down all resistance. The constant generation of a
relative surplus-population keeps the law of supply and
demand of labour, and therefore keeps wages, in a rut that
corresponds with the wants of capital. The dull compulsion
of economic relations completes the subjection of the
labourer to the capitalist. Direct force, outside economic
conditions, is of course still used, but only exceptionally.
In the ordinary run of things, the labourer can be left to
the “natural laws of production,” i.e., to his
dependence on capital, a dependence springing from, and
guaranteed in perpetuity by, the conditions of production
themselves. It is otherwise during the historic genesis
of capitalist production. The bourgeoisie, at its rise,
wants and uses the power of the state to “regulate” wages,
i.e., to force them within the limits suitable for
surplus-value making, to lengthen the working-day and to
keep the labourer himself in the normal degree of
dependence. This is an essential element of the so-called
primitive accumulation.

The class of wage labourers, which arose in the latter
half of the 14th century, formed then and in the following
century only a very small part of the population, well
protected in its position by the independent peasant
proprietary in the country and the guild-organisation in the
town. In country and town master and workmen stood close
together socially. The subordination of labour to capital
was only formal — i.e., the mode of
production itself had as yet no specific capitalistic
character. Variable capital preponderated greatly over
constant. The demand for wage labour grew, therefore,
rapidly with every accumulation of capital, whilst the
supply of wage labour followed but slowly. A large part of
the national product, changed later into a fund of
capitalist accumulation, then still entered into the
consumption-fund of the labourer.

Legislation on wage labour (from the first, aimed at the
exploitation of the labourer and, as it advanced, always
equally hostile to him), [3]
is started in England by the
Statute of Labourers, of Edward III., 1349. The ordinance
of 1350 in France, issued in the name of King John,
corresponds with it. English and French legislation run
parallel and are identical in
purport. So far as the labour-statutes aim at compulsory
extension of the working-day, I do not return to them, as
this point was treated earlier (Chap. X., Section 5).

The Statute of Labourers was passed at the urgent
instance of the House of Commons. A Tory says naively:

“Formerly the poor demanded such high wages as to
threaten industry and wealth. Next, their wages are so
low as to threaten industry and wealth equally and
perhaps more, but in another way.” [4]

A tariff of wages was fixed by
law for town and country, for piece-work and day-work. The
agricultural labourers were to hire themselves out by the
year, the town ones “in open market.” It was forbidden,
under pain of imprisonment, to pay higher wages than those
fixed by the statute, but the taking of higher wages was
more severely punished than the giving them. [So also in
Sections 18 and 19 of the Statute of Apprentices of
Elizabeth, ten days’ imprisonment is decreed for him that
pays the higher wages, but twenty-one days for him that
receives them.] A statute of 1360 increased the penalties
and authorised the masters to extort labour at the legal
rate of wages by corporal punishment. All combinations,
contracts, oaths, &c., by which masons and carpenters
reciprocally bound themselves, were declared null and void.
Coalition of the labourers is treated as a heinous crime
from the 14th century to 1825, the year of the repeal of the
laws against Trades’ Unions. The spirit of the Statute of
Labourers of 1349 and of its offshoots comes out clearly in
the fact, that indeed a maximum of wages is dictated by the
State, but on no account a minimum.

In the 16th century, the condition of the labourers had,
as we know, become much worse. The money wage rose, but not
in proportion to the depreciation of money and the
corresponding rise in the prices of commodities. Wages,
therefore, in reality fell. Nevertheless, the laws for
keeping them down remained in force, together with the
ear-clipping and branding of those “whom no one was willing
to take into service.” By the Statute of Apprentices 5
Elizabeth, c. 3, the justices of the peace were empowered to
fix certain wages and to modify them according to the time
of the year and the price of commodities. James I. extended
these regulations of labour also to weavers, spinners, and
all possible categories of workers. [5] George II. extended the laws
against coalitions of labourers to
manufactures. In the manufacturing period par
excellence, the capitalist mode of production had
become sufficiently strong to render legal regulation of
wages as impracticable as it was unnecessary; but the ruling
classes were unwilling in case of necessity to be without
the weapons of the old arsenal. Still, 8 George II. forbade
a higher day’s wage than 2s. 7½d. for journeymen tailors
in and around London, except in cases of general mourning;
still, 13 George III., c. 68, gave the regulation of the
wages of silk-weavers to the justices of the peace; still,
in 1706, it required two judgments of the higher courts to
decide, whether the mandates of justices of the peace as to
wages held good also for non-agricultural labourers; still,
in 1799, an act of Parliament ordered that the wages of the
Scotch miners should continue to be regulated by a statute
of Elizabeth and two Scotch acts of 1661 and 1671. How
completely in the meantime circumstances had changed, is
proved by an occurrence unheard-of before in the English
Lower House. In that place, where for more than 400 years
laws had been made for the maximum, beyond which wages
absolutely must not rise, Whitbread in 1796 proposed a legal
minimum wage for agricultural labourers. Pitt opposed this,
but confessed that the “condition of the poor was cruel.”
Finally, in 1813, the laws for the regulation of wages were
repealed. They were an absurd anomaly, since the capitalist
regulated his factory by his private legislation, and could
by the poor-rates make up the wage of the agricultural
labourer to the indispensable minimum. The provisions of the
labour statutes as to contracts between master and workman,
as to giving notice and the like, which only allow of a
civil action against the contract-breaking master, but on
the contrary permit a criminal action against the
contract-breaking workman, are to this hour (1873) in full
force. The barbarous laws against Trades’ Unions fell in
1825 before the threatening bearing of the proletariat.
Despite this, they fell only in part. Certain beautiful
fragments of the old statute vanished only in 1859. Finally,
the act of Parliament of June 29, 1871, made a pretence of
removing the last traces of this class of
legislation by legal recognition of
Trades’ Unions. But an act of Parliament of the same date
(an act to amend the criminal law relating to violence,
threats, and molestation), re-established, in point of fact,
the former state of things in a new shape. By this
Parliamentary escamotage the means which the labourers could
use in a strike or lock-out were withdrawn from the laws
common to all citizens, and placed under exceptional penal
legislation, the interpretation of which fell to the masters
themselves in their capacity as justices of the peace. Two
years earlier, the same House of Commons and the same Mr.
Gladstone in the well-known straightforward fashion brought
in a bill for the abolition of all exceptional penal
legislation against the working class. But this was never
allowed to go beyond the second reading, and the matter was
thus protracted until at last the “great Liberal party,” by
an alliance with the Tories, found courage to turn against
the very proletariat that had carried it into power. Not
content with this treachery, the “great Liberal party”
allowed the English judges, ever complaisant in the service
of the ruling classes, to dig up again the earlier laws
against “conspiracy,” and to apply them to coalitions of
labourers. We see that only against its will and under the
pressure of the masses did the English Parliament give up
the laws against Strikes and Trades’ Unions, after it had
itself, for 500 years, held, with shameless egoism, the
position of a permanent Trades’ Union of the capitalists
against the labourers.

During the very first storms of the revolution, the
French bourgeoisie dared to take away from the workers the
right of association but just acquired. By a decree of June
14, 1791, they declared all coalition of the workers as “an
attempt against liberty and the declaration of the rights of
man,” punishable by a fine of 500 livres, together with
deprivation of the rights of an active citizen for one year.
[6] This law
which, by means of State compulsion, confined the struggle
between capital and labour within limits comfortable for
capital, has outlived revolutions and changes of dynasties.
Even the Reign of Terror left it untouched. It was but quite
recently struck out of the Penal Code. Nothing is more
characteristic than the pretext for this bourgeois coup
d’état. “Granting,” says Chapelier, the reporter
of the Select Committee on this law, “that wages ought to be
a little higher than they are, ... that
they ought to be high enough for
him that receives them, to be free from that state of
absolute dependence due to the want of the necessaries of
life, and which is almost that of slavery,” yet the workers
must not be allowed to come to any understanding about their
own interests, nor to act in common and thereby lessen their
“absolute dependence, which is almost that of slavery;”
because, forsooth, in doing this they injure “the freedom of
their cidevant masters, the present entrepreneurs,” and
because a coalition against the despotism of the quondam
masters of the corporations is — guess what! —
is a restoration of the corporations abolished by the French
constitution.[7]

Footnotes

1. The author of the
“Essay on Trade, etc.,” 1770, says, “In the reign of Edward
VI. indeed the English seem to have set, in good earnest,
about encouraging manufactures and employing the poor. This
we learn from a remarkable statute which runs thus: ‘That
all vagrants shall be branded, &c.’” l. c., p. 5.

2. Thomas More says in
his “Utopia": “Therfore that on covetous and unsatiable
cormaraunte and very plage of his native contrey maye
compasse aboute and inclose many thousand akers of grounde
together within one pale or hedge, the husbandman be thrust
owte of their owne, or els either by coneyne and fraude, or
by violent oppression they be put besydes it, or by wrongs
and iniuries thei be so weried that they be compelled to
sell all: by one meanes, therfore, or by other, either by
hooke or crooke they muste needes departe awaye, poore,
selye, wretched soules, men, women, husbands, wiues,
fatherlesse children, widowes, wofull mothers with their
yonge babes, and their whole household smal in substance,
and muche in numbre, as husbandrye requireth many handes.
Awaye thei trudge, I say, owte of their knowen accustomed
houses, fyndynge no place to reste in. All their housholde
stuffe, which is very little woorthe, thoughe it might well
abide the sale: yet beeynge sodainely thruste owte, they be
constrayned to sell it for a thing of nought. And when they
haue wandered abrode tyll that be spent, what cant they then
els doe but steale, and then iustly pardy be hanged, or els
go about beggyng. And yet then also they be caste in prison
as vagaboundes, because they go aboute and worke not: whom
no man wyl set a worke though thei neuer so willyngly profre
themselues therto.” Of these poor fugitives of whom Thomas
More says that they were forced to thieve, “7,200 great and
petty thieves were put to death,” in the reign of Henry
VIII. (Holinshed, “Description of England,” Vol. 1, p.
186.) In Elizabeth’s time, “rogues were trussed up apace,
and that there was not one year commonly wherein three or
four hundred were not devoured and eaten up by the
gallowes.” (Strype’s “Annals of the Reformation and
Establishment of Religion and other Various Occurrences in
the Church of England during Queen Elizabeth’s Happy Reign.”
Second ed., 1725, Vol. 2.) According to this same Strype, in
Somersetshire, in one year, 40 persons were executed, 35
robbers burnt in the hand, 37 whipped, and 183 discharged as
“incorrigible vagabonds.” Nevertheless, he is of opinion
that this large number of prisoners does not comprise even a
fifth of the actual criminals, thanks to the negligence of
the justices and the foolish compassion of the people; and
the other counties of England were not better off in this
respect than Somersetshire, while some were even worse.

3. “Whenever the
legislature attempts to regulate the differences between
masters and their workmen, its counsellors are always the
masters,” says A. Smith. “L’esprit des lois, c’est la
propriété,” says Linguet.

4. “Sophisms of Free
Trade.” By a Barrister. Lond., 1850, p. 206. He adds
maliciously: “We were ready enough to interfere for the
employer, can nothing now be done for the employed?”

5. From a clause of
Statute 2 James I., c. 6, we see that certain clothmakers
took upon themselves to dictate, in their capacity of
justices of the peace, the official tariff of wages in their
own shops. In Germany, especially after the Thirty Years’
War, statutes for keeping down wages were general. “The want
of servants and labourers was very troublesome to the landed
proprietors in the depopulated districts. All villagers were
forbidden to let rooms to single men and women; all the
latter were to be reported to the authorities and cast into
prison if they were unwilling to become servants, even if
they were employed at any other work, such as sowing seeds
for the peasants at a daily wage, or even buying and selling
corn. (Imperial privileges and sanctions for Silesia, I.,
25.) For a whole century in the decrees of the small German
potentates a bitter cry goes up again and again about the
wicked and impertinent rabble that will not reconcile itself
to its hard lot, will not be content with the legal wage;
the individual landed proprietors are forbidden to pay more
than the State had fixed by a tariff. And yet the conditions
of service were at times better after war than 100 years
later; the farm servants of Silesia had, in 1652, meat twice
a week, whilst even in our century, districts are known
where they have it only three times a year. Further, wages
after the war were higher than in the following century.”
(G. Freytag.)

6. Article I. of this
law runs: “L’anéantissement de toute
espèce de corporations du même état et
profession étant l’une des bases fondamentales
de la constitution française, il est défendu
de les rétablir de fait sous quelque prétexte
et sous quelque forme que ce soit.” Article IV. declares,
that if “des citoyens attachés aux mêmes
professions, arts et métiers prenaient des
délibérations, faisaient entre eux des
conventions tendantes à refuser de concert ou
à n’accorder qu’à un prix
déterminé le secours de leur industrie ou de
leurs travaux, les dites délibérations et
conventions... seront déclarées
inconstitutionnelles, attentatoires à la
liberté et à la declaration des droits de
l’homme, &c.;” felony, therefore, as in the old
labour-statutes. [As the abolition of any form of association between citizens of the same estate and profession is one of the foundations of the French constitution, it is forbidden to re-establish them under any pretext or in any form, whatever they might be. ... citizens belonging to the same profession, craft or trade have joint discussions and make joint decisions with the intention of refusing together to perform their trade or insisting together on providing the services of their trade or their labours only at a particular price, then the said deliberations and agreements ... shall be declared unconstitutional, derogatory to liberty and the declaration of the rights of man, etc.] (“Révolutions de Paris,” Paris,
1791, t. III, p. 523.)

7. Buchez et Roux:
“Histoire Parlementaire,” t. x., p. 195.

## Chapter 29: Genesis of the Capitalist Farmer

Now that we have considered the forcible creation
of a class of outlawed proletarians, the bloody discipline that turned
them into wage labourers, the disgraceful action of the State which employed
the police to accelerate the accumulation of capital by increasing the
degree of exploitation of labour, the question remains: whence came the
capitalists originally? For the expropriation of the agricultural population
creates, directly, none but the greatest landed proprietors. As far, however,
as concerns the genesis of the farmer, we can, so to say, put our hand
on it, because it is a slow process evolving through many centuries. The
serfs, as well as the free small proprietors, held land under very different
tenures, and were therefore emancipated under very different economic conditions.
In England the first form of the farmer is the bailiff, himself a serf.
His position is similar to that of the old Roman villicus, only
in a more limited sphere of action. During the second half of the 14th
century he is replaced by a farmer, whom the landlord provided with seed,
cattle and implements. His condition is not very different from that of
the peasant. Only he exploits more wage labour. Soon he becomes a metayer,
a half-farmer. He advances one part of the agricultural stock, the landlord
the other. The two divide the total product in proportions determined by
contract. This form quickly disappears in England, to give the place to
the farmer proper, who makes his own capital breed by employing wage labourers,
and pays a part of the surplus-product, in money or in kind, to the landlord
as rent. So long, during the 15th century, as the independent peasant and
the farm-labourer working for himself as well as for wages, enriched themselves
by their own labour, the circumstances of the farmer, and his field of production,
were equally mediocre. The agricultural revolution which commenced in the
last third of the 15th century, and continued during almost the whole of
the 16th (excepting, however, its last decade), enriched him just as speedily
as it impoverished the mass of the agricultural people. [1]

The usurpation of the common lands allowed him to augment greatly
his stock of cattle, almost without cost, whilst they yielded him a richer
supply of manure for the tillage of the soil. To this was added in the
16th century a very important element. At that time the contracts for farms
ran for a long time, often for 99 years. The progressive fall in the value
of the precious metals, and therefore of money, brought the farmers golden
fruit. Apart from all the other circumstances discussed above, it lowered
wages. A portion of the latter was now added to the profits of the farm.
The continuous rise in the price of corn, wool, meat, in a word of all
agricultural produce, swelled the money capital of the farmer without any
action on his part, whilst the rent he paid (being calculated on the old
value of money) diminished in reality. [2] Thus they
grew rich at the expense both of their labourers and their landlords. No
wonder, therefore, that England, at the end of the 16th century, had a
class of capitalist farmers, rich, considering the circumstances of the
time. [3]

Footnotes

1. Harrison in his “Description of England,”
says “although peradventure foure pounds of old rent be improved to fortie,
toward the end of his term, if he have not six or seven yeares rent lieng
by him, fiftie or a hundred pounds, yet will the farmer thinke his gaines
verie small.”

