Capital, vol. I, The process of accumulation of capital: Simple reproduction

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Whatever the social form of the production process, it has to be continuous, it must periodically repeat 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 in the constant flux of its incessant renewal, every social process of production is at the same time a process of reproduction.

The conditions of production are at the same time the conditions 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 society can reproduce or maintain its wealth on the existing scale only by replacing the means of production which have been used up – i.e. the instruments of labour, the raw material and the auxiliary substances – with an equal quantity of new articles. These must be separated from the mass of the yearly product, and incorporated once again into the production process. Hence a definite portion of each year’s product belongs to the sphere of production. Destined for productive consumption from the very first, this portion exists, for the most part, in forms which by their very nature exclude the possibility of individual consumption.

If production has a capitalist form, so too will reproduction. Just as in the capitalist mode of production the labour process appears only as a means towards the process of valorization, so in the case of reproduction it appears only as a means of reproducing the value advanced as capital, i.e. as self-valorizing value. The economic character of capitalist becomes firmly fixed to a man only if his money constantly functions as capital. If, for instance, a sum of £100 has this year been converted into capital, and has produced a surplus-value of £20, it must continue during the next year, and subsequent years, to repeat the same operation. As a periodic increment of the value of the capital, or a periodic fruit borne by capital-in-process, surplus-value acquires the form of a revenue arising out of capital.1

If this revenue serves the capitalist only as a fund to provide for his consumption, and if it is consumed as periodically as it is gained, then, other things being equal, simple reproduction takes place. And although this reproduction is a mere repetition of the process of production, on the same scale as before, this mere repetition, or continuity, imposes on the process certain new characteristics, or rather, causes the disappearance of some apparent characteristics possessed by the process in isolation.

The purchase of labour-power for a fixed period is the prelude to the production process; and this prelude is constantly repeated when the period of time for which the labour-power has been sold comes to an end, when a definite period of production, such as a week or a month, has elapsed. But the worker is not paid until after he has expended his labour-power, and realized both the value of his labour-power and a certain quantity of surplus-value in the shape of commodities. 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 also the variable capital, the fund out of which he himself is paid, before it flows back to him in the shape of wages; and his employment lasts only as long as he continues to reproduce this fund. This is the reason for the formula of the economists, mentioned in Chapter 18, under II, which presents wages as a share in the product itself.2 What flows back to the worker in the shape of wages is a portion of the product he himself continuously reproduces. The capitalist, it is true, pays him the value of the commodity 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 created by the money-form vanishes immediately if, instead of taking a single capitalist and a single worker, we take the whole capitalist class and the whole working class. The capitalist class is constantly giving to the working class drafts, in the form of money, on a portion of the product produced by the latter and appropriated by the former. The workers give these drafts back just as constantly to the capitalists, and thereby withdraw from the latter their allotted 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 means of subsistence, or the labour-fund, which the worker requires for his own maintenance and reproduction, and which, in all systems 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 his own product constantly moves away from him in the form of capital. But this form of appearance of the labour-fund makes no difference to the fact that it is the worker’s own objectified labour which is advanced to him by the capitalist.3 Let us take a peasant liable to do compulsory labour services. He works on his own land with his own means of production for, say, three days a week. The other three days are devoted to forced labour 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 and forced labour for the lord never acquires the character of voluntary and paid labour. If one, fine morning, the landowner appropriates to himself the plot of land, the cattle, the seed, in short, the means of production of the peasant, the latter will thenceforth be obliged to sell his labour-power to the former. He will, other things being equal, labour six days a week as before, three for himself, three for his former lord, who thenceforth becomes a wage-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 forced labour is changed into wage-labour, the labour-fund, which the peasant himself continues as before to produce and reproduce, takes the form of a quantity of capital advanced in the form of wages by the lord of the land. The bourgeois economist, whose limited mentality is unable to separate the form of appearance from the thing which appears within that form, shuts his eyes to the fact that even at the present time the labour-fund only crops up exceptionally on the face of the globe in the form of capital.4

Variable capital, it is true, loses its character of a value advanced out of the capitalist’s funds5 only 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 form of primitive* accumulation [ursprüngliche Akkumulation] that took place independently of the unpaid labour of other people, and that this was therefore how he was able to frequent the market as a buyer of labour-power. However this may be, the mere continuity of the process of capitalist production, or simple reproduction, brings about other remarkable transformations which seize hold of not only the variable, but the total capital.