2. On the influence of the depreciation
of money in the 16th century, on the different classes of society, see
“A Compendium of Briefe Examination of Certayne Ordinary Complaints of
Divers of our Countrymen in these our Days,” by W. S. Gentleman (London
1581). The dialogue form of this work led people for a long time to ascribe
it to Shakespeare, and even in 1751, it was published under his name. Its
author is William Stafford. In one place the knight reasons as follows:
Knight: You, my neighbor, the husbandman, you Maister Mercer, and
you Goodman Cooper, with other artificers, may save yourselves metely well.
For as much as all things are dearer than they were, so much do you arise
in the pryce of your wares and occupations that ye sell agayne. But we
have nothing to sell whereby we might advance ye price there of, to countervaile
those things that we must buy agayne.” In another place, the knight asks
the doctor: “I pray you, what be those sorts that ye meane. And first, of
those that ye thinke should have no losse thereby? Doctor: I mean
all those that live by buying and selling, for as they buy deare, they sell
thereafter. Knight: What is the next sort that ye say would win
by it? Doctor: Marry, all such as have takings of fearmes in their
owne manurance [cultivation] at the old rent, for where they pay after
the olde rate they sell after the newe — that is, they paye for theire
lande good cheape, and sell all things growing thereof deare. Knight:
What sorte is that which, ye sayde should have greater losse hereby, than
these men had profit? Doctor: It is all noblemen, gentlemen, and
all other that live either by a stinted rent or stypend, or do not manure
[cultivate] the ground, or doe occupy no buying and selling.”

3. In France, the régisseur, steward,
collector of dues for the feudal lords during the earlier part of the middle
ages, soon became an homme d'affaires, who by extortion, cheating, &c.,
swindled himself into a capitalist. These régisseurs themselves
were sometimes noblemen. E.g., “C'est li compte que messire Jacques
de Thoraine, chevalier chastelain sor Besançon rent és-seigneur
tenant les comptes à Dijon pour monseigneur le duc et comte de Bourgoigne,
des rentes appartenant à la dite chastellenie, depuis xxve jour
de décembre MCCCLIX jusqu'au xxviiie jour de décembre MCCCLX.”
[This is the account given by M. Jacques de Thoraisse, knight, and Lord of a manor near Besançon, to the lord who administers the accounts at Dijon for his highness the Duke and Count of Burgundy, of the rents appurtenant to the above-mentioned manor, from the 25th day of December 1359 to the 28th day of December 1360]
(Alexis Monteil: “Traité de Matériaux Manuscrits etc.,” pp.
234, 235.) Already it is evident here how in all spheres of social life
the lion's share falls to the middleman. In the economic domain, e.g.,
financiers, stock-exchange speculators, merchants, shopkeepers skim the
cream; in civil matters, the lawyer fleeces his clients; in politics the
representative is of more importance than the voters, the minister than
the sovereign; in religion, God is pushed into the background by the “Mediator,”
and the latter again is shoved back by the priests, the inevitable middlemen
between the good shepherd and his sheep. In France, as in England, the
great feudal territories were divided into innumerable small homesteads,
but under conditions incomparably more favorable for the people. During
the 14th century arose the farms or terriers. Their number grew
constantly, far beyond 100,000. They paid rents varying from 1/12 to 1/5
of the product in money or in kind. These farms were fiefs, sub-fiefs,
&c., according the value and extent of the domains, many of them only
containing a few acres. But these farmers had rights of jurisdiction in
some degree over the dwellers on the soil; there were four grades. The
oppression of the agricultural population under all these petty tyrants
will be understood. Monteil says that there were once in France 160,000
judges, where today, 4,000 tribunals, including justices of the peace,
suffice.

## Chapter Thirty: Reaction of the Agricultural Revolution on Industry. Creation of the Home-Market for Industrial Capital

The expropriation and expulsion of the agricultural
population, intermittent but renewed again and again, supplied, as we saw,
the town industries with a mass of proletarians entirely unconnected with
the corporate guilds and unfettered by them; a fortunate circumstance that
makes old A. Anderson (not to be confounded with James Anderson), in his
“History of Commerce,” believe in the direct intervention of Providence.
We must still pause a moment on this element of primitive accumulation.
The thinning-out of the independent, self-supporting peasants not only
brought about the crowding together of the industrial proletariat, in the
way that Geoffrey Saint Hilaire explained the condensation of cosmical
matter at one place, by its rarefaction at another. [1]
In spite of the smaller number of its cultivators, the soil brought forth
as much or more produce, after as before, because the revolution in the
conditions of landed property was accompanied by improved methods of culture,
greater co-operation, concentration of the means of production, &c.,
and because not only were the agricultural wage labourers put on the strain
more intensely [2], but the field of production on which
they worked for themselves became more and more contracted. With the setting
free of a part of the agricultural population, therefore, their former
means of nourishment were also set free. They were now transformed into
material elements of variable capital. The peasant, expropriated and cast
adrift, must buy their value in the form of wages, from his new master,
the industrial capitalist. That which holds good of the means of subsistence
holds with the raw materials of industry dependent upon home agriculture.
They were transformed into an element of constant capital. Suppose, e.g.,
a part of the Westphalian peasants, who, at the time of Frederick II, all
span flax, forcibly expropriated and hunted from the soil; and the other
part that remained, turned into day labourers of large farmers. At the same
time arise large establishments for flax-spinning and weaving, in which
the men “set free” now work for wages. The flax looks exactly as before.
Not a fibre of it is changed, but a new social soul has popped into its
body. It forms now a part of the constant capital of the master manufacturer.
Formerly divided among a number of small producers, who cultivated it themselves
and with their families spun it in retail fashion, it is now concentrated
in the hand of one capitalist, who sets others to spin and weave it for
him. The extra labour expended in flax-spinning realised itself formerly
in extra income to numerous peasant families, or maybe, in Frederick II’s
time, in taxes pour le roi de Prusse. It realises itself now in profit
for a few capitalists. The spindles and looms, formerly scattered over
the face of the country, are now crowded together in a few great labour-barracks,
together with the labourers and the raw material. And spindles, looms, raw
material, are now transformed from means of independent existence for the
spinners and weavers, into means for commanding them and sucking out of
them unpaid labour. [3] One does not perceive, when looking
at the large manufactories and the large farms, that they have originated
from the throwing into one of many small centres of production, and have
been built up by the expropriation of many small independent producers.
Nevertheless, the popular intuition was not at fault. In the time of Mirabeau,
the lion of the Revolution, the great manufactories were still called manufactures
réunies, workshops thrown into one, as we speak of fields thrown into one.
Says Mirabeau:

“We are only paying attention to the grand manufactories,
in which hundreds of men work under a director and which are commonly called
manufactures réunies. Those where a very large number of
labourers work, each separately and on his own account, are hardly considered;
they are placed at an infinite distance from the others. This is a great
error, as the latter alone make a really important object of national prosperity....
The large workshop (manufacture réunie) will enrich prodigiously
one or two entrepreneurs, but the labourers will only be journeymen, paid
more or less, and will not have any share in the success of the undertaking.
In the discrete workshop (manufacture séparée), on the contrary, no one
will become rich, but many labourers will be comfortable; the saving and
the industrious will be able to amass a little capital, to put by a little
for a birth of a child, for an illness, for themselves or their belongings.
The number of saving and industrious labourers will increase, because they
will see in good conduct, in activity, a means of essentially bettering
their condition, and not of obtaining a small rise in wages that can never
be of any importance of the future, and whose sole result is to place men
in the position to live a little better, but only from day to day.... The
large workshops, undertakings of certain private persons who pay labourers
from day to day to work for their gain, may be able to put these private
individuals at their ease, but they will never be an object worth the attention
of governments. Discrete workshops, for the most part combined with cultivation
of small holdings, are the only free ones.” [4] The expropriation
and eviction of a part of the agricultural population not only set free
for industrial capital, the labourers, their means of subsistence, and material
for labour; it also created the home-market.

In fact, the events that transformed the small peasants into wage labourers,
and their means of subsistence and of labour into material elements of capital,
created, at the same time, a home-market for the latter. Formerly, the
peasant family produced the means of subsistence and the raw materials,
which they themselves, for the most part, consumed. These raw materials
and means of subsistence have now become commodities; the large farmer
sells them, he finds his market in manufactures. Yarn, linen, coarse woollen
stuffs — things whose raw materials had been within the reach of every
peasant family, had been spun and woven by it for its own use — were now
transformed into articles of manufacture, to which the country districts
at once served for markets. The many scattered customers, whom stray artisans
until now had found in the numerous small producers working on their own
account, concentrate themselves now into one great market provided for
by industrial capital. [5] Thus, hand in hand with the
expropriation of the self-supporting peasants, with their separation from
their means of production, goes the destruction of rural domestic industry,
the process of separation between manufacture and agriculture. And only
the destruction of rural domestic industry can give the internal market
of a country that extension and consistence which the capitalist mode of
production requires. Still the manufacturing period, properly so called,
does not succeed in carrying out this transformation radically and completely.
It will be remembered that manufacture, properly so called, conquers but
partially the domain of national production, and always rests on the handicrafts
of the town and the domestic industry of the rural districts as its ultimate
basis. If it destroys these in one form, in particular branches, at certain
points, it calls them up again elsewhere, because it needs them for the
preparation of raw material up to a certain point. It produces, therefore,
a new class of small villagers who, while following the cultivation of
the soil as an accessary calling, find their chief occupation in industrial
labour, the products of which they sell to the manufacturers directly, or
through the medium of merchants. This is one, though not the chief, cause
of a phenomenon which, at first, puzzles the student of English history.[6]
From the last third of the 15th century he finds continually complaints,
only interrupted at certain intervals, about the encroachment of capitalist
farming in the country districts, and the progressive destruction of the
peasantry. On the other hand, he always finds this peasantry turning up
again, although in diminished number, and always under worse conditions.
The chief reason is: England is at one time chiefly a cultivator of corn,
at another chiefly a breeder of cattle, in alternate periods, and with these
the extent of peasant cultivation fluctuates. Modern Industry alone, and
finally, supplies, in machinery, the lasting basis of capitalistic
agriculture, expropriates radically the enormous majority of the agricultural
population, and completes the separation between agriculture and rural
domestic industry, whose roots — spinning and weaving — it tears up.
[7] It therefore also, for the first time, conquers for
industrial capital the entire home market. [8]

Footnotes

1. In his “Notions de Philosophie Naturelle.”
Paris, 1838.

2. A point that Sir James Steuart emphasises.

3. “Je permettrai,” says the capitalist, “que vous ayez l’honneur de me servir, à condition que vous me donnez le peu qui vous reste pour la peine que je prends de vous commander.” [I will allow you ... to have the honour of serving me, on condition that, in return for the pains I take in commanding you, you give me the little that remains to you] (J. J. Rousseau: “Discours sur l’Economie Politique.”)

4. Mirabeau, l.c., t.III, pp.20-109 passim.
That Mirabeau considers the separate workshops more economical and productive
than the “combined,” and sees in the latter merely artificial exotics under
government cultivation, is explained by the position at that time of a
great part of the continental manufactures.

5. “Twenty pounds of wool converted unobtrusively into yearly clothing of a labourer’s family by its own industry in the intervals
of other works — this makes no show; but bring it to market, send it to
the factory, thence to the broker, thence to the dealer, and you will have
great commercial operations, and nominal capital engaged to the amount
of twenty times its value.... The working-class is thus emersed to support
a wretched factory population, a parastical shop-keeping class, and a fictitious
commercial, monetary, and financial system.” (David Urquhart, l.c., p.120.)

6. Cromwell’s time forms an exception.
So long as the Republic lasted, the mass of the English people of all grades
rose from the degradation into which they had sunk under the Tudors.

7. Tuckett is aware that the modern woollen
industry has sprung, with the introduction of machinery, from manufacture
proper and from the destruction of rural and domestic industries.

“The plough, the yoke, were ‘the invention of gods, and the occupation
of heroes’; are the loom, the spindle, the distaff, of less noble parentage.
You sever the distaff and the plough, the spindle and the yoke, and you
get factories and poor-houses, credit and panics, two hostile nations,
agriculture and commercial.” (David Urquhart, l.c., p.122.)

But now comes Carey, and cries out upon England, surely not with unreason,
that it is trying to turn every other country into a mere agricultural
nation, whose manufacturer is to be England. He pretends that in this way
Turkey has been ruined, because “the owners and occupants of land have
never been permitted by England to strengthen themselves by the formation
of that natural alliance between the plough and the loom, the hammer and
the harrow.” (“The Slave Trade,” p.125.) According to him, Urquhart himself
is one of the chief agents in the ruin of Turkey, where he had made Free-trade
propaganda in the English interest. The best of it is that Carey, a great
Russophile by the way, wants to prevent the process of separation by that
very system of protection which accelerates it.

8. Philanthropic English economists, like Mill,
Rogers, Goldwin Smith, Fawcett, &c., and liberal manufacturers like
John Bright & Co., ask the English landed proprietors, as God asked
Cain after Abel, Where are our thousands of freeholders gone? But where
do you come from, then? From the destruction of those freeholders.
Why don’t you ask further, where are the independent weavers, spinners,
and artisans gone?

## Chapter Thirty-One: Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist

The genesis of the industrial *
capitalist did not proceed in such a gradual way as that of the farmer.
Doubtless many small guild-masters, and yet more independent small artisans,
or even wage labourers, transformed themselves into small capitalists,
and (by gradually extending exploitation of wage labour and corresponding
accumulation) into full-blown capitalists. In the infancy of capitalist
production, things often happened as in the infancy of medieval towns,
where the question, which of the escaped serfs should be master and which
servant, was in great part decided by the earlier or later date of their
flight. The snail’s pace of this method corresponded in no wise with the
commercial requirements of the new world market that the great discoveries
of the end of the 15th century created. But the middle ages had handed
down two distinct forms of capital, which mature in the most different
economic social formations, and which before the era of the capitalist
mode of production, are considered as capital quand même [all the same] — usurer’s
capital and merchant’s capital.

“At present, all the wealth of society goes first into the possession
of the capitalist ... he pays the landowner his rent, the labourer his
wages, the tax and tithe gatherer their claims, and keeps a large, indeed
the largest, and a continually augmenting share, of the annual produce
of labour for himself. The capitalist may now be said to be the first owner
of all the wealth of the community, though no law has conferred on him
the right to this property... this change has been effected by the taking
of interest on capital ... and it is not a little curious that all the
law-givers of Europe endeavoured to prevent this by statutes, viz., statutes
against usury.... The power of the capitalist over all the wealth of the
country is a complete change in the right of property, and by
what law, or series of laws, was it effected?” [2]

The author should have remembered that revolutions are not made by laws.

The money capital formed by means of usury and commerce was prevented
from turning into industrial capital, in the country by the feudal constitution,
in the towns by the guild organisation. [3] These fetters
vanished with the dissolution of feudal society, with the expropriation
and partial eviction of the country population. The new manufactures were
established at sea-ports, or at inland points beyond the control of the old
municipalities and their guilds. Hence in England an embittered struggle
of the corporate towns against these new industrial nurseries.

The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation,
enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning
of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into
a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosy
dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are
the chief momenta of primitive accumulation. On their heels treads the
commercial war of the European nations, with the globe for a theatre. It
begins with the revolt of the Netherlands from Spain, assumes giant dimensions
in England’s Anti-Jacobin War, and is still going on in the opium wars
against China, &c.

The different momenta of primitive accumulation distribute themselves
now, more or less in chronological order, particularly over Spain, Portugal,
Holland, France, and England. In England at the end of the 17th century,
they arrive at a systematical combination, embracing the colonies, the
national debt, the modern mode of taxation, and the protectionist system.
These methods depend in part on brute force, e.g., the colonial
system. But, they all employ the power of the State, the concentrated and
organised force of society, to hasten, hot-house fashion, the process of
transformation of the feudal mode of production into the capitalist mode,
and to shorten the transition. Force is the midwife of every old society
pregnant with a new one. It is itself an economic power.

Of the Christian colonial system, W. Howitt, a man who makes a
speciality of Christianity, says:

“The barbarities and desperate outrages
of the so-called Christian race, throughout every region of the world,
and upon every people they have been able to subdue, are not to be paralleled
by those of any other race, however fierce, however untaught, and
however reckless of mercy and of shame, in any age of the earth.” [4]

The history of the colonial administration of Holland — and Holland was
the head capitalistic nation of the 17th century —

“is one of the most
extraordinary relations of treachery, bribery, massacre, and meanness”

Nothing is more characteristic than their system
of stealing men, to get slaves for Java. The men stealers were trained
for this purpose. The thief, the interpreter, and the seller, were the
chief agents in this trade, native princes the chief sellers. The young
people stolen, were thrown into the secret dungeons of Celebes, until they
were ready for sending to the slave-ships. An official report says:

“This one town of Macassar, e.g., is full of secret prisons, one more
horrible than the other, crammed with unfortunates, victims of greed and
tyranny fettered in chains, forcibly torn from their families.”

To secure Malacca, the Dutch corrupted the Portuguese governor. He let them into
the town in 1641. They hurried at once to his house and assassinated him,
to “abstain” from the payment of £21,875, the price of his treason.
Wherever they set foot, devastation and depopulation followed. Banjuwangi,
a province of Java, in 1750 numbered over 80,000 inhabitants, in 1811 only
18,000. Sweet commerce!

The English East India Company, as is well known, obtained, besides
the political rule in India, the exclusive monopoly of the tea-trade, as
well as of the Chinese trade in general, and of the transport of goods
to and from Europe. But the coasting trade of India and between the islands,
as well as the internal trade of India, were the monopoly of the higher
employés of the company. The monopolies of salt, opium, betel and
other commodities, were inexhaustible mines of wealth. The employés
themselves fixed the price and plundered at will the unhappy Hindus. The
Governor-General took part in this private traffic. His favourites received
contracts under conditions whereby they, cleverer than the alchemists,
made gold out of nothing. Great fortunes sprang up like mushrooms in a
day; primitive accumulation went on without the advance of a shilling.
The trial of Warren Hastings swarms with such cases. Here is an instance.
A contract for opium was given to a certain Sullivan at the moment of his
departure on an official mission to a part of India far removed from the
opium district. Sullivan sold his contract to one Binn for £40,000;
Binn sold it the same day for £60,000, and the ultimate purchaser
who carried out the contract declared that after all he realised an enormous
gain. According to one of the lists laid before Parliament, the Company
and its employés from 1757-1766 got £6,000,000 from the Indians
as gifts. Between 1769 and 1770, the English manufactured a famine by buying
up all the rice and refusing to sell it again, except at fabulous prices.

The treatment of the aborigines was, naturally, most frightful
in plantation-colonies destined for export trade only, such as the West
Indies, and in rich and well-populated countries, such as Mexico and India,
that were given over to plunder. But even in the colonies properly so called,
the Christian character of primitive accumulation did not belie itself.
Those sober virtuosi of Protestantism, the Puritans of New England, in
1703, by decrees of their assembly set a premium of £40 on every
Indian scalp and every captured red-skin: in 1720 a premium of £100
on every scalp; in 1744, after Massachusetts-Bay had proclaimed a certain
tribe as rebels, the following prices: for a male scalp of 12 years and
upwards £100 (new currency), for a male prisoner £105, for
women and children prisoners £50, for scalps of women and children
£50. Some decades later, the colonial system took its revenge on
the descendants of the pious pilgrim fathers, who had grown seditious in
the meantime. At English instigation and for English pay they were tomahawked
by red-skins. The British Parliament proclaimed bloodhounds and scalping
as “means that God and Nature had given into its hand.”

The colonial system ripened, like a hot-house, trade and navigation.
The “societies Monopolia” of Luther were powerful levers for concentration
of capital. The colonies secured a market for the budding manufactures,
and, through the monopoly of the market, an increased accumulation. The
treasures captured outside Europe by undisguised looting, enslavement,
and murder, floated back to the mother-country and were there turned into
capital. Holland, which first fully developed the colonial system, in 1648
stood already in the acme of its commercial greatness. It was

“in almost exclusive possession of the East Indian trade and the commerce between
the south-east and north-west of Europe. Its fisheries, marine, manufactures,
surpassed those of any other country. The total capital of the Republic
was probably more important than that of all the rest of Europe put together.”
Gülich forgets to add that by 1648, the people of Holland were more
over-worked, poorer and more brutally oppressed than those of
all the rest of Europe put together.

Today industrial supremacy implies commercial supremacy. In the
period of manufacture properly so called, it is, on the other hand, the
commercial supremacy that gives industrial predominance. Hence the preponderant
rôle that the colonial system plays at that time. It was “the strange
God” who perched himself on the altar cheek by jowl with the old Gods of
Europe, and one fine day with a shove and a kick chucked them all of a
heap. It proclaimed surplus-value making as the sole end and aim of humanity.

The system of public credit, i.e., of national debts, whose
origin we discover in Genoa and Venice as early as the Middle Ages, took
possession of Europe generally during the manufacturing period. The colonial
system with its maritime trade and commercial wars served as a forcing-house
for it. Thus it first took root in Holland. National debts, i.e.,
the alienation of the state – whether despotic, constitutional or republican – marked
with its stamp the capitalistic era. The only part of the so-called national
wealth that actually enters into the collective possessions of modern peoples
is their national debt. [7] Hence, as a necessary consequence,
the modern doctrine that a nation becomes the richer the more deeply it
is in debt. Public credit becomes the credo of capital. And with
the rise of national debt-making, want of faith in the national debt takes
the place of the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost, which may not be forgiven.

The public debt becomes one of the most powerful levers of primitive
accumulation. As with the stroke of an enchanter’s wand, it endows barren
money with the power of breeding and thus turns it into capital, without
the necessity of its exposing itself to the troubles and risks inseparable
from its employment in industry or even in usury. The state creditors actually
give nothing away, for the sum lent is transformed into public bonds, easily
negotiable, which go on functioning in their hands just as so much hard
cash would. But further, apart from the class of lazy annuitants thus created,
and from the improvised wealth of the financiers, middlemen between the
government and the nation – as also apart from the tax-farmers, merchants,
private manufacturers, to whom a good part of every national loan renders
the service of a capital fallen from heaven – the national debt has given
rise to joint-stock companies, to dealings in negotiable effects of all
kinds, and to agiotage, in a word to stock-exchange gambling and the modern
bankocracy.

At their birth the great banks, decorated with national titles,
were only associations of private speculators, who placed themselves by
the side of governments, and, thanks to the privileges they
received, were in a position to advance money to the State. Hence the accumulation
of the national debt has no more infallible measure than the successive
rise in the stock of these banks, whose full development dates from the
founding of the Bank of England in 1694. The Bank of England began with
lending its money to the Government at 8%; at the same time it was empowered
by Parliament to coin money out of the same capital, by lending it again
to the public in the form of banknotes. It was allowed to use these notes
for discounting bills, making advances on commodities, and for buying the
precious metals. It was not long ere this credit-money, made by the bank
itself, became. The coin in which the Bank of England made its loans to
the State, and paid, on account of the State, the interest on the public
debt. It was not enough that the bank gave with one hand and took back
more with the other; it remained, even whilst receiving, the eternal creditor
of the nation down to the last shilling advanced. Gradually it became inevitably
the receptacle of the metallic hoard of the country, and the centre of
gravity of all commercial credit. What effect was produced on their contemporaries
by the sudden uprising of this brood of bankocrats, financiers, rentiers,
brokers, stock-jobbers, &c., is proved by the writings of that time,
e.g., by Bolingbroke’s. [8]

With the national debt arose an international credit system, which
often conceals one of the sources of primitive accumulation in this or
that people. Thus the villainies of the Venetian thieving system formed
one of the secret bases of the capital-wealth of Holland to whom Venice
in her decadence lent large sums of money. So also was it with Holland
and England. By the beginning of the 18th century the Dutch manufactures
were far outstripped. Holland had ceased to be the nation preponderant
in commerce and industry. One of its main lines of business, therefore,
from 1701-1776, is the lending out of enormous amounts of capital, especially
to its great rival England. The same thing is going on today between England
and the United States. A great deal of capital, which appears today in
the United States without any certificate of birth, was yesterday, in England,
the capitalised blood of children.

As the national debt finds its support in the public revenue,
which must cover the yearly payments for interest, &c., the modern
system of taxation was the necessary complement of the system of national
loans. The loans enable the government to meet extraordinary expenses, without
the tax-payers feeling it immediately, but they necessitate, as a consequence,
increased taxes. On the other hand, the raising of taxation caused by the
accumulation of debts contracted one after another, compels the government
always to have recourse to new loans for new extraordinary expenses. Modern
fiscality, whose pivot is formed by taxes on the most necessary means of
subsistence (thereby increasing their price), thus contains within itself
the germ of automatic progression. Overtaxation is not an incident, but
rather a principle. In Holland, therefore, where this system was first
inaugurated, the great patriot, DeWitt, has in his “Maxims” extolled it
as the best system for making the wage labourer submissive, frugal, industrious,
and overburdened with labour. The destructive influence that it exercises
on the condition of the wage labourer concerns us less however, here, than
the forcible expropriation, resulting from it, of peasants, artisans, and
in a word, all elements of the lower middle class. On this there are not
two opinions, even among the bourgeois economists. Its expropriating efficacy
is still further heightened by the system of protection, which forms one
of its integral parts.

The great part that the public debt, and the fiscal system corresponding
with it, has played in the capitalisation of wealth and the expropriation
of the masses, has led many writers, like Cobbett, Doubleday and others,
to seek in this, incorrectly, the fundamental cause of the misery of the
modern peoples.

The system of protection was an artificial means of manufacturing
manufacturers, of expropriating independent labourers, of capitalising
the national means of production and subsistence, of forcibly abbreviating
the transition from the medieval to the modern mode of production. The
European states tore one another to pieces about the patent of this invention,
and, once entered into the service of the surplus-value makers, did not
merely lay under contribution in the pursuit of this purpose their own
people, indirectly through protective duties, directly through export premiums.
They also forcibly rooted out, in their dependent countries, all industry,
as, e.g., England did. with the Irish woollen manufacture. On the
continent of Europe, after Colbert’s example, the process was much simplified.
The primitive industrial capital, here, came in part directly out of the
state treasury. “Why,” cries Mirabeau, “why go so far to seek the cause
of the manufacturing glory of Saxony before the war? 180,000,000 of debts
contracted by the sovereigns!” [9]

Colonial system, public debts, heavy taxes, protection, commercial
wars, &c., these children of the true manufacturing period, increase
gigantically during the infancy of Modem Industry. The birth of the latter
is heralded by a great slaughter of the innocents. Like the royal navy,
the factories were recruited by means of the press-gang. Blasé as
Sir F. M. Eden is as to the horrors of the expropriation of the agricultural
population from the soil, from the last third of the 15th century to his
own time; with all the self-satisfaction with which he rejoices in this
process, “essential” for establishing capitalistic agriculture and “the
due proportion between arable and pasture land” — he does not show, however,
the same economic insight in respect to the necessity of child-stealing
and child-slavery for the transformation of manufacturing exploitation
into factory exploitation, and the establishment of the “true relation”
between capital and labour-power. He says:

“It may, perhaps, be worthy the attention of the public to consider, whether any manufacture, which,
in order to be carried on successfully, requires that cottages and workhouses
should be ransacked for poor children; that they should be employed by
turns during the greater part of the night and robbed of that rest which,
though indispensable to all, is most required by the young; and that numbers
of both sexes, of different ages and dispositions, should be collected
together in such a manner that the contagion of example cannot but lead
to profligacy and debauchery; will add to the sum of individual or national
felicity?” [10]

“In the counties of Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, and more particularly
in Lancashire,” says Fielden, “the newly-invented machinery was used in
large factories built on the sides of streams capable of turning the water-wheel.
Thousands of hands were suddenly required in these places, remote from
towns; and Lancashire, in particular, being, till then, comparatively thinly
populated and barren, a population was all that she now wanted. The small
and nimble fingers of little children being by very far the most in request,
the custom instantly sprang up of procuring apprentices from the
different parish workhouses of London, Birmingham, and elsewhere. Many,
many thousands of these little, hapless creatures were sent down into the
north, being from the age of 7 to the age of 13 or 14 years old. The custom
was for the master to clothe his apprentices and to feed and lodge them
in an “apprentice house” near the factory; overseers were appointed to
see to the works, whose interest it was to work the children to the utmost,
because their pay was in proportion to the quantity of work that they could
exact. Cruelty was, of course, the consequence. ... In many of the manufacturing
districts, but particularly, I am afraid, in the guilty county to which
I belong [Lancashire], cruelties the most heart-rending were practised
upon the unoffending and friendless creatures who were thus consigned
to the charge of master-manufacturers; they were harassed to the brink
of death by excess of labour ... were flogged, fettered and tortured in
the most exquisite refinement of cruelty; ... they were in many cases starved
to the bone while flogged to their work and ... even in some instances
... were driven to commit suicide.... The beautiful and romantic valleys
of Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire and Lancashire, secluded from the public
eye, became the dismal solitudes of torture, and of many a murder. The
profits of manufacturers were enormous; but this only whetted the appetite
that it should have satisfied, and therefore the manufacturers had recourse
to an expedient that seemed to secure to them those profits without any
possibility of limit; they began the practice of what is termed “night-working,”
that is, having tired one set of hands, by working them throughout the
day, they had another set ready to go on working throughout the night;
the day-set getting into the beds that the night-set had just quitted,
and in their turn again, the night-set getting into the beds that the day-set
quitted in the morning. It is a common tradition in Lancashire, that the
beds never get cold.” [11]

With the development of capitalist production during the manufacturing
period, the public opinion of Europe had lost the last remnant of shame
and conscience. The nations bragged cynically of every infamy that served
them as a means to capitalistic accumulation. Read, e.g., the naïve
Annals of Commerce of the worthy A. Anderson. Here it is trumpeted forth
as a triumph of English statecraft that at the Peace of Utrecht, England
extorted from the Spaniards by the Asiento Treaty the privilege of being
allowed to ply the negro trade, until then only carried on between Africa
and the English West Indies, between Africa and Spanish America as well.
England thereby acquired the right of supplying Spanish America until 1743
with 4,800 negroes yearly. This threw, at the same time, an
official cloak over British smuggling. Liverpool waxed fat on the slave trade.
This was its method of primitive accumulation. And, even to the present
day, Liverpool “respectability” is the Pindar of the slave trade which
— compare the work of Aikin [1795] already quoted — “has coincided with
that spirit of bold adventure which has characterised the trade of Liverpool
and rapidly carried it to its present state of prosperity; has occasioned
vast employment for shipping and sailors, and greatly augmented the demand
for the manufactures of the country” (p. 339). Liverpool employed in the
slave-trade, in 1730, 15 ships; in 1751, 53; in 1760, 74; in 1770, 96;
and in 1792, 132.