If a surplus-value of £200 is generated every year by the use of a capital of £1,000, and if this surplus-value is consumed every year, it is clear that when this process has been repeated for five years, the surplus-value consumed will amount to 5×£200, or the £1,000 originally advanced. If only a part were consumed, say one-half, the same result would follow at the end of ten years, since 10×£100 = £1,000. The following general formulation emerges: the value of the capital advanced divided by the surplus-value annually consumed gives the number of years, or periods of reproduction, 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 the value of his original capital; but what he thinks cannot alter the actual situation. After the lapse of a certain number of years, the value of the capital he possesses is equal to the sum total of the surplus-value he has appropriated during those years, and the total value he has consumed is equal to the value of his original capital. It is true that he has in hand a quantity of capital whose magnitude has not changed, and that part of it, such as buildings, machinery, etc., was already there when he began to conduct his business operations. But we are not concerned here with the material components of the capital. We are concerned with its value. When a person consumes the whole of 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 surplus-value appropriated by him without payment. Not a single atom of the value of his old capital continues to exist.

Therefore, entirely leaving aside all accumulation, the mere continuity of the production process, in other words simple reproduction, sooner or later, and necessarily, converts all capital into accumulated capital, or capitalized surplus-value. Even if that capital was, on its entry into the process of production, the personal property of the man who employs it, and was originally acquired by his own labour, it sooner or later becomes value appropriated without an equivalent, the unpaid labour of others materialized either in the money-form or in some other way. We saw in Chapter 4 that for the transformation of money into capital something more was required than the production and circulation of commodities. We saw that on the one hand the possessor of value or money, on the other hand the possessor of the value-creating substance – on the one hand, the possessor of the means of production and subsistence, on the other, the possessor of nothing but labour-power – must confront each other as buyer and seller. A division between the product of labour and labour itself, between the objective conditions of labour and subjective labour-power, was therefore the real foundation and the starting-point of the process of capitalist production.

But what at first was merely a starting-point becomes, by means of nothing but the continuity of the process, by simple reproduction, the characteristic result of capitalist production, a result which is constantly renewed and perpetuated. On the one hand, the production process incessantly converts material wealth into capital, into the capitalist’s means of enjoyment and his means of valorization. On the other hand, the worker always leaves the process in the same state as he entered it – a personal source of wealth, but deprived of any means of making that wealth a reality for himself. Since, before he enters the process, his own labour has already been alienated [entfremdet] from him, appropriated by the capitalist, and incorporated with capital, it now, in the course of the process, constantly objectifies itself so that it becomes a product alien to him [fremder Produkt]. Since the process of production is also the process of the consumption of labour-power by the capitalist, the worker’s product is not only constantly converted into commodities, but also into capital, i.e. into value that sucks up the worker’s value-creating power, means of subsistence that actually purchase human beings, and means of production that employ the people who are doing the producing.6 Therefore the worker himself constantly produces objective wealth, in the form of capital, an alien power that dominates and exploits him; and the capitalist just as constantly produces labour-power, in the form of a subjective source of wealth which is abstract, exists merely in the physical body of the worker, and is separated from its own means of objectification and realization; in short, the capitalist produces the worker as a wage-labourer.7 This incessant reproduction, this perpetuation of the worker, is the absolutely necessary condition for capitalist production.

The worker’s consumption is of two kinds. While producing he consumes the means of production with his labour, 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 has bought it. On the other hand, the worker uses the money paid to him for his labour-power to buy the means of subsistence; this is his individual consumption. The worker’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 production process. The result of the first kind of consumption is that the capitalist continues to live, of the second, that the worker himself continues to live.

When dealing with the ‘working day’, we saw that the worker is often compelled to make his individual consumption into a merely incidental part of the production process. In such a case, he provides himself with means of subsistence in order to keep his labour-power in motion, just as coal and water are supplied to the steam-engine, and oil to the wheel. His means of consumption are then merely the means of consumption of a means of production; his individual consumption is directly productive consumption. This, however, appears to be an abuse, rather than an essential attribute of the capitalist process of production.8

The matter takes quite another aspect if we contemplate not the single capitalist and the single worker, but the capitalist class and the working 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 valorizes the value of his entire capital. He kills two birds with one stone. He profits not only by what he receives from the worker, but also by what he gives him. The capital given in return for labour-power is converted into means of subsistence which have to be consumed to reproduce the muscles, nerves, bones and brains of existing workers, and to bring new workers into existence. Within the limits of what is absolutely necessary, therefore, the individual consumption of the working class is the reconversion of the means of subsistence given by capital in return for labour-power into fresh labour-power which capital is then again able to exploit. It is the production and reproduction of the capitalist’s most indispensable means of production: the worker. The individual consumption of the worker, whether it occurs inside or outside the workshop, inside or outside the labour process, remains an aspect of the production and reproduction of capital, just as the cleaning of machinery does, whether it is done during the labour process, or when intervals in that process permit. The fact that the worker performs acts of individual consumption in his own interest, and not to please the capitalist, is something entirely irrelevant to the matter. The consumption of food by a beast of burden does not become any less a necessary aspect of the production process because the beast enjoys what it eats. The maintenance and reproduction of the working class remains a necessary condition for the reproduction of capital. But the capitalist may safely leave this to the worker’s drives for self-preservation and propagation. All the capitalist cares for is to reduce the worker’s individual consumption to the necessary minimum, and an immense distance separates his attitude from the crudeness of the South American mine-owners, who force their workers to consume the more substantial, rather than the less substantial, kind of food.9