Whilst the cotton industry introduced child-slavery in England,
it gave in the United States a stimulus to the transformation of the earlier,
more or less patriarchal slavery, into a system of commercial exploitation.
In fact, the veiled slavery of the wage workers in Europe needed, for its
pedestal, slavery pure and simple in the new world.[12]

Tantae molis erat, to establish the “eternal laws of Nature” of
the capitalist mode of production, to complete the process of separation
between labourers and conditions of labour, to transform, at one pole,
the social means of production and subsistence into capital, at the opposite
pole, the mass of the population into wage labourers, into “free labouring
poor,” that artificial product of modern society. [13]
If money, according to Augier, [14] “comes into the
world with a congenital blood-stain on one cheek,” capital comes dripping
from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt. [15]

Footnotes

* Industrial here in contradistinction to
agricultural. In the “categoric” sense the farmer is an industrial capitalist
as much as the manufacturer.

2. “The Natural and Artificial Rights
of Property Contrasted.” Lond., 1832, pp. 98-99. Author of the anonymous
work: “Th. Hodgskin.”

3. Even as late as 1794, the small cloth-makers
of Leeds sent a deputation to Parliament, with a petition for a law to
forbid any merchant from becoming a manufacturer. (Dr. Aikin, l. c.)

4. William Howitt: “Colonisation and
Christianity: A Popular History of the Treatment of the Natives by the
Europeans in all their Colonies.” London, 1838, p. 9. On the treatment
of the slaves there is a good compilation in Charles Comte, “Traité
de la Législation.” 3me éd. Bruxelles, 1837. This subject
one must study in detail, to see what the bourgeoisie makes of itself and
of the labourer, wherever it can, without restraint, model the world after
its own image.

5. Thomas Stamford Raffles, late Lieut-Gov.
of that island: “The History of Java,” Lond., 1817.

6. In the year 1866 more than a million
Hindus died of hunger in the province of Orissa alone. Nevertheless, the
attempt was made to enrich the Indian treasury by the price at which the
necessaries of life were sold to the starving people.

7. William Cobbett remarks that in England
all public institutions are designated “royal”; as compensation for this,
however, there is the “national” debt.

8. “Si les Tartares inondaient l’Europe
aujourd’hui, il faudrait bien des affaires pour leur faire entendre ce
que c’est qu’un financier parmi nous.” [if the Tartars were to flood into Europe today, it would be a difficult job to make them understand what a financier is with us] Montesquieu, “Esprit des lois,”
t. iv., p. 33, ed. Londres, 1769.

9. Mirabeau, l. c., t. vi., p. 101.

10. Eden, l. c., Vol. I., Book II.,
Ch. 1., p. 421.

11. John Fielden, l. c., pp. 5, 6. On
the earlier infamies of the factory system, cf. Dr. Aikin (1795), l. c.,
p. 219. and Gisborne: “Enquiry into the Duties of Men,” 1795 Vol. II. When
the steam-engine transplanted the factories from the country waterfalls
to the middle of towns, the “abstemious” surplus-value maker found the
child-material ready to his hand, without being forced to seek slaves from
the workhouses. When Sir R. Peel (father of the “minister of plausibility"),
brought in his bill for the protection of children, in 1815, Francis Horner,
lumen of the Billion Committee and intimate friend of Ricardo, said in
the House of Commons: “It is notorious, that with a bankrupt’s effects,
a gang, if he might use the word, of these children had been put up to
sale, and were advertised publicly as part of the property. A most atrocious
instance had been brought before the Court of King’s Bench two years before,
in which a number of these boys, apprenticed by a parish in London to one
manufacturer, had been transferred to another, and had been found by some
benevolent persons in a state of absolute famine. Another case more horrible
had come to his knowledge while on a [Parliamentary] Committee ... that
not many years ago, an agreement had been made between a London parish
and a Lancashire manufacturer, by which it was stipulated, that with every
20 sound children one idiot should be taken.”

12. In 1790, there were in the English
West Indies ten slaves for one free man, in the French fourteen for one,
in the Dutch twenty-three for one. (Henry Brougham: “An Inquiry into the
Colonial Policy of the European Powers.” Edin. 1803, vol. II., p. 74.)

13. The phrase, “labouring poor,” is
found in English legislation from the moment when the class of wage labourers
becomes noticeable. This term is used in opposition, on the one hand, to
the “idle poor,” beggars, etc., on the other to those labourers, who, pigeons
not yet plucked, are still possessors of their own means of labour. From
the Statute Book it passed into Political Economy, and was handed down
by Culpeper, J. Child, etc., to Adam Smith and Eden. After this, one can
judge of the good faith of the “execrable political cant-monger,” Edmund
Burke, when he called the expression, “labouring poor,” — “execrable political
cant.” This sycophant who, in the pay of the English oligarchy, played
the romantic laudator temporis acti against the French Revolution, just
as, in the pay of the North American Colonies, at the beginning of the
American troubles, he had played the Liberal against the English oligarchy,
was an out and out vulgar bourgeois. “The laws of commerce are the laws
of Nature, and therefore the laws of God.” (E. Burke, l. c., pp. 31, 32.)
No wonder that, true to the laws of God and of Nature, he always sold himself
in the best market. A very good portrait of this Edmund Burke, during his
liberal time, is to be found in the writings of the Rev. Mr. Tucker. Tucker
was a parson and a Tory, but, for the rest, an honourable man and a competent
political economist. In face of the infamous cowardice of character that
reigns today, and believes most devoutly in “the laws of commerce,” it
is our bounden duty again and again to brand the Burkes, who only differ
from their successors in one thing — talent.

14. Marie Angier: “Du Crédit
Public.” Paris, 1842.

15. “Capital is said by a Quarterly
Reviewer to fly turbulence and strife, and to be timid, which is very true;
but this is very incompletely stating the question. Capital eschews no
profit, or very small profit, just as Nature was formerly said to abhor
a vacuum. With adequate profit, capital is very bold. A certain 10 per
cent. will ensure its employment anywhere; 20 per cent. certain will produce
eagerness; 50 per cent., positive audacity; 100 per cent. will make it
ready to trample on all human laws; 300 per cent., and there is not a crime
at which it will scruple, nor a risk it will not run, even to the chance
of its owner being hanged. If turbulence and strife will bring a profit,
it will freely encourage both. Smuggling and the slave-trade have amply
proved all that is here stated.” (T. J. Dunning, l. c., pp. 35, 36.)

## Chapter Thirty-Two: Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation

What does the primitive accumulation of capital, i.e.,
its historical genesis, resolve itself into? In so far as it is not immediate
transformation of slaves and serfs into wage labourers, and therefore a
mere change of form, it only means the expropriation of the immediate producers,
i.e., the dissolution of private property based on the labour of
its owner. Private property, as the antithesis to social, collective property,
exists only where the means of labour and the external conditions of labour
belong to private individuals. But according as these private individuals
are labourers or not labourers, private property has a different character.
The numberless shades, that it at first sight presents, correspond to the
intermediate stages lying between these two extremes. The private property
of the labourer in his means of production is the foundation of petty industry,
whether agricultural, manufacturing, or both; petty industry, again, is
an essential condition for the development of social production and of
the free individuality of the labourer himself. Of course, this petty mode
of production exists also under slavery, serfdom, and other states of dependence.
But it flourishes, it lets loose its whole energy, it attains its adequate
classical form, only where the labourer is the private owner of his own
means of labour set in action by himself: the peasant of the land which
he cultivates, the artisan of the tool which he handles as a virtuoso.
This mode of production presupposes parcelling of the soil and scattering
of the other means of production. As it excludes the concentration of these
means of production, so also it excludes cooperation, division of labour
within each separate process of production, the control over, and the productive
application of the forces of Nature by society, and the free development
of the social productive powers. It is compatible only with a system of
production, and a society, moving within narrow and more or less primitive
bounds. To perpetuate it would be, as Pecqueur rightly says, “to decree
universal mediocrity". At a certain stage of development, it brings forth
the material agencies for its own dissolution. From that moment new forces
and new passions spring up in the bosom of society; but the old social
organisation fetters them and keeps them down. It must be annihilated;
it is annihilated. Its annihilation, the transformation of the individualised
and scattered means of production into socially concentrated ones, of the
pigmy property of the many into the huge property of the few, the expropriation
of the great mass of the people from the soil, from the means of subsistence,
and from the means of labour, this fearful and painful expropriation of
the mass of the people forms the prelude to the history of capital. It
comprises a series of forcible methods, of which we have passed in review
only those that have been epoch-making as methods of the primitive accumulation
of capital. The expropriation of the immediate producers was accomplished
with merciless Vandalism, and under the stimulus of passions the most infamous,
the most sordid, the pettiest, the most meanly odious. Self-earned private
property, that is based, so to say, on the fusing together of the isolated,
independent labouring individual with the conditions of his labour, is supplanted
by capitalistic private property, which rests on exploitation of the nominally
free labour of others, i.e., on wage labour. [1]

As soon as this process of transformation has sufficiently decomposed
the old society from top to bottom, as soon as the labourers are turned
into proletarians, their means of labour into capital, as soon as the capitalist
mode of production stands on its own feet, then the further socialisation
of labour and further transformation of the land and other means of production
into socially exploited and, therefore, common means of production, as
well as the further expropriation of private proprietors, takes a new form.
That which is now to be expropriated is no longer the labourer working for
himself, but the capitalist exploiting many labourers. This expropriation
is accomplished by the action of the immanent laws of capitalistic production
itself, by the centralisation of capital. One capitalist always kills many.
Hand in hand with this centralisation, or this expropriation of many capitalists
by few, develop, on an ever-extending scale, the cooperative form of the
labour process, the conscious technical application of science, the methodical
cultivation of the soil, the transformation of the instruments of labour
into instruments of labour only usable in common, the economising of all
means of production by their use as means of production of combined, socialised
labour, the entanglement of all peoples in the net of the world market,
and with this, the international character of the capitalistic regime.
Along with the constantly diminishing number of the magnates of capital,
who usurp and monopolise all advantages of this process of transformation,
grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation;
but with this too grows the revolt of the working class, a class always
increasing in numbers, and disciplined, united, organised by the very mechanism
of the process of capitalist production itself. The monopoly of capital
becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished
along with, and under it. Centralisation of the means of production and
socialisation of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible
with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The
knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.

The capitalist mode of appropriation, the result of the capitalist
mode of production, produces capitalist private property. This is the first
negation of individual private property, as founded on the labour of the
proprietor. But capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of
a law of Nature, its own negation. It is the negation of negation. This
does not re-establish private property for the producer, but gives him
individual property based on the acquisition of the capitalist era: i.e.,
on cooperation and the possession in common of the land and of the means
of production.

The transformation of scattered private property, arising
from individual labour, into capitalist private property is, naturally,
a process, incomparably more protracted, violent, and difficult, than the
transformation of capitalistic private property, already practically resting
on socialised production, into socialised property. In the former case,
we had the expropriation of the mass of the people by a few usurpers; in
the latter, we have the expropriation of a few usurpers by the mass of
the people. [2]

Footnotes

1. “Nous sommes dans une condition tout-à-fait
nouvelle de la societé... nous tendons a séparer toute espèce de
propriété d’avec toute espèce de travail.” [We are in a situation which is entirely new for society ... we are striving to separate every kind of property from every kind of labour] (Sismondi: “Nouveaux
Principes d’Econ. Polit.” t.II, p.434.)

2. The advance of industry, whose involuntary
promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due
to competition, by their revolutionary combination, due to association.
The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet
the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates
products. What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, are its
own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally
inevitable.... Of all the classes that stand face-to-face with the bourgeoisie
today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class. The other
classes perish and disappear in the face of Modern Industry, the proletariat
is its special and essential product.... The lower middle classes, the
small manufacturers, the shopkeepers, the artisan, the peasant, all these
fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their existence
as fractions of the middle class... they are reactionary, for they try
to roll back the wheel of history. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Manifest
der Kommunistischen Partei,” London, 1848, pp. 9, 11.

## Chapter Thirty-Three: The Modern Theory of Colonisation [1]

Political economy confuses on principle two very
different kinds of private property, of which one rests on the producers’
own labour, the other on the employment of the labour of others. It forgets
that the latter not only is the direct antithesis of the former, but absolutely
grows on its tomb only. In Western Europe, the home of Political Economy,
the process of primitive accumulation is more of less accomplished. Here
the capitalist regime has either directly conquered the whole domain of
national production, or, where economic conditions are less developed,
it, at least, indirectly controls those strata of society which, though
belonging to the antiquated mode of production, continue to exist side
by side with it in gradual decay. To this ready-made world of capital,
the political economist applies the notions of law and of property inherited
from a pre-capitalistic world with all the more anxious zeal and all the
greater unction, the more loudly the facts cry out in the face of his ideology.
It is otherwise in the colonies. There the capitalist regime everywhere
comes into collision with the resistance of the producer, who, as owner
of his own conditions of labour, employs that labour to enrich himself, instead
of the capitalist. The contradiction of these two diametrically opposed
economic systems, manifests itself here practically in a struggle between
them. Where the capitalist has at his back the power of the mother-country,
he tries to clear out of his way by force the modes of production and appropriation
based on the independent labour of the producer. The same interest, which
compels the sycophant of capital, the political economist, in the mother-country,
to proclaim the theoretical identity of the capitalist mode of production
with its contrary, that same interest compels him in the colonies to make
a clean breast of it, and to proclaim aloud the antagonism of the two modes
of production. To this end, he proves how the development of the social
productive power of labour, co-operation, division of labour, use of machinery
on a large scale, &c., are impossible without the expropriation of
the labourers, and the corresponding transformation of their means of production
into capital. In the interest of the so-called national wealth, he seeks
for artificial means to ensure the poverty of the people. Here his apologetic
armor crumbles off, bit by bit, like rotten touchwood. It is the great
merit of E.G. Wakefield to have discovered, not anything new about the
Colonies [2], but to have discovered in the Colonies
the truth as to the conditions of capitalist production in the mother country.
As the system of protection at its origin [3] attempted
to manufacture capitalists artificially in the mother-country, so Wakefield’s
colonisation theory, which England tried for a time to enforce by Acts
of Parliament, attempted to effect the manufacture of wage-workers in the
Colonies. This he calls “systematic colonisation.”

First of all, Wakefield discovered that in the Colonies, property in money,
means of subsistence, machines, and other means of production, does not
as yet stamp a man as a capitalist if there be wanting the correlative
— the wage-worker, the other man who is compelled to sell himself of his
own free will. He discovered that capital is not a thing, but a social
relation between persons, established by the instrumentality of things.
Mr. Peel, he moans, took with him from England to Swan
River, West Australia, means of subsistence and of production to the amount
of £50,000. Mr. Peel had the foresight to bring with him, besides,
300 persons of the working class, men, women, and children. Once arrived
at his destination, “Mr. Peel was left without a servant to make his bed
or fetch him water from the river.” [5] Unhappy Mr. Peel who provided for everything except the export of English modes of production
to Swan River!

For the understanding of the following discoveries of Wakefield,
two preliminary remarks: We know that the means of production and subsistence,
while they remain the property of the immediate producer, are not capital.
They become capital only under circumstances in which they serve at the
same time as means of exploitation and subjection of the labourer. But this
capitalist soul of theirs is so intimately wedded, in the head of the political
economist, to their material substance, that he christens them capital
under all circumstances, even when they are its exact opposite. Thus is
it with Wakefield. Further: the splitting up of the means of production
into the individual property of many independent labourers, working on their
own account, he calls equal division of capital. It is with the political
economist as with the feudal jurist. The latter stuck on to pure monetary
relations the labels supplied by feudal law.

“If,” says Wakefield, “all members of the society are supposed
to possess equal portions of capital... no man would have a motive for
accumulating more capital than he could use with his own hands. This is
to some extent the case in new American settlements, where a passion for
owning land prevents the existence of a class of labourers for hire.” [6]
So long, therefore, as the labourer can accumulate for himself — and this
he can do so long as he remains possessor of his means of production —
capitalist accumulation and the capitalistic mode of production are impossible.
The class of wage labourers, essential to these, is wanting. How, then,
in old Europe, was the expropriation of the labourer from his conditions
of labour, i.e., the co-existence of capital and wage labour, brought about?
By a social contract of a quite original kind. “Mankind have adopted a...
simple contrivance for promoting the accumulation of capital,” which, of
course, since the time of Adam, floated in their imagination, floated in
their imagination as the sole and final end of their existence: “they have
divided themselves into owners of capital and owners of labour.... The division
was the result of concert and combination.” [7] In one
word: the mass of mankind expropriated itself in honor of the “accumulation
of capital.” Now, one would think that this instinct of self-denying fanaticism
would give itself full fling especially in the Colonies, where alone exist
the men and conditions that could turn a social contract from a dream to
a reality. But why, then, should “systematic colonisation” be called in
to replace its opposite, spontaneous, unregulated colonisation? But - but -
“In the Northern States of the American Union; it may be doubted whether
so many as a tenth of the people would fall under the description of hired
labourers.... In England... the labouring class compose the bulk of the people.”
[8] Nay, the impulse to self-expropriation on the part
of labouring humanity for the glory of capital, exists so little that slavery,
according to Wakefield himself, is the sole natural basis of Colonial wealth.
His systematic colonisation is a mere pis aller, since he unfortunately
has to do with free men, not with slaves. “The first Spanish settlers in
Saint Domingo did not obtain labourers from Spain. But, without labourers,
their capital must have perished, or at least, must soon have been diminished
to that small amount which each individual could employ with his own hands.
This has actually occurred in the last Colony founded by England — the
Swan River Settlement — where a great mass of capital, of seeds, implements,
and cattle, has perished for want of labourers to use it, and where no settler
has preserved much more capital than he can employ with his own hands.”

We have seen that the expropriation of the mass of the people
from the soil forms the basis of the capitalist mode of production. The
essence of a free colony, on the contrary, consists in this — that the
bulk of the soil is still public property, and every settler on it therefore
can turn part of it into his private property and individual means of production,
without hindering the later settlers in the same operation.[10]
This is the secret both of the prosperity of the colonies and of their
inveterate vice — opposition to the establishment of capital. “Where land
is very cheap and all men are free, where every one who so pleases can
easily obtain a piece of land for himself, not only is labour very dear,
as respects the labourer’s share of the produce, but the difficulty is to
obtain combined labour at any price.” [11]

As in the colonies the separation of the labourer from the conditions
of labour and their root, the soil, does not exist, or only sporadically,
or on too limited a scale, so neither does the separation of agriculture
from industry exist, nor the destruction of the household industry of the
peasantry. Whence then is to come the internal market for capital? “No
part of the population of America is exclusively agricultural, excepting
slaves and their employers who combine capital and labour in particular
works. Free Americans, who cultivate the soil, follow many other occupations.
Some portion of the furniture and tools which they use is commonly made
by themselves. They frequently build their own houses, and carry to market,
at whatever distance, the produce of their own industry. They are spinners
and weavers; they make soap and candles, as well as, in many cases, shoes
and clothes for their own use. In America the cultivation of land is often
the secondary pursuit of a blacksmith, a miller or a shopkeeper.” [12]
With such queer people as these, where is the “field of abstinence” for
the capitalists?

The great beauty of capitalist production consists in this —
that it not only constantly reproduces the wage-worker as wage-worker,
but produces always, in proportion to the accumulation of capital, a relative
surplus-population of wage-workers. Thus the law of supply and demand of
labour is kept in the right rut, the oscillation of wages is penned within
limits satisfactory to capitalist exploitation, and lastly, the social
dependence of the labourer on the capitalist, that indispensable requisite,
is secured; an unmistakable relation of dependence, which the smug political
economist, at home, in the mother-country, can transmogrify into one of
free contract between buyer and seller, between equally independent owners
of commodities, the owner of the commodity capital and the owner of the
commodity labour. But in the colonies, this pretty fancy is torn asunder.
The absolute population here increases much more quickly than in the mother-country,
because many labourers enter this world as ready-made adults, and yet the
labour-market is always understocked. The law of supply and demand of labour
falls to pieces. On the one hand, the old world constantly throws in capital,
thirsting after exploitation and “abstinence”; on the other, the regular
reproduction of the wage labourer as wage labourer comes into collision with
impediments the most impertinent and in part invincible. What becomes of the
production of wage-labourers, supernumerary in proportion to the accumulation
of capital? The wage-worker of to-day is to-morrow an independent peasant, or
artisan, working for himself. He vanishes from the labour-market, but not into
the workhouse. This constant transformation of the wage-labourers into independent producers, who work for
themselves instead of for capital, and enrich themselves instead of the
capitalist gentry, reacts in its turn very perversely on the conditions
of the labour-market. Not only does the degree of exploitation of the wage labourer
remain indecently low. The wage labourer loses into the bargain, along with
the relation of dependence, also the sentiment of dependence on the abstemious
capitalist. Hence all the inconveniences that our E. G. Wakefield pictures
so doughtily, so eloquently, so pathetically. The supply of wage labour,
he complains, is neither constant, nor regular, nor sufficient. “The supply
of labour is always not only small but uncertain.” [13]
“Though the produce divided between the capitalist and the labourer be large,
the labourer takes so great a share that he soon becomes a capitalist....
Few, even those whose lives are unusually long, can accumulate great masses
of wealth.” [14] The labourers most distinctly decline
to allow the capitalist to abstain from the payment of the greater part
of their labour. It avails him nothing, if he is so cunning as to import
from Europe, with his own capital, his own wage-workers. They soon “cease...
to be labourers for hire; they... become independent landowners, if not
competitors with their former masters in the labour-market.” [15]
Think of the horror! The excellent capitalist has imported bodily from
Europe, with his own good money, his own competitors! The end of the world
has come! No wonder Wakefield laments the absence of all dependence and
of all sentiment of dependence on the part of the wage-workers in the colonies.
On account of the high wages, says his disciple, Merivale, there is in
the colonies “the urgent desire for cheaper and more subservient labourers
— for a class to whom the capitalist might dictate terms, instead of being
dictated to by them.... In ancient civilised countries the labourer, though
free, is by a law of Nature dependent on capitalists; in colonies this
dependence must be created by artificial means.” [16]

What is now, according to Wakefield, the consequence of this unfortunate
state of things in the colonies? A “barbarising tendency of dispersion”
of producers and national wealth.[17] The parcelling-out
of the means of production among innumerable owners, working on their own
account, annihilates, along with the centralisation of capital, all the
foundation of combined labour. Every long-winded undertaking, extending
over several years and demanding outlay of fixed capital, is prevented
from being carried out. In Europe, capital invests without hesitating a
moment, for the working class constitutes its living appurtenance, always
in excess, always at disposal. But in the colonies! Wakefield tells an
extremely doleful anecdote. He was talking with some capitalists of Canada
and the state of New York, where the immigrant wave often becomes stagnant
and deposits a sediment of “supernumerary” labourers. “Our capital,” says
one of the characters in the melodrama, "was ready for many operations
which require a considerable period of time for their completion; but we
could not begin such operations with labour which, we knew, would soon leave
us. If we had been sure of retaining the labour of such emigrants, we should
have been glad to have engaged it at once, and for a high price: and we
should have engaged it, even though we had been sure it would leave us,
provided we had been sure of a fresh supply whenever we might need it.”

After Wakefield has constructed the English capitalist agriculture
and its “combined” labour with the scattered cultivation of American peasants,
he unwittingly gives us a glimpse at the reverse of the medal. He depicts
the mass of the American people as well-to-do, independent, enterprising,
and comparatively cultured, whilst “the English agricultural labourer is
miserable wretch, a pauper.... In what country, except North America and
some new colonies, do the wages of free labour employed in agriculture much
exceed a bare subsistence for the labourer? ... Undoubtedly , farm-horses
in England, being a valuable property, are better fed than English peasants.”
[19] But, never mind, national wealth is, once again,
by its very nature, identical with misery of the people.

How, then, to heal the anti-capitalistic cancer of the colonies? If
men were willing, at a blow, to turn all the soil from public into private
property, they would destroy certainly the root of the evil, but also —
the colonies. The trick is how to kill two birds with one stone. Let the
Government put upon the virgin soil an artificial price, independent of
the law of supply and demand, a price that compels the immigrant to work
a long time for wages before he can earn enough money to buy land, and
turn himself into an independent peasant.[20] The fund
resulting from the sale of land at a price relatively prohibitory for the
wage-workers, this fund of money extorted from the wages of labour by violation
of the sacred law of supply and demand, the Government is to employ, on
the other hand, in proportion as it grows; to import have-nothings from
Europe into the colonies, and thus keep the wage labour market full for
the capitalists. Under these circumstances, tout sera pour le mieux dans
le meilleur des mondes possibles. This is the great secret of “systematic
colonisation.” By this plan, Wakefield cries in triumph, “the supply of
labour must be constant and regular, because, first, as no labourer
would be able to procure land until he had worked for money, all immigrant
labourers, working for a time for wages and in combination, would produce
capital for the employment of more labourers; secondly, because every labourer
who left off working for wages and became a landowner would, by purchasing
land, provide a fund for bringing fresh labour to the colony.” [21]
The price of the soil imposed by the State must, of course, be a “sufficient
price” — i.e., so high “as to prevent the labourers from becoming
independent landowners until others had followed to take their place.”
[22] This “sufficient price for the land” is nothing
but a euphemistic circumlocution for the ransom which the labourer pays
to the capitalist for leave to retire from the wage labour market to the
land. First, he must create for the capitalist “capital,” with which the
latter may be able to exploit more labourers; then he must place, at his
own expense, a locum tenens [placeholder] on the labour market, whom the Government
forwards across the sea for the benefit of his old master, the capitalist.

It is very characteristic that the English Government for years practised
this method of “primitive accumulation” prescribed by Mr. Wakefield expressly
for the use of the colonies. The fiasco was, of course, as complete as
that of Sir Robert Peel’s Bank Act. The stream of emigration was only diverted
from the English colonies to the United States. Meanwhile, the advance
of capitalistic production in Europe, accompanied by increasing Government
pressure, has rendered Wakefield’s recipe superfluous. On the one hand,
the enormous and ceaseless stream of men, year after year driven upon America,
leaves behind a stationary sediment in the east of the United States, the
wave of immigration from Europe throwing men on the labour-market there
more rapidly than the wave of emigration westwards can wash them away.
On the other hand, the American Civil War brought in its train a colossal
national debt, and, with it, pressure of taxes, the rise of the vilest
financial aristocracy, the squandering of a huge part of the public land
on speculative companies for the exploitation of railways, mines, &c.,
in brief, the most rapid centralisation of capital. The great republic
has, therefore, ceased to be the promised land for emigrant labourers. Capitalistic
production advances there with giant strides, even though the lowering
of wages and the dependence of the wage-worker are yet far from being brought
down to the normal European level. The shameless lavishing of uncultivated
colonial land on aristocrats and capitalists by the Government, so loudly
denounced even by Wakefield, has produced, especially in Australia [23],
in conjunction with the stream of men that the gold diggings attract, and
with the competition that the importation of English-commodities causes
even to the smallest artisan, an ample “relative surplus labouring population,”
so that almost every mail brings the Job’s news of a “glut of the Australia
labour-market,” and the prostitution in some places flourishes as wantonly
as in the London Haymarket.

However, we are not concerned here with the conditions of the colonies.
The only thing that interests us is the secret discovered in the new world
by the Political Economy of the old world, and proclaimed on the housetops:
that the capitalist mode of production and accumulation, and therefore
capitalist private property, have for their fundamental condition the annihilation
of self-earned private property; in other words, the expropriation of the
labourer.

Footnotes

1. We treat here of real Colonies, virgins
soils, colonised by free immigrants. The United States are, speaking economically,
still only a Colony of Europe. Besides, to this category belong such old
plantations as those in which the abolition of slavery has completely altered
the earlier conditions.

2. Wakefield’s few glimpses on the subject
of Modern Colonisation are fully anticipated by Mirabeau Pere, the physiocrat,
and even much earlier by English economists.

3. Later, it became a temporary necessity in
the international competitive struggle. But, whatever its motive, the
consequences remain the same.

4. “A negro is a negro. In certain circumstances
he becomes a slave. A mule is a machine for spinning cotton. Only under
certain circumstances does it become capital. Outside these circumstances,
it is no more capital than gold is intrinsically money, or sugar is the
price of sugar.... Capital is a social relation of production. It is a
historical relation of production.” (Karl Marx, “Lohnarbeit und Kapital,”
N. Rh. Z., No.266, April 7, 1849.)

5. E. G. Wakefield: “England and America,”
vol.ii. p.33.

6. l.c., p.17.

7. l.c., vol.i, p.18.

8. l.c., pp.42, 43, 44.

9. l.c., vol.ii, p.5.

10. “Land, to be an element of colonisation,
must not only be waste, but it must be public property, liable to be converted
into private property.” (l.c., Vol.II, p.125.)

11. l.c., Vol.I, p.247.

12. l.c., pp.21, 22.

13. l.c., Vol.II, p.116.

14. l.c., Vol.I, p.131.

15. l.c., Vol.II, p.5.

16. Merivale, l.c., Vol.II, pp.235-314
passim. Even the mild, Free Trade, vulgar economist, Molinari, says: “Dans
les colonies où l’esclavage a été aboli sans que le
travail forcé se trouvait remplacé par une quantité équivalente
de travail libre, on a vu s’opérer la contre-partie du fait qui
se réalise tous les jours sous nos yeux. On a vu les simples travailleurs
exploiter à leur tour les entrepreneurs d’industrie, exiger d’eux
des salaires hors de toute proportion avec la part légitime qui
leur revenait dans le produit. Les planteurs, ne pouvant obtenir de leurs
sucres un prix suffisant pour couvrir la hausse de salaire, ont été
obligés de fournir l’excédant, d’abord sur leurs profits,
ensuite sur leurs capitaux mêmes. Une foule de planteurs ont été
ruinés de la sorte, d’autres ont fermé leurs ateliers pour
échapper à une ruine imminente.... Sans doute, il vaut mieux
voir périr des accumulations de capitaux que des générations
d’hommes [how generous Mr. Molinari!]: mais ne vaudrait-il pas mieux que
ni les uns ni les autres périssent? [In the colonies where slavery has been abolished without the compulsory labour being replaced with an equivalent quantity of free labour, there has occurred the opposite of what happens every day before our eyes. Simple workers have been seen to exploit in their turn the industrial entrepreneurs, demanding from them wages which bear absolutely no relation to the legitimate share in the product which they ought to receive. The planters were unable to obtain for their sugar for a sufficent price to cover the increase in wages, and were obliged to furnish the extra amount, at first out of their profits, and then out of their very capital. A considerable amount of planters have been ruined as a result, while others have closed down their businesses in order to avoid the ruin which threatened them ... It is doubtless better that these accumulations of capital should be destroyed than that generations of men should perish ... but would it not be better if both survived?] (Molinari, l.c., pp.51,52.)
Mr. Molinari, Mr. Molinari! What then becomes of the ten commandments,
of Moses and the prophets, of the law of supply and demand, if in Europe
the “entrepreneur” can cut down the labourer’s legitimate part, and in the
West Indies, the labourer can cut down the entrepreneur’s? And what, if
you please, is this “legitimate part,” which on your own showing the capitalist
in Europe daily neglects to pay? Over yonder, in the colonies where the
labourers are so “simple” as to “exploit” the capitalist, Mr. Molinari feels
a strong itching to set the law of supply and demand, that works elsewhere
automatically, on the right road by means of the police.

17. Wakefield, l.c., Vol.II, p.52.

18. l.c., pp.191, 192.

19. l.c., Vol.I, p.47, 246.