Hence both the capitalist and his ideologist, the political economist, consider only that part of the worker’s individual consumption to be productive which is required for the perpetuation of the working class, and which therefore must take place in order that the capitalist may have labour-power to consume. What the worker consumes over and above that minimum for his own pleasure is seen as unproductive consumption.10 If the accumulation of capital were to cause a rise of wages and an increase in the worker’s consumption unaccompanied by an increase in the consumption of labour-power by capital, the additional capital would be consumed unproductively.11 In reality, the individual consumption of the worker is unproductive even from his own point of view, for it simply reproduces the needy individual; it is productive to the capitalist and to the state, since it is the production of a force which produces wealth for other people.12

From the standpoint of society, then, the working class, even when it stands outside the direct labour process, is just as much an appendage of capital as the lifeless instruments of labour are. Even its individual consumption is, within certain limits, a mere aspect of the process of capital’s reproduction. That process, however, takes good care to prevent the workers, those instruments of production who are possessed of consciousness, from running away, by constantly removing their product from one pole to the other, to the opposite pole of capital. Individual consumption provides, on the one hand, the means for the workers’ maintenance and reproduction; on the other hand, by the constant annihilation of the means of subsistence, it provides for their continued re-appearance on the labour-market. The Roman slave was held by chains; the wage-labourer is bound to his owner by invisible threads. The appearance of independence is maintained by a constant change in the person of the individual employer, and by the legal fiction of a contract.

In former times, capital resorted to legislation, whenever it seemed necessary, in order to enforce its proprietary rights over the free worker. For instance, down to 1815 the emigration of mechanics employed in machine-making was forbidden in England, on pain of severe punishment.

The reproduction of the working class implies at the same time the transmission and accumulation of skills from one generation to another.13 The capitalist regards the existence of such a skilled working class as one of the conditions of production which belong to him, and in fact views it as the real existence of his variable capital. This becomes very clear as soon as a crisis threatens him with its loss. As a result of the American Civil War and the accompanying cotton famine, the majority of the cotton workers of Lancashire were, as is well known, thrown out of work. Both from the working class itself, and from other social strata, there arose a cry for state aid, or voluntary national subscriptions, in order to make possible the emigration of those who were ‘redundant’ to the English colonies or to the United States. That was the time when The Times published a letter (24 March 1863) from Edmund Potter, a former President of the Manchester Chamber of Commerce. This letter was rightly described in the House of Commons as ‘the manifesto of the manufacturers’.14 We shall reproduce 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.’ The same Potter then proceeds to point out how useful the cotton industry is, how ‘it has undoubtedly drawn the surplus population from Ireland and from the agricultural districts’, how immense is its extent, how it yielded 5/13ths of total English exports in the year 1860, 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: ‘[It is not to be denied that] 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?’ This cry from the heart reminds one of Lord Chamberlain Kalb.* ‘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 upward 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 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 demoralizing 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 cotton manufacturers, distinguishes between two sorts of ‘machinery’. Both belong to the capitalist, but one stands in his factory, while the other is housed in cottages outside the factory at night-time and on Sundays. The one is inanimate, the other living. The inanimate machinery not only wears out and loses value from day to day, but also much of it becomes out of date so quickly, owing to constant technical progress, that it can be replaced with advantage by new machinery after a few months. With the living machinery the reverse is true: it gets better the longer it lasts, and in proportion as the skill handed down from one generation to another accumulates. Here is the answer given by The Times to the cotton magnate:

‘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”. 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 dependants, 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.’16

This article was only a jeu d’esprit. The ‘great public opinion’ was in fact of Mr Potter’s own opinion, it too thought that the factory workers were movable accessories to the factories. Their emigration was prevented.17 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 reproduces in the course of its own process the separation between labour-power and the conditions of labour. It thereby reproduces and perpetuates the conditions under which the worker is exploited. 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.18 It is no longer a mere accident that capitalist and worker confront each other in the market as buyer and seller. It is the alternating rhythm of the process itself which throws the worker back onto the market again and again as a seller of his labour-power and continually transforms his own product into a means by which another man can purchase him. In reality, the worker belongs to capital before he has sold himself to the capitalist. His economic bondage19 is at once mediated through, and concealed by, the periodic renewal of the act by which he sells himself, his change of masters, and the oscillations in the market-price of his labour.20

The capitalist process of production, therefore, seen as a total, connected process, i.e. a process of reproduction, produces not only commodities, not only surplus-value, but it also produces and reproduces the capital-relation itself; on the one hand the capitalist, on the other the wage-labourer.21