20. “C’est, ajoutez-vous, grâce
à l’appropriation du sol et des capitaux que l’homme, qui n’a que ses bras,
trouve de l’occupation et se fait un revenu... c’est au contraire, grâce
à l’appropriation individuelle du sol qu’il se trouve des hommes
n’ayant que leurs bras.... Quand vous mettez un homme dans le vide, vous
vous emparez de l’atmosphère. Ainsi faites-vous, quand vous vous
emparez du sol.... C’est le mettre dans le vide le richesses, pour ne la
laisser vivre qu’à votre volonté.” [It is, you add, a result of the appropriation of the soil and of capital that the man who has nothing but the strength of his arms finds employment and creates an income for himself ... but the opposite is true, it is thanks to the individual appropriation of the soil that there exist men who only possess the strength of their arms. ... When you put a man in a vacuum, you rob him of the air. You do the same, when you take away the soil from him ... for you are putting him in a space void of wealth, so as to leave him no way of living except according to your wishes] (Collins, l.c. t.III, pp.268-71, passim.)

21. Wakefield, l.c., Vol.II, p.192.

22. l.c., p.45.

23. As soon as Australia became her own law-giver,
she passed, of course, laws favorable to the settlers, but the squandering
of the land, already accomplished by the English Government, stands in
the way. “The first and main object at which new Land Act of 1862 aims
is to give increased facilities for the settlement of the people.” (“The
Land Law of Victoria,” by the Hon. C. G. Duffy, Minister of Public Lands,
Lond., 1862.)

## The Value-Form

Appendix to the 1st German edition of Capital, Volume 1, 1867

## Introduction by the Translators, Mike Roth and W. Suchting

The first edition of the first volume of Capital contains an appendix (Anhang) entitled The Value-Form (Die Wertform). This was dropped in the second edition, most of the material being worked into the rewritten version of Chapter 1. [1]

The origins and nature of this appendix are elucidated in the Marx-Engels correspondence. During June 1867, Engels was reading the page proofs of the first volume of Capital. On 16 June 1867 he wrote to Marx saying, amongst other things:

“The second sheet especially bears rather strong marks of your carbuncles, but that cannot be altered now and I do not think you should do anything more about it in an addendum, for, after all, the philistine is not accustomed to this sort of abstract thought and certainly will not cudgel his brains for the sake of the form of value.” (Marx and Engels Collected Works, 1987, vol. 42, p. 381) [a]

He later goes on:

“In these more abstract developments you have committed the great mistake of not making the sequence of thought clear by a larger number of small sections and separate headings. You ought to have dealt with this part in the manner of Hegel’s Encyclopaedia, with short paragraphs, every dialectical transition marked by a special heading and so far as possible all excurses and mere illustrations printed in a special type. The thing would have looked rather like a schoolbook, but it would have been made much more comprehensible to a very large class of readers. For the people, even the learned section, are no longer at all accustomed to this kind of thinking and one must facilitate it for them in every possible way.” (Marx and Engels Collected Works, 1987, vol. 42, p. 382)

On 22 June, Marx replied to Engels. He began by expressing the hope that “the bourgeoisie will remember my carbuncles all the rest of their lives,” and continues later in the letter as follows:

“As to the development of the value-form I have and have not followed your advice, in order to behave dialectically in this respect as well; i.e. I have: 1. written an appendix in which I present the same thing as simply and pedagogically as possible, and 2. followed your advice and divided each step in the development into §§, etc. with separate headings. In the preface I then tell the ‘non-dialectical’ reader that he should skip pages x–y and read the appendix instead. Here not merely philistines are concerned but youth eager for knowledge, etc. Besides, the matter is too decisive for the whole book. (Marx and Engels Collected Works, 1987, vol. 42, p. 385)

This appendix contains an extraordinarily clear and succinct exposition of Marx’s concept of value. Indeed there is no better introduction to the much more involved exposition in the first chapter of volume I of Capital as we now have it. Marx says in the Preface to the first edition of Capital (1867): “Beginnings are always difficult in all sciences. The understanding of the first chapter ... will therefore present the greatest difficulty. (Marx and Engels Collected Works, 1996, vol. 35, p. 7). Especially in the English literature there is still a strong tendency to skip these initial ‘subtleties’. As opposed to this, in the years after the student movement, young Marxists in West Germany have tried to acquire a new understanding of the whole of Marx’s analyses, taking the value-form seriously. As there has been no language barrier, study of the additional versions of the fundamental part of the analysis as contained in such work as the Grundrisse, the Results of the Immediate Process of Production, the first edition of Capital, and the Notes on Adolph Wagner, all until recently closed to readers with no knowledge of German, was an important part of this work. This has been combined with reading secondary literature like I. I. Rubin’s work, recently translated into English as Essays in Marx’s Theory of Value, V. S. Vygodskii’s book on the history of Marx’s economic work, translated as The Story of a Great Discovery: How Karl Marx Wrote ‘Capital’, and most important of all Roman Rosdolsky’s The Making of Marx’s ‘Capital’, which has only just now appeared in English translation. The result of this recent renaissance of Marx-studies in Germany, involving a greater number or people than ever before, is a rapidly increasing volume of literature on central topics of the analysis of capitalist society, much of which is not yet available in English. This includes work which emphasises the analysis of the value-form, listed in the bibliography below.

The following translation of Marx’s Value-Form appendix to volume I of Capital was made in 1976. After its completion and submission for publication there appeared the first English published version of it in a volume entitled Value: Studies by Karl Marx, edited by Albert Dragstedt [b]. An examination of this published version however showed that it was neither a very readable nor an adequate rendering of Marx’s text. (It may suffice to point out that twenty-six lines of Marx’s text, most of them quite crucial, are omitted without notice [2]). So we have considered it appropriate to present the following translation to the public.

## The Value-Form

by Karl Marx

The analysis of the commodity has shown that it is something twofold, use-value and value. Hence in order for a thing to possess commodity-form, it must possess a twofold form, the form of a use-value and the form of value. The form of use-value is the form of the commodity’s body itself, iron, linen, etc., its tangible, sensible form of existence. This is the natural form (Naturalform) of the commodity. As opposed to this the value-form (Wertform) of the commodity is its social form.

Now how is the value of a commodity expressed ? Thus how does it acquire a form of appearance of its own ? Through the relation of different commodities. In order correctly to analyse the form contained in such a relation we must proceed from the simplest, most undeveloped shape (Gestalt). The simplest relation of the commodity is obviously its relation to a single other commodity, no matter which one. Hence the relation of two commodities furnishes the simplest value-expression for a commodity.

## I. Simple Value-form

20 yards of linen = 1 coat

or

20 yards of linen are worth 1 coat

The secret of the entire value-form (aller Wertform) must be hidden in this simple value-form. Hence its analysis offers the real difficulty.

### §1. The two poles of the expression of value (Wertausdruck): relative value-form and equivalent form

In the simple expression of value the two types of commodities, linen and coat, obviously play two different roles. The linen is the commodity which expresses its value in the body of a commodity different from it, the coat. On the other hand, the commodity-type coat serves as the material in which value is expressed. The one commodity plays an active, the other a passive role. Now we say of the commodity which expresses its value in another commodity: its value is represented as relative value, or is in the relative value-form. As opposed to this, we say of the other commodity, here the coat, which serves as the material of the expression of value: it functions as equivalent to the first commodity or is in the equivalent form.

Without analysing the matter more deeply, the following points are clear from the start:

(a) The inseparability of the two forms.

Relative value-form and equivalent form are moments of the same expression of value, which belong to one another and are reciprocally conditioning and inseparable.

(b) The polarity of the two forms.

On the one hand, these two forms are mutually excluding or opposed extremes, i.e. poles, of the same expression of value. They are always distributed amongst different commodities, which the expression of value relates to one another. For example, I cannot express the value of linen in linen. ‘20 yards of linen = 20 yards of linen’ is not an expression of value but simply expresses a definite quantity of the object of use, linen. The value of linen can thus only be expressed in another commodity (in andrer Ware), i.e. only relatively. The relative value-form of linen thus presupposes that some other commodity confronts it in the equivalent form. On the other hand, this other commodity, here the coat, which figures as the equivalent of the linen is thus in equivalent form, and can not be at the same time in the relative value-form. This commodity does not express its value. It furnishes only the material for the expression of value in another commodity.

Certainly the expression: ‘20 yards of linen = 1 coat’ or ‘20 yards of linen are worth one coat’ also includes the converse: ‘1 coat = 20 yards of linen’ or ‘1 coat is worth 20 yards of linen’. But in doing this I must reverse the equation, in order to express the value of the coat relatively, and once I do this the linen becomes the equivalent instead of the coat. The same commodity therefore cannot make its appearance in the same expression of value at the same time in both forms. Rather, these exclude one another in a polar manner.

Let us consider exchange between linen-producer A and coat-producer B. Before they come to terms,

A says: 20 yards of linen are worth 2 coats (20 yards of linen = 2 coats),

But B responds: 1 coat is worth 22 yards of linen (1 coat = 22 yards of linen).

Finally, after they have haggled for a long time they agree:

A says: 20 yards of linen are worth 1 coat,

and B says: 1 coat is worth 20 yards of linen.

Here both, linen and coat, are at the same time in relative value-form and in equivalent form. But, nota bene, for two different persons and in two different expressions of value, which simply occur (ins Leben treten) at the same time. For A his linen is in relative value-form – because for him the initiative proceeds from his commodity – and the commodity of the other person, the coat, is in equivalent form. Conversely from the standpoint of B. Thus one and the same commodity never possess, even in this case, the two forms at the same time in the same expression of value.

(c) Relative value and equivalent are only forms of values.

Relative value and equivalent are both only forms of commodity-value. Now whether a commodity is in one form or in the polar opposite depends exclusively on its position in the expression of value. This comes out strikingly in the simple value-form which we are here considering to begin with. As regards the content, the two expressions:

1. 20 yards of linen = 1 coat or 20 yards of linen are worth 1 coat,

2. 1 coat = 20 yards of linen or 1 coat is worth 20 yards of linen

are not at all different. As regards the form, they are not only different but opposed. In expression 1 the value of the linen is expressed relatively. Hence it is in the relative value-form whilst at the same time the value of the coat is expressed as equivalent. Hence it is in the equivalent form. Now if I turn the expression 1 round I obtain expression 2. The commodities change positions and right away the coat is in the relative value-form, the linen in equivalent form. Because they have changed their respective positions in the same expression of value, they have changed value-form (die Wertform gewechselt).

### §2. The relative value-form

(a) Relation of equality.

Since it is the linen which is to express its value, the initiative proceeds from it. It enters into a relation with the coat, i.e. with some other commodity different from itself. This relation is a relation of equalisation (Gleichsetzung). The basis of the expression ‘20 yards of linen = 1 coat’ is in fact: linen = coat, which expressed in words simply means: ‘the commodity-type “coat” is of the same nature (ist gleicher Natur), the same substance as the “linen,” a type of commodity different from it’. We overlook that for the most part, because attention is absorbed by the quantitative relation, i.e. by the definite proportion, in which the one type of commodity is equated to the other. We forget that the magnitudes of different things are only quantitatively comparable after their reduction to the same unit. Only as expressions of the same unit are magnitudes with the same denominator (gleichnamige) and hence commensurable. In the above expression the linen thus relates to the coat as something of its own kind, or the coat is related to the linen as a thing of the same substance, as the same in essence (Wesensgleiches). The one is therefore quantitatively equated to the other.

(b) Value-relation.

The coat is only the same as the linen to the extent that both are values. Thus that the linen is related to the coat as to something of its own kind or that the coat as a thing of the same substance is equated to linen, expresses the fact that the coat counts in this relation as value. It is equated to the linen insofar as the latter is value as well. The relation of equality is thus a value-relation, but the value-relation is above all the expression of the value or the existence as value of the commodity which expresses its value. As use-value, or body of the commodity (Warenkörper), the linen is distinguished from the coat. But its existence as value comes to light, is expressed in a relation, in which another commodity-type, the coat, is equated to it or counts as the same in essence.

(c) Qualitative content (Gehalt) of the relative value-form, contained in the value-relation.

The coat is value only to the extent that it is the expression, in the form of a thing, of the human labour-power expended in its production and thus insofar as it is a jelly of abstract human labour – abstract labour, because abstraction is made from the definite useful concrete character of the labour contained in it, human labour, because the labour counts here only as expenditure of human labour-power as such. Thus the linen cannot relate (sich verhalten) to the coat as a thing having value, or cannot be related (bezogen werden) to the coat as value, without relating (bezogen werden) to it as a body whose sole substance consists in human labour. But as value this linen is a jelly of this same human labour. Within this relation the coat as a thing (Körper) thus represents the substances of value which it has in common with linen, i.e. human labour. Within this relation the coat thus counts only as shape of value (Gestalt von Wert), hence also as the form of the value (Wertgestalt) of the linen, as the sensible form of appearance of the value of the linen. Thus by means of the value-relation the value of the commodity is expressed in the use-value of another commodity, i.e. in the body of another commodity different from itself.

(d) Quantitative definiteness (Bestimmtheit) of the relative value-form contained in the value-relation.

The 20 yards of linen are, however, not only value as such, i.e. a jelly of human labour, but value of a definite magnitude, i.e. a definite quantity of human labour is objectified in them. In the value relation of the linen to the coat the commodity-type coat is hence not only quantitatively equated to the linen as bodily form of value (Wertkörper) as such, i.e. as embodiment of human labour, but a definite quantity of this bodily form of value, 1 coat, not 1 dozen, etc., insofar as in 1 coat there is hidden precisely as much value-substance of human labour as in 20 yards of linen.

(e) The relative value-form as a whole (Das Ganze der relativen Wertform).

Thus through the relative value-expression the value of the commodity acquires, first, a form different from its own use-value. The use-form of this commodity is, e.g. linen. But it possesses its value-form in its relation of equality with the coat. Through this relation of equality the body of another commodity, sensibly different from it, becomes the mirror of its own existence as value (Wertsein), of its own character as value (Wertgestalt). In this way it gains an independent and separate value-form, different from its natural form. But second, as a value of definite magnitude, it is quantitatively measured by the quantitatively definite relation or the proportion in which it is equated to the body of the other commodity.

### §3. The equivalent form

(a) The form of immediate exchangeability.

As values all commodities are expressions of the same unit, of human labour, which count equally and are replaceable or substitutable for one another. Hence a commodity is only exchangeable with another commodity insofar as it possesses a form in which it appears as value. A body of the commodity is immediately exchangeable with another commodity insofar as its immediate form i.e. its own bodily or natural form, represents (vorstellt) value with regard to another commodity or counts as value-form (Wertgestalt). This property is possessed by the coat in the value-relation of the linen to the coat. The value of the linen would otherwise not be expressible in the thing which is the coat. Therefore that a commodity has equivalent form at all, means just this. Through its place in the value-expression its own natural form counts as the value-form for another commodity or it possesses the form of immediate exchangeability with another commodity. Therefore it does not need to take on (annehmen) a form different from its immediate natural form in order to appear as value for another commodity, to count as value and to act on it as value (auf sie als Wert zu wirken).

(b) Quantitative definiteness is not contained in the equivalent form.

That a thing which has the form of a coat is immediately exchangeable with linen, or a thing which has the form of gold is immediately exchangeable with all other commodities – this equivalent form of a thing contains absolutely no quantitative definiteness. The opposed erroneous view springs from the following causes:

First, the commodity ‘coat’, for example, which serves as material for the expression of value of linen is, within such an expression, also always quantitatively definite, like ‘1 coat’ and ‘not 12 coats’, etc. But why? Because the ‘20 yards of linen’ are expressed in their relative value expression of value not only as value as such, but at the same time are measured as a definite quantity of value. But that 1 coat and not 12 coats contains as much labour as 20 yards of linen and hence is equated with 20 yards of linen has absolutely nothing to do with this characteristic property of the commodity-type coat of being immediately exchangeable with the commodity-type linen.

Second, if ‘20 yards of linen’ as value of a definite magnitude are expressed in ‘1 coat’, then conversely the magnitude of value of ‘1 coat’ is also expressed in ‘20 yards of linen’, and thus similarly quantitatively measured, but only indirectly, through reversal of the expression, not insofar as the coat plays the role of the equivalent but rather insofar as it represents its own value relatively in the linen.

Third, we can also express the formula ‘20 yards of linen = 1 coat’ or ‘20 yards of linen are worth 1 coat’ in the following way:

‘20 yards of linen and 1 coat are equivalents, or both are values of equal magnitude’.

Here we do not express the value of either of the two commodities in the use-value of the other. Neither of the two commodities is hence set up in equivalent-form. Equivalent means here only something equal in magnitude, both things having been silently reduced in our heads to the abstraction value.

(c) The peculiarities (Eigentümlichkeiten) of the equivalent form

α) First peculiarity of the equivalent form: use-value becomes the form of appearance of its opposite, of value.

The natural form of the commodity becomes the value-form. But, nota bene, this quid pro quo occurs for a commodity B (coat or wheat or iron, etc.) only within the value-relation to it, into which any other commodity A (linen, etc.) enters, and only within this relation. In itself, considered in isolation, the coat, e.g., is only a useful thing, a use-value, just like the linen, and hence its coat-form is only the form of use-value (ist nur Form von Gebrauchswert) or natural form of a definite type of commodity. But since no commodity can relate to itself as equivalent and therefore also cannot make its own natural hide an expression of its own value, it must relate itself to another commodity as equivalent or make the natural hide of the body of another commodity its own value-form.

This may be illustrated by the example of a measure, which is predicable of the bodies of commodities as bodies (den Warenkörpern als Warenkörpern zukommt) i.e. as use-values. A sugar-loaf, qua body (weil Körper), is heavy and hence has weight, but one cannot tell the weight of a sugar-loaf by looking or feeling (man kann keinen Zuckerhut seine Schwere ansehn oder anfühlen). Now we take different pieces of iron whose weight has been previously determined. The bodily form of the iron considered in itself is just as little the form of appearance of weight as that of the sugar-loaf. However in order to express the sugar-loaf as heaviness or weight, we put it into a weight-relation with iron. In this relation the iron counts as a body, which represents nothing but heaviness or weight. Hence quantities of iron serve as the measure of the weight of sugar and represent, with regard to the body of sugar, merely the form of heaviness (blosse Schweregestalt), form of appearance of heaviness. Iron plays this role only within the relation in which the sugar, or some other body whose weight is to be found, enters. Were both things not heavy they could not enter into this relation and hence the one could not serve as the expression of the weight of the other. If we throw both on the scale pan, we see in fact that they are, as weight, the same and hence in a definite proportion also of the same weight. Just as here the body of the iron represents, with regard to the sugar-loaf, simply heaviness, so in our expression of value the body of the coat represents, with regard to the linen, simply value.

β) Second peculiarity of the equivalent form: concrete labour becomes the form of appearance of its opposite, abstract human labour.

The coat counts in the expression of the value of the linen as the value-body, hence its bodily or natural form as value-form, i.e. therefore as embodiment of undifferentiated human labour, human labour as such (schlechthin). But the labour by which the useful thing which is the coat is made and by which it acquires a definite form, is not abstract human labour, human labour as such, but a definite useful, concrete type of labour – the labour of tailoring. The simple relative value-form requires (erheischt) that the value of a commodity, linen, for example, is expressed only in one single other type of commodity. Which the other type of commodity is, is however, for the simple value-form, completely irrelevant. Instead of the commodity-type ‘coat’ the value of the linen could have been expressed in wheat, or instead of wheat, in iron, etc. But whether in coat, wheat or iron, in every case the equivalent of linen counts as the body of value with regard to the linen, hence as embodiment of human labour as such. And in every case the definite bodily form of the equivalent, whether coat or wheat or iron, remains embodiment not of abstract human labour, but of a definite concrete useful type of labour, be it the labour of tailoring or of farming or of mining. The definite concrete useful labour, which produces the body of the commodity which is the equivalent must therefore, in the expression of value, always necessarily count as a definite form of realisation or form of appearance, i.e. of abstract human labour. The coat, for example, can only count as the body of value, hence as embodiment of human labour as such, in so far as the labour of tailoring counts as a definite form, in which human labour-power is expended or in which abstract human labour is realised.

Within the value-relation and the value expression included in it, the abstractly general counts not as a property of the concrete, sensibly real; but on the contrary the sensibly-concrete counts as the mere form of appearance or definite form of realisation of the abstractly general. The labour of tailoring, which, for example, hides in the equivalent ‘coat’, does not possess, within the value-expression of the linen, the general property of also being human labour. On the contrary. Being human labour counts as its essence (Wesen), being the labour of tailoring counts only as the form of appearance (Erscheinungsform) or definite form of realisation of this its essence. This quid pro quo is unavoidable because the labour represented in the product of labour only goes to create value insofar as it is undifferentiated human labour, so that the labour objectified in the value of the product is in no way distinguished from the labour objectified in the value of a different product.

This inversion (Verkehrung) by which the sensibly-concrete counts only as the form of appearance of the abstractly general and not, on the contrary, the abstractly general as property of the concrete, characterises the expression of value. At the same time, it makes understanding it difficult. If I say: Roman Law and German Law are both laws, that is obvious. But if I say: Law (Das Recht), this abstraction (Abstraktum) realises itself in Roman Law and in German Law, in these concrete laws, the interconnection becoming mystical.

γ) Third peculiarity of the equivalent form: private labour becomes the form of its opposite, labour in immediately social form.

Products of labour would not become commodities, were they not products of separate private labours carried on independently of one another. The social interconnection of these private labours exists materially, insofar as they are members of a naturally evolved social division of labour and hence, through their products, satisfy wants of different kinds, in the totality (Gesamtheit) of which the similarly naturally evolved system of social wants (naturwüchsiges System der gesellschaftlichen Bedürfnisse) consists. This material social interconnection of private labours carried on independently of one another is however only mediated and hence is realised only through the exchange of their products. The product of private labour hence only has social form insofar as it has value-form and hence the form of exchangeability with other products of labour. It has immediately social form insofar as its own bodily or natural form is at the same time the form of its exchangeability with other commodities or counts as value-form for another commodity (anderer Ware). However, as we have seen, this only takes place for a product of labour when, through the value relation of other commodities to it, it is in equivalent-form or, with respect to other commodities, plays the role of equivalent.

The equivalent has immediately social form insofar as it has the form of immediate exchangeability with another commodity, and it has this form of immediate exchangeability insofar as it counts for another commodity as the body of value, hence as equal (als Gleiches). Therefore the definite useful labour contained in it also counts as labour in immediately social form, i.e. as labour which possesses the form of equality with the labour contained in another commodity. A definite, concrete labour like the labour of tailoring can only possess the form of equality with the labour of a different type contained in a commodity of a different kind, for example the linen, insofar as its definite form counts as the expression of something which really constitutes the equality of labours of different sorts or what is equal in those labours. But they are only equal insofar as they are human labour as such, abstract human labour, i.e. expenditure of human labour-power. Thus, as has already been shown, because the definite concrete labour contained in the equivalent counts as the definite form of realisation or form of appearance of abstract human labour, it possesses the form of equality with other labour, and hence, although it is private labour, like all other labour which produces commodities, it is nevertheless labour in immediately social form. Precisely because of this it is represented in a product that is immediately exchangeable with the other commodities.

The last two peculiarities of the equivalent-form set out in §§ β and γ become still more comprehensible when we recur to the great theorist (Forscher) who for the first time analysed the value-form, like so many forms of thought, forms of society and forms of nature, and for the most part more happily than his modern successors, I mean Aristotle.

Aristotle clearly formulates first of all the fact that the money-form of the commodity is only the further developed shape (Gestalt) of the simple value-form, i.e. of the expression of value of a commodity in any other commodity, for he says:

‘5 beds = 1 house’ (κλῖναι πέντε ἀντὶ οἰκίας)

‘does not differ’ from

‘5 beds = such and such an amount of money’ (κλῖναι πέντε ἀντὶ ... ὅσου αἱ πέντε κλῖναι)

He sees further that the value-relation, in which this expression of value hides, determines, for its part, the fact that the house is qualitatively equated with the bed and that these sensibly different things would not be able to be related to one another as commensurable magnitudes without such essential equality. ‘Exchange’, he says, ‘cannot take place without equality, and equality cannot occur without commensurability’ (οὔτ᾿ ἰσότης μὴ οὔσης συμμετρίας).

But at this he pulls up short and ceases the further analysis of the value-form, ‘But it is in truth impossible (τῇ μὲν οὖν ἀληθείᾳ ἀδύνατον) that things of such different sorts should be commensurable’, i.e. qualitatively equal. This equalisation can only be something which is alien to the true nature of things, and therefore only a ‘makeshift for practical purposes’. [c]

Aristotle thus tells us himself just where his further analysis suffers shipwreck, namely, on the lack of the concept of value. What is that which is equal, i.e. the common substance, which the house represents for the bed in the expression of the value of the bed? Such a thing ‘cannot in truth exist’, says Aristotle. Why? With respect to the bed the house represents something which is equal (stellt ein Gleiches vor) insofar as it represents what in both, the bed and the house, is really equal. And that is – human labour.

But the fact that in the form of commodity-values all labours are expressed as equal human labour and hence as counting equally (als gleichgeseltend) could not be read out of the value-form of commodities by Aristotle, because Greek society rested on slave labour and hence had the inequality of people and their labours as a natural basis. The secret of the expression of value, the equality of all labours and the fact that all labours count equally because and insofar as they are human labour as such can only be deciphered when the concept of human equality already possesses the fixity of a popular prejudice. But that is only possible in a society in which the commodity-form is the general form of the product of labour and thus also the relation of people to one another as possessors of commodities is the ruling social relation. The genius of Aristotle shines precisely in the fact that he discovers in the expression of value of commodities a relation of equality. Only the historical limit of the society in which he lived prevents him from finding out what, ‘in truth’, this relation of equality consists in.

δ) Fourth peculiarity of the equivalent form: the fetishism of the commodity-form is more striking in the equivalent form than in the relative value-form.

The fact that the products of labour – such useful things as coat, linen, wheat, iron, etc. – are values, definite magnitudes of value and in general commodities, are properties which naturally pertain to them only in our practical interrelations (in unsrem Verkehr) and not by nature like, for example, the property of being heavy or being warming or nourishing. But within our practical interrelations, these things relate to one another as commodities. They are values, they are measurable as magnitudes of value, and their common property of being values puts them into a value-relation to one another. Now the fact that, for example, ‘20 yards of linen = 1 coat’ or ‘20 yards of linen are worth 1 coat’ only expresses the fact that:

1. the different types of labour necessary for the production of these things count equally (gleichgelten) as human labour;

2. the fact that the quantity of labour expended in their production is measured according to definite social laws;

3. that tailors and weavers enter into a definite social relation of production.

It is a definite social relation of the producers in which they equate (gleichsetzen) their different types of labour as human labour. It is not less a definite social relation of producers, in which they measure the magnitude of their labours by the duration of expenditure of human labour-power. But within our practical interrelations these social characters of their own labours appear to them as social properties pertaining to them by nature, as objective determinations (gegenständliche Bestimmungen) of the products of labour themselves, the equality of human labours as a value-property of the products of labour, the measure of the labour by the socially necessary labour-time as the magnitude of value of the products of labour, and finally the social relations of the producers through their labours appear as a value-relation or social relation of these things, the products of labour. Precisely because of this the products of labour appear to them as commodities, sensible-supersensible (sinnlich übersinnliche) or social things. Thus the impression on the optic nerve brought about by the light (Lichteindruck auf den Sehnerv) from something is represented, not as a subjective stimulation of the optic nerve itself, but as the objective form of a thing outside the eye. But in the case of seeing, light from a thing, from the external object, is in fact thrown upon another thing, the eye. It is a physical relation between physical things. As opposed to that the commodity-form and the value-relation of products of labour have absolutely nothing to do with their physical nature and the relations between things which springs from this. It is only the definite social relation of people (der Menschen) itself which here takes on for them the phantasmagoric form of a relation of things. Hence in order to find an analogy for this we must take flight into the cloudy region of the religious world. Here the products of the human head appear as independent figures (Gestalten) endowed with a life of their own and standing in a relation to one another and to people. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of the human hand. This I call the fetishism which clings to the products of labour as soon as they are produced as commodities and which is therefore inseparable from commodity-production.

Now this fetish-character emerges more strikingly in the equivalent-form than in the relative value-form. The relative value-form of a commodity is mediated, namely by its relation to another commodity. Through this value-form the value of the commodity is expressed as something completely distinct from its own sensible existence. At the same time it is inherent in this that existence as value (Wertsein) is a relation which is alien to the thing itself and hence that its value-relation to another thing can only be the form of appearance of a social relation hidden behind it. Conversely with the equivalent-form. It consists precisely in the fact that the bodily or natural form of a commodity counts immediately as the social form, as the value-form for another commodity. Therefore, within our practical interrelations, to possess the equivalent-form appears as the social natural property (gesellschaftliche Natureigenschaft) of a thing, as a property pertaining to it by nature, so that hence it appears to be immediately exchangeable with other things just as it exists for the senses (so wie es sinnlich da ist). But because within the value-expression of commodity A the equivalent-form pertains by nature to the commodity B it seems also to belong to the latter by nature outside of this relation. Hence, for example, the riddle (das Rätselhafte) of gold, that seems to possess, by nature, apart from its other natural properties, its colour, its specific weight, its non-oxydisability in air, etc., also the equivalent-form, or the social quality of being immediately exchangeable with all other commodities.

### § 4. As soon as value appears independently it has the form of exchange-value

The expression of value has two poles, relative value-form and equivalent-form. To start with, what concerns the commodity functioning as equivalent is that it counts for another commodity as the shape of value (Wertgestalt), a body in immediately exchangeable form – exchange-value. But the commodity whose value is expressed relatively, possesses the form of exchange-value in that:

1. its existence as value is revealed by the exchangeability of the body of another commodity with it;

2. its magnitude of value is expressed through the proportion in which the other commodity is exchangeable with it.

The exchange-value is hence the independent form of appearance of commodity-value.

### §5. The simple value-form of the commodity is the simple form of appearance of the opposites, use-value and exchange-value contained within it

In the relation of value of the linen to the coat the natural form (Naturalform) of the linen counts only as the shape (als Gestalt) of use-value, the natural form of the coat only as value-form (Wertform) or shape (Gestalt) of exchange-value. The inner opposition between use-value and value (Gebrauchswert und Wert) contained in a commodity is thus represented by an external opposition, i.e. the relation of two commodities, of which the one counts immediately only as use-value, the other immediately only as exchange-value, or in which the two opposing determinations, use-value and exchange-value, are distributed in a polar manner among the commodities.

If I say: As a commodity the linen is use-value and exchange-value, this is my judgement about the nature of the commodity gained by analysis. As opposed to this, in the expression ‘20 yards of linen = 1 coat’ or ‘20 yards of linen are worth 1 coat’ the linen itself says that it

1. is a use-value (linen);

2. is an exchange-value distinct from that (something equal to the coat); and

3. is the unity of these two differences, and thus is a commodity.

### §6. The simple value-form of the commodity is the simple commodity-form of the product of labour

The product of labour in its natural form brings with it into the world the form of a use-value. Therefore it requires further only the value-form in order for it to possess the commodity-form, i.e. for it to appear as a unity of the opposites use-value and exchange-value. The development of the value-form is hence identical with the development of the commodity-form.

### §7. Relation between the commodity-form and the money-form

If we replace:

20 yards of linen = 1 coat

or

20 yards of linen are worth 1 coat

by the form:

20 yards of linen = 2 Pounds Sterling

or

20 yards of linen are worth 2 Pounds Sterling

then it becomes obvious at first glance that the money-form is nothing but the further development of the simple value-form of the commodity, and therefore of the simple commodity-form of the labour-product. Because the money-form is only the developed commodity-form it obviously springs from the simple commodity-form. Hence as soon as the latter is understood it only remains to consider the series of metamorphoses through which the simple commodity form ‘20 yards of linen = 1 coat’ must run in order to take on the shape (Gestalt annehmen) ‘20 yards of linen = 2 Pounds Sterling’.

### §8. Simple relative value-form and singular equivalent-form

The expression of value in the coat gives the linen a value-form by virtue of which it is distinguished simply as value from itself as use-value. This form also puts it only in relation to the coat, i.e. to some single type of commodity different from itself. But as value it is the same as all other commodities. Its value-form must hence also be a form which puts it into a relation of qualitative equality and quantitative proportionality to all other commodities – to the simple relative value-form of a commodity corresponds the singular equivalent-form of another commodity. Or the commodity, in which value is expressed, functions here only as singular equivalent. Thus the coat in the relative expression of value of linen possesses only the equivalent-form or the form of immediate exchangeability with relation to this single type of commodity, linen.

### §9. Transition from the simple value-form to the expanded value-form

The simple value-form requires (bedingt) the value of one commodity to be expressed in only one commodity of another sort, though it does not matter which. It is therefore just as much a simple relative expression of value of the linen whether its value is expressed in iron or in wheat, etc., or when it is expressed in the commodity-type coat. Thus according to whether it enters into a value-relation with this or that type of commodity there arises different simple relative expressions of value of the linen. There exists the possibility that it has (Der Möglichkeit nach hat) just as many different simple expressions of value as there are different sorts of commodities. In fact, therefore, its complete relative expression of value consists not in an isolated simple relative expression of value but in the sum of its simple relative expressions of value. Thus we obtain:

## II. Total or Expanded Value-form

‘20 yards of linen = 1 coat or = 10 pounds of tea or = 40 pounds of coffee or = 1 quarter of wheat or = 2 ounces of gold or = ½ ton of iron or = etc.’

### §1. Endlessness of the series

This series of simple relative expressions of value is in its nature constantly extendible or never concludes. For there constantly occur new types of commodities and each new type of commodity forms the material of a new expression of value.

### §2. The expanded relative value-form

The value of a commodity, for example linen, is now represented in all other elements of the world of commodities. The body of each other commodity becomes the mirror of the value of the linen. Thus only now does this value itself appear truly as a jelly of undifferentiated human labour. For the labour which constitutes the value of the linen is now expressly represented as labour which counts equally with any other human labour whatever natural form at all it possesses and hence whether it is objectified in coat or wheat or iron or gold, etc. Hence by virtue of its value-form the linen now stands also in a social relation no longer to only a single other type of commodity, but to the world of commodities. As a commodity it is a citizen of this world. At the same time there is inherent in the endless series of its expressions the fact that the value of commodities is irrelevant with regard to each particular form of use-value in which it appears.

### §3. The particular equivalent form

Each commodity – coat, tea, wheat, iron, etc. – counts in the expression of value of linen as equivalent and hence as a body of value. The definite natural form of each of these commodities is now a particular equivalent form beside many others. Similarly the manifold definite, concrete, useful types of labour contained in the different bodies of commodities now count as similarly many particular forms of realisation or appearance of human labour as such.

### §4. Deficiencies of the expanded or total value-form

First, the relative expression of value of linen is incomplete (unfertig) because the series which represents it never concludes. Second, it consists of a motley mosaic of different (verschiedenartige) expressions of value. Finally, if as must happen, the relative value of each commodity is expressed in this expanded form, the relative value-form of each commodity is an endless series of expressions of value, different from the relative value-form of each other commodity. The deficiencies of the expanded relative value-form are reflected in the equivalent-form corresponding to it. Since the natural form of each single type of commodity is here a particular equivalent-form beside innumerable other particular equivalent-forms there exist only limited equivalent-forms of which each excludes the other. Similarly the definite, concrete, useful type of labour contained in each particular commodity-equivalent is only a particular and thus not exhaustive form of appearance of human labour. The latter certainly possesses its complete or total form of appearance in the complete range (Gesamtumkreis) of those particular forms of appearance. But thus it possesses no unified form of appearance.

### §5. Transition from the total value-form to the general value-form

The total or expanded relative value-form consists however only in a sum of simple relative expressions of value or equations of the first form, like:

20 yards of linen = 1 coat

20 yards of linen = 10 pounds of tea, etc..

But each of these equations contains, conversely, also the identical equation:

1 coat = 20 yards of linen

10 pounds of tea = 20 yards of linen, etc..

In fact, if the possessor of the linen exchanges his commodity with many other commodities and hence expresses the value of his commodity in a series of other commodities, then necessarily the many other possessors of commodities must also exchange their commodities with linen and hence express the values of their different commodities in the same third commodity, the linen. Therefore, if we reverse the series ‘20 yards of linen = 1 coat’ or ‘10 pounds of tea’ or ‘= etc.’, i.e. if we express the converse relation which is already contained ‘in itself’ (an sich), implicitly in the series, we obtain:

## III. General Value-form

1 coat = )

10 pounds of tea = )

40 pounds of coffee = )

1 quarter of wheat = )20 yards of linen

2 ounces of gold = )

½ ton of iron = )

x commodity A = )

etc., commodity = )

### §1. The changed shape (Gestalt) of the relative value-form

The relative value-form now possesses a completely changed shape. All commodities express their value:

1. simply, namely in the body of one other single commodity,

2. in a unified manner, i.e. in the same other body of a commodity.

Their value-form is simple and common, i.e. general. The linen now counts for the bodies of all the different sorts of commodities as their common and general shape of value. The value-form of a commodity, i.e. the expression of its value in linen, now distinguishes the commodity not only as value from its own existence (Dasein) as a useful object, i.e. from its own natural form, but at the same time relates it as value to all other commodities, to all commodities as equal to it (als ihresgleichen). Hence in this value-form it possesses general social form.

Only through this general character does the value-form correspond to the concept of value (entspricht dem Wertbegriff). The value-form had to be a form in which commodities appear for one another as a mere jelly of undifferentiated, homogenous human labour, i.e. as expressions in the form of things of the same labour-substance. This is now attained. For they are all material expressions (Materiatur) of the same labour, of the labour contained in the linen or as the same material expression of labour, namely as linen. Thus they are qualitatively equated.

At the same time they are quantitatively compared or represented as definite magnitudes of value for one another (für einander dargestellt), i.e.:

10 pounds of tea = 20 yards of linen

and

40 pounds of coffee = 20 yards of linen

Therefore

10 pounds of tea = 40 pounds of coffee.

Or in 1 pound of coffee there hides only a quarter as much of the substance of value, labour, as in 1 pound of tea.

### §2. The changed shape of the equivalent-form

The particular equivalent-form is now developed further to the general equivalent-form; or the commodity in equivalent-form is now general equivalent. By counting as the form of value of all other commodities the natural form of the body of the commodity linen is the form of its property of counting equally (Gleichgültigkeit) or immediate exchangeability with all elements of the world of commodities. Its natural form is therefore at the same time its general social form.

For all other commodities, although they are products of the most different sorts of labour, the linen counts as the form of appearance of the labours contained in them, hence as the embodiment of homogenous undifferentiated human labour. Weaving – this particular concrete type of labour – counts now by virtue of the value-relation of the world of commodities to linen as the general and immediately exhaustive form of realisation of abstract human labour, i.e. of the expenditure of human labour-power as such.

For precisely this reason the private labour contained in linen also counts as labour which is immediately in general social form or in the form of equality with all other labours. If a commodity thus possesses the general equivalent-form or functions as general equivalent, its natural or bodily form counts as the visible incarnation, the general social chrysalis of all human labour.

### §3. Corresponding development (Gleichmässiges Entwicklungverhältnis) between relative value-form and equivalent-form

To the degree of development of the relative value-form there corresponds the degree of development of the equivalent-form. But – and this is to be noted carefully – the development of the equivalent-form is only the expression and result of the development of the relative value-form. The initiative proceeds from the latter.

The simple relative value-form expresses the value of a commodity only in a single other type of commodity, no matter in which. The commodity thus only acquires value-form in distinction from its own use-value form or natural form. Its equivalent also acquires only the singular equivalent-form. The expanded relative value-form expresses the value of a commodity in all other commodities. Hence the latter acquire the form of many particular equivalents or particular equivalent-form. Finally, the world of commodities gives itself a unified, general, relative value-form, by excluding from itself one single type of commodity in which all other commodities express their value in common. Thereby the excluded commodity becomes general equivalent or the equivalent-form becomes the general equivalent-form.

### §4. Development of the polarity of relative value-form and equivalent-form

The polar opposition or the inseparable interconnection (Zusammengehörigkeit) and at the same time constant exclusion of relative value-form and equivalent-form implies:

1. that a commodity cannot be in one form without another commodity being in the opposite form; and

2. that as soon as a commodity is in the one form it cannot at the same time, within the same expression of value, be in the other form.

Now this polar opposition of the two moments (Momente) of the expression of value develops and hardens (entwickelt und verhärtet sich) in the same measure as the value-form as such is developed or built up (ausgebildet).

In form I the two forms already exclude one another, but only formally (formell). According to whether the same equation is read forwards or backwards, each of the two commodities in the extreme positions (Warenextreme) like linen and coat, are similarly now in the relative value-form, now in the equivalent. At this point it still takes some effort to hold fast to the polar opposition.

In form II only one type of commodity at a time can totally expand its relative value, i.e. it itself possesses expanded relative value-form only because and insofar as all other commodities are in the equivalent-form with regard to it.

Finally, in form III the world of commodities possesses general social relative value-form only because and insofar as all the commodities belonging to it are excluded from the equivalent-form or the form of immediate exchangeability. Conversely, the commodity which is in the general equivalent form or figures as general equivalent is excluded from the unified and hence general relative value-form of the world of commodities. If the linen – i.e. any commodity in general equivalent-form – were also to participate at the same time in the general relative value-form, then it would have had to have been related to itself as equivalent. We then obtain:

20 yards of linen = 20 yards of linen

a tautology in which neither value nor magnitude of value is expressed. In order to express the relative value of the general equivalent, we must reverse form III. It does not possess any relative value-form in common with other commodities; rather, its value expresses itself relatively in the endless series of the bodies of all other commodities. Thus the expanded relative value-form or form II now appears as the specific relative value-form of the commodity which plays the role of the general equivalent.

### §5. Transition from the general value-form to the money-form

The general equivalent-form is a form of value as such. It can therefore pertain to any commodity, but always only by exclusion from all other commodities.

However the mere distinction in form between form II and form III already points to something peculiar, which does not distinguish forms I and II. This is that in the expanded value-form (form II) one commodity excludes all the others in order to express its own value in them. This exclusion can be a purely subjective process, for example a process traced out by the possessor of linen (z.B. ein Prozess des Leinwandbesitzers) who assesses the value of his own commodity in many other commodities. As opposed to this a commodity is in general equivalent-form (form III) only because and insofar as it itself is excluded as equivalent by all other commodities. The exclusion is here an objective (objektiver) process independent of the excluded commodity. Hence in the historical development of the value-form the general equivalent-form may pertain now to this now to that commodity in turn. But a commodity never functions in fact (wirklich) as general equivalent except insofar as its exclusion and hence its equivalent-form is a result of an objective social process.

The general value-form is the developed value-form and hence the developed commodity-form. The materially quite different products of labour cannot possess the finished commodity-form, and hence also cannot function in the process of exchange as a commodity, without being represented as expressions in the form of things (dingliche Ausdrüche) of the same equal human labour. That means that in order to acquire the finished commodity-form they must acquire the unified general relative value-form. But they can only acquire this unified relative value-form by excluding from its own series a definite type of commodity as general equivalent. And it is only from the moment when this exclusion is definitely limited to a specific type of commodity that the unified relative value-form has won objective stability and general social validity.

Now the specific type of commodity with whose natural form the equivalent form coalesces (verwächst) socially becomes the money-commodity or functions as money. Its specific social function and hence its social monopoly becomes the playing of the role of general equivalent within the world of commodities. A definite commodity, gold, has historically conquered this privileged place amongst the commodities which figure in form II as particular equivalents of linen and in form III express commonly (gemeinsam ausdrücken) their relative value in linen. Hence, if we put in form III the commodity gold in the place of the commodity linen, we obtain:

## IV. The Money-form

20 yards of linen = )

1 coat = )

10 pounds of tea = )

40 pounds of coffee = )

1 quarter of wheat = ) 2 ounces of gold

½ ton of iron = )

x commodity A = )

etc., commodity = )

### §1. Difference between the transition from the general value-form to the money-form and the earlier developmental transitions

Essential changes occur at the transition from form I to form II and from form II to form III. As opposed to this, form IV is distinguished from form III by nothing except the fact that now gold instead of linen possesses the general equivalent-form. Gold remains in form IV what linen was in form III – general equivalent. The progress consists only in the fact that the form of immediate general exchangeability or the general equivalent-form has now, by virtue of social custom, definitely coalesced with the specific natural form of the body of the commodity gold. Gold confronts the other commodities as money only because it already confronted them before as a commodity. Like all other commodities it also functions as equivalent, either as singular equivalent in isolated acts of exchange, or as particular equivalent beside other commodity-equivalents. Little by little it functioned in narrower or wider circles as general equivalent. Once it has conquered the monopoly of this position in the expression of value of the world of commodities it becomes the money-commodity (wird es Geldware), and from the moment when it has already become the money-commodity, form IV distinguishes itself from form III, or the general form of value is transformed into the money-form.

### §2. Transformation (Verwandlung) of the general relative value-form into the price-form

The simple relative expression of value of a commodity, e.g. linen, in the commodity which is already functioning as the money-commodity, for example gold, is the price-form. The price-form of linen is hence:

20 yards of linen = 2 ounces of gold

or, when 2 Pounds Sterling is the currency name for 2 ounces of gold,

20 yards of linen = 2 Pounds Sterling

### §3. The simple commodity-form is the secret of the money-form

We see that the money-form proper offers in itself no difficulty at all. Once we have seen through the general equivalent-form it does not require the least brain-fag to understand that this equivalent-form fastens on to (festhaftet) a specific type of commodity like gold, and still less insofar as the general equivalent-form in its very nature requires the social exclusion of a definite commodity by all other commodities. It is now only a matter of this exclusion winning an objectively (objektiv) social consistency and general validity, and hence does not concern different commodities in turn nor possesses a merely local reach (Tragweite) in only particular areas of the world of commodities. The difficulty in the concept of the money-form is limited to comprehending the general equivalent-form as such, form III. However, form III in turn (rückbezüglich) resolves itself into form II, and the constitutive element of form II is form I:

20 yards of linen = 1 coat

or

x commodity A = y commodity B.

Now if we know what use-value and exchange-value are, then we find out that this form I is the simplest, most undeveloped manner of representing any product of labour, like linen for example, as a commodity, i.e. as a unity of the opposites use-value and exchange-value. At the same time we easily find the series of metamorphoses which the simplest commodity-form

20 yards of linen = 1 coat

must run through in order to win its finished shape

20 yards of linen = 2 Pounds Sterling

i.e. the money-form.

Notes

1. There is an English translation of the first edition version of chapter 1, by Axel Davidson (Marx 1972).

2. The appendix is on pages 764–84 of the first edition of Das Kapital (Marx, 1867). This was reprinted in Marx and Engels (1955), pp. 262–88, which is the text we have used for this translation. [d] The Dragstedt translation omits lines from pp. 262, 264, 274 and 279 ff. of Marx’s text. Cf. Albert Dragstedt’s version, pp. 49, 51, 57, 63.

Notes for MIA edition

a. Translations in the English-language Marx and Engels Collected Works (London, Lawrence and Wishart) differ slightly from the versions translated by Roth and Suchting.

b. Axel Davidson was a pseudonym for Albert Dragstedt. The appendix was published in the United States as Karl Marx, 1973, The Forms of Value: The First English Translation of the Appendix of the Value-Form, Volume I, First Edition of Capital, translated by Axel Davidson, Bulletin Marxist Classics V., New York: Labor Publications.

c. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Bk. V, Ch. 5 (Loeb edition, London 1926), pp. 287–9.

d. The first edition of Capital in German is also published in MEGA 1983 II.5 pp. 626–649